Leadership
Founders & Executive Team
Our founders combine deep expertise in mobility, machine learning, and product design to build the commuting platform that cities need.
Andrew O'Brien
Andrew O'Brien is the co-founder and CEO of GoPool, where he leads the company's strategic vision, fundraising, and partnerships. His personal experience with the inefficiency and cost of solo commuting in the San Francisco Bay Area inspired him to build a technology platform that makes carpooling as easy and reliable as any other form of daily transport.
Before founding GoPool, Andrew spent six years at Uber in product strategy roles, where he developed deep expertise in marketplace dynamics and driver-rider matching systems. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Andrew is a frequent speaker at urban mobility and sustainability conferences, and has been featured in TechCrunch, Wired, and Bloomberg for his work on the future of commuting. He lives in Oakland with his family and commutes — by carpool, naturally — to GoPool's San Francisco office.
Emma Walsh
Emma Walsh leads all aspects of GoPool's product strategy, user experience design, and feature development. A transportation technology veteran, Emma brings over a decade of product expertise from companies including Lyft, Waze, and Via, where she built and scaled products used by tens of millions of commuters worldwide.
At Lyft, Emma led the product team responsible for shared rides and commuter offerings, giving her firsthand insight into the challenges of building reliable carpooling products at scale. Her research into commuter behavior and preference patterns directly informed GoPool's core matching and scheduling features.
Emma holds a B.A. in Cognitive Science from Yale and an M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon. She is an advisor to several urban technology startups and serves on the board of Move Forward, a nonprofit focused on equitable transportation access in underserved communities.
David Kim
David Kim is the architect of GoPool's technology platform, including its AI matching engine, real-time routing optimization system, and safety infrastructure. His background in machine learning and large-scale distributed systems gives GoPool a significant technical advantage in delivering accurate, reliable carpool matches at scale.
Prior to GoPool, David led machine learning infrastructure at two successful logistics technology companies, building routing optimization systems that processed millions of delivery assignments daily. His proprietary approach to multi-dimensional compatibility scoring — which accounts for route overlap, schedule tolerance, communication style, and verified community trust — is the engine behind GoPool's industry-leading 94% match satisfaction rate.
David holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Seoul National University and a Ph.D. in Machine Learning from MIT. He holds three patents in route optimization and contributed two widely-cited research papers on dynamic carpooling algorithms before transitioning from academia to industry.