Daniel Hest
CEO, Togo Group
The Basics
Company Name: Togo Group
Location: 131 E. McMicken Ave., Cincinnati, OH 45202 and 500 West Madison Street, Chicago, IL 60022
Founded: Togo Group was founded in 2018 (Roadtrippers, part of our company, was founded in 2011)
Full-Time Employees: 85
Products: Togo RV, Roadtrippers, Content Studio
Social: Roadtrippers Instagram // Togo RV Instagram // Roadtrippers Facebook // Togo RV Facebook
Claim to Fame: Roadtrippers is the #1 road trip planning app
The Culture
The best thing about working at togo Group is:
The people who are passionate about creating a safe and joyful travel experience for all people by building the leading platform for road-based travel.
When we’re not working, we’re:
Taking road trips, camping, RVing and exploring all our National and State Parks.
What we’re reading:
○ How to Be an Antiracist by Ibrahim X. Kendi,
○ White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo,
○ Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
○ Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad.
○ They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
What we’re listening to:
Angela Davis speeches on Spotify
If they made a movie about our workplace, it would be called:
We Are One Pack
Inclusion in the outdoors matters because:
We firmly believe all people have a right to safely travel the world: all races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, genders, abilities and ages. We vow to work hard to create technology for road-based travel that helps all travelers stay safe and informed, and allows everyone to experience the joy of exploring the outdoors. To borrow the sentiment by Theodore Parker, made famous by Martin Luther King, Jr., we believe the road of morality may be long, but that it curves toward justice, and we will work to make that road safe for all who travel.
Five years down the line, it’s our hope that:
● 100% of our job postings will be syndicated on quality, diverse, minority-focused job sites.
● We will launch a camping outreach program to invite underrepresented groups into outdoor spaces and lessen the learning curve associated with camping and RVing.
● We will increase the visibility of all races in outdoor content by committing to racial diversity in our content, with a target to show Black people in at least 15% of all our content going forward.
● We will remove 100% of racially insensitive location listings from our database. Likewise, we will research and create location listings for historically important sites that have been made invisible--Black churches burned down, the former site of Black Wall Street, the former site of Seneca Village in Central Park.
● We will create tools within our apps for users from all backgrounds to flag, mark and review any location listings that are unsafe for specific groups, or any location listings that have made it clear they are safe spaces for specific groups. These flags and reviews will be visible for all who travel to ensure they can make informed choices about their safety on the road.