Aaron Lieberman and the problem sitting in his driveway

Aaron Lieberman had acquired a small luxury: an electric vehicle charger at home. Before it arrived, charging meant working around public stations, equipment that did not work, and opportunities to collect a few more miles while shopping. With a charger in his own driveway, the business of keeping a car moving suddenly became much less interesting. That was the attraction.

Then another detail caught his attention. He used the charger only one or two nights a week. For much of the time, a piece of equipment that had improved his own routine was waiting around, doing nothing for anybody. Somewhere nearby, another driver might still be planning an evening around a plug.

There was a business in that mismatch. Lieberman founded Buzze in 2022, initially imagining a network through which people with home chargers could make them available to neighbors. An unused appliance would acquire a second occupation. The homeowner could earn something; the driver could find a convenient place to charge.

For Lieberman, the arrangement had a familiar shape. Long before electric cars became his business, he had helped connect college students with preschool children. Later, he built an early education company and won a seat in the Arizona Legislature. His career keeps returning to the practical arrangements that determine who can use something valuable.

The luxury of an idle plug

Buzze’s public launch came on November 8, 2023. More than 60 hosts were already spread across Greater Phoenix, from New River to Casa Grande. Drivers could use the app to find a host, make an appointment and charge. The system measured the session through the car’s telematics and handled payment. Launch week came with free charging, a reasonably persuasive way to invite people to try an unfamiliar arrangement.

The intended customers included people who rented their homes or lived in apartments. A home charger offers obvious convenience to somebody with the authority and space to install one. A renter has a different set of permissions. Enthusiasm for a car does very little to change the electrical arrangements in a building somebody else owns.

“We’re focused on people who live in apartments or who rent their house,” Lieberman explained at the launch. The distinction put housing at the center of a transportation business. It also gave Buzze a way to learn. Once drivers began using the network, the places where it worked could tell the company something its initial pitch could not.

Fifteen students and a preschool

The earlier version of this story starts in the early 1990s. Lieberman, a Yale undergraduate, worked with children at a summer camp in New York state. He and fellow student Rebecca Weintraub were troubled by the abrupt end of relationships built over the summer. The children boarded buses home; the work stopped with the calendar.

In 1993, they organized fellow Yale students and persuaded New Haven’s Head Start program to let the group work with children individually. The early effort involved 15 students. Jumpstart paired young children with college students to develop language, literacy and social skills. Its basic ingredients were close at hand, though bringing them together required an organization.

Lieberman graduated in 1994 with a degree in English and International Studies. Jumpstart expanded to Boston that year, and he became its founding chief executive. He also taught in Head Start. The founder was therefore working with the same kind of classroom his organization sought to support, a useful proximity for someone asking others to participate.

The program grew beyond its initial city. AmeriCorps funding arrived in 1996, and branches opened in New York and Washington in 1997. College students could receive support for their own education while working with younger children. The arrangement connected two educational needs without pretending that a willing volunteer automatically came prepared to teach.

Training, curriculum and assessment were part of the model. Those details matter to Lieberman’s story because they show the work after the appealing idea. Pairing people was the beginning. Giving those relationships structure was what allowed the program to travel.

An organization that could outlast its founder

Lieberman became an Echoing Green fellow in 1995. While at Jumpstart, he also founded and chaired Schoolsuccess.net, a venture-backed spinoff that put early childhood assessment tools online. The boundary between a nonprofit and a commercial company was already something he crossed in practice.

In 2002, he founded Acelero Learning, concentrating on Head Start children and families. Its later Shine Early Learning business helped other providers use the organization’s practices and tools. One part delivered services directly; another helped institutions improve their own work. That second route allowed ideas to reach beyond centers the company operated itself.

He stayed as Acelero’s CEO until 2015, then moved into the chairman’s role. In 2022, he helped oversee its sale to a BlackRock-led investor group. The sequence covers two decades: founding, operating, transferring executive responsibility and eventually helping arrange a new ownership chapter.

His education work also extended into venture philanthropy. He joined New Profit in 2017 as a part-time partner leading early childhood work, including a Massachusetts public-private effort supporting new approaches to training and technical assistance. Teach Plus lists him as its board chair. EV charging has become his daily business, while education remains part of his institutional life.

Five thousand doors, then a closed one

Lieberman was born and raised in Phoenix. When he first ran for the Arizona House, in 2018, he was campaigning in the district where he had grown up. He knocked on more than 5,000 doors. He won, then won re-election in 2020. His committee assignments included education, appropriations and natural resources.

The district offered a different scale of conversation from an organization’s executive office. A campaign requires a candidate to turn up at somebody else’s door and explain why the interruption might be worth it. Five thousand doors is a considerable investment in that proposition.

His run for governor ended differently. In May 2022, he suspended the campaign, saying he could not see a realistic path forward. The decision is part of the record alongside the legislative victories. A career that moves between founding organizations and asking voters for office also moves between different kinds of judgment. A company’s next customer and a statewide electorate do not make their decisions together.

That same year brought Buzze’s founding. The new company gave Lieberman another operating problem to work on, this time with cables, parking spaces and drivers. Public service would return to the foreground. For the moment, the useful question was whether nearby people could share a charger.

The apartment parking lot

After launching, Buzze noticed that its successful hosts tended to live close to multifamily housing and rental districts. The company developed an arm focused on installing affordable charging at those properties. The move carried the service closer to the residents who needed it.

It also changed the work. A neighborhood sharing app needs hosts and drivers. A multifamily installation requires a property owner, an electrical plan, installation coordination and a way to pay for the project. Buzze began helping owners navigate that process, including available incentives. The promise of a convenient charge depended on a collection of rather inconvenient tasks being completed first.

In December 2024, Lieberman wrote about owners overwhelmed by proposals for systems that did not fit their properties. He argued for starting with the building’s actual circumstances: existing EV ownership, likely future demand and electrical capacity. His question, “What are the electrical constraints of the property?”, is unlikely to sell movie tickets. It is considerably more useful when installing a charger.

“What are the electrical constraints of the property?”

Aaron Lieberman, December 2024

He described beginning with a few shared chargers and adding capacity as resident demand increased. The logic gives an owner room to act without making every decision at once. Permitting, contractors and possible upgrades still require attention. A modest beginning is only useful if someone does the work carefully enough to make expansion possible.

Financing belongs in that account, too. Buzze partnered with Enduring Planet for non-dilutive financing to support deployment and operations. The partnership supported expansion across ten states. Lieberman’s company now presents itself as a nationwide multifamily charging operator. The original geographic experiment has become a business working through different properties, owners and funding arrangements.

Still knocking

By October 2026, Lieberman was again on Arizona’s election pages, running as the Democratic candidate for Senate District 4. He remained the founder and CEO of Buzze. His campaign emphasizes affordability, public education and economic opportunity. Those priorities sit alongside a company whose practical task is making charging work where people live.

There is no need to make every turn in his career inevitable. A Yale student organizing tutors could hardly have written a dependable plan for apartment charging three decades later. The record contains decisions made in different circumstances, a long education career, successful elections and a campaign abandoned before the vote.

But the driveway provides a useful place to leave him. Lieberman had solved his own charging problem and noticed the equipment’s spare time. Buzze’s subsequent experience pointed toward the apartment buildings nearby. The idea began with something he owned. Its direction came from the people who still needed somewhere to plug in.