Storage industry pioneer rides high into another high-stakes venture

Peter Warhurst helped reinvent the national self-storage industry with PODS, portable on-demand storage. Despite that Clearwater-based company’s success — a private equity firm bought it in 2007, nine years after Warhurst founded it, for $430 million — Warhurst often lamented a missed opportunity.

That’s because although PODS pioneered on-demand self-storage, it lost out when customers moved the stuff that filled the containers. Years after he left PODS, which was sold again in 2015, Warhurst would chat up the executives. “I would ask them, ‘Are you making any money on the [moving] system?’ I always felt like there was more we could’ve done there.”