Ride AI

This week Oliver interviews Richard Burger, co-founder of Swapfiets, the largest bike subscription service in Europe. With more than 220,000 subscriptions and growing rapidly, it’s a great discussion on solving the job-to-be-done for biking/micromobility, as well as the challenges and opportunities of operating large service business at scale across 6 (soon to be 7) countries.

Specifically, they cover:

- The context of the existing bike ownership experience in the Netherlands that gave rise to paying 16 euros a month to rent a bike.

- The origins of Swapfiets, and the genius marketing decision to use a blue-front wheel to make the bike’s identifiable

- The operational challenges and economics of the subscription business

- Who their customers are, and how that’s evolved over time

- The launch of their new electric bike, and how that’s performing

This week Oliver interviews Dmitri Pivovarov from Bolt Mobility, which is one of the largest ride hailing players in Europe, and has been quietly building a micromobility business which recently announced it was expanding to challenge Tier as the largest micromobility operator in Europe in 2021. Oliver uses this episode to dig into the interplay between ride hailing and micromobility, how Bolt has built the business, and get an update on the overall shared micrombobility market in Europe. It’s a great interview.

Specifically, they dig into:

- The history of Bolt Mobility, and it’s origins as Taxify

- Clarify that they are indeed, not endorsed by Usain Bolt

- Talk about the nature of mobility markets, and servicing this demand with either ride hailing or micromobility

- How the Bolt team sought to approach building the micromobility business, and how they’ve built a very cost-effective operations engine for scaling

- The unique design points from their new custom hardware

- The state of the other players in the European market

Today Oliver interviews Horace for a fun review of the parallels between the smartphone revolution and what we’re seeing play out with the growth of lightweight electric vehicles trips. It’s also a hilarious chance to hear Horace talk about how we think about fostering children as a species and ask why the same thinking isn’t applied to how we run organisations and products.

Specifically they dig into:

- The history of the smartphone industry, and why business model rather than competence dictated the fall of Nokia.

- Discuss the importance of understanding the framing of job-to-be-done and why that matters for micromobility.

- Horace points out how the fostering and growth of children is so natural to humans, and asks why it is yet so challenging for companies to foster comparable innovation.

- Talk about how incumbent car manufacturers will be treating micromobility internally, and how the immune systems of the organisations will struggle to accept such a wide departure from their standard business model.

Micromobility World is our first all-digital event running from Jan 27-29th, 2021. We have some of the biggest names in the worlds of owned and shared micromobility, disruptive innovation, urban design and investing coming together to talk about how to supercharge the Micromobility revolution. Tickets are free, with a VIP tier for curated community participation. Register at Micromobility.io - it’s going to be awesome.

This week Oliver interviews a fellow kiwi, Timothy Allan, CEO of Ubco, about their heavy duty electric motorbikes. While the firm is small - they’ve sold a bit more than a thousand units across NZ, Europe and the US - it ticks a few interesting disruptive innovation boxes, mainly by meeting the customers core needs in very specific ways through improved reliability and then  creating new jobs to be done in the form of silent transport and portable power packs that change the basis of competition against other ICE options. 

Specifically, they dig into: 

- The history of the Ubco brand/motorbikes in 2014/15

- Why farming environments in New Zealand are the perfect place to test heavy duty micromobility vehicles

- The value of getting bikes into the hands of customers for real world feedback

- The importance of quality in componentry in a heavy duty setting

- The challenges incumbent manufacturers will face transitioning across to electric powertrains

- How they think about distribution and servicing, and how that impacts the business

- The story of fundraising for an electric motorbike manufacturer down in the middle of nowhere.

This week Oliver interviews Amir Haleem, the CEO of Helium, about Peoples Network, which promises ubiquitous coverage and data costs of $1/year to connect a Micromobility vehicle. Oliver has been incredibly excited about what they’re up to for a while, and so welcomed the opportunity to sit down and unpack what they’re doing and why it’s transformational.

Specifically, they dig into:

- The history of Helium and the importance of permissionless innovation.

- What is LoRaWan and why does it matter?

- Why does Helium use blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies to make their back end system function, and why is that largely irrelevant for customers?

- How big the network now is, and how quickly it’s building out

- Why this may well be the new model for how we build out telco networks in the future.

- Why this is perfectly suited to Micromobility, and what possibilities it unlocks in terms of diagnostics, tracking and other value add services

- How $1/year data costs are transformational, and how the costs for transponder and hotspot is going to rapidly decline.

- They review the competition for creating connected Micromobility, comparing data costs, battery performance, coverage and the sort.

If you’re interested in the Helium project, go and check out The Hotspot Podcast

Full disclosure, Helium were kind enough to sponsor earlier podcasts and Oliver has got a few hotspots to learn more about their tech, but mainly, as you can hopefully hear, we just think they’re on to something and building out the best solution for micromobility connectivity that’s available in this space.

This week Oliver interviews Derek Dorresteyn, COO of Damon Motorcycles. Derek previously worked at Boosted and was the CTO at Alta Motorbikes, one of the first electric motorbike manufacturers globally. They do a whistle stop tour of the electric motorbike space, including why it’s so hard, what we’ve collectively learnt and Dereks predictions on the space. Derek has been around the space for a long time and thinking about the challenges longer than most.

Specifically they dig into:

⁃ Derek’s history in motorbike racing and eventually setting up a machine shop business.

⁃ His early forays into electric motorbike after reading the Tesla blog

⁃ The story of Alta Motors, including their raises, development, partnership with Harley Davidson and eventual closure

⁃ His work with Boosted on the products that would come after the Rev

⁃ His reflections on capital raising in the micromobility hardware space from 2010 onwards, and why now it’s easier than ever to raise

⁃ His work now at Damon Motorcycles, and the potential of electric in the hyperbike category

⁃ The possibilities for safety created through electric powertrains and ADAS systems.

⁃ The growth of SPAC’s and the impact that that is having on the space.

Horace rejoins Oliver on the podcast to revisit the original reasons that Horace started looking at micromobility, and identified it as a disruptive innovation. It covers the context of the research that he was doing at the time, and why it meets the theoretical and anecdotal indicators that it’s going to change the way that we think about transport.

Specifically we dig into:

⁃ Horace’s research into the auto market, and why he didn’t think that the shared, electric autonomy that was all hype in 2014-16 was going to deliver on it’s disruptive potential.

⁃ Why only when asking questions that no-one was asking about cars did he start to see the potential for micromobility

⁃ Why a lack of datasets is confirmatory that he was on to something, and why that’s been problematic

⁃ What he think he got right in the original thesis back in 2018, and what he thinks has changed since then

⁃ Horace reviews his own predictions, what he got wrong and what he didn’t see back then.

This is another classic Horace episode.

This week Oliver is joined by Horace for an update and discussion on heavy micromobility, including a recent video interview of Sandy Munro, the automotive engineering guru, and Mark Frohnmayer, CEO of Arcimoto talking about their three wheeled electric auto-cycle [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC2Y6aA67Rk]. Mark has been a guest on the podcast in the past in episode 46 and Micromobility Industries are big fans of what they’re doing. Finally, they circle back on the age old question of whether Tesla is conforming to disruptive innovation theory.

Specifically, they dig into:

- How Arcimoto is conforming to the theory of disruptive innovation with the way that it’s approaching the market - underserving, lower end, modularised production, solving for the job to be done - and why it’s the first stock recommendation (other than Apple) that Oliver has ever heard Horace make.

- The history of overserving the customers in the car market, and why there’s a space under them in the market for heavy micromobility

- The speed of technological and business model development, and how that ties to the size and speed of the vehicle

- The recent Battery Day announcements and manufacturing process upgrades from Elon Musk, and whether they’ve changed Horace’s mind that Tesla is a disruptive (rather than sustaining) innovation.

Today Oliver interviews Paul Steely White, head of Policy at Link by Superpedestrian. We had Assaf Bidermaan, the CEO of Superpedestrian on last year to talk about their new scooter, but that was before they launched Link and recently won one of the Seattle scooter permits. The second mover advantage in this space continues to become clearer and it was great to dig into this. Paul has been around the micromobility/bike advocacy traps a long time first at Transportation Alternatives, then Bird and now Link, and like many others we’ve had on, is a bit of an OG of the space. We hope you enjoyed this as much as we did.

* His background at Transportation Alternatives, Bird and now Superpedestrian

* How and why Superpedestrian decided to start LINK, and the importance of the feedback cycle in product development

* What LINK does differently in it’s vehicle including the importance of being able to do granular onboard vehicle maps and how their vehicle intelligence and operations allow them to be profitable with only one ride per day.

* What he thinks Bird and Lime did wrong.

* The New York City RFP for scooters and what they’re seeing in the space

* What he is seeing with LINK and cities now in terms of what they want for their operators

* The question of infrastructure, and his experience working with Transportation Alternatives and experts like Donald Shoup to change street space allocation.

* How it helps to be a second mover in the space

* The emergence of debt in new rounds of scooter funding and how the question of insurance is changing as the industry matures

In one of his favourite interviews to date, Oliver interviews Cedrick Tandong, CEO of ThreeWheelsUnited, a electric rickshaw or tuktuk financing and operations company based in Bangalore, India. With over 3000 tuktuks on the road, partnerships with the largest local manufacturers, Uber partnership and more, Cedrick and the team have found the sweet spot for Micromobility in what is a fascinating local niche.

Specifically they dig into:

* What is ThreeWheelsUnited and the multiple sides of the business - vehicle supply, financing, tech platform for payments and operations.

* Cedricks background and how he ended up going from Cameroon to France to India.

* How the unit economics are playing out with new electric tuktuks vs. existing models.

* How to build out a low-cost recharging infrastructure for these vehicles.

* The challenges and joys of working in India as a foreigner

* The story of fundraising for a vehicle financing and tech startup - how that's gone, what they’re looking for and how they managed to get Techstars and Asian Development Bank money.

* The climate impact that they’re having.