In this episode, Oliver interviews Jeff Russakow, CEO of Boosted Boards, makers of the famous electric skateboards and now scooter. Boosted focuses on vehicle-grade owned micromobility, which provides a refreshing counter to the hype around shared models. It’s one of our best episodes to date--highly recommend checking it out!

Specifically we cover:

- the origins of the company, and how it proves out Horace’s early thesis on the disruptive potential of modularized componentry.

- Jeff’s history with lightweight electric vehicles and his eventual coming to Boosted

- How they think through their role as manufacturing ‘vehicle grade’ vehicles in the micromobility space, and how this differentiates them from other manufacturers

- how their customers use their products - hint: 82% of their customers use them for their commute.

- How they think through shared services vs. the owned micromobility market, solving the job-to-be-done of travel and why they’re doubling down on personally owned vehicles

- Why they consider their competition the car and not other scooter or board manufacturers.

- How they think about safety, why shared scooters have given a lot of people the wrong impression about what micromobility safety can be, and the standards that they build their vehicles to.

- How they think about infrastructure for these lightweight vehicles, and where the opportunities are for regulators to harness the benefits.

- The challenges that they’ve faced scaling to being a global, growth stage electric vehicle company.

- How the venture capital community have viewed them vs the hyped space of shared micromobility.

- Hints at their product pipeline and what they find interesting.

Key quotes:

“What are your options? You can buy a vehicle like ours and you're down to two dollars a day for unlimited mileage and no parking. You can pay $2 a mile for scooter or car share, or you can take your car - it's 40/50 cents a mile between insurance and depreciation and then parking could be $30 a day. So quite literally buying a premium scooter is the cheapest thing you can do.”

“It’s been fun for us with the scooter shares because somebody is spending a billion dollars of somebody else's money to put free demos on every street corner on the planet and educate people to the value of these vehicles. There's a bunch of people say, ‘this is great.’ I'm going to use sharing and that's awesome, and then there's a bunch of people who say I like this so much, I’m going to buy one. If they want a vehicle grade one, there's only one. So we're in an interesting market spot.”

In this episode, Horace and Oliver run over Horace’s insights from his recent research using UN data into city-level potential for micromobility markets globally. We run through the most interesting growth trends in 1800+ cities.

Specifically we look at:

- Contextualising the rapid growth in car-based urbanisation as part of a 5000 year trend

- Why Africa is one of the most interesting potential markets between now and 2035.

- The cities positioned for both the fastest growth and largest increase.

- How the low-income demographics of new migrants to these emerging mega-cities necessitates the need for cheap micromobility transport

- Why we should look at auto-ownership rates to understand the 'low-end' potential of micromobility.

- The likely business models we'll see emerge with the confluence of autonomy, networking and new propulsion options.

- How these vehicles will beat the current incumbents of petrol powered scooters in Asia

The things mentioned in the episode are:

- The blogpost that Horace has written on the micromobility markets by city.

- The talk by Jeremy Grantham re: the majority of increase in global population coming from Africa between now and 2100 - https://youtu.be/cPCblFpqrkI?t=1635

As requested, if anyone has a suggestion for an interview guest for micromobility in India or Africa, please message me on Twitter @oliverbruce. Thanks!

In this episode, Horace and Oliver run over Horace’s insights from his recent research using UN data into city-level potential for micromobility markets globally. We run through the most interesting growth trends in 1800+ cities.

Specifically we look at:

- Contextualising the rapid growth in car-based urbanisation as part of a 5000 year trend

- Why Africa is one of the most interesting potential markets between now and 2035.

- The cities positioned for both the fastest growth and largest increase.

- How the low-income demographics of new migrants to these emerging mega-cities necessitates the need for cheap micromobility transport

- Why we should look at auto-ownership rates to understand the 'low-end' potential of micromobility.

- The likely business models we'll see emerge with the confluence of autonomy, networking and new propulsion options.

- How these vehicles will beat the current incumbents of petrol powered scooters in Asia

The things mentioned in the episode are:

- The blogpost that Horace has written on the micromobility markets by city.

- The talk by Jeremy Grantham re: the majority of increase in global population coming from Africa between now and 2100 - https://youtu.be/cPCblFpqrkI?t=1635

As requested, if anyone has a suggestion for an interview guest for micromobility in India or Africa, please message me on Twitter @oliverbruce. Thanks!

In this episode, Oliver interviews Lawrence Leuschner, CEO and co-founder of Tier, one of Europe’s largest scooter operators with over 6 million cumulative rides to date.

Specifically, we cover:

- Lawrence’s background as a successful entrepreneur and his motivations for starting Tier

- the landscape for micromobility adoption in Europe, and why Europe is better placed to adsorb these transport innovations

- we unpack the reasoning behind their unique operational model and more recent moves into custom hardware

- reviews of regulations and data standards across Europe, lessons from Paris and why he thinks Germany is the most promising micromobility market

- capital efficiency of operations, and how/why European operators differ from Lime and Bird

- current and future integrations with public transport systems, and where this is most likely to occur.

All in all, a fascinating interview!

In this episode, Oliver interviews Lawrence Leuschner, CEO and co-founder of Tier, one of Europe’s largest scooter operators with over 6 million cumulative rides to date.

Specifically, we cover:

- Lawrence’s background as a successful entrepreneur and his motivations for starting Tier

- the landscape for micromobility adoption in Europe, and why Europe is better placed to adsorb these transport innovations

- we unpack the reasoning behind their unique operational model and more recent moves into custom hardware

- reviews of regulations and data standards across Europe, lessons from Paris and why he thinks Germany is the most promising micromobility market

- capital efficiency of operations, and how/why European operators differ from Lime and Bird

- current and future integrations with public transport systems, and where this is most likely to occur.

All in all, a fascinating interview!

In this episode, Horace and Oliver discuss Donald Shoup’s work, The High Cost of Free Parking, and why micromobility offers such a compelling counter to the dominant mindset that has existed around parking for the last 70 years.

Specifically, we cover:

- the financial and spatial impact of parking minimums in the US

- The Catch-22 of parking legislation - parking creates sprawled landscapes that increases the need for them to move around.

- The importance of pricing parking appropriately

- The odd behaviour that our misplacing of car parks has created in Japan and the US

- the logical use case for autonomy in RV’s if we can’t better price/allocate roadspace

- Why micromobility offers such a fundamental rethink of space allocation and parking requirements

In this episode, Horace and Oliver discuss Donald Shoup’s work, The High Cost of Free Parking, and why micromobility offers such a compelling counter to the dominant mindset that has existed around parking for the last 70 years.

Specifically, we cover:

- the financial and spatial impact of parking minimums in the US

- The Catch-22 of parking legislation - parking creates sprawled landscapes that increases the need for them to move around.

- The importance of pricing parking appropriately

- The odd behaviour that our misplacing of car parks has created in Japan and the US

- the logical use case for autonomy in RV’s if we can’t better price/allocate roadspace

- Why micromobility offers such a fundamental rethink of space allocation and parking requirements

In this episode, Oliver interviews Sampo Heitanen, CEO of MaaS Global/Whim on their mobility as a service subscription model they have in Helsinki and a number of other markets.

Specifically we cover:

- How MaaS Global came to be started

- The unique context of Helsinki’s regulatory environment and the enabling factors that made it a great first market

- The challenges and opportunities of scaling mobility as a service offerings - ticketing, API’s, regulatory barriers and walled gardens

- The importance of docked and dockless micromobility in driving down the costs of the subscription model

- Their customer demographics and how this has driven their choices around subscription packages

- How he thinks about Uber’s walled garden efforts in the mobility as a service space

- The role of governments/regulators in encouraging mobility as a service offerings

It’s a great conversation about the shift of business models to mobility-as-a-service subscriptions, underpinned by micromobility.

In this episode, Oliver interviews Sampo Heitanen, CEO of MaaS Global/Whim on their mobility as a service subscription model they have in Helsinki and a number of other markets.

Specifically we cover:

- How MaaS Global came to be started

- The unique context of Helsinki’s regulatory environment and the enabling factors that made it a great first market

- The challenges and opportunities of scaling mobility as a service offerings - ticketing, API’s, regulatory barriers and walled gardens

- The importance of docked and dockless micromobility in driving down the costs of the subscription model

- Their customer demographics and how this has driven their choices around subscription packages

- How he thinks about Uber’s walled garden efforts in the mobility as a service space

- The role of governments/regulators in encouraging mobility as a service offerings

It’s a great conversation about the shift of business models to mobility-as-a-service subscriptions, underpinned by micromobility.

In this episode, Oliver interviews Tiffany Chu (@tchu88), co-founder and COO at Remix to discuss the role of software in helping cities plan for better use of their streets and help them harness the benefits of micromobility.

Specifically we cover: 

- The story of Remix and how they came to found it.

- The predominant use cases for cities in utilising their software, and how this helps break down silos within city governments.

- The challenges she sees with the rapid growth of micromobility and cities ability to absorb these new vehicles.

- How she sees us more rapidly deploying new micromobility friendly infrastructure, and how that pares with the existing political processes in a lot of places

- An explanation of MDS and why it’s valuable for city officials

- What they’re planning to do with their recent Series B raise

- What she would recommend for entrepreneurs thinking of working with governments.

Unfortunately we lost a bit of the better quality audio halfway through so have to revert to the backup recording. Apologies.

Also, as mentioned in the episode, check out the great Slate article on the MDS debate from David Zipper: https://slate.com/business/2019/04/scooter-data-cities-mds-uber-lyft-los-angeles.html