Madi Rifkin and Mount — Cohort 13 Founder Spotlight
By Tiger Tam, Program Associate at Blue Startups
This week, Blue Startups sat down with Cohort 13 founder, Madi Rifkin, CEO and founder of Mount, a platform that generates ancillary revenue streams at AirBnB properties through the management of electric scooters and bikes. Madi touched on the vision behind the business, micro mobility, and the future of Mount.
What is the story behind Mount? How did the idea come to life?
When I was twelve-years-old, I created a bike lock (out of necessity, because I forgot it everywhere). I entered it into a Shark Tank-style competition and won. By the time I was fifteen, I had a fully-funded patent.
In college, I was studying entrepreneurship and decided to start a bike lock company. I learned all I could about bikes and this eventually evolved into scooters. I took the lock into the scooter market, where I learned about micro mobility and met Mount’s team. We ran with the scooter lock idea for a while until we came out with an IoT device and a management platform for assets. Then COVID happened. Micro mobility went on the downturn and we had to figure out a path forward. Micro mobility is too chaotic on its own, so I asked myself, what’s an industry where micro mobility would do really well? We had the idea of giving it structure via hospitality.
How did you meet the team that founded Mount?
Rishab, our CTO and co-founder went to BU and I went to Northeastern. We worked on various projects together, and we have very different skill sets so it works well. Our third co-founder, Matt, comes from the micro mobility industry. He was working at JUMP and running a fleet of 500 bicycles in Denver. I showed up at his warehouse and said, here’s what I’m doing, wanna come on board? So he did. At this point he’s more of a founder advisor but he definitely brings that expertise to the table.
Can you explain micro mobility for people who don’t know?
Micro = small, mobility = movement of things. Micro mobility means any trip taken on an electric vehicle that’s under five miles. 60% of all car trips in the US are under six miles (2017). It seems really inefficient to have a car if you’re only going five miles. That’s the whole premise behind the term micro mobility. Make cities more bike-able and walkable which would in turn help the environment. Unfortunately scooter companies say they’re reducing your carbon footprint, but what they don’t tell you is that a scooter lasts three months on the street and goes to a landfill. Hopefully they can do better.
Did your travel experiences impact the company and the vision in any way?
Totally. Mount’s team is made up of people that are a part of micro mobility and also travel enthusiasts. We’re all remote at this point because of COVID but we enjoy our roles because we can travel, visit our AirBnB hosts, and visit our customers.
I was traveling through Amsterdam with a friend and we showed up to an AirBnB property. At times traveling abroad I feel awkward because everyone is staring and I don’t want to be that dumb American tourist — it’s a sigma that won’t leave you. But our AirBnB host gave us two bikes, and we hopped on and went exploring. Immediately, the mindset shifted. We felt more like a local, because everyone is on bikes in the city. That’s when I thought this was such an easy amenity to add on. It also allowed us to explore in ways other than we thought. That’s what we wanted to bring to Mount… It’s not just a scooter at an AirBnB property, it’s a whole experience.
Can you share a major milestone in building Mount thus far?
I think there’s two. One would be after our initial pilot in Sept 2020. We took four scooters to a boutique hotel in Avon, CO and asked them to test for us. We weren’t even in hospitality at that point, it was just to test the platform. And we stumbled upon a unique circumstance in that they were only operating at 20% capacity because of COVID, but every single guest that came — and even the staff — was on the scooters. One person took it 22 miles. It wasn’t what we intended and it was a use case that opened our eyes to the hospitality world.
The second cool milestone is when we weren’t sure if the AirBnB market was right. so we posted in a Facebook group announcing a scooter trial, sign up if interested. We got a crazy number like 130–140 individuals that were AirBnB hosts signed up in a week for scooters. I went and talked to all of those people, interviewed them, and got them on a waitlist. We have a pretty substantial waitlist for scooters right now.
Is Mount planning on expanding to hotels?
That was another interesting fact-finding mission. We were talking to some large resorts and told them what we could do with bikes and scooters. They asked if we could put this on all of their moving assets to give them a picture of what’s happening. They were the ones who gave us the idea for maid carts, bellhop carts, golf carts, construction equipment, and anything that moves. We thought: Wow, that’s way bigger than we thought it could be. Resorts are really interested in knowing where everything is, and that’s exactly what we do. You can be alerted when your equipment needs maintenance, how many miles it has, etc. It’s useful for that information to be streamlined, because the majority of staff uses a walkie talkie and a clipboard. It’s very inefficient. When someone leaves the company (which happens a lot in those type of jobs), the info goes with them. There’s no paper or tech trail.
What cities are you hoping to expand to?
We just hit nine cities as of this week. Our target areas are coastal vacation areas like Florida, Hawaii, and California coast. In reality, we’re not geographically constrained because depending on your area there’s definitely an amenity or asset that you’re going to want to track or monetize. That’s why we opened 9 new markets in a few months. All the way from Florida, Oklahoma, Denver, Arizona, California, and Canada.
What is your favorite piece of professional advice that you’ve received?
One of my favorites comes from a founder whose company was acquired. He got his group of friends together from college and he said they didn’t set out to build a multi-billion dollar company. They started it because they all wanted to work together with their friends. They asked themselves, what do we want to get out of this? And answered, we want to be a YC company and we want to have fun while doing it. His piece of advice was, you don’t start wanting to be a billion dollar company. You should have some goals and objectives and what you want to get out of it. Because we had those, it led to something a lot bigger that we didn’t anticipate. After I heard that, I asked our whole team, what do you want to get out of this? Travel was one. Having fun and expanding was one. Not taking it too seriously but also hopefully having a pretty good outcome. It took some stress off the table and refocused everyone about the culture of the company. Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, said that as well: Our goal was never to make money, we just wanted to have fun making track running shoes.
To learn more about Mount, visit: http://www.mountlocks.com/
