Citymapper bigger than Uber, Uber to become Citymapper’s Bitch.

doug_scott
Jul 28, 2017 · 3 min read

This post follows numerous discussions with founders, angel investors and VC’s in the UK technology eco system and is as the title says why I believe Citymapper will grow to be one of the biggest and most influential companies on the planet.

A simplistic view — Uber is taxi type service, with some very clever taxi technology and data, where as Citymapper is a complete transport/technology/data company. Citymapper will operate across all platforms, so whatever forms of transport come and go: tram, city bike, river, etc etc they can just be plugged in or pulled out at will. Thus enabling operators/cities to launch services that will be used and thus both improve transportation and make money.

To build a $100 billion plus company though you need more than just a good idea though, you need numerous other things:

  1. You must start in a market that most people do not see of any value, this allows you freedom to learn without competition
  2. Have a founder who is smart but also unreasonable, contrarian and is interested in only making the product they have built to be the best and will probably not sell the company. These founders are typical War Time generals who are paranoid and will buy, take over or kill every competitor
  3. Have a product that users use regularly and as the product gets better, the more data collected makes the product better, hence more data is collected as more users use the product. Have a product that has will be used by almost everyone on the planet. Huge network effect
  4. Have investors who either believe in the founder’s vision, or maybe even so scared of the founder that they let him/her do whatever they want without limiting the money supply.

Apply the above criteria to Uber and compare to Citymapper you will see a pattern

  1. Uber was a high end taxi service in San Francisco. Citymapper was a bus timetable in London
  2. Travis at Uber ( he recently stepped down but he was the driving force ) — enough public data on how Travis does not conform ( if you want to read some look here and here ). Azmat at Citymapper — I have never met him but numerous stories float round London about how unreasonable he is:)
  3. Uber are doing over 5 million rides per day in over 400 cities. Citymapper operates in over 50 cities and have 50 million installs they have all the data that Uber have about user travel behaviour plus many other types of transport.
  4. See 2:)

So where does Citymapper go next?

Citymapper is already working with numerous cities and the associated government bodies to help them devise better transportation systems for their cities. If they are not charging cities yet they will do soon. London currently says it costs $20 million per annum for the data and tech to run transportation in London, this is an easy quick win for Citymapper.

But the huge value to Citymapper doing these city deals is more data about how people travel. The knowledge they learn from one city will be applied to other cities, hence having a huge network effect. Citymapper then can charge more cities as the product gets better but also allows them to charge private companies, like Uber, to access the data. Over time Citymapper will know more about individual travel than anyone else in the world and the gap in data between themselves and anyone else will be huge.

Uber has only a subset of the data that Citymapper has. Uber can only make use of a small proportion of the business opportunities that Citymapper can.

Citymapper could easily become the glue for all transportation on the planet. People will remove Uber like applications from their phone and use Citymapper, Citymapper will then tell a person what type of transport to use to suit their personality and needs.

Note Uber is already a subset of Citymapper

Remember when people thought Uber was just a high end taxi service:)

Uber will become Citymapper’s bitch — BINGO.