“We must leave a better world for our kids — there’s no planet-B”.
As urgent as this idea is — these words feel hollow, right? We’ve been hearing this since forever.
A couple of months ago, my seven-year-old son was getting ready to go to the UN Climate march -He was working on his protest sign, which featured leaping flames and said, ‘Save our home’. His classmate’s poster said — ‘There is No Planet B’.
Later, as we walked across 42nd street towards the UN, with what ended up being 60,000 other kids and adults calling on world leaders to eliminate fossil fuels. I thought about how words that sometimes feel hollow take on much more urgency when it’s your own children asking.
It can seem as a species that we just don’t have an evolutionary mechanism to respond to long-term risk. After all, the Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change was presented way back in 1956.
And I, too had been guilty of this sense of helplessness, until I felt the climate urgency myself much more viscerally. It was a gift when I became a father, and all of a sudden, my relationship with the future became much more personal, no longer limited to my own mortality, but rather the lives of my children and their children.
As I think about this more — I’ve decided to share my motivations and my thinking for doing what we do at CLIP and how that is relevant for the future.
I’ll frame the source of my motivations within three simple questions I asked myself — almost subconsciously — and now, perhaps in hindsight — better articulated — as I embarked on my current entrepreneurial journey.
1. What is an urgent problem that is unlikely to be solved in my lifetime?
2. What part of this problem am I uniquely equipped to work on?
3. Finally, how to draw that line from a unique insight that leads to an innovation that has the potential to address the problem at scale?
AN URGENT PROBLEM UNLIKELY TO BE SOLVED IN MY LIFETIME.
Building a company is hard — it’s more likely going to take up your entire life so what is an urgent problem I could devote myself to happily spend the rest of my life on.
As you can probably guess from my opening — I strongly believe that there is no greater existential threat to our species than the climate emergency. And let’s please go ahead and call it what it is — an emergency — As we can ourselves witness from the air outside. (The AQI in Delhi during the time of writing this was a whopping 640)
There’s a well-known anecdote about the advisor to the Republican Party named Frank Luntz — often credited with popularizing “climate change” and discouraging “global warming” in a secret 2002 memo to the GOP. He said “global warming” sounded catastrophic while “climate change” was less scary because it sounded more controllable and less emotional. At the time, he thought it was a good idea to convince the public that the science wasn’t settled. He’s since abandoned that line of thinking and advised on communications strategies to encourage climate action.
So for me this was the (BHAG) problem I would have no regrets spending the rest of my life on.
WHERE CAN I UNIQUELY CONTRIBUTE?
Thanks to my background and my education- there is one part of this problem I am uniquely interested in.
I grew up in Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, I started my creative journey focused on architecture and the flows between it. Chandigarh was a heroic experiment to signify post-independent modern India, But since then it has been totally reshaped by the India of today. Modernist urban planning radically reimagined the cityscape as an elaborate mechanism devoted solely to the efficient storage and movement of its essential life force: the working population. The single most influential carrier of this life force:, the automobile, drove Corbusier’s imagination, but this core design principle was and is still wrong today.
So, let’s be honest: the car is an invasive species in India, as it is everywhere else; maybe here, it is more noticeable. Because of this, we must find ways to control it, confine it, and limit its reach.
When I joined the Smart Cities group at MIT’s Media Lab, I had a really romantic view of architecture and urban planning, in part because of the very seductive and comforting ideas behind the design of the very city I grew up in. I may have felt it intuitively, but I still lacked the necessary criticality towards a car-centric city.
Even at MIT, While we aspired to solve for the future of urban mobility, we still looked at problem-solving through the lens of the automobile. For my part, I was logically resolving the problem into how one could compress the ground and carbon footprint of the car. So we designed Folding cars, Stackable cars, and many complex solutions that were intellectually exciting for a young mind until ……. a few of us started to question the car-centric premise and instead choose to revisit a solution that was staring at us right in the face:
The 200 yr old bicycle.
Consider this: 80% of urban passenger commutes are 6 miles or less. Using a car for such short distances is like using a sledgehammer to crack a small nut twice a day, every day.
The bicycle stands out as the most efficient and cleanest mode of transportation. Throughout history, it’s been an instrument of empowerment and progress. Many of you know, the well-known Steve Jobs quote. … a computer is . . . the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. Well, if the bicycle is the most efficient way for humans to move across short distances and computers are a way to expand our mental capacities then instead of making a better car we should focus on making existing bicycles better at doing what they already do so well.
IS THIS FOR SCALE?
So… how to draw that line from this starting point to an innovation with the potential to address our problem at scale?
The next kernel of insight derived from my desire to ride my bike to work and my own laziness. I bought a bicycle with the motivation to ride it every day to work on my 3-mile commute — but in about a month — the stress, sweat, and drudgery of riding slowly uphill was enough to make me want to quit.
So whats unique about this insight that doesn’t just lead us to an e-bike?
What I am proposing is that the existing, ONE BILLION human-powered bicycles already in circulation, are the key to our urban mobility, climate, and energy transition challenges.
Again, 5 or 6 percent of our energy consumption globally is in very short trips …. definitely under 10 miles and is an under-appreciated and under-exploited opportunity.
At its core, micro-mobility isn’t just about efficiency or reduced carbon footprint; it’s also about decentralizing our approach to urban planning.
That means we have to shift our perspective from large infrastructure and complex systems focused on the car, to smaller, adaptable, and more human-focused solutions. This isn’t just theoretical; it’s practical and rooted in the realities of today’s urban environments. Case in point the recent global conversations around the 15-minute cities.
The solution that I decided to finally work on : To shift the focus from the car by making it really convenient to upgrade all bicycles into e-bikes at scale by creating the world’s most affordable electric mobility platform based on the bicycle.
CLIP — represents not just an evolution of the bicycle but an evolution in how we think about urban mobility. By adding a simple device to an existing bicycle and democratizing this tech — , you can transform it into an electric vehicle capable of assisting riders uphill, against strong winds, or during long commutes. This flexibility is key. Only some people want or can afford a new e-bike, but many can benefit from the occasional assistance an electric motor provides.
The true beauty of this is twofold. First, it ensures that countless bicycles, already in circulation, continue to be used, reducing the wasteful cycle of disposal and replacement. Second, it highlights an essential principle: solutions to our most pressing urban problems don’t always need to be grand or expensive.
Sometimes, they are deceptively simple yet profoundly transformative.
As these IOT devices become an integral part of our daily lives, they can gather data processed by AI to give us insights into traffic patterns, infrastructure needs, and energy consumption.
This decentralized approach to urban planning puts the power back into the hands of the people, allowing for organic growth and development based on real needs and usage patterns — a far cry from the centralized vision of one architect and his infatuation with the automobile.
With our rich history, diverse culture, and a booming manufacturing industry, India is uniquely positioned to be a global leader in this new era of urban micro-mobility. By embracing AI-linked micro-mobility devices as atomic elements of our energy grid, we can show the world a new way forward, one that is sustainable, efficient, and, most importantly, centered around the well-being of its people.
And moreover — If only everybody cycled as much as the Dutch, global carbon emissions would drop by nearly 700 million tonnes per year. exceeding the entire carbon footprint of most countries, including the UK, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Australia.
The opportunity before us is immense. The challenges of our urban landscapes require innovative solutions. By integrating the timeless efficiency of the bicycle with the radical opportunities of AI, we can pave the way for a sustainable and equitable future.
Som | CEO for CLIP | NewDelhi Slush’D 2023
