Episode 5: Scooters and transport ecologies

Welcome to Micromobility, a podcast exploring the disruptive potential of light weight utility vehicles. Using the history of computing as a framework we examine how these technologies will upend everything we thought we knew about the future of transport.

The host of the show is Horace Dediu, founder of Asymco.com and I’m his co-host Oliver Bruce.

In today’s show we cover the rise of scooter sharing and how different localised constraints result in different micromobility solutions blooming. Specifically:

1. The scooter sharing model that Bird pioneered, why it emerged in Santa Monica and why it might not apply to other contexts.
2. The history from the Segway to the hoverboard, Boosted Board and on to the current scooter form factor.
3. The local variables that need to be considered for micromobility fleet operators.
4. The parallels of the rise of micromobility with early cellular, and the Galapagos scenario of ecosystem development.

Note — aware that the last 9 minutes of audio from this episode were mistakenly added to the end of last week’s podcast. Apologies for any confusion. Contextually, makes far more sense here!

Horace: All right, and we’re back. Welcome again to Micromobility. It’s me, Horace, and I have with me here, or there as the case may be, Oliver Bruce. Oliver you are in Belfast, is that right?

Oliver: That’s right Horace. Yeah, Northern Ireland.

Horace: Northern Ireland. So Belfast I know there was a song. That was a great song that this goes song about Belfast. It was one of these Boney M songs, I think. Um, but Belfast and I’m in Boston, so we’re not that far away this time.

Oliver: It’s nice to be back in that relatively normal time zone. New Zealand is the opposite end of the Earth — being upside down as they say.

Horace: Ha! So just a quick note. I’m just slightly tired because I actually went on a long electric bike trip today. It’s a perverse thing because the Mercedes mechanic I use is unfortunately quite far away from where I’m staying here in Boston.

It’s about 25 miles. Whenever you go to pick up your car, you know, you’ve got to deal with someone giving you a ride. So this time I thought I’d ride my bike there. 25 miles isn’t that far. But the problem in New England and the suburbs of Boston is uh, there aren’t good bike lanes. The weather was fine, I had a bike with plenty of range. This is a Stromer, not the top of the line, but it’s an okay bike for for the job. It tops out at 25 miles an hour. It was a fairly exciting trip.

You know, I had to make my way through country roads and city streets and former railroad lines that were in converted to cycling tracks. They’re great because they’re very flat and as a result, you have a very smooth ride. On the ebike, you know, you’re just flying. 25 miles an hour is tremendously fast — something like 35 kilometers an hour.

It’s a great feeling. I made the trip in about 80 minutes. The funny thing is once I got there, I put my bike in the back of the car and I left around 3 o’clock. I didn’t get home till round 4:30!

This is Peak rush hour, and this is the particularly bad part of the city for traffic. It’s just unbelievable. So the trip back was longer. I think it was it was so frustrating to because even though it’s an hour and half in a car, you know, it’s really painful. You have to run the air conditioning. It’s stop and go. It’s stressful. The exact opposite with cycling which was exhilarating. On that, you’re going fast, you have the breeze constantly, and so it just proved the point once again how a good cycling infrastructure coupled with a good vehicle is absolutely loads better than cars and traffic.

And one more thing, the distance traveled is is fairly far. It’s about 30–35 kilometers, which is well beyond even the median distance traveled by most people on a single trip with a car. It’s a outer edge of the limit of what might be considered a micromobility trip. Again, Marchetti’s constant is about one hour and that’s for a whole day. So for a single Journey a single one way trip to go to an hour and half is a long trip. But again, it was it was doable.

What I want to bring up now is, segmenting trips by distance. Here, I just experienced a very long trip. But at the other extreme is a very shortest of all trips — kind of the walking distance. These trips I witnessed in Santa Monica which is where I was last week. It’s a beautiful town on the Pacific Ocean. Santa Monica is famous right for for being the birthplace of scooter sharing?

Oliver: Yeah, as far as I understand it that’s where Bird first launched wasn’t it?

Horace: Yes it was. Right so, Santa Monica is kind of an interesting place. It’s in the heart of what they call silicon Beach. It’s this tech hub where where Snapchat and a few other gaming companies are based. Secondly, it has a grid system of streets, and people have taken to getting around with cycling, roller skates and rollerblades. All of the beach culture that brought this kind of mobility.

The city is not small. It’s fairly fairly big as all things in California are. So it’s not intimate and you spend time traveling if you’re on car. It’s fast, but it’s painful because you have to find parking everywhere and then you might face traffic.

So the usual traffic and the usual car problems in cities. Now, what’s interesting is that yes, it was the home of Bird. Now for those of you who don’t know, Bird is scooter sharing. Here’s one thing we need. We need to settle what the word scooter means because um, it’s funny how how it works.

When I heard the term myself initially I thought they meant these the motorized moped type. I think of mopeds when you when you say scooter. So I think many people do and so so sometimes sometimes people would say it’s a kick scooter but that doesn’t apply if it’s electric, right?

These were small wheeled, tiny, skateboard like devices. So you stand on them with one leg usually and you kick with the other. You have a handlebar that’s attached to the front wheel. These were children’s products which kind of became an early 21st century fad where people were using these to kick around cities and speed up their travels.

The newest generation are little bit bigger, a little bit beefier, have wheels that are 10 centimeters or more in diameter and these are designed with electric motors and with batteries to essentially travel within a short distance, you know, maybe up to 2 to 3 miles. The batteries on board typically lasts 15 miles and they are operated with a thumb throttle and they go about maximum 15 miles an hour. So these are really really low end product when it comes to motorized transport.

Oliver: I had thought these have actually been around for a while. So I was really surprised to see them explode in popularity so quickly. How did they appear out of nowhere so quickly?

Horace: That’s a great question. How did this suddenly appear as a phenomenon and phenomenon it is right. Now there’s about 12 companies that are bidding to operate in San Francisco. Only five will be allowed to do so but we’ll get into that in the second first.

Let’s make sure we understand what the vehicle looks like and where it comes from. So, these are two wheels in tandem separated by a flat board, stand-up position with the handlebar that lets you steer and the thumb throttle for powering a small tiny motor that is fed by batteries in the down tube of the handlebar. They also have mechanical brakes. It’s not a very complex product. Now the funny thing about it is that as a predecessor, we had a fad for these hoverboards and hoverboards came after the Segway, which was an early 2000s invention. The Segway was two wheels parallel to one another with a platform in between using electric motors but with also handlebar. They operated more by the user leaning forward so the user stood with their feet slightly apart facing forward.

Oliver: And falling off of them if they were George Bush.

Horace: Yes! There are many episodes over the years of sort of people not quite getting how to use them because they require a balancing and they use sensing and torque motors that allow the setup to balance itself and provide a intuitive motion. By just leaning forward you would go. It was entirely driven by your body. That made the Segway go in a certain direction. The Turning was using the handle bar a little bit but just senses your intent. It wasn’t a physically turning. The Segway was way ahead of its time. When it was introduced it really was micromobility, version 0 because the idea was exactly what we’re seeing in micromobility today. Electric motors, lightweight battery on board, utility transport as opposed to something as a recreational.

Now the Segway failed. At the time there were a lot of debates about it and and the proponents of it were super excited. I was one of the people who super excited about it because it really promised what we see the micromobility promise today being, which is motorized transport personal size and highly efficient.

But because it wasn’t a bicycle configuration and because it was motorized and potentially quite fast there were laws that permitted it anywhere. The laws were saying it cannot go on the street and it wouldn’t be permitted on the sidewalk. Although you could make it slow enough.

So it found a few niches, I think some postmen were trying these out as mail delivery vehicles, and famously almost as a joke mall cops were using these. It kind of became a character in a in a movie called Mall Cop, which is a satirical look at not quite police officers. By the way, Steve Jobs was also asked by Dean Kamen, the inventor, to review the product after he built it. Supposedly, Steve Jobs was very negative about it saying, you know, look it’s not it’s not good enough. All these important Silicon Valley people were there and and there was sort of a mixed response to it even amongst these luminaries.

Now again, the story of Segway is a rather tragic one and it was bought by a company in China. They’ve been trying to commercialize it in different forms. The hoverboard is really a miniaturized version of it. If you think about it, it more or less does the same thing — you stand with your feet in the same position and you have to balance it. It’s a harder to use product because you don’t have the handle bars and it doesn’t have the mass of the original. But the idea was similar that you could sort of stand and move at the same time.

Now, the company that is now Chinese(Ninebot) is the one that is supplying most of the scooters that we see on the roads in use today as shared vehicles. And what’s interesting about that is that the iteration was:

Segway -> hoverboard -> powered scooter

Scooters seem to be the one that is finding a product market fit meaning it is becoming successful and useful. The Segway failed but somehow, from its ashes, we see the emergence, the rebirth, the renaissance of personal mobility for a very small vehicle.

Now mind you these are still all throttle vehicles. They’re not assisting the existing input of energy. They’re not amplifying. The users locomotion is what the European standard for pedal electric has been all about. Pedelectric is a completely different animal in terms of the philosophy which is that you should never have a throttle. It’s a vehicle that is an evolution of an existing bicycle configuration that has been around for 100 years.

Oliver: It’s like bionic.

Horace: Yeah, that’s exactly how I like to think of it as a bionic product. Whereas these are more toy. Like these are more again the evolution of a child’s toy or perhaps this kind of mall cop invention. And yet, and yet, how do you make sense of this is this is one of these a flip phone and the other a candy bar phone. Basically, two forms of the same thing in the way users use it and maybe slightly different segmentation by trip distance.

It turns out that there are limitations and benefits to the very design constraints that these vehicles have. In other words, when the wheels are small, they are appropriate in Santa Monica, which is a wonderful, warm climate with smooth streets and very little potholes or debris. You might find on the roads, which is more common in again in colder climates, [that the scooter doesn’t work]. The scooter’s only have a small battery by necessity because that’s a very small vehicle and so you can’t really go long distances. It’s also a standing up configuration. So you can’t really carry much with you. The regulations, at least in California, require helmets and they cannot be used on sidewalks and yet people do that. I saw I saw many many people using them on sidewalks without helmets and so maybe over time those rules will change, and normative behavior might dictate the new rules.

But what what I’m trying to explain is that because of the design considerations and the small size of the product, it’s easy to deploy. It’s easy to move. It’s easy to charge because you can put a few of them in a truck or SUV and then you move them to a charging location charge them overnight and put them back out. In fact, there’s a whole gig economy now.

Oliver: Indeed, they chargers are getting paid to be able to relocate them and charge them at night.

Hey, this is a really interesting point. I really love this breakdown of this larger vehicle/smaller vehicle. It’s almost like using the distances as being the determining factor in what the actual job is there to be done.

There’s an interesting question here for me though. When I was at Uber, we would oftentimes talk about liquidity of supply in a city [as in, a rider and a driver would be able to count on getting reliable ride within a few minutes — the market was working efficiently]. The thing that I can see that becomes tricky as if you start differentiating so early in this between you know, large and short distances, would it not be that you end up with, you know longer range bikes end up being too far away from someone to walk. I guess you could just go and get a scooter ride to a bike, right, [and then take it from there]?

Horace: So you get a scooter to get to the other to the other vehicle type. One of the great attributes of micromobility is that it plays well with others. Micromobility is inherently multimodal. Multimodal means you take a car to the train and then you know to train maybe to a bus to complete the journey — you use multiple modes. When you’re dealing with micromobility, you might be switching vehicles three or four times per Journey.

You said liquidity. I like to use the word accessibility. So they’re very accessible. They’re available everywhere. They’re designed to be where you need them as opposed to having to take them with you which is what the issue with bikes is in general. You know the Brompton, which is one of the greatest inventions in cycling, was invented specifically to deal with the problem of taking a bicycle onto the English rail network. Commuters could complete their journey door to door. And so the bike comes with you as essentially luggage.

The micro Mobility idea is that well, once you get off the train, they’ll be a bike or scooter or something else there. Again, the way to think about it again, is that the distances travelled imply jobs to be done. So when you are competing with walking, which is what I think what scooters do, there also might be journeys like the one I took today where I need to go 25 miles where an e-bike was absolutely fantastic and so [you’ll be able to access] everywhere in between.

You’re going to see inventions. By the way, we forgot to mention one more very important micromobility device which which came between the the scooter and and its predecessor, the hoverboard, which is the Boosted board. The boosted board is a skateboard with a particularly large motor. The idea was you have a Boosted board, and you would essentially throttle it or use the throttle with a Bluetooth remote.

So to clarify, we went from:

Segway -> hoverboard -> boosted board -> powered scooter

The first three of those things you bought, the electric scooters are the thing you rent. Your question in the beginning was like well what happened? Weren’t these around? Certainly they were and they’re still available for you to purchase. There are many variants which are very inexpensive but the scooters that were picked off the shelf were consumer-grade basically and put on the streets by Bird were made by the same company that made the Segway.

Oliver: Yeah, Ninebot.

Horace: yeah, and so this only happened in September 2017. The very first few hundred scooters were put out in Santa Monica and now we are talking to you in June of 2018. So it’s only been about nine months and already there are dozens of companies and billions of dollars have been invested in the sector. I’m not exaggerating. I’m not just throwing that number around. Literally billions because if you add all these startups see how much capital they raised it adds up to that.

It is taking off in the United States. What’s important is to understand that at this point at least, it’s a not actually a US phenomenon. It’s a regional phenomenon of of the West Coast, and perhaps a few spots in other parts like Washington DC and maybe a few places in the South. Um, maybe they’re starting to creep into the cities of the north as well.

But it’s only been nine months and in nine months, you don’t even get the chance to set up a meeting to discuss this topic in any other context. This is something that is is as fast as I’ve ever seen something take off. I could be a it could be a fad. It could be a bubble.

But the reason it’s not and the reason they attracted so much capital is because of the operating data that they’re collecting. The data is measured in terms of utility and price of the of the ride.

So you measure how many rides does the vehicle get taken on on a daily basis? If you have 100 vehicles and you give 500 rides a day, then you say that your utilization is five, dividing the number of rides by the number of vehicles. It doesn’t mean that every vehicle is used five times, but on average it’s used five times.

And and so that you till is a number multiplied by how much people are willing to spend on these rides. And typically they are dollar to start and fifteen cents a minute. It’s kind of become the the default pricing of these things. So if there’s five rides a day, at two dollars a ride, it’s $10 a day and the scooter itself may cost three to four hundred dollars. Now, it depends how much extra hardware is needed there in terms of geo-positioning location, locking mechanisms and so on. These are various additional costs beyond the commodity pricing of the scooter itself, but nonetheless, it’s a 400–500 dollar product as a cost out of pocket to the operator. If it’s earning $10 a day then in 50 days, it’s paid off and anything that is used beyond 50 days is profit. Of course, you have to pay charging, you have to pay maintenance. You have to pay staff and engineers and so on. Charging is actually the biggest cost because charging seems to be about five dollars per scooter per day and this is paid again to a gig economy worker.

They have to take the vehicle off the street that they told where it is on an app, and they pick it up. They charge it overnight and have also drop it off somewhere. So they also act as balancers. So they they balance the vehicle fleet in terms of location and the balance the energy and the vehicle fleet by charging it. So their costs are mostly time to do so and the vehicle that they need. It’s like an Uber driver but they’re not carrying people, they’re carrying scooters. So that now we have some people were kind of doing hundreds of these.

The idea though, is that the unit economics really work out pretty well. That the vehicle would be paid off in a couple of months. As long as the the vehicle doesn’t fall apart in that time, which is if it does fall apart after those two-three months then you’re losing money. Anything above it’s payback period is profit and to the extent that you can get that utilitization even higher beyond five trips/day you’re doing tremendously well. So what Bird was able to obtain and only a few months was they got these tremendous numbers in Santa Monica. Their utilization was off the charts compared to bike-sharing compared to what was thought of as micromobility before.

That is why suddenly billions of dollars started flying at this problem. Now, that sounds like a great success story, but I have some concerns over all on potential for this becoming a phenomenon globally and also universally at the expense of every other mode of micromobility. Their model works fantastically well because it’s available, cheap, accessible and easy to use but it has the limitation of distance. Maybe you’ll get much better and I’ve seen prototypes which are actually far more advanced in terms of the vehicle design.

Oliver: The latest ones from Skip and Uber are longer longer range, so you’d be able to get more rides in before you need to recharge it and obviously that that stretches your ability.

The thing that I find amazing about it is as you look at the of those 12 applications that were put in there for the San Francisco permit, and there’ve been a few listeners, Michal and others, who’ve gone and done analysis on it and you can see how quickly and how different manufacturers and companies are able to evolve and adapt for each variable. I find that so incredible because it is as you sort of say this really only started in September and we’re in June and this is um, I mean the amount of experimentation is almost like a Cambrian explosion. I think it’s actually going to kind of set the stage for a lot of other experimentation and exactly what else in the space

Horace: To tell you just how impactful it’s been, some companies which started with bike-sharing switched in the United States to scooter sharing. China was the home of bike sharing, at least the free-floating bike-sharing. Limebike which came out of China to bring that concept to the United States is now switching to scooters and in fact taking scooters back to China.

So here we have this sort of leap frog effect. By the way bike-sharing China was such a huge hit, with 20 million bikes and 70 million active users a day, hundreds of millions of rides per month per being consumed using standard not electric pedal bikes. China was so proud of that phenomenon that they called it one of the five modern Chinese inventions that influenced the world that we’re led from China. And yet here we are seeing a phenomenon where we’re using a completely different form factor and configuration and use is coming back and the kind of leapfrogging again.

Now, I’d be cautious to suggest that this is the ultimate micromobility configuration. There’s the shared kick scooter with an electric motor. I’m at a loss for for perfect analogies, but perhaps it’s the introduction of the Razr which was one of the most successful flip phones and we hadn’t yet seen the iPhone or the launch of the Blackberry, which is again a huge hit in the in a phone space or the launch of a laptop which had a trackball. A lot of these things were huge hits at a time and they were normative. They redefined the segment. Everybody assumed that that was the way forward but they were again incremental or they were stepping stones onto something else.

Because again, we have four five four or five other stepping stones to get to this one that we’re seeing today. And and so I don’t know why should we stop here? Right?

Oliver: Yeah, absolutely. I mean I have ideas about what I think the problems of this are. I remember when the Razr came out with the iTunes addon, and Steve Jobs was famously embarrassed by how bad it was, you know, it was like ‘we know we’re trying to solve for something here, but we’re not quite sure what it is’.

To me, there’s a bunch of problems with the scooters. You still need to charge them. They don’t go and charge themselves, you know, there’s problems with all the kind of tragedy that comments in terms of parking Etc.

What are the parts that you can see that still need to be solved to get us from this Razr moment to an iPhone moment?

Horace: Well, first of all, first of all, I think safety is the first insufficiency of this of this configuration, because small wheels are inherently, prone to being upset by obstacles. Consider if you will mopeds. One of the most iconic is the Vespa. Everything about a Vespa is absolutely gorgeous, but it has these small wheels, which is one of the compromises you need to have in order to get that configuration. The small wheels means that as a moped, it is not a very suitable one for again for rough climates. It was invented in Italy and works very well in the South. Motorcyclists know that the wheel diameter is going to give you a different ability to cope with rough rough roads and so on.

Um, another example would be to imagine your mountain bike. You have a smooth surface for cycling and you have a very thin tire for racing, and you have a thicker tire for a commuter bike and then you have a very thick wide tire for offroad. But also you cannot do mountain biking with small wheels.

So when you think about all these other domains of vehicles, the tool matches the job very closely and this is one reason why scooters with small wheels to me don’t scale to all micromobility potential. We are going to have room for bikes, we’re going to have room for ebikes and regular bikes.

I think that the way to think about it in terms of jobs, though is geography; where you are. Are there many hills? Is the weather inclement frequently? Do you have rough pavements? Are the distances long? This is where the data is available that you can say, okay, the demand exists for certain distances and the walking is very easily addressed by scooters in warm climates, but perhaps in cooler climates, rough surfaces or very hilly geographies, you will want to still go to an e-bike with a larger wheel.

So again, this is this is why I think that in transport, one size does not fit all. The paradox or the irony here is that we’ve been hiring one vehicle to do all these jobs in the past: the car. In fact, as time goes on, the bigger it gets and so people are now hiring an SUV for every job of transport. That is the true tragedy. So whereas I see this hive of activity, this potential for innovation, we’re going to see all kinds of cool things. I’m going to Germany this summer to Eurobike which is a trade show that, you know, people show off their bike ideas.

You know, we get to see a lot of e-bikes literally hundreds of e-bikes cargo bikes which are typically now also electric, lus recumbent which are sometimes called velomobile which may or may not have a fairing around them. They can be made much cheaper, can be engineered much better, can be sold or distributed with new business models, sharing etc. We haven’t even touched on the potential for having software and sensing on board.

I think the platform is going to come as a layer on top just like in the phone business. We’re at the stage right now that is similar to the late 90s, though things are happening so quickly that that, you know, we’re sort of compressing decades into years or months. In the 90s, we had this problem: who owns the relationship of the customers? The operator gives you a phone or do you buy it from a phone maker and then go get your sim card to get your service from a different company? All of that was trying to be sorted out initially.

Eventually, the relationship was held by the service provider which parallels to today to the operator of the fleet. You didn’t think much about going to China for your scooter and saying well, can you put this scooter on on this sharing network? It wouldn’t actually doesn’t make sense because they’re not personally owned.

But now we’re juggling all these ideas. In fact curiously Ofo began as an idea that people would share their own personal vehicles. So they would park them and allow others to rent them. Essentially that’s how it sort of started as car-sharing applied to bikes in universities. That’s how it started initially 2015 or so and so they say they pivoted to having to own their bikes because they couldn’t get supply and demand squared away and decided to go with their own, buying off the shelf. By the way, firstly they bought off the shelf bikes and then they began to engineering them because you’re going to need to engineer them for the demands of fleet use.

And so again, we’re so early with scooters. The time it takes to engineer a new scooter is over one year because people have to go back to the factory, source the parts and it takes about the same time as a phone does. And yet the businesses are just just now getting so much money there’s a funny consequence of this that some of the larger capitalized companies are monopolizing the supply chain by saying well we’ll buy every scooter you make and so none are left for the others.

Oliver: There’s a couple of really interesting points in there one was. I was in China last week before I came over to Northern Ireland and I spent a little time in the Mobike headquarters with the uh, one of the presidents there and they have locked up their own OEM supply for Mobike. Mobike is one of the the Chinese bike-share suppliers. They were just saying yeah, we iterate every couple of months and release these new bikes and to you point, I can see they’re absolutely doing the same thing with scooters and they’ll they’ll lock up that supply. I mean, that’s why none of them are available on Amazon.

There’s also another point in there which is around the other modalities around micromobility, which is it doesn’t really work if you’re in the middle of an industrial park where the only other access to any other sort of transport is your car. As you say, you’re really replacing walking.

So it has to be in an environment where walking was even a default means of getting around. Which actually when you think about it as a lot of cities not necessarily the case. The other point is around weather protection because where it’s really sunny that works really well, but um, I’m and Ireland. The weather here is terrible. It’s made to be the middle of summer and it’s raining every day, you know.

I’m that’s actually I have you ever seen that lit motors C1? The auto balancing version of the cabin bicycle that they were trying to build. I have a pre-order. I love the idea of having like a two-wheeled gyro bike. While I was in China, I saw Lingyun Intelligent mobility launched a similar modell. Lingyun is a Chinese company that effectively has cloned the Lit motors C1. Interestingly, the people who had backed it were Sequoia. Now Sequoia are leading the latest round for Bird and had previously backed Ninebot and Segway. So obviously they can see something coming down the pipe. To your point, we’re waiting for that iPhone moment. We don’t know what it’s going to look like, but I can see there being in this whole emergence of this class of vehicles.

Horace: For sure. Absolutely. The trajectory where we talk about in disruption theories is that you begin with some foothold market and then you you have product market fit and then you begin to evolve along the dimensions of performance hat users seem to resonate with. When you start out by asking what’s missing, I think safety is the first thing and to address that you get to I think that rather than make it a heavy and protected you want to throw technology at it in terms of sensors, in terms of intelligence.

With all the things that we talk about cars becoming smarter with sensing and intelligence, we can see those things coming to micromobility much quicker. So part of the innovation will be on the mechanical engineering side, as you pointed out gyroscopes, and uh, fairings or covers and other forms of physical innovations, but also in terms of software and intelligence, which would empower the user and prevent accidents.

There’s a great potential there. I think people were you know, looking at unit economics today are that’s just that’s just uh table stakes. That’s just getting in the game. Once this starts moving forward, it’s going to first evolved rapidly on the product side.

We’re going to see magical improvement in the performance of the product and then it’s going to evolve into platforms so that the experience of time you spent with these vehicles is going to be monetized or made more valuable somehow and it’s going to integrate then with other things.

The other dimension of improvement that we’ve not discussed is the network. The network would allow vehicles to interoperate cycling with public transit, but also, you know, even to the point where ride-sharing services will engage, micromobility users by saying, okay, well, we’ll give you a lift and then we’ll drop you off at a micromobility device or vice versa or we’ll use our big vehicles to balance the small vehicles, which is already happening.

Those integrations between different systems and the creation of markets for handoffs I sometimes call the tokenization or sort of the breaking the problem into tokens and then being able to trade these tokens.

So you actually create a whole new economy of transfers so that it’s not a single entity that dominates all transport. This is perhaps idealistic. Maybe is gonna meet may turn out like like, uh, like Amazon for retail or or Google for search. Uh, but you could also end up more quote unquote open or modular [infrastructure] where you have essentially plug and play compatibility between the different modes. And so so this is fascinating.

I think what you just we’re just doing now is scratching the surface on all the potential that exists for taking something which is so simple. Today, it’s just an electric motor with a battery attached to the couple of wheels. How simple can you get? Well you give me that’s what a scooter is today, you know, but we’ve gone through many iterations as I said, from a Segway which was too early to hoverboards, which was not very useful, to the Boosted Board, which is still required quite a bit of coordination on the part of the user and it was not for everybody, and now we have these scooters which actually seem to be like everybody can handle these.

At the same time coming from above you have the evolution of electric bicycles, which are I think more European Centric. Regular cycling is more China Centric and scooters seem to be more of a US phenomenon. And again, from history, we had a similar Galapagos situation where Japan was different than Europe than the different than the United States a lot of that had to do with regulation and the early years of cellular telephony.

So the US had multiple standards. It was very chaotic, somewhat backwards in terms of data on the network. Japan was very advanced on data, but didn’t have a great ecosystem. Uh, Europe had great devices and unified Network called GSM, which meant that that users started using a text messaging very very quickly, but then the US evolved quickly to Blackberry and then into iPhone because of software and it sort of trumped everything else.

But again, that’s not say to history repeats itself. But we’re seeing rhyming here, and the fact that you do have different ecologies in different parts of the world based on indigenous flora and fauna, right?

So you have you have the flora and fauna of companies, people, cities, histories, cultures, and then of course regulation which is influenced by all those things. So things bloom there that wouldn’t bloom elsewhere. In the US given it’s rather perverse monoculture of automobile, it kind of almost pushed everything else out. But out of the crack in the concrete grew the scooter which began to flourish there. So even the absence of an ecology, the US has still allowed the blooming of a particular species.

Now will these begin to cross borders and begin to dominate as a single phone form-factor ended up really dominating, similar to how we have touch screen phones running Android and iOS? That’s the question before us.

I think that the the exciting thing is that, if you just dabble in this slightly, you see all these opportunities. If you’re focused on software, if you’re focused on hardware, you see great opportunities there and if you’re focused on service and jobs to be done or design, you see opportunities there it’s as if we’re on the on the cusp of a truly marvelous, supernova of innovation and why it attracted me so much. So I think the conversation goes on right? I think we’ve tried today to talk about scooters, to get our hands around the problem and again by the time you hear this this may have moved on already because it’s moving so fast, but yes, it’s a rich history with lots of anecdotes here.

Let’s look forward to the next version of this show

Oliver: Absolutely.

Horace: All right. Well, thank you very much for us. Really appreciate it.