🏢 🚙 🤖 Issue 24; batteries, scooters, industrial real estate boom and D2C

Sam Cash
Sam Cash
Sep 3, 2018 · 5 min read

Thanks to all those who read and shared my article in VentureBeat last week. Especially, those who found the link elsewhere after I copied the incorrect link in this newsletter — here it is again for those who missed it.

Main Stories

🔋 Batteries — in Maslow’s modern hierarchy of needs, it seems that (phone) battery is now at the top of the pyramid (joke, kinda). Batteries, currently predominantly lithium-ion, will become increasingly vital as the prevalence of personal technology is coupled with more environmentally friendly national power grids and new transportation methods such as EVs and light-electric vehicles.

Lithium-ion batteries have remained largely the same for nearly 30 years with incremental increases in output, the most significant change being the reduction in cost as shown below:

As the cost of cells has decreased, we’ve seen new products and consumer behaviours emerge, as evidecenced by this newsletter EVs, e-bikes and scooters. As is being evidenced with EVs, according to Bloomberg around half the growth of new cars came from EVs. as the cost of productiong has decreased:

vehicle sales in the 12 months ending in June increased by about 1.15 million units, year over year. Of that, about 565,000 were electric vehicles. In other words, almost half the growth in the overall car market was taken by the plug-ins.

Another important aspect of battery technology progression is to solve the issue of power storage, a key impidement to more environmentally friendly power consumption. Solutions thus far have ranged from Tesla’s Power Wall for personal consumption to energy stored through concrete blocks and cranes for local micro grid energy. A number of countries have been engaged in the development of a battery to supplant lithium-ion, with the potential for this new “super” battery to unlock a new paradigm of technological invention and wealth creation. Currenly, South Korea and Japan (Panasonic supply Tesla) are ahead in this race.

As battery cells take center stage in a post-petro world, we can only hope that development in the next 30 years will be more pronounced than the last 30.

🌉 San Francisco scooter operators — Scooters are back in SF after a forced summer recess. This week San Francisco’s MTA announced that, out of twelve applicants, it has awarded licences to Scoot and Skip, in the process shunning better capatilised Bird and Lime, as well as Jump (Uber) and Lyft.

Many more will now be bemoaning Uber’s Travis era attitude of ‘most-fast-change-consumer-behaviour-capture-market-share-then-deal-with-regulators’ attitude. Bird and Lime both rolled out scooters in SF this Spring without clear authorisation from the city and are now paying the price for Uber’s regulatory indiscrentions.

The ride-hailing wars saw a clear correlation between capital raised and market share, as driver and passenger subsidies spiralled. Looking at last-mile transportation and more specifically scooters — we’ve just seen companies that have raised $415m and $467m respectively beaten by companies which have raised $56m collectively.

>> Does this mean that the post-Travis world of new transportation methods, capital is no longer the key factor in scaling?

🚲 ⚡️ NYC bikes go electric — To date, e-bikes in the city had been used predominantly by on-demand food delivery couriers and had been made illegal by Mayor De Blasio back in October of last year. The Mayor’s office specifically cited businesses which use the bikes in an unsafe way and the subsequent danger to pedestrians and motorists. The regulation was particularly punitive for low-paid workers who made a living from on-demand services and was, rightly, viewed as a step backwards for NYC mobility and transport.

In April, De Blasio rolled back part of this legislation and released a framework for legal use pedal assist bikes, permitting bikes which did not have a throttle or could exceed 20mph as of August 2018 (the legislation is complex).

This week, NYC’s City Bike scheme released 200 electric bicycles into the wild, a review here. With the imminent shut down of the L Train, alternate modes of transport are being discussed to move the 100,000s of people who use this line daily. Citi Bike are to launch 1,000 bikes to service the L Train issues in April 2019. This forced mass adoption may be good news for the cities long term mobility goals. If e-bikes take off in NYC, expect to see them replicated in other US cities, provided by either government or private companies (note: City Bike is operated by Motivate, which is owned by Lyft).

Interesting Companies

Carmera — is a full-stack AV mapping company based in Brooklyn. The company has released products from LIDAR mapping, vehicle fleet management and crowdsourced mapping. This week the company raised $20m from investors such as GV and Matrix

Nexar — is a provider of in-car dashcams which use computer vision, AI and inter-vehicle networking to reduce car accidents. The company recently launched the Lights API, which predicts traffic light patterns, a considerable source of human-error related accidents

Vague Scientist

Toyota invest $500m into Uber — the investment is part of a wider partnership which will see Toyota vehicles equipped with Uber’s self-driving technology. As of late, Uber’s self-driving ambitions have taken a back seat to the company’s multi-modal push

The Commercial REIT boom — whilst its accepted that the penetration of ecommerce continues to shutter physical retail, ecommerce has also had a huge impact on the growth of industrial properties used for storage and consigment. This article predicts for every additional $1bn in ecommerce sales, a million square foot of industrial space needs to be built.

Comprehensive Direct-to-Consumer rundown — Eze Vidra provides one of the most all encompassing breakdowns of the current D2C environment. From company stack, strategy, verticals, incumbents and current insurgents

HBR looks at what Alibaba does differently — this long-ish read is written by Alibaba EVP Ming Zeng and looks at the strategy and business lines it pursued in becoming one of the worlds biggest companies

An investigation in supply-chain software — this fascinating article looks to better understand the opaque world of supply chain management and the software that powers it (more interesting than it sounds, I promise)

Farfetch teardown — Loose Threads analyses the company’s business model F1 filing in advance of their IPO

Socratic Tech

Thought pieces on startups and technology. Cutting through the noise, so you don’t have to.

Sam Cash

Written by

Sam Cash

Early stage VC @Project_A_Ventures | prev. @betaworks | loves great founders + tech + emergent behaviours | Newsletter: http://bit.ly/PWTjoin

Socratic Tech

Thought pieces on startups and technology. Cutting through the noise, so you don’t have to.

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