This week we’re releasing the first of the content from the recent Micromobility America conference. In this interview, Lauren Goode from Wired interviews Andrew Yang who was one of the headline speakers. Lauren and Andrew talk about Forward, his new American political party, before moving on to talk about role of micromobility in the future of transport. It’s a great conversation and we in the team really appreciate it when politicians have such progressive takes and are willing to embrace tech...
Oct 30, 2021•32 min
This week Oliver interviews one of his heroes in the urbanist space, Gabe Klein. Gabe has successfully managed to successfully operate in both the private and public sectors, as one of the first execs at Zipcar, helping form the company that became Car2Go and then was appointed head of DOT in both Washington DC and Chicago. He has a great grounding in the space and understands what works and what doesn’t in cities giving him great perspective of what micromobility offers to the cities and urban ...
Oct 13, 2021•56 min
This week Oliver interviews Jaideep Dhanoa, Founder and CEO of Fenix, about his experience within the micromobility industry across Asia and the Middle East. Jaideep is an absolute OG of the space. They talk about his experiences with the Chinese bikeshare boom while at Grab, his move back to the Middle East with Circ and now his efforts with Fenix. They talk Turkey which is a market that hasn’t been on the radar till now, but could well become the next Paris or Seoul. It's a great conversation ...
Oct 04, 2021•46 min
Hey team, this week Oliver interviews Olaf Sakkers about his new book, Mobility Disruption Framework. Olaf is one of the General Partners at Redblue Capital, a new mobility venture investment firm that he founded. Prior to this, he was at Maniv Mobility for 6 years with Michael Granoff, a friend of Micromobility Industries and a previous guest on the podcast. This is one of our favourite episodes. Olaf’s work feels seminal, which is always a good place to start from. It covers a lot of the same ...
Sep 15, 2021•1 hr 1 min
This week Oliver interviews Horace about his recent thoughts on the impact of lithium ion batteries on power tools and how the market and products have developed. He also spawns a new framework: batteries we carry, batteries that carry us and batteries that carry themselves. It’s Horace at his best - riffing and letting his brain do what it does. In the meantime, make sure that you get your tickets for Micromobility America, the world’s largest summit devoted to small electric vehicles. It retur...
Sep 03, 2021•43 min
Today Oliver interviews Michael Dunne, founder of Zozogo, former VP of JD Power in China, GM of General Motors Indonesia and host of the Winning in Asia podcast which covers the auto sector in China. Mike has a huge depth of experience in China, which is an area that the team haven’t covered as much as we’d like on this show. The conversation gave rise to a lot of discussions about the lay of the land in the Chinese auto sector, the role of the Chinese auto sector in Micromobility and how microm...
Aug 23, 2021•54 min
Today Oliver interviews Kyle Doerksen, founder/CEO of Onewheel, about the companies journey. Kyle has been in the space since the very beginning and epitomises the builder mentality - having tinkered with lots of components back in the late 2000’s to build his first prototypes. They also talk a lot about funding and manufacturing as OneWheel has taken quite a different approach to others in the space in the USA. This video is also up as a Youtube video, complete with images of the vehicle as wel...
Aug 04, 2021•40 min
Today, Oliver interviews Erdem Ovacik, CEO of Donkey Republic, the first shared micromobility player to go public globally. Donkey Republic is listed on the Nasdaq First North exchange in the Nordics. It’s a great discussion about how the market has evolved, and why they see increasingly tight cooperation with governments being the next phase of shared market developments. Specifically, they dig into: - the backstory of Donkey, including where the name came from and the development of the bikesh...
Jul 09, 2021•40 min
This week Oliver interviews Richard Thorpe, CEO of Gocycle. Gocycle are the world’s premier electric folding bike manufacturer, and Richard has been at the game longer than most, starting to work on the project back in the early 2000’s. In this episode, they dig into the history of the company, why folding matters in a multimodal future, and the importance of vehicle weight. Specifically: - Richard’s background at Mclaren and how that informed his view on weight - The challenge of building an el...
Jun 15, 2021•49 min
This week, Oliver and Horace interview Amir Haleem, CEO of Helium, about the rise of distributed telco infrastructure. This was originally recorded for the Critical Path, but given that Amir has been a guest on the podcast in the past and there’s a direct link between what they’re building and low cost connectivity for micromobility, we wanted to share here as well. If you’re interested in Helium and wondering how it sits within the telecommunication industry business model, this is a great epis...
Jun 06, 2021•56 min
This week we’re releasing an audio version of the recent Micromobility Membership webinar on low end micromobility that Oliver did with reporter Lavender Au and Nat Bullard, Head of Content at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. They discuss Lavender’s lauded RestofWorld article on low end micromobility in China. In lieu of full-size cars, Chinese commuters are flocking to tiny alternatives that look and perform more like golf carts or rickshaws than Teslas. In 2019, these low-cost, low-speed vehicles...
May 28, 2021•50 min
In celebration of Earth Day 2021, Oliver interviews Horace about his latest project - looking at the carbon emissions in the transport sector and modelling the pathways for the current options. You can probably imagine where they get to, but they don’t want to spoil the show. This is still a work in progress, and they are putting this out as a primer so that folks may understand the narrative arc, and the background/context of why Horace is looking at this. Specifically they look at: - The math ...
Apr 23, 2021•1 hr 17 min
Between COVID work stoppages, a massive stock surge, a strategic tech acquisition, partnering with legendary automotive engineer Sandy Munro, and the general fits and starts of pre-production, Arcimoto, maker of semi-enclosed electric three-wheelers, has had an eventful year. This week Oliver interviews their CEO, Mark Frohnmayer, to shed light on the company’s manufacturing progress and long-term ambitions—and why he believes heavy micromobility is vital to the future of electric vehicles. This...
Apr 21, 2021•44 min
This week Oliver brings you an exclusive interview with Salvatore Palella, CEO of Helbiz, which is about to list on the NASDAQ as the first shared micromobility player to go public globally. It’s a fascinating conversation about the current state of the market, how valuations are reached in the SPAC space, and what possibilities are enabled for micromobility by the public markets. Specifically, they dig into: - Salvatore’s background, including as one of the youngest professional football club o...
Apr 09, 2021•40 min
This week, Oliver interviews Jameson Dietweiler, CEO of Fantasmo. Fantasmo has been around since 2014 to build maps for machines, and has been working specifically on micromobility since the earliest days in 2017. With the recent announcement that they’ve partnered with Tier to roll out an innovative phone based parking verification technology Oliver was excited to have a chance to bring them on the show. They use camera based positioning to better locate vehicles like scooters and ebikes in cit...
Apr 06, 2021•40 min
This week, Oliver interview Joseph Brennan, co-founder of Zoba, an analytics company working on optimizing micromobility operations. It’s a pretty nerdy topic, but the topline is that their clients have seen up to 74% more rides per scooter simply from operational tweaks that Joseph and the team have suggested. As micromobility operations get more sophisticated and cities get stricter on operators and rule enforcement, services like what Zoba offers will become even more important. This was orig...
Mar 29, 2021•42 min
We're excited to bring you this interview with Carson Brown, co-founder of TAUR Scooters who are building one of the best designed and coolest looking scooters we've seen on the market. With their team based in London, it’s an excellent discussion about the role of design in micro, and why these new vehicles reflect the culture and environment that they’re designed in. We really hope that you enjoy it. This was originally a Youtube video for Micromobility Industries - if you’re keen to check tha...
Mar 20, 2021•46 min
This week, Oliver interviews Horace about the ‘Trillion Dollar Question’. With Arcimoto (who we’ve covered on episode 46) hitting a $1b market cap, and the recent article from RestofWorld covering the rise of low end Chinese micro-EV’s, we wanted to circle back to the question of what will heavy micromobility - those vehicles in the 50-500kg category - look like and why could they be where we find the defining vehicles of our time. Specifically we cover: - A quick summary of Horace’s research in...
Mar 16, 2021•47 min
This week, we release the first of the many incredible sessions from the 2021 Micromobility World conference, wherein Benedict Evans and Horace Dediu discussed the disruptive potential of micromobility. It was an incredible conversation between two people who clearly have a lot of time and are excited by each others ideas. We hope you enjoy it! Specifically they dig into: - Why Benedicts background as a historian makes him a great analyst. - The micromobiltiy disruption thesis - low end, the asy...
Feb 06, 2021•48 min
On this episode, Horace joins Oliver on the show to talk about what an entry by Apple into the mobility market would look like, and why a car is perhaps the wrong form factor to be looking at. They talk through the growth prospects for micromobility, and why Apple’s entry into the market would be a meaningful contribution to the world of mobility. This is on the back of Horace’s post ‘Apple Computer’ published on the Micromobility Industries blog recently. Check it out here: https://micromobilit...
Jan 24, 2021•58 min
Fun fact: Seoul, South Korea is the largest market for shared scooters globally, and Beam is one of the largest players there. This week, Oliver interviews Alan Jiang, founder of Beam, the largest shared Micromobility operator in Asia-Pacific. Asia is one of the hotspots for micromobility given its home to the majority of the world’s population experiencing the growth, density and ensuing urban congestion where micromobility really thrives. We’re very excited to cover more of it in 2021. Alan ha...
Jan 16, 2021•47 min
Today on the show, Oliver interviews Puneeth Meruva, Associate at Trucks VC about their latest report: The Three Axes of Micromobility: Supply Chains, Distribution and Maintenance about the often unseen world of getting Micromobility into the hands of consumers. This is a topic that hasn’t received much coverage to date, so it was a fascinating conversation fully of nitty-gritty and relatively technical details about the opportunities for development and investment in the micromobility ecosystem...
Jan 08, 2021•58 min
This week Oliver interviews Chinmay Malaviya and Charlie Depman, cofounders of Ridepanda, about their efforts to build a better customer journey for purchasing owned micromobility. The platform is relatively new, but it hits on a very relevant need. Thanks to Reilly Brennan from Trucks VC for putting us onto them. Specifically we dig into: - Their backgrounds at Bird, Scoot and Lime and how that led them to starting this business. - The core customer needs that they’re trying to solve - The impo...
Dec 17, 2020•57 min
This week, Horace joins Oliver for the podcasts 100th episode, and they run through what’s happened in the last 2 and a half years, and wonder aloud what will happen in the next two. Specifically they dig into: - Horace’s early theses - The emergence of scooters and why they proved to be so challenging to Horace’s ideas about what vehicles would be most popular - The biggest mistake that Horace thinks he made in his early theories - What Oliver considers the biggest barriers, and where he over a...
Dec 10, 2020•1 hr 8 min
This week Oliver interviews Richard Burger, co-founder of Swapfiets, the largest bike subscription service in Europe. With more than 220,000 subscriptions and growing rapidly, it’s a great discussion on solving the job-to-be-done for biking/micromobility, as well as the challenges and opportunities of operating large service business at scale across 6 (soon to be 7) countries. Specifically, they cover: - The context of the existing bike ownership experience in the Netherlands that gave rise to p...
Dec 04, 2020•43 min
This week Oliver interviews Dmitri Pivovarov from Bolt Mobility, which is one of the largest ride hailing players in Europe, and has been quietly building a micromobility business which recently announced it was expanding to challenge Tier as the largest micromobility operator in Europe in 2021. Oliver uses this episode to dig into the interplay between ride hailing and micromobility, how Bolt has built the business, and get an update on the overall shared micrombobility market in Europe. It’s a...
Nov 27, 2020•49 min
Today Oliver interviews Horace for a fun review of the parallels between the smartphone revolution and what we’re seeing play out with the growth of lightweight electric vehicles trips. It’s also a hilarious chance to hear Horace talk about how we think about fostering children as a species and ask why the same thinking isn’t applied to how we run organisations and products. Specifically they dig into: - The history of the smartphone industry, and why business model rather than competence dictat...
Nov 20, 2020•1 hr 4 min
This week Oliver interviews a fellow kiwi, Timothy Allan, CEO of Ubco, about their heavy duty electric motorbikes. While the firm is small - they’ve sold a bit more than a thousand units across NZ, Europe and the US - it ticks a few interesting disruptive innovation boxes, mainly by meeting the customers core needs in very specific ways through improved reliability and then creating new jobs to be done in the form of silent transport and portable power packs that change the basis of competition ...
Nov 13, 2020•51 min
This week Oliver interviews Amir Haleem, the CEO of Helium, about Peoples Network, which promises ubiquitous coverage and data costs of $1/year to connect a Micromobility vehicle. Oliver has been incredibly excited about what they’re up to for a while, and so welcomed the opportunity to sit down and unpack what they’re doing and why it’s transformational. Specifically, they dig into: - The history of Helium and the importance of permissionless innovation. - What is LoRaWan and why does it matter...
Nov 05, 2020•1 hr 2 min
This week Oliver interviews Derek Dorresteyn, COO of Damon Motorcycles. Derek previously worked at Boosted and was the CTO at Alta Motorbikes, one of the first electric motorbike manufacturers globally. They do a whistle stop tour of the electric motorbike space, including why it’s so hard, what we’ve collectively learnt and Dereks predictions on the space. Derek has been around the space for a long time and thinking about the challenges longer than most. Specifically they dig into: ⁃ Derek’s hi...
Oct 30, 2020•1 hr 3 min
