This week Oliver interviews James Gross, one of the co-founders of Micromobility Industries (which host this very podcast and the conference) to talk about the launch of Ride Review, the new source of reviews and ratings for all vehicles in the micromobility universe, from Onewheels to escooters/bikes, to golf carts and pods. As this space undergoes a Cambrian explosion of new vehicle models and types, Ride Review seeks to cover them and provide help riders who are trying to find the best option...
Oct 13, 2022•45 min•Ep. 152
This week we release another session from Micromobility America – this one is the interview with Wayne Ting, CEO of Lime being interviewed by Julia Thayne Demourdaunt. Wayne was impassioned and his call more recognition of Micromobility and the role that it can play in our transport systems. Being in the audience It was electric to watch. We hope you enjoy the session as much as we did. Specifically they dig into: The history of the space and how they’ve grown What he sees as the opportunities f...
Oct 06, 2022•28 min•Ep. 151
This week we release a talk from our recent Micromobility America conference that we hosted in the Bay Area in mid September - this was one of the most popular panels of the event - the ‘Raising Money in Micromobility for Software VC’ panel that was run by our conference cohost, Julia Thayne Demourdant and featured a slew of the top mobility investors and incubators in the space. We loved this panel, because it covered all manner of topics, from funding to government regulation to total addressa...
Oct 03, 2022•44 min•Ep. 150
This week Oliver interviews Alper Oktem, CEO and founder of Marti, which as far as we can tell, is the largest Micromobility operator in Turkey. Oliver has long wanted to cover the Turkish Micromobility market, because it is such a large country, and they are proportionately so underserved. Turkey is proportionately underserved with transport options in the cities – Istanbul is considered one of the most congested cities in the world. This was a great conversation and Alper is a real go-getter i...
Sep 15, 2022•48 min
This week Oliver interviews Julia Thayne Demordaunt, Principal of Urban Transformation at the Rocky Mountain Institute. Oliver is a massive fan of RMI - they’ve been advocated for market based climate solutions for years and have some of the most in depth research on the pathways required to help us meet our climate goals. Julia is leading the research at RMI about the potential for micro to contribute. She came onboard as one of the hosts for the Micromobiltiy Europe show and the team had an ab...
Sep 08, 2022•53 min
This week we share another interview from Micromobility Europe - This time it is the timeless interview of Jason Slaughter, creator of the largest urban planning YouTube Channel - Not Just Bikes being interviewed by Julia Thayne DeMourdant from the Rocky Mountain Institute, about why many cities suck, but Dutch cities don’t. Our host Oliver has often joked that if you spend enough time talking about Micromobility, you end up falling backwards into discussions about urbanism, space allocation and...
Sep 01, 2022•22 min
This week Oliver is joined by Marcus Li the founder of Eli who are building a lightweight electric vehicle similar to a Smart car but a bit smaller and selling into the European and American markets. This is possibly one of the most interesting interviews Oliver has done with an early stage founder of a hardware company – They get really into the nitty-gritty details of how Marcus has funded the company to date and the challenges and opportunities that exist in the space. They also discuss the C...
Aug 25, 2022•50 min
This week Oliver interviews Kari Anne Solfjeld Eid from Whee! Whee is a cargo bike subscription service based in Oslo Norway. Kari Anne won this years inaugural Micromobility accelerate pitch competition that we had at the Micromobility Europe conference in June. She was selected by a group of judges as the best presenter on the day for a new Micromobility service or product. The judges noted her quirky style but also a really solid business under it. One thing not covered in this episode was Ka...
Aug 18, 2022•43 min
This podcast was first published on our sister podcast, Infinite Block This week we're releasing a talk from our recent Micromobility Europe Conference, with Horace interviewing Azeem Azhar. Azeem is one of the great thinkers in the space of smart cities, the importance of exponential technologies like Micromobility and how they relate to governance and the social contract. You may recall that we interviewed him earlier this year. Both Horace and Azeem are big fans of each other and at the recen...
Aug 11, 2022•35 min
This week Oliver interviews Adam Barmby from EAV, the electric cargo bike manufacturer based in the UK. When Amazon launched their 'micromobility hub' in the UK recently, an EAV bike was the pictured bike used in promotional material for the announcement. Micromobility for freight hasn’t been discussed a lot on the podcast, and it was really exciting to unpack the implications of Micromobility and see how it conforms to the thesis that Horace and Oliver have been weighing out of the last couple ...
Aug 05, 2022•42 min•Ep. 143
This week is the release one of the episodes from recorded at the recent Micromobility Europe conference in Amsterdam in early June. This episode is the story of TIER with Lawrence Leucshner, and interviewed by Julia Thayne DeMordaunt from The Rocky Mountain Institute. TIER is now the worlds largest micromobility operator. Lawrence was a guest on the podcast very early on, back in episode 37, in August 2019. A lot has happened since then, and it really is a fascinating take with Lawrence this ep...
Jul 28, 2022•26 min
This week Oliver is excited to share an interview with Lihang Nong, CEO and founder of Nimbus. Nimbus recently went public with their vehicle, the Nimbus One, in a Techcrunch article. Oliver has been talking to Lihang for years and was excited to be able to interview him and bring a bit more of the story for you. We think what Nimbus is building is really really important - as you’ll hear hear, in an era of climate change, high costs of travel and urbanisation, we need lightweight electric vehic...
Jul 14, 2022•41 min
This week we share an interview with Lihang Nong, CEO and founder of Nimbus. Nimbus recently went public with their vehicle, the Nimbus One, in a Techcrunch article. Oliver has been talking to Lihang for years and was excited to be able to interview him and bring a bit more of the story for you.
Jul 13, 2022•41 min
This week Horace and Oliver were together in person for the first time in nearly two and a half years as they got ready for the Micromobility Europe conference. One of the things that they love to do every so often is to revisit the Micromobilty thesis. They want this to be the episode you share with everyone who is perhaps interested in what all the fuss is about. If you’re a first time listener, Horace Dediu is the creator of the term Micromobility, and this podcast was where he and Oliver fir...
Jun 29, 2022•1 hr 23 min
This week Oliver speaks with Job Stehmann from Vanmoof. Job is the chief of product design and technology at Vanmoof and responsible for bringing you the beautiful bikes that they produce. Specifically they tackle: - Vanmoof’s new bikes, the A5 and the S5 and the innovations that they have on them. - The wider context of Micromobility and design, and what works. - Job's journey with Vanmoof from where it was when he arrived (around the start of ebikes) to now, and how that journey has been for h...
Jun 07, 2022•36 min
This week Oliver interviews Mark Frohnmayer, CEO of Arcimoto. Mark has been on the podcast before on episodes 111 and 46, and this time they discuss the latest progress with the vehicles they’re building, like the FUV and where they’ve got to with future vehicles like the Mean Lean Machine. They get into the revisions to the platform they’ve made for manufacturing with one of Oliver’s industry favourites, Sandy Munro, as well as the various variants that they’ve developing. Specifically, they ta...
May 29, 2022•37 min
This week Oliver interviews Laura Fox, General Manager of the Citi Bike bike sharing service in New York, and Senior Director of Lyft Bikes. This podcast was also released on our sister podcast project, Infinite Block. Laura has a very deep background and thinking about the future of cities, not only in an operational sense - running a Micromobility firm, before that working for Sidewalk Labs for Google and working with former world bank urban economist, with whom she edited one of Oliver's favo...
May 18, 2022•49 min
This week Oliver interviews with Ryan Johnson, CEO and founder of Culdesac. This was first released over on the Infinite Block, our sister podcast looking at the intersection of urbanism, technology and the social contract (more on that below). Ryan is building the first Micromobility-focused real estate development in the US, with the goal of eventually building the US’s first car free city. The majority of people want to live in walkable/bikeable neighborhoods, yet only 8% do. Culdesac are dev...
May 09, 2022•35 min
This week Oliver interviews Josh Whale, the founder/CEO of Ampersand, based in Rwanda. This is a story that we've wanted to bring our listeners for more than two years - ever since we first heard that there was a team trying to build their own full stack motorbike and battery swapping hardware and software in one of the world's most underserved mobility markets. We're excited that it shows the adoption of micromobility in markets purely on the basis of its economic merits, and helps develop low-...
May 01, 2022•43 min
Bradley Tusk is a political fixer-turned-venture capitalist who specializes in working with startups like Bird, Coinbase, Eaze, FanDuel, and Wheel to break through in highly regulated markets. He was formerly the campaign manager of Michael Bloomberg’s 2009 NYC mayoral bid, the Deputy Governor of Illinois, and the first political advisor at Uber. In addition to his firms, Tusk Strategies and Tusk Ventures, Bradley is currently exploring mobile voting technology and blockchain solutions to help f...
Apr 12, 2022•58 min
This week, Oliver interviews Tanguy Goretti, one of the founders of Cowboy, who just raised a $80m series C to fuel their expansion into the US. Tanguy debuted the C4 in the US at Micromobility America back in September, and this is the first chance that Oliver has had to sit down with him to talk through about the latest bikes and what funding will unlock for them. It’s a great conversation. Specifically they unpack: - The history for Tanguy’s involvement in Micromobility and the formation of t...
Mar 17, 2022•37 min
This week we’re releasing the interview of Rebecca Bellan from Techcrunch interviewing Gogoro CEO and cofounder Horace Luke at our recent Micromobility World event. Horace is an OG of Micromobility and very similar to our Horace Dediu in that he came from mobile as well, and then sought to apply the advancements in tech to transport. Gogoro aspires to build a battery swapping infrastructure that will power millions of micromobility users from Berlin to Hangzhou everyday. Rebecca gets the inside ...
Mar 03, 2022•51 min
This week we release the interview that Horace did with Bird CEO/founder Travis VanderZanden at Micromobility World conference from January 2022. It was his first public appearance since Bird went public late last year and it is an instantly iconic exchange between two of the industry’s most important figures - Travis who catalyzed dockless electric scooters at Bird in California back in 2017 and Horace who coined the term micromobility. Travis and Horace discuss mega trends in micromobility and...
Feb 25, 2022•38 min
This week Oliver interviews Mina Nada, CEO of Zoomo (formerly Bolt Bikes, featured on episode 66), about their business leasing ebikes to delivery gig workers like UberEATS/Deliveroo/DoorDash in the UK, US and Australia. The business has massively expanded in the last 18 months, and Mina has managed to drive a lot of that growth remotely while he’s been locked down in Australia. It’s an awesome story - don’t miss it. Specifically, they dig into: - for the uninitiated, a brief background on the s...
Feb 02, 2022•41 min
This week Oliver joins Horace to talk about his latest blogpost about his new transport metric - A Modicum of Transport. Developing new metrics is in some ways a provocation to remap how we thinks of new things, and change the framework for how the incumbents are viewed. This is no different. Like the horsepower before it, or the byte or Monthly Active User, we are trying to develop new nomenclature, metrics and ratios that sit around this phenomenon called Micromobility. They discuss the name, ...
Dec 28, 2021•49 min
This week Oliver interviews Horace about his latest research on climate and micromobility, and his reflections on the recent COP26 meeting in Glasgow. Specifically, they dig into why micromobility wasn’t more prominently featured in the potential solutions provided by groups like the IEA, and how that matches up to the disruptive innovation framework. Specifically they get into: - His new research and modelling into the climate action opportunity that micromobility presents - The new IEA report ...
Dec 14, 2021•44 min
In today’s episode, Oliver interviews Ties Carlier, the co-CEO and cofounder of Vanmoof to talk about the new Vanmoof V, which is one of the most beautiful ebikes at Micromobility Industries have ever seen and is due to drop next year. It’s a lot faster and more powerful than anything they’ve done before, and this was a great chat about that design decision and why Ties thinks we need to get more creative and lateral in how we think about what micromobility vehicles can do and should be regulate...
Nov 30, 2021•44 min
This week Oliver interviews Enrico Howe and Alex Gmelin from Invers (@Inversmobility) about the 2021 Global Moped Sharing Report. Oliver interviewed Enrico on the show in episode 52 for the 2019 version and it was great to have him back and get an update two years later on about the state of moped sharing globally. It included some incredible and crazy stats – the mopeds sharing industry has transitioned to electric at a dizzying pace in the last two years. We’re looking forward to hearing comme...
Nov 19, 2021•43 min
This week we’re releasing another interview from the Micromobility America conference. Laura Bliss from Bloomberg interviews Ben Bear, CEO of Spin (and guest on MM episode 73), about where sharing is going next after a COVID 19 put the brakes on it. Spin is one of the more interesting companies with the relatively crowded shared Micromobility field being owned by Ford, and pursuing a slow and steady strategy focussed around things like charging infrastructure. It’s a great discussion. Specifical...
Nov 12, 2021•17 min
This week Oliver interviews Eric Qwidwenus-Wahlforss, Founder and CEO of Dance. When we first heard that the founders of SoundCloud had got into electric bikes we wondered how does the world of software paralleled across to the world of hardware and electric bikes. But Eric puts up a convincing argument and Dance has made a splash with their launch. This is a great conversation about the nature of how the industry has changed over time and how the business model of micromobility parallels to a l...
Nov 08, 2021•34 min
