This week Oliver interviews Udi Meridor from City Transformer. You may have come across City Transformer as it was on the recent Top Gear episode of microcars in Paris. Obviously, we’ve done two microcar episodes week on week so this is an area that we're definitely thinking about, as are McKenzie who I had on the week prior talking about mini mobility. It feels like such a burgeoning area and we have been really excited to explore this topic. If you enjoy this conversation, you will definitely ...
May 11, 2023•55 min•Ep. 182
This week Oliver interviews Oliver Ouboter, one of the founders of MicroLino , who are producing one of the most beautiful cars that we have seen in the neighbourhood electric vehicle space – the thing is an electric version of the iconic BMW Ysetta from the mid 1950s. We really loved this interview for a few reasons - firstly, because the operators – Oliver and his father Whim were the OGs of the Micromobility space – setting up a company literally called Micromobility back in the early 2000s a...
May 04, 2023•54 min•Ep. 181
This week Oliver interviews Caroline Sampanaro, Head of Micromobility and Transit Policy at Lyft, about her role and opportunities for micromobility to participate in conversations about better transport systems and cities. They also talk a lot about the shared business model, and why PPP feels like the most logical endpoint for a lot of the shared use cases for micromobility. We have continually been struck by the great team that Lyft has built - check out our earlier conversations with Laura F...
Apr 27, 2023•49 min•Ep. 180
This week Oliver interviews Kersten Heineke, a partner at McKinsey , and lead of the McKinsey Centre For Future Mobility , based in Germany. We discuss the role and scope of the Center for Future Mobility, the rising interest in micro vehicles, and the potential impact of mini-mobility on the transportation landscape. Kersten provides an extensive overview of his research, including the emergence of direct-to-consumer electric vehicles brands like Lectric and Ride1Up, and the innovative hardware...
Apr 20, 2023•52 min•Ep. 179
We're really excited to bring this episode to you. Apollo Scooters are one of those companies that quietly works away in the background and ships without being loud and overly public about it – We have been following them since they first unveiled the Apollo Pro at Micromobility Europe last year. Last year, they shipped 30,000 scooters – which is a pretty decent amount for a company that has never raised outside capital at all. In this conversation we run through the founding of the company, the...
Apr 13, 2023•56 min•Ep. 178
This week we chose to resyndicate a recent episode of a podcast called The Next Billion Seconds, for their series called The Next Billion Cars, where they look at the future of the transportation industry and how tech will help enable the next billion vehicles to get around. In this episode, Drew Smith interviews Horace, exploring the origins and future of micromobility. Per their description, “Horace offers a blistering critique of the failure of the automotive sector to embody the new design p...
Apr 06, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 177
This week Oliver interviews Grace Rink, Chief Climate Officer for the City and County of Denver. Grace leads the Office of Climate Action, Sustainability, and Resiliency. She’s more well known in micromobility as the head of the Denver e-bike subsidy programme, which has captured the imagination of regulators all over the world with the latest program iterations selling out in mere minutes. Today we talk about how she ended up in Denver, why the programme was formed and it’s objectives and the i...
Mar 30, 2023•52 min•Ep. 176
This week Oliver interviews Melinda Hansen, founder of consulting firm Brightside and formerly the head of sustainability at Bird. They talk about the recent spate of Micromobility/ebike battery fires in New York and the response there as well as the wider conversation about equitable transport options, from her work with the equitable commute project. Like we’ve discussed many times on the show, we think that there is a real opportunity for Micromobility to contribute to the conversation. We re...
Mar 23, 2023•48 min•Ep. 175
This week Oliver interviews Rickard Bröms from Sweden, who is the founder of Vässla, who won the Rider Choice Award at the recent 2023 Micromobility Riders Awards for best subscription company. We’ve been following along with what they’ve been doing for a while and really love the new pedal Ebike that they are bringing out, along with the standard throttle bike and moped that they've been offering. They have really nailed the subscription services for micromobility, lowering the barriers to entr...
Mar 17, 2023•54 min•Ep. 174
This week we are releasing another talk from our recent Micromobility World - this one with Matthew Yglesias, pioneering political blogger and self-described "ebike dad," on why electric bikes and other small vehicles offer a compelling alternative to the solve the urban mobility dilemma. Matt has a wealth of knowledge about the interplay of politics, Transport and land use and Julia is an excellent host to ask him about it. This was a really compelling and interesting 50 minutes. We hope you en...
Mar 09, 2023•56 min
This week on the podcast, we welcome back Horace for the first time in a while, to discuss the recent Mastodon storm on Apple's fabled car efforts and why they may fail, especially in the face of smaller, more modular vehicle solutions. We’ve linked to it below, but as quick context, the overall arc is that cars have a very long development and use lifespan, and that computers, the thing that Apple is best at, have far shorter timespans, and that there’s a mismatch there around how these two dyn...
Mar 02, 2023•49 min
This week Oliver interviews Levi Conlow who is the founder of Lectric Ebikes . This really is one of the most incredible stories of Micromobility in the last few years. Back in 2019 when they were just starting out, they started with an Ebike that they struggled to sell and no-one wanted to buy. Last year they had the most popular model of a bike in America shipping over 150,000 units, all while being profitable. It’s stories like this that we love from Micromobility – companies that have really...
Feb 21, 2023•54 min•Ep. 171
This week we are releasing another episode from the Micromobility world catalogue – this one is a conversation between Gabe Klein, the first person to head the newly formed Joint Office of Energy and Transportation , and Julia Thayne, our Micromobility world Cohost. Gabes' job is to break down barriers to electrifying transportation. We’ve had him on the podcast before for episode 122 for what was one of the top episodes of the year. Before he took his current role, he has held a number of reall...
Feb 16, 2023•24 min•Ep. 170
This week, we are releasing one of the talks that we had at the recent Micromobility World event early this year . A discussion between Horace, Julia Thayne, one of our co hosts and the famed journalist Kara Swisher, this was a particularly energising section, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did! Specifically they tackle: - The intersection of tech and transport - The micromobility thesis and is it correct or not? - Which cities are best for micromobility - What Elon got wrong With that, ...
Feb 09, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 169
This week we're releasing another interview from Oliver's tour of micromobility companies in Southern California. This episode is with LeGrand Crewse, founder of Super73, on the growth of his very distinctive brand. Ever since Oliver first saw the first image of the electrified mini taco bike, he thought that Super73 were on to something - they clearly understood what electrification buys you in terms of bike design, and they had focused on knobbly tyres, aesthetics and the likelihood that rider...
Feb 02, 2023•47 min•Ep. 168
This week we're excited to bring you an interview from Oliver's recent tour of Southern California ahead of our Micromobility World online event. Oliver flew up from NZ to be with James, Julia and the team to produce the event but while he was there also took the chance to visit a whole heap of companies working in micromobility, either as vehicle makers or peripherally. He learnt a huge amount - especially from those who have been in the industry for a while. Benno Baenziger is an OG of the bik...
Jan 26, 2023•52 min•Ep. 167
This week, Oliver interviews Dong Tran, founder of Ryvid, who make electric motorbikes in California. We’ve not covered heaps of motorbikes on the show so far, but that’s changing and we will have a bunch more next year. There’s a few really interesting things about Ryvid... Firstly, they’ve got a pretty unique new metal folding technique for frame design which, if you listen to Horace and how he talks about how manufacturing techniques dictate how products evolve, has a lot of potential in offe...
Jan 19, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 166
This week Oliver interviews Robin Eriksson from Cogo app which is the largest shared micromobility aggregator in Europe. Horace and Oliver have long had a theory that the world of micromobility will mature to be more like the public transport or airline industry over time. So it’s no surprise to us to see the rise of Cogo, which allows for discovery to be handled in a single app for all micromobility providers in a city. We were excited to hear that they’ve recently added payments, and so wanted...
Jan 12, 2023•51 min•Ep. 165
As we tick over from 2022 to 2023 we wanted to reshare our most popular episode from 2022. Our recent Spotify Wrapped and general analytics we get from our podcast platform gave us a few really cool stats about the podcast. We’re in the top 5% of followed and shared podcasts shared globally, with listeners from 61 countries and the majority of you being new listeners who only found us in the last year. Exciting times! We're excited to rerelease what was our most listened to episode from 2022. Wh...
Jan 05, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 164
This week Oliver interviews Danny Kim from Lit Motors. Danny is an OG of the micromobility space. He was thinking about the impact of electric and what it’d enable in vehicle architectures well before pretty much anybody else, evidenced by both the Kubo and their C1. The C1 is an enclosed gyro balanced electric motorbike that in our view has amazing potential in terms of providing something that is as performance, weather protection and safety of a car, but in the package of a motorbike. We thin...
Dec 29, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 163
This week Oliver interviews David Hansen from Weel Bike based in Seattle. Oliver has known David since the early days of Micromobility Industries, and indeed, Weel was one of the companies that the Microbility VC syndicate invested in back in 2019 when we were running it, so full disclosure, Oliver does have some skin in the game. We love what they’re doing - they really have taken to heart what Horace talked about early on with the concept of what a smartphone on wheels would look like, rather ...
Dec 22, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 162
This week Oliver got to interview Josh Hon from Tern bikes. If you’ve not come across the Tern brand before, they’re now a mid-size bike company, but have really found a strong niche providing high quality utility bikes like their best selling mid-drive short tail compact cargo bike the GSD. Tern is different from a lot of the other micromobility companies that we've had on the Micromobility Podcast in that it’s definitely more of a traditional bike company, using bike shops etc to sell and serv...
Dec 15, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 161
This week Oliver interviews Mike Radenbaugh from RAD Power Bikes. RAD is the largest maker of the bikes in the US and this is a conversation we have wanted to have for a really long time. They discuss the new bike that they have just unveiled (skip ahead to around minute 13 if you want to know more about that!) They've been so excited to let you know about what is happening! Besides that, they also talk all about how he got to starting the company, the vehicles that he's built and why he still s...
Dec 06, 2022•47 min•Ep. 160
This Week Oliver interviews Murvah Iqbal from HIVED. Every so often we come across entrepreneurs where we come away thinking that they’re going to own a segment in a way that the incumbents are going to struggle to respond to. Murvah is one of those. We loved this interview. We got into the backstory for HIVED, what they’re building and why micro is core to their strategy. The world of package delivery is one that is here and real. We're super excited to follow her career and see them succeed. I...
Dec 01, 2022•52 min
This week Oliver interviews Horace about the talk he did at Micromobility America on the Total Addressable Market for micromobility, and the opportunity of the space. This should really be listened to in context of the 5 Billion Riders talk that Horace gave at the conference, which is now on Youtube . Here, we dig into Horace’s thought pattern and the significance of mapping out addressable markets in informing the debate and opportunity for the space. Specifically, they dig into: The backstory ...
Nov 24, 2022•57 min•Ep. 158
Ever since Oliver interviewed Karianne from Whee! earlier in the year, we’ve been excited to find more companies doing ebike subscription services to families. As Karianne says, there is a lot of money to be made by taking women and families seriously. So it was awesome to more recently discover the team at Lug and Carrie, based in Australia, who are as far as we can tell, the largest e cargobike consumer subscription business globally (notwithstanding Dance and Swapfiets etc in Europe that do c...
Nov 17, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 157
This week Oliver speaks with Albin Wilson from Roam Motors, who are building a electric motorbike manufacturer and battery stack out of Kenya. Oliver was particularly struck when talking to Albin about the size of the opportunity and how conforming to the theory of micromobility what they’re doing is. We have long thought that the market for Micromobility would be most exciting in countries where automobility and electrification has yet to happen simply by nature of these vehicles being cheaper ...
Nov 10, 2022•37 min
This week Oliver interviews Jonas Nyvang, CEO and founder of Stilride, who are building a very novel electric motorbike out of Sweden. We are always VERY interested in how micromobility will create and enable new production techniques for lightweight electric vehicles, and we think that what Stilride have built might offer something very interesting to the conversation. As Horace has often laid out, the manufacturing technique determines so much about a product, and new vehicle manufacturing tec...
Nov 03, 2022•35 min•Ep. 155
This week Oliver interviewed Sam Baker from Mobility Fund. We’ve had Sam on before, on episode 50, when he was still at Wunder Mobility, but since then, he’s headed off and is doing his own fund specifically focused on micromobility B2B businesses. He’s been a real advocate for the space and it was great to reconnect at Micromobility America and to get into more depth about the opportunities that exist in micromobility around the edges and in niches that otherwise aren’t always covered. We reall...
Oct 30, 2022•57 min•Ep. 154
This week Oliver interviews San Kim, founder and CEO of Swing Scooters, the largest shared micromobility operator in South Korea. South Korea is one of the worlds biggest shared micro markets and also one of the most underreported. This interview lifts the lid on the growth of the space and why the unique regulatory environment, high incomes, dense urban environment and other factors has contributed to one of the highest levels of penetration per capita for shared than anywhere else on the plane...
Oct 25, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 153
