Interview with GoCardless CEO Hiroki Takeuchi after paralyzing accident | Hacker News Reader

Interview with GoCardless CEO Hiroki Takeuchi after paralyzing accident

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190 pointsrobbiet48087 comments

This is really incredible. I'm a quadriplegic student and you don't really see people in my position in tech, and definitely not in executive roles so this means a lot in terms of proving it's possible.

Somewhat tangentially, the current governor of Texas is also paraplegic. I suppose if you place his politics aside since they are quite disagreeable to the typical HN reader you could probably find some inspiration in his success as a paraplegic in the political spectrum as well.

I think we need to start designing our cities so that people walk and cycle on a level above the street, sort of like the Highline in NYC. And cars and trucks operate below that without pedestrians.

That would make cycling a lot safer. Expensive to do for existing cities, but robotic construction may make it cheap enough to do in a few decades.

It would be cheaper to just give all the cyclists self-driving cars.

Cheaper perahps, but better long-term? Doubtful.

I don't want to live in a concrete jungle. Have you seen what two level roads are like? It's MISERABLE at street level, all shadow and columns.

Well I would counter that that would serve as a great incentive for people to prefer riding their bikes over driving — so that they can enjoy the sunshine. When you think about it though, chances are these raised roads will be much narrower than the roads themselves, as bikes require much less space than cars. So it won't be like a full ceiling on the roadway.

You don't raise the people, you drop the cars. Boring Company style - a sublevel for vehicle traffic.

Are there any good examples of that besides that one Paris district?

maybe with the a bit of help from mirrors (reflecting the sun) the street level would look better.

You'd have to build 3x as many extra roads, because cars take up a lot more space than bicycles.

How about we deploy a few restricted lanes on some roads and only allow cars on those roads, and only in those lanes.

Then the rest of the road can be used by people, with and without cycles.

Any experiments that explore ways to achieve vehicle and cyclist/pedestrian separation would be welcome for me.

I'm both a cyclist [1] and driver, live in a very popular recreational cycling area, and fear for the very real possibility of vehicle to cyclist accidents on at least a weekly basis.

[1] mostly former cyclist, as I probably have some PTSD from my near fatal vehicle to cyclist accident.

Just curious, have you considered therapy for your crash? I'm in a similar situation and am wondering if therapy could help.

Not really. I've taken up running and swimming instead and am happy pursuing these two disciplines as like the people I train with.

Even if the cycling anxiety is gone, the danger would still be there (and SV drivers are only getting more aggressive and hurried each year). I'm generally a risk averse person and I don't really miss cycling much, given my local road conditions.

That being said I have been told by friends that behavioral cognitive therapy can be a big help.

A cheaper option might be to cycle around the Netherlands on a holiday. But then you really won't want to cycle in the USA.

I really hope than once we have the technology to robotically construct elevated cities, we have already solved most of the problems of people with reduced mobility with by some other means that let them integrate with standard-mobility society in a more seamless way.

Urban planning and design is hugely important; and I love seeing the few examples of interesting concepts around the world. A few I've noticed and visited recently:

- Chicago: the 2- or 3-level streets around the riverfront are pretty awesome. Separating local traffic from through-traffic and commercial traffic. Loading docks and heavy traffic can all be hidden from view underground. - Amsterdam: as one of the most biking-friendly cities in the world; there are bike lanes everywhere. Bike lanes are separated from the road by parking lanes, and intersection also separate the bike lames from the road by giving them independent crosswalks with a raised curb for protection. The canals also allow everyone to enjoy a trip anywhere in the city center via boat. - Shanghai: the CBD's main buildings is connected via elevated walkways that go above the road.

I think the future would have all car traffic underground or pedestrian and bike friendly on elevated walkways.

I-480 is worst version of this where SF put the car traffic ABOVE the pedestrians. Happy every day I take a jog on the embarcadero that it's been demolished.

Cities don't come out of nowhere, and demolishing a city block and rebuilding it disproportionately affects people of color.

Yes, we need to make cities more accessible. But rather than discarding existing cities as un-accessible wastelands, it would be great (but harder!) to figure out how to retrofit existing buildings and sidewalks to be accessible.

What? Grayscale people don't live in city blocks anymore?

Why not just simply ban cars from cities in general? Most of the cities in Europe at least have a great public transport setup. Just imagine how much space used by parked cars would be available to public again!

I've never been to the US but I've heard that "everything" is so far apart from each other that people need cars.

> Why not just simply ban cars from cities in general?

I think you're over-interpreting your parent. In some cities it is feasible to go without cars. There's a lot of space between cities and a lot of smaller cities and towns where that isn't feasible, at least not currently or without a lot of additional infrastructure.

Some cities yes, and you can honestly count them on not too many hands for the ones which have adequate public transportation.

i have lived in dc and NYC since 2007 and not owned a car

Even without any cars, delivery, trade, construction and transit vehicles add up to a significant fraction of current traffic in big European cities. You can't remove this traffic without functionally harming city life.

London, where I live, has both congestion charging and emissions charging (ULEZ) but still has loads of traffic. I'd estimate about 75% of it is not private vehicles outside rush hour, and probably no more than 50% private during rush hour, in central areas. My estimates come from riding through it by motorcycle daily.

Awesome, London's got 2.6E6 registered cars according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/314980/licensed-cars-in-.... Since by your estimation, 50% of traffic during rush hour is private, these cars need a space to park. A parked car needs roughly 8sqm. That's 2.6E6 * 0.5 * 8sqm = 10 400 000sqm of parking area (plus commuters which are obviously not included) covered by cars not moved more than a couple of mins/day. And I bet 50% of the traffic wouldn't functionally harm cities, it would simply harm people's selfishness. A car is - in most of the cases - unnecessary and simply used as a status symbol.

Whoa, you're leaping to some conclusions there - most cars owned by Londoners are not used for commuting, they're for shopping, moving kids around, that kind of thing - things that public transport is a poor substitute for. Things like congestion charging apply only to the centre, where the congestion is, and that's where my comments apply. Most of the cars owned by Londoners are not in central London.

> things that public transport is a poor substitute for

Largely because public transport is underfunded in London and, of course, ridiculously hampered by the car traffic.

Try getting a bus down the A2 in peak hours or at the weekend. It's often quicker to walk. That's why people end up getting cars and ... making things worse for everyone.

Nope. I certainly wouldn't be able to carry my weekly shop on the bus. And public transport is, in my opinion pretty well funded here.

I love the irony. Moving 2 tons to buy 1kg of bread ;) delivery services as an alternative? It would work out if people wanted to...

Delivery services means delegating your choice of fresh produce. Incentives are not aligned; the lowest bidder will not do as good a job as the consumer.

From direct experience: food delivery works well enough for branded, processed and other long shelf life products. It's not bad for meat, as long as you're ordering from a specialist and not a supermarket (and of course there is a price premium). It's not good at all for fruit or vegetables, with current suppliers. Goods are bruised, mouldy, unripe, overripe, etc. It's also useless for bread; you always get yesterday's bread.

Not true in my experience; stuff in the physical shops is often worse best before date wise than the online delivery. All of the online delivery services will instantly refund and produce with no questions ask that you say is bad quality.

If your weekly shop consists of 1kg of bread, you and I have somewhat different life-styles.

Cars are not necessary in almost all parts of London. Removing them would vastly improve quality of life.

This is ridiculous: you're just arguing by assertion. Give some evidence for your assertions, please!

Cars aren't necessary, of course; we could get by with horses and carts. But removing them would not "vastly improve" quality of life.

I live in Greater London, about 12 miles from where I work (35 minutes by scooter, 55 minutes by public transport if you time it perfectly, average 1h20 if you don't). My preferred supermarket is 3.9 miles away by road, about 40 minutes by bus or 12 minutes by car (though I normally go by scooter). Would my life be better without a motorised vehicle? My opinion is it definitely would not!

Either I'd need to severely reduce my choices in purchasing or commit to spending significantly more of my life on and waiting for public transport. Neither of these would vastly improve my quality of life.

This is ridiculous. Most people have cars because they need them. Try raising kids without a car to move them around, its a lot trickier than you can imagine.

And most people need them because most people have them.

I know of families in ecotowns that don't have cars. The tram service covers nearly everything they need, and when they do actually need a car, they get a car-share/rental.

The infrastructure where they live is set up for this, to the extent that owning a car is awkward, because you're not allowed to park it anywhere near the houses, but it's fine because there are such good facilities for people without cars in that area.

The point is that we need cars because we don't have good facilities for not having cars, and we don't have good facilities because we all have cars.

Not really. I was raised without a car just fine, as was most of my generation.

Totally agree. I am of the generation that grew up without a car and life was pretty tough on public transport and it meant we couldn't do things like shop efficiently and price consciously because we had to think how we would carry our purchases home.

I still use public transport as much as I can, and the traffic in London is such that it's often a viable option, but a car is also a necessity.

What's a "significant fraction"? Reducing traffic by, say 70% and eliminating all the parking space that goes along with the millions of cars could massively improve city life. Air pollution, noise pollution, deaths and injuries in accidents, all those things would be dramatically reduced.

BTW, pedestrian zones exist in most cities. The stores there still get their goods delivered and emergency vehicles still have access. Turning most of a city in a pedestrian/cyclist zone doesn't mean that you can't have any car traffic at all.

I just looked out the window of our office and took a quick sample of the traffic. There's no bus route on our road, mind. Out of 10 vehicles, 2 looked private (no livery at least - one Mercedes S-class possibly chauffeured, the other could be Uber but wasn't a Prius so maybe not), 3 were black cabs, 3 were delivery vans and 2 were trade vans.

Eliminate 70% of that traffic, and something will break. Kill taxis and business will suffer. Kill trade vans and basic utilities will be out of action for longer. Kill deliveries and the pace of economic activity will slow down. Deliveries are the best candidate for reduction, but don't forget use of delivery vans is directly related to public transport use - people who use public transport can't carry lots of stuff around, or trek out to centralized pickup hubs, so they need delivery vans instead.

Hasn't London already done quite a bit to reduce private traffic in the city centre? Like you gotta pay 10 pounds to drive into the city center? That may explain why there's a smaller percentage of private vehicles, and quite possibly fewer vehicles being driven altogether.

London has already proven, during the month of restrictions around the Olympic Games, that it is possible to massively reduce motorised vehicle traffic within zone 1 and zone 2 during the workday without causing harm to businesses and the functioning of the city. Most people felt that the quality of life in London dramatically improved during the games, and one of the major reasons cited is reduced traffic, cleaner air, pedestrianised zones, increase in cycling, smoother traffic flow for public transport, out of hour deliveries, etc.

It's already been successfully done, there is just a lack of political will to make such measures permanent.

> cleaner air

Ride 100 provides an excellent demonstration of this even just by closing -some- roads for -one- day.

cf this graph of pollution on Putney High Street:

https://twitter.com/jwoLondon/status/892004529545379840

People simply do business on a different day to cycle takeovers.

I can't really fathom what your point is here? No cars means no pollution -> reducing the amount of cars reduces the pollution. Is that disputed?

Their point is that the closing a road once doesn't just make all the pollution not happen, it time-shifts some of it to other days when people are driving again.

I expect there are some people who do make other arrangements and take a bus, so it's a net gain, but there are also those who take their car on Monday since they couldn't on Sunday.

EDIT: I looked up how RideLondon works, map at the end of this PDF shows road closures https://d1ffaecguugkl4.cloudfront.net/ridelondon/live/upload...

So it's not even time-shifting necessarily. People can drive around that and just move the pollution from one street to the next. But yes, the pollution measurements on one of the closed roads would look better that day.

> closing a road once doesn't just make all the pollution not happen

Yes, I know, it was an illustration of how much pollution is caused by traffic in London and how much could be gained by reducing those traffic levels overall. I am baffled that this is causing confusion to people.

You're not considering how much activity was displaced by the Olympics. Many people just went on holiday. Traffic is already lower in summer because of holidays, as well as reduced school runs.

My own commute times nearly doubled with the Olympic lanes. It would have been intolerable permanently.

> Why not just simply ban cars from cities in general?

Your solution is too complicated and will not work. Why not just 'simply' build a bunch of cities on Mars and relocate?

They tried this in Manchester, UK in the 1970s and 1980s near the University.

It was a complete disaster.

To be fair, most transport related things involving Manchester are a disaster - bus deregulation, the current smartcard debacle, etc.

London tried exactly this post-WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Pedway_Scheme

As a pedestrian, bicyclists are much more of a hazard to me than cars, and I want them as far from me as possible.

Yes, cars are bigger, but in cities they are often moving more slowly, and drivers are much more aware of pedestrians. Bicyclists, by and large, are either ignorant or purposefully ignore traffic laws, run red lights, race down sidewalks, and in general create hazards for both pedestrians and drivers. The only major cities I've been to where the majority of bicyclists are decent and mostly obeying traffic laws are in Copenhagen and Amsterdam.

Just to be clear, though, I have no clue what happened in this accident or whether anyone was actually at fault, so this comment shouldn't be meant to suggest that Takeuchi wasn't a law-abiding cyclist!

This is a load of heresy and conjecture if ever I heard it.

Here's the stats of deaths in the UK, for example (2006-2010).

    +--------------------------------------------+
    | Year | Pedestrian deaths, hit by:          |
    |      | pedal cycle | car, pick-up or truck | 
    |------+-------------------------------------| 
    | 2006 | 3           | 233                   | 
    |------+-------------------------------------| 
    | 2007 | 6           | 267                   | 
    |------+-------------------------------------| 
    | 2008 | 3           | 247                   | 
    |------+-------------------------------------| 
    | 2009 | 0           | 141                   | 
    |------+-------------------------------------| 
    | 2010 | 2           | 123                   | 
    +--------------------------------------------+

More here: http://www.cyclinguk.org/campaigning/views-and-briefings/ped...

And here: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/uk_accident_statistic...

This year there has been a lot of bad press for cyclists in the UK as one 20 year old biker hit and killed a lady.

Lots of negative emotions and bad blood exposed, the court case got nationwide attention for weeks.

However nobody seemed to realise the dissonance that whilst 1 cyclist caused death is the ultimate heresy, drivers kill people daily without us batting an eye.

It's all a bit frustrating, I don't understand where this bias comes from - is it latent auto industry propaganda?

> drivers kill people daily without us batting an eye

Background noise - easily ignored.

> whilst 1 cyclist caused death is the ultimate heresy

Statistical anomaly - easily highlighted.

See also, e.g. "gun deaths in the USA vs Islamic terrorists"

this case is a bit unusual. It wasn't a normal accidental death.

He modified his bike which made it illegal to use on English roads.

He had a pattern of dangerous riding.

He blamed the victim, and he lied about the accident and her afterwards.

It's a pretty toxic combination.

Specifically, he removed the brakes from his bike and was proud of doing so.

The press haven't been completely honest in their description of his bike. He had a fixie. Which is illegal, and is dangerous, but you can slow / stop the bike by simply not pedaling. People are acting as if he was cycling a runaway train.

They're quite common in the US and not illegal there.

This discussion is outdated but just wanted you're right, I think I was misled here: it's standard pedal-back-and-skid brakes. The newspapers here really did make it sound like he had no capacity to brake at all.

I don't think anyone's worried about getting killed by a bike, they're worried about getting hit and being hurt. I totally understand, since a lot of bikers ride like maniacs and don't seem to give a shit about the rules.

While we are just having opinions on things I'll say pedestrians on their phones are the biggest danger to pedestrians of all.

Pedestrians on a phone are a danger to themselves, and can maybe cause an accident if they wander by mistake on the street. If I bump into another pedestrian I'm pretty sure I'll be fine.

A biker is a 60kg bag of meat coming at you with 15km per hour. They are completely silent and love riding on sidewalks.

Coincidentally, I almost got mowed down yesterday by a girl on a citibike. She made no attempt to slow down and if I hadn't stopped in the crosswalk, she would have hit me. As a native New Yorker, I am weary of cars, buses, and trucks, but I know where they are going to be, generally speaking. Bicyclists are a less predictable variable. They are harder to spot and don't obey any traffic rules to any large degree.

That said, I have observed that if they are a commuter with a helmet on, then they are likely to stop at lights and for pedestrians. If they have no helmet on, or are riding a citibike, then all bets are off and I should be very careful if they are heading my way.

I've always found that the safest way to cycle in a busy city is to behave as similarly to a car as possible. If you're acting like a car and participating properly in traffic flow, it's far less likely that you'll get into an accident or altercation with a vehicle.

This is helped enormously by 20mph speed limits around the city where I live. It means that at a busy junction in the city center, I can accelerate away and get up to traffic speed as quickly as a car, if not quicker.

I think those look like raw numbers, rather than adjusted by volume of use. To be comparable you would probably have to compare number of deaths per non-motorway miles travelled or something similar.

To add some more anecdata, I walk to/from work in central London every day. I will admit that I do occasionally see motor vehicles breaking traffic laws, but I see an order of magnitude more cyclists breaking the rules. I have both experienced, and witnessed multiple near-misses by cyclists ignoring the traffic rules/laws.

As there's no need for registration there's never any repercussions, so why not?

I'm sure in some cases there are justifications (it's dangerous travelling next to motor vehicles, so safer to cross major junctions in pedestrian phases), but as a pedestrian I have to not only make sure I'm looking out for when it's my turn to use a crossing, motor vehicles disobeying rules, and also cyclists who could come from any direction at any time at any speed. I think this is probably where the negative opinions of cyclists comes from.

But I've also witnessed pedestrians ignoring traffic signals and almost walking into cyclists as well. So in conclusion, people are the worst.

If you hurt someone while driving a bike or any other vehicle there are repercussions, if at fault you will probably be arrested, and charged with crimes up to manslaughter:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/18/cyclist...

Cars are far more dangerous, just by virtue of being heavier vehicles.

Indeed, cars/motor vehicles are much more dangerous.

In terms of repercussions, I was talking about the act of breaking traffic laws/rules themselves rather than actually causing a serious accident. With a registered vehicle, one can record a number plate and report it (or have red-light cameras). I would expect this to have an impact on behaviour.

> one can record a number plate and report it

Unfortunately, to take a general public complaint "seriously", MetPol want two minutes of video before -and- after the alleged incident. Good luck with that. Even if you do have video, it's exceedingly rare for any driver to suffer even a warning.

But that case shows the limits in the law. He was charged with manslaughter (a charge that was never going to work even in this case) and with a Victorian law - "wanton and furious driving" - a law which doesn't mention death.

> I do occasionally see motor vehicles breaking traffic laws, but I see an order of magnitude more cyclists breaking the rules.

To add to this anecdata, I see more vehicles breaking the rules than cyclists -but- even if it were 10:1 cyclists:vehicles, one of them is at least a ton of metal at high speed and therefore capable of doing many orders of magnitude more damage.

> this is probably where the negative opinions of cyclists comes from

People are inured to cars and tend to turn a blind eye to their minor indiscretions (perhaps because they happen at a distance - cyclists are less common, out of most people's experience, and much closer - thus more visible indiscretions.)

Really? On my walk to work from the station in central London, I probably see 20-100 cyclists running red lights, each time. I've had upteen near misses with cyclists because of this (crossing the road). Much rarer with cars imo.

I walk 15-20 minutes from a station in Central London to work and whilst I might see a handful of cyclists jumping the lights, I pretty much always see more vehicles doing similar or worse.

Boris Bikes[1] started operating in the middle of 2010.

I looked it up because I was curious about whether the scheme had any overlap with the above table.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santander_Cycles

it is much less dangerous for cyclists to be on the same path as pedestrians than them being on the same roads as cars. Its quite clear why.

In Paris, because no fatal collision of a cyclist with a pedestrian has occurred last year, that category has been removed from the yearly report : https://twitter.com/EmmanuelSPV/status/909330409099530245 - the killers of pedestrians are the motorized vehicles.

Bikers are more an annoyance than killers.

The fact that they don't kill doesn't mean they don't cause accidents though. If a biker hits ones hand or arm or topples someone over the accident won't show up in those statistics you cite.

> Delivered without sugar-coating and designed to manage expectations, the prognosis from doctors wasn’t good. The aim of surgery was to straighten Takeuchi’s spine and fix his posture, not to enable him to walk again. If during the procedure the doctors saw additional work that could be done, they would do it, but he shouldn’t allow himself to think that he would wake up and be walking.

Wow. We are a community of people who enjoy the ability to dream and ask, "what if?" It's very difficult to turn that off and accept that the impossible is, in fact, impossible. That kind of realization can be, and almost would certainly be to me, defeating.

Not for Hiroki - this guy is just wired differently.

I wish him the best.

I did an internship at GoCardless last summer - Hiroki is an excellent leader and I'm not surprised to see him bounce back in such an inspiring way

Interesting how work can bea meaningful distraction after a crisis. Something meaningful to think about other than adjusting to life in a wheelchair, in this case.

About 5 years ago I was CTO'ing for a firm upstairs in the same building as GoCardless - both firms moved out of that abandoned shell in Finsbury Square around 3-4 months after I left, I believe. At the time they were focused entirely on validating direct debit payments were something people wanted to do online (they do), and we were figuring out how to move private jets around Europe (long story).

I only met Hiroki briefly, my main interactions were with others there. They seemed like a committed and focused group, determined to build something of value.

I have some empathy for some of this story: I couldn't walk in April of this year and had to have surgery to remove an abscess that caused some quite nasty neuropathy. It happened quite quickly - over a couple of weeks, not a car crash speed, at least. And I was treated by Imperial down in Hammersmith, the same trust who I believe run St Mary's.

Whilst my prognosis was not quite as dramatic - I was told that walking again was "a nice side effect we see in 70%-80% of people in this sort of case" - I was prepared to be in a wheelchair the rest of my life. I told my GF that if she couldn't handle that, I'd understand. The silly cow didn't take her chance... :-)

That moment when you wake up in recovery, try and move your toes and realise nothing has really changed: pretty devastating.

I was lucky. Physiotherapy and time have contributed to me walking pretty well with a stick, and that might go soon. My spinal injury was no more than a compression, in which the nerves will over time regrow mostly - unlike Hiroki's which sounds more like a shear.

I can also empathise with the desire to get through physiotherapy quickly: whilst I still receive weekly physiotherapy sessions (I have one in a couple of hours, actually), I wanted to get off the inpatient unit ASAP: the normal stay was 3-4 months for my sort of case. I got done in 5 weeks. I've heard stories of people being there for years.

Also, being pushed around is stupid. I agree with him on that. My girlfriend, bless her, she did well. But never again.

And yes, it does all make you rethink everything you are and do and value in life, and in some ways accidents like this can be blessings in disguise. I suspect he will now be more focused and determined to do the big things in life that you dream about but never act on: I know I have become so since leaving hospital. No more sitting around watching Netflix every night for me...

I might be lucky in that I can walk again - and 6 months from now you'll never know I went through anything like I have - but I'll always have a certain appreciation for life that only people who have been through something that traumatic can share.

Good luck to him, and to the rest of the GC guys - they're all going to be fine.

I don't think this is the first interview [1] but it's interesting. DSM is worth a listen if you've not heard it before.

[1] - http://www.wnyc.org/story/death-sex-money-rachel-hiroki/

"the GoCardless CEO’s first with the technology or business press"

The 2012 Paralympic Games London were a huge triumph.

However London doesn't seem innately supportive to people in wheelchair users, I hardly ever see them in central London, and not at the many Meetups I attend; which I believe is a loss for us all.

The new Crossrail Line is being built with wheelchair access in mind, so hopefully it just won't be the tough as nuts, extrovert wheel chair users who can surmount getting into London.

Smaller towns may be easier to get into, but they probably don't have the critical mass, and events.

Which is the best large city for wheel chair users?

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