The birth and death of a bike company: What happened to SpeedX
cyclingtips.com
cyclingtips.com
I've lived in several cities in europe and i'm not actually sure i've ever seen anybody using them. Yet there seems to be tons of competing companies putting out bikes in the street.
On top of that, they don't even seem to bother marketing or anything. The first I'll hear of a new company is seeing a new colour of bike.
The idea is sound in practise, but people seem to place great value owning their own transportation and the flexibility it affords them.
This article is about a company that was building bicycles to sell directly to consumers, not a bikeshare company.
For the "serial entrepreneurs" this is an easy way to stay employed (it can be surprisingly hard to get a job at BigCorp with CEO on your resume). These folks might just start a new company, raise some money, and voila they are once again on an "incredible journey."
In my experience for each "successful" exit (where the investors made some money) you get a ticket for one free "future" company from those investors. Once you don't have enough tickets to get another company funded you either have to change venues (new people, less history), or change markets (also new people but can be in the same locale).
Why do you think that is? It's so common to hear advice that bigco's will always want to hire people w/ Startup experience, but does that not extend to the founders?
That and the cited "common knowledge[1]" that the population of CEOs contains a higher percentage of sociopaths than the general population. I have yet to work at a company that considered sociopathic characteristics as a "positive" for the company.
[1] I really have heard this from multiple sources but have yet to find any well executed study that shows it to be actually true so I treat such pronouncements with a bit of skepticism. I have heard more than a few people who are disgruntled at losing their job will blame it on their boss being a sociopath. Such externalization of causes feels good psychologically but it is also self serving.
edit: I don't know why this is being downvoted. Is it because I'm lampooning a "common knowledge" that people like? For pete's sake, the research paper that spawned this meme even got retracted by the authors: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23744006.2016.12...
I think it's less "The Boss" than the fact that the CEO is generally more marketing/finance focused (far less relevant after a buyout as the purchasing company already has that established) than the CTO or VP of Engineering.
There are, of course, exceptions where a company gets bought specifically to install their CEO in the CEO role of the purchasing company.
Are there any well known cases of startup CEOs who were wildly successful as employees in another company?
Wildly might be a high bar, but otherwise it's pretty much majority of acquisitions.
But now you mention acquisitions, it could be argued that NeXT CEO Steve Jobs did OK as an Apple employee…
Direct mp3 link, since Tim Ferriss puts a wall of text before his actual content: https://rss.art19.com/episodes/6c7b3008-cf08-4aae-93f8-d3fde...
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OV-fiets.
It also features halfway decent (for the task at hand) bicycles.
Both are good for consumers, but I don’t think such a system makes venture capitalists happy.
The publicly sanctioned bikeshare is in shambles after an operator change.
The only thing keeping the public system alive is it’s offerings outside the city’s core.
I feel like the business model is the main problem. Low margins high-costs (you frequently need to replace thousands of bikes) and basically no moat.
Every few years a new startup can enter the marketing with a better bike. The incumbents have to improve their or risk losing the entire market in a matter of weeks.
the story of the sharing economy right there. I seriously don't know how bike / taxi / scooter rental companies have become a favourite of tech investors. It seems like some Robin Hood scheme to distribute money from investors to customers
(They're also pretty heavy for anything but short distances and not always in great condition. And at least in Berlin where I lived you can get your own bike for $50 or so, which I had. But I still like the idea.)
I live in a crowded European capital city (Bucharest) and one of the big reasons for me not buying a bike is that I don't have enough available place. I personally live in an one-bedroom apartment (before that I used to live in a studio) and yes, I could probably fit a bike somewhere around the place but that would be pretty inconvenient. I also live on the 8th floor and a regular bike doesn't fit in my building's elevator, so that would mean me having to carry it 8 floors up and down each time I wanted to ride it.
My gf does have a bicycle but for the reasons I mentioned above she decided to keep it at her office, which is at walking distance from where we currently live (about 10-15 minutes).
If you buy a bike you lose some flexibility. With bike sharing I can take the bus to work, take a bike to my meeting and then decide whether to take the bus or bike home depending on the weather and my plans. I can also do things like take the bus into town and then take the bike from the bus stop to the place I'm going, or bike into town and take the bus home with all my shopping.
But then you look at bike ownership. I almost want to put "bike ownership" in quotes because even the mere phrase makes it sound so much more serious and demanding than it is. It's so easy and cheap, it seems obvious you would just do that. Or put it this way, I don't find myself going "I just don't want & can't handle all that responsibility of a bike!" It's like, boy you better not get any houseplants then, that much responsibility will stress you right out!
I don't know if the prices are currently subsidized, but there's no reason they couldn't be.
[0] I'm assuming it's this program: https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/vehicle-solutions/
Out of locked, "secured" garages.
It gets expensive after awhile.
Neither of them is making a profit though!
Well, depends. Bikes take shitload of space inside the house, which in a city is often a low double-digit m² flat for singles, or slightly larger double-digit m² for families. Unlike cars, you can't keep bikes outside for too long, as they can get stolen quickly. Then, unless you know how and like doing it yourself, you'll end up bringing it into a repair shop for checkup and maintenance just as often as you would a car. At least you don't have much insurance paperwork.
Overall, bike ownership is still a hassle.
On the other hand, a personal bike that is only half as shitty as the typical bikeshare will be extremely loyal and never leave you for another rider.
But I get it, it's the public transport freedom which people who never experienced it rarely understand: if you always return to your personal vehicle having to do so feels perfectly fine. But when you got accustomed to ad-hoc modeswitching itineraries, being confined to returning to your personal vehicle feels strangely limiting, despite all the "wherever, whenever" of your own car/bike/boat.
No but seriously. Sounds like your transit agency doesn't have bike racks on the buses. That's what enables the integration with transit. Around my area you can take a bike on the bus or light rail.
All the other problems have pre-existing solutions though too:
Groceries to carry → Get panniers, and don't buy more than they can hold (you can always get more tomorrow, and it'll be fresher).
Rain → Wear rain gear.
Bad part of town → Own a modest bike and a good lock.
The extreme mode flexibility you mention sounds nice, but I've never found I've needed it. With a little advance planning and the extra bits above, you can just commit to one mode.
https://twitter.com/ridebluebikes/status/634459070200680449
As others have stated, it's not about renting vs. owning a bike, but it's about having the bike option when/where you need it.
Seems in the sunnier months they get about 200,000 trips, from a fleet of 10,000 bikes.
I think a lot of people start riding the share bikes before deciding to purchase a bike themselves too. Overall ridership is up 12% this year.
- In May 2019, bike share users took about 218,400 trips on a fleet of about 4,400-5,100 bikes. (~43 trips per bike average during the month)
- Around 95,000 individual users
- ~2 trips per individual user during the month
So, realistically not that great on a per-user basis and it seems like a lot of users are only trying it out a few times or grabbing a bike once in a while. That meshes pretty well with the idea that people who find themselves using the service frequently probably just buy a bike.
Edit: I was still on the 2017 figures for some reason. 800,000 trips last May, 975,000 last August. (https://montreal.bixi.com/en/open-data)
In other words, not really a profitable market.
I don't mean to sound elitist but riding BSOs is the surest way to turn people away from biking - and these bikeshare one look worse than the mamacharis ridden in Tokyo. In anycase, considering the bike culture of Seattle, I doubt there is a big overlap b/w the two kind of riders - casual and dedicated commuters.
As a datapoint, i almost crashed into someone riding one in London an hour and a half ago. The front lights on the Lime bikes are evidently not very reliable.
The brakes on hers weren't reliable enough to go down hills, let alone stop in an emergency. Mine weren't much better.
We left appropriate reviews, and were able to tell the next rider which to use, but they really need a quick maintenance survey, even just for brake shape, and perhaps a "flag bike as dangerous" button.
Also found the e-assist awkward, particularly at low speeds around pedestrians.
Would ride again, but just double check the brakes/mainteance.
Works great for me and apparently someone uses the bike in for their commute in the mornings since the bike is usually gone in the morning when I get to the bus stop.
If you want some real data from a large program with good public support, CitiBike in NYC publishes open ridership data: https://www.citibikenyc.com/system-data
The tl;dr is that the system is very popular, and they're constantly expanding it - currently averaging around 62k trips per day on 12k bikes across 750 stations.
I own my own bike, but I'll use a Citibike for a one-way trip or to bridge a gap when I'm already out away from home without my bike. There is also a ton of utility for people who ride more casually, or don't want to carry bikes up stairs, or don't have room in their apartment, etc, etc.
Used them all the time in London and Paris, and visiting other cities. They were great. Loads of people used them in the cities I saw.
I think there are a sort of people who will only use cars for everything, and don't really notice anything not car related.
Is that not the best marketing? Actually paying for inner city marketing is probably expensive, online marketing is probably going to reach more people that this isnt relevant to. If you're seeing the bike you probably are the target market and can see its a somewhat legit company (in the sense that they do actually have bikes at least).
Honestly, I hate the litter these dockless sharing companies have spread across the city.
It costs €30 for a "season", and that gives you 30-minutes free ride from the bicycles you'll find all over the place in their stands. You can pay a small fee to get more time, or you can do what most people do which is to ride to a stand, and swap your bike for another.
The only problem with the scheme is that it only runs around the summer, but I guess fewer people are interested in cycling in the snow/ice-heavy part of the year.
More details here:
I just see the same thing with this bike company. Ignore all the rideshare stuff, the push to grow so fast and not having a sustainable product and its the same story. They took a standard Aero fram and tried to make it appear as a "high end" product. The problem is, once you've ridden a high end road bike you suddenly realize the amount of engineering and R&D that goes into those bikes to get them to perform at that level. You can't just reproduce that overnight, it takes time and a lot of money. From the article (and the scathing reviews of the bike) it didn't sound like they really tried to make a quality product, just another carbon Aero knockoff with a cool integrated stem. At that point, it was easy to undercut your competition on price.
The lessons are all too clear and which you see a lot of. You can't cut corners on products like this and sell it off as "high end" and expect to get away with it.
Source: I worked in the bike industry for almost 15 years. Had various stints with Specialized and Cannondale.
Most of the value and innovation has shifted to the groupset suppliers, with Shimano taking the lion's share of the market and a few smaller players picking up scraps. When all the important components come from Shimano it barely matters who manufactures the frame and assembles the complete bike.
At this point road bikes are about as good as they will ever be within the limits of available materials and UCI rules. It would be nice if one of the big bike manufacturers would make their own high-quality components to compete with Shimano. Or throw out the UCI rules and build a fast, comfortable bike for customers who don't care about competing in sanctioned races.
Also, safety is important, and shitty bikes are less safe.
I think we all agree, buy something shitty and you get shit, especially with things you put between you and the earth. A medium quality bike, which costs an order of magnitude less than a "fancy" bike, will do literally everyone who isn't a cat 1-2 racer fine, objectively. Price difference is $1-5k for a mid range vs $10-20k for top of the line.
I don't think anyone is advocating for $300 walmart bikes here.
Yes, the person I was replying to was advocating for department store quality bikes. I don't see how you can interpret it any other way. He literally said "shittiest heaviest bike you can find", not "$1-5k medium quality bike".
If you're not at the TDF level, there's no point in spending more than $2k on a bike since the difference in weight won't matter.
The fact that there are few compressed air hybrids is probably a good sign that it's not significantly better than batteries.
Few electric bikes even use regenerative braking, it's generally not worth the weight and complexity.
Are you not familiar with electronic shifting? Integrated components? Sure, frames have basically all consolidated down to a few similar model types, but I see that as a good thing. It means the market has all figured out that "this is the most aerodynamic frame possible". I mean honestly, what else would you expect their to be improvements on?
> with Shimano taking the lion's share of the market and a few smaller players picking up scraps.
Uhh SRAM would like to have a word with you...OTOH it's basically a duopoly (with Campy's lagging 3rd). This is a good thing because it means I can swap parts in and out as I please since Shimano/SRAM basically can fit on to any modern bike. I see this as a feature, not a bug.
> It would be nice if one of the big bike manufacturers would make their own high-quality components to compete with Shimano
You mean like every major bike brand is already doing? Trek with Bontrager, Specialized with Roval, etc. etc. Sure they aren't the shifting/braking components, but I'd rather have 30+ years of mechanical innovation behind progress on components than a frame manufacturer and assembler trying to do it. The reality is that most of the bike brands are providing high quality wheels, handlebars, accessories, etc. now, and that should be applauded.
Recumbents are exactly that, but it's still very much a niche market. Furthermore, at any given component grade, a recumbent will cost more - and add a further premium if it's a trike.
We really need more recumbent bikes where the head of the rider is in a higher position.
Just imagine recumbent cyclocross, that mental picture is all you need for understanding why recumbents are a niche. Most real life transportation use of bicycles is full of lesser versions of similar challenges.
You've just described endurance bikes. but the reality is that the traditional bike design is still pretty much the best design, and anything radical has enough downsides and trade-offs to confine it to a niche market, so the endurance bikes still are pretty similar to any other road bike.
we've gotten really, really good at building bikes in the last 100 years. This year's model not being wildly different to last year's model isn't anything to complain about.
Every competitive road bike manufacturer is also offering a TT and/or tri model. Those are still governed by rules, but those rules allow far more radical designs. Cyclists looking for something faster than road UCI (but not quite a recumbent or velomobile) know where to get it, that market is not constrained by lack of options.
If you want to stop, we've got hydraulic disc brakes. If you want to go, we can stick a motor on it. Don't want to maintain derailleurs? Get a 14 gear Rohlhoff internal hub. Don't want to maintain a chain? Get belt drive. Don't even want to go to the effort to physically push the mechanism to the next gear? We have electric shifting now.
None of this was available twenty years ago. The "innovation every 10 years" you're looking for happened well over 100 years ago. The low-hanging fruit was taken before your grandfather was born. But build a bike with brakes so good it will lift the back wheel in the pouring rain, and people still aren't satisfied. :-)
It takes a while for things to find their level. The 'Boris bike' is now a feature of London, the other bikes haven't established that niche in the streetscape.
The road bike was also innovative, if flawed. Plenty of bikes and plenty of bike groupsets are flawed when they first come out. It takes a couple of iterations to get right and the costs of getting it wrong are terrible.
Years ago in the days of the mountain bike craze a brand came out with a few of their own components including a bespoke freehub body. This did not last long on any given bike and it did not take long before the warranty returns aspect of the business fixing whole wheels took over. There was no scope to develop the brand when all hands are literally swapping tyres and tubes onto new wheels and getting them out to customers.
Sometimes bikes that don't actually work don't bounce back. During the mountain bike boom there was a shortage of Shimano components and a rising Yen. This made it hard to get the gears and brakes needed to build a bike. So European components might be substituted. And they would not actually work together, no matter how skilled the mechanic, no matter how new everything was, the gears would not shift and the brakes would not stop the bike.
Very few of these frankenbikes made it back. They just sat in sheds and garages, never to be ridden!
The SpeedX bike was not a bike that would be just dumped in the shed or bought as a well meaning gift. They could not rely on 90% of the problems not coming back.
They also were never going to do well with the cycling press. Or the industry. The cycling business is actually really conservative and there are chunks of it controlled by people who never actually ride..
> Zoom out from the specific, and you quickly start to drown in the enormity of it all. Millions of bikes, assembled by thousands of hands. Entire towns like Wangqingtuo, built around servicing a rapacious demand. Restaurants and hotels and supermarkets, constructed and opened and shuttered in what are now virtual ghost-towns. Countless families relying on the bikeshare industry to survive. Seats and spokes and tyres beyond number, consigned as fast as they were made to technicolour scrapheaps around China. All of it, this vast mound of human toil, left to rust and rot among bamboo and rubble.
I am continually facinated with China and it's people. But in instances like this I get a real feeling of looking into the eyes of Yog-Sothoth, the Gate and the Key.
A gigantic amount of Chinese entrepreneurship is just about people trying to game the insane capital market in China under every pretext possible, without any genuine concern for the business being sound. Not much different from what you see in the US, except for even less curbs on outright fraud. After all, all of that came to China along with the first wave of "returnees" from US West Coast.
In this case, you have to admit, the company simply ran out of money, and you can not put that in any other way. Whether they would've or wouldn't have been descended upon by the communists wouldn't have changed anything about that.
I noticed a tendency that in China, whatever company can be called a substantial, solid business is much more likely to be privately owned, low profile, and kept as far away from capital markets as possible.
Best example — Bu Bu Gao group, the second in line after Samsung in smartphones, but is almost invisible.
Espressif recently went with a placement, but also very low profile, without much noise, and on a 3rd tier burse oriented to institutional buyers.
Allwinner, Rockchips — both companies are past their prime, but still super duper secretive with regards to ways of company's leadership.
You seem to have skipped the paragraph with the little tanks. Arbitrary plot twist it out of a clear blue sky, would be too absurd even for an episode of South Park.
The universal playbook of all bike related crowdfunding campaigns: take a tiny innovation (or none at all, it's not strictly necessary to have something original), put it in a blender with everything that has become state of the art within the last decade or two and use it to impress those who have never experienced anything better than a walmart clunker from the falling edge of the original mountain-bike wave.
As a road cyclist - I'm no expert on this, but even in 2004 such a thing was becoming commonplace in Chinese CF frames and companies that were trying hard to copy Cervelo.
The manufacturers using carbon like Time, Look were not producing anything 'aero'. Giant's TCR (ridden by T mobile) in 2004 was carbon front triangle with aluminium seat and chain stays. And again, not 'aero'.
Lots of interesting details from here: http://autobus.cyclingnews.com/teamtech04.php?id=tech/2004/p...
It's only had preventative maintenance in the years I've ridden it. I grew up biking, and I've never had one more reliable.
I just wish the frame had rack mounts for a pannier rack.