Disrupting the European mobility industry
Personal notes from building a mobility innovation community at The Drivery
Some six months ago, on the 1st of March 2019, The Drivery opened its doors. The paint was dry, the stage floor just uncovered, but the screen still wrapped in foil. We got going with kickscooter test rides. On stage with me were Julian Blessin (Co-founder of TIER Mobility) and Julia Boss (MD of WIND), discussing the coming urban micromobility revolution and the joys and challenges of building startups capitalizing on this trend while also pushing for change.
In just six months, from March to August 2019, The Drivery team has built and scaled a mobility innovation community with 400+ members addressing some of the most interesting disruptive challenges: Micromobility, autonomous vehicles, and the new infrastructure based on data and artificial intelligence.
In what follows, I will give some personal insight into the joyride of building what is now Europe’s premier hub for disruptive mobility innovation. First off, I would like to thank The Drivery team: Natalia Bahancova, Felix Kreysig, Ana Rome, Timon Rupp, and Nicole Schulz.
In what follows, let’s discuss the following:
- The initial challenge of attracting mobility innovators and persuading them that a larger community hub makes a difference.
- The process of iterating with early visitors, customers, and members to understand for whom The Drivery creates most value, and how we best deliver.
- The emerging competence clusters in micromobility, autonomous vehicles, and artificial intelligence, which we see as key ingredients to initiating and completing an urban mobility revolution that will serve humanity’s needs to be mobile in a fully sustainable manner.
My conclusion explores how The Drivery might find and win a second wave of mobility innovators to foster engagement and activity in a hub already providing nearly 10,000 sqm, engineering garages, and deep learning servers.
Doors open: The initial ‘real-estate’ challenge
Just two nights before The Drivery doors opened, I was hosting our first mobility innovators dinner on a construction site. We rented furniture, got some catering, turned on the electric cooker, and managed to have water on the taps at the last minute. The twenty-five invited mobility innovators had a splendid time amid all the construction utensils.
Getting a large construction site ready on time requires tenacity and a bit of luck. Even though not ‘picture perfect’, we opened on schedule on 01 March 2019. Yet, that created an opportunity only: The opportunity to build a mobility innovation hub.
Visitors came to the construction site. As we passed through the large space, a question kept popping up: “You really want only mobility companies and innovators to come here?” Yes, we did. Of course, that is unusual because when you have a very large space (aka real estate) you would want to offer it to any solvent client. In this sense, choosing to focus only on mobility companies is the equivalent of entering a race with a voluntary handicap…
Vertical co-working is a larger risk but taking the risk is essential to building a community with the capability to accelerate innovation and its adoption. When starting something new, you have the chance of focusing on mission and meaning. Although the mobility industry in Germany and Europe historically is vibrant, we shared a sense that when it comes to shaping the future of mobility, especially with regard to disruptive capacity and speed, Europe exhibits room for improvement.
Another question popping up frequently has been: “Who are you? And what is the Drivery’s business model?” The answer invariably starts with something like: We are neither an incubator nor an accelerator but rather a place and a community. We charge membership fees and offer event space. We think it is unlikely that an incubator will generate a disruptive companies. We don’t do equity deals. We don’t try to collect service fees while promising the blue moon. Rather, our purpose is to bring together a community of innovators, a community that collaborates but also challenges each member, a community that drives forward disruptive innovation at speed and scale.
If you have followed the success of Tel Aviv and its mobility innovation ecosystem, then you may imagine the Drivery as a cross-over of Ecomotion x Coworking x Engineering. Launching such a venture in Berlin may seem a bit of a gamble. Indeed, the typical Berlin venture has been mobility-as-a-service of the incremental innovation type. Hence, unsurprisingly, too many ‘startups’ offering this type of service in crowded inner-city Berlin turn out to be new companies that do not scale well, and quite a few of them are a small corporate spin-off only.
The Drivery is unique in several respects:
- The Drivery exists to support and foster innovation that changes mobility at scale, making mobility more sustainable.
- We think that hardware innovation, artificial intelligence, and software-hardware integration breakthroughs are key to achieving change at scale.
- It is attractive to entrepreneurs first and foremost, i.e. people and teams willing and capable to launch disruptive products.
Attracting members: What is product-market fit for a mobility innovation hub?
Offering a large space means an early design commitment and sunk costs. A real-estate play is in some ways quite the opposite of a lean startup. Then again, Rocket Internet now also is investing in real estate, and the seat of the Drivery — Ullsteinhaus in Tempelhof — is owned by a Samwer holding company.
Having a product ‘under construction’ also creates the opportunity: You can gauge interest in an effort to find out for whom the mobility innovation hub is most interesting. Placing an add on a real estate platform was not an idea, however, because we are building a community. It is not sales but network economics. In a double sense:
- You need to have and build a network of mobility innovators willing to contemplate working side-by-side.
- If you find the right starting point, you can create network effects (literally) that help you build the community.
That The Drivery opened its doors with kickscooter test rides was not random. Early 2019 was a special situation in Berlin and Germany. Electric kickscooters are a new form of mobility, one that had taken off in many countries, but was still prohibited in Germany. Nevertheless, Berlin is home to three startups that raised a large Series A. The startups were growing fast and The Drivery had space… TIER Mobility moved in early, and subsequently grew its HQ to more than 150 employees in a few months.
AIPARK, which operates a data factory for providing live parking maps across 500+ cities, was also an early adopter. In early 2019, AIPARK was moving to Berlin, and The Drivery still had plenty of office space. It was an office space with the promise of a community, but in the early days it was a promise only… so I am grateful that AIPARK moved in and was an early anchor.
On that note, the flagship startups establishing their HQ at The Drivery are: AIPARK, Autonomous Driving Stealth Startup, ENWAY, Another Stealth Startup, TIER Mobility, TRACKS.
The construction site tours, conversations with early members, and the Grand Opening on 23 May 2019 all indicated to me that The Drivery was very attractive to mobility startups around Series A because it offers the following:
- A space to focus solely on building the company
- Flexibility in terms of scaling operations
- A dedicated community with the potential to work together in softening and removing barriers to adoption while accelerating growth
Competence clusters at The Drivery
Within six months, The Drivery has grown to 400+ members, coming from more than 40 companies. While scale brings diversity, some notable competence clusters are emerging at The Drivery, namely
- Micromobility
- Autonomous vehicles
- Artificial intelligence
Micromobility
I think the electric kickscooter is a disruptive product, and it is beginning to shape the new category micromobility. The kickscooter is a new object — unlike the e-car and the e-bike. To date, most mobility-as-a-service plays seem to me a case of ‘smarter horses’, particularly those on four wheels.
By contrast, electric micromobility has the potential of giving us back what we all want: Door-to-door mobility without the hassle and the delays. For that to work, we need to change our environment. Currently, this mainly means removing barriers to adoption and increasing accessibility (e.g. dedicated lanes, local charging points, improved environmental balance sheet for scooters). Looking ahead, we need to understand how best to refashion the urban landscape to realize an emission free and carbon-neutral electric micromobility, which is the vast majority of urban journeys.
Some relevant companies at The Drivery: TIER Mobility, rideOS, Stark Mobility
Autonomous vehicles
Level 5 autonomy disrupts vehicle design while changing the way mobility is organized. Autonomous + electric + shared mobility gives us the chance to organize environmentally sustainable mass mobility at global scale. I believe we urgently need accelerated development, e.g. by focusing on scaling autonomous mobility initially via restricted use cases such as gated communities, logistics centers or designated zones.
Startups have the advantage, I think. Established players have fleets on the public road, and therefore typically will seek a gradual progression of autonomy from Level 3 through 4 to 5. By contrast, startups are free to focus their efforts on Level 5 only, and can make this mobility electric and shared from the start.
Unfortunately, in Europe I don’t see much appetite for investing in the urban infrastructure and vehicle technology in a manner that rapidly facilitates autonomous urban mobility. However, if we focus on restricted use case initially, we can reduce complexity, making early deployment of Level 5 more manageable. Some of the feasible short-term use cases in Germany and Europe that come to mind are
- Private road scenarios such as logistic centers or race tracks
- Restricted urban scenarios such as city cleaning in pedestrian zones
- Special permits on separate public roads such as motorways
We need these use cases to work out and scale as fast as possible, i.e. within five years. Moreover, we all better start planing now the implementation of a sustainable mass mobility system for the future, which I believe will be defined by a combination of 2-wheeled micromobility and 4-wheeled autonomous vehicles whose operation must be climate neutral.
Some relevant companies at The Drivery: ENWAY, LiangDao, Intrepid Delta, Phantasma Labs
Artificial Intelligence
Vehicles and services already provide a multitude of data, and this includes the smart phones we use as customers and passengers. Principally, data is an infinite resource, and one that renews daily. Hence, I believe that data accessibility and engineering is key. Accessibility is structured by ownership, and the tussle for mobility data is noticeable, particularly around vehicle data. Two types of mobility data are particularly interesting — those routinely produced by all kinds of vehicles and their users (e.g. sensors, cameras, smartphone data) and those specifically produced for Level 5 autonomy.
In both cases, the challenge is defining which data are relevant for the use or business case. Particularly for Level 5 autonomy the engineering includes the augmentation of data and the building of simulations. My expectation is that further advances now hinge on better defined use cases with high quality data engineering. The elaboration of the use cases conditions the potential traction of any productionized AI model. The engineering quality conditions the usability of the AI model and thus if the traction potential may be realized.
With regard to trends in mobility AI, let’s watch out for
- Data marketplaces and/or the emergence of data alliances so that new business cases can be built.
- The augmentation of Level 5 data factories with simulations as well as real-time data from large fleets.
- Use-case led smart data plays, by which I mean treating AI not as a project but as a product for a specific customer.
Some relevant companies at The Drivery: AIPARK, MotionTag, TRACKS, AEYE, HELLA FFWD, Honda, Hyundai Cradle
Launching the second wave?
Six months after launch, The Drivery has emerging competence clusters in micromobility, autonomous vehicles, and artificial intelligence. These clusters are backed by investment in the infrastructure such as deep learning servers and engineering garages.
To my mind, The Drivery is creating the future of sustainable urban mobility now. This moment is an exciting opportunity for
- Disruptive corporates teams and disruptive startups to launch or scale products from the Drivery platform.
- Ecosystem players capable of supporting the emergent technologies and business models through capital or services.
- Policy makers and planners looking to refashion our urban environments more rapidly for full sustainability.
If you would like to discuss further, please contact me via LinkedIn.
