But even if you are right I don't understand why Uber is eager to buy in now. If this takes off so much that Uber is obliged to get in on the action, they can wait. It strikes me as like Apple with MP3 players or smartphones or smartwatches: it's cheaper and easier to let somebody else prove the market and then just come in and crush everybody.

In particular, you've had to lock up your bike and still had it/parts stolen - not your problem if it's not your bike. Not being your bike also takes care of the maintenance - not your bike means it's not your problem! (I mean, don't go around trashing their bikes for the sake of it, but it means you don't have to worry about the derailleur alignment or tire/rim sizes.) There's the logistics of biking - if you go out, but take a taxi home, then you have to come back to get your bike later. Jump means you don't have to, and if you don't bike back, you can take an Uber instead.

You've definitely had a car almost kill you - likely more than once. The new protected lanes that are popping up all over the city don't make that problem go away, but it's a big step forwards.

Imagine having never experienced being almost killed by a car.

Finally, there's that whole pedaling thing. Not to be (further) presumptuous, but I'm guessing somewhere in the 10+ years, there's a stop sign that's been run. If you stop, then you have to start again. That gets old pretty quickly on any street with stop signs every block. Jump bikes being electric makes that stop being such a workout.

None of these problems are truly insurmountable - as your experience proves! There are other problems w/ bicycling that Jump doesn't solve, but Uber's bet is the kind of friction that Jump does solve, will make this purchase profitable for them, $2 for 30 mins at a time.

Finally, since Uber knows where its riders have been dropped off, it's able to use that data to move Jump bikes around the city to optimize their placement.

If you wait until something's a "sure" thing, then it's too late - the price has gone up, so there's less money to be made. The time to buy BTC was 10 years ago, not now, but if you think it's this weird sketchy thing now, 10 years ago it was E-gold 2.0.

But again, even if you are exactly right, it won't be too late for Uber. Either they'll be successful, and so have plenty of money, or they'll be troubled, and this business won't be nearly enough to save them. And in the meantime, it's at best a giant distraction, and at worst they smother it, as happens all the time with large-company acquisitions.

Compare with Apple. They were 3 years behind on smartwatches, 4 years behind on MP3 players, 6 on smartphones. It didn't matter, because they had skills, assets, and market power. It was better for them to wait and let others prove the market and then come in when the shape of consumer need and likely solution was clearer. I think the same would be true if Uber were a successful, stable company.

> it's cheaper and easier to let somebody else prove the market and then just come in and crush everybody.

before there is a dominant player

WRT to your Apple and MP3 market, Microsoft tried the same thing with it's Zune, and failed miserably.

Of course, that may not translate to every city but I think it will move across the US much faster than pure dockless schemes.

For your question on why not? I bet being able to move a significant number of trips by volume from your competitors back onto your platform is well worth the cost and mind share that you could build. (e.g. no bikes available? How about you take this uber for x% off instead!)

American bicycle infrastructure is behind, but it exists. I don't own a car. I get around those cities on bike without issue. It's as fast or faster than a car in many cases and I'm peddling the old fashioned way (with legs).

The density simply isn't there, and the infrastructure is pretty horrible aside from some exceedingly small areas of the city proper, and of course the amazing bike paths (which typically are not useful for anything other than leisure). If that's what you consider a high bar for "bike infrastructure" in the US, I think the situation is pretty dire.

I moved to Chicago largely due to transit-related reasons, and the bike commute here isn't exactly stellar - but it's at least night and day compared to the average suburban-oriented city in the US.

That said, spending significant time in the Netherlands may have raised the bar too far for me to really think of any US bike infrastructure as being much more than an afterthought at best.

1. https://www.outsideonline.com/1930411/10-best-bike-cities-no...

2. https://www.travelchannel.com/interests/outdoors-and-adventu...

There's nothing out-of-ordinary about the amount of rainfall in Minneapolis or Chicago so not sure where you're coming from with that one, but you just wear a rain jacket and, again, have a dry change of clothes if you're going somewhere that demands formal dress. In Chicago I've found the wind has a much bigger impact on my biking than precipitation.

So in Chicago the typical bicycle commuter commutes on the nice days (maybe half the year?) and will take public transit the rest.

In Minneapolis I commuted via bike for financial reasons so it was mostly a "suck it up, buttercup" sort of deal. You brought changes of clothes, outfitted your bike for the weather, and otherwise just made do. Honestly summer was worse than winter because I sweat a lot in heat. I cannot imagine living in that area without a car voluntarily. You just cut yourself off from far too much - but I suppose this was pre-Uber so the situation is a little bit more tenable.

Public transit in Minneapolis is basically for poor folks or those with DUIs - so it's not exactly stellar and usually not an option for most folks living in the metro area.

Edit: The follow up of "maybe 15 bad days" you had is for what most would call hardcore riders. The number of days the casual fair-weather bicycle commuter rides is far, far, less. I feel pretty comfortable saying this considering my family was known as crazies because we'd bike throughout the winter no matter the weather.

What? No.

I'm in Minneapolis. I live downtown. I find using the bus and light rail far more convenient and easy then a car. Let alone the baggage a car brings such as maintenance, insurance, upfront costs, and not to mention parking.

Or the heavy Boris bikes or the small wheeled shopper style that a lot of these bike share companies use and most of these bikes are probably badly maintained.

Portland itself is a very bikeable city and a lot of time/energy is spent to improve and grow this infrastructure. Traffic is getting to the point where cycling is faster for inner-city trips, but as I live outside of the city it's a non-starter because public transportation from my end of town is severely limited.

Seattle doesn't seem nearly as bike friendly, and while it's certainly faster to bike or walk during rush hour, it doesn't seem nearly as safe as Portland. I certainly have no interest in cycling in Seattle, driving is bad enough.

Going up the hill on a Lime, Spin, or Ofo...no way -- you see those at the bottom of every hill.

Seattle is probably in the top 5 cities for driver awareness, but it has room for improvement.

the biggest challenge is bike security (not getting it stolen). bike racks and locks are a poor solution if unattended. if we could put bike racks right in front of the gate attendant booths that most public parking garages have, it would be a much better deterrent to theft. and for residential buildings, you could have lockers or a locked bike storage room (possibly with security cameras too).

Except that LA is a sprawl and almost nothing is close together. Maybe if you live at the beach its nice.

Also, a bicycle can serve as a last-mile connector to the transit system - imagine someone who lives at Wilshire and La Brea but works in West Hollywood, and would like to take the Red Line, but doesn't want to lose an hour to walking.

Isn't LA like, the single place on earth where this is least true?

I have never heard this before? Do you a citation for this? More likely in LA is that people simply "limit their tether to 5 miles."

but you gotta get over that perception of sprawl to realize how great LA is for multi-modal transport.

multi-modal transport? You mean the bus? The bus in LA is a joke. Nobody wants to take the bus in LA - it takes way to long to get anywhere. The metro is notable in how little area it covesr. I think this map illustrates this well:

https://media.timeout.com/images/103334943/image.jpg

So what does that leave? Cars. You yourself even mentioned ""Lyft and renting a car." Owning a car, renting a car and calling a car are all car-centric modes of transport.

And LA doesn't have a perception of sprawl it is actually sprawl.

but as a resident i almost never do that kind of ping-ponging around town. you can find good food, drinks, and entertainment in each neighborhood so i typically hit up only one area of town on a given evening, depending on which friends i'm with (or visiting).

berkeley is nice and chill and bike-friendly, but it's also tiny compared to LA (18 vs 500 sq. miles).

It's....Dallas! We have over 20,000 bikes in the city now.

http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dallas-bike-share-regulat...

I unfortunately don't see them being any kind of major replacement for anything in Seattle anytime soon unless the Mayor actually puts high tolls on downtown exits -- especially since we have fairly good public transit.

[1] - http://www.limebike.com/electric-assist-bike

Have you tried and confirmed you can make it up the hill with little to no issues?

Traffic is pretty bad at core times and the hassle of parking adds quite a bit of time at each end.

It's also a great fit because traffic SUUUUCKS and there are a lot of healthy people who buy into the concept.

American cities were built for the car.

African cities are growing rapidly and can be built for the car, the bike, or something else entirely.

That is literally what people said about Segways.

ebike sales are growing rapidly and in general will start to shape cities in europe very rapidly. That will trickle over to the US in a lot of the big cities that are already dense, and then shift over to the less dense but flatter cities (think LA!)

I've been seeing these scooters popping up all over SF including Lime and Spin branded ones.

I hope to see more of them spring up as a viable alternative to using a car to get everywhere. Though I see the lack of helmets being included with these as a disaster waiting to happen.

I've rode a personal electric scooter for over a year now and I can say a helmet is a must. The biggest dangers I've seen is clueless uber/ lyft drivers cutting you off (happens a lot) and pot holes / cracks in the pavement. They travel at 10+ mph so if you hit a big enough pot hole your going to eat it.

Europe and Asia seem like the most important markets for the technology rather than the US which is littered with sprawled out cities.

Since the dockless bikes did not ask for permission of the city, they're now forbidden and the few I've seen were in a bad state.

Outside of Europe what would you consider the major non car-centric cities?

An e-bike can go 20 miles comfortably which means you could take it to work, lock it up and charge at work, and ride back in the evening for most commutes. I'd guess about 30 minutes is the upper bound average for most commuters that would ride a bike to work. Seattle and SF are perfect for pedal assist e-bikes because hills feel like flat roads, and their public transit system isn't nearly as good as NY

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-traffic-los-angeles...

And maybe you haven't been to NYC in a while because although there is lots of mass mass transit, that does not make it non car-centric. It most certainly has a car traffic problem. Just because you don't have to own a car does not make a city non-car centric.

If you look at the inrix score care you will LA is number 1 for traffic and NYC is number 3.

http://inrix.com/scorecard/

Bit of exercise and gets you there faster and cheaper.

Ride-sharing suffers from the problem of clustered networks - you can be a global player like Uber and still lose the entire city of SF to a competitor like Lyft, or feel a minnow like Juno tear into your margins in NYC.

Having bike sharing in your pocket helps you build a wider moat around these clustered networks. If I typically take a bikeshare to the subway every morning, and rarely Uber on the weekend, Uber might win 10 low-margin trips from me during the week (bikeshare to and from the subway every day), and through the use of a loyalty program incentivize me to make my 2 high-margin weekend ridesharing trips Uber trips.

So yes, it is an adjacency, and it is lower margin than ridesharing and capital intensive, but this is a difficult market and at this point in the game it might make sense.

While it still takes a leap of faith to buy, the argument is sound. And using some other posters' terminology, we can put it like this:

If this works, it will drive significant revenue growth and consolidation of both the rideshare and bikeshare markets.

If it fails, meh. It's just "rounding error."

Seems like a low-risk, high reward proposition to me, the way you stated it.

As for Jump;

https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organ...

They just announced a $10M series A in January. To cash out at a $100M valuation doesn't seem like a bad outcome; after just doing just a series A, the founders' stake is likely to be in the 25-50% range (I'd guess in the lower end).

Obviously the zeitgeist is to shoot for a unicorn, but there are plenty of reasons to chose an earlier exit, only some of which suggest that the underlying business is shaky.

(Dodgeball sounds like a great deal BTW; rest & vest for a year or two, and then go start your company again except this time without having to bring in outside funding for your seed).

Bringing other transport methods under the Uber umbrella seems like a play to keep you opening the Uber app when you want to go somewhere, rather than opening somebody else's app and selecting Uber.

It can also miss the forest for the trees if they have a few bikes that they usually put in an okay spot (but not enough bikes to meet the real demand).

I don't mean to sound like an advertisement. I just want to note how transformative owning an ebike has been. A good 50% of my car trips have been replaced, and I enjoy the ride while doing so. And I like my car, too. But ebikes are just that much fun.

not entirely true concerning the bike share companies. when they are fighting for dominance like they are in Dallas, the city gets littered with the bikes and people start vandalizing them. This happened in Paris so much that the dockless bikeshares pulled out.

Bike sharing is therefore complementary to "ride sharing" and having the two within one system could potential improve both.

   The odds of their work surviving to the 10 year mark seems so small.

They just took $10m in January, which is a fair bit of runway for testing hypotheses. When they start to run low on that, they can go to every single VC firm for more. Inside Uber, they are going to have approximately one executive to get funding from. Currently that executive obviously likes them. But feelings change, and they're just a reorg or an executive departure away from somebody who gives zero fucks.

If they combine accounts there will be true synergy though: many people either have zero rideshare accounts or almost all of them, the famous lack of moat. The same is probably true where multiple bikeshares are available. Those who have zero accounts in one "x-share" group and multiple in the other would be 100% locked to Uber when they occasionally do cross over from bikeshare to rideshare or vice versa.

You are 100% right with this being just a drop in the bucket though.

Note that Mark Zuckerberg could have sold Facebook early on for a variety of "he gets rich" prices: http://www.businessinsider.com/all-the-companies-that-ever-t...

And I'd add that anybody who gets into doing a startup only because they want to be rich is probably better off buying lottery tickets.

The two valuable things Uber has is customer credit cards on file and an app installed on their devices. Deals like this that add to those is valuable, and is a barrier to their current and future competitors.

I remember my time as a freshman, getting a bike from Walmart became a necessity after the first couple weeks.

After every winter, I had to fix or buy a new bike just because parts got rusty, broked or vandalize.

So I would totally be happy to just use a shared bike if it was available back then.

Citibike is similar, its not a cash cow but every single bike is painted up in Citibank livery and logos.

But...

From Uber's perspective, they have a lot of cash right now. They are worried about a self driving future where Waymo takes all the rides from them. Drivers are expensive (at least half the ride price), and electric assist bikes removes driver wages from the ride expense. And really what is Uber's big monopoly advantage? Just the 2 sided market, but it's local. With a 1000 drivers + advertising you could compete in a local market with them. Right now they are subsidizing a lot of their rides with the world's largest pool of capital, but eventually their capital will run down. If this is a good business they will get competition.

The shared bike business is capital intensive (buying bikes, building infrastructure) but that capital actually buys you some monopoly moat power. It's a really tough business for a startup to be in, but a pretty good fit for a big company. Uber could also do some cool things like a long haul Uber carpool to a bunch of Jump bikes just outside of downtown. Ie. shuttle up 101 to SF, Jump bike to get you through traffic.

For the Jump founder, they have been working on social bikes since 2010, the Uber deal probably includes a cash payout for some of their stock (often after a year). A reasonable guess is that the first 7 years of that were starvation times with a capital intensive business and low capital. At this point the founders might have 20 to 60 percent of the company, with half their stock paid for in cash they might get 10 to 30 million dollars in a year plus the same amount in Uber stock, which is pretty liquid. Plus whatever new grant in Uber stock they get for staying on (it would not be weird if this was another 5-10 million per executive over 5 years). And fundraising is just a massive pain.

From the Jump CEO's perspective:

  Sell
    $10-40 million / founder, almost certain payout
    Never fundraise again
    Lose company (everyone pretends, but that's what happened)
    Still get to run company for a few years
    Slowly watch your good culture be consumed by Uber's bad culture.

  Compete
    Compete with
       - the 3 electric scooter startups that have launched in SF in last 2 weeks  
       - Uber and Lyft
       - buses
       - Go bikes
       - self owned bikes and ebikes
       - driving personal cars     
    2-7 years of hard work before cash, but then more money
    Go before Board of Supervisors meetings to explain your plan for fishing bikes out of the bay
    Keep company and autonomy
    Make vision a reality