Two weeks later, and we're limiting the 2025, cohort to up to five individuals, so it may be the case that some very, very qualified individuals will have to defer to later years. So that's a bit on the program. And back to you gentlemen.
Thank you so much, Joe. Yeah, we are fortunate for 2024 I have three brilliant researcher professionals joining us, Laura David, Alex, and I hope many more will feel interested and apply for the 2025 cohort, right? So now I would like to invite Laura David and Alex each to say a few words about themselves and start with Laura.
Great. Yeah. Thanks. Jim on Thanks, John, thanks Yvonne for being a great initial cohort here. Really enjoyed working with you all over the course of this year. I'm Laura Fox. I'm the co founder of street life ventures. We invest at pre seed seed stage B to B companies at the intersection of cities and climate. So this includes mobility and logistics is a deep focus area, but also buildings, energy, waste and water and adaptation. Previously, I led city bike at Lyft and grew that into 100 million. Arr business due diligence at Sidewalk Labs on mobilities, buildings, sustainability systems and others. Launch mobility stores for big corporates, while at BCG with their digital ventures group and much more so long term mobility, transportation business person, I guess, and so excited for this upcoming conversation. Wonderful.
Thank you for joining us today. Alex,
similar to Laura, I've been a longtime sort of mobility nerd the last sort of 15 years or so have, for me, involved a pivot of going from being sort of a quote, unquote car guy to realizing that the automobile exists in a series of systems, both at the Urban level and at the data level, where we learn a lot more about climate change. So a lot of the pivot over the last 15 years, for me, has been really focused on sort of an overarching question of, how do we invest money into mobility outcomes, both meet people's needs but also tend towards more sustainable systems, including decarbonization. So that's involved being a leadership team of an eV startup in what we would now call clean tech 1.0 for many years, working in Los Angeles clean tech incubator, doing investments and incubation of startups in the zero emissions mobility space, and currently doing a variety of roles beyond this fellowship, including serving at a venture partner at a couple climate funds, where transportation is within the scope of focus, and it's been a pleasure to be part of this this program.
Wonderful. Thank you. Alex, David
Sure. David zipper, I am, in addition to the role at MIT, I am something of a transportation writer. I'm a contributing writer at Vox, and I've written extensively about transportation technology and society in the Atlantic and slate, Bloomberg, city, lab, Washington Post, a whole variety of other places. And I approached transportation, really, from the perspective, I guess it's cities and technology. I previously worked in the mayor's office in Washington, DC, overseeing economic development strategy at a time when Bike Share was born and ride hail arrived. And then I LED Smart Cities and mobility investments at a early stage VC fund called 1776 where I really got a front row seat into all these changes that were taking place in transportation about 10 years ago. And decided that, you know, aside trend that could be used for good or for ill, and that's why I decided to to get involved and stick with it and do a lot of writing around it, and it's been a lot of fun working with the MIT team over the last year.
Nice. Thank you. David. So now let's start with the first presentation by Laura Fox. Talk about deploying a non dilutive capital to scale early stage, urban mobility, climate investment. So
sharing my screen. Okay, great, yeah, you can see everything, right? Great, yeah. So as you know, as we discussed, my name is Laura Fox. I'm really excited to talk to you today about deploying non dilutive capital and what that looks like. I think John is always reminding me that not everyone is deep in finance, and maybe just a couple things to note before we get in some of the details. When we say non dilutive capital, that means capital that doesn't impact or dilute a founders ownership of a startup. So this typically report refers to grants and debt capital. There's a couple of other forms, but those are the main ones. And dev capital, traditionally is easier for later start stage firms to get given proven technology easier understanding of bankers and others who are worried on more of the loss side of things, but has traditionally been a bit harder, but is also essential for earlier stage technology companies. And so I focus on the earlier stage side, which is also where we invest at street life, and given a little bit of context in us earlier in the intro. So I won't go into too much depth there, but thought that we could ground ourselves just in a little bit of the landscape of what mobility tech is looking like right now, on the venture side, in terms of deal counts and values. So there's been a more, you know, a more than 70% decrease from the height of the market, from 2021 to 2023 in terms of deal value, and 50% in deal count. And for 2024 we're expecting this to be on par with 2023 this is not abnormal compared to other areas of the overall market. It's, you know, largely in line. And so we've just generally seen a downwards trend. But happy to go back to some of that data, because I think it's surprising for folks when they first look at it. What really drives this, though is kind of value chain of money in the space, which I think is important to talk about. So, you know, nature of exits, how people are bringing what's called liquidity back into the market and into the hands of private investors called limited partners. So allocate to funds. So allocate to startups. It's essentially the way that fresh capital gets back in the market. And so we've seen exit values decreased 85 to 90% from 2022, to 2023, from 2021 peak. And after these mega exits of 2021 we've with exit values of over a billion dollars, right 1.1 so you can see here like 2024 is seeing that average value of below 50 million. And so we've really seen a pretty dramatic shift in you know, how companies are not only getting funded, but how they're getting valued on these exits, and what that looks like. And so just kind of continue to build this picture of what this means for founders. You know, we've seen overall, you know, not only you know our deal counts going down, size of deals going down, but also time between rounds going up 40 to 50% and so this means that founders are under pretty significant pressure to extend runways right as they think about how to build these sustainable companies that are built for the long run but have pretty significant challenges in the short term these last couple years. And so a lot of that you know results in, how do you extend runway? What does that look like one of the results of that pressure is an increase what's called debt to equity ratio in early stage companies. It's up about 40% since 2019 some of this is venture debt, which we could talk about later, is a pretty tough form of capital, and so I wanted to spend time talking about other options for founders when they think about how to align sources and uses of capital on the cap table to build companies not get diluted, not have onerous structures that need to be paid out, and next equity round and things like that. And so just starting to again, kind of ground ourselves in what that means. You know, I think a bright spot at the moment is that it's actually good for founders to understand different capital sources earlier on, bird is oftentimes talked about within the mobility space. They were purchasing scooters and shipping them by plane, the most expensive means possible, using equity dollars, which is one of the worst uses of capital that you can imagine, given the expected rate of returns that you can see here. And so if you were to kind of redesign how to think about a product like that and build it in a way that you know each type of investor is getting the return that they expect, what would that look like? So I've included here just a kind of high level sample of what a sources and uses capital framework for founders looks like. This will be different for every company. But in this example, I assumed a mobility started with physical assets and project needs. And outside of equity, all other forms of capital are non dilutive, and so just kind of walking through each of these areas, equity is dilutive, right? So that means that it reduces the founders ownership stake in the company. Equity investors are typically like myself, are typically making a bad forward looking right on the overall growth and trajectory of the company. Cost of capital is high because the risk profile of that is high, and so you tend to use a high cost of capital for things that you can't get other forms of capital for. So this concludes, you know, R and D of the product, sales and marketing and other things like that going down the list, debt capital, non dilutive, there's a huge range here, and we'll go through a table a little bit later on of what some of those forms are. But typically you need to have a commercially ready product in order to have debt providers, you know, excited and interested to underwrite, whether it be an asset or a project. And we'll, again, we'll go into more depth, and then grants, non dilutive, least expensive, because they're free, getting free dollars. I was always great. And these we use to fund early R and D, there's a range of both federal, state, local, kind of rate payer incentives and others, demonstration deployments, which can really be used to help set you up to raise debt later on, LMI, like low moderate income deployments and others. And of course, last line is revenue, right, which is what everyone is looking to start growing so they could become less and less reliant on equity as a kind of capital source. And so just with that in mind, you know, how does this translate to kind of a healthy journey for, say, a new hardware product within the mobility space that has, you know, IP that they've been developing and significant R and D. So this is a company that isn't just looking to deploy existing kind of hardware, but needs to develop it themselves. And so leaving aside revenue from this equation, just looking at the other forms of capital, typically, kind of a healthy journey starts with raising R and D grants, right? So this might come in the form of non dilutive accelerators and incubators, as you're starting to kind of build out what that case looks like, then you might get a first round of pre seed capital and some additional grants start to gain in terms of equity, maybe some deployment grants, and then bring on debt. What you once you've proven out some of those deployments, and typically, what debt providers are looking for with those early deployments is, what does the actual cost look like? How does the underwriting look? Kind of longevity of assets and a whole range of other factors, and then you gradually switch to more and more debt as the drivers of your hardware and project financing, and really only start to use equity for sales and marketing and continue to reduce that right as you continue to grow revenue. So this just kind of helps, kind of maybe keep in mind what what should be doing. One of the reasons why we focus on this a lot at street life is we've seen founders what we call force fed equity, which we think is really damaging to kind of dilution of the ownership stake of a company, and also it means that you're not building the fact base to raise debt later on, which means that inherently, don't have a sustainable business, right? Because you're gonna need more and more very expensive equity in order to grow this company. Equity investors aren't going to see the type of return profile that they need to get from the business, and so as a result, many equity only focused investors can get scared off of hardware versus we think that like these conversations should be very open. Investors should be helping counsel, coach and advise founders and how to think about these different tools at their disposal. And so, you know, founders, like, especially the early stage, experience a lot of pain points in securing these forms of non dilutive capital. So we won't have time to go into a ton of tech, but just wanted to go go over what that looks like in a few kind of solution set. So kind of, you know, first set of this is like, unclear option set, like, what are my options? Who are the players? How do I grow awareness of this? Because you're not going to be going to a bank of America or Goldman Sachs or others for those first rounds of that raising second is an unclear process. So it's very different than raising equity, right? Equity investors are making a bet on future growth of the company. They are looking at downside, but the way that their diligence and underwriting is quite different. Data room, set of materials, are quite different. And then third, there aren't a ton of great case studies out there for founders, and so you typically need to source conversations with other founders to understand the basics, pros, cons. Watch outs, how to think about structuring this? Oops, skip one.
So we'll go quickly through this, but just in terms of making the options that clear, this is something we do a lot at street life. We've collaborated with SSB, other climate, VCs, NYC to EDC and others to create a range of resources for early stage founders, including some of these non dilutive capital that are specifically suited to founders in that seed series, A, early B, before they're qualifying for larger debt sources. And so there's a range of both established groups like green banks, private credit firms. Ggrf is a main form of capital coming into market right now that is really exciting for this. And generally think that these kinds of resources should be public and available to founders, rather than kept behind like VC walled gardens has like source of value. Think that investors should be putting out this information a lot more and a lot regularly. So we can come back to that if it's interesting for the group. And then next piece here is that, you know, underneath this, not all debt is created equal. And so again, you know, thinking about those broad ranges that I showed earlier, you really do need to be selecting the right tool for the job. And there's, you know, a couple areas of, I won't cover each one here, but just quickly to go through a couple, maybe four of them. You have project finance, which is really suited for kind of large scale projects that are going out and deploying pretty capital intensive projects. So this might be need to build new manufacturing plants for a particular type of asset. It might include needing to trench right if you're an EV company and others. There's equipment financing. This is underwriting assets. So that could be the Chargers themselves, and that EV company, example, you know, if you're talking about micro mobility, is alloc will grow into that bike or scooter. It could be the truck or the asset itself. And so debt providers are really going to be digging into the useful life of that asset, the type of contract, and what that looks like. And then receivable financing, which, you know many This can sometimes be difficult within a more mobility hardware or other market, because providers here oftentimes looking for 50% margins, if they're standalone, versus suppliers can be a great source of that. Again, lots, lots underneath each of these points, but trying to go through quickly to give a quick overview. And then second here is just clarifying the process. You know, can include lots of different links and others to go through the MIT mobility group in general. But you know, in general, the, as I mentioned earlier, the process here is quite different. So you need a different data room. You need a different set of documents and give credit create an SBB structure. So this is not only kind of legal, but pretty heavy lift on the financial side. And one group to call out that I think does a particularly good job here is spring Lane capital. They have a developer you program for anyone here who's on the call, who's developing a hardware product, like please send me a LinkedIn connection, or others, I'm happy to send you more resources and a note, or when their next program occurs, because it's a great boot camp for founders on that side and raising debt capital, and then on the grant side, I think you know, because of these prolonged periods of time between funding grounds that founders are experiencing right now, It's that, how can you get grant capital earlier, knowing that federal, state, even local grants can take a long time to actually hit the books. And so there's a number of different providers who will work on that and during planet is one of them. But there's also folks like streamline climate that can help you apply to and understand some of those grant resources very early on. And then, you know, just lastly, in terms of highly encourageable case studies, this is something that we're planning to do as a partnership between street life and the MIT mobility group next year, and doing three different workshops, one on early stage deployment grants to de risk debt capital. Again, this is a really essential part of qualifying for debt capital, getting debt providers to understand the underlying cost of the business and ways to do that. There's a number of founders who have done great jobs. A lot of great payers out there are actually great at supporting these kinds of projects. Second is equipment financing. There's countless examples of founders who have been incredibly successful and moved off equity at a Series A or Series B, even so, rather than valorizing equity, how do we think again about moving on to best forms of capital? And then the last is project financing, which has both pre construction side and construction side for folks who are working through this. So that's kind of quick, tour through. Happy to get into more details later on, the discussion. Too great.
Thank you, Laura. I hope the many of the founders or aspiring founders in the audience will appreciate this guide. Really practical, specific. On this note that beside the presentation today, each of the fellow is writing a full report which will distribute across the community there, so you can get a much more in depth understanding of Laura, David and Alex. Finally, on this right? Alex, next one, talk about how we support micro mobility, both from the private sector and also from the government support. Yeah. Alex, this
uh, all right, can everybody see Miss green? Yes. All right, great. Um, well, as I shared at the intro, I am a sort of car not turned questioning the value of cars in certain situations. Um, obviously cars play a pretty important role in our mobility system. But my sort of hypothesis going into this research is that there was a pretty big disconnect between the potential benefits of micro mobility, e cargo bikes, e bikes, scooters, and the attention that both the investment community and the private sector as well as the government investing. And so, like it was sort of, is that really a true disconnect? And if so, what might need to be true to resolve that disconnect? So first part of the research was just really looking into, you know, one validating is micro ability really all that great. And I would argue, yes, it is, but it's a little bit challenging because it's one of those Swiss Army knives where it's great, it's really darn good across a number of things, but it's doesn't fit every use case and every application. The thing, I think it's always stunning is, when you compare on the left weld wheel, grams of CO two per passenger kilometer. And you see that when you incorporate current technologies for mining minerals, for EVs, and then the potential for recycling or not, etc, you see that we obviously get a benefit if we say, set up government incentives to get people out of an internal combustion engine and into an EV we get a huge benefit if we can somehow figure out how to get people out of cars all together, or at least for a lot of their trips, and into E bikes. So that's sort of one thing that is worth quantifying and having policy makers and others understand the others, of course, like the quality of life benefits, which is to say, when people are cycling around a city, there's all sorts of benefits in terms of health, community making, etc. So that's just sort of grounding. And you know, what do we mean by micro ability? And why should we care about thinking about the benefits of micro ability versus, say, just getting people out of an internal combustion engine to into A into an EV. Since I'm looking at it like is my guts, right, we're under investing, or at least not investing, I would say in microbial The answer is no, we're generally just not doing this. If you look at, for example, the inflation Reduction Act, it's incredibly easy to isolate for how much money could be spent on the federal tax credit. On the EV side, it's incredibly hard to find pots of grant money or whatever else within the inflation Reduction Act regal that can be definitely applied towards micro ability. But in that case, the one in the neighborhood access equity grants, it's micro ability included. But there's other forms of sort of uses that that those dollars can be applied for, and the same trends holds true on the private investment side, where I focused on venture capital. But you can just see that obviously, even with the sort of decline in funding that Laura talked about at the macro level, there's just never been as much big picture attention towards micro ability, as there has been towards, say, electric vehicles, and I did then spend some time really talking to a lot of founders and investors to validate whether, you know, from a quantitative perspective, they really thought About the fundability of this category, for those for micro ability. And what was intriguing, I think, was that, you know, any founder of a startup will tell you fundraising is hard. I don't think, though, I was expecting that 94% of them would say, yeah, it's just harder to raise for micro ability than it is for other mobility sub sectors. And I think their sort of concerns were validated when I did a survey of folks in the venture capital side who invested in mobility, who at least half of them were just like, Yeah, I just don't think micro mobility is basically worth investing in from a venture capital perspective. And then I really spent the rest of the research looking through, okay, if both the federal government and venture capitalists are not particularly interested in microability. What would need to be true in terms of market transformation forces to make this something that both people in federal policy making in DC could get excited about, and subsequently, potentially investors on the venture capital side and look through a couple of different levers on the consumer market structure side, you know, if consumers just put their own accord demonstrated a higher willingness to pay or purchasing, to what degree would that change attention and minds in DC and in the venture community, you've had More things that were driven by policy makers like infrastructure level support, protected bike lanes, bike parking, but also producer level support, and then real federal at either the producer or consumer level, whether those be consumer focused, you know, buy downs at the cost for a consumer to get A new bike, or even producer level manufacturing subsidies. Surveyed founders about this, and also surveyed VCs, which is in the written report. And I think my overall conclusion was, nobody sees a silver bullet, except for maybe founders being really excited for, obviously, the continued investment in state and local infrastructure, in protected bike lanes, whatever else. But notably across both groups, there was an acknowledgement that a lot of what we have tried thus far has failed to, like really make it a breakthrough market in terms of people's attention, and that it was time to think about newer approaches, like a federal producer subsidy or something like that, that would really help catalyze market growth. And so, you know, the outcome of those conversations was, you know, on the consumer market structure side, we haven't yet seen these sort of just organic breakthroughs of changes in consumers behavior, where consumers dramatically change their behavior that makes the market more investable state and city policy, what I would say is, we've already got a lot of this. We've got 100 e bike incentive programs in North America by local and state governments, and, you know, we still have almost no federal policy. And so I would argue that the big unlock we can hope for is, you know, sort of some level of maintain and grow in that middle column of state and city policy, and then really leaning into what would it take to get changes to the federal policy level? And subsequently spent a lot of time talking to various members of Congress about what, you know, what is really feasible, right? Politics and policy is the art of the possible. I think there's an acknowledgement, both before and after the election, that a lot of the things that have been near and dear to people's hearts as like sort of moonshots on federal policy are probably still moonshots at best under a change in administration. But so, you know, consumer tax credit, for example, I think for purchase on E bikes, people have quite little, little little faith in being part of the next administration. But there are some windows of opportunity for those of us who say, hey, you know, the election really changed. So the calculus in DC, how do we still push for this in a changed administration? But I would argue there's, there's three ways where, if we want to be opportunistic and take advantage of what is likely less enthusiasm in Congress for micro ability, what do we do? One is the 2017 tax cuts must be reauthorized or allowed to lapse. That means that there's an opportunity to refine what the tax cuts can be applied for. It's worth pushing for either production some sort of production level program, or consumer tax credit for purchase of E bikes. Second, and probably even more important, is the Surface Transportation Reauthorization Act. We have a way of thinking about government spending at the federal level that's either highways or public transportation, and never the two shall meet. And there's sort of a giant missing middle that we need to have ingrained in the way we think about federal spending programs that Angie is that it's not just a binary choice between highways and public transportation, but investment in a whole stream of mobility solutions. And then last and least, you know, there is obviously, for better, for worse, bipartisan interest in tariffs wage to particularly anything that touches the battery economy, and that is an opportunity for metal for worse, to think about what is, what does nearshoring e bike production need, in terms of the potential interest in getting Congress and support and then subsequently, potentially investment from the private sector. Thank you so much, and I'm looking forward to the discussion. Wonderful.
Thank thank you so much, Alex, I would just add that another major area this lack of support investment is also on the pedestrian side. So who invests that? Who promotes that, along with the micro mobility discussion, right? So thank you. Alex moved to David zipper talked about the how do marketing electric vehicle and what metrics make sense? What metrics are being promoted or what should be promoted? Thank
you. And I'll just say up front, I'm having some technical issues. So Chino, if I could recruit you to help me with slide advancement, I'll be grateful,
very happy to do so, yeah, thank you. Actually,
you can jump on to the next slide right away. Thank you. Yeah. So what I what I focused on with my investigations with MIT this year is looking at the metrics that automakers are using in the US to market their vehicles. And this is something that I've been that seems potentially important, and something that hasn't gotten a whole lot of attention that I've seen among so the advertising world and the auto making world, and, frankly, the media writ large. And it also seems like now, as we're just now adopting EVs in the US at scale, it's sort of beyond the early adopters. It's extremely important how we're informing people how to think about which metrics really matter, and sort of understanding what is a high quality EV and what's not I actually turn so my briefing is available online. Perhaps move on. Can stick that into the chat, and I also produced a Fast Company article, actually just a week ago. I think that sort of shares its findings. Can find that article, as well as a bunch of other articles I've written about EV is on my website, just David zipper.com go the next slide, please. So metrics, first of all, explain what I mean by this. Metrics are the numbers that we use to basically evaluate car quality, and automakers have all have long played a major role in sort of helping people understand with what metrics matter and how, and sort of pushing them out to consumers. You have different metrics, usually for a sports car versus a family car and so or a pickup, so forth and so on. The metrics also evolve historically with the time, so in the 50s and 60s, a time when a lot of cars were underpowered compared to where we were today. You saw a lot of metrics around zero to 60 times as well as horsepower. Then when the oil crisis hit in the 70s, suddenly, mpg was all over the place, even before the CAFE standards were created in the mid 70s, because people were really concerned about it, and sort of went from there. And I think, you know, the metrics really play three roles that I think are worth mentioning. One, obviously, it helps consumers say, Okay, how do I compare Model A to model B to Model C as I'm shopping? But perhaps a little bit less clearly, but I think really importantly, the metrics really guide a lot of R and D efforts, and dictate, to some extent, the future of the auto market. Because automakers, if they know that, they're going to be evaluated with their models off of blah blah blah metric three years from now, they're going to invest time and being having a leg up on the competition. So these numbers really do matter, and especially now as we're talking about electric vehicles, they really matter, because so many people really don't necessarily know how, among the public, how to think about electric vehicle quality. Do we use the same numbers we've always used, or do we use new ones? And because they spend billions of dollars on vehicle marketing, automakers are going to play a huge role in determining, really what, how that, that sort of understanding plays out, go the next slide please. Yeah, actually go ahead and go to the next slide. So what I did is a couple things. I looked at, just get a flavor for what metrics are being used by automakers. I looked at the landing pages for the most popular EV models in the US, and just made note of all of the metrics that are voluntarily shared with consumers or visitors. So not looking at the specs, the long lists of of numbers that automakers always include on their websites, but like the numbers are being pushed forward, and I also noted which ones are sort of more prominent than others. And once I collected that information, I talked with a whole bunch of people who are experts in the auto market, whether on the private sector side, or regulators or academic leaders, trying to get a sense of are these metrics constructive for the long term health of the EV market, and, frankly, for the planet, because we all want to see EVs succeed, or are there really hidden dangers? And I'm going to share with you some of my major findings, but you can find more if you look at the documents that I shared at the beginning. Next slide, please. So this is just a table. You can see more information about it in the MIT briefing, but basically there are a few metrics that just jumped out. And then there was a dog that didn't bark, if you will. So I want to share that with you quickly. These are sort of like the highlights, next slide, please. So the number one metric, which I don't like, surprise you if you follow EVs, was range. Every car maker had it front and center, usually like without having to scroll in the slightest if you wanted to see what the range was for the vehicle. And that makes sense, like the range anxiety constantly comes up when you talk to consumers who do surveys about consumer responses for why they may or may not be considering buying an EV. So it's understandable why this is the dominant metric. However, it raises real questions. For one thing, Americans vastly overestimate how much they drive and how much range really matters. 19 of every 20 trips in the US is 20 miles or less, and assuming 30 miles or less, let me get that right, and the likelihood that you're actually going to hit 2050, or 300 miles in a given journey, it just happens a lot less frequently than the risk that in emphasizing range, you're going to end up reinforcing a misperception among a large swath of the population. But there's other issues too, one of which is the range is not ironclad. People think, oh, yeah, I get 283, miles of range with my vehicle. No, you don't, as the many engineers on the call are going to know range is going to be determined by by but also by driving behavior, by the weather, by topography, a lot of variables at play, and you have a lot of of unfortunate surprises among EV owners that can undermine confidence in electric vehicles, writ large. And then there's another problem, which is, if we're going to be focusing on ranges like this becomes like the guiding sort of metric for the future of the EV market. Well, the way that you have longer ranges, you install bigger batteries, by and large. And that's a problem, because big batteries is a is relative waste of resources. It's also a safety risk, because heavier cars, bigger cars, are going to exert more more force in a crash, particularly with smaller cars, and that could worsen what we already have is a road safety crisis in the US. So rather than get into an arms race on range, it'd be a lot better if we could focus on building out a charger network, which is another issue I'm not going to get into, but that feels like that's a much healthier way for the EV market to develop. Next slide, please. The second most popular metric was acceleration. And I showed a whole article about acceleration, and also in past company a few months ago that was inspired by research I was doing, putting the briefing for MIT together, and the long and the short of it is, and this is a technical term, zero to 60 times are just dumb. They are not helpful at this point, because every EV can go more than quick enough for any driving on a public road. By and large, you now have SUVs that can hit 60 in under 464, seconds, which is not or useful, practical for most drivers. So the apple the comparison of zero to 60 times is just not a particularly useful one for drivers or for car owners. And I worry that this, based on a lot of conversations I've had with with folks who follow the market closely too, that there is a potential risk that if, if Auto, excuse me, if consumers are looking at range and looking at acceleration as they're choosing which EV to buy, whether, whether to buy an EV. It's not a great recipe for consumer satisfaction because the range is not ironclad. It's not potentially as important as people think, and acceleration really isn't as important as people think. Next slide, please. Then the third most popular metric, I found, is charging time. This one is super important, and it would be great to have a competition among car makers over time, but who can have the most efficient charging systems? The problem is that automakers are not making it easy to do apples to apples comparisons and the market materials that I reviewed, I saw some automakers talking about the amount of range you get from 15 minutes of charging. Others talk about amount of range from 20 minutes. Others talk about the time, the mileage you can get in range from, excuse me, the amount of time it takes to go to, sorry, the matter the amount of time it takes to get from going 10% of of charge to 80% so it's really difficult to do an apples to apples comparison here. And you can't have a robust market in terms of, like, compelling automakers to compete in efficiency, excuse me, in terms of charging time. If it's not easy to do that kind of comparison, I'm not sure it is right now, based on what I've seen Next slide, please. And then there's a dog that didn't bark. Um, I every expert on EVs I spoke with, whether on the public sector side or in academia, and the ones who are honest and are off the record, I should say in in private sector too, they all said that efficiency is absolutely essential for having a robust future EV market. We need to to have EVs that are going to make maximum value of the energy they consume. And this, by the way, would also counteract car blood, which is an ongoing problem in the US that I've done a lot of work with, and the federal government, to its credit, puts MPGe, which is an efficiency metric, front and center on the Monroney sticker, which is depicted here. But I didn't find MPGe anywhere on any of the websites that I reviewed, and I only found one reference to vehicle efficiency, and that was with the BMW. I for
miles, miles per kilowatt hour, which is better, frankly, but it does not feel that that vehicle efficiency is a metric that automakers are putting out there, helping consumers unfamiliar with EVs recognize is important that to me, is a concern. Just next slide to wrap. You know, I like this did so really in some what I found concern me, because I worry that by focusing on the metrics that we're seeing with all these ads, and again, this is like a lot of how people are determining how to think about EV quality, because so much money is being spent. We're looking we're focusing on metrics that could potentially undermine future customer confidence in EVs and lead to potentially road deaths and waste. This is not good for the for society, but it's also really not good for automakers who want to see their EV models succeed over time. So my hope is that this is a bit of a wake up call, and that we can, we can think differently about how automakers and marketing really
electric models.
So I'll pause there and say, Thank you very much. Wonderful.
Thank Thank you. David in 2009 I wrote my dissertation, preference accommodating versus preference shaping the EV industry are clearly shaping people's preference, hopefully to the right direction. As David mentioned, yeah, we don't have a 14 minutes now. I encourage people again, the audience, to type your comments and questions that we'll get to in shortly. But before that, I'd like to invite the panel, actually from Laura, offer some quick remark about the other panelists the presentation here, Laura and
yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, Alex's presentation is obviously like near and dear to my heart as someone who ran a large scale micro mobility system for a number of years and have given many presentations like a better car doesn't solve the problem right when we think about urban transportation networks and all of those different components. And couldn't agree more with his statements around just the challenges around investing in micro mobility right now, I think that we've seen a lot of headwinds, which is negative outcomes of past investments that have been very splashy, right? In some cases, right? I think bird hops to mind for a lot of folks, but even on business models that many of us here thought would be wildly successful. So I think of you know, monthly rental models of E bikes like swats and dance and others, and European cities that are known for this seeing a lot of challenges and even bankruptcy declarations to restructure companies in those instances. So we are really excited about the move and potential for fleets, and how you invest in kind of fleet, fleet work, given just rises in efficiency and what that looks like. And so a lot of what Alex resonated, or what Alex brought up, really resonates, yeah, and then on on David's point. This is something David and I have spoken about a number of times, and it's incredibly frustrating, because we know that these things aren't good for end consumers, and yet it's what is being marketed to. I think another piece of David's research that I found really compelling in the past is related to a lot of these marketing elements, is, you know, ideas of safety, right? And so as safety being for the person sitting in the car versus the person that is outside of the vehicle, right? And that by kind of promoting larger vehicles is more safe, right? We've actually created a much more dangerous external environment. And I saw a number of comments from folks on just, you know, challenges of like the total emissions profile right of the vehicle and increasing right based on increasing size of these batteries. And I would just add one last point to that, which is, like all of these estimates are based on having a clean grid in terms of reducing emissions by the move to ice to electric. And what we know is that grids in dense urban areas are 70 to 80% dirty, and that in order to just provide the necessary kind of generation capacity if we're to move to ice to electric that we need investments in the US grid at the scale of 125 billion. So we're creating a very difficult downstream problem to solve for right when it comes to the way that we're marketing to consumers.
Nice. Thank you. Laura Alex,
on Laura's presentation, I just want to underscore for those who are founders, are part of the startup community, the importance of her statement around founders being force fed equity. When I was at Lacey, we, you know, Lacy as an incubator, has a venture fund, I created a definite compliment that to prevent that force feeding. And I think just to be cognizant, if you're a founder, of what is the market failure there exactly. There are a lot of VCs who've spent 1015, years investing, have a track record, and, you know, are successful in raising capital and then investing, and have decided to broaden their remit into a place that includes hardware. And I think to do that right, you have to be sort of like the approach that Laura and street life interest has, which is great, we're going to then be educated about all the other parts of the capital stack. And there's a lot of VCs who've been successful for 15 years doing software investments, saying, like, Look just next round more equity. Here we go. And they're like, I don't, you know, advanced my career. Why should I spend the next three to five years really learning about all these complementary sources of capital? So just acknowledge, if you're a founder raising capital, that not every VC is necessarily trying to take advantage you on this topic or whatever, there's someone's coming up from a point of their own ignorance on what works and what doesn't in that dichotomy between software investing and hardware investing. And then, yeah, I think on David's presentation. I really it's one of my biggest laments for the entire industry that so much over investment in battery capacity, and I do think like sort of a standardized norm around the 10% to 80% charge time, and how that works in the following scenario of it's a level two charger with X amount of power being delivered might at least force automakers to think about how they do it, but maybe just one thing that I'm you know, to also underscore on this, we have a scarce right now number of batteries that we can deploy, and whether those go in EVs, microbid, stationary storage, whatever we want to make the absolute best use of them for a variety of reasons, including, again, for better or for worse, growing geopolitical tensions between our consumption into that chain and the production into that chain. In you know, some countries for which tensions are really growing between the US and them, and it's a very short sighted national security risk to say, Wow, there goes another EV Hummer, and we just put a whole lot of batteries that had a whole lot of useful societal implications and came with their own geopolitical risk to purchase in a Hummer. So really, really, David's work is near and dear to my heart on the wasteful way we are approaching this.
Thanks, Alex.
Yeah. Maybe just to be brief and look at both Alex and Laura's research, it just strikes me that both of their findings sort of confirm. It's striking to me that, when I listen to them, that the areas that we need most urgently that can do the most good I would argue for reducing emissions and transportation would be transit, micro mobility and walking. None of those seem to be robust areas to say it lightly for venture capital or startups right now, none of them. Yeah, if you might have started wants to can make money out of walking, please let me know, because I've never heard of it, but, but, but even if we electrify in the most optimal way possible, we're not actually gonna be able to reduce emissions enough to to hit the targets of single Toronto study from a couple of years ago. And so, given the fact that the like, you know, micro mobility is so difficult for for startups, and doing any kind of of mobility startups is so challenging right now for Laura is saying it just strikes me that for active transportation, we have to you.
Cough, which is one of the world's largest climate gatherings, right, which is setting in things like the Paris Accords, right, and these large scale negotiations and how governments collaborate globally in order to ensure a reduction in emissions. And I continue to be shocked that transportation does not have its own day as the largest driver of emissions globally, second largest driver in cities. And was doubly shocked that there was such little discussion of transportation related solutions on site by government leaders in particular, for really struggling to pull together the right capital sources to kind of fund the future of reducing emissions, and yet have actually a toolkit right when we think about moving people to other forms of transportation, be it transit lanes, car free, bus lanes, right, and other that are readily available, well known and lead to, like, very clear results and so completely wish that at a kind of global and national level that this was understood to be the biggest and best thing that we could
do. Nice, yeah, thank all three panelists for the conversation. It's really nice, John, we still have couple minutes for the Q.
A, yeah, super Okay, so we will definitely share that with you all, some very interesting questions and commentary came up. Let me just start with a specific question, I think, for Laura from Alexis subro, who's with, actually, with the Department of Energy and administers quite a few grants and non dilutive capital. So his comment was, grants are, quote, free in terms of expected return, but are there other types of costs or burdens that should be highlighted or recognized? So I think here, Laura, if you just have thoughts on perhaps the strings attached that may come with grants. Yeah,
of course, this is like such a deep topic. So I'll give the top two line sentence version, but there's a lot of stuff that we could go into here. Completely agree that not all grants are created equal, and many come with significant strains attached in terms of reporting consistency, kind of volume of that potential requirements that are embedded. You know, you know, Alex has looked at this in the micro mobility space quite a bit. We've talked about this in the larger climate ecosystem. Many will come with a fully made in America type of protocol, right, which may might make the cost profile not work for the overall project. And so I think that there's a lot of ways that streams could be difficult. And so I would really encourage people to take a look at that. You know, I think for application streamline climate is a really great tool to be using, because some of it can just be about finding the right grants for reporting. This is something that a lot of founders have talked about in terms of looking for grants that have similar reporting cycles, so at least the reporting that they're doing is generally aligned, right? And they're not creating 18 different reports for 18 different organizations, and then the like fit with your overall strategy. Like you should not be accepting a grant if it pushes you down a strategy right direction that isn't like actually growing the company overall. Yeah. So lots, lots lots more there, but completely agree that, like, grants are free money, but oftentimes do have kind of cost implications on a people and reporting side of that
right. Super Alex on micro mobility, there was also quite a bit of commentary in the chat. What maybe one thing that I would like to share is we had invited Andrew Salzberg to teach a class on basically decarbonizing urban mobility. And as part of that class, he did a kind of focus study on the Boston metropolitan area and asked the following question. He noted that half of all trips in Boston, all trips are three miles or less, all automotive trips, I should emphasize. And he asked the question, What if all of those three mile or less automotive trips were converted to micro mobility? What would be the impact on CO two emissions? And the answer that he came up with is it would reduce CO two emissions by 5.2% so it's one of those when it's half of the trips, but it's the half of trips that are very short trips, and so that does leave us with this long term situation that still so many of the miles are, in fact, really only lend themselves to automotive mobility. And I just, I just wonder, Alex, I'm sure you've come across this type of analysis before, like, how do you sort of reflect on on that trade off?
And I think that gets back to, you know, in my first slide, the quality of life versus the CO two. Because I do think we probably overestimate the environmental benefits of giving somebody a $2,000 e bike incentive, acknowledging that that might work for a large number of their trips, but not a large percent of their VMT, and they might keep a car and still keep using that versus thinking about it holistically in terms of, okay, there's a carbon benefit of somebody being in an E bike, but there's also a quality of life, place making, neighborhood driving, etc. And then I think that also gets back, you know, in addition to the conversation with a private car, how do we make sure that micro ability works in concert with public transportation, as opposed to to the detriment of public transportation, because there are going to be some of those scenarios where you can actually drive somebody, prompt somebody to drop a car, if you've got the right holistic solution in a community between good transit and good, you know, Active transit in the form of walking and good micro ability.
I think we're at time. I just Just one last quick comment, which is, you know, you're at the slide that you shared, Alex, that had the well to wheel life cycle CO two emissions, even that still generates a lot of sort of interest and discussion, and I think you know you and move on, put in the chat the link to really like, explore that model and to understand why those numbers are presented the way that they are. But your point about, you know, the scarcity of batteries, it's a point that's been made by Gil Pratt, the chief scientist at Toyota, many times that we have to sort of think holistically about. We only have so much of this material. How do we spread the chips in a way that optimizes decarbonization? And that ties really well to David's whole all the work that David has done on, you know, car bloat, the dangers of driving vehicles that are heavier because they have these very heavy batteries and so forth. So what I love about this is that you, the three of you, tackled these very different topics, and yet they are all very much interconnected as part of this mobility system. So with that, back to you gentlemen,
right? Thank you, John, that's a perfect summary on this. Yeah, I really enjoy all through our presentation. I feel like it's all fair to present all three in my session for one hour. Squeeze so much with Syria. So thank you for delivering this, everybody. Please join me. Thank you, Laura, Alex, for the patient today. Wonderful, right? And if you still don't mind, you can stay for a bit. We have a breakout room to chat a bit and for the audience here also just a quick advertisement for our last session this term will be by Professor Kai angison Talk about the dilemma of transportation planning and a possible alternative urban vision. There'll be the last one from the 420 24 season. Obviously, many of you next week have good weekend. Bye, bye. So I will create a breakout room here to do that. Here you
