In part one of our Mobility-as-a-Service series, Zachary is joined by Ryan McManus, founder and CEO of SHARE Mobility. Based in Columbus, Ohio, SHARE Mobility is an all-in-one mobility solution that offers all of the tools that organizations need to manage multimodal transportation programs.
Zach and Ryan discuss the mission, creation, and development of SHARE Mobility as well as general trends in the mobility industry. Topics include bike commuting, one-car households, car subscription models, and the effects of COVID-19.
Visit our website for information about our legal services related to emerging technologies.
In part one of our Mobility-as-a-Service series, Zachary is joined by Ryan McManus, founder and CEO of SHARE Mobility. Based in Columbus, Ohio, SHARE Mobility is an all-in-one mobility solution that offers all of the tools that organizations need to manage multimodal transportation programs.
Zach and Ryan discuss the mission, creation, and development of SHARE Mobility as well as general trends in the mobility industry. Topics include bike commuting, one-car households, car subscription models, and the effects of COVID-19.
Visit our website for information about our legal services related to emerging technologies.
ZBP Zachary Pyers
McManus Ryan McManus
ZBP
Welcome to the newest episode of the Reminger Report Podcast on Emerging Technologies. We are excited today to have a special guest with us, Ryan McManus, the CEO and founder of SHARE Mobility which is based out here, in Columbus, Ohio. Ryan, if you could, could you tell us our audience a little bit about yourself and how long you have been working in the startup space?
McManus
Well, Zach thanks for having me on the podcast today. I’ve been working in innovation for the last decade, and my career started in corporate innovation where I got to work inside of larger companies and help them diversify and create new lines of business. Started my first company in 2014 and then this company started in 2016 which is now SHARE Mobility. We are based here in Columbus, Ohio and we are trying to create equitable access through mobility as a service.
ZBP
Now you talk about mobility as a service, one of the things I am kind of interested in is how did you decide to get into the mobility market?
McManus
Well, I am not trying to advise others to go about starting a company this way but generally there are types of companies. There is company versus company and product versus company then product versus company and a product versus company is how we started. And when you are thinking about how autonomic vehicles were going to be part of that future, and we were going to build apps for inside of cars so the only real decision we made when we founded the company was we were going to look at how to effect the change of the automotive industry and then address the corporate innovation challenges that we saw from major automakers. I believe this is currently in progress and it is accelerating its pace but the automotive industry is in a glide path. The way they sell cars today is most likely not the way they are going to be selling cars in a decade and it was that original idea about autonomous vehicles that got Jaguar Land Rover to give me a concept investment. So I actually have investment before we incorporated this business. It was a pure idea and I was given six months and a very small amount of funding to figure out what is the biggest opportunity in the automotive industry that we can win in in Columbus, Ohio and that’s how I found my way to B to B Mobility as a service.
ZBP
Tell me a little about this process if you would, just about landing that money from Land Rover Jaguar, how did you find that opportunity and how that opportunity, how did you seize that oppurutnity?
McManus
You know it is really serendipitous. I knew someone in Portland that knew someone that was managing the program and that is how I got awareness of the program. Otherwise, I would not have known … we are able to get an application in on the very final day that they were accepting them and you know I think that who you know matters a whole lot and the fact that I had my friend Rob be able to make the introduction, I think it got our application on the top of the pile. And then I think they made a bet on us at Jaguar Land Rover and I think their bet was we’ve got six companies and five other companies that all have a product and they know what they are building and we have one team that’s starting from scratch and let’s see how they do. I think we made the most out of the accelerator program and we really were able to learn a whole lot through that program that we wouldn’t have otherwise had. So I think for founders, that would be first time founders. They don’t have a track record of starting and selling a company and they want to go after a really big market and they have a really big vision. I think incubators and accelerators are very good starting points. They will take chances on somebody as a first timer. They will give you a very small amount of money, and puts the crunch on because you have to make progress in a three months or six months and we did the first six months with Jaguar Land Rover who came out of the program and kind of had some ideas of what we wanted to do, but it took us another six months and we got into the second accelerator and we did that here in Columbus. It was the Smart City accelerator that was funded by NCT Ventures and AEP and through that program, we really formalized what became SHARE Mobility, that’s when we got our vans and started doing transportation services.
ZBP
Tell me a little bit about the transition that you were just describing when you said that SHARE Mobility got their first vans and kind of transitioned a little bit into more mobility space. How did that progression happen? I know you described getting from one accelerator to the other, but was there an ah ha moment for you or others at SHARE Mobility that said okay now we are going to transition, we are going to look at this area?
McManus
I always said the word platform. From the beginning of the company we talked about building a platform and my background in B to B lead to me go and say how do I take this platform concept and take it into businesses. So I got to meet with some very large senior health providers, some very large employers, and different groups that were running their own internal transportation services. They thought they wanted to do some things like Uber, they needed it to be really trusted and consistently nobody wanted to run the service. So my first customer said to me, we will be your customer if you are everything. We won’t buy software and keep running the vans because you are not getting to win a deal there. So we had to say alright we are willing to take the whole project, we are going to do a turn-key solution where you contract with us, we provide the vehicles, the drivers, the insurance, and the technology. From an MVP product development standpoint to very common intact where you build something very, very minimal, we had very little software in the beginning, very very little, just had enough for the rider and a little bit for the driver and created some efficient routes but it was by no means a software package that you could hand to somebody else. So by building a holistic solution that went out and solved the program, we didn’t need to have everything in place. I probably would have needed to raise several million dollars more in the first year of the company to be able to build an entire software product before I had revenue. And being in Columbus, Ohio, a lot of the expectations on entrepreneurs is based on revenue and I don’t think that is bad thing, it means that we are building good businesses today, not we are building things in hope of big business in the future. But we had to be able to show revenue early on and we had to prove a model that others didn’t believe in. Everybody was saying they wanted it to be like Uber. We want the ease of Uber. They wanted it to be instant. Uber went public and they were losing money on every ride so I knew from the operator’s perspective, that that was not going to be sustainable. We decided instead of taking no control over the vehicle like Uber does and say that the drivers are independent, we are going to do the exact opposite and we are going to take full control over the fleet. We are going to have more data than anybody else, we are going to provide the safest most trusted transportation service, we are going to focus on solving problems, not just selling software because when you build software, you have to build for scalable repeatable consistent use case and if you have to build that software in a vacuum before you can get it to market, would people try it and give you feedback, then you’ve got to build a whole lot before it is ready. So our approach allowed us to get started, learn and literally build the different parts of the technology we needed to get to the next phase. So for example in 2018, we tripled our revenue in a sixty day period and our volume of dispatchers and calls went through the roof. We spent the next three months building out new capabilities for our dispatchers and routing and today we do ten times as many rides as we did then and we have the same amount of dispatchers, so we were able to create efficiencies in scale as we grew. But we wouldn’t have known what to build for the operators and dispatchers had we not been the operator, it is really one of our competitive advantages.
ZBP
Now it’s interesting as you talk about the progression of SHARE Mobility because at least from my understanding of the company, please tell me if I am wrong, but you guys operate Mobility as a service company and you also have a kind of another arm of software as a service. But it sounds to me that really the software was built in its full capacity, the way that it has been fully flushed out, the only reason you have been able to do that is because you started more as a mobility as a service company first.
McManus
Right. The term mobility as a service is modeled after a software as a service and so just like you don’t buy software, you don’t buy mobility, you subscribe to it. So that’s why we call it mobility as a service. We have the two lines of business where some companies come in and they buy mobility service in units of hours and then we have other organizations that are cities or transit agencies or private operators that use our software to run their own service. What those companies that are on our platform get the benefit of is now they can be our third-party operator in their city so we are in five states where we have third-party operators that are professional fleets with W-2 drivers. They can meet the same service level expectations that we have with our corporate contracts, but we are able to plug them in to new opportunities that they would otherwise not be aware of and so we can bring to an operator the ability to serve an enterprise company or a rural manufacturer and bring them opportunities that they otherwise would not have.
ZBP
Now I am going to shift gears if you don’t mind before I shift back, but you kind of mentioned one of this and I know you and I were talking before we started recording this about how you covered some of these kind of mobility topics on your own podcast, and so for those listeners who don’t know, I would at least like to plug your podcast … it’s called the Commute Podcast, is that correct?
McManus
Yes, the nerdiest of transit and mobility as you can imagine. It’s like a 45 minute episode, I’ve done 25 of them, and I interviewed people working on transportation around the world we have done everything from hyperloop to ebikes, and it is very self-serving. I interview people I want to meet and get to learn from them and the amount of insights that I’ve had is not just the conversations that I recorded, it’s the things that happen before and after that are so insightful and I became so much smarter about transportation by having access to all of these people. So you can find us on all of the different You Tube, I-Tunes and Spotify.
ZBP
I have not listened to all of your podcasts but I will tell you that I did listen both to the ebikes one and the hyperloop one, as well as a couple of the others, and (now we are totally off topic) the hyperloop has always fascinated me simply because the idea of me living here in Columbus, Ohio and may some day commute to an office in Chicago in roughly the same time that it takes me to get to my downtown office in Columbus, is kind of interesting to me.
McManus
Can you imagine a Gino’s Pizza Shop showing up hot and ready?
ZBP
I know, and the other thing that I’ve been thinking about especially since the pandemic has gone on and traffic has declined too is that I am only six miles from the office, I’m really not that far from where I live, and there is a bike path that leads almost directly from my house to the office and I have oftentimes thought of about is it feasible for me to commute that distance and had a friend who, when we were back in law school, actually commuted that distance for an entire summer while we were studying for the bar exam and he used it as a stress reliever and a way to get exercise in an already busy schedule and I thought to myself is it feasible. So some of the episodes you have covered I think are incredibly practical even for people like me who are thinking how is this going to impact my life moving forward.
McManus
Will you share my personal experience.
ZBP
Yeah.
McManus
So forty days ago, I sold my car. My wife and I went to become a one car household. I now daily ride my bike to the bus, take the bus. I commute from the north side of Columbus to near the airport every day.
ZBP
So how’s it changed your daily life or how as it impacted you?
McManus
So the thing my wife and I are measuring is a helpfulness score, so like almost on a daily basis, if there is a decision related to travel, we kind of decide whether I am being helpful or not by not having a car and we’ve actually found that there hasn’t been a single time where we haven’t been able to accommodate taking the kids to activities, or she has something or I have something, we’ve been able to make it work. Other things we are measuring are our own time spent and then monetary savings. The monetary savings are nice, $400 to $500 a month. I think for me the best part is that it is a really great way to start the day. I love getting on the bike and having a little bit of time out in the fresh morning air, there is something cool about standing on the side of the road waiting for the bus, it feels like you are in a bigger city and I’ve gotten to see the city from a different viewpoint from taking the bus. I’ve also gathered a lot of ideas that we are implementing into a new membership program that is going to incorporate the bus, so I am not going to Jim Carry an entrepreneurship where like I am a method entrepreneur. I dive right in and try to be an active participant in the things that we are doing but I don’t see things going back to having a second car.
ZBP
Yeah, and I’ve had this conversation I think with a lot of people in various capacities just because the Podcast and the book that Kenton and I have written, and various people we have talked to in the industries, but I think there is going to be a lot families that are going to be thinking or considering that in a much shorter time frame than I think that other people really recognize. And it is funny too because for a long period of time when I grew up, my family was a one-car family and my father walked to work even though I was from a small town in northeastern Ohio. He spent 28 years walking to and from work because he had worked in a building that was really only four or five blocks away from our house. He would come home for lunch and then he would walk back. I remember walking to meet him when he would walk home from work. That concept for a long period of time was so foreign that we could ever reach a point where like a family would ever need one car again just because people were so busy. But it does make wonder whether we are rapidly approaching that period again, and I have heard more and more stories like yours where people have made the decision whether they live close to downtown or they live close to work. I know we have people in our office who live close to the office and whose cars have been parked for weeks on end because they are able to walk to and from work and that is not totally an abnormal thing. Sometimes their cars are in our parking garage, I don’t know if they are here or at home because their home is so close, they just leave their car in our parking garage.
McManus
I think we’re on an inevitable path of families going from two cars to one, and not from an economic reason, but from a quality of life/lifestyle, where you want to live and what you really need to have. If the economy were to have a downturn, I think you’ll find a lot of people look to get the equity cash they have, their personal wealth. Other than home equity, car equity is probably the largest single source of pretty much liquid capital that somebody could get to if they were in a pinch, right, and so I think you could see a, especially with used car values being at an all-time high, I think you could see a lot of people look to do it to get the cash they have, and if I were in control of the automotive industry, I would say this is a perfect time to be moving somebody into a subscription model. Let’s not lose them forever because they want to sell their car. Let’s give them the capital they have back and move them into a subscription model, but they’re not going to do that.
ZBP
Now I have seen some of the subscription models being offered by various companies.
McManus
Germain did it here in town. You could get a different car all the time.
ZBP
I saw that and I’ve seen some of the manufacturers start to introduce a couple of them, but they’ve been relatively limited, and frankly, I don’t know how successful they have been or haven’t been at this juncture. But it is interesting that, I mean it is interesting that that, I mean as a business model that may become more relevant as time goes on.
McManus
Yeah, I know Volvo, Porsche, GM - they all have them. They didn’t do so well in the subscription model because they were extremely expensive. You were paying a lot more to have the flexibility to swap a car, and people really didn’t do it. I think it comes back to data. I’d like your insights here. So, you know how we don’t own our phones anymore, right?
ZBP
Yes.
McManus
And it’s for what reason?
ZBP
Largely because of the cash outlay, I think.
McManus
I actually think it’s about data ownership.
ZBP
Okay.
McManus
So the carriers and Apple have very clear ownership about the data on a device that they own that you subscribe to.
ZBP
Sure.
McManus
And so if you look at the phone plan you have with your carrier, you’ll notice that you don’t actually own this device. At the end of your two years, you have to give it back or there’s a huge fee at the end.
ZBP
Sure.
McManus
I think the same thing happens in the automotive industry around connected car data. So it’s projected that the value of the connected car data could exceed the value of the car itself, right? And so if you want to make sure that you can monetize the data, you need to have very clear ownership of the asset that produces the data, and by moving the automotive industry into a subscription model, it’s very clear that the user/driver doesn’t own the data, that the organization does, and I think that’s why the automotive industry should be scared of the capabilities of an Amazon or an Apple or the Samsung to come in and say, old model out, new model in. You don’t buy these, you subscribe to them, and you’re gonna buy apps and everything you stream makes money for the company that owns the asset.
ZBP
That’s interesting. That’s interesting, especially as we’ve heard that some of these companies that you just mentioned are exploring or have been exploring for a number of times, entrance into the automotive industry.
McManus
Yeah, I mean, why would Amazon buy 200,000 SUVs in 2019?
ZBP
Yeah, I mean it’s certainly, it certainly raises that, I mean it certainly raises the question. I mean the other thing that I, you talk about the subscription services. You know, one of the other things that I have heard about and that talking, and it’s not the same context, but I’ve also heard about the automotive industry introducing some of their self-driving platforms in a more subscription service where you would have vehicles that you may own but you would turn certain features on and off, still providing those subscription services but still paying a monthly subscription service essentially for that feature.
McManus
Yes, somebody did that in the last two weeks where you would, you would pay by the mile whenever you activated your autonomous vehicle capability.
ZBP
Yeah.
McManus
Kind of, kind of interesting, right, where they can, and Tesla’s doing this now. Basically every car is the same and it’s software variations that give you access to more range and different features and they can just turn them on and turn them off, and the idea is that the automakers, through over-the-air updates, can ship the same car to everybody, but through software, create high level/low level.
ZBP
Yeah, and I mean, I also think it creates an ongoing revenue stream for the car companies, but I think it goes, it, the reason I bring this up and I’m kind of touching on it and thinking about it, is your content as it relates to the data ownership. So if you’re, if the feature is more of a subscription, the question becomes, who owns that data in that subscription model. Even if I own the car, I may not own that feature and that data is being collected by the automobile manufacturer, then they may own that data. So, I think it’s a very real, I mean I think it’s a very interesting question as we kind of move forward and the industry shifts so much. Shifting back but also still talking about shifting, one of the questions that I wanted to talk to you about is, as far as mobility companies, the pandemic this last year, I know has altered and/or just changed the way a lot of them have looked at stuff and done business, and frankly, it was just tough for a lot of mobility companies. Now, I’m, I am encouraged by the fact that I think we’re in, at least here in the United States, slowly coming out on the other side of this. What do you see, kind of areas of growth, for mobility companies and for shared mobility, kind of as we come out of his pandemic? What kind of shifts did you see during the pandemic that may change the way shared mobility is doing business or looking at things?
McManus
So for us, it was really clarifying of the mission because when a lot of people stopped going to work, you realized that those people probably weren’t the customers to begin with, and taking an individual out of a car they drive doesn’t feed our mission as much as giving transportation to somebody that doesn’t have it, and through the pandemic, those who needed it, needed it even more, are essential workers or people working out in rural areas. For us, it’s highlighted a growing population of people that are either by choice, economics, age or physical disability, they’re always passengers, and our team kind of doubled down on focusing on those people through the pandemic, and you know, I think in the next 60 days, we’re gonna be back to pre-, above where we were before the pandemic, but the customers and the use cases are more impactful, I think, than they were maybe before it.