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Baldy Interviews Alta Motors Co-Founder Marc Fenigstein

Mar 23, 2024
you need to race a super bike and this is also a performance category and there were a couple of ideas from that, the main one was that they had really chosen the right one. battle now they chose the right battle partly because they were bikers and that's what they did and that's how you know, part of how they were friends, they had collaborated on a couple of projects but they also rode together, they rode dirt bikes and so on. That's where They started, but they ran into something on the street. You can generate a huge amount of power.
baldy interviews alta motors co founder marc fenigstein
You have a lot of traction. The roads are flat and straight and the reason you know we're done. with very high displacement bikes, thousand CC, you know, 2000 CCS in the cruiser category, you can actually use all that power and torque when you have enough tires and enough fastball on this long straight road. Yeah, I had a Ducati Diavel a few months ago and oh my gosh you know, that thing is so fast they had the high performance exhaust listed on Wikipedia as the second fastest bike in the world to hit 60 times. I don't know if that's true, it's just what was on Wikipedia, so I tried some of these 0-60 times. the neurons to let me keep the throttle open oh yeah your eyes start distorting everything there's crazy so yeah and it didn't feel like it accelerated it felt like it transported you to the future you just opened the throttle and suddenly you were going 100 or something and it's still going fine anyway, so off road your traction is limited and that means your power is limited, never mind if you somehow put 200 horsepower on a dirt bike , you're not using it, you know, and in fact, outside again desert and sand racing, there aren't that many people on the planet that can even make the 55 or 60 horsepower of a 450 outside of some moments tight on certain tracks so once you start looking at how much power you know the dirt bike really is disappointing even for a professional rider and even on a fairly large track it turns out to be quite low.
baldy interviews alta motors co founder marc fenigstein

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baldy interviews alta motors co founder marc fenigstein...

The race format for motocross is relatively short, especially at veterinary or amateur levels, but even the professional race lasts 35 minutes. So the amount of power you need is basically your average power multiplied by the time you use it. Motocross is a format with a low average power and a very short duration, so suddenly, instead of being 5 times farther from where you need it to be in terms of the amount of power you could put into a vehicle that you you were closer like a neck and a half and maybe that's a gap you can close and especially if your goal is not the pro commute and 35 minutes but the Vette travels at 20 now the numbers work and that's what you know most cyclists and it's definitely the cyclists who pay their own money for their bikes if you can take that cyclist and you can go faster at that time. a performance driven category in a category that's about winning the race by being faster than your friends, that's something that people will actually pay to click on and then also that algorithm of ah, our limitation is the battery and how we find categories that are This combination of average power and time is not limited.
baldy interviews alta motors co founder marc fenigstein
You can start looking at the transportation world and say, well, motocross is kind of to the right on the Pareto chart so as not to be too nerdy and it's a good thing it's performance driven. has a lot of brand value and is probably the most skeptical customer I can ever imagine, so if we can win over that customer, I think we can win over anyone, so you said online a couple of times that it wasn't a green movement . totally fine, I mean it's about 90 percent performance and oh yeah, bonus points for being green, but most motorcyclists don't care much or didn't care at the time about being green, just gimme a performance, make me that, yeah you had it.
baldy interviews alta motors co founder marc fenigstein
This saying: you want to turn your customers into heroes and the heroes have put it on a better performing bike so they win and their hero, yes, I would say that was absolutely the case from a business point of view, it had to be that We, in a way, couldn't blind ourselves with promises that it would be cleaner and more ecological. We had to be tough about whether this was going to be a business, it had to be a better motorcycle, regardless of whether it was not electronic or not Tesla green, but Oh, by the way, you can go from zero to 60 in four seconds, that's how it was and well, maybe that's how we should have gone because I don't know a great fellow, yeah, but I think our audience was a little bit different, I think that, you know, you would find a pretty large swath of luxury car owners who responded to that message that they wanted most of the performance and none of the blame and they wanted to be able to point out maybe that they were responsible even while they were doing irresponsible things and I definitely have some of that built into me.
I don't think there would have been that many of those customers in our industry, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that the fact that it was electric and had the advantage of being cleaner, wasn't a big part of our motivation when starting the company, so now You know, it's not the sales page, it's not what we thought was going to move the bikes, but it was ours. There's no reason for the three of us to be there and I think that was true for most, if not all, of the members. of the team who came and joined the company.
I mean, it was really an impossible combination of everything you could expect from a Good Job if you're going to make work your life, which we did for a decade, it was a product that we would all have been going crazy for and spent our time looking and reading online instead of doing our work if we hadn't. There was like the kind of thing we loved and wanted to spend our time on, it was something that had the potential to leave the world a better place than we found it and it was with two of the brightest humans that I eventually met hundred of the brightest humans that ever met, but it was really a special team and you know when those things come together, something that is super fun and meaningful, and potentially a great business opportunity and a team that really brings you together. with and I'll say yes, so I met Jeff and Derek in the summer of 2009, we spent six months of nights and weekends working together, but also getting to know each other and making sure this was what we wanted to do and then we even started the company , I think officially, in January, but we all kept our day jobs for another six months after that, so there was really a year because we knew it was a big, crazy, risky adventure and we wanted to make sure.
You're, you're messing with the right people and I can say that I was even a decade later with all the trials and tribulations and even knowing the outcome, it's still very closed with both of us and we would work together. Again, sure, yeah, that's really awesome, and there were some that you mentioned before you posted this, that one of your co-

founder

s, Derek, is Damon Jared or Stein, yeah, he's working with the guys in Vancouver, Damon, I don't . I know a ton and I can't share what I know either, but they showed a pretty impressive looking bike at CES earlier this year, January of this year and from what I know of you guys, you know EV technology, I think the numbers that What we are talking about are possible not only the performance figures but also the cost figures and I also know that Derek is a brilliant architect of every powertrain, chassis and motorcycles, so I have high hopes for that project.
I think they have potential to improve. finish some of the things that we started, I think they're adding a layer that we never got to the rider protection package, that technology that they're working on that I think has been a long time coming and could be a good solution. exciting leap forward early warning systems I think there's a couple of other technologies there too early warning systems mean what kind of crash detection, so when you're close, it's cars pulling away in front of you at 35 miles, yes, you know that. driver not looking before leaving or the surprise U-turn or the left turn of the cyclist approaching you and it's not that we don't see those things when we're looking ahead, I think we all develop a sixth sense of looking for the right direction. driver's head and what they're doing and if the car moves forward a little bit, but it's in those moments of distraction that we look at the car pulling out of the driveway to the right and we miss the guy who did that, you know, coming towards us, so I'm not sure the details of how they're implementing the warning sound like anything, but I know it's an issue they're trying to address and I think they will.
I've made good progress there too and besides mmm the performance stuff, some of those youtubes of def cameras go viral, you know, from Tesla when it anticipates something two cars down on the freeway, it brakes the car and damages the lanes or something like that. so, that's like wow dude, yeah, I can be pretty good at times, yeah, yeah, and I really like the idea of ​​it adding to that experience without taking anything away. I think that was the basis of our approach at ulta, it seems like it's similar in hell, we didn't want our bike to make decisions for you or you know, early traction control has actually gotten a lot better, but early traction control was really a horrible intervention that made you feel bad about yourself, the page, yes, yes, and that was I'm just telling you that you screwed up, you're a clumsy, really yes, and that type of traction control is actually very easy to implement in electric vehicles, as the level of control you have over what the engine or rear tire does is pretty infinite compared to what you can do in a gas vehicle, but we really work hard to improve your skills as a driver and not be like the teacher with the ruler like a punch and you on the wrist, but being the coach who maybe gave you a little bit of a safety net or could slow things down enough that you could respond yourself and I think you feel that in the way the alter e responds it will definitely go off the line and if you keep the throttle open it will keep spinning you won't stop unless you stop but we built it to run at a more human pace so it comes out but You know, if you've reacted correctly, it will.
Come back to the line very kindly and gently and I'll say you know I think for mere mortals like me it's completely necessary if you ever take a look at the bike that we built and the maps that we built for Josh Hill and it was in 2016 straight. pace, you don't explain what maps are, yeah I'll take a step back, I mean maps have been implemented on many gas bikes, there's a rain mode, a sport mode and a track mode, it's very very simulated , they call them ecological. mode and sport mode and things like that, yeah, it's the ability to tune the relationship between the throttle and when the rear wheel is actually responding to the throttle.
I mean, the older version of this is just different front cams, right, you can throw in the regenerative. the braking no it wasn't mapped three released the throttle yeah so we had some levers that are harder to adjust than on a gas bike you know gas bikes especially with ride by wire can now do some of the same things. In terms of making the throttle response less delicate or the kind of torque curve versus the throttle position, what we were also able to do was adjust the behavior in the off-throttle position, so we adjusted the amount of engine brake braking. that you had, we were also able to adjust the speed. throttle which is another term for open loop traction control so effectively it's KTM traction control and now maybe Kawasaki has done some similar things on their off road bikes where you know it's not using a speed sensor of the front wheel. to measure the differences in traction between the two and intervene in the way that some of the advanced systems are just to say, well, we know that the rear wheel could never spin that fast because the bike can accelerate so fast, so let's reduce speed.
Reducing it to a percentage of that will allow a certain amount of wheel slip, but it will still slide if you stay on it so we can control the rate of change. In theory there was like a whole collection of future things that we could have done that, we never got around to that, we had played with Hill Hold which was a great feature for certain enduro tracks, just a bike that you know won't go backwards unless you tell it that it can go back and therefore you can write. of ratchet for going up a hill or climbing features, so it sounds great for those unclaimed Abul Hill Climb things, yeah, I mean, the redshift was already a pretty amazing hill climber to begin with, and that was just a Kind of icing on the cake, but I definitely haven't seen a single one of theunclaimed youtubes of Abul Hill Climb where you see people destroying their bikes because they think too much about the bike, they don't know what they were.
I'm going down the hill. I just miss that another guy had put together a climber, you know, a stretched swing, our climber and I think Josh won that competition, that's cheating a little bit to send a pro against the locals, but yeah, they did pretty well and that was it. It was my universal experience when I take people for rides. I always looked for their hardest climb and preferably one they knew well because they knew how hard they struggled or what their success rate was. make that up half the time and take them out with the redshift and pretty much universally oh, okay, yeah, they would clean it up and yeah, that was a great way to turn, yeah, that's awesome, people into believers, so I always had this point of view with Ulta that when I was a teenager we all had 360 grunts and with the expansion chambers there were two bangers, they were just loud, I mean there's a definite hearing and they caused a lot of places to close down. because they were like that with some of these people they hated noise and the bikes were cool but they also polluted a lot, you know, so they were full of smoke, you mixed them with gasoline, yeah, they had smoke and they just gave way to four bangs along the time and the four strokes were quieter and cleaner etc. and I thought you knew a crossover indicator was coming in motocross where they are quieter and perform better and when that happens there I thought you were getting pretty close.
I mean you know, it seemed like Ulta went from being funded by Angel to having three guys to a hundred people and winning some races being on the front row at the starts of some big ones and everything was going well and it seemed like the turning point was finally had arrived, now we have improved battery technology and we have improved all the things you could do, gasoline motorcycles were going to give away two electric ones for that type of racing. Do you think that was going to happen? Do you think you were close? I did.
I think so, I think we were close and we go back to the same initial story of in a specific place. category where you know numbers can work. I think in theory the technology is there today to compete in pro level Supercross. I think pro level motocross and winning I think you can, you can match the weight and the power and I think you can. we adjust the reach of the bikes even with weight, weight and power, and what we learned is that you know if the weight and the power are the same, the electric is absolutely faster, especially off-road, it all comes down to your ability of transmitting power to the ground and whether they were beginners or professionals, everyone was able to put more power into the ground, in fact, that ended up causing a major hole, not a tear, but a change in strategy because when we did our calculations on how much energy What we needed was based on a gas bike so we were able to squeeze out the power we wanted and what we found was that because people were able to put more power on, they were using more power than we had anticipated and so we didn't launch with the range that we expected because as soon as people get it, you can't stop someone with a performance mentality from going as fast as they can and could go faster, so yeah, we did it.
To discount our scope expectations a little and be a little more careful with the categories, we thought from the beginning that we were going to aim for Pro Motocross and we realized that we were going to have to restart and find different categories. because the range wasn't quite there, but I think it's there now in theory mmm if someone had the will to go after it mm-hmm yeah, cool, so in a couple of days the live broadcasts have been done on the past, people are so It's interesting to you that I haven't answered some of the questions in the chat.
Oh yeah, right, so I wanted to go to the ATV pilot first. Grinch says to ask Mark if the machine shop is still in the old Pabst Blue Ribbon factory in San. Francisco, unfortunately it's not and it's closed, it wasn't PBR, it wasn't Schlitz, yeah, it was an old brewery, it was an old brewery, it was Derek's machine shop, the Moss machine that we grew up from and and so yeah, was set up on Bryant Street with a pretty capable machine shop, we wouldn't have been able to start the way we did without that and we were there until about 2015 when we cleaned that all up and moved to Brisbane and that's how our transition from a research and development company was. with just a machine shop to a proper facility set up for production with real quality control and cleanliness and all the other things you need.
We had a big burn party and left that. buy some covered flat tracks and some bales of hay and shoot, well, a Grinch was lucky enough to get a run. He said that he did an informal tour twelve years ago and then he was testing Panasonic batteries, experimenting with the bodywork, is using the CRF as a platform, etc. Fantastic view from the tower. Most likely, he is no longer here. Oh yeah, that would have been too early. So I bet the tower is still there. I think it's Hertz or Avis now and they're just parking cars there.
That was the last time I heard there are still buildings there. I think Hertz is going out of business, don't you? Maybe you also have some R&D stories on the runway. I was there when Supermoto USA's Brock McAllister tested the supermotor version before the race in San Mateo. so it was still in its infancy I set the benchmark and it remains to this day one of the best electric bikes out there and now they want to know what happened and a lot of people were put off when they closed the doors so I spoke before You can't say much about what happened, but I can definitely share some of the stories from the racetracks and I think one of the good things about the freedom of the company being sold and going out of business is that I can share the embarrassing stories. which I probably wouldn't have done it a long time ago, but I remember you know I think this is probably true for a lot of entrepreneurs if you knew the rules you should follow, you probably wouldn't get this far.
So when I look back at the early days, there were definitely some dumb moves from a safety and liability standpoint. I think it probably wasn't until we started building the production era design and maybe in 2013-2014 and we had some real funding, we started behaving like adults and I was more responsible, so I remember, and right before, I think it was at Cow Palace, there was a supermoto race that used to happen in the car park there and we had recruited Drew Dixon to Come Ride, this was still the first bike built from prototype frappe plastics.
It wasn't yet the redshift that everyone knows and the stock market doesn't sell cylindrical cells, but it was a fast bike that had had 40 horsepower Pat, yes. about 40 horsepower, it was a little heavy but definitely a little front heavy, but he went and took it out and it was a mostly paved track, but there was a little kicker and as soon as he got off the kicker, The front end just stopped like 12 o'clock and luckily he was able to hit the brake, put it down and hit it pretty hard and that's when we realized how quickly there is no inertia in an electric drivetrain and it will just wake up.
It rose almost instantly, so you know the bike will rise in a split second. Fortunately, Drawn was fine in that case, but there was one that I felt particularly bad about because of the same prototypes that are still set in supermoto mode and I hope. I'm not stealing Thunder from a story I shared for this documentarian Chuck Neary. I hope he finishes his movie and comes out. I'm going to share this story in both places, so we had a really interesting potential investor that kind of could have finally taken off, these are the early days, maybe in 2013, after two years of, you know, no income, no investment , we were burning through our reserves and a single fairly well-connected investor who wanted his guys to come.
I went out and tested the bike so I could know it was real. He liked everything he saw, but you know he wanted to hear from the experts, so he showed up without anyone. Suddenly, I was left without the name Mike LaRocco and Kevin Windham. To test the bike and we went to the Sonoma go kart track to do it and we had our red run and I don't remember if it was the CRF, we had a 450, I think it was the CRF and we sent them both. like a couple and Kevin on the red shift and Mike on the 450 and they're like dicing it up and you can tell they're having a great time and I turned to one of my teammates, Kyle and I like this is the best day of my life, it was just perfect, like they were having everything we wanted and then as he comes up behind us before the frontstretch, we see Kevin just stand up. about the bars and like taking him off the court and throwing over the bars, which wasn't supposed to happen and we all run out and Kevin gets up holding his shoulder and this was about a week before he was supposed to announce his retirement and some people who followed Supercross closely and I think this was in 2013, maybe in 2014 they will remember that Kevin didn't participate in what it was supposed to be, it was like his last or penultimate ride and it was our fault, but what ended up happening was It ran the bike harder than ever and had demagnetized the motor and we still didn't have the correct error detection built into our motor control to handle that and the result was that the throttle stuck and that's how it pushed. he through his front brake had the front brake locked and he was pushing it off the track and then there was, you know, 15 feet of holding the front brake while pushing it off the track and then he hit the kill switch and that was when he fell and landed on his shoulder, really very lucky.
I mean, we were all there, we didn't close on the investment we didn't deserve and I'm so sorry Kevin, I didn't mean for that to happen. We've gotten better, we've gotten better, and in fact, despite some of those stupid moves in the early days, I'm very proud of the standards that we met in terms of what we were willing to send to the public and for sure, as a new company that spends money, you are under tremendous pressure to launch the product. Despite that, we had some people with money in the company who wanted us to change that first version of the bike and we definitely had pressure to do so.
I sent the second version, one that didn't arrive tomorrow, but I sent it earlier, so I was really ready because it's hard to determine where to draw that line. The first bicycles, it is true, were not so reliable. I think there are probably some people watching this. They've had battery problems or other things have gone wrong, but I think you know we drew the right line in terms of safety. Knock on wood. I don't know anyone who has been hurt because of an engineering decision we made, I mean sport is inherently dangerous and people get hurt, but we wanted to make sure that no one got hurt because of the decisions we made in terms of level of engineering and security.
As a result, the bikes are probably a little heavier than necessary, but I think that's the right side to err on, especially in the early days, yeah cool, so there's another question on the site that MDC asks our electric motorcycle industry leaders looking for the electric equivalent of the Honda ct1 2500 cub or the Super Cub, if we could. Building an affordable, high-quality puppy in the US would dominate a huge global market. I would set one up and reverse an exclamation point thanks for the great

interviews

. I love that idea. I think there's a lot of potential in smaller bikes, whether it's for racing formats or just for fun, you know?
There's like a natural cycle of pursuit of performance and pursuit of performance, and not just on off-road, but on street bikes as well: adventure bikes get bigger, more powerful, bigger and more powerful, and customers Those who started with it grow with them, so you know. We asked our 250 or maybe our 125 and then the 250 and then the 450 and then the 450 go from 50 horsepower to 55 and then from 55 to 60 and you know, the people who were buying that all along can follow the rythm. with that, but if you're new to the sport, you're going to spend the same 15 years mastering that and then you're going to grow that curve or five years, even if it doesn't have to be 15 and I think we've really limited our ability to grow the market and attract people. new to the sport with that kind of singular pursuit and I think for Alta it was absolutely.
I think it was a great place to start and show that bikes and technology were what we said they were and generated credibility and there are no cyclists more influential than those people whoThey're dyed wool and they really live and breathe it every day, but I think after that you'll know if they were still around, there's a lot of potential for the '80s 125, the off-road and on-road 65 class. I think there's a ton of untapped potential and it's actually easier with electric than with gasoline with gasoline, whether it's a yes, whether it's a 65 or it's a 1200, you have the same level of complexity in the same things with the to deal with and maintenance and all that and electrical, I think it really comes down very nicely and very elegantly, and you have these products that are really just about the journey and I love it, I love squeezing, it's my happy place, it's where I find some Zen, but I love riding more than squeezing, so I think there were a lot of things we were worried about losing from the experience with electric and And I'm biased, but in my opinion you gain a lot more for everything you lost, so you know, yes you lose some tear but the longer you ride you lose sound and vibration but for me I got a lot more back.
In terms of feel, my ability to stay connected to the machine, the chassis, the rubber, the dirt or the road was so improved that it was like going from a standard definition TV to HD suddenly, but whatever the version tactile of that. it's so yeah, it's a long and winding answer, but I agree, yeah, so talk a little bit about the feel and the sound. First I had a couple of stories of my own, there's a comment in the chat, someone said I have the best MX bike. have I ever had an exclamation point, we still use it, what Whitesell said, they are still available, they are used from time to time, you can still get one if you really want it, someone else said they wanted, I want to see more electric movement, so I can practice locally and not bother the neighbors so one asked about access yeah yeah so one of the things I was writing about the other day was my mountain bike for exercise in the mountains and it has brakes hydraulics, it's the Santa Cruz and it's coming down.
I went up the gravel, my rear brake failed and now I only had one front brake and I was ready for the gravel and I was gaining too much speed and it's like: Oh God, should I ditch now or risk a high speed accident or what do I do, was applying the front brake, but because it was quiet I could hear him getting a feel for the front wheel traction, then someone who was using one of your bikes in a race said that was one of the things he found that gave him more feeling like the bike wasn't making so much noise that I could hear what the tires were actually working against the gravel and dirt is a thing really oh absolutely yeah I mean it's that moment in, say, a start on a hill where you're not sure if you're slipping the tire or slipping the clutch mm-hmm right, you've never never done it, you know that for sure and besides, there's no clutch lip so you can actually roll, you know that of course, and start, but also, yes, take a superbike at high speed coming out of a corner when you accelerate.
You can hear the rubber rip against the pavement and you combine that with that feeling of I and that feeling of skidding and the feeling through your thigh of the chassis to feel that slide too because there's no vibration going through you. they're getting a lot more information about what the tire is doing and that's what it's all about, you know, you would always hear MotoGP or mxgp and Supercross riders describe the feel at the front, especially in MotoGP, they talk about their feel of the tire . front end and when the front end moves and I think about my experiences on the track and if the front end moves like I ruined my shorts and then you get on our superbike and suddenly you can like it For the first time, you know that the front would move and I wouldn't panic because I was able to do it early enough and I felt in enough control and the same with the rear, you just get a clearer signal, you get it sooner and that's it.
It's such a rich and rewarding experience that anything I like to switch to is worth losing. I would love to, yes, well, it depends on the vehicle. I love trading in my Honda. I hated the Ducati mm. Interesting. Sorry, my Yamaha, not the Honda. Mine was the air cooled one, it was a Multistrada 1200, oh yeah, and I found the transmission to be very agrarian, it was like a John Deere. I learned to drive standard on an old Ford tractor and it reminded me a little bit of that, you know, it's funny. I went to Morocco in February and people listening to me know this because Triumph was launching a new 900 Tiger and it was all the rage because it was in the trailer for the new Bond movie, No Time to Die, so we got to I traveled for four days there on road off road and so on and on the off road day I was trying to get used to flexing the gears less but it was always shifting and there were pro riders with us and they were giving us clues that everyone was doing. a great driver, but they were giving us little clues and so on and they told me that I am one gear too high, it's a 900, it has a lot of torque.
I'm sorry when your gear is too low, go up a gear, so I was doing that, but I was still shifting a lot and I was standing around doing a lot of shifting trying to forget my muscle memory of using the clutch and you know, using the clutch of the changes, but I'm still changing and I'm trying to go. Just at the RPM level, sometimes I'm chatting a little and so on. Just three days ago, Xero brought an adventure bike from the Black Forest and left it in my driveway and I always thought I'd like to upgrade, right? take it off and sometimes my muscle memory when I come to an intersection still works and it's worth it, I lost the clutch and you know what after three days of driving it around town and hills and everything around you on the freeway 35?
We were just talking about how I fell in love with not changing anymore. It's great, there's always throttle when you want it, you never have to think about the powerband, it's just one less thing to think about, especially when you're off. -road and when it's really nasty and you're slowing down and it's sand and everything else, you don't have time, the change in balance seems like fewer neurons are firing, you know, you know that was something Jeff always talked about and he doesn't I think the only Keith code you know talks about you having a certain amount of cognitive awareness right now using it to change, it's a lot less than what you have or everything else going on around you, yeah I want I mean, it's actually easier to talk about in terms of cars because the transmissions have matured more and there's more variety of options there.
I still love going back to a 5 speed single clutch transmission and like it better than a sequential shifter like the dual clutch paddle shifter. car even though the paddle shifters shift faster, it's like you took away all those parts, maybe because I have too much muscle memory or maybe because once you do a little bit of that, you want to have the full experience. I'd rather just put myself in an automatic and if it's just one drive, it's just one drive, but if I'm going to shift, I want to feel the clutch because feeling the clutch is part of the experience and yes, I was hoping to do that.
I miss that, but with electricity it's different because you don't get half of the half, but not everything like you just described. I think you get a kind of pure torque and it's its own reward that never runs out. that it's seamless and you can just stay on that edge of the traction zone, you know, until the world is so predictable that it doesn't really depend on what gear you're in and what's happening, you know you always had this mentality. The calculation sounds like 2000 rpm and I'm in third gear, so if I go up and accelerate that much, you know I'm not likely to die or whatever, so yeah, yeah, there's another phenomenon that Jeff always talked about, which It's especially on the track.
You tend to limit your speed based on what gear you're in, so you know you come out of a corner and you really want to shift into third, but you know you're going to go back down to second, so you just don't. So you just increased your speed at that moment or the same in the other direction and you find yourself trapped in that support defined by your transmission and that is the Machine that limits you and if suddenly you can use the full range, yes, you sure do what the track wants you to do, much more than letting the Machine limit you, so maybe this is really stupid and I'll show my ignorance, but I wear size 14 boots and I also don't.
I don't like putting my toe under the shifter when you're really dragging it because I'm always afraid of my toes getting tangled and coming off the peg and twisting back and all that and that happened to me on a Ducati last November and I actually broke it. leg and that hadn't happened before, but my leg, my toe got caught in the sand and then it turned behind me and under the hard luggage that I had to leave for the photo shoot and it fell on my leg and I broke the leg. So I'm with the zero, I can keep the balls of my feet on the pegs and at least with the brake on the right side, my toes on top are not on the bottom, so is this a thing or am I just getting used to it? myself, oh.
No, it's absolutely, this is a bit of heresy, but I think that, well, I think that over time electric vehicles will take over most of the market, with the exception of the real adventure, like the real long-distance stuff. , just too much energy, but I think. electric ones will take over - I think the standard controls pattern will change, we will change to dual brake levers, dual handbrake levers and not only will we lose the gear lever on the left, we will lose the brake lever on the right and I I think because that's how I ended up riding both of my bikes, it was a little harder to get used to the supermoto for some reason on the street than off-road, maybe it was proposed, yeah, maybe it was my bike experience mountain. a little more uncomfortable, but there are many advantages, one and the main one is that it takes away your muscle memory and years of experience.
You have much finer control with your hands than your feet, so yes, some people are very, very sensitive. with your foot, but most people with an off-road boot, you know, with the giant bareback, they're not really as sensitive as they can be with their left hand, for me it was the difference between getting off the back seat and just It's like taking a ride and waiting and descending like I do on a mountain bike, where I'm centered and I'm actually forward even on the descent and I have control of the front and then the other one is yeah, your foot. it never gets stuck where you don't want it, you need to stick one foot out in the corner, you can always stick that foot out and then you combine that with I think kids will start learning on electric bikes like stasek and sirhan and call it like the new KTMs and they will learn with levers dual-shift, so I think, just like the current generation of riders don't know how to use an H-pattern shifter, I think within 15 years the next generation of motorcyclists.
You may not know how to use a foot brake. It will be something esoteric, like a suicidal change, which is crazy, so you are a combination of entrepreneur and designer. Steve Jobs used to say that you can tell a lot about a person and a company from the heroes they keep, who your heroes are, that's interesting, that's what she had warned me about beforehand, you know, they're all, they're clichés. I don't know about hero, but I've done it. I always felt fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci, it's not an honor, but he was like that, an incredible inventor, there was a great book that came out not long ago of all these undiscovered or unpublished writings of his about the scientific method that we think about. of him as a divinely inspired inventor or a slash artist, but he had this incredible methodology even before the scientific method was established, he was taking a lot of those steps, forming hypotheses, testing them, going through these ways from observations, so Yes, I found it, I remember. the name I'm an earth sign, not my experience, so yes, you would love it.
He observed the movement of water a lot when walking. He was describing fluid dynamics. It's really fascinating what I've long felt is science. It's not just a body of knowledge, it's a part of it, but it's a way of thinking and it's quite different to the way of thinking that you often see on social media when people. I have some stalkers who were furious with me because I keep a round home. and I'm a geophysicist, I checked it out, I think it's round, you know, they'll put up cameras and satellites and they'll go around and around, but these guys are mad at me and they just won't let me off the hook, I think maybe a little bit. more specifically relevant, then the hero Honda is his story, every step of his story is amazing, whether you are talking about the origins of Honda, you know, putting washing machine

motors

in bicycles to his very smart business steps that initially entered the the US market Super Cub is an incredible story, the seedy 750, I mean, it's an incredible story.
I couldn't believe it when it arrivedhere, I just couldn't believe it, yes, the tariff game with Harley Davidson and where it was delivered. them and made them focus on these big bikes, well, you know, they continued on to the rest of the market. Its hands-on approach to all racing motorcycles. Honda racing bikes from the early 80s are every one of them. "A masterpiece and I feel like your hand is in each one of them, so it's up there for sure. Speaking of big manufacturers, you guys were rumored to have had a relationship with the big manufacturer and with everything you know, we respect you , they know everything they can." I'm not saying it, but I don't think a lot of people expected Ulta to disappear, we hope that the intellectual property doesn't completely disappear and it will manifest itself somewhere because it seemed like you were getting to this point where it was okay.
Fragile at first all companies are, but now it is really becoming something. I have a dog that is a lap dog and I will also answer his questions if he has done it. Yes, I was one of those people who told Ignis to leave, I felt like we had done it. escape velocity and it was that we went through seven or eight really difficult years between 2010 and 2030 months before we ran out of money. In fact, even other business owners would read the brand that we live in the Death Zone, I think longer than anyone else. startup or more often than any other startup I knew, but we always figured it out or our investors came to our aid and kept things going, but yeah, it was ugly, it was complicated and we were taking on a lot of water and then with the launch of our bikes, you know, immediately after I think Josh Hills' performance on the Red Bull straight pace was a real turning point and things definitely got better from there, but it wasn't until we launched.
Our bikes at the beginning of 2018, where we felt good, we actually felt like we had the product that we really wanted to build the market and it's responding the way we expected, customers tell us. all the things we had thought about the bikes, but you know, we were all biased, so it doesn't count until you hear it from someone who put in their own money and the sales were off the charts, we were doing 50% growth . Quarter to quarter, that's incredible in 2018 and I couldn't keep up, so I felt like we knew we were hitting all the right notes and at the very least it felt good, you know, even if none of us make it. rich of this and it doesn't turn out the way we want it to be like Ulta and the technology that we've created is now here and it's here to stay and yeah, it really felt like the rug was pulled out from under it. from underneath all of us, even though you could see some kind of hands coming to pull the rug and that was a strange place to be and I think one of my regrets is that not everyone on the team and at that time We were a hundred people, you know how close things were to the limit, we kind of saw the ax coming and we kept hoping for the best and planning for success, but the worst can still happen unfortunately, I can't share many details of how and why, and you had 70 distributors at that time, didn't you?
Yes, and they grew quickly, they had inventory. if they had known an entire global supply chain that had had the rug pulled out from under them, had a backlog of unfinished products that essentially become scrap, and had made investments in high, we had our direct investors, we had a whole team. both of you that you already know in a very very illuminating thank you but there were four let them yes I'm sorry to interrupt you but while you can still hear me I think we're losing your sound it's your echo buds cooking dead baby I I can still hear clearly and save it oh here we go Okay, can you hear me now?
Yes, I can hear you well, continue, no, lost sound, no sound, okay, now I can hear it well, yes, I feel like twice a day I do that work from home. work from home, yeah, you know, progressively, maybe it wasn't, you know, employee number 20, maybe it was employee number 50, but there's a point where the company seems big enough and stable enough that even if you say Look, there are no guarantees here, you know you feel like it. the expectation is that at this point we're going and yet, without a doubt, the hardest part of closing was not knowing the lost potential of the company and what we would have built next, which was something incredible, there was definitely something that people It had to do.
I saw well our first and a half effort and there was much more that was possible. Without a doubt, the team of people we built were incredibly capable and such good people that I don't know if I'll ever be able to do it. Putting together a team like that again, hey Lucas, it's a shame to name them and then, yeah, and lose them both, that sure was the worst part, well, tell him to go watch the documentary on general magic, so I used to work for a company called General Magic. yeah, and we got the best and the brightest, it was amazing and we were building the iPhone before the iPhone, but we were too early, that was one thing, of course, we had some problems, but we were pretty early and then the people who were on The Team kept doing all these great things and 20 years later we decided to make a documentary about it and show it at various film festivals and all that, and we thought we'd lose all our money because who cares about 20 years? dead company and it turned out to be this year's documentary, it's inflight entertainment, it's the number one documentary on the iTunes Store, it's amazing because everyone felt the same, we were doing something so incredible and we were getting there and then. the rug was ripped out yes I haven't seen it I'll check it out yes you'll love it you'll see me there four or five times with mine it's just that our story isn't that unique I think there are Yes a lot of people who've been to three cool stories, so we're out of town and out of time, and I'm trying to read the chat to see if I missed anything really good.
My question to mark, how close did you really come? get to homologate the mxr for Supercross. I'm closed by Alta is the word, yeah, let's see. Derek will remember the details of this better than I because he was pretty hands-on or Dale lineweaver. I think we thought we were homologated for Arenacross and I think we hoped and I think we were homologated for amateur open mm-hmm and that both should have been sort of stepping stones towards homologation. If I remember correctly, we were not prepared for something like that. Head straight for the higher levels of AMA or mxgp in 2019.
I think the best bet would have been somewhere in 2020, which honestly would have been good news for us. I think, again, Derek would remember better if we had done it, if we had the distance. for Supercross, but 2020 would have given us time to have the distance and yes, I think we would put on a pretty good show, so last question, now you work at Lift and you are thinking about mobility for urban mobility, what kind of mobility ? Yeah? I'm building their future micromobility system so from the people I know, LIF operates the biggest bike share business there and also a couple of scooter share businesses and most people are probably familiar with Bird and Lim and maybe with jumping companies that entered.
I like micro mobility, great and it exploded. 2018, especially 2019, were really important years. We're doing it a little differently at Lyft. I can't talk about specifics, but I can talk about the general because I think it's great. No, I don't know, you know, compared to high-performance motorcycles, it's a different animal, but thanks, a fun way to see Paris, although I can tell you that, well, the birds, the limes and whatever else they had all over Paris, everywhere, it really was there. The French didn't like him doing it. I think stupid fun is the right phrase because it has a couple of meanings, but they really are.
Scooters are fun. The bikes, if you've never been on an electric bike, are pretty magical. of the elements of what it does and it doesn't are exploding and sales are just going crazy, yes the II bikes are now outselling standard bikes in Europe and are growing like crazy in the US and in fact, the kovat has more than 110 percent or so sales. I heard the sales of bicycles and any bicycle. Would you like to make bicycles instead of motorcycles? I like my timing right now. To be honest, we were also a little early so we probably would have been better off if we started three or four years later and yes, I think the technology is much more mature in the e-bike space, but I don't think people have realized. not even close to what is possible in that area now, the type of fleet bikes that we have.
What we're doing is different because it's about how to turn two wheels into public transportation, which I think could actually be a big boon for the motorcycle industry. I mean ending the moment when you teach someone how to use the accelerator, a little bit of acceleration or turning. accelerator that they have taken the first step scooter is much closer the mo cycle is much closer, especially an electric motorcycle, you don't have to learn to shift in five marriages to get in, it really disappears, but it's more, you know, is there a way to give people a life of individual transportation, so not like the Train, not like a bus where they have a can, they go to fix a place without a driver or they have to wait for autonomous vehicles and I think we can and it's great Imagine a city ​​dominated by people on two wheels going around.
I think the potential that's out there could take us a generation to get there and it was always kind of on our roadmap at Alta. I don't think we imagined the kind of small town. scale scooters, electric bikes, but coming up with something that's more Vespa-like in function was definitely part of the roadmap going forward once we knew we had established a brand and were really credible and weren't going to put our core at risk you know the SKS scooter could be the Cayenne for our commuting red 911 911 or that and its heart and soul is still there in Porsche but Cayenne sells a lot of vehicles and makes a lot of money by the way we will have time for This story will be very short.
Steve Jobs had two 911s, air-cooled black convertibles, and he used to drive them down the highway at over 100 miles per hour. You'd get dizzy if you went with him. out to lunch or something and then he came over one day with the silver Mercedes and we didn't know what to do because he was just out of the picture of him, you know, you know, he can't be driving a frothy drink, we say. We told him that John Sculley had just purchased the same car he had him sell it to, so he was going to thank you, but then we got a couple of really good questions.
We will have to answer them quickly. When can we find out what really happened to Ulta? Yes. I see the next one from Brian Haskell, who has been one of our most notable clients. I'm happy to say yes, it's a good one, and in fact what Whitesell said is the best question I've ever been asked, so let's finish with the message. I have for current Ulta owners, oh man, how much time do we have? Well, that's a very important question, yes, the first one is thank you, the same way I described our team members, our investors and our suppliers before, everyone who bought an Ulta. an investor in the company and the dream and what we were trying to achieve by taking a big risk, you know, writing their own checks for something that was pretty uncertain.
I would like to think that they, you know, have a bike that is all the magic they hoped for and that the experience of writing it and yes, writing it makes it all worth it, but I also recognize that there are surely some people who will have mechanical or electrical problems here and there. There will no longer be replacement parts for them and they will have a very expensive piece of wall or brick art and I spent a lot of late 2018 and 2019 thinking about that and I can tell all of you if you are listening. I'm so sorry for leaving you in that position.
I hope the bikes last forever, but I know they won't and I hope you enjoy them while they work. I think the track record of most of them will last quite a while, but you know if you have the bad guy in the lot, you're in a really tough situation and there's not much you can do to fix it that well. make them collector's items and get third party pieces, just think about the brands that came back with a bang, Alton Alton in India and what's happening in Australia now with that classic brand and I'm blanking out my fantastically wonderful conversation with you , thank you.
Much to come. I think I'm supposed to press the end broadcast button and then we look at each other for 15 seconds. Well, thank you very much for inviting me. It has really been a pleasure. Great and thanks to everyone in the chat for joining.

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