Mobility Innovators

Mark Seeger ([00:00:00]):

When urban density goes up, mobility demand goes up. Okay, but where are we putting people on what infrastructure platforms exist to move people? And taking a step back for a second, in a city you have sewage systems, water systems, power systems, communication systems, and you have mobility systems. Those are the pillars of infrastructural civilization that make an urban environment work. Well, if more people live, you build a bigger superpipe. If more people use water, you build a bigger water pipe. So we kind of have solutions to that. Mobility, we haven’t. We have two options. We have roads that everyone uses for everything and therefore are congested most of the time. And we have an engineering solution to saying, “Well, I need more throughput, more bandwidth. I need to move more people than the road can do because the road is just a mess. And that’s called rail or subway or metro, whatever.

Mark Seeger ([00:00:59]):

The different light rail. There’s different versions of rail, but it’s all the same technology. And that technology approach says, I’m going to take an exclusive road, a railroad. No one can use it except for me. And I’m going to build this huge vehicle called the train and I’m going to batch it and I’m going to run it every couple minutes or every hour or whatever it is. And I’m going to stop at every single station. But when that system is running, I can move lots of people, which is true. Trains do literally that. And so, okay, so we have solutions, but why does my city not have movement? Well, trains are incredibly expensive. They’re unaffordable by most cities. Fun fact, there’s only 204 cities that have a metro system. There’s thousands of cities. So market failure. Either a physical one because trains are very big or an economic one.

Mark Seeger ([00:01:46]):

We can talk about that later. And roads don’t work. And we’ve been trying for the last 50 to 100 years designing better cars, bigger cars, faster cars. Now in the last, I don’t know, 10 or 20 years, autonomous cars. Marvels of human ingenuity, a car that drives itself. Incredible. But you know what? An autonomous car and stuck in traffic is just a car stuck in traffic. It doesn’t do anything. If anything, an autonomous fleet, when you deploy hundreds or thousands of autonomous robotaxis on congested streets, you’re kind of making congestion worse. You’re not actually making it better. Why?

Jaspal Singh ([00:02:24]):

Welcome to the Mobility Innovators Podcast.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Mobility Innovator Podcast. I’m your host, Jaspal Singh. On this podcast, we bring you conversation with leaders, shipping the future of mobility and transportation across the world. A today guest is someone with a truly unique journey, spanning NASA, Apple and entrepreneurship across completely different industry, from biodegradable plastic to premium fashion. And now he’s re-imagining mobility.

He’s the founder and co- CEO of Glydways, a company working to fundamentally rethink how City Move people. I’m really happy to welcome Mark Seeger, founder and co- CEO, Glydways. It’s now time to listen and learn.

Hey, Mark welcome to the podcast. It’s great to have you on the show.

 

Mark Seeger ([00:03:19]):

Good morning, Jaspal. It’s great to be with you. Thank you so much for making time. This is going to be a good conversation given your background and the interest base of your viewers and listeners, so I’m very excited to get into it.

Jaspal Singh ([00:03:29]):

Likewise, I mean, your background is equally interesting and that’s where I want to start with your professional journey. I mean, you work across NASA, Apple, Ogilvy, and completely different industries. And then you are a founder itself. This is your third venture, which you will talk about a lot, Glydways.

Mark Seeger ([00:03:45]):

Six.

Jaspal Singh ([00:03:46]):

Sixth, man. And the couple of I know was green idea in biodegradable plastic. And then you created MGM, which is a premium denim for tall people. And I know you are quite tall. I saw some of your picture and I can … It’s like six five or six, eight. I don’t know. You can correct, but it’s not a typical part to transportation because being from transportation industry, I see people who work in the sector and try to do something, but your background is completely different. So what make you curious to enter into transportation sector because this is not the way people enter into mobility. And if you look back now at your journey, what are the common thread across the journey you see which brought you to where you are right now? Because a lot of time I tell people, you need to look back your journey backward if you really want to see what connected the dots in these different path.

Mark Seeger ([00:04:38]):

It’s a great question and I don’t know if I have a very good and coherent answer for you, but I’ll just be authentic and share it with you. And I think my background really, if I bring the clock all the way back, it is multicultural because that’s where I think a lot of the insights come from. So let me just tell you where I’m from because that I think then sets the stage for a weird way who I’ve become by planner, by happenstance. So I’m Dutch American. I was born in the Netherlands to an American father and a Dutch mother. And at some point we moved from Holland to the United States, East Coast. And I went to school in the US from all the way through to university. I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, studied undergrad in mechanical and electrical engineering. And I did that.

Mark Seeger ([00:05:25]):

I graduated in an international business MBA and then moved to the West Coast where I worked for Apple and then ultimately to Singapore where I lived for a decade and then back to the US. And I explain it that way because what I experienced was probably something you and your listeners can relate to a lot, which is that in certain parts of the world, particularly Holland, Western Europe, and certainly Singapore and places that are very modern and metropolises that are growing very quickly like a Hong Kong or Tokyo, any of those cities, I experienced phenomenal mobility. I had access to subways and light rails and just things that just worked and you didn’t really think about it. And that’s exactly what it should be in the sense that if I wanted to go somewhere, the friction to getting there was relatively low. I had confidence I could go, I knew the system, the experience was acceptable, the cost was acceptable or affordable and I was able to do the things I wanted to do, whether it’s economic things, professional things or social things.

Mark Seeger ([00:06:33]):

But in between those two bookends of growing up in Europe and living in Singapore was living in the United States, just the way it worked out when my family moved there. And that’s when I experienced the exact opposite of that. There was none. There was no transit of any kind. And I was hit with an experience that was new for me, but of course not new to most people who live there, which is that when you don’t have reliable, affordable, safe, dependable mobility solutions, well, you can just do very less. Now as a teenager, what I wanted to do then is obviously different than what I would want to do now, particularly at different hours of the day, but the fundamental fact is still the same. I was able to extract a thesis, nothing earth shattering something people you can articulate far better than I can given your background.

Mark Seeger ([00:07:24]):

But the idea is the same, which is that, gosh, access to mobility that is there, it’s friction free, it’s affordable, safe, dependable, all those things and available is access to either economic opportunity or social opportunity or both. Yeah. It’s sort of a basic economic thesis. Moving labor and goods creates economic value. Well, if I want to do something with my life, I need to be able to get to places or I can’t live in a bubble. And when you don’t have access to those things, your opportunity space starts to shrink socially or economically, just your opportunities to develop yourself to experience life shrink. I’ll give you an extreme example that the Speaker of the House in the Philippines shared with me when I met with them two years ago, I think, which is in Manila where in Greater Manila, you have over 41 million people, 41 million people in the space of roughly two New Yorks, just astronomically large and dense city.

Mark Seeger ([00:08:18]):

And because they don’t have transportation other than road predominantly, it takes in some cases an hour to move a kilometer. And so the economic radius, sorry, let me rephrase. The radius of economic opportunity for people in that city is about three kilometers from where you live because anything further than that, you can have a great job, but if it takes four hours to get to, it’s not a job opportunity. Very true. So I realized very quickly that where you can go determines who you can become.

Mark Seeger ([00:08:48]):

And therefore when you can’t do those things, you start to limit your potential and everyone feels that. That’s not an academic exercise, that’s a visceral being a human experience, living the human experience on earth, this defines your life. And so what I realized very quickly from that sort of awakening of like, why is this the case? How is this the case? What engineering aptitude can I apply to understanding the world the way it is? Which as a little aside, I learned a long time ago that it’s okay to be critical of people or systems or technologies or what have you, but before you hit the criticism, understand why the world is the way it is first. Decompose that down to first principles and then you can criticize it. So rather than just saying, “Well, this is terrible.” Okay, well, why is it terrible? And what that did for me was, and my engineering upbringing helped with that, I think, which was to say, what are we trying to do in an urban environment that isn’t working?

Mark Seeger ([00:10:04]):

When I have a limited set of opportunities, I can’t get to where I’m going, I can’t get the experiences or the opportunity that I want because I can’t get there or there’s too much friction to get there. It’s just not practical. What is happening? And again, I’m a very simple person, so I kind of brought it back down to very simple math, which is when urban density goes up, mobility demand goes up, but where are we putting people on what infrastructure platforms exist to move people? And taking a step back for a second, in a city you have sewage systems, water systems, power systems, communication systems, and you have mobility systems. Those are the pillars of infrastructural civilization that make an urban environment work. Well, if more people live, you build a bigger superpipe. If more people use water, you build a bigger water pipe.

Mark Seeger ([00:10:54]):

So we have solutions to that. Mobility, we haven’t. We have two options. We have roads that everyone uses for everything and therefore are congested most of the time. And we have an engineering solution to saying, “Well, I need more throughput, more bandwidth. I need to move more people than the road can do because the road is just a mess and that’s called rail or subway or metro, whatever. The different light rail, there’s different versions of rail, but it’s all the same technology. And that technology approach says, I’m going to take an exclusive road, a railroad. No one can use it except for me. And I’m going to build this huge vehicle called the train and I’m going to batch it and I’m going to run it every couple minutes or every hour or whatever it is, and I’m going to stop at every single station.

Mark Seeger ([00:11:40]):

But when that system is running, I can move lots of people, which is true. Trains do literally that. And so okay, so we have solutions, but why does my city not have movement? Well, trains are incredibly expensive. They’re unaffordable by most cities. Fun fact, there’s only 204 cities that have a metro system. There’s thousands of cities. So market failure, either a physical one because trains are very big or an economic one. We can talk about that later. And roads don’t work. And we’ve been trying for the last 50 to a hundred years designing better cars, bigger cars, faster cars. Now in the last, I don’t know, 10 or 20 years, autonomous cars. Marvels of human ingenuity, a car that drives itself incredible. But you know what? An autonomous car and stuck in traffic is just a car stuck in traffic. It doesn’t do anything. If anything, an autonomous fleet, when you deploy hundreds or thousands of autonomous robotaxis on congested streets, you’re kind of making congestion worse.

Mark Seeger ([00:12:38]):

You’re not actually making it better. Why? Well, amazingly enough, or not amazingly enough, funnily enough, I was able to deduce, and I don’t know if this is right or wrong, but this is kind of the simplistic process my simple brain works through is that all of our mobility systems, rail, road, et cetera, et cetera, they’re based entirely, completely on the concept of interruption of flow. You stop at a traffic light, you stop at a stop sign. If someone wants to cross the road, you’re stopping traffic. If there’s a garbage truck, you stop behind it. If there’s just stopping … And trains are the same thing. You stop at every single station. Even if I want to go over there, I got to stop at every … So we have a paradigm based entirely on a concept of interruption and any engineer, probably anybody with common sense will say, well, that doesn’t scale.

Mark Seeger ([00:13:24]):

It may work small, but it doesn’t work big. And so I think, and this is kind of bring it back to a conclusion here. I think we’re at the beginning of a historical shift from a scarcity of flow where we need it the most. So a scarcity of flow that we call traffic to an abundance of flow. That historical shift, this will be the first time in human history that actually happens. And I think we’re at that place because for the first time, two things are kind of intersecting at exactly the same time. The crisis of lack of scalability, trains don’t scale because of economics and also physics, they’re very big, but less than one 10th of 1% of cities can afford rail. So not a scalable solution. And we should talk about why that’s the case. And roads don’t scale because they’re based on interruption.

Mark Seeger ([00:14:14]):

And when you have an interruption-based system, the bigger you get it, the more interruption you get. The system collapses, it doesn’t scale and it has to change. Why does it have to change? Well, today, roughly half the human population lives in a city, but the World Bank estimates that in the next, I think it’s 25 years, it may be 30, the urban population is going to double.

Jaspal Singh ([00:14:35]):

Oh, for sure.

Mark Seeger ([00:14:36]):

We’re in the largest urban migration in human history. It is incredible. Well, if it’s a crisis today, mobility, if traffic and mobility and moving people in urban environments is at crisis today, in the next 25-30 years you’re going to double that population, it’s going to be catastrophic. And so we’re at a point where this has to change and for the first time it can change. And that’s what I said or what I believed 10 years ago when I started Glydways and we can talk about, okay, well, what’s the intellectual journey and what is the approach? Because it’s fundamentally different, going from interruption-based mobility to flow base and abundance of flow. But the last comment I wanted to make is that if you park for second the physics, the engineering, and the economics, which we will get to, because without that, none of this works. And you just imagine a world where you have an abundance of flow.

Mark Seeger ([00:15:25]):

Now suddenly how cities move, how cities grow, but more importantly, how cities provide access to opportunity, social or economic, it rewrites history. It changes the human experience and it unleashes potential and that world or getting to that world, enabling that world is what excites me and motivates me. And I believe my whole team because it’s possible and the effect is, I think, and look, I’m biased, is going to be amazing because we’ve never had an abundance of flow. And what can you do with that for yourself, for your city, for your country, for your people, for your family? So anyway, a little bit of a narrative.

Jaspal Singh ([00:16:08]):

I mean, that’s really great. And I really like what you said is where you can go determine what you can be. It’s basically the mobility create opportunity and not only social, but also economic and the education jobs. And you rightly said, I long back, I read an article why people are not coming to city to work because there is no transport back for them to go home. So they can come in the morning, but the challenge is how they will go back to their home. So that’s why it’s created a lot of issue with also the housing because then you have to be, like you said, the cities are becoming more and more dense and creating more issues. Why? Because everybody want to work in the city and they have no other option just to live in the city. Your radius is becoming three kilometers or five kilometers and you cannot go beyond.

 

 

Jaspal Singh ([00:16:59]):

In fact, you little bit give a preview about Glydways and I really see you’re really passionate about it, creating this abundance of mobility option for all the human being.

Jaspal Singh ([00:17:11]):

What is Glydways? I mean, if somebody asks a person who is working in a transit or not working in transit, how will you explain Glydways in a very simple term? And then what is the core problem? Like you mentioned about rail you cannot afford. It’s very expensive and that’s what we see. Many cities are building rail network, but it’s very hard to run operationally because you need a constant money to maintain and operate those vehicle and the road, the capacity is limited. So you need to share among everything. How you think Glydways also solve both problems at the same time, because you also need space. You also need to create these lanes for the vehicle and all. So what makes Glydways different from others?

Mark Seeger ([00:17:52]):

Yeah, sure. No, I appreciate the question. And let’s start there. So Glydways is a new mobility system based entirely on the concept of continuous movement. So you don’t stop, you don’t wait, you don’t transfer, you don’t sit in congestion, you just go from where you are to where you want to be and zero stops, zero slowing down in between. So that’s what Glydways is. And because it’s built as a network rather than a collection of vehicles, we can deliver far greater capacity throughput at a fraction of the cost. And that’s why cities around the world are now starting to deploy it. So that’s what Glydways is. Now, given your background and your audience’s background, let me go a layer deeper in terms of like, okay, well, really what is it? Yeah. So what we do is we take the approach that says, I have to solve for throughput capacity, number of people per hour I can move because that’s bandwidth.

Mark Seeger ([00:18:53]):

But by the way, before I get into the technical bit, let me give an analogy that works for me, which is when we think of the internet, evolutionary new technology can change or has changed the world over the last, I don’t know, 30 or 40 years. Well, taking this revolutionary technology like the internet and putting it on an existing infrastructure designed for something completely different, which is dial-up back in the day, you and I are old enough to remember when I had to dial up via phone line. If I take this revolutionary technology and put it onto something designed for human voice, it’s so constrained that Netflix movies are not possible, the cloud is not possible and AI isn’t possible. So that’s sort of internet 1.0 and what unleashed the internet was putting the internet on a, let’s say a fiber optic network, for example, or something else that had high bandwidth that was designed for lots of data.

Mark Seeger ([00:19:48]):

Well, now it’s unconstrained and we have whole new economies and new technologies and AI is changing the world. Cloud is redefined services and so on and so on. And just a little sticky with that analogy, the autonomous vehicle is the key. It’s the key unlocked, but putting an autonomous vehicle on open roads designed for human drivers is like AV 1.0. It doesn’t do anything. As I said before, an autonomous car stuck in traffic, it’s just a car stuck in traffic, but taking that autonomous car and putting it on a purpose-built network designed for flow, now everything changes. And that’s what Glydways is. We take autonomous cars, we do put them on dedicated lanes that are optimized and designed for flow, nonstop travel. But when you do that and I say, well, now everything changes. What I mean by that is we can move 10 times the number of people per hour, the flow rate, the throughput, the bandwidth, 10 times as many people in a space smaller than a car lane.

Mark Seeger ([00:20:42]):

So what does that mean? I can move the capacity of a five lane highway. It’s about 10,000 people per hour in the space of half of one car lane. Our lanes are the size of a bike lane. So I like to say we can put a five lane super highway in a bike lane. That’s what we’re able to do because we’re going down to a small vehicle, and I’ll explain how that works in a second, where we maintain also on- demand service, so it’s not scheduled, it’s waits for you, you don’t wait for it, walk up and go, so to speak, the ideal of a car. With zero traffic, no congestion because the whole thing is orchestrated, therefore much faster, lower journey time, where you get there very quickly because you’re never stopping at a fraction of the cost. So far I’ve described an Uber, but the best of an Uber, because an Uber is still stuck in traffic or a Waymo, still stuck in traffic.

Mark Seeger ([00:21:32]):

I’m doing better than that at a fraction of those costs. So how do I deliver a better than Uber, a better than Waymo experience, moving much more people at a cost that’s much more comparable to a public transit fair rather than a premium private ride hailing? That’s what Glydways is. And we do it because we invert the paradigm. We do the exact opposite of what has always been done when the question is, how do I move large volumes of people? So instead of building an enormous vehicle like a train and filling it up, batching it with lots and lots and lots of people and stopping at every single stop along the journey and only living on a line, I do the exact opposite. I give everyone their own vehicle. So the technical term for that is if a train aggregates people, we disaggregate people. Sticking with that silly internet analogy, again, I’m a simple person on a Friday morning-

Jaspal Singh ([00:22:20]):

It’s a good analogy to explain. I really like the way you explain. Yeah,

Mark Seeger ([00:22:25]):

We packetize people the way the internet packetizes data. So when you email me a picture, that file, that photo gets broken up into little packets and they’re routed intelligently across a mesh network and they get to the other side and there you go. That’s how we move lots of data. Well, we do the same thing. We packetize people down to the individual person or party into vehicles that are four person vehicles. They’re quite large, they’re very comfortable. We can talk about that in a second, but rather than sharing a vehicle with lots of people that forces you to stop a lot of times and go back to interruption-based paradigms, we do the opposite. Why do we do that? Well, it’s all about economics. Let’s start with that first. If I batch people, if I aggregate people into a train, well, now I’ve got a physics problem.

Mark Seeger ([00:23:08]):

A train is really big. It’s a metal tube that weighs, I don’t know, 500 tons. Well, now my infrastructure that has to lift up that train or support that train is enormously expensive, huge. Here in California, one mile of train track is over $2.2 billion as if it’s on the ground. New York is similar numbers.

 

Mark Seeger ([00:23:27]):

It’s either billions. Yeah, exactly. It’s either billions or hundreds of millions. So big vehicles require big infrastructure equals big cost, big problem and that’s usually the first economic impediment. But that’s on the CapEx side, capital expense. OpEx is even more pernicious. If I have a shared vehicle, I’m rolling that vehicle regardless of how many people are on that train two o’clock in the afternoon or two o’clock in the morning, that train has got to run. It’s got to maintain that schedule even if there’s three people on that train. Now that’s economically incredibly inefficient, which is why trains lose money operationally. Almost all trains lose money and that’s why they have to be subsidized by the taxpayers. And so that’s why the economics aren’t there. A train is really expensive on CapEx, really expensive because it loses money, so you have to subsidize it over and over again.

Mark Seeger ([00:24:18]):

And weirdly, the more people you move, the more money you lose, which is not what you want at all. And so that’s why trains can’t scale from an economic point of view. But if you break the problem down to the individual passenger where you disaggregate, quantize whatever language you want to use, well, now my vehicles are smaller, much smaller. A four-person vehicle is the size of a car. So my vehicle’s smaller, my infrastructure is smaller and much lighter weight and much less disruption to build. And so my CapEx comes way down. In our case, about 90% lower, roughly speaking.

Mark Seeger ([00:24:51]):

90% compared to doing the same job with a train. Whether it’s above ground, on the ground or below ground, we end up being about one-tenth the cost, give or take a bit. It kind of varies country by country, but that’s crazy. I shrink the size of the vehicle, I shrink the size of the infrastructure by costs come way down, but that’s only possible because of one fundamental paradigm shift. We are demand responsive. That principle is different than a pre-scheduled service that always has to run regardless of how many people use it. When I’m demand responsive, I respond to you, the individual passenger, which is why I build a vehicle that seats four people like ours. So I’ve explained how a small vehicle has small costs, but on the operational cost, something magical happens. I think it’s magical. I get really into this. A demand responsive system means you only deploy a vehicle when someone’s paying for a ride, which is a different way of saying we’re not paying to drag empty seats around the city, which a bus train does a majority of the time because a majority of the time it’s not fully utilized.

Mark Seeger ([00:25:52]):

And that economically means our operational costs are also a fraction of a fraction because we only deploy vehicles when they’re needed. Empty vehicles just sit sleeping if you want to think about that waiting for the next passenger. Okay, so that’s great. Everyone gets their own vehicle. You walk up and you go. It’s nonstop. It’s a private journey personalized to you twenty four seven, low cost with high capacity, high throughput. How do you achieve that? Well, two principles when you go from demand responsive that you have to now do. The first is I have to have offline embarkation. So we have arterial lines, trunk lines that have continuous flow nonsense. But if your passenger selects a stop that’s over here, that vehicle will demerge, slow down, pull over into an access point, people get on, people get off and then that vehicle will remerge and rejoin that continued flow line.

Mark Seeger ([00:26:45]):

And so for the first time we’ve disassociated, decoupled the embarkation activity from this continuous flow network. Let me go back to a train or a bus. The opposite is true. When a train comes up to a train station, it stops, people get on, people get off and then train rolls again. It has blocked that entire train track in perpetuity until it starts moving again. So that’s an inline embarkation we do offline embarkation. Well, now because the system flows around the embarkation, not only can you take as much time as you want, I can have as many stops as I want because you bypass all the stops you don’t want to stop at. You only pull over and stop for your stop. So the system isn’t impeded by having to stop at every single stop. And so that is the first thing I do. And then the second thing I do is because it’s a controlled system and it’s computer orchestrated and AI and autonomy and all those great things that are now technologically possible.

Mark Seeger ([00:27:33]):

I can now bring my vehicle headway, the distance between vehicles from the two to three seconds that a normal human driver typically needs down to fractional seconds and still maintain the safety levels required for public service. Technically very hard to do, but it is now possible. Yeah. So I can bring my vehicles closer together and that also means I don’t need to go very, very fast. I can go 30 miles an hour or 50 miles an hour or speeds like that. I mean, relatively modest, but because I never stopped, that’s also my average speed. Whereas a bus average speed, if you include the stopping is like six or seven miles an hour in most cities and a train is like 13 to 14 miles an hour because you’re constantly stopping, I don’t do that anymore. That’s only possible because of autonomy. I don’t need a lane this big because humans swerve.

Mark Seeger ([00:28:20]):

Computers drive cars very tightly. So I can bring my lane space down to a bike lane size, two meters wide, five and a half feet and I can bring my headway between vehicles much closer. And when you do that, you get a 10X, an order of magnitude increase in throughput, 10,000 people per hour roughly. And so that solves my capacity problem. It solves my experience problem. Because I’m vehicle steered and not infrastructure steered the way a train is steered by the train tracks, I’m just four rubber tires on road, my infrastructure is super simple. It’s literally pavement or concrete. The vehicle steers itself. So just mucking or just- No, not even that.

Mark Seeger ([00:28:56]):

We don’t need markings. We don’t need a rail. We don’t need power. It’s battery electric. So it’s just a bike lane. Those are cheap, fast to build, widely available because we have to think of supply chains now, predictable. It’s not some new technology with Maglev things that have all sorts of technical risk and no one really knows how it’s getting. No, it’s a bike lane. It’s literally a bicycle lane or a pedestrian lane, if you will. And you can repurpose roads. We do that a lot. We can repurpose existing infrastructure that no one can use because we’re very flexible. The world of where you put this suddenly opens up.

Mark Seeger ([00:29:28]):

Pretty dramatically and it’s simple, very, very, very simple. And so now the last piece of the puzzle, so we’ve shrunken everything down, we’ve brought our CapEx down, we’ve brought our spatial requirement down, we’ve brought our economics on the CapEx side and on the OpEx down. So now I’ve got a high quality ride. I can meet the need of moving lots of people. My costs are low, so I’m kind of putting a lot of pieces down. What about the experience? Because the system is only good if people want to use it. If nobody uses it, you’ve just wasted a whole bunch of space and effort. Well, what do people care about? We know people love a private ride.

Mark Seeger ([00:30:02]):

We know they love on demand rather than pre-scheduled. We know a direct to destination is something everyone loves, but nobody has. That is a new product that has never existed before. Certainly not in a city where point A to point B has zero stops, zero slowing down, zero congestion. So that’s a good thing. And if I can price it around mass transit public transit fares, or at least not at premium ride hail taxi levels way down here, this is good. This is good. As long as that sustains itself and it turns out that it does. And again, that’s because CapEx is low, operational costs are low, I’m demand responsive. So my cost to operate is a fraction of an aggregated system, a grouped batch system like a bus or a train. And so I can pass those savings onto the customer. And that’s what we do because we want people to use this.

Mark Seeger ([00:30:50]):

We want to get them off roads. We want to give them better access to economic opportunity. It’s about equity of opportunity. All those mission statements for us are why we do this. We do what we do because we care about expanding the radius of economic and social opportunity for people for as many people as possible. It’s what drives us. No pun intended. And so got the CapEx economics. I’ve got the OpEx economics. I’ve got the experience, experience is good. I’ve got the capacity bit. Because I’m vehicle steered, it’s just four rubber tires. I can now change the topology from a line, which is what a train line is. It’s a one-dimensional line. People don’t live on lines. They live in neighborhoods. I can now go into neighborhoods. I can go mesh networks, loops, grids, spurs. Because I can go wherever a vehicle can go. I don’t need to build train tracks and switches and signaling and all that cacophony of infrastructure.

Mark Seeger ([00:31:38]):

I can connect to that building and that building and that stadium and that park. I can do all those things with low cost and there’s no functional cost to the throughput or wait times or journey times when I add another stop. A train, I add another stop. Everyone has to stop. The journey gets longer, the capacity drops. It’s sort of the exact opposite of what you want, which is providing connectivity. Well, with a system like this, you don’t have any of that. And so then the next question now becomes, if my economics are sustainable, if I can make money at it and therefore attract private capital and scale it, that’s how you scale these things. You have to have a business model. If you have a business model, capital allows you to scale to global demand. And we’re talking about a global problem, not a small problem.

Mark Seeger ([00:32:18]):

So if the economics are good, capital scales and the supply chain is good because bike lanes or pedestrian lanes, that’s scalable. Vehicles are electric and autonomous. Guess what? There’s many vehicle supply chains, car companies have existed a long time. There’s lots of car factories and supply chains around the world that can be relatively commoditized to a degree. Software is scalable just inherently. And the experience is good and therefore people want to use it. The last question then becomes, where do I put these lanes? Cities are space constrained. They’re busy. People use bike lanes to bike. People use pedestrian lanes to walk. Cars use car lanes and delivery trucks and garbage trucks and emergency trucks. It’s all there. Well, if we’re the size of a bicycle lane or a pedestrian lane and all we need is just a running surface and we’re very small as we’re car sized, not bus or train size, which means we can maneuver like a car, a turning radius is small.

Mark Seeger ([00:33:15]):

I can now go almost anywhere, more to the point. I can now use rights of ways, land, real estate that are otherwise unused. So let me give you some examples. There’s a lot of creativity here. I can go on the side of a road if there’s space, but there usually isn’t. I can go above a road and the economics allows me to do that. Yes, raised infrastructure is more expensive, but the economics still pencil out. I can go down the median of a road, but I can also use a disused rail line. I can go under power lines. I can go on canals or next to canals. I can go places that are unusable for a bus or a car but are great for a little path. And many of our customers around the world have found land that we can use that is otherwise useless.

Mark Seeger ([00:33:59]):

The question for us then doesn’t become, and there’s many other examples I can give. The question is not, do cities have space? That’s not the question. The question is, is the space cities have used efficiently? And if you have a interruption-based mobility solution, which is what roads are, you use space incredibly inefficiently, incredibly inefficiently. And you can have both. You don’t have to pick one or the other. But as long as you’re flexible in the economics pencil out and you’re physically small, you can now go in lots of places and coexist. And we found all over the world now, very big, very dense, very old cities that were never designed for a rail or a road. We fit in very nicely and provide exactly what people want.

Jaspal Singh ([00:34:45]):

No, that’s really amazing. Now one question I have, will Glydways complement the existing public transport infrastructure? Will it aim to remove the car from the city and make it much more cleaner? Or how do you see the future? Let’s say in next 20, 30 year, I know you guys are working in Dubai and Boston and many other city. What kind of change you want to bring in those city?

Mark Seeger ([00:35:13]):

It’s a great question because now we’re talking about an interesting idea, maybe it’s technically proven. How do you roll it out because you can’t jump straight to an end state where- Everything is glide. Yeah. So this is something we spent a lot of time thinking about in the early years of how do you start this and still make it sustainable to get to some end state where there’s real proliferation. When you are demand responsive, so small, nimble, light, economic, sustainable, your economic viability shrinks. What that means is I can do a small Glydways system and still make it pencil out economically, still make it profitable, which is why you would build. And so our first wave of customers were and are adding to existing transit systems. What does that mean? It means I’ve got a train line and I’ve got a station every, I don’t know, two kilometers or whatever the interstitial spacing is.

Mark Seeger ([00:36:06]):

Well, that’s great. The station is not a destination. You want to get to where you’re going. So what about the last couple of miles? Can we link from a train station or metro station into different parts of the neighborhood? It’s exactly what we do. Now we’re adding value to the installed thing you just spent a ton of money and are still spending a ton of money on. You want to keep that value going. So we add value to that. This is what we’re doing in Dubai, by the way, and in other cities as well. So we can connect to existing systems and make them more valuable going into the last miles, going into the neighborhoods, connecting from the train station to wherever you actually want to go. So that’s sort of one subset of deployment. If you’re thinking about building a system, or let me rephrase.

Mark Seeger ([00:36:46]):

If the mobility demand in your neighborhood, in your city, in your development exceeds the capacity of the infrastructure you have and you’re considering buying a multi-billion dollar train system, well, we can go there too at a fraction of a cost. So we can add value to existing systems. If you’re thinking about a rail system, I would say take a look at a Glydways system. We can do far more at far less cost probably with zero subsidy and probably with private capital funding some or even all of the CapEx, which is great and a much better system. So we have the city style customers, whether we start small or big, the whole concept is landing and expanding, which is like, “Hey, let’s build a little bit, see if it works, and then we’ll expand it this way and this way and this way and this way.” You can expand this mesh network over time and that’s not just nice because you dip your toe into something and ramp up, but the installed base gets more valuable as you add more stops to the network, the network effect, which is great.

Mark Seeger ([00:37:43]):

So that’s one batch of customer profiles we have. And because we are still economically viable when we’re small, we can also do private developments. So what does that mean? It means airports. So interterminal mobility systems, going from terminal one to terminal two, terminal three to the car park. I want to pause and draw a little point here. We developed a new technology with a company called Parkin. It’s a UAE Dubai-based company that builds parking garages. If you combine the parking garage with a mobility system, two things now happen that have never happened before. Not only does the utilization of that parking garage become more valuable because you can park your car and zip directly to where you want to go directly, but I can now for the first time disassociate the location of that parking lot from the destination because we have to always park our parking lots, build these massive buildings in the middle of city where real estate is really precious next to the museum or the shopping mall.

Mark Seeger ([00:38:33]):

What a terrible waste of space. Now I can put the parking lot over there where it’s cheaper and less out of the way and zip people directly to where they’re going. That’s park and mobility and we just announced that project actually last week out of Dubai or maybe this week. I can’t remember. I lose track of time because I’ve been traveling a lot, but that’s a revolutionary new product in the space of urban parking. And so we’re doing that now too. We have a bunch of customers that are shopping malls, theme parks, airports, residential districts and so forth. So that’s the point. We can go in many places big and small and land and expand over time. Eventually, will we become the dominant form of urban mobility? Look, from a technical point of view, whether Glydways is that or not, what we’ll see, I do think so that this form of mobility is the inevitable conclusion where we have to go.

Mark Seeger ([00:39:27]):

And we call it AV 2.0 for a reason. AV1.0 doesn’t scale at all. It makes traffic worse, but it’s just a stepping stone. I mean, the autonomous vehicle is never the end state. The end state is AV2.0. You take that autonomous vehicle and unleash it on a network purpose built for flow. And that’s what Glydways is. Glydways is AV 2.0. And we think that that form of mobility, that concept will become the dominant form of urban mobility because there’s literally nothing else.

Mark Seeger ([00:39:54]):

Air taxis don’t hit the flow. There aren’t that many landing spots. The elevators can’t handle the flow. Air taxis have a role, but they’re not going to scale up to meet that massive demand.

Jaspal Singh ([00:40:02]):

Oh, for sure.

Mark Seeger ([00:40:04]):

Not possible. So it’s got to be something like that. So to answer your question, I do think in the next 10- 20 years, maybe sooner, I mean, boy, the commercial traction we’re getting is really causing a lot of stress because we’re trying to scale faster than we ever thought. But I really think the endpoint is a flow-based network, flow network becoming the dominant form of urban mobility just because I don’t know what else you do. There is nothing else humanity has invented that can meet those needs and scale to meet global demand.

Jaspal Singh ([00:40:37]):

And like you said, the time is now given the development happening in AV, in AI, the technology-wise, the people perception and the demand is changing. So the time is now when people can change. Now, one question I have is Heathrow Airport, they have PRT. So it’s something I would say some people will say Glydways is very similar to PRT, which people used to call personal rapid transit. There was some attempt done in the past. People tried to scale up these Heathrow Airport experiments did work. I was involved in one of the case study in Delhi where we were trying to connect one of the busiest shopping mall, like you said, it was crazy. The traffic was crazy. So we thought, why don’t we connect that parking far away with that shopping mall and people can segregate? What is, I would say, Glydways secret sauce because it has been done in the past.

Jaspal Singh ([00:41:31]):

What are you doing differently and why does this model work when people fail earlier? I mean, one secret sauce is you given your passion and experience, but what else?

Mark Seeger ([00:41:43]):

I wouldn’t say that at all. So we need to give credit where credit is due. And there has been not just the attempts you mentioned at Heathrow Airport, but several. In fact, you can go all the way down to the late 1950s and ’60s where the concept of personal rapid transit PRT was first discussed and theorized and worked out where before you or I were born, this idea was already accepted in transit and engineering circles as this is the only solution to meeting mobility demand. But that was over 50 years ago. It was like 60 or 70 years ago. By the way, there’s a famous quote from one of the American presidents, I forget which one, that said, surely if we can move four astronauts 250,000 miles to the moon, we can move 250,000 people four miles to work. Early we can do this. And out of that came Boeing Aerospace Corporation back in the day trying to do this.

Mark Seeger ([00:42:44]):

And there’s a fantastic, not PRT, sort of a GRT group rapid transit system built in West Virginia, Morgantown, still operating to this day. It’s extraordinary. There’s a London Heathrow example that you talked about, Masdar City.

Mark Seeger ([00:43:01]):

So there’s a French company that tried it, a British company, American company. Lots of attempts have been trying to do this, but you’re right, it’s never worked because they don’t exist. They’re not scaled. So I’ll give you what I think is the reason for that and why we are different. Couple points. One is we’re just lucky that we find ourselves at a time with industrial and commercialized technology that things are possible now that we’re not technologically or economically possible before. And there’s really two things and this gets to the second point. And the two things are commoditization of electric powertrains, batteries, motors, controllers, and chargers, sort of the Tesla effect, credit where credit is due autonomy technology. A lot of autonomous cars are out on … I mean, I live next to San Francisco. You can hail an autonomous car anytime you want AI technology that’s necessary to manage these flow networks.

Mark Seeger ([00:43:56]):

So a lot of technologies are now not just technically existing, but economically scale to be quote unquote commoditized or widely available that were never possible before. So that enabled the second point, which is to design the system for high capacity from the beginning. And all the systems you and I were just talking about, the London Heathrow example, the Mazda example, the Morgantown example, there’s a couple others out there that have come and gone. They were never designed for high capacity. They tried and couldn’t make it work because the vehicle headways couldn’t shrink down the AI software to intelligently deconflict every vehicle trajectory from every other vehicle trajectory was computationally not possible. Theoretically, yes, but not computationally. Or there were technological sensors out there, but they were so expensive and so custom built and very large that you couldn’t scale it. Technically bits and pieces were possible, but the economics weren’t possible.

Mark Seeger ([00:44:48]):

And so what we looked at about 10 years ago when we started the company was we have to design this for scale from the beginning. And that means two things, high capacity. We will not start at low capacity and promise to ultimately work our way to high capacity because that doesn’t solve the problem statement. We have to start a high capacity and then we can go down to low capacity if we so choose. Very different technological framework, very, very different because now you’re asking yourselves, how do I achieve that end state that the market actually needs, not how do I work my way up to it? And then secondly, can I take the technical solution to deliver the scale, the throughput, the capacity? Can I deliver it with a supply chain base that can deliver to scale and economically deliver with commoditized supply chain components rather than custom-built Christmas trees of sensors on cars that are enormous and kilowatts of power and cost a quarter million dollars each where you can technically deliver it, but economically you can’t.

Mark Seeger ([00:45:53]):

And so we constrained ourselves 10 years ago when we started designing the Glydways technical stack to only use off-the-shelf commodity hardware components for the vehicle. For example, what does that mean? Automotive cameras, radar was a thing. Adaptive cruise control existed with some LiDAR systems, very simple LiDAR systems. So automotive compute wasn’t very powerful, but could we make a system work, could we make a Glydways system work at high capacity with the levels of safety required, which are extraordinarily high, much higher than autonomous vehicles have to deliver and economically make it work out at high capacity with supply chains. And that was how we started it. And we just got lucky that 10 years ago, roughly 2015-2016, that those things were beginning to be possible. You could kind of squint and say, well, in five years, those bits and pieces would exist. And I can get more into the technical bits.

 

Mark Seeger ([00:46:50]):

So I think if I take a step back, if I zoom out, the bigger picture is we designed for the problem statement as a starting point, not an aspiration. And that was high capacity. Comma with economic feasibility, which is if I sell you a ride at a price you’re willing to pay, can I deliver that ride and have some money leftover? Which is sort of like selling coffee. Can I sell you a cup of coffee and are you willing to pay enough for that coffee for me to have a little bit of money leftover because that’s now scalable. I can scale that. Private capital follows profitability. I can build more … Because the problem is global. 10,000 cities on planet earth today, never mind what’s going to be in the future. There’s no point in solving a solution for the 1% if I can’t solve for the 100%.

Mark Seeger ([00:47:34]):

And that’s just a decision we made and it was audacious and it is very hard, but we stand on the shoulders of 50 or 60 years of giants that have laid the groundwork for this to be possible.

Jaspal Singh ([00:47:46]):

No, I use your analogy for internet. Netflix was not possible 20 year or 30 year back because streaming was not possible. Netflix became possible now because everybody has a phone or the streaming or internet is possible. So I see it’s the right time for you. And I’m really curious, you mentioned about the supply chain, how to make it affordable. I mean, I know you guys are working with Suzuki Motor on the vehicle side. What about the autonomy? Because I think that’s a critical piece. It’s not the vehicle, but I think the whole system, the network and the autonomy. So are you guys developing autonomous vehicle technology in- house or partnering with different player? What is the approach you’re following there?

Mark Seeger ([00:48:27]):

Great question. And this goes right back to the conversation we were just having around, I want to solve a problem, but part of the problem is I have to design for scale, not functionality. That’s the key. Economic scale, technical scale, capacity scale, supply chain scale. My technical solution has to be scalable, otherwise it’s not useful. It’s not practical, it’s not scalable. So to answer your question, let me take a step back again, which is that we’re a very different kind of company. We’re based in Silicon Valley, by the way, but we’re a very un-Silicon Valley company in many ways. We’re infrastructure, nobody likes infrastructure. Many, many different things about taking a systems level approach that are a little bit unique. But one of them is that we built partnership into our DNA from day one or day zero.

Mark Seeger ([00:49:16]):

However, we designed the whole thing ourselves. So we’re a little bit like Apple. Apple designs everything in- house because they believe as we do that in order to deliver a compelling product that is technically compelling, economically compelling, experientially compelling, scalable, et cetera, you have to control everything. You have to build the whole thing. You can’t leave bits and pieces to other optimizations that other people made for different purpose because now you’re bringing yourself to mediocrity and it will not work. So we took that Apple mindset, which is Glydways is going to design the system. We’re going to design the autonomy, design the vehicle, design the infrastructure, design the software, but we’re not going to build it. And why? Because that’s not scalable. If we become a Tesla, we need enormous amounts of money to learn how to build a factory and produce vehicles that other people have already mastered.

Mark Seeger ([00:50:02]):

Why would we take that risk and take that on when we don’t need to? Because again, we designed our solution to leverage existing supply chains. So as you pointed out, we did design the vehicle, but we partnered with Suzuki to build it. And Suzuki is a hundred-year-old company. They have manufacturing discipline, the likes of which I am still admire and impressed with today. It is extraordinary and somehow they have the patience to work with us, but they take a level of engineering precision and meticulousness to not just producing our vehicle, but designing our design and adapting it to be designed and to fit their supply chains. And that’s our answer to scale, economically scale, quality scale, but also proliferation. Suzuki builds millions and millions of cars per year. So that’s how you embody that partnership. And in the same way, we partner with civil construction companies and engineering companies because we don’t want to build infrastructure.

Mark Seeger ([00:50:57]):

We don’t know how. But it goes even further than that, which is we also have never run a large transit system before. We have not dealt with customer service or fair collection or all the maintenance required. How do you maintain a fleet of taxis, robotaxis, or glide cars? These are all new things for us and we want to de- risk execution. And so we partner with companies who do that too. So we take a step back and we say, for now, we own the network layer because we believe that the winners here will not be the vehicle owners. The winners will be the corridor owners if I kind of put a business hat on it. And we will partner with and pay people to do all the rest. We’ll pay people to build vehicles, design and build infrastructure and operate and maintain these systems and we’ll help, of course.

Mark Seeger ([00:51:46]):

And later we’ll get into that if it makes sense when we scale the company, which will be a wonderful place to be. But we designed everything with partnership in our DNA again to the same point, which is that if we are successful, if our system works, we have an urgent problem we need to solve, which is 10,000 cities on earth today, nevermind setting the stage for the next generation of urbanization and to support that urbanization migration that’s happening right now at an unprecedented level. You brought up India before. India is a very special market for us. We’ve been working on a go- to-market plan for two years and by the end of this year, you’re going to start to see some pretty big things. I mean, something extraordinary is about to happen in sort of the second half. It’s a market,

Jaspal Singh ([00:52:25]):

It’s tough to crack, but once you crack it, then it’s a huge market.

Mark Seeger ([00:52:29]):

Yep. And I’m very excited with what’s about to happen to your point because once we crack that market is, because in India, people are asking themselves, how do the next billion people move? Is it putting more cars on the roads? And by the way, you know, those roads cannot handle more autonomous or not. It doesn’t matter. It’s just like there’s no physical space. Can you build more roads? Nope. Cities are kind of built up. Can you afford rail? Not at that level. You just can’t. There’s not enough money to do that. So you need something else. So when you think about the problem we’re solving in that sense, you have to think about scale as a fundamental engineering principle to how you engineer the solution. So back to your point, yes, we built the software. It’s our own autonomy stack. We tried to license other autonomy stacks, but they were built for a different problem.

Mark Seeger ([00:53:14]):

They were built for the infinity problem of an open road. Well, we don’t have that. We have a very different problem to solve. Thankfully, a much more constrained problem. We had to invent technology that just didn’t exist. Swarm management, if you want to think about how do you manage swarms of vehicle in an effective way and the AI that underpins that, but also the hardware. But we had to design in a way that other people could produce it, other people could scale it, other people could operate it. That’s a scalable solution. So that’s kind of how we thought about it.

Jaspal Singh ([00:53:40]):

Very interesting. And I really like, I mean, you worked at Apple. It was a short stint, I know, but you bringing that concept about how Apple … A lot of people are now questioning why Apple is not launching their own AI product, but they don’t need to do it. They have their superpower, which is hardware and let other people, they have that physical layer available with them. Now you mentioned in the beginning that you started international business, that’s what I did international marketing too. And the culture play a very big role. Each cities, each country is very different, how they are structured. You’re moving into real world deployment now. You will be in Dubai, you are launching in Boston. I saw you’re talking in New York and you mentioned about Delhi. I know there are some conversations- And to demand Southeast Asia, Philippines. And Southeast Asia.

Mark Seeger ([00:54:24]):

We were talking about, I mean, all over the world.

Jaspal Singh ([00:54:27]):

Yeah. So these are completely different urban environment. I mean, some are dense, some are more oriented, some are more vehicle scooter or pike oriented and all. How do you take … Now, I know you mentioned you’re not going to take a single system, but it says like a single system architecture. How will you adapt to different cities, different culture, different regulatory framework? How you’re planning to do, like you said, you’re preparing a go- to-market strategy for India for two years. I mean, that’s amazing because that take time. A lot of people come to me and say, “Hey, we want to launch.” Yeah, but you need time to understand that market. It’s not easy to do it. What are you doing to crack this code?

Mark Seeger ([00:55:09]):

The way I would frame the answer at a high level before we get into some details that I think might be interesting to talk about is to take the approach that we are a student of other people’s cultures. It starts with that. We are a guest in their country in their culture and that doesn’t just mean respect for what they do and what they have, but it means having the curiosity to understand them in the context that we’re talking about, mobility or infrastructure or any of those doing business. And it starts with that, which is I was taught humility in the concept of going into another country culture and country and being a guest of them, of that environment of the people, of the different cultures that make up a country. I happen to enjoy that. I love learning about cultures and languages. I mean, that is something I have a passion for.

Mark Seeger ([00:56:15]):

And I think growing up between two cultures created a third culture of learning this. But international business helps you frame that way, which is you have to understand who they are and have the humility of not to judge it, but to be curious about why it is the way it is and how you want to fit into that, because you are still a guest of them. You’re not imposing, you can’t impose things even if they want your product or solution or whatever it is you’re doing. So it starts with that principle.

Mark Seeger ([00:56:42]):

Then you start to learn how do you do business there? Nevermind what you’re selling or how you’re selling it. That comes last. So I’ll give you an example and I’m sure you’ll relate to this. Something that Americans generally culturally lean towards in the world of business and parts of Western Europe do this too. It’s contract comes first and the relationship might come later.

Jaspal Singh ([00:57:05]):

It’s very different.

Mark Seeger ([00:57:07]):

Most of the world is the reverse. I want to know who you are. I want to like you, understand where you come from and trust you, and then maybe we’ll get to a contract at the end of the day. Contract last, relationship first, contract last, completely different. So that’s one example, and you’ll know this better than I do, that there’s so many of those nuances of approach that you have to adopt as a different mindset to engender the relationship that allows the dialogue to understand the problem and their appetite for a solution to get to a solution to maybe eventually get to a contract that’s still based on the trust that we established over that whole journey. And in particular for a startup, which we are, where our product doesn’t really exist yet. We’re not an established product that’s been in the market for decades.

Mark Seeger ([00:57:54]):

We don’t have the product tenure credibility to rely on because it doesn’t exist yet. We’re building it. Any startup has to do that. We have relationship integrity and relationships are so important. It’s the key in most other cultures. Again, very different from typically how the United States, not exclusively, but how we’re taught in the US, which is legals and contracts and terms, and then eventually maybe a relationship on the backend. It’s completely opposite. So that’s one thing. Then I’ll give you another example. We do business in Japan. We talked about that in the Middle East, you brought that up before Europe and the US. We see very different types of environments, but a through line across all. And so let’s take Japan for a second. Japan is very methodical, very meticulous, very first principles thinking, very systems thinking. When they built the Shin consent, the bullet trains they have there before anyone else on earth did that, they didn’t try to build a better train.

Mark Seeger ([00:58:53]):

They built a better system. They completely rebuilt from the ground up this idea of a faster train and how to do that. And Japan is very good at systems level thinking and of course infrastructure and robotics and just a very different kind of mindset. And so they do things with precision. Now that also does take some time, but that’s how they do things there. And you get the excellence of technology that we’ve all learned to appreciate from Japanese companies, Japanese technologies, so forth. You go to the Middle East, it’s all about ambition. It is ambition, turbocharge. Yeah. I mean, Dubai as a city didn’t exist 50 years ago and now it’s a metropolis that is big and moderate. I mean, it’s extraordinary. What they pull off, it is ambition, ambition, ambition, but there the governing philosophy is I don’t want to optimize an old technology.

Mark Seeger ([00:59:44]):

I want to leapfrog that straight to, I don’t want to manage traffic. I want to eliminate traffic. I want to leapfrog technology. I’m not going to go from copper wires to cell phones. I’m going to go straight to cell phone. I’m not going to go from congested traffic systems to unsustainable rail to Glydways. No, no, I’m going to go straight to Glydways. And so we have a massive ambition in the Middle East that is just extraordinary. The US, enormous demand. I mean, how many of our cities in the US are just choked with congestion, but it’s very bureaucratic and so it takes a little bit more time.

Mark Seeger ([01:00:17]):

So you can make that model for every country and every part of the world, but the through line is still there. And the through line is that people are realizing that managing traffic is a losing battle. You have to eliminate it. You have to go to a flow network. Or if I want to be more intellectual about it, people are realizing that an interruption-based mobility paradigm can’t scale and will never scale and we need something else and we need a flow network, which is what we provide. It’s what Glydways is. And so the through lines are still there, but the process is very, very different and it’s extraordinary, but it is relationship heavy because we don’t have 30 years of market presence where you have credibility based on what you’ve been doing for the last 30 years. We’re doing it afresh. And so that’s just how we’re orientated.

Mark Seeger ([01:01:04]):

And last thing I’ll say on this is that our mission statement, let me say it differently.

Mark Seeger ([01:01:13]):

Once flow becomes abundant, access to opportunity expands for everyone. For sure. And that’s why we do what we do and that’s Glydways. And that is a human first principle that we have found so far connects with almost everyone we engage with. Whether we’re the right solution or not, we’ll figure that out. But that fundamental thought that for most people’s aspirational abundance of flow, access to opportunity for everyone is a thought we can all align to. And that provides a platform for getting into details and rational dialectic discourse about a solution, but it’s magic and it’s fun and it’s hard. And that’s what we’re doing.

Jaspal Singh ([01:01:58]):

It’s hard. It’s a hard problem to solve. It’s not an easy problem to solve. One other hard problem to solve is most of these transit systems, they are built for efficiency and you were mentioning about keep running because you have to run, otherwise even you have five people or 10 people, what they are missing is experience. And what today’s time people are looking, especially the younger generation or everybody, they’re like, “What is the experience I can get? ” How do you bring that delightful experience in Glydways for Passenger? I don’t think it’s people just want to go from point A to point B. It’s like how that experience can also be changed with these vehicle. Are you planning something to do differently in these vehicles so that the experience is different? It’s not just the journey, but it’s the experience.

Mark Seeger ([01:02:48]):

And I’ll take it a step further because I think this is where you’re going. If the experience isn’t good, now people don’t want to use it and you’ve got the exact opposite problem of declining ridership rather than what we want is increasing ridership or increasing utilizing. And you’re absolutely right. It is about the experience. We can talk about the economics and the physics and the engineering. If going back to the coffee analogy, my coffee tastes bad, if the coffee isn’t good, no one’s going to buy my coffee. So we got to start with first principles there, and that kind of gels with how we think about things. Look, the vehicle experience for us, we have engineering solutions and ideas that are massive and we’re super thrilled, but we’ve parked all of that for chapter two. And the reason why is that we believe we have to do one thing and one thing really, really, really well.

Mark Seeger ([01:03:39]):

And that is I need to provide a ride that is available, accessible. So that means wheelchair compatible, bicycle compatible, double wide baby stroller compatible, luggage compatible, all those things, environmentally compatible, all that bit. Available, accessible, affordable, safe and reliable. That’s the baseline. Everything else from there is sort of icing on the cake that we want to get to. So our vehicle, luckily, even though the Glydways, the width of our lanes are two meters wide, which is pretty big. Our vehicle’s only one and a half meters wide, but we’re able to take two business class airplane seats, put them side by side and then four of them. So one, two, three, four. So you have a lot of space. Even freakishly tall guys like me, like you were pointing out at the beginning, I can sit on opposite sides of the vehicle and our legs will never touch.

Mark Seeger ([01:04:30]):

So we have a big vehicle. We have great air conditioning or heating, whatever your environment requires. In Dubai, that’s a big deal. We have Bluetooth audio, Wi-Fi. It’s personalizable, but it’s comfortable and it’s clean and it’s available and it’s safe and it’s quiet. Well, one of the jokes that we like to think about is that, and this was inspired by the Japanese, we want the vehicle to be so smooth it can pass the martini test, which is if I have a martini glass that is filled and I put it on a table, will slosh around during my journey. That’s what we have to do. So we’re doing that. That’s what we’re focused on. Nothing more. Could we put in wireless chargers? Of course. Could we put in TVs? 100%. Could we put in a fridge and sell amenities? We can do all those things, but we’re not going to do those things right now because we want to do that first and we want to pass the cost savings onto the customer so that we can get the cost as low as possible so that you use it as often as possible.

Mark Seeger ([01:05:29]):

Now we’ve created something that works. So we think about it in that regard. That’s number one. Clean, safe, comfortable, reliable. Does it deliver you friction-free, fast, but at a cost you want to pay? Then we think about scalability, which goes back to the prior conversation. Can we give you the destinations you actually want to go to? And we’re finding something out. This is magical. This is the kind of stuff that makes it so exciting. We’re finding that private developers, shopping mall owners, like hotel owners, office towers, they’re saying, “Hey, there’s a Glydways running near my building. Can you build a spur into my lobby? Because we’re small vehicles, we’re electric, we’re quiet. We can go into the lobby. We can do that. ” So we’re starting to invent above and beyond things that didn’t exist before like elevated elevator or lobby to lobby mobility systems or parking lot to destination mobility system like we were talking about before and so on.

Mark Seeger ([01:06:30]):

So we have a pretty large innovation path that we’re really thrilled about. And one of the challenges is saying all that’s great, but start with the baseline and work up from there. Prove this first, then get to that. Do we need a ceiling with blinky starry lights and an LCDP? Maybe- I do it, but not now.

Mark Seeger ([01:06:49]):

Not now. Here’s the argument that goes through my head and I think most of my team members, I know my design team thinks this way. Every feature has a cost. Can I justify an increase, even a small increase to a daily ticket cost to a daily commuter that uses Glydways twice a day, five days a week, maybe six days a week? Can I justify that extra incremental cost because of that feature? And if I can’t pass that test, park it for later.

Jaspal Singh ([01:07:17]):

No, it make completely sense. And I mean, even though the cultures are very different, I was in Nairobi, they have these Matatus and the guys was telling me there are people who have a customized Matatus with the customized music and all.

Jaspal Singh ([01:07:30]):

And people ready to pay more for those vehicle. And I was like, “Man, this is crazy.” But like you said, most of the people, they want to pay the lowest fare and want to get the basic service and all. And those feature can come. Like you mentioned, you can have more customized vehicle, you can have themed vehicle like I was in China and they have this Panda trains customized fully to Panda. And let’s say you launch a service to Zoo. So probably the vehicle can be designed in a way which look like animal theme or something. Yeah, there is not one can do and it’s much more possible given the vehicles are very modular and all. Now I want to discuss a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey because that’s very interesting. I thought you did three venture and you said it’s six.

Mark Seeger ([01:08:13]):

Yeah, not all of them succeeded, but I have-

Jaspal Singh ([01:08:15]):

But that’s a way you need to keep trying and that’s a passion. What are the common threads across all these ventures and is there a pattern to the problem you are drawn to in all these ventures? What keep you motivated? Because I did couple of venture and I can tell you after two, three venture, you were like, “Man, I’m tired.” What keep you motivated to go on?

Mark Seeger ([01:08:38]):

Yeah, wow, that’s a great question. Well, the through line for me has always been a belief guiding principle. Let’s call it a belief. I’ve not had to say it before, so let me think about … I’ve always had a belief that people who have a skillset, like engineering as an example, a skillset of any kind, have a responsibility to apply that unique skillset to solving any one of the problems that beset our world, of which there are many social, economic, environmental, technological. I mean, there’s political, there’s lots of problems because I believe in creating a sustainable world culture where the baseline quality of life and opportunity set for people goes up a little bit because it’s sort of area under the curve. If I help a small group of people achieve great things that does less than if I help a lot of people achieve just a little bit more because the area under the curve kind of problem.

Mark Seeger ([01:09:48]):

And so I’ve always believed that rather always all the things I’ve done with the exception of the genes thing, which is a whole different story, I’ve always tried to create a better product that helps more people with less resource. Now, is that less money? Is it less energy? Is it less carbon, biodegradable plastics like we were talking about before? It’s sort of that thought because we have a lot of concerns in our world today and there’s so many things that we as a society are doing that are not sustainable and I have to live in that world, so do you, but so do my kids and their kids’ kids. And I believe that we have a responsibility to ourselves and then the next generation to make it better, not worse. I mean, it really is that. And then yeah, I mean, it sounds lofty, so I apologize for that. This is kind of how-

Jaspal Singh ([01:10:36]):

No, no, but this is something your greater calling is like something you want to bring some change, not to just for yourself, for your family, but at large with society. And like you said, if you have knowledge and skillset, it’s your duty to make some changes. If you don’t do, it’s like you are failing using your skillset and it’s like superpower. You have a superpower and you’re like, “I don’t want to use it to make any change in the world.” So you need to use … No, Glydways, you started 10 years back. A lot of people think, “Ah, Glydways now is in news and you just started.

Jaspal Singh ([01:11:10]):

One two year back.” I mean, you started in 2015 and closed a very big round of $170 million series C and you’re already started looking for series D. So first, Congratulation for this success. It’s not easy.

Mark Seeger ([01:11:23]):

No.

Jaspal Singh ([01:11:24]):

And I tell people being from mobility space, it’s not easy to build startup in mobility space. I mean, it’s very hard. Building startup is hard, but it’s 2x if you’re building something in mobility. What has been your funding journey being like or any advice you want to give it to other founder? Because I think what you are doing, it takes a lot of conviction to tackle something as complex and as capital intensive or resource intensive. It’s not easy. I mean, you made it look very simple. You like, “Oh, we designed the vehicle,” but I know it’s not that simple. I would say try to, it’s a humility at your end. You try to show like, ah, it’s not a big deal, but I can imagine it’s really a big deal to put it on the ground. What is advice you want to give to other founder?

Mark Seeger ([01:12:11]):

Well, that’s a tough question only because I want to think about a high level rather than all the details that I’ve learned and frankly, those details are me making infinite mistakes and learning from them. So the longer you do this, the more mistakes you make, the more you learn. But at a high level, I think fundamentally you have to believe in your idea and you have to believe in yourself and that’s when you start something, but very quickly yourself becomes your team. Glydways is nearly 300 people. We have eight offices around the world. They are our team. That’s who we work with, who I work with. You don’t work for people, you work with people and we have to believe in ourselves. And when you start up a company of any kind, and particularly to your point, a really hard company or really hard venture, you will have people who will say, “I love your idea, but I don’t believe in you, ” or, “I don’t believe in your idea, but I believe in you, or I don’t believe in any of it.

 

Mark Seeger ([01:13:09]):

” Most people say no to you. Raising money and convincing people to work with you, whether they’re giving you time or capital or something else, most people will say no because most people won’t believe in some aspect of you. And we have this right now, we still have this people or a particular person who absolutely doesn’t believe in you no matter what you’ve achieved, but, and there’s always a but. And I think the through line with that is you have to have the conviction. And here’s how I’ll put it. It’s not about finding a belief that you don’t have or working your way up to a level of self-confidence, level 12 instead of level six on a 10-point skiff. There is that, but that’s not what I mean.

Mark Seeger ([01:13:55]):

You have to know that you are right. I will tell you with absolute authenticity and conviction that I am right, that Glydways is right. Glydways is inevitable, AV 2.0 is inevitable, inevitable, flow networks are inevitable and Glydways is the solution. I will tell you that because I believe it not because I have faith because I know it to be true no matter who you are, you could be a billionaire, powerful person saying you don’t believe in me or the idea, find water off a duck’s back because I know I’ve seen the future. I have been to the future and I’ve seen it as a fact and I’ve come back saying, “I don’t care what you say. I know it’s true. I’ve seen the future.” Facts don’t lie. That’s the level of conviction I have and you have to have that. Now, if you don’t have it, the question becomes, is your idea that idea or do you need to explore the idea further?

Mark Seeger ([01:14:50]):

Because some people have ideas, even myself, I’ve had ideas where I was like, “Yeah, I think the world is a better place with this idea, but not so sure.” If you go through that thought exercise and it takes time and it takes lots of conversations to realize you have or don’t have that conviction, that is the best test of is your idea backable and do you have what it takes and will you be able to attract people who have what it takes to execute it? Because you’re right, it’s harder than you will ever think it is and then harder still. And so it’s not about self-confidence, you have to have that or self-assurance and you need to have passion. All that’s true, but you have to know you are right and your idea is right. And if you have that, no one can stop you.

Jaspal Singh ([01:15:33]):

That conviction is very important. No, rightly mentioned because there will be a lot of terms and I’ve worked with a lot of founders and that’s a difference I see, those who don’t quit even things are not in a favorable term because they have that conviction. They know, like you said, you’ve been to the future and come back and say, “Guys, after 10 year, it will happen.” And people are like, “I don’t believe.” Uber in 2000, I would say 2008 or nine, it’s like 10. Somebody you ask in 2001 or 2002, you can book a ca through your phone, people are like, “Ah, it’s not possible, but you need to travel 10 year ahead and come back.” And no, I think Guideway is a very interesting concept. And like I said, the time and technology is right. Now you guys are scaling up and like you mentioned 300 people, eight offices, and I’m pretty sure it will multiply 2X or 3X in next one or two year.

Jaspal Singh ([01:16:26]):

Given your fond or experience, what kind of people do you look for when you are building a team for something this ambitious? Because like you mentioned, some people believe in you, some people believe in idea, some people believe in both. What kind of people you are bringing together?

Mark Seeger ([01:16:42]):

Yeah, I mean we are so lucky our team that we just have the most incredible people. I mean, look, what I’m about to say has been said so many times before and it’s true, have the most amazing people on our team and it is a privilege to work with them. And what attracts them is not necessarily a lens that we look through to hire only people that are great people to work with because you do that no matter what. Everyone tries to hire the best. No one hires mediocrity, sort of obvious table stakes. But what we found is that people who gravitate towards Glydways as an engineer, as a business person, as a designer, it doesn’t matter what vector you take, it’s people who can connect with the idea and the mission and the opportunity space. That’s a through line I can think of. Can you come to work and work with amazing people doing something amazing technically or economically, or it doesn’t matter what your role is or what you want to do, it’s the opportunity to work with amazing people, which we have doing something that we happen to think is really amazing.

Mark Seeger ([01:17:48]):

And those are the kind of people we connect. And I want to make another point, which kind of goes back to your entrepreneurial foundation as well, because it applies to founders, but it also applies to every employee I feel, which is that a company from day zero or day one is nothing. It’s just people.

Mark Seeger ([01:18:13]):

It’s either a person or a couple people. And 10 years later, yes, we have technology and customers, but it’s still people and business is people. It links to the culture question we were discussing earlier. And so only my advice and my experience and my guiding principle is to only work with people who value people. The moment you hear out of someone’s mouth directly or indirectly, because there’s many ways to reveal this, that I love the idea, but the people not so much walk away. They don’t understand that this is a human enterprise and it’s about people first. It’s not just for people, they’re your end customer and your investors, but it’s about people and it’s about the people that try to create an institution that is so strong that the people can then fade away and the institution still survives. So a lot of people ask me, “What’s your end state?

Mark Seeger ([01:19:17]):

What defines success? Is it your first customer, your first dollar revenue? Is it an IPO?” I don’t think about it in those terms. I think about in the following that my mission to the degree I can contribute is to create an idea, an institution that can survive independent of the people that built it or said differently, an institution that can out-survive the founding team that built it because otherwise you’re dependent on people that’s not sustainable, it’s not scalable and it’s not sustainable. And so people who don’t understand that, you’ll find investors who don’t understand that, employees who don’t, whatever, a lot of people, those are not compatible with that mission. It’s not about the technology. All that is secondary. It’s fundamentally we are building an institution. Yes, it has to be for- profit and has to scale and do technical things and economic things and provide healthcare plans and all that is fundamental, but the foundation is we are building something with people for people and the people are the ones that carry that through.

Mark Seeger ([01:20:20]):

And if you don’t believe in those people, stop. Stop. That’s my takeaway. I don’t know if that’s valuable.

 

Jaspal Singh ([01:20:27]):

It’s very interesting because I always tell my team as well is you need to always think about live without us being in the picture. Will this system survive? Will this geography or will this market survive without me? I started it, but you need to imagine if you die tomorrow morning, what will happen? Will it collapse or will it grow? Now this is my last question and you said you see in the future looking ahead 10, 15 year, what do you think will fundamentally change in urban mobility? You think it has to change now in 10, 15 year?

Mark Seeger ([01:21:05]):

Yeah, that is a good question. Our perspective is that no on specific technology can solve all problems, but a platform can as long as it’s flexible and adaptable. So I’ll give you a little hint as to where we’re going as a company. We’ve talked about Glydways being a mobility system based on continuous movement, a flow network. That flow network requires three technologies, electric autonomous vehicles, lanes that they operate on and AI software to coordinate them. And it solves a real need. That is where the need is. We’re trying to move people. We’ve talked about that.

Mark Seeger ([01:21:57]):

A version of Glydways not too far away is that our vehicles, which are cars, and it’s why we designed them like a car with four over tires, can be a hybrid between a flow network and a robotaxi. Okay. What does that mean? It means a vehicle, glidecar, can come off the Glydways network and use open roads and then come back onto a Glydways network and zip you where you need to be. And so that’s really interesting because now you’re saying like, “Hey, the network layer is the Glydways system and the embodiment is a hybrid and is flexible between high-capacity lanes where I need them and I can use the open roads when that’s appropriate.” It’s a hybrid because everything absolutely … Glydways can do that. Glydways can be backwards compatible with open roads and be a hybrid solution. Not now, but you asked 10-20 years from now, that’s what we think of it.

Mark Seeger ([01:22:51]):

No other mobility system can do that. You can’t take an autonomous vehicle, a robotaxi, and immediately transplant it onto a dedicated flow network. So there’s many reasons why that doesn’t work, but a Glydways system can do both. And

Mark Seeger ([01:23:06]):

So we see a world where there’s that kind of play going on.

Jaspal Singh ([01:23:10]):

So it’s basically. There’s a point-to-point mobility, which is people always dream about that you feel it’ll be possible picking you from your lobby and the hotel and dropping you inside the airport, or similar, picking you from your office building and then dropping you stayed away to your home. No, I see world is changing very fast and there’ll be a lot of things we will see innovation and all.

Now, thanks, Matt, firstly, for a great conversation. Really learned a lot. I mean, I noted at some point I will use some of your quotes in different places, thanks for that. We generally end this episode with the rapid fire round. So if you are ready, we’ll have some question for you.

 

Mark Seeger ([01:23:51]):

I’ll do my best. Let’s do it.

Jaspal Singh ([01:23:53]):

Okay. So let’s say if you are not doing a transportation startup right now, what else you will be doing at this stage?

Mark Seeger ([01:24:01]):

Sleeping.

Jaspal Singh ([01:24:02]):

Sleeping. So doing nothing.

Mark Seeger ([01:24:06]):

I need to catch up on a lot of sleep. I

Jaspal Singh ([01:24:08]):

Can imagine. I can imagine after so many ventures and living in so many different places. Now you travel, you lived in different places. Your favorite city in the world and why?

Mark Seeger ([01:24:20]):

I have several and they’re usually related to food and people like where are my friends and even that is dispersed. So I love cities that are open, accessible, and different. The more different they are, the more interesting they are. So those are cities in North Asia, South Asia, Europe, even in the US, India. So I have a lot of places. Now I will say because that’s a cop out answer, the best food and sake, which is something I like to drink, I found is in the city of Kyoto. So that’s one of my cities.

Jaspal Singh ([01:24:50]):

Kyoto is beautiful. I mean, the city is also beautiful. Now a book or idea that has influenced your thinking.

Mark Seeger ([01:24:58]):

I don’t even have time to read, so I haven’t read in a very, very long time, but I’ll say people who have influenced my thinking a lot are professors in school who taught international business, one in particular where the thinking is what we talked about earlier, which is that human connection isn’t just about sharing a meal or sharing a drink. It’s about having a mindset that is curious about the other person as a different expression of humanity, which is fascinating. You know your expression of humanity, your friends, your family, but the mindset to learn how to be curious about someone else’s, that’s probably one of the most amazing gifts you can find. And when you achieve that mutual curiosity, interesting things happen. So I think people who embody that are the most interesting and the writings that reflect that to me are the most interesting.

 

 

Jaspal Singh ([01:25:48]):

My wife always complained because I start talking to people on the way and she’s like, “Why you just talk to random people? ” But I fully agree with you. That’s where you build a connection. Now, one thing do you wish you should have learned early in life?

Mark Seeger ([01:26:03]):

It’s not one thing. There’s many, many things. A lot of mistakes. I would just really say patients, people who want to build, people who want to do, people who have the audacity to think they can do change things, that is a definition of impatience. And so I made my parents crazy by living with this ethos as a result of impatience. I kind of phrase it this way, which is that for a long time I lived with the ethos that said anything that is worth doing is worth doing to excess. And I think I would’ve been better served dialing that down a bit because it drove my parents nuts.

Jaspal Singh ([01:26:43]):

I know my kids do that same. They are impatient at the same time. You want them to be faster, but at the same time, you want them to be a little bit more patient. Now, this is the last question and I know what you want to change, but if there is something else, if you could change one thing in world, what would we be? I know you may say congestion, but is there anything you really want to change in the world?

Mark Seeger ([01:27:07]):

There is. If I ever had infinite time and wasn’t working on this- portable water.

Mark Seeger ([01:27:12]):

Yeah, exactly. It would be potable water, drinking water and getting chemicals and microplastics out of the water. I’m really concerned with the pollution that is now global of microplastics and the effect of microplastics in the human body, but also some forever chemicals. And so I think that as population goes up and potable drinking water sources are reduced and contaminated, finding an economic way, a sustainable way to provide drinking water, I think is one of the biggest problems we are facing now around the world, but that’s only going to get worse. But right now, I just want to focus on flow networks and getting cities and life to be sustainable so that people have the option and the opportunity to go explore solving those kinds of problems.

Jaspal Singh ([01:27:54]):

So when the Flow Network will be successful, you pass on the button, probably the flow water can be the next. I like it. I like it. Yeah. Mark, thank you so much. This was really insightful conversation. I really enjoyed it and I really wish you all the best with Glydways. I know you guys are doing amazing job and everything ahead, whatever you want to achieve. I wish you a lot of success with that.

Mark Seeger ([01:28:15]):

Just well, thank you so much for today. Great conversation, good questions, and anything we can do to help let us know. So thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you.

 

Jaspal Singh ([01:28:23]):

Thank you for listening to this podcast. If you enjoy this episode, please don’t forget to give us a five-star rating and hit the subscribe button. This will really help us to spread our message across the globe. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, feel free to reach out to us at info (a) mobility – innovators.com. I look forward to see you next time. Thank you.