The rise and fall of the Jump bike, the electric machine that wooed Uber into a $200 million sale and is now being discarded by the thousands

Source: Vice

Source: Vice

Employees were passionate about their mission, and the company had spirit, but the tech was flimsy at the time. One of SoBi's first customers was the San Francisco International Airport in 2012, and the bikes hardly ever worked.

SoBi finally saw its shining moment in 2016: the company became profitable and rolled out 1,000 bikes in a mega-launch with the Nike-sponsored Biketown program in Portland, Oregon.

The market would balloon, firms would learn to skirt lengthy approval processes, and startups capable of scaling large and fast would entice Silicon Valley VCs left and right.

At the time, New Lab somewhat ironically warned against a "cautionary tale: the flood of bicycles into the market overwhelmed demand, resulting in vast bicycle graveyards" in China.

Lime, Spin, and Bird did this unlawfully in San Francisco in 2018, much to the dismay of city leaders and residents.

It was an approach that Rzepecki's company rebelled against on moral ground.

Source: Vice

It was intuitive, with the motor communicating with the pedals and smoothly increasing and decreasing power as needed.

"This was like the first time using an iPhone," ex-Uber exec Dmitry Shevelenko, who test rode the e-bike before the acquisition, told Vice in June. "It just feels magical."

It was the San Francisco-based company's first acquisition of a ride-sharing firm that utilized a mode of transportation that wasn't the car.

Using bikes and e-scooters for shorter trips instead of cars made more sense, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in late 2018, and would help the company grow its total userbase.

When it first landed on the streets, riders could pay $2 for every 30 minutes they were using the bike.

Uber had an established web of cities where it had launched its carsharing, a network that could help get Jump bikes onto the streets, then-head of new mobility at Uber Rachel Holt said at Business Insider's 2018 IGNITION conference.

Rzepecki would stay on and report to Khosrowshahi.

Source: Forbes

The company had never before been profitable, and the IPO ushered in a fresh sense of urgency for the firm to turn a profit. The pressure to scale and hit growth metrics strained Jump employees at Uber as well.

As Business Insider's Brittany Chang reported in July 2019, Uber started raising prices on its Jump dockless e-bikes in several US cities.

Uber had acquired Jump as scandals surrounding co-founder Travis Kalanick were still plaguing the company.

Former Jump employees echoed Vice's reporting to Business Insider, saying many leaders within the "new mobility" unit lacked experience doing bike-share, which is fundamentally a hardware business compared to Uber's core ride-hailing operations.

"A lot of the leadership at Uber was not qualified to be in their position," one former employee said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "All of the NeMo leadership was not qualified. They put Rachel Holt in and she had no idea how to run a hardware company. Most say that she ran it into the ground."

In one instance, the source said, Uber had purchased "thousands and thousands" of bikes that just sat in warehouses until being deployed in local markets.

"That's one of probably the biggest reasons why we had a lot of money issue," the employee said.

The company resorted to private security guards as a solution, but one of the contractors reportedly tackled a Black teen girl who was riding a Jump bike at the time.

On January 8, Business Insider reported Rzepecki and a handful of other founding employees were leaving Uber. In early May, The Information reported Uber was considering leading a $170 million emergency fundraising round for the e-scooter startup Lime.

In the same week, Wayne Ting, a former longtime Uber executive, took over as Lime's CEO.

Jump employees, meanwhile, were largely let go to cut costs as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged Uber's revenue. Not one designer behind the Jump bike or scooter will be on the team under Lime, as of right now.

In late May, footage surfaced of tens of thousands of the red bikes and scooters being scrapped, according to CNN. Uber confirmed that they were being recycled.

He's reportedly using some of the cash from his $200 million sale to the ride-sharing giant to fund a charter city, or a politically autonomous, private city at an undisclosed location. The city would perhaps welcome the anticipated flood of fleeing Silicon Valley tech workers who are now remote.

Rzepecki told the Telegraph he was drawn to environmentally friendly and socially responsible private cities after witnessing the glaring wealth disparity while living in San Francisco.

Operating in a self-governed city free from a traditional government, Rzepecki said, could allow for a new way of addressing issues like homelessness and sustainability.