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Grant Ryan dreamed up a radical reinvention of the bicycle and now he wants to sell his vision to the world

People keep telling Grant Ryan he should stop calling himself an inventor. Sounds mad, they say, all lab coat and electric-shock hair when the look he should be portraying is of pinstriped pragmatism. Lord knows what they’d say about his ambitions for his latest enterprise, the YikeBike. Ryan’s “big, hairy goal” — so big as to be laughable, he concedes — is that one day his electric bike will be the most commonly owned transport device in the world. Yes, you heard right: more ubiquitous than the bicycle.

 

“It just makes the project that much more interesting,” he says with a grin.

 

The business world knows Grant Ryan as a serial entrepreneur with an impressive track record. He was the guy behind Global Brain, an internet search technology that he dreamed up on a couch and later sold to an American news organisation for US$32 million, one of the biggest tech deals done by a New Zealand firm. After the dotcom crash, Ryan and a group of investors bought back the technology at fire sale rates and relaunched it as SLI Systems, now making $10 million in revenue.

 

Then there was Eurekster, another Web 2.0 company and Ryan’s great “near-miss”, after the American investors involved turned down a multimillion-dollar offer from Google.

 

But the software thing was an aberration. The YikeBike, by contrast, is pure Grant Ryan, a product of both his mechanical engineering background and a PhD in ecological economics that got him thinking about clean transport solutions.

 

One British writer memorably described the YikeBike as “the extraordinary lovechild of a Segway and a Penny Farthing with dwarfism”, and the thing screams of an inventor leaping from his bath in a big ‘eureka!’ moment — or in this case from a couch, which is where Ryan does much of his creative thinking.

 

He says the idea came to him after seeing the Segway, which for all its futuristic appeal is also heavy, expensive, complicated technology that in many places is not road legal. “I thought ‘as a professional inventor, how would I solve that?’”

 

You could say Ryan set out to reinvent if not the wheel then the bicycle.

 

“The basic bike hasn’t changed for 100 years and the reason is that it’s a magical design. If you change any angles it just doesn’t work. Our aim was to find another configuration that was inherently stable. Then we asked ‘how would you design something that only went 20km an hour, so you wouldn’t need as big a wheel base?’ If you could make it dramatically smaller it could link with other transport forms, you could stick it in the back of your car or take it on the train.”

 

When Ryan says ‘we’ he means himself and YikeBike co-founder Peter Higgins, an old family friend and a fellow engineer. (Ryan’s business history is notable for the involvement of friends and family. Older brother Shaun runs SLI Systems, a cousin is project engineer on the Yike and his father Jim invested in both. “I don’t try to keep it in the family,” he says, “they just happen to be very good at what they do.”)

 

The pair tinkered away for five years in a Christchurch suburban garage developing the Yike, loosely based on the geometry of the Penny Farthing. Pedals and chain were quickly discarded for an electric motor to save on weight. They went with carbon fibre for the same reason. Weighing less than 10kg, including the battery, you can lift the final incarnation with a couple of fingers.

 

But the truly ingenious thing about the bike is the way, with a few quick twists of some levers, it becomes not a bike, but something you can pop into a shoulder bag before walking into your downtown meeting.

 

Ryan says when he rides the Yike people stop and stare, even applaud. But seeing it being folded away is when the penny drops — “it’s ‘oh, now it makes sense’”.

 

“And then they ride it for a while, and they say ‘this is easy and fun, and it goes up hills and over bumps’. And then they’re like ‘I could actually see this being useful’.”

 

And there’s no denying its novelty appeal. When the Yike was unveiled to the world at the Euro Bike trade fair in September, the international media went gaga, with big splashes in UK broadsheets, coverage on Good Morning America, CNN and several European news shows.

 

Ryan, whose list of potential ventures numbers 100, says one of his most important criteria for deciding whether to do something is how much fun it will be. “And I’ve never done a project that’s as much fun as this one.”

 

On a blustery, wet afternoon — hardly ideal biking weather — I meet the inventor-entrepreneur at YikeBike HQ in the industrial part of Addington. The suburban tinkering phase is over, and for the past year Ryan and a small team of engineers and industrial designers have been working fulltime in expectation of going into production some time around April 2010, targeting the European market.

 

If Ryan is feeling the pressure, you wouldn’t know it. He’s relaxed, down to earth — more Canty engineering grad than wild-haired boffin. But he’s clearly an extremely sharp operator.

 

Matthew Houtman, a partner in Pioneer Capital, which has invested in SLI Systems and the YikeBike, says what makes Ryan so backable is “his tenaciousness, entrepreneurial bent and his raw intelligence. He’s a very good person to be involved with”.

 

Paul Dyson thought so. The expat Australian with 25 years’ experience in international technology companies — including as CEO of an Indian-based electric bike company — was persuaded to join the YikeBike board after taking one for a top-secret test ride in an underground Auckland car park.

 

“Grant said he had a vision to develop a completely new form of transport that would be more ubiquitous than the bicycle. I thought ‘well, this should be interesting’. And then he showed me, and I thought ‘my God, this is interesting. It’s amazing’. Grant is a very astute businessman, a clever entrepreneur and, frankly, a brilliant inventor.”

 

He was always going to be one. Growing up in Otautau, Western Southland, and later Invercargill, the middle of three boys, Ryan watched his father tinker away in his workshop and took careful note. Jim Ryan was a chicken farmer, a very successful one, and being a Southland man-of-the-land what he conjured up in the garage was always practical. The best — a plastic cover to protect newborn lambs from the fatal southerlies — he sold around the world. Ryan Senior, an investor in his son’s ventures since Global Brain, remembers once having problems with a machine he was developing. “Unbeknown to me, Grant went away and built a model out of Lego to help me visualise what I was trying to do.

 

“His mother came across his art folder the other day and it was just full of drawings of cogs and machines.”
Glenn Martin, deviser of the Martin Jetpack and a friend of Ryan’s, says what any inventor really needs is constant optimism — “that and an outrageous, big-arsed vision”.

 

Ryan has never lacked for either. When he left Southland Boys, where he was runner-up to Dux, he wrote ‘inventor’ for probable career in the school yearbook.

 

“They said ‘no, you have to be serious’. But I was serious. So I went about trying to work out how you could do these creative things. I chose mechanical engineering. I went off track later when I did the PhD in ecological economics, but I did that because I was fascinated, and that’s always a good reason, I think.”

 

Ryan studied long-term constraints on economic growth — peak oil, water scarcity, the full catastrophe. Perversely, he came out feeling more optimistic. “Humans have an innate ability to solve problems. I’m a big believer in that, and it’s one reason I’m doing the clean, green transport thing.

 

“And I’m a huge believer in innovation. It’s my day job, but also theoretically I understand the value of that to an economy.”

 
Ryan, who’s a director of Canterbury Development Corporation and has been on the boards of the government’s Venture Investment Fund and the Foundation for Research Science and Technology, sees plenty of room to improve how we go about commercialising smart ideas, particularly in the universities and Crown Research Institutes, which he says tend to put millstones around the necks of their spinoff companies.

 

“We do it badly, and partly that’s because of a deep lack of understanding in those places of how difficult it is to start up a company.

 
“In order for a startup to survive you have to have a small team utterly focused on one thing, and they have to be left to do whatever they need to do.”

 

It’s what Ryan thrives on. “I like the ill-defined uncertainty of startups. Some people find it too unstructured and messy. But I love that, when it’s all raw and fresh and you don’t know where it is going to go.”

 

Even so, with two kids and a mortgage, Ryan had to think hard before throwing in his job at Industrial Research to start his first company. But the idea behind Global Brain — that each time someone interacts with a search page you can learn something with which to improve the experience for the next user — seemed so obvious he was amazed nobody had done it. The thought of having a crack became obsessive, and he said goodbye forever to a regular paycheck.

 

“Of course that first time you don’t realise how hard it is. I once heard someone say that knowing how difficult it is to start a business, anyone who’d do it a second time must have a personality disorder. I guess I’m afflicted. I’m an addicted entrepreneur.”

 

No wonder, given the success he enjoyed first time out of the blocks. Ryan says the eventual sale of Global Brain to the internet arm of NBC was a crazy time, “like winning Lotto every two weeks for a year”. Unfortunately, much of the deal was tied up in stock that became worthless when the tech wreck hit.

 

“But what do you need a Lear jet for, really?” asks Ryan. “I made more than enough to continue to play around on projects. It’s my one expensive vice, I guess.”

 

But for all the talk of couch-dreaming, the word that keeps coming back on Ryan is he is pragmatic. Paul Dyson says Ryan understands the essentials of turning good ideas into successful businesses.

 

“He has a clear sense of how to prioritise, especially in the startup context, when as CEO you have to be thinking of everything. He also has a remarkable sense for recruiting good people; his team is a very impressive bunch.

 

“I’ve met a lot of inventors and entrepreneurs and Grant is not typical at all in my experience. He doesn’t have that struggle with personal ownership of the vision. If someone else’s idea is better, he goes with it.”

 

“Grant is very outcomes focused,” adds Matthew Houtman. “Unlike a lot of engineers, he is very focused on delivering to market, rather than building in a garage the perfect widget.”

 

Says Ryan: “As an inventor, the real buzz is seeing your thing used. That little search algorithm [for SLI Systems] is used over a billion times a year by millions of people. And I really can envisage in 20 years visiting different parts of the world and seeing these bikes buzzing around and thinking ‘our little team in Christchurch had something to do with that’.”

 

They won’t be Yikes, though. Ryan’s strategy is to pitch his New Zealand-assembled, ultra-light carbon-fibre version at the top of the market, priced somewhere north of €3000 (more than NZ$6000), a price the Europeans in particular don’t seem to find off-putting.

 

“When we started we had the choice, did we want to be Toyota or Porsche? Porsche are consistently in the top two or three for profitability.”

 

The plan is to license someone overseas to make a far cheaper, mass-market version, with Yike clipping the ticket. Several bike and car manufacturers have expressed interest. “Potentially, we think it could be made cheaper than a normal bike.”

 

If that’s true, then you can easily imagine how useful something like the Yike might be as a commuting tool in a congested overseas city, where people live in cramped apartment buildings on the outskirts, catching buses to train stations, trains to downtown, and on and on.

 

“Last year was the first year that more people lived in cities than rurally, and that trend is accelerating. You can’t just throw more cars into the cities,” says Ryan.

 

With the rain easing, he grabs the chance to show the reporter the Yike in action. He takes off up the road, turns, comes hurtling back, the inventor riding his extraordinary idea down a backstreet in Addington. Will the Yike take over the world? Who knows. But Ryan’s going to enjoy the ride.

 

With public transportation costs going up and reliability going down New Yorkers are left wanting an alternative. But vehicles are costly and there is still that tiny issue of parking. I mean, if you could afford to pay a second rent you wouldn’t be living in 600 square feet to begin with right?

 

With the addition of improved bike lanes around the city cycling has become much safer here in town. Perhaps you’ve considered riding but fear having to hang a bike rack over your kitchen table or the inevitable theft from outside your door. Everybody knows those locks don’t work.

 

What if I told you about a motor-powered bike that fits in your coat closet, and under your desk at work? What if I said it was light and portable and no harder to lug around than a messenger bag or that suitcase you call a purse? So say the creators of YikeBike.

 

YikeBike Created in New Zealand the strategy is this: “use smart technology to solve the problems of our increasingly congested, polluted and stressful cities.” Weighing around 22 pounds and costing between 4 and 5 grand this mini bike goes 12.5 miles per hour and folds up in a minute flat. Sustained by a clean energy lithium battery one charge lasts you 6 miles. Taking just 30 minutes to charge back up again, it’s perfect for the harried New Yorker.

 

Here’s the best part, when traffic is at its daily standstill you are fully entitled to those freshly paved bike lanes. With rear attached handle bars, a small wheel at the back, and one large in front the design may cause people to look at you like you’re crazy. Crazy like a fox perhaps. You’ll save on taxis, parking, and stress of waiting for the cross-town bus. Who’s crazy now?

 

Newly available in the states YikeBike is sure to be the hottest item in 2010 for city dwellers. Read more

Imagine watching an ad campaign showcasing frustrated drivers sitting in traffic. Confronted with another parking ticket, battling for a parking space and facing high prices at the gas pump are all situations to which you can relate. Throughout each reenactment is a quickly passing image of a person dashing through the scene on some mode of transportation. Is it a bike? Is it a scooter? Is it a skateboard? It's certainly not a conventional automobile. Welcome to the world of the YikeBike.

 

At first glance, the YikeBike looks like a cross between a traditional bicycle and a scooter. However, there is one major difference – the handle bars aren't where you'd expect them to be. Visually, the YikeBike is reminiscent of an old-time bicycle with a large wheel in front and a much smaller wheel in the back. However, you can leave your bowler hat at home. This spiffy, cutting edge invention has taken all the stability of a traditionally designed bicycle and made it lightweight, portable (you can actually fold it up and tuck it into a carrying case) and motorized.

 

Inventor Grant Ryan's dream was developed and perfected over five years before making the YikeBike a reality. The YikeBike provides a smooth and stable ride for up to six miles with each 30-minute charge. It's perfect for the city dweller, since it weighs only about 21 pounds and can be stored just about anywhere once folded.

 

As you rest your legs comfortably on the footrests of this clever, pedal-free, battery operated transporter, your hands steer the carbon composite frame from a position near your hips. The YikeBike's Lithium Phosphate (liFePO4) battery is good for at least 1,000 charges. With a maximum speed of 12 mph, the YikeBike is great for people who are interested in the power and convenience of a battery powered bike but not ready to commit to the greater speeds of a scooter.

 

The YikeBike is the first licensee of Mini-Farthing. Basically, Mini-Farthing took all the tried-and-true design aspects of a traditional bicycle and reengineered these qualities to be better suited for the challenges of living in an urban setting. The most compelling characteristic is the fold-ability and portability of a Mini-Farthing design. Since the mechanics of the YikeBike are enclosed within the frame, you don't need to worry about getting dirty every time you fold it and pack it away in its handy carrying case.

 

With the initial release in early-to-mid 2010, the YikeBike will be available to consumers in several European countries, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, sporting a price tag of approximately $5,000 to $6,000. For more information, or to reserve a YikeBike, visit www.YikeBike.com. Read more

 

YikeBike mini-farthing will give people freedom in congested cities.

Friedrichshafen, September 2, 2009 – A radical new electric bicycle, launched today at EUROBIKE, is expected to transform the way urban commuters navigate congested cities.

A result of five years of research and development, YikeBike mini-farthing has a radically different riding position, steering mechanism and wheel configuration, giving a safe smooth ride while folding up to a super small size.