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The Vital MTB Crew
If you didn't document your ride, did you even ride, bro?
CHORT! And to be fair that could also be the ones we show our significant others. "The video really makes it look way slower/smaller/flatter than it really was"
Yes, trust me (enduro)bro.
"Speaking to the eBike riders I see on the trails here, they're all shifting to lower-priced bikes as they've realized that they can without sacrificing performance." This lines up with a hypothesis I've been thinking about for a while, which is that I think so much of the weirdness of the bike industry and bike customers (obsession with grams and weight, obsession over granular differences in tire feel and suspension tuning, and willingness to spend enormous amounts to customize and upgrade a stock bike) comes down to the weakness of the human motor and the human mind.
We only generate around a quarter or a half of a horsepower, which means every little thing creates a perceivable difference in bike handling, and because huffing and puffing is hard and humans don't like sweating more than they need to, we're willing to spend inordinate amounts of time and money in the hope of reducing our huffing and puffing. Example: old out of shape guy on a carbon aero road bike with GP5000's and deep dish aero rims. No matter how many times Dario or I say "bike weight doesn't matter," people's legs and lungs are still going to be screaming for relief on climbs, and any perceived solution is going to be welcomed with open arms and open wallets.
With an ebike, all of that logic changes pretty quickly. Rhythm or performance level-suspension works pretty darn well on a heavy ebike because the mass eliminates a lot of bumps. DH tires pedal just fine when you've got 1000+ watts backing up your feet. And suddenly shelling out $1000 for lighter cranks becomes an exercise in decoration only, because your mind can't sense or justify any meaningful difference in bike weight anymore. It's harder to pretend there's a meaningful impact after investing in performance upgrades.
I've given a lot of thought to the impact of the weak motor and weak mind on traditional bike sales, but @swoopswoop until you mentioned it, I hadn't thought about the leveling effect of ebikes on performance and pricing. Thanks to the decades of tweaking and puzzling from riders of traditional pedal bikes, any ebike company today can pretty easily create a geometry design, suspension design, and component spec that works great for 99% of riders. Which means it really does boil down to the motor and battery.
I think you are right.
What is weird is that I still see tons of fully kitted out ebikes in my area, with the latest factory electronic suspension, wireless everything, carbon, titanium, etc. Which really makes NO DIFFERENCE on a 50+ lb ebike. But...these guys like the bling and they have already put every doodad on their Tacoma, so what's left.
The lower priced ebikes mean they can spend the rest of the money on "upgrades". The mountain bike marketing is SO GOOD at convincing people that they need the latest $150 radial tire in order to make that one climb on their nearest blue trail.
I find myself regressing more and more into old and obsolete "vintage" bikes the more of this I see.
We did see a shift a few years back from 2 year to 3 year cycles... Some companies said it was to give more development time, I think they also wanted more time to recoup tooling costs..
Also, companies seem less likely to wait for a certain time of the year to release new bikes bow.. Especially if the current model is pretty much sold out and the new one is ready to go..
To be fair, I used “going concern” imprecisely here.
The normal accounting assumption is that a company is a going concern, meaning it is expected to keep operating. What I meant was the bad version: language in a 10-Q, 10-K, or auditor report saying there is “substantial doubt” about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern, often referred to as a going concern warning.
That does not mean bankruptcy is guaranteed. But it does mean there is meaningful risk the business may not be able to keep operating over the next year without raising money, selling assets, refinancing, restructuring, being sold, or otherwise materially changing its situation.
I meet lots of younger folk thru work. I think most older folk would be astounded by the number of kids who see far less media (social and otherwise) than your average millennial/ gen xer
Half a decade of click clacking probably didn’t help either
Posting for the sake of updating your friends on your life is largely dead. Young kids are the first to correctly recognize that they have to always be giving a performance if there’s any chance they’ll be on camera because they’re always at risk of being the subject of a viral moment. Be hawk tuah or be nothing
This is why I probably won't ever buy a complete e-bike - I want to slap on a bunch of CUES parts, coil suspension plus DH wheels and tires, so a bare/minimal frame makes much more sense. I see no reason to drop $15k on a carbon bike with XTR/XX/Factory/Ultimate when I'll be stripping those parts off for something more practical and less expensive.
The Pope reads Vitalmtb forums confirmed
Dibs on the "Be Hawk Tuah or Be Nothing" tee shirt.
I see little bit of this concept from the periphery. To reiterate what Jeff said, someone uttering the words "going concern" is akin to saying "cancer." If it's worth verbalizing the fact the entity might not be a "going concern," it ain't good - regardless what "stage" the problem is in.
Less nerdy people could think of it like this: if a bike is so clapped out that it isn't really rideable and the best thing for the owner to do is part it out and get whatever they can for the parts that still work and have value, the bike is no longer a "going concern." In other words, the bike/entity is no longer greater than the sum of its parts.
Jeff - please correct me if I'm getting this wrong.
Or at least not share everything?
Old habits die hard.
Saddleback enters administration...
https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/major-uk-cycling-business-saddleback-…
Watching the footage back I filmed in 2011-2012 with my Hero2 was enough to make me decide to never buy another action cam.
Came here to post this! Real shame, I used to order stuff from them via my lbs - always arrived super quick, great cust service whenever anything went wrong. Fingers crossed this wont impact Nukeproof Axess Racing - they seemed to have pretty close ties with them and some of their brands.
Idk radial tires are amazing.
Unfortunate to see a quality distributor find themselves in too deep and have to go down this path. They had a number of premium brands and, by all accounts, did some pretty heavy lifting on the marketing front, which can't be said of all distributors. Losing Cannondale and Enve certainly didn't help matters, but I would also guess Castelli and TLD (premium clothing) were a drag, and brands like Pivot and King likely carry some heavy inventory dollar/pounds. I don't know about the UK, but Silca is always on sale here, so likely some margin pressure for a distributor, and Abbey doesn't really have traditional margins on tools with their "pro" focus.
I do still wonder how much the downfall of CRC/Wiggle pulled down distributors in the UK. There have been a number of exits from the business in recent times - Moore Large, Paligap, Raleigh (Accell), etc. For a lot of brands, I would guess that upwards of 50% of their business with their UK distributor was heading to CRC/Wiggle, with a large portion of that then going international. UK distributors benefited greatly before it all crumbled.
We all know the business side of bikes evolves at snail's pace, but I have to wonder how long the traditional distributor model survives in major markets. The very definition of a middleman in a compressed margin, retail price-sensitive world. B2B sites, independent reps, and 3PL warehouses cost less (in theory) than the 30-35 points a distributor requires.
The American answer to DJI (sort of)
https://www.a16z.news/p/why-we-founded-westmag
Translation: drone warfare is popping off and we want in on that bag 💰💰💰
Seriously, people have expressed concern over handing over their data to a Chinese company like Avinox but if you sync your phone to anything to do with Marc Andreessen (a16z) you might as well be giving it directly to the CIA. He’s not exactly shy about it
I know I’m probably in the minority around here in saying I look up to Marc, and I’d be happy to defend that view in the right setting. This isn’t that setting.
I don’t think he’s god’s gift, and I don’t think you have to like everything someone says or does to respect what they’ve built or how they think. No two ways about it, Marc is undeniably an important entrepreneur and venture capitalist, and a16z is one of the most influential firms in the world. They are doing to venture capital what Blackstone or Apollo did to private equity.
Point is, when his team is funding something, or deems something "important" (drone/robot motors) - especially something adjacent to a product or market we talk about here, I think it’s worth posting here even if you don't like the guy.
https://www.digitec.ch/en/page/gopro-faces-bankruptcy-42842
Things are not going well over at GoPro the company is losing money with less demand on sales on GoPro action camera's, Bankruptcy could happen with in the next 12 month's.
Yep, @jeff.brines wrote a whole post about it 👆
They're starting a company and building a factory to get to 30 million electric motors per year by 2030? Per year? 30 million?
Is this a joke? Should that be billion?
I work for a moderately small automotive supplier in freaking Slovenia and we probably make more than a million electric motors from our designs, by components, in a year. I'm not taking into account all the small DC motors from the likes of Johnson which are a commodity. I'm talking about stepper motors and BLDC drives that are similar to what's in ebike drives.
Is the state of manufacturing in the US really that bad that a company, backed by the most important VC firm achieving 30 million motors per year is an achievement?
Also his quote that China makes 30 million more motors than the US... Should that also be billion? 30 million TIMES more motors? 30 million more designs? Because 30 million motors is probably a daily or at least a weekly output for a big motor manufacturer in China...
Having seen GoPro rent a chalet in the Alps the last two winters, ski, wine and dine clients I'd say they haven't been clever. And that was some mid level stuff & they'll say that there was benefits to getting big sales.
Yes, very much enjoyed the comment of lame mates videos.
This is a seed round in a company with big ambitions, not an investment in a mature, proven business. Going from zero to 30 million high-performance motors in 3.5 years would be a pretty meaningful achievement if they can pull it off. And at a $10 ASP, which is probably conservative, that is $300 million of annual revenue. Venture capital operates on 10+ year time horizons, and I’d assume the plan is to scale well beyond the 30 million unit mark.
As for whether 30 million motors is enough to matter, I’d argue it is a sizable dent. If you add up motors for drones, robots, and e-bikes, you are probably looking at something like 200 to 300 million units per year. For one company to target 10 to 15% of that market within roughly four years of launch seems extremely ambitious, especially in the U.S., where we do not have the same rare earth and motor supply chain depth that China does.
Finally, A16z is not exactly known for being casual about diligence so I'd probably trust their homework. I know this forum is not particularly fond of Marc or his firm, but if they are writing a check into a company like this, it is reasonable to assume they are not doing it purely on vibes.
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