All

There's definitely a balance between testing out new prototypes, and keeping your design language consistent through your product line. Testing a new prototype for so long probably hurts sales of the "old" design.

If the UCI played hardball like that with the manufacturers, the OEMs would just pack up their stuff and go home. Downhill is mainly a marketing exercise for companies who participate. Very few companies are selling enough DH bikes to justify the money they spend in WC Downhill. They're hoping that their presence/results there will make you feel more confident in the performance of the rest of the bikes they produce and sell.

World Cup racing is gonna go to shit if we lose a bunch of teams like YT, Intense or others.

New post up on the whole YT situation. Thanks to a sleuth-y VitalMTB member, financials were found (up until 2022). Huge shoutout...but I want to make sure he wants the shoutout first! Substack My Blog My Super Ugly Windows 98 Themed Blog (reader beware)

I'm getting really close to locking this thread.

Posted a comment on the other site, but this statement is pretty shitty " If you placed an order before July 15th, please note that—due to legal regulations—it may be part of the restructuring process and will be reviewed individually." No, YT, you made the choice to prioritize short-term cash flow by screwing over customers. There are well-established legal options for protecting customer payments from becoming part of an insolvency estate. You could have used an escrow or trust account from the outset, structured payments to transfer only upon delivery, or at the very least paused sales and issued a...

At least they finally read the room and released a Bosch motor e-bike. I'm just waiting for some typical SoCal guy to buy the core 1 and then swap out the fork (and then sell me that beautiful white Bomber)

PSA NOT A UNION POLITICS THREAD

When the poors started showing up to group rides in Rapha on last model year's bike, PNS and MAAP were standing by ready to rinse the REAL roadies with even more muted earth tone offerings.

Honestly their knee pads were so good if they focused more on practical apparel for MTB and less on rinsing roadies for everything they had, I feel like they could do very well. That said, I thought rinsing roadies for their last penny was a nearly recession-proof model. Kinda like a constant of the universe. Death, taxes, roadies overpaying for microscopic gains to their cycling experience... Need to grab another pair before they can't be found anymore.

Not to rain on the GM hype parade, but let’s not rewrite history… Back in the ‘08–‘09 mess, GM took a fat bailout – over $50B from the U.S. government. They went full bankruptcy, government owned a chunk, and when all was said and done, taxpayers ate like $11B in losses. Not exactly a heroic brand imo. Ford? They saw the writing on the wall early, leveraged everything (even mortgaged the damn blue oval logo), and pre-borrowed $23B in 2006. Didn’t touch the TARP bailout like GM and Chrysler. They did take some smaller loans for tech stuff, but actually...

As others have said, this is a nice thread which has surprisingly little trolling/politics or conflict in general. @jeff.brines in case it comforts you somewhat, I have a good friend working in a hedge fund, he has pretty much been depressed since covid telling me none of the financial models apply anymore and the markets don't react with any reasonable logic. And it seems safe investments are more and more ignored to chase growth similar to big tech which seems completely unsustainable.

Hey everyone, not mad at anyone in this thread (besides maybe myself). I clearly have ideas and a delivery style that probably isn’t ideal for a mountain bike forum. Robot wrote a genuinely great post (he’s a better writer than me), and I realized there was no way for me to counter it. Not because I didn’t have anything to say, but because I started turning into this (actual photo Tucker took of me this morning): Any frustration you see from me is with myself, not anyone else. I like friction. I like debate. What I don’t like is knowing...

hmm i dont get the confusion. yes pinkbike has region specific pages so it would be tone deaf to have a big YT ad for EU users (but an understandable oversight) otherwise ya, YT absolutely has to push forward with NA/US sales and advertising, not just to stay afloat but to potentially bail out YT EU if at all possible. given lead times for products, whatever they are releasing was arguably planned before they had confirmed the insolvency path in the EU. maybe i'm misinterpreting what is being discussed. but YT is not gonna advertise LESS while they are faltering...

I don't have a horse in this race other than being very sad if Jeff stops posting his type of posts, and interacting with all of us in reply to help us along. It seems to me Jeff's posts were (are) nearly universally loved here, there's a reason I started jokingly referring to this thread as "bike industry talk and lessons in finance with Jeff". It would be a different landscape without Jeff and I hope he reconsiders.

To be fair to what you are saying, I'm making a big assumption: Sam doesn’t have the level of nuanced understanding that someone who has been in or around the industry their whole life would have. I very well could be wrong, but usually if you go to work at Amazon, you aren’t also spending govs of time to understand all the ins and outs of how the (esoteric) bike industry functions. From afar, being a supply chain wizard at Amazon should bring a lot of synergy (yes, I’m using that word) to a company like YT, and I bet...

cringe for sure, but i'm kinda impressed that he managed to somehow eke a couple $2M hypercars, pimp house & large assortment of $$$ toys out of the mountainbike industry. always assumed there wasn't sufficient margins / volume to generate that kind of bank, but somehow...

I would kill to have you come to a dinner party with me.

"A lways observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are, and what was yesterday a speck of semen tomorrow will be a mummy or ashes. Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end your journey in contentment, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced I and thanking the tree in which it grew." “Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you." "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break...