In this episode, Oliver interviews Jeff Russakow, CEO of Boosted Boards,makers of the famous electric skateboards and now scooter. Boosted focuseson vehicle-grade owned micromobility, which provides a refreshing counterto the hype around shared models. It’s one of our best episodes todate—highly recommend checking it out!Specifically we cover:- the origins of the company, and how it proves out Horace’s early thesison the disruptive potential of modularised componentry.- Jeff’s history with lightweight electric vehicles and his eventual comingto Boosted- How they think through their role as manufacturing ‘vehicle grade’vehicles in the micromobility space, and how this differentiates them fromother manufacturers- how their customers use their products - hint: 82% of their customers usethem for their commute.- How they think through shared services vs. the owned micromobilitymarket, solving the job-to-be-done of travel and why they’re doubling downon personally owned vehicles- Why they consider their competition the car and not other scooter orboard manufacturers.- How they think about safety, why shared scooters have given a lot ofpeople the wrong impression about what micromobility safety can be, and thestandards that they build their vehicles to.- How they think about infrastructure for these lightweight vehicles, andwhere the opportunities are for regulators to harness the benefits.- The challenges that they’ve faced scaling to being a global, growth stageelectric vehicle company.- How the venture capital community have viewed them vs the hyped space ofshared micromobility.- Hints at their product pipeline and what they find interesting.Key quotes:“What are your options? You can buy a vehicle like ours and you're down totwo dollars a day for unlimited mileage and no parking. You can pay $2 amile for scooter or car share, or you can take your car - it's 40/50 centsa mile between insurance and depreciation and then parking could be $30 aday. So quite literally buying a premium scooter is the cheapest thing youcan do.”“It’s been fun for us with the scooter shares because somebody is spendinga billion dollars of somebody else's money to put free demos on everystreet corner on the planet and educate people to the value of thesevehicles. There's a bunch of people say, ‘this is great.’ I'm going to usesharing and that's awesome, and then there's a bunch of people who say Ilike this so much, I’m going to buy one. If they want a vehicle grade one,there's only one. So we're in an interesting market spot.”