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Image courtesy of Wheels
Can WeHo-Based Wheels Get More Underserved Angelenos to Ride E-Bikes?
Maylin Tu
Maylin Tu is a freelance writer who lives in L.A. She writes about scooters, bikes and micro-mobility. Find her hovering by the cheese at your next local tech mixer.
When Los Angeles launched its micromobility pilot in 2019, it had big dreams for improving transportation equity for all Angelenos.
Three years later, less than 3,000 people make use of micromobility programs aimed at helping poorer sections of the city, despite stringent requirements on companies to provide these options and programs to help raise awareness. At issue, experts said, is a patchwork of rules and regulations between municipalities that can be a logistical headache for riders, infrastructure that doesn’t offer much protection for scooter and bike riders in these areas and a public outreach campaign that has failed to gain traction.
“It's a big challenge because when you drive your car, for example, people don't pay attention to municipal boundaries. They just want to get from point A to point B in the most seamless way possible,” said Will Sowers, director of public affairs at Wheels.
Wheels Director of Public Affairs Will Sowers.
Image courtesy of Wheels
While each city has its own equity requirements, the city of L.A. established its current program in 2021. Any operator deploying vehicles in special operation zones (including Venice, Hollywood and Downtown) is required to deploy 20% of its fleet in equity zones. There is no trip fee for rides that begin or end in these zones. The city also requires operators to offer a low-income option for riders, attend meetings with neighborhood councils and other local stakeholders, provide a non-credit-card and non-smartphone option for payment and partner with a community-based organization.
But those efforts haven't made as much an impact as the city might have hoped.
As of October 2021 there were 2,915 active users enrolled in low-income programs across all operators, according to information provided by L.A.’s Department of Transportation. That’s just 17 more riders than the city reported a year and a half earlier–in a report which also noted that 85% of users did not know that equity programs were available.
Riders in L.A.’s underserved neighborhoods use micromobility differently than those in more affluent areas, according to Sowers. While a rider in Venice might ride to the beach or to a restaurant, riders in underserved areas often use e-scooters as a way to get from a transit stop to work and vice versa.
“We've even seen examples of people using our device as a courier,” he added, “where they may — with one of many delivery apps — grab a short shift.”
Wheels Plan to Go Further
Wheels is trying something different. The company has made an effort to design its scooter for the way that lower-income riders use them, and is one of the few scooter companies able to thread the requirements of multiple municipalities in L.A.
It currently boasts it has the most interconnected micromobilty network in the L.A. metro region, with permits to operate in the city of L.A., Santa Monica, Culver City and West Hollywood, as well as plans to launch in Glendale.
Practically speaking, that means a user could ride a Wheels device between municipalities to get to work or school without worrying about landing in a no-parking zone (Beverly Hills, for instance, is geofenced and off-limits for scooter riding and parking).
Wheels was founded in 2018 in West Hollywood by Jonathan and Joshua Viner, who previously co-founded pet-walking startup Wag. The company’s scooters are designed for traveling longer distances. While a typical standup scooter goes one mile per ride, a Wheels seated mini-bike goes about one and a half miles. Along with its app-based service, the company also offers monthly rentals.
So far, the company has raised $96.3M in funding..
As part of its “Wheels for All” program, riders in all four municipalities who use state or federal benefits can ride at a steep discount. Currently, Wheels devices are $1.10 to unlock and then $0.39 per minute to ride. But underserved riders get unlimited rides of 30 minutes or less, paying only the unlocking fee.
The program is also more expansive than L.A. requires. In addition to low-income riders, people with disabilities and older adults who the city designates as “underserved populations,” Wheels program is also available for unhoused people.
To qualify, applicants fill out a form online and provide proof of enrollment in a state or federal program.
In comparison, its competitor Lime offers rides for $0.50 to unlock plus $0.07 per minute plus tax through its Lime Access program; Bird offers 50% off rides for low-income Angelenos through its Community Pricing program.
Although Wheels has the most interconnected equity program, enrollment is low. Only about 1,000 riders are signed up across the greater L.A. area. The program has provided just over 23,000 rides in the last year.
Sowers said this is an issue his company is doing its best to address. He added that he frequently talks to social service workers and organizations to help spread the word. Many, he said, are initially skeptical of recommending micromobility options to their clients.
One such person called him after seeing someone with a disability riding a Wheels device:
“They called me and were like, ‘That makes sense to me. It makes sense that someone can sit down and potentially have an accessibility challenge, but still be able to ride your device’.”
Berkeley professor and co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center Dr. Susan A. Shaheen told dot.LA over email that Wheels’ approach to equity has potential.
“It could provide a more affordable alternative to private vehicle use, particularly during these times of high gas prices,” she said.
Image courtesy of Wheels
No Equity Without Infrastructure
Another challenge that Wheels, like its competitors, deals with is infrastructure. California law bans e-scooters from operating on sidewalks. But not everyone is comfortable riding an e-scooter or e-bike in the street, especially where there are no bike lanes and little infrastructure to keep riders safe. That’s especially true in many low-income neighborhoods.
“If you want to prioritize equity, you need to build infrastructure for micromobility in the places that are the most dangerous to use micromobility, which is in the least-invested communities,” said Michael Schneider, founder of advocacy group Streets For All. He added that providing equity means building interconnected cycling infrastructure throughout the city, especially along L.A.’s high injury network.
The city has said it's trying to address the disparity.
Los Angeles has brought in $4 million over two fiscal years through its micromobility permit program, according to the city’s Department of Transportation. It’s using some of that money to fund a redesign of the 7th Street corridor, including protected bike lanes, after data showed that this segment of Downtown was one of the busiest for e-scooters and e-bikes, Public Information Director Colin Sweeney said via email.
In the future, Sowers sees the potential for L.A. to use that funding, along with the data it collects from operators, to build better infrastructure in underserved areas.
“If someone in a transit desert is riding one of our devices, and I give the city good data and say, ‘Hey, I've got tons of rides in this neighborhood, but there's no protected bike lanes,’ then that creates a reason for the city to build that.”
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Maylin Tu
Maylin Tu is a freelance writer who lives in L.A. She writes about scooters, bikes and micro-mobility. Find her hovering by the cheese at your next local tech mixer.
How Jordan Fudge Raised One of the Largest Funds in LA History
06:30 AM | December 14, 2020
Jordan Fudge – Black, openly gay, and only 28-years old – recently closed one of the largest venture funds in Los Angeles history, which he runs out of a lavish Bel Air mansion. He has raised nearly a billion dollars in dry powder from a reclusive billionaire in Germany, who he got connected to through his personal trainer.
In a notoriously clubby and homogenous industry with few people of color, Sinai Capital Partners Managing Partner Fudge sees standing out from the pack as a major edge.
"We can be ourselves and leverage our youth in a way that makes founders feel excited to share their ideas with us and feel like they won't be rejected for having something that comes out of left field," Fudge said. "We understand certain concepts a little bit more quickly because typically the market they're trying to address is people like us."
Sinai Capital Partners has raised $600 million, $500 million of which will go towards the tech-focused Sinai Ventures and the rest to fund movies and television shows at New Slate Ventures. All told, Sinai will now have $800 million in assets under management, vaulting it into the upper echelon of L.A. venture funds.
The news touting the raise as the largest in Los Angeles history was announced in a terse press release last month but received scant attention, perhaps because Fudge does not travel in the usual VC circles or because he says he has deliberately avoided the spotlight.
"We preferred to stay under the radar until we had some real results and a track record," Fudge said.
In something unheard of in the tech world, Fudge does not have a LinkedIn profile.
"To me, LinkedIn encourages a rather shallow, artificial type of networking," he said.
But Fudge is hardly shy. He shares shirtless selfies in his home gym or pictures of yachts and sports cars to his nearly half a million followers on Instagram. Earlier this year, he co-hosted a tony fundraiser at his home for Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg with Empire writer/director Lee Daniels. He also serves on the board of the LGBTQ advocacy group, GLAAD, and was a young associate director at the Metropolitan Opera until last year.
Instead of the sleek corporate offices in Santa Monica most venture firms operated in before the pandemic, Fudge runs Sinai from a $9 million mansion tucked in the hills of Bel Air, furnished in all-white with a grand staircase and backyard pool.
"We chose it over an office because we don't like working in traditional office spaces," he explained. "We've had founders stay there when they're in L.A. for meetings and in better times hosted events and fundraisers."
What also makes Sinai unusual is that all of its capital comes from a single limited partner. Asked who that person is, Fudge said the individual prefers not to be named. "We don't comment on our LPs out of respect for their privacy," he said.
Then, he volunteered that the LP is a German billionaire who made his fortune as a founder of enterprise software conglomerate SAP and has a family office called Eagle Advisors.
A quick Google search reveals the billionaire is almost certainly Hans-Werner Hector, ranked as the 945th richest man in world by Forbes with an estimated $2.4 billion fortune.
The head of Eagle Advisors, Ekkehart Hassels-Weiler, has been known mostly for his lavish real estate purchases on both U.S. coasts. He bought four penthouses totaling $120 million in New York starting in the mid-2010s and last year reportedly purchased a Benedict Canyon spec mansion with his new husband for $43 million.
In 2015, after an uninspiring post-college stint at 21st Century Fox, Fudge met Hassels-Weiler through their personal trainers who happen to be brothers.
"We'd often see each other at the gym in L.A. near where the family office is based," Fudge remembers. "When I left Fox, I intentionally started scheduling sessions at the same time as him to get some face time and pick his brain. I finally asked him if he had hired anyone to look after tech, media, telecom and he hadn't due to their focus on energy and real estate."
Fudge pitched Hassels-Weiler on the graphics processing chip manufacturer NVIDIA Corporation and the timing turned out to be perfect. The stock more than tripled in a year, a return that led to Hassels-Weiler bringing Fudge on as an associate.
"I developed sort of an in-house private house venture capital fund for them, which was then spun out into what is now Sinai," Fudge said. "We started with them seeding us with one hundred million and did really well with that."
The biggest breakout from the 85 startups Sinai has invested in so far is Pinterest. The fund came in relatively late in Pinterest's 2017 Series H at a post-money valuation of $12.3 billion. The company went public in 2019 at a lower valuation of $10 billion, but Pinterest now has a market cap of more than $40 billion.
Sinai also got in on the real estate service Compass' Series D and the Series A of Ro, the parent company of Roman Health.
Eagle Advisors more than doubled its investment on Fund I, according to sources.
"We were able to use that credibility to continue to raise more capital from them and go later in the life cycle of some of these companies that we're interested in," Fudge said. "Specifically within Los Angeles, there really aren't many funds that are able to write those kinds of checks."
Fudge initially launched Sinai in the Bay Area, but he quickly soured on the tech scene there.
"I found San Francisco to be a monoculture and generally a soulless, unpleasant place to live," he said. "The VC crowd there has a tendency of being rather pompous and the deals we were seeing in the city seemed increasingly overpriced."
In 2018, the firm relocated to Los Angeles. Fudge and Zach White — the partner who helps oversee Sinai Ventures — both grew up here and say they want to invest in L.A. startups, but also companies anywhere that encapsulate the L.A. ethos of tech, entertainment and diversity.
"We're L.A. at our very core," White said. "And the sort of fiber and DNA of our fund is L.A. But we are going to be global in the way that we allocate capital."
Far from a hindrance, White says the fact that he and Fudge are young and Black has helped them get into highly competitive funding rounds. He points to Brud, an L.A company that uses artificial intelligence to create virtual popstars. It secured early funding from Sequoia but Fudge is friends with the founder, Trevor McFedries, and so they were able to get in on the Series A.
"He has no shortage of suitors trying to get into that company," White said. "But I think that us being able to view it from the perspective of someone who's a little bit closer in age and skin color to him really benefited us."
McFedries says he finds Fudge to be "super smart" and a great listener.
"He has a point of view that allows him to recognize opportunities others wouldn't," said McFedries. "And being in L.A. it's been great to have an investor close by."
An Entertainment Fund for Underrepresented Founders
After he graduated from Northwestern University, Fudge got what seemed like a plum gig in 2014, working on digital strategy under co-chairs Dana Walden – now a top executive at Disney – and Gary Newman. As he remembers it, the mandate of his group was figuring out how to make money licensing Fox's vast library of content to Netflix and Hulu without cannibalizing the studio's lucrative television and movie business.
"At the time, legacy studios like Fox were just beginning to recognize the legitimacy of subscription services as existential threats," Fudge said. "Part of the reason I left was I realized there wasn't much more runway for a company like that, a legacy media company owned by a family that sort of is trying to compete with these massive tech behemoths that have deeper pockets and a better understanding of the customer."
Six years later, every big media company is desperately trying to be the next Netflix and Fudge thinks he can use his entertainment and tech experience to both make a sizable return and elevate underrepresented filmmakers.
"There is a huge opportunity for artists that typically wouldn't fare very well within traditional studio structures to be able to make their films and create art that is authentic and resonates with this generation," Fudge said. "They can do that with us because we understand it as first-hand consumers of that content."
Fudge's New Slate Ventures wants to fund projects from underrepresented filmmakers. It has seen critical success backing "The Forty-Year-Old Version," a semi autobiographical comedy mostly shot in black and white from filmmaker Radha Blank that critics have hailed as "bringing a new voice to cinema." The film drew raves at Sundance and was picked up by Netflix.
New Slate is also developing a limited series on junk bond king turned philanthropist Michael Milken written by Terrence Winter of "The Sopranos" and "The Wolf of Wall Street" fame.
Aside from both being a sometimes glamorous yet risky investment, entertainment and tech would seem to have little in common. But Fudge maintains there have never been more similarities.
"The rules are being administered by the same companies and also being rewritten by similar types of people in terms of the founders who are coming to create new companies in a way that I think directors and producers are also looking to create new opportunities in media," Fudge said. "I have a very good understanding of how to make money in entertainment in this new sort of era that we're entering with the streaming wars being what they are."
The entertainment fund is being run by Jeremy Allen, who spent two years as an assistant to WME Chairman Patrick Whitesell.
"We understand how to read a script," Allen said. "We understand what makes a good movie. We understand how to produce something."
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Ben Bergman
Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior finance reporter. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks.
https://twitter.com/thebenbergman
ben@dot.la
LA Tech ‘Moves’: MeWe Taps Apple Co-founder, Aspiration Swipes Tesla Director
12:00 PM | August 05, 2022
Photo by James Opas | Modified by Joshua Letona
“Moves,” our roundup of job changes in L.A. tech, is presented by Interchange.LA, dot.LA's recruiting and career platform connecting Southern California's most exciting companies with top tech talent. Create a free Interchange.LA profile here—and if you're looking for ways to supercharge your recruiting efforts, find out more about Interchange.LA's white-glove recruiting service by emailing Sharmineh O’Farrill Lewis (sharmineh@dot.la). Please send job changes and personnel moves to moves@dot.la.
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Aspiration, a sustainable financial services company, appointed former Tesla director Tim Newell as its first chief innovation officer. Prior to leading teams at Tesla, Newell also worked under the Clinton Administration as a deputy director for policy in the White House office of science and technology.
All-electric vehicle manufacturing company Phoenix Motorcars hired industry veterans Lewis Liu as senior vice president of program management office and business development. Phoenix also hired Mark Hastings as senior vice president of corporate development and strategy and head of investor relations.
Counterpart, a management liability platform, welcomed Claudette Kellner as insurance product lead and Eric Marler as head of claims. Kellner served at Berkley Management Protection as vice president, while Marler previously served as an assistant vice president at the Hanover Insurance Group.
Legal tech and eDiscovery veteran Mark Wentworth joined compliance software company X1 as external vice president of sales and business development.
Sameday Health, a testing and healthcare provider, named Sarah Thomas as general counsel. Thomas previously served at digital health company Favor.
MeWe, an ad-free and privacy-first social network, tapped the co-founder of Apple Steve Wozniak to its advisory board, and co-founder of Harvard Connection Divya Narendra to its board of directors.
Internet marketplace Ad.net, welcomed former Interpublic CEO David Bell to its board of directors.
Science and technology company GATC Health, appointed addiction specialist Jayson A. Hymes as a new advisory board member.
AltaSea, a non-profit organization that aims to accelerate scientific collaboration, added South Bay philanthropist Melanie Lundquist to its board of trustees.
Correction:An earlier version stated Divya Narendra was added to MeWe's advisory board.
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Decerry Donato
Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
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