Grant Ryan and the story of the YikeBike

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.”