KUHMUTE ⚡

We are ecstatic to announce the third panel during the 2024 CCAT Global Symposium on #Mobility Innovation presented by Mcity and the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute! Diana E. Paez, Senior Director of Mobility and Energy at the William Davidson Institute will lead a panel on the #electricVehicle transition from the perspective of infrastructure, policy, and workforce development on Day One (May 21st). Diana is joined by Ashlee Breitner, Workforce Director at the Electric Vehicle Center - University of Michigan, Dr. Brandy Brown, Michigan Team Lead at DNV, Edward T. Hightower, Managing Director of Motoring Ventures LLC, and Sherwin Prior, Chief Executive Officer of KUHMUTE ⚡. Swipe to see the full list of speakers and secure your space while early-bird pricing is still available: https://myumi.ch/lx72G #ccatSymposium University of Michigan College of Engineering James Sayer Henry Liu

So, Superpedestrian has gone (the US part, anyway). Despite its demise, my time there taught me some valuable lessons about success. Here are three:   🛴 Success looks different to different people. Superpedestrian was an engineering company at heart. Among the leadership team, some were trying to build automotive-grade manufacturing and quality assurance processes, others wanted to build world-class corporate teams, and still others were aiming to build a billion-dollar company. These aims don’t necessarily conflict, but they can if not managed properly. My takeaway is that, when you look back, all the leaders achieved the metric of success they were striving for (apart from those with the billion-dollar valuation goal, but they got a lot closer than many will ever do). 🛴 Staff for success - or fail your staff. In the case of Superpedestrian, the leadership team had a real blind spot when it came to marketing and brand. Both remained hideously under-resourced throughout my time as comms director, and there was no marketing function represented at the top table. The result was confusion internally about the brand and its customers (not helped by having two completely different brands), which couldn’t help but translate externally. This lack of clarity is fatal in an environment as competitive as micromobility was then. In an internal strategy paper I prepared at the time (2020), I likened it to rolling into a warzone in a tank with no gun. (Not an analogy I would choose to use today.) My takeaway is that, while brilliant marketing won’t guarantee success, failing to invest sufficiently in your in-house marketing resources is almost certain to guarantee failure. 🛴 Reaching the summit may be by another path. I discovered early at Superpedestrian that city tenders simply didn’t allow the space to go into the incredible levels of detail that the company had put into its tech. (A memorable weekend: we had a single page to answer multiple questions on the tech, and one of the leaders wrote an eight-page answer full of solid engineering detail on Saturday - and asked us to edit it to fit by Monday morning.) It therefore became even more important to raise awareness through comms work, leading to some lines that got real cut-through at the time, including “the Volvo of e-scooters,” “the seatbelt moment for micromobility,” and the OS update from Asimov to Briggs that got the company featured in TechCrunch for the first time. My takeaway is that if the path you’re trying to take is blocked, step back and see if there’s another way to tackle the challenge.   Personally, I remain very grateful for the opportunity I had to work with many wonderful people and achieve so much. Though I'm sad to see the company has gone, I look back on this chapter of my life as an absolute success (see point 1 😎).