The Electric Skateboard Company That Would Take Over the World

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THE ELECTRIC SKATEBOARD COMPANY THAT WOULD TAKE OVER THE WORLD

Posted on August 4, 2016 by Morley It’s clear from the beginning that something is dierent about this couch. It’s a beaten-up gray and has the word “Boosted” written across the back in blocky orange letters—as in Boosted Boards, America’s favorite purveyor of electric-powered skateboards. Oh, and instead of feet, the couch has two Boosted longboards supporting it.

The biggest hint that this is no ordinary couch, though, is the guy sitting on the rightmost cushion holding two pistol-shaped remote controls and wearing a big grin. This is John Ulmen, Boosted’s cofounder and CTO. “Scoot all the way over,” he says to me, “to balance the weight.” He’s about to start the couch, and he doesn’t want me to go ying o.

The couch is outside Boosted’s oce in Mountain View, California, in the parking lot. Some cars, a basketball hoop, and a skate ramp serve double duty as a makeshift obstacle course. Fingers on triggers like an old-timey cowboy, Ulman squeezes both remote controls and the couch starts moving. He guides us easily around corners and over bumps—this ain’t his rst couch ride—before suddenly icking one lever backward and one forward, sending the couch spinning like a top. Ulmen looks over at me and laughs, his shaggy hair whipping in the wind. Then he slows it down and hands me the remotes. My turn to drive. “It’s really easy,” he says. “We take it out on the street sometimes.”

Inside Boosted’s large warehouse of an oce, Ulmen and his team have Boosted just about everything. The couch, a surfboard, a toboggan, basically anything with a place to sit or stand and room for wheels and a motor. The only thing the company sells, at least for now, is a longboard— essentially a super-sized skateboard with subtle tweaks that make riding easier and more comfortable than the classic style. In four years on the market, the bright orange wheels and black decks of Boosted boards have become staples on the streets of San Francisco, New York, and other cities where nerds don’t like their Rockports to touch concrete.

Now, Boosted’s second-generation board is about to go on sale, and the company faces all sorts of competition for the last-mile geek-transport market. Ulmen and his team are racing to make sure their company still makes the most fun, most practical, most awesome electric skateboard on the planet. And after that? “In the future, you’ll have ride-sharing, you’ll have public transit, you’ll have private vehicles,” says Sanjay Dastoor, Boosted’s CEO. “Some of them will be autonomous. Some of them will be driven by people.” And some of them, he says, will have Boosted’s bright-orange logo on the side. At the Boosted oces, anything that could have wheels…gets wheels.Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED

From There to Here

Like so many things in Silicon Valley, Boosted began as a cure for a white guy’s laziness. As a Stanford grad student studying robotics, Ulmen shuttled among a teaching gig and two labs, each at dierent corners of the sprawling campus. He got tired of walking (and being late) and bought a Loaded Dervish, a bouncy bamboo longboard, to help him get around. He’d never been a skater before, he says, but “I loved it, because I could carry it into class with me. If I needed to go somewhere, I’d just stand up, walk outside, drop it on the ground, and go.” No bike racks, no parking spots. Simple.

Ulmen’s laziness caught up to him again: He got tired of pushing the board around all day. “So I gured, hey, I’m just going to see if I can get an electric longboard. This seems like something that should exist.” He went shopping, and found … not much. “It was all this old lead-acid battery technology,” he says, which hadn’t come far since Jim Rugroden, another walking-averse student, built the gas-powered MotoBoard in the 1970s.

He knew how motors and batteries worked, and even where to get them. So over the next few months, Ulmen cobbled together $1,000 or so (for parts) and built himself an electric longboard. It went about 25 miles an hour and didn’t have brakes. “I’d just haul ass around campus,” Ulmen says, “and then footbrake. So I’d go through shoes really fast.” The board had no protective housing, no weatherproong. The remote was a huge RC plane controller, with a rubber band on the throttle stick to pull it back when he let go. It looked bad. But as Ulmen rode, people would stop him and ask him: Where can I get one? “I realized at that point that there is something here,” he says.

Ulmen connected with Dastoor and Matthew Tran, two other Stanford robotics students who’d been working on their own board, equipped with casters that let riders shred like a snowboarder. “The idea was that this is something people could use to get around these high-density areas, whether it’s a campus or a city,” Dastoor says. He and Tran had the vision; Ulmen had the board. They were a perfect match.

In the summer of 2012, after a few months and many revisions later, Ulmen, Tran, and Dastoor got into both Stanford’s StartX program and the famed Y Combinator incubator. They had big plans for a splashy Kickstarter and a big company kicko, but one of their new investors talked them into rst doing a beta test. Boosted CEO Sanjay Dastoor. Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED Boosted CEO Sanjay Dastoor. Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED

So the guys bought ve more Loaded decks and rigged them up with an Arduino to handle the signal processing, a battery, and a Wii nunchuk—not the controller, the little accessory joystick—as the remote control.

They somehow found ve people willing to pay $1,200 for the contraption. They kept in close touch, talking to their new customers about what they liked (speed, portability) and what they hated (charging, charging, and charging). One guy stuck with them the most, a rando they’d met in a Palo Alto bar. He told them the board made him explore more, see new things, and try new places, because so many more things were now a few minutes away. That idea—of shrinking your town or city, making everything feel close—became like a mantra at Boosted.

A Good Ride

Even as Boosted has tried to make its board fun and exciting and totally righteous, brah, the team has repeatedly made decisions with practicality in mind. They’ve invested heavily in customer service, and they focused on making the board not fast or thrilling but as rideable as possible. When Boosted did launch a Kickstarter campaign in the fall of 2012, one of the funding options was to spend an extra $300 and be part of a beta-testing group for early models. “They were able to test the drivetrain,” Dastoor says, “and we were able to see how that failed. Then we’d give them the motor controller and see how that failed.” To iterate more quickly, Boosted’s oce was set up with the engineering team about 15 feet from the prototyping machines.

Sam Sheer, a creative producer at Mashable and my most Boosted-riding friend, says this is precisely why Boosted is worth the price. “To me, as someone who has ridden all of the electric skateboards,” he says, “you just see the attention to detail with every damn detail.” Sheer says he loves the exible bamboo deck (made by Loaded) for riding over bumps, and raves about the remote’s simple safety switch and rolling throttle. He says he has let more than 50 strangers try it on the streets of New York, and everyone loves it. “They think it’s some sort of insane contraption,” he says, “but it’s just a board with a motor on it.”

A year after the Kickstarter campaign, Boosted shipped its rst nished board. Then it immediately started working on the next one, based on the feedback that came pouring in. Users didn’t like that their $1,200 longboard might break down every time it drizzled, so the new board has water- resistant housings around the electronics. They couldn’t stand that their battery kept dying mid- ride, but still wanted to be able to take the board on a plane, so Boosted made the battery easily swappable—and created a bigger one for people who don’t care about coming under the FAA’s size regulations. “Ninety percent of the board is redesigned and new,” Ulmen says.

With fame comes competition. Kickstarter and Amazon teem with electric skateboards, not to mention the hoverboards, the scooters, the unicycles.

Boosted wouldn’t share exact sales numbers, but at this point, it’s safe to say the company is at least the best-known company making motorized boards, with high-prole fans like Dave and James Franco and YouTube vlogging champion Casey Neistat. Whether he’s turning it into a magic carpet or his friend is manualling straight into a river, “Casey’s been good for us,” Dastoor says with a laugh. But with fame comes competition: Kickstarter and Amazon teem with electric skateboards now. Plus there are the hoverboards, the scooters, the unicycles. “I think if you’re looking carefully,” Razor CEO Carlton Calvin says, “you’ll see a lot of interest in electric mobility.” Razor’s fastest-growing product is its adult scooters, Calvin says, and the company is beeng up its engineering department to produce more “adult electric mobility products.”

Boosted co-founder and CTO John Ulmen. Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED

After the Longboard

Even if the piles of ready-to-ship boxes might indicate otherwise, Boosted Boards are still niche products. The $1,000 price tag is too high, for one thing. And an electric longboard will never be for everyone. Even traditional longboarders instinctively look down on anything electronic, anything with brakes—“I like pushing,” one deadpans into the camera during a YouTube review of the rst Boosted. I see at least one guy in a suit happily zooming up Third Street on a Boosted every morning, but outside San Francisco, board-commuting might be a hard sell.

Ulmen says he’s OK with that. Longboards are just the rst idea of many. More and more people are starting to change they way they move around the world. It’s familiar territory by now: We’re moving to cities; we’re ditching our cars; we’re more connected than ever. “It is the logical conclusion of the liberation of computing,” says Carlo Ratti, a designer and architect at MIT. The real-time data that comes from connecting everyone and everything, Ratti says, made Uber possible, makes self-driving cars possible, and will make room for new forms of transit that don’t look like cars at all. “With autonomy and shared ownership, this form factor will become one instance of many,” he says. “With autonomy and shared ownership, this form factor will become one instance of many,” he says. “With advances in robotics, new machines that empower the human body can be built.”

In 2015, California passed a law ocially legalizing motorized skateboards, outlawed since 1977 (when the only available products were gas-powered and considered unsafe). Kristin Olsen, then Republican leader of the California State Assembly, introduced the bill after touring the oces of Intuitive Motion, whose ZBoard is one of Boosted’s biggest competitors. Olson said after the law passed that she hoped to make room for “an environmentally friendly transportation option.” Boosted and others are hoping that California will be a leader in their regulatory ght.

Meanwhile, someone needs to gure out where people should actually ride these things. “Think about the car lane, the bike lane, and the sidewalk as three dierent things that exist pretty much throughout any city,” Dastoor says. The car lane is heavily regulated and heavily congested. The sidewalk is for walking, not wheels. (Don’t be that guy.) “And then you see the bike lane opening up,” he continues. Amsterdam and Copenhagen are building even more bike infrastructure. Dastoor imagines the Boosted Board as a new link in the chain: Drivers hate cyclists, who hate boarders, who hate pedestrians. The circle of commuting life.

The new board looks similar, but nearly everything about it has changed. Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED

At the company, “Boosted” has become a verb, at least internally. As in: We got kinda drunk and Boosted that couch last night, duder. Anything that can move is fair game. So at one point near the end of our conversation, I half-jokingly ask Dastoor if Boosted’s going to make an electric car. “Well, not anytime soon,” he says. “But I don’t see us just sticking with skateboards.”

Boosted already has people who understand batteries, motors, wheels, and customer service. They could probably make a car or something car-like—wheels, doors, a roof. But you can’t carry a car could probably make a car or something car-like—wheels, doors, a roof. But you can’t carry a car into a building or onto a train. Cars are the problem with present infrastructure, not the solution to it. By the time your Model S lease runs out, your next ride could be a longboard, a hoverboard, or a wacky self-balancing electric unicycle. It might even be a couch.

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