After living in Africa for ten years, the last four in Cape Town, I have missed out on the great mobility boom across the world. Africa, generally speaking, has a ton of work to do in improving the roads and public transport across the continent. In Dar es Salaam, streets flooded every rainy season and driving on highways at night was extremely dangerous due to buses overtaking on the two lane roads. In Cape Town, protestors destroy trains and ripped up railway in fits of fury at the unfair economic conditions. Congestion there grows worse every year, and people living less than 3 miles out of town drive over an hour to get home.
But in Berlin? Wow. It’s summer now and people are riding bicycles everywhere. There are at least four different app based bicycle mobility companies, with plenty of well maintained bikes across the city. The scooter companies are here too, Lime and Vol, whose product is less maintained and more expensive but a joy to travel around on.
Infrastructure matters for economic development and innovation. A common cliche is that necessity is the mother of all invention, but in mobility I see the opposite. The vast majority of interesting work in mobility is happening in places that need it the least. Berlin has a great public transport system. Owning a bike is cheaper than using an app based bike product. Scooters pretty much just feel cool to ride.
So why Berlin? The infrastructure here provides the rails for mobility products. Just as the internet acted as the rails for apps, mobility products require rails for distribution, but more importantly their use. This is important to think about for other startups. As startups increasingly move into physical products, we need to analyze not just the design and distribution of their app, but also an additional layer of utilization landscape and access. A company cannot be successful if their product doesn’t provide some sort of value. And in the case of mobility, half the value is in the infrastructure. That’s good news for entrepreneurs thinking about the next mobility start up in Africa…maybe don’t.