Grant Ryan and the story of the YikeBike

He was always going to be one. Growing up in Otautau, Western Southland, and later Invercargill, the middle of three boys, Ryan watched his father tinker away in his workshop and took careful note. Jim Ryan was a chicken farmer, a very successful one, and being a Southland man-of-the-land what he conjured up in the garage was always practical. The best — a plastic cover to protect newborn lambs from the fatal southerlies — he sold around the world.

Ryan Senior, an investor in his son’s ventures since Global Brain, remembers once having problems with a machine he was developing. “Unbeknown to me, Grant went away and built a model out of Lego to help me visualise what I was trying to do.

“His mother came across his art folder the other day and it was just full of drawings of cogs and machines.”
Glenn Martin, deviser of the Martin Jetpack and a friend of Ryan’s, says what any inventor really needs is constant optimism — “that and an outrageous, big-arsed vision”.

Ryan has never lacked for either. When he left Southland Boys, where he was runner-up to Dux, he wrote ‘inventor’ for probable career in the school yearbook.

“They said ‘no, you have to be serious’. But I was serious. So I went about trying to work out how you could do these creative things. I chose mechanical engineering. I went off track later when I did the PhD in ecological economics, but I did that because I was fascinated, and that’s always a good reason, I think.”

Ryan studied long-term constraints on economic growth — peak oil, water scarcity, the full catastrophe. Perversely, he came out feeling more optimistic. “Humans have an innate ability to solve problems. I’m a big believer in that, and it’s one reason I’m doing the clean, green transport thing.

“And I’m a huge believer in innovation. It’s my day job, but also theoretically I understand the value of that to an economy.”

Ryan, who’s a director of Canterbury Development Corporation and has been on the boards of the government’s Venture Investment Fund and the Foundation for Research Science and Technology, sees plenty of room to improve how we go about commercialising smart ideas, particularly in the universities and Crown Research Institutes, which he says tend to put millstones around the necks of their spinoff companies.

“We do it badly, and partly that’s because of a deep lack of understanding in those places of how difficult it is to start up a company.

“In order for a startup to survive you have to have a small team utterly focused on one thing, and they have to be left to do whatever they need to do.”

It’s what Ryan thrives on. “I like the ill-defined uncertainty of startups. Some people find it too unstructured and messy. But I love that, when it’s all raw and fresh and you don’t know where it is going to go.”

Even so, with two kids and a mortgage, Ryan had to think hard before throwing in his job at Industrial Research to start his first company. But the idea behind Global Brain — that each time someone interacts with a search page you can learn something with which to improve the experience for the next user — seemed so obvious he was amazed nobody had done it. The thought of having a crack became obsessive, and he said goodbye forever to a regular paycheck.

“Of course that first time you don’t realise how hard it is. I once heard someone say that knowing how difficult it is to start a business, anyone who’d do it a second time must have a personality disorder. I guess I’m afflicted. I’m an addicted entrepreneur.”

No wonder, given the success he enjoyed first time out of the blocks. Ryan says the eventual sale of Global Brain to the internet arm of NBC was a crazy time, “like winning Lotto every two weeks for a year”. Unfortunately, much of the deal was tied up in stock that became worthless when the tech wreck hit.

“But what do you need a Lear jet for, really?” asks Ryan. “I made more than enough to continue to play around on projects. It’s my one expensive vice, I guess.”

But for all the talk of couch-dreaming, the word that keeps coming back on Ryan is he is pragmatic. Paul Dyson says Ryan understands the essentials of turning good ideas into successful businesses.

“He has a clear sense of how to prioritise, especially in the startup context, when as CEO you have to be thinking of everything. He also has a remarkable sense for recruiting good people; his team is a very impressive bunch.

“I’ve met a lot of inventors and entrepreneurs and Grant is not typical at all in my experience. He doesn’t have that struggle with personal ownership of the vision. If someone else’s idea is better, he goes with it.”

“Grant is very outcomes focused,” adds Matthew Houtman. “Unlike a lot of engineers, he is very focused on delivering to market, rather than building in a garage the perfect widget.”

Says Ryan: “As an inventor, the real buzz is seeing your thing used. That little search algorithm [for SLI Systems] is used over a billion times a year by millions of people. And I really can envisage in 20 years visiting different parts of the world and seeing these bikes buzzing around and thinking ‘our little team in Christchurch had something to do with that’.”

They won’t be Yikes, though. Ryan’s strategy is to pitch his New Zealand-assembled, ultra-light carbon-fibre version at the top of the market, priced somewhere north of €3000 (more than NZ$6000), a price the Europeans in particular don’t seem to find off-putting.

“When we started we had the choice, did we want to be Toyota or Porsche? Porsche are consistently in the top two or three for profitability.”

The plan is to license someone overseas to make a far cheaper, mass-market version, with Yike clipping the ticket. Several bike and car manufacturers have expressed interest. “Potentially, we think it could be made cheaper than a normal bike.”

If that’s true, then you can easily imagine how useful something like the Yike might be as a commuting tool in a congested overseas city, where people live in cramped apartment buildings on the outskirts, catching buses to train stations, trains to downtown, and on and on.

“Last year was the first year that more people lived in cities than rurally, and that trend is accelerating. You can’t just throw more cars into the cities,” says Ryan.

With the rain easing, he grabs the chance to show the reporter the Yike in action. He takes off up the road, turns, comes hurtling back, the inventor riding his extraordinary idea down a backstreet in Addington. Will the Yike take over the world? Who knows. But Ryan’s going to enjoy the ride.