40: Investing in Micromobility :: Martin Mignot of Index Ventures

**Martin Mignot** (0:01)
Let's go.

**Oliver Bruce** (0:11)
A podcast exploring the disruptive potential of lightweight utility vehicles. Using the history of computing as a framework, we examine how these technologies will upend everything we thought we knew about the future of urban transport. The host of the show is Horace Dediu, founder of asimco.com, and I'm his co-host, Oliver Bruce.
And welcome to Micromobility. Today, it's just me, Oliver. I have with me Martin Mignot from Index Ventures. How are you doing today, Martin?

**Martin Mignot** (0:41)
I'm great, thanks a lot.

**Oliver Bruce** (0:43)
I'm really excited to have you here. We're going to have Martin on stage in Micromobility Berlin on October 1st. If you're interested in coming and checking this out, come and get your tickets, micromobility.io.
Tickets are available. If you use the code OLIVERANDHORACE, you'll get a 30% discount. But look, let's just dig in. Martin, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast. It's been a long time. You've been playing in this space really since the beginning. So take me through it. Who are you? How did Index Ventures get started and what's your involvement in Micromobility so far?

**Martin Mignot** (1:11)
So there is a lot to talk about, indeed. But before I get started, I just want to take a minute just to thank you and Horace, obviously, for all of the hard work that you guys have been doing over the past couple of years to really evangelize the market about Micromobility. And also, I really build a very strong analytical framework that really helps us as investors to really think about the space.
I can't really think of any space that so early in its journey had already so much theory and analysis done in a very strong way with a lot of data to back it up. So I really want to say it's super impressive what you guys have done. And thank you for all of the hard work.

**Oliver Bruce** (1:51)
There's mainly Horace. I tag along for the ride, but no, I deeply appreciate it. I mean, it's been a really exciting ride. And as I said, I mean, we're excited to have you coming along and talking. The conference is really a chance for everybody to come together and talk about this and celebrate the space. Because I feel like we're part of a movement, right? Like it's like there's investors and there are operators, et cetera.

**Martin Mignot** (2:11)
But it's exactly that. I came to the first one. I'm very excited to come to the second one.

**Oliver Bruce** (2:15)
Awesome. Awesome. Well, yeah, take me through it. It's like how have you guys been playing in the space? What's the story of Index Ventures and your interest in Micromobility?

**Martin Mignot** (2:22)
We got started about 25 years ago, both in Europe and in the US. Today, we've got half of the team in London and Geneva and half of the team in San Francisco.
But our specificity is that it is the same team. So we work really as one across the Atlantic, which means we're all kind of equal partners and have all of the same incentives for our companies, regardless of where they're from, to really develop and do well. And that's pretty unique. We really work as one integrated unit. The other thing that's pretty unique is that we cover both early stage and growth stage, which means that we can both focus on Series A and at the same time help these companies across their life cycle. So we can invest over the life cycle of a company, we can invest up to $100 million into the business in some cases, from really the inception to the IPO.
And we've been focusing on tech, both B2B and B2C, and mobility as a whole, not only micro but also macro, I would say, has been a very, very big area of focus for us.

**Oliver Bruce** (3:27)
Yeah, awesome. Well, as I was doing some research for this episode, I came across your previous investments and you've got a lot on that, as you say, macro mobility. So it's like trains and car shares and all that sort of stuff.
So talk me through, because you guys have been involved with Bird relatively early on, how did that thinking of the macro mobility stuff kind of inform how you started to assess micro mobility as it came along?

**Martin Mignot** (3:50)
Yeah, I think the thesis originally was just that once you get GPS into anybody's pockets and the ability to authenticate themselves and to locate themselves on a map and to connect with the devices and the people around them, then suddenly the way you move is totally different. You used to have to buy a vehicle and then move with it, or do things in a very kind of offline analog way. And then suddenly that totally changes because the world around you gets located and you can interact with it. And so that applied to investments like BlaBlaCar, for example, which was one of our early investment in the transportation space, which is pulling people together from point A to point B. Obviously, before the internet, you had no good way to know who was going where when.