#48 - The Future of Bike Sharing with Ofo Cofounder Yanqi Zhang and Anu Hariharan

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Yanqi Zhang and Anu Hariharan. Yanqi is the co-founder and COO of Ofo, and Anu is a partner here at YC.
So before we get going, if you haven't yet reviewed the show wherever you get your podcast, it would be awesome if you did. All right, here we go.

**Anu Hariharan** (0:21)
Hi, I'm Anu Hariharan, a partner at YC, and thank you Yanqi for being here today with us for our global growth event and for doing this interview with us. So Yanqi is the co-founder and CEO of Ofo.
Can you describe what Ofo is for our audience?

**Yanqi Zhang** (0:40)
Absolutely. So first of all, Anu, thanks very much for having us. I'm very excited to be here to share our story. So Ofo is the first smart station free bike sharing program in the world. So what we do is that we provide the station free bikes and for people to use, to unlock with their smartphones.
It's very easy accessible. It's very green, and it's a very smart way of getting around the city, especially for the last mile.

**Anu Hariharan** (1:05)
Great. Can you talk about the scale as well? Like how many cities are you in? How many trips do you cover?

**Yanqi Zhang** (1:10)
Yeah, absolutely. So as of today, we are in 180 cities. We're doing over 25 million trips a day.
And we have deployed over 10 million bikes already. And we're in right now, globally, 13 countries. The goal here is that by the end of this year, we're gonna go to at least 20 countries.

**Anu Hariharan** (1:28)
Oh, that's phenomenal. I mean, it's truly unique for a Chinese company to really go international this fast. Before I touch into how you did the international expansion, I wanted to hear your story on year one.
What was the motivation to launch Ofo? And how did you guys go about doing that?

**Yanqi Zhang** (1:47)
Basically, the company was founded by a group of passionate cyclists.
So it was founded in university when we were in university. So the very natural thing is that you have your bike in the university, but I think probably like this is something everybody has experienced is that your bike been stolen, and or like-

**Anu Hariharan** (2:07)
A lot in San Francisco actually, unfortunately.

**Yanqi Zhang** (2:10)
Yeah, so found himself like he lost four bikes during his university period of time. So, yeah, so we come up with this idea of what if like we have a shared bike system, like people don't need to worry about like bike being stolen be like when you go out of a station, right? There's still like 1.5 miles to go, but you don't have any transportation methods. You have to walk or something like that. What if we can solve that problem, right? So that's where sort of like the idea came about. I think this kind of last mile commuting problem is we feel that in China, but right now we know it's actually universal. It's everywhere, right? There is not a... Before us, there's not a very good solution for that. So yeah, so that's where we came from. And it's very natural, like any other startup in the world, we came up from wanting to solve a very simple pain point of people's regular daily life.
So yeah, we started in 2014, in university, right?
Bigging University. So basically, that's where the founding team studied. So basically, we started from there, and we spent some time to expand to 200 universities at the beginning. And starting from end of 2016, we expanded to the cities. So in the city markets, because we have the experience of running operations and all the systems, like within the university. So in the city, it's a different scenario, but there are a lot of things we can borrow. So we scale really quickly.
We spent eight months to expand to over 170, 180 cities. And in China, also include some international cities. Right now, mainly in China. And the trips grew from, at the beginning, it was 200,000 trips last year. Right now, it's over 25 million. So there's a big growth there.
Yeah, so that's sort of like our story and our trajectory.

**Anu Hariharan** (4:10)
Yeah, so I wanted to go back a little bit on the first year when you launched in the university.
How did you launch? Did you make your own bikes? Because you obviously wanted to move from doctor stations to something that people could access anywhere. So what was the supply in the first year?

**Yanqi Zhang** (4:25)