On Monocle Radio's The Entrepreneurs, host Tom Edwards spoke with ENVO founder Ali about the origins of his interest in electric mobility, the first products he built after moving to Canada, and the thinking behind ENVO's growing range of vehicles.
Their conversation moves from a childhood experiment with a bicycle and a tape recorder motor to modular manufacturing, overlooked transportation needs, affordability, and what it would take to build a lasting business around right-sized mobility.
The dialogue below follows the order and substance of the interview. Speech has been lightly edited for readability and apparent transcription errors.
The Question That Started in Tehran
Tom Edwards: Ali was born and raised in Tehran. His interest in electric mobility began early, when he tried to use the motor from his father's broken tape recorder to power his bicycle uphill. He went on to study mechanical engineering and develop electric bicycle technology. After moving from Iran to Canada, he founded ENVO in 2015. Ali, tell me more about the journey that brought you here.
Ali: I was born and raised in Tehran, one of the most polluted cities in the world. That gave me an understanding of the chaos cars can cause in the environment.
I reached a point where the idea of burning fossil fuel, and moving a three-ton metal box to transport a person who might weigh 60 or 80 kilograms from point A to point B, seemed absolutely wrong.
What is the solution? Bicycles are good, and during my career I learned about electric bicycles and ways to make bicycles more effective. That is when I became interested in spending more time and resources understanding why people move as they do, and what the right way of moving might be.
Tom: What fascinates me is that this pursuit goes all the way back to when you were a child. You were a tinkerer. There is the story of your father's tape recorder and your attempt to use it on a bicycle. You had that instinct to create, reuse and rethink things as far back as you can remember.
Ali: As far as I remember, yes. I turned my bicycle upside down, cranked the pedals and watched the wheel spin. I had the motor from my dad's broken tape recorder and a few batteries. My dad worked at a battery manufacturing company in Iran, so I normally had access to batteries of different sizes.
I ran the motor with a battery and used a small wheel attached to it to spin the bicycle tire by friction. The bicycle wheel spun so fast in the air that I thought, if I put the bicycle back on its wheels and do the same thing, it should go just as fast. Let's ride it!
It never worked. The motor did not have enough torque or power. It could spin a free wheel quickly, but it could not move the vehicle and rider. Understanding the difference took several more years, until I studied mechanical engineering at university.
From Conversion Kits to a Wider Portfolio
Tom: You founded ENVO Drive Systems in 2015, around the time you moved to Canada, because you could not find the outlet you needed for this work. Today the portfolio is broad: bicycles, cargo platforms, snow bikes, snow carts and even marine applications. Does changing transportation at a large scale require that breadth of solutions?
Ali: I don't think so. The breadth of the portfolio may partly come from my own curiosity, but there are other forces pushing us in that direction. To explain it, I should step back to how the business started.
A bootstrap business built on conversion kits
It started with conversion kits for regular bicycles. That was the core of the bootstrap business. When I came to Canada, I already had an entrepreneurial background, including many failures. At one point I counted 62 startup ideas that had failed before I moved, as well as two that had succeeded. The conversion kit felt like the right idea, at the right time and at the right size for this community.
People were becoming interested in e-bikes and looking for affordable, practical ways to ride them. Eleven or twelve years ago, e-bikes were relatively rare and expensive. I developed electromechanical components that could convert different types of bicycles. I had worked on that technology for several years in Iran.
We launched a few setups successfully, they began generating revenue and cash flow, and I used that revenue and profit to grow the business into a more diverse range of products.
From a one-man show to a team
The first employee came about two years after I started. For those first two years it was a one-man show. As the market and portfolio grew, so did our capabilities in product design, customer service, supply chain management and logistics.
At the time of this conversation, we are a team of roughly 32. The wider portfolio is now supported by the mobility concept I am trying to introduce: modularity.
Why Modularity Matters
Tom: Let's talk about modularity, because it is fundamental to this. Do you think some people in the industry underestimate its value or its importance?
Ali: I expect the world to appreciate modularity much more in the near future. Look back at the evolution of automotive manufacturing and mobility. Much of it still follows the pattern Ford established in the early 1900s: mass production of the same type of vehicle, a one-size-fits-all solution.
Even innovative automakers produce a small number of vehicle types and expect people to use them for many different purposes. An SUV can do a lot of things. But if you want to right-size mobility, you need vehicles designed for particular applications. Otherwise the vehicle becomes big, bulky and inefficient again.
Right-sizing means many configurations
Right-sized mobility means addressing specific applications and different niches of the market. If we imagine smaller, more suitable vehicles replacing some of the work now done by large cars and trucks, we may need hundreds or even thousands of vehicle configurations:
- One for taking a child to school
- Another for commuting
- Another for a delivery worker
- Another for a delivery fleet
Here is the disconnect: what automaker wants to start a portfolio of hundreds of different vehicles? The industrial model teaches us to make one vehicle in very large quantities. Yet that is different from what the market, and the planet, need in mobility today.
What we are trying to bring to ENVO is modularity that still benefits from producing components at scale. A battery could power many different vehicles. A motor could serve many different applications. We can then combine those elements in different configurations according to how people actually need to use a vehicle. It is a form of mass customization that makes a broad portfolio of right-sized mobility products possible. That is the direction ENVO is heading.
The Challenge of Building a Sustainable Business
Tom: Which is harder: developing the technology and building the solution, or convincing people of the use case and the need to think about mobility differently?
Ali: Honestly, neither is the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge is building and pursuing a sustainable business while the market and the economy go through their ups and downs. You are building something innovative that has not been done before, while also dealing with crises such as COVID, the period after COVID, wars and other disruptions.
On customer adoption, I think that if you are addressing a real pain point in a particular market, you should not be too worried at the earliest stage. That is different if you are building only to satisfy your own curiosity without solving a market problem.
In our space, there are large gaps and ignored markets. If you target one of those markets, people are often already looking for a solution. You need to provide one that is wise, affordable and practical. That is what we are trying to do.
The technical work is challenging too. Modularity means designing elements that can perform in different environments, use cases and configurations. The result may be a simple product, but the engineering behind it is not simple. Still, the greatest challenge is navigating the business so it can survive and sustain the work.
Finding the Applications Others Have Missed
Tom: Competition is part of running that business. Who are you competing with? Other innovators, automakers, bicycle manufacturers, established habits, or perhaps regulations?
Ali: We need to adjust the lens. When you bring a new solution to a problem, competition is not necessarily the biggest issue.
For example, imagine a municipal organization using an F-150 truck for routine work, such as inspections. It may be looking for a right-sized, sustainable alternative, perhaps because of government mandates or a change in mindset. But it cannot find a vehicle that does that particular job.
What if we can design one for them? A fully custom vehicle would normally be very costly. But with a modular approach, they could tell us the problem and we could combine the appropriate building blocks to make a suitable product. The cost would be based on the components and the work of putting them together, rather than developing an entirely new vehicle from scratch.
When you can offer that kind of solution, you are creating a market. At this stage, the challenge is bringing the solution to the people who need it. I do not see it simply as competing with bicycles or cars.
An Innovation Has to Be Affordable
Tom: Affordability must be critical. How affordable do these vehicles have to become for right-sized mobility to take off at a larger scale?
Ali: Definitely. For a while, we made electric ATVs. Film studios approached us because they wanted to adapt one to carry cameras, cranes and other equipment for filming.
Could cost a film studio a couple of hundred thousand dollars.
Around ten thousand dollars, then equipped to do the same job.
It is all about affordability. A creative or innovative product is not automatically a solution. It must be affordable and economically viable for that particular use case. Otherwise the shift will not happen. It must also be financially sustainable for both the user and the business making it.
If you are replacing an F-150 used for a specific job with a smaller electric vehicle, there is a clear opportunity for it to cost less than the truck. If you want a family to use a right-sized vehicle to commute to work, the price needs to be around the level of a used small electric car. Otherwise it risks becoming another interesting startup product that never reaches broad adoption.
What Success Would Look Like
Tom: How do you measure success now? You have gone from one person to more than 30. Would success mean 300 employees or a particular revenue figure? Or would it be the changes you can see in how people and cities move?
Ali: From a legacy perspective, I would like ENVO to help bring about a new era of mobility. The big shift that needs to happen is right-sizing transportation.
There have been efforts around the world to introduce new right-sized vehicles, from cargo bikes and velomobiles to microcars and low-speed vehicles. Many startups have introduced innovative products over the past ten years, but many of those businesses no longer exist because their business models did not last.
I would call it a big success if, ten years from now, we could look back and see that this model worked and became a pattern. ENVO could become a community of connected businesses that follow this approach, share a supply chain and share engineering methods to make it sustainable.
That success may or may not mean thousands of people employed directly by ENVO. It could mean tens of thousands of people employed through this concept in different countries.
Building Something That Lasts Beyond One Person
Tom: One last question. To understand and deliver these solutions, it seems you need more than mechanical engineering and entrepreneurship. You need some understanding of urban planning, economics, behaviour, regulations and how cities work. Those priorities can pull in different directions. How do you draw them together?
Ali: Honestly, to make a sustainable business, you also need to be a good salesperson. I was reading about the founding of IKEA, and it struck me how important that ability was. It took me ten years to understand that engineers are not always the boss. Salespeople are the boss.
You are right that growing a multidimensional business requires a multidimensional understanding. You need to be able to speak the languages of legislation, business and technology.
An engineering background helps when somebody proposes a solution: you can judge right away whether it is technically viable or just a dream. In many of the areas we are entering now, I can see that a solution is technically practical and consider whether it can also be affordable. Both matter.
But that is me today. At the same time, we need to build a team that can do these things without me. If you want to leave a legacy, there will be a time to retire. You need to make sure the team can take over, continue the work and carry it further.
This dialogue is adapted from Tom Edwards's interview with Ali on Monocle Radio's The Entrepreneurs. Learn more about ENVO at envodrive.com.
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