Tech companies today are building bigger and bigger campuses. Think about Google's sprawling complex in Mountain View, Facebook's expansive headquarters in Menlo Park, and Amazon's new HQ2 in Arlington, VA. These are not just workplaces; they are mini-cities, pulsating with thousands of employees every day. Just trying to get around campus becomes a rather daunting task and that’s a problem that Jeral Poskey, founder of Swyft Cities, thinks about a lot:
Swyft Cities was founded in 2019 by some Google Alums, behind the real estate and transportation programs for Google Campuses! The problem they were trying to solve? How do you move massive amounts of people in an increasingly growing campus?
Jeral envisions a future where getting around tech campuses and cityscapes is as seamless as hopping on a ski lift, but with the urban flair of downtown gondola rides.
Swift Cities isn't just about easing commutes; it's about transforming how we interact with our urban environments, making them more accessible, sustainable, and enjoyable. As Jeral puts it, it's about creating a 'Goldilocks density' of urban living, where communities thrive without the clutter and pollution of cars.
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Tech companies today are building bigger and bigger campuses. Think about Google's sprawling complex in Mountain View, Facebook's expansive headquarters in Menlo Park, and Amazon's new HQ2 in Arlington, VA. These are not just workplaces; they are mini-cities, pulsating with thousands of employees every day. Just trying to get around campus becomes a rather daunting task and that’s a problem that Jeral Poskey, founder of Swyft Cities, thinks about a lot:
Swyft Cities was founded in 2019 by some Google Alums, behind the real estate and transportation programs for Google Campuses! The problem they were trying to solve? How do you move massive amounts of people in an increasingly growing campus?
Jeral envisions a future where getting around tech campuses and cityscapes is as seamless as hopping on a ski lift, but with the urban flair of downtown gondola rides.
Swift Cities isn't just about easing commutes; it's about transforming how we interact with our urban environments, making them more accessible, sustainable, and enjoyable. As Jeral puts it, it's about creating a 'Goldilocks density' of urban living, where communities thrive without the clutter and pollution of cars.
Helpful links:
Tech companies today are building bigger and bigger campuses. Think about Google's sprawling complex in mountain view. Facebook's expansive headquarters in Menlo park. And Amazon's new HQ, two in Arlington, Virginia. These are not just workplaces. There are many cities pulsating with thousands of employees every day. Just trying to get around campus becomes a rather daunting task. And that's a problem that Gerald Polski, founder of swift cities. Thinks about. A lot.
Jeral Poskey:We're swift cities, we're creating these places, we're creating an experience for people. And the whoosh transportation system is. the mechanism to get that moving and get that started
Swift cities was founded in 2019 by some Google looms. Including Jerell. The were behind the real estate and transportation programs for Google campuses. The problem they were trying to solve. How do you move massive amounts of people in an increasingly growing campus?
Jeral Poskey:we've got to solve a transportation problem that's bigger than one we at Google had ever faced before
Jerell envisions a future where getting around tech campuses and city scapes is as seamless as hopping on a ski lift, but with the urban flair of downtown gondola rides.
Jeral Poskey:a swift city is a place you can get where you want to go, when you want to go, anywhere in the area, on demand. And it's just a good place to be.
Swift cities. Isn't just about easing commutes. It's about transforming how we interact with our urban environments. Making them more accessible, sustainable, and enjoyable. So join us on things have changed podcast. As we dive into how swift cities is revolutionizing urban mobility.
Shikher Bhandary:Our listeners at THC might know this. Jed and I used to live in Phoenix, Arizona. And while I was there, I worked at Intel in their semiconductor fabs. And anyone who's. aware of it, or even knows how they look, they're basically massive pieces of land where you have four to five factories and that's your campus. And each fab is as big as a city square. And close to 10, 000 people work daily. So it was interesting that, my shift on a daily basis used to be 6am to 3pm. And so for me to actually get to work. I had to actually reach there at 5 30. The biggest reason why I had to do that was because I could not find any parking because there were just cars everywhere. So you have 10, 000 people working in this fab and everyone drives their own car, parking lot is humongous, goes on for a mile, right? So that's just one issue. There's another one where often you have to move from one fab to another multiple times in a day, because maybe your work is in a different factory, but in the same campus. So again, you either walk for 30 minutes you drive your own car or you take the buggy and there are very few buggies. So this was a pain point and it is literally searching for an easier, faster way of solution. To move people within a dense setting the fab or the factories that, you know a lot of the manufacturing plants face similar issues. So today on things have changed. We are super excited to host Gerald Poskey, CEO of swift cities, a company with a really novel mobility solution where they offer a modular and scalable gondola system. For a sustainable way of connecting our cities at the fraction of the cost. So think ski gondola lifts, but in the city downtown, right? So it's just a novel idea. It's getting a lot of traction. So it's super interesting, Gerald. And, thanks for being on Things Have Changed.
Jeral Poskey:You're welcome. A really cool concept you have because everywhere around my world transportation, mobility, real estate, the world is changing. And it's an area that has been a little slow to change and a little slow to embrace change. And now it's about to happen in a big way that tidal wave of change is coming from multiple direction and we're about to see just a quantum shift in the way we think about transportation and the way we think about land use and real estate. I think your example is one of many that are out there where people are scratching their heads because they don't know. What worked in the past is not working now and is not going to work in the future. There's a lot of change coming and not all of it was in the right direction. And so I think we have a solution that is going to be, fill a need that is a gaping hole among everything that's out there.
Shikher Bhandary:absolutely. And everyone's searching for more walkable, denser settings where you don't have as many cars. And I think one thing that changed with COVID is, suddenly I remember, Jed lives in New York right now, I used to live there and they just shut cars off from certain streets because you wanted open settings, open restaurants. And then people really loved not having the cars on streets. It added to. The area it added to the Brooklyn neighborhood. So before jumping into the applications there, I'd love to understand how this idea was brewing in your past experience within Google and how that kind of came about.
Jeral Poskey:Yes, it starts with a problem. Now, this wasn't just an idea for ideas sake. I've been in transportation a very long time, but when I moved into Google's real estate division, that was the first time I was on the customer side of the table. And so many light bulbs went off seeing it from that perspective. And then you bring it to a point, and this was pre COVID where Google had realized that the, Infamous history of Google would be many people live in San Francisco and they take one of the many frequent buses down for those not from the area. That's a 45 minute ride, a minimum on the perfect conditions, but can easily push two hours on a bad day. And it was clear that employees were not enjoying that commute anymore. I think there was a time when people said, wow, these buses are great. Glad it's so glad I'm not driving. And then as more and more options became open to more walkable parts in San Francisco is going through some. Pretty fun times of more tech startups moving to up there, people said, Yeah, why am I spending this much time on a commute? And Google's campuses, Google had moved into just typical suburban office parks. That wasn't intentional. It's just how life had been. You had to have a small office and then you had to have a medium office and then a bigger office. And as they were getting bigger and bigger, Google had realized the trend is not toward more big office parks. It doesn't matter how many cafes and gyms and ball pits and all the wonderful Google things you put in there. Nobody wants that kind of life anymore, where you have, you live in one place and you work somewhere else and there's this big separation. We at Google were on a path to say, The new campuses are going to be different and they're going to be what you said people are looking for. They're going to be walkable, you're going to be able to live nearby, you don't have to live in your office, but it's convenient, it's close, it's connected, and there's open space, and there's restaurants, and there's entertainment, and all of the things you can live a life very comfortably. The biggest problem when you do something at that scale is transportation. So the answer became, we've got to solve a transportation problem that's bigger than one we at Google had ever faced before. Originally, Project Swift was out there to find what's that new technology that exists or that is in development that will solve our problems. And there's autonomous vehicles, there's things in tunnels, all sorts of things were coming along. And we thought the answer was going to be one of those. We looked at, I believe, 200 different options there, and it turns out none of them are solving the one to five mile transportation problem for dense areas in a way that makes sense. Many of them are focused on these sort of Almost mythical 20 mile commute, commutes. It's 1%, 2 percent of the people are actually making those commutes and yet we're designing high speed corridors and flying cars and things to solve that. When really 60 percent of people are making their trips that are 6 miles, 5 miles or less. And so we're looking at that saying none of that self driving cars are tied up in traffic. The stations you need for a lot of these other solutions don't make sense for a short trip. By the time you build those and get in, the effort to get in and out of a station. And we knew we needed something that would lower costs, but also make sense. The development better for the people who are there. So yes, you've described it as looking like a ski gondola. And at the first glance, that's absolutely right. But there's a few things that are different that make all the difference in how it works, both for the urban setting as well, just for the rider themselves. So number one, a ski resort gondola is a giant rope or cable that moves constantly. The vehicles are very dumb. They just clamp on, they follow the same path between two points. The number one change is with Woosh, the transportation system, the name for the system. With Woosh, the cable's not moving. So now the vehicles are driving themselves along the cable. And they're autonomous. And because there is a switching system within Woosh, now they don't have to follow the same path. Each vehicle can go origin to destination in whatever path makes sense. So now that you're not restricted to that straight line up a mountain, You can have an interconnected network, so you can go between not just two stations, five, ten, fifty, whatever the network requires. You can cover that area with a network of cables that are low cost and add capacity above the ground. From the user's perspective, it's like the perfect Uber. You walk up, vehicles are kept waiting for you, you get in, you tell it where to go, it's going to take you to that destination that you picked. There's no stoplights. There's no stop signs. As you pass stations along the way, those are off on sightings. So you're not stopping at anything until you get to your destination. Your vehicle pulls off to the side, you leave the vehicle, and now it's free to be rerouted anywhere else in the network it's needed. So you've got this user perspective. It's the perfect Uber with an incredible view. From the customer's perspective, it's the cheapest way to add capacity in a dense environment. From a city perspective, it adds. The right kind of density. It creates these districts or neighborhoods that are bustling with activity and places to be. And then from a global perspective, it's just the most efficient way to move. And it is the most efficient way to build out our cities is with this level of density that we can enable.
Jed Tabernero:There's super long lead times for these massive traditional infrastructure projects. I think what I love about this solution is that you assume that the other pieces of transportation are still part of that mix. And so the modularity allows for it to be, super customizable to where you're going to build it.
Jeral Poskey:We had built our first prototype here at a Google warehouse in Mountain View. And in February, 2020, we disassembled it and moving it to a bigger site in San Jose for more testing and to do more with it. In March, 2020, COVID broke out. Everything shut down. And a few times during Covid I would go over to the warehouse and see all the parts that had been moved over. And it was like a giant set from ikea. You felt like you could, I even one time was like, can I pick these things up myself? Because it's, here are the polls. Here's the bases. Here's the top. Here's the cable. Here's the trolley. All the pieces are there. The tops can vary depending on the angle of a turn. But the pole and the pole's heights may vary a little, but it's primarily, it's a kit. It's something that you feel like you can take out of a box. And put together with just minor customization along the way. So it's exactly that. And then the speed of implementation, because you're keeping things lighter, as we know, in the Silicon Valley electronics world, these things tend to success builds on exit on success. So because it's
Shikher Bhandary:Momentum is
Jeral Poskey:are smaller. Yeah. And Now you have more flexibility of where you put the post. So you don't have to move some underground utility or do something else. You can just move the post and you make the cable a little bit longer to avoid that thing. Now your installation time is faster. And because it's faster, it can keep up with, say, the pace of real estate development around here. It can be based on data that exists today in the near future instead of having to be built for some hypothetical 20 to 30 year future forecast that traditional systems always had to go. It in the transportation world, you had to do it. You had to make your best effort. But you always knew that it was going to be horribly wrong in the end because it was so far out. And now we can do things in a two to three year cycle based on activity that you know is happening and you can get there in time to make a difference. So yeah just speed, smallness, modularity gives you flexibility that leads to speed. And it's just this really self supporting cycle.
Jed Tabernero:You know what also I learned from listening to the podcast that you were already on and some of the materials read the best insider article, by the way, a great information on parking there. So we'll link that in the comments here. But one thing I learned about this as well, beyond the modularity is that, man, it is really expensive to build parking lots. And now thinking back, cause I was mentioning that I worked in finance before this, and one of my spaces was a CapEx. And we had an infrastructure project in HQ2, Amazon had one in DC. And I remember there were about six buildings that we were building in HQ2, the very beginning. And, they all had their varied costs associated with those buildings to build these buildings. One of them was little smaller than the rest, but it was still above 75 million. Okay. And what I found out about that one piece was that it was this massive parking structure that we were building. And in my head I was just thinking, that's an insane amount of cost for some place that people are going to go drive their cars into and leave it for the rest of the day. You know what I mean? Because we have a train system in D. C. And it was just interesting for me to think like the solution that we could think about for our next HQ, our next headquarters, where we're going to put, I don't know, 60, 70, 000 corporate workers, it's going to be a big parking lot. So little bit on the cost of a parking lot there. That's insane. That's a lot of money.
Jeral Poskey:Yes. And it, my audience often doesn't know that. And I forget that fact. And so I'll get asked maybe An investor or someone, how much does a system cost? And we'll say, one for a corporate campus, 25 to$50 million, and their eyes get big of how expensive this is and who would ever pay that? I've spent$300 million on a parking structure before. This is a drop
Jed Tabernero:Oh my gosh.
Jeral Poskey:And. Yeah, and then also, when you think about, if you think about the placemaking and trying to make that campus really effective, more space went into parking than it did for the people. Your typical desk space in a corporate environment is going to be 250 square feet per employee. Parking surface parking, 400 square feet a person. Garage parking, a little denser, is around 300 to 330. More space gets spent on the cars than on the people who are actually doing the work. It's a system that the dollars and cents are aligned, the motivation is aligned. But it's a constraint when you have to have all of that space and half of your space is going to cars, your ability to build a wonderful walkable environment goes away. And if you think about the places that you probably enjoy in Washington, D. C. I think of here in my area in California, you've got Palo Alto, Mountain View, these wonderful downtowns. Those wouldn't be wonderful downtowns if each one of those buildings had to be surrounded by its own parking lot. And yet density is key. And we've been talking about transportation with hints on real estate. I'm going to turn our conversation to real estate because the two are so interlinked and very few people know that, cities, these walkable areas, Mountain View, Palo Alto, other places, They wouldn't exist and couldn't exist if everybody was coming by car. So they typically have a train station nearby or something that brings in people that gives that ability to say, here's how big I would have been if everybody drove. And now if I can get a few more people, now I get a few more people in my shop. And even if I cut back on parking, now my shop is closer to the next shop and the next shop and the next shop. And now you've created this neighborhood that just wasn't possible when it was all built around cars. And these are the places people like, and it's this trend that we saw pre, even pre COVID from Google to say, people want to be in these wonderful connected places. And now the rest of the real estate world has woken up very suddenly to say, these booming large mixed use developments are happening everywhere. Massive growth across the South and Southwest of the U S and even to the world. That is the trend. And people have woken up that's the, where the demand is and that's where the economics are. The biggest problem to make those happens is often transportation.
Shikher Bhandary:Yeah. On that point, it's so tightly linked. If it's a bit more dense setting, this multi land use projects and these initiatives that we are seeing more often now that is encouraging a certain restaurant. To get some business or a bakery or a shop flower shop, you're in that vicinity So it becomes part of the culture which kind of then, flourishes Way better than just concrete, parking lot, building, car, go back home after work. So there's nothing that really makes you want to stay in that area. So
Jeral Poskey:One of the things I learned at Google, let's say you were building a small office building and it was going to have some ground floor retail and you have a VP of retail whose job it is to go fill that space. He's going to go out and get a McDonald's, a Taco Bell, a subway these entities that can maximize the dollars per square foot. Of that real estate. That's what you do. You squeeze those in and that's your maximum revenue. Now let's say you're building 4 million square feet of real estate and 3000 housing units and all of these wonderful things going on. You hire a VP of retail and she's going to go out and get the little fuss shop, the little neighborhood sandwich shop, the yoga studio, the bike store, and maybe he goes to the CEO and he says, what are you doing? You're getting, 30 percent less revenue of retail than this other guy over here. What are you thinking? And then she looks back and says, yeah, but did you see the office? The vacancy rates are lower. The rental rates are higher. Those apartments are flying off the shelf. We've had to raise the rent twice, just to satisfy the demand for these units because there you're not maximizing. For the retail per se, you're maximizing for the overall entity, and this place making truly has value, and we then take that one more level that was from a building to a development. Now, if you look at a district, a subsection of the city that can be all interconnected, we do the same and what a swift city is. I should cover that separately. A swift city, it's going to be very visible. You see the gondolas, you can't avoid seeing who's around the terrain, but you also will know seeing it that a swift city is a place you can get where you want to go, when you want to go, anywhere in the area, on demand. Easily, more easily than in a car. And it's just a good place to be. And when we apply that, we say, yeah, the accountant might not put a stop at the museum or might say, boy, there's not enough writers at the park to justify a station. You go back to that example about. Which businesses do you bring in? You want to create an environment where people just know I can get where I want to go. It's a great place to be. And I've got that density. That's not scary density, but sometimes called the Goldilocks density. It just feels right. That's the swift city that we are building.
Shikher Bhandary:That's awesome. And can you break down the product aspect of your company? You mentioned the Woosh. It's not hardware that your company builds, but you partner up with teams and. It's not just the hardware side. It's a software side, as well as the operation side. Running infrastructure requires having an operation know how. Yeah.
Jeral Poskey:You're right. It is a full value chain, a full industry that we've lined up to be supportive. And number one, the hardware that we described and what and you picture is Woosh. And it was developed under Project Swift, but it was developed by Home Solutions down in New Zealand. And having a Large engineering partner to do design and manufacturing. At first, I, my first instinct would have been to have that in house, but it turns out having somebody with massive resources and lots of experience working with a third party has been tremendous. And then from there, now there's a value chain to go through. The next most important piece, which is our piece is the autonomy. How do you move? Dozens to hundreds to potentially thousands of vehicles simultaneously across a network at good speed at close headways where you're moving lots of people. The reason that trains are big is because they can't happen very often. So you better get a lot of people into them. The problem is reverse for us. Vehicles are smaller. You better move them very frequently, very close together. So that's the autonomy piece that we do. And then it moves into implementation. We've been working with construction companies, design and engineering companies, some of the names you may recognize, AECOM, Flatiron Construction, and then the finance piece and operations. You're right, the key, and oftentimes the literal customer might actually be the finance group, not the developer themselves, but they may be contracting with the finance group who's going to take the responsibility. For building it out making sure that the money flows in all directions. And so the operations plenary Americas is a group that we've been working with on a number of projects. And then that takes you to operations. And so we're not there to clean the vehicles. We're not there to wipe the floors on the stations, but we are there for the overall system control and system management and system operations. From a business model perspective it's pretty, pretty great because even during the preliminary phase, during your sales cycle, you do get paid for studies, but then primarily you get the hardware sale at the beginning. So you get revenue in a big chunk as the system comes online. And then through the software, through the autonomy, now there's recurring revenue. And that tends to have an increase that's exponential as systems get bigger, you get more writers. Your costs are only linear in expansion, but your ridership is above linear. It's exponential and it's growth. And so that's where you want to be as some upfront revenue, even during the sales cycle, then a big chunk early in the project life and then recurring revenue along the way.
Shikher Bhandary:Gotcha. Yep. We are like I'm a supply chain. Person, Mr. Jed here is finance operations, infrastructure, CapEx, that's his lingo and day to day. So when we see such infrastructure projects, the first thing we go is, wait, how is it happening? What is, take aside the hardware and the software, but what is happening? How do you make this work? So I think that's just the mindset that we have, because what we've noticed in our, different experiences. Are that's where the pain points are, you have a great system, like automated driving, you have a great software, but how are you going to make it work what are the operation steps you need to make sure that it's adopted by the public, so those are key steps. Yeah,
Jeral Poskey:surprises me some of the questions I get from, especially the investment community in Silicon Valley, I guess they've been exposed to a lot of startups who have neat ideas and don't understand how to put things into practice because they ask questions that to me were obvious and no brainers. And so number one, it's broadly to build out the team within the company that can deliver full projects. It's not just about the technology. So for us, it starts with Regulations. Did you design according to regulations that exist, or are you just designing for theoretical and you're going to figure out the regulations later? We've designed for regulations that exist today. Thankfully, some regulations were changed in 2021 and everything we do. Matches U. S. And is aligned with international standards. Then you say, as you said, how do you get permission to do this? We fit under the same structure that cable TV companies and phone companies did to put post. And cables in public right away down the street, put them in and service them. So you're following that pattern. And then I recruited one of the people who I've worked with for 10 years. Now, Katrine is one of our co founders. I call her the city whisper. She knows how to get cities to say yes. And often if you have,
Shikher Bhandary:that's the hardest part.
Jeral Poskey:And so there's a magic to that and bringing in sort of our support and also a lot of local involvement to make sure you've got that support. And then once you're approved to go forward, the clay is another co founder. He is a, I say, project manager extraordinaire, but. What it is he's, we've worked with a ton of great project managers, but he like project managers, project management, and understands how to put a process around project management so that the next project is better than this one. And the one after that is better than that one. And so you see that, having enough exposure in my career to say, okay, these are the people who stand out and these are the people who can get things done.
Shikher Bhandary:What you said is so accurate. I was watching like a video and reading some articles about how the most important person in these big telecom companies, big infrastructure companies are not like the CEO, but the person that interacts with the regulators. On a side note, how has it been working with that sort of challenge, right? The regulatory challenge where it's not zero one where for a customer on SAS platform that they are like, Oh, this is a better product. I'm going to jump into this. It's not that it's more, you have to follow certain standards and get the approvals. from, city council, state governments to actually gain traction. So how does that play out?
Jeral Poskey:Yes, and so far it has been going far better than I had expected. I've been in this industry a long time. I would have expected more resistance 20 years ago, cities really were and agencies really were focused just on buses and trains, and now they have woken up that the world is changing underneath their feet and they better. and move forward. So I think they're very open minded toward new solutions, especially solutions that support the existing transit networks that are already in place. And then at the city level, number one, we don't go where there's not a problem and we don't go where we're not wanted. So we would take a map and if you, there's single family homes and people living alone, just put a bigger edX, you're not going there. Don't even try. And then you say, where is the problem? And. Cities and residents and developers are actually surprisingly aligned on things they want. The individual resident wants less traffic and they want lower taxes, but they want a great city. And so the city staff knows they need to bring in generally new development and new activity to make that happen and developers are saying, hey, if you can improve that, I'm happy to do it. At least if you're in busy growing areas. So there's a surprising amount of alignment between the interests If you can, work through a few things. And I think the not in my backyard, which, it's a literal, we often use that just as a general pejorative term, if it's your backyard and there's a gondola going overhead, I totally agree. You can speak up and say, you don't want that to happen. We don't go there. Going back to your question is just, I have been surprised at how open minded and willing to consider new things people are. And again, as long as you're not going over next to people's houses, they tend to really like the idea. Yeah.
Jed Tabernero:When an institution. Or a company is stuck thinking about transportation solutions. All of a sudden they become open to this, new idea that, maybe it's not so traditional. Something I think about a lot, because my wife's European is that she always complains about how much we don't have public infrastructure here for trains, for things like that, things we aren't super very popular about in the United States. And the one thing that she always mentions is, look, we don't have Y'all love cars. Americans love cars. And I want to ask you how you think about cars being in the picture for this space. I understand that, you're not going into certain communities that are single family homes and whatnot. But Americans they love cars. Are we really only looking at the population that's backed up to a corner that doesn't have any other choice? How do you convince this population to be okay with that being as a form of transport in urban cities and very dense scenarios as well?
Jeral Poskey:One thing that's oddly unique about our company and the people here is that we face reality, I think, in the planning world, transportation planning and urban planning, there's a lot of people who plan around how people ought to behave and people ought to be willing to ride a bike. People ought to be willing to walk a half mile to the train station. And these are true conversations we have. That, Oh, we don't want to station too close because they ought to get more exercise. People ought to get more exercise. They ought to want that. And it just boggles my mind how you can do so much planning specifically. You're choosing to avoid the reality of what people want. Maybe on one hand, they say that, but when they actually get going in the day, they pick up their keys. Even if they say my new year's resolution was to bike to work or do all these things, they pick up their keys and they get in their car. That's the reality. They're only going to not do that. Yeah. If the alternative is better and alternative that is better has to truly be better on the metrics they value and not well, it matches some goals. We said over here. We said we were going to be more sustainable or we said we were. No, that's not their goals. Their goals and their metrics are I'm in a hurry. I need to get there. And this is my fastest, best way to get there. To the extent that parking is plentiful on both ends and it's right by the door, it's probably going to continue to be the case, but as you've seen more and more developers and cities around the country in the U S and around the world really are removing certain requirements for parking. So parking gets a little harder on each end. The economics of not putting in parking are very strong for developers when they do that. And so now you have an incentive to say. Maybe I'll consider something new. And we're not expecting to get 100 percent of the people. We're not expecting to get 50 percent of the people. But you're looking for, there's a normal distribution here. And right now the people who don't take their car is a really small piece on the end. But as you move up that scale, each incremental step, you get more and more yield. Off each incremental step. And so we're looking like we can move that thing about a third of the way up the chart where you get really high and increasing yields on each piece of investment. So yeah, we're not trying to take away anyone's car, but we want to give them a better option.
Shikher Bhandary:that's a great point, understanding the reality that this country loves their freedom and loves their cars and loves their trucks, but there is a window here. There is a niche where in dense settings. Yes, absolutely. They would love a way to commute fast. Generally you've got some traction out in New Zealand. I would love to understand how that came by and what's the progress. What's the plans out there? Was it more a private initiative or was it more a public initiative?
Jeral Poskey:Definitely private to start. And now the transition is happening. Real estate developer with what you're talking about. It's a little more sprawling, but 300 acre trying to convert that to hectares for your international audience, I'm slow on that. The For the large film,
Shikher Bhandary:Even we have no idea. We'll add it in the, we'll add it in the bio.
Jeral Poskey:sounds good.
Shikher Bhandary:Hectares.
Jeral Poskey:yeah, the site has apartments, it has hotels, it has office, it has entertainment, and right now he has to build You know, five parking spaces, a little bit less than that, but we call it five parking spaces for visitor. They're going to rent a car. They're gonna park at the hotel. When they want to go out to eat, they're gonna have to drive and it's just spread out enough. Some people might walk it, but a lot of people are gonna drive that distance. And then when you want to go to the next place, you're gonna drive. And he sees, wait, I could just connect it to where people park once, as you said, and now I've cut my cost tremendously. Okay, that's great. That solves a near term problem. Also, he's adjacent to the airport. What if the next phase connects to the airport and now people don't even have to rent a car. They can go straight from the airport to the properties, to the hotels, everything he has. And then as you said, the modularity, there's developers on each side of him who have said, Oh we'd want to be connected too. And he already has his first permits from the city. And the city's only feedback was yeah, you show downtown connection as phase 10 of a future idea. Can we bump that up a bit? Why wouldn't you come to downtown sooner? And so now it's becoming more of a public sector project down there. Very exciting. And I think it's the roadmap. I think it's the roadmap. Initially, I thought this modularity and this expansion was our little secret. And aha, we'll get it going then. And then, aha, we can start to expand. No, everybody sees it. There's no secret to it. The beauty of starting small, getting it going, and then expanding is just universally the customer reaction. They get there. Yeah,
Jed Tabernero:You know what I love about this? It's the fact that this entire time that you've been talking about the product, you're mentioning a lot about the user and the user experience. When I think of the folks who designed the bus system here in Jersey, or the guys who designed the path system, right? I don't think they considered the user experience at all in that. And you know what? I got to give them kudos. It's getting a little bit better. It's getting a little bit better, but the amount of times. That kind of this public infrastructure. I, by the way, I appreciate it so much because I'm from the West Coast, spent a lot of time in California and the Bay area. And so coming out here with this is great. I have all this infrastructure that I have to do. I don't need my car, but I have one. I'm very American in that respect, but the public transportation is quite good. It's just a. The government or the folks that are running these programs, right? They don't really think about the user experience aspect of this. I'll tell you what, there are times that I've decided to take Ubers to the Hoboken path station, which was about, it's about a 20, 30 minute walk, which is not terrible, but there's also a bus system that goes from my place to this terminal, right? That takes me into the city. And how many times have I just chosen to take the Uber just because, I don't know if the bus is going to be there on time. I don't know if it's going to be late. You know what I mean? I don't think they, they cared about that aspect a lot. And so this kind of mix between public and private startup build is just really exciting to me because then you start considering user experience, right? I liken this a lot to when, Privatization of my space had occurred in the space industry, where it was all government stuff. So it was like really difficult to get things going. There was a lot of things going on. Things were so expensive. And then you privatize it. And some things had to figure out for themselves like a reusable rocket, right? Made a lot cheaper. So I see that very much similar to that shift where we're talking now about transportation, urban planning solutions. That are going to be led by a startup did want to ask you the user experience of somebody using this product, right? Maybe it's going to come in different shapes and forms. As you said, you work with a lot of partners, but I've heard it described a lot like an Uber, like an autonomous Uber in the sky. And I've also read a lot of documentation that says, maybe it's in the form of an app. Somebody has a request it'll wait for you, all of these, et cetera, details. Wanted to hear more a little bit about that piece and how you're connecting actually to the customer.
Jeral Poskey:the good point to dive into a little bit more and I'm going to take it back to the company. Your premise is right. That our DNA is a bit different. If we were a swift transportation company, my job would probably be to maximize the number of poles and miles of cable I get in the ground. But we're not, we're bigger than that. We're swift cities, we're creating these places, we're creating an experience for people. And the transportation, the whoosh transportation system is. the mechanism to get that moving and get that started. But there's, it's beyond that. It's not just a device. And then but to the specific user experience, what we're seeing is that in most of our early cases, it's a feature added to an existing site. So if you show up at a ski resort or an airport or this site down in New Zealand nobody wants to say yeah, but before you can go anywhere, now you have to download an app. And sign up for an account no, they're definitely picturing it. That you get on, there's a touch screen. You just get on, tell it where you're going, press the button and you're off. Then as you get to something that's more, whether there's a cost sharing element or, it's a public system that has paid rides, now you're talking to the app and or it gets just big enough that, the touchscreen becomes. Complicated. Now you're looking at the app and there may be a time when it's even optional and there may be two ways of doing it, but yeah, it depends on the situation whether there's a, often get asked whether there's going to be a fair or not, that's not our decision. In the end, it's going to be what's right for that site. There's no blanket answer. Is it free? Is it priced the same as a bus? Is it priced the same as an Uber? Is it better than an Uber? That's not our decision and it'll be very case by case.
Shikher Bhandary:cover so many founders and it's all that sustainability angle. It's so interesting. This specific use case is not just sustainability, it's transportation, it's urban planning, it's RE, real estate it's private, it's public. So there are so many different spheres that it touched that we actually didn't get to the sustainability part.
Jeral Poskey:First of all, I want to remove the focus on just the transportation. It's the transportation and real estate together. And unfortunately, there's several, unfortunately it's here, transportation and real estate, the built environment, whatever you call it, are two of the highest sources of carbon emissions and both of them are not getting better. They are at best steady or getting worse over time. And those are trends that have to reverse. And what's even worse beyond that, when you look at the new forms of transportation that people are very excited about, underground tunnels and flying cars and things, even autonomous vehicles, those are, All the signs point toward those are leading us to make it easier to live farther away, easier to live a spread out lifestyle, breaking emissions down to an individual person level, half of our emissions come from how we move around and half come from how we live. So even if you were to make the remarkable, awesome, one of those systems I just said that had, wonderful, positive impacts on energy use, which I don't think any of those will Now you're moving people into an area where their lifestyle is more spread out and they're not walking and their houses are bigger and they're harder to heat. And so that's a negative. We're looking at a situation where we're, the things are trending negative, both transportation, real estate, land use are all trending negative. How do you fix that? You fix that by giving them a way to move. Electric. You move shorter distances. It's not just, distance matters. Even if it's electric, it's how far you're moving and creating that land use that works. These are 50 year decisions. We've got two and a half billion people who are moving to cities from, or from rural areas worldwide over the next 25 years. Each one of those people needs hundreds of square feet. Probably 500 square feet on average. That's something like 50 billion square feet of real estate has to get created Each and every year for the next 25 years to support this migration. And if we do that wrong, those are 50 year commitments in poorly formed buildings. And I picked on sprawl there. I think people have long established that sprawl, that's individual houses have to be heated and cooled. Okay. That's clearly going to use more energy and create more emissions. And. skyscrapers, those types of living. Oh yeah, heats and cools as much as, there's very much less energy used to do that. So that's the right answer. And now it has turned out to say actually no, because the energy that you factor in of creating super tall buildings. obliterates that advantage that you gained on the operational. And especially right now, we're a tipping point here of climate change, putting in tons of upfront carbon in order to gain a long term carbon benefit might not be the best decision. And just, it doesn't work out life cycle wise. The man Lloyd Alter says, Cause it Goldilocks density from a sustainable point of view where you want to be in this 4 to 6 to 8 story, maybe 12 story range. That's the most sustainable density and building style and conveniently, it's the style we've already established is the style that people like. It's just something that awkwardly. The transportation network doesn't support, you really can't support that level of density with just cars or even cars and buses can help a bit and yet that's not dense enough for trains to really work. Trains need more density than that to be highly effective. So it's this middle ground and we've got some interesting charts that we haven't released to show. It's just a bimodal distribution that there's a lot of development around the density that cars work at. There's a lot of development that there's the density that trains work at. Neither of those are where we need to be for sustainability and we're filling in that gap for this Goldilocks area that's both sustainable, but also what people want what cities want, what developers wanna build. It's just a great place to be and amazing that no one ever really focus on that as a transportation problem. Before.
Shikher Bhandary:This was awesome. We genuinely love anything infrastructure, anything capital, anything physical. Before we leave, we always hand the virtual mic. To our guest to give a shout out to your team as well as maybe sending a message as to how people could reach out to you. Maybe it's a hiring thing, maybe it's funding and stage is yours to provide that
Jeral Poskey:Yeah. Before we're done, I do want us to shout out to all the team I've mentioned a few by name and for those who I didn't get to thank you for what you're doing. I do think we have the puzzle. Built at least for the stage we're at, and now we're at this point where we have a lead investor for our next round looking forward to closing that, looking forward to building a bigger puzzle, adding a whole new section to a puzzle, making a modular puzzle. At the same time, I've referenced some of our industry partners. And so as we go, as we move forward, I see that expanding among planning, design, construction, so many of these are local, you can't just have one partner for the whole world. And so we look forward to seeing that, and especially the real estate side. One thing I didn't mention before was that real estate partner here really understand the land acquisition ahead of our system expansion and then the entitlement phase. And so finding the right partner in the real estate space to help plan out how the growth happens and how to take advantage of that really to make it better for. For everyone to have better, larger, more profitable sites, but also just getting this level of density out there, the bigger it is, the more places you have to go, the better the experiences. Yeah, love the team. We have a look forward to expanding it. Look forward to closing this next funding round and then getting more partners in board here in the coming months and on,
Shikher Bhandary:That's awesome. Thanks a lot, Gerald. We can't wait to jet. What say we fly out to New Zealand when this.
Jed Tabernero:that'd be great.
Jeral Poskey:that's a very hospitable country. They're going to make sure you enjoy your trip down there.
Jed Tabernero:Great news.
Shikher Bhandary:great..
Just to close out a big shout out to Gerald Polsky and swift cities for a fresh take on beating urban gridlock. From a mountain view warehouse to broader horizons, they're crafting a solution. Uh, straightforward as a snap together kit in Ikea. Keep an eye out swift cities might just change the daily commute game. The information and opinions expressed in this episode are for informational purposes only. And are not intended as financial investment or professional advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making any decisions based on the concept provided. Neither the podcast, nor is creators are responsible for any actions taken as a result of listening to this episode.