Exclusive Interview with Daniel Urbino, CEO of Ride1Up
From police auctions, to Santa Monica Boulevard. The story and inside mentality behind one of the most trusted e-bike brands on the market: Ride1Up. We dive deep with Daniel Urbino to discuss the e-bike boom, managing the crash of '22 and plans for 2026.
This interview hits a little closer to home. For those that have met Alex or me, you'll know we got our start in e-commerce with a company called EBC, which was a micro-mobility reseller (e-bikes, e-boards, e-scooters, etc.). We built the company in 2019, with probably a few thousand between the few of us founders, and ended up selling it to Agora Brands (DTC aggregator) in November 2021, just at the tail-end of the 'e-bike boom' let's call it.
So when Daniel and I sat down last week for over an hour to chat about all things electric, we had a lot to talk about. He was also about to head out for his first attempt at Pickleball, so we didn't waste any time. A California local, and CEO of Ride1Up for over 5 years, Daniel's philosophy along with founder Kevin Dugger is one that resonates with most founders not looking for a quick exit or a classic venture time-bomb (RIP VanMoof), but one of quality, experience and product innovation that's kept Ride1Up as one of the leading e-bike brands in the US.
From police auctions to being thrown in at the deep end
Daniel was quick to remind me he's not the founder but joined a few years into the mayhem. The brand was founded in 2018 by Kevin Dugger, in Davis, California, which by the sounds of it looks like the kind of place where cycling is democratised more than driving. So Kevin's start was a pretty wickedly unconventional one: buy bikes at police auctions, refurbish them, sell them to UC Davis students. Then, every May, when the students moved home and abandoned half the campus' bike fleet by the side of the road, rinse and repeat.
As Kevin grew the business from side-hustle to a legitimate brand over the years and started engineering their first few SKUs for DTC, fast-track to COVID 2021, that little operation was doing the kind of volume most large teams would kill for, with three employees, two models, and a Wordpress site. Having lived through that exact moment from the other side of the boom, I can confirm: not normal and very high stress.
So when Daniel walked into Ride1Up in Q2 of 2021, he was walking into the calm-looking surface of a category that, underneath, was an absolute circus. "I didn't know anything about the e-bike industry," he told me, "and when I did learn about it, I just wanted to learn more." His background, importantly, was not bikes. Accounting, finance, an MBA, a few years in ad tech and ecommerce. Which, as it turned out, was a great fit for a brand built on quality product and engineering to have some help steering the brand from the business and marketing side.
“For me, and how I view the company, you have three main pillars.”
"Product, customer support, and sales and marketing. Those are probably the three most important pillars for a successful DTC business. If those three aren't aligned, it's really hard to have long-term sustainable growth. It's the kind of thing that sounds obvious until you actually try to build a brand that holds all three at once. Most can't. Most don't."
What's interesting about Ride1Up is how each of those pillars looks in practice. On product, they don't chase proprietary mechanical parts for the sake of it. Their bikes are intentionally built around standard, non-proprietary components, which means if you bring a Ride1Up into any local bike shop in America with a flat or a snapped chain, the guy behind the counter can actually fix it. That decision is small on paper and enormous in practice. "We're not using any real proprietary bike mechanical components," Daniel said. "That means servicing our bikes is really easy because most of the reported issues are mechanical in nature."
On customer support, this is essential. I will never forget the nightmare our poor CS team at EBC used to have to deal with, when e-bikes were on the water for 6 months and parts were shipped by container ship from China, delayed at Long Beach every week (fun times). At least Ride1Up isn't selling $300 e-boards that people are spending their last stimulus check on instead of putting food on the table (we got a lot of these).
What's interesting is Ride1Up still stocks electrical components for the 500 Series, a bike they stopped selling in late 2022. "I just placed an order for batteries for that bike," Daniel told me, with the casual tone of someone who clearly doesn't think this is unusual. "We haven't sold that bike in almost four years now, but our customers could technically source the battery from third-party suppliers. However, if they're doing that, they're not getting that brand trust and supply-chain vetting that you're getting from Ride1Up." That's the move. Counterfeit and mislabelled batteries are one of the genuine horror stories of the e-bike category, and Ride1Up's answer is to keep stocking the original parts on bikes they stopped selling years ago. That long-term support is a real differentiator in the category. It builds trust, and value for customers who’ve been with the brand for years.
And then sales and marketing, which is where most founders blow themselves up.
Daniel's approach here is almost boring on purpose. "Everything we do is very ROI-focused," he said. “In a tough market, we don't do a whole lot of exploratory or experimental marketing spend. We evaluate everything through the lens of ROI. At the same time, we continue investing in product education, community, and brand-building initiatives. All this stuff is aimed at building customer value" No flashy brand campaigns to win design awards. No "let's just see what happens" budget lines. Just disciplined spend tied to actual return. Which doesn't sound radical until you remember what most of his 2021 competitors were doing with their Series A rounds.
The whole model, when you zoom out, is built around one assumption: that the customer is going to be on this bike for a long time, and the brand has to still be standing for all of it. That single belief touches every decision. Product design, parts strategy, marketing spend. It's also, I suspect, the reason Ride1Up is still here in 2026 while a long list of louder competitors quietly aren't. Apparently some customers do 20,000 miles a year on their e-bikes (WTF!). We laughed about introducing a million-mile club, like Volvo.
"When you look at the e-bike, it is a fundamentally good thing. The exploration, the ability to commute, the reduced cost to commute."
Daniel and I agreed, like anything, there's a problem when legislators have little to no understanding of a product they're legislating. This applies in all walks of life, sometimes in political interest, other times in pure ignorance. Not everyone can afford a car. Some people can afford an e-bike that can get them 30, 40, 50 miles on a single charge to where they need to go. It's a category that's quietly democratised access to transport, particularly for lower-income riders, ageing customers who can no longer cycle traditionally, and commuters who'd otherwise be stuck in traffic burning fuel.
Which is why the current policy is a friction point. Legislators are now pushing to strip Class 3 (28 mph) bikes from the market, the exact segment that makes e-bikes a viable car replacement in the first place. "It's counterintuitive," Daniel said. "They're stripping away the bikes that give people the freedom to commute, get around, and replace cars." The kicker is California, where the state spent millions on voucher programs to help lower-income consumers buy e-bikes for environmental reasons, and is now legislating to outlaw the bikes those vouchers just paid for.
To be clear, Daniel isn't anti-regulation. "We have to have legislation. We have to have safety standards," he said. "It's just the way they're trying to implement it isn't hitting the nail on the head." The e-bike industry, like a lot of new categories, is being legislated by people who, often through no fault of their own, just don't ride the product they're writing about.
Here's the part of the e-bike story most people don't fully appreciate unless they were inside it.
The 2020 to 2021 surge wasn't a product cycle, it was a stampede. Stimulus checks were floating around, lockdowns had turned every backyard into a fitness studio, and people were buying e-bikes on vibes. If a bike had two wheels, a battery, and a "ships in 4-6 weeks" line on the PDP, it sold. "The barrier to enter the industry was very low," Daniel told me. "It brought a lot of good and a lot of bad."
This is the part where the cream rises in any craze. The brands that ride the wave of hype almost always end up underwater when the tide goes out, and the e-bike list is brutal. VanMoof, the European darling, raised over $180M, opened flagship stores in a dozen cities, sold bikes with so much proprietary tech that the company became the only people on earth who could service them, and went all the way to a Dutch bankruptcy court in 2023, leaving thousands of customers with $3K bricks.
RadPower, once the largest e-bike company in North America, raised over $300M, went through multiple rounds of brutal layoffs, and in early 2025 filed for Chapter 11. Alex and I were speaking to members at Aventon, who reportedly bought into a mountain of inventory at exactly the wrong moment. Today, they’re whispered about on supplier calls in the tone reserved for cautionary tales. A long tail of smaller brands just vanished, especially resellers.
It's the classic venture-backed story, repeated almost identically across every consumer category. Raise large, scale at all costs, treat the boom as the new baseline, and assume you'll figure out the unit economics on the way up. Remember: for a lot of founders, their win may be selling secondary or cashing out, but that timing is hard, let alone the execution, and it doesn't prepare the business for longer-term survival.
The problem is that the unit economics in hardware aren't software economics. You can't refactor a warehouse full of 2022 inventory. "There were brands that came in with splashy technology and great looking bikes, but didn't have the customer support to back it," Daniel said. "Those brands are no longer around." Ride1Up, despite raising a Series A in 2022, kept operating like a bootstrapped company throughout. The founder lesson is the one every category eventually relearns: demand spikes are a stress test, not a strategy. The e-bike industry didn't pick winners on hype. It picked them on patience.