Swyft Cities’ Jeral Poskey on getting big ideas off the ground

Andy:

 Hello and welcome to Ashurst Business Agenda. My name's Andy McLean, and you are listening to a special episode in our Outpacing Change miniseries where we meet with visionaries who are changing the world around them. In today's episode, you'll hear my conversation with Jeral Poskey, who is helping to reinvent the way that people travel around cities and communities.

And so to our episode, in this discussion with Jeral Poskey, he talks me through his instrumental role in better connecting Google's campuses through transportation and development. We discuss the process of testing and learning for a mode of transport that smashed targets for effectiveness, cost, sustainability, and speed to market. And today Jeral is chief executive of Swyft Cities, an independent company that is commercialising this transport solution and bringing innovative mobility to public and private real estate projects. It's a wide-ranging discussion with plenty of inspiration and takeaways for business leaders and innovators in any industry or sector. I can't wait to share it with you, so let's jump in and hear the conversation. So Jeral, welcome to Ashurst's outpacing Change miniseries. It's great to have you with us.

Jeral:

Hi, Andy. It's great to be here. Thank you.

Andy:

Now, before we jump into your adventures at Google and Swyft Cities, I'm interested to get a little bit of your origin story if you like. You're obviously work in transportation now, but you actually grew up in rural Texas, so I'm just wondering, were you one of those little kids who was playing with toy train sets and Lego?

Jeral:

Well, I only had one Lego, literally, so it wasn't that. But trains, yeah, you guessed it right. Train books, train set. I say all through high school, there's only two assignments I ever did early. One was my transportation booklet in first grade, which I still have. And my 11th grade term paper on the automobile industry. That in hindsight must have been the driest paper the teacher ever read, but I was so into it.

Andy:

Confession time. How did you get graded on those assignments?

Jeral:
A lot of work went into those. They were going to be perfect. Must have been A's, I can't imagine. Must have been A's.

Andy:

These are the early seeds for where your future was going to take you. So could you tell me how this initial passion, which presumably started as a hobby, gradually became your career and your livelihood?

Jeral:

Yeah, yeah. What's really funny is I didn't think I was a transportation person. I did think it was a hobby. So as an undergrad in college, a friend would tell me good urban planning classes to take, and I would sign up and get the course pack and then drop the class. So I just wanted to read the course packs for fun. I didn't really want to take the classes. I was going to be a PhD economist.

So I started that direction. And in grad school I was skipping classes to go to transportation seminars. I took my first job. I took vacation days to go to transportation conferences. It took me a surprisingly long time to realise, "You know what? Maybe this isn't a hobby. Maybe this is what I'm supposed to do."

Andy:

That's very interesting though, so you had that passion and yet you were studying economics. And I put two and two together there, I would argue that economic background, that commercial nous if you like, that you developed early, stood you in really good stead when you had to think big picture about transportation later on.

Jeral:
Good point. I think so and truly, somewhere along the way, my fascination wasn't with the physical object of the train, but what is the train there to do? What problem is it solving? And that's how my brain works. I realise it's different than a lot of other people, but I was trying to solve the ultimate problem and I was less concerned about the gadget. But what's the underlying problem?

Andy:

And were you kind of always looking ahead as well? Do you think, Jeral, when you think back to those days, were you always thinking, what does the future look like for cities? What does the future of transportation look like? Was that something that was in your mind even back then?

Jeral:

It was partially my mind and it affected my career path, which is not a career ladder. It is not an straight upwardly trajectory. It's a web. And I advocate just for people to follow your career web. I went very horizontally. I was in politics in DC. I was in systems engineering for Kodak. I then went to business school and this transition where I said, this is going to be, this should be my career. I had been to all these transportation conferences and becoming a civil engineer like these other people was the obvious thing.

But then it dawned on me when I go to these conferences and people have these great innovative ideas that weren't going anywhere, especially at that time when transportation just wasn't as ripe for innovation. The problem wasn't, we were one engineer short of the solution, it was there's nobody there with business skills. So I said, "Where's the best place I can go to learn how to bring technology to the market?" I set my sights on Stanford Business School. I had made it in there and I was really surprised, at that point I was the only transportation person at the business school, and now it's an extreme. It's a whole topic in of itself.

Andy:

There you go. So you were thinking ahead, you were kind of ahead of the pack in a way there, and it's interesting that you referenced that career. So you had really quite a varied career, as you say, you worked at the US Senate, the House of Representatives, you in marketing and sales. And then for fast-forward quite a lot, we find in 2012, there you are at Google. And I'm just interested for you to tell me a little bit about what the mobility challenge was that you first faced at Google. Tell us a bit about the problem.

Jeral:

Yeah, I had joined Google 2006 when I had left another transportation startup and thought I needed a break. And I was first in data analytics and then in Google Maps and Earth. But of course though, I got pulled back into the transportation world with Google's real estate division. At one point I told the head of transportation, we were kind of having lunches and we've been having lunches for two years, and the conversations are kind of a circle. You're bringing me the same problems, the same ideas, but then those have their own problems. And this circle, I said, "Look, give me six months on the transportation team and I'll have a plan that you can follow."

Andy:

Okay. You finished the plan, what happened next?

Jeral:

Well, I wouldn't say we finished the plan. I was only there for eight years and weren't quite done when I was done. But things that Google changed a lot and that plan evolved and evolved and evolved. We never got to the end, but when I started, the goal of the transportation programme was simply, "Let's get people to work conveniently so they're not stressed and they're ready to start their day. And people are excited to work at Google." Now we're in a suburban area where I'd say less than 3% of people would normally take the bus to work, and Google had gotten that number up to 20%. It's just massive, massive what's called mode share of how many people willing to take the bus. It's a huge accomplishment because it got traffic down. Now it allowed Google to go to the city and asked to build more office space.

Traffic is usually the reason why the neighbours are going to shoot down any expansion. But with Google's series about traffic, the city could give the green light to add more office space, and that's where the light bulb went off for our leadership. Solving these transportation problems basically is allowing you to print more land and in Silicon Valley that's printing money. So now we can come up with all sorts of crazy transportation ideas and put a value, put a return on investment to them. Will this X billion dollars you spend allow me to build another 500,000 square feet of real estate? Well, if it could, if it gets enough people out of the cars, we get the green line. So at that point, transportation became strategic. It wasn't just an employee service anymore, it was a strategic element in Google's real estate plans. And Google's real estate plans and office plans were just strategic to how the whole company grew. So it was a great place to be that really valued the strategic value of transportation.

Andy:

And I think it's fair to say that transportation and employee transportation, for a lot of organisations, it might be seen as you refer to as an employee benefit. It might be something where just the HR department perhaps gives that some thought. But what you are saying is that Google actually made that strategic priority, and I think I'd be right in saying that by doing so, that gave you the freedom to innovate. It gave you the mandate to do so. Is that correct?

Jeral:

Exactly, yeah. I have counterparts that the other companies, the other major Silicon Valley companies, and some of them have bus programmes and some of them have others. But you can tell how organisation is set up and how it affects. If they're part of the HR department, if they're part of the facilities group, and are they an afterthought? Are they strategic? And really nobody else treats it strategically like Google does. And so the mandate was there to find a solution, prove return on investment, but then make it happen. So jumping ahead, eventually the low hanging fruit was gone. First we maximised how many people can we get taking buses? That was up above 30%, then it was biking to work. Can we push that further? Five, 10%?

Then it was shared rides and carpools, but then eventually it was, "What's next?" Every improvement that has an ROI, you know we should pursue, but we're really stuck at the what's next. And I'd say one other thing that changed. So even before COVID-19, Google had realised that the old corporate campus model was dead, where you're just in a suburban building surrounded by parking lots or something, and you drive there. And I don't know if, I mean Google's famous for the massages at work and the restaurants and the bowling alleys and all of these features. But those were kind of loosen to the lustre even with all of that, people weren't wanting a sterile isolated office park.

Andy:

And what happened next?

Jeral:

And then Google envisioned some, I'll just say incredible new campuses. I mean, yes, adding office, but going really big on this around our area, desperately needing housing and then simultaneously building up restaurants and retail, but at the same time adding open space. So you were surrounded by nature. These were awesome visions, and not everybody likes rural around here.

All of the key opponents even came around. The city liked it. The Google employees liked what they were seeing and even the opponents, I said got on board and said, "Wow, these are awesome campuses."

And they're visions of probably what you picture a vacation. If you're picturing yourself going on vacation, sipping coffee at a cafe or buying some little sandwiches and having lunch in a park. It was that kind of environment. But, the but, on all of this was everybody liked it, but if you built it the traditional way, the parking and transportation cost would be enough to seek the financial viability of these ideas. So it was my idea to find a solution. What is something out there that would be that next best thing on how to get people to work and solve these problems?

Andy:

Fantastic. Now tell us about the solution that you came up with.

Jeral:

Oh, yes, we haven't covered that. So it's an autonomous vehicle on cables. So at first glance, you'd say it looks like a gondola at ski resort, but there's a few key differences that make all the difference. First, the cables don't move. The vehicles drive themselves along the cable, and that means that every pole now they can turn, they can change directions, they can even move to a new path. So they're not stuck on the same back and forth to station path all day just doing the same thing like a normal ski resort gondola.

Now they operate as a network. They interconnect and have any number of stations, and you don't follow the same path every time that you need to go between two different stations. Every time it's a nonstop trip. Speaking from the perspective of the rider. So these vehicles are small and they're waiting at stations for you, and the stations are just there at the ground, like a bus stop.

You get in, tell it where you want to go. Now your vehicle's going to take the cable up from the ground. Now it's elevated. You're up above, you're going to skip every station along the way because they're also on these sightings and you go nonstop to the station that you chose. It's like having the perfect Uber in the air. Now, from the perspective of our customer, these are the real estate developers, the airports, the universities, maybe even the cities that are installing these. Cable systems are really cheap, they're easy to instal, they're very flexible, and importantly, they're expandable. They don't have these two stuck endpoints. You can grow the system phase after phase after phase, and as you do, it marginally gets cheaper per unit while it gets simultaneously more and more valuable to have more people connected. We say it's just the cheapest and most sustainable way to add capacity in a busy area.

Andy:

Okay. Let's pick up the story. When you left Google and you created Swyft Cities, which is where you're really commercialising this innovation and bringing it to the world. Where are you now on that journey and what's next?

Jeral:

Oh, yes. That was a year and a half ago, that was in 2021. And at that time it was just after, only in hindsight, we knew it was just after the peak of the venture capital market here in Silicon Valley. If you had asked me where I thought we would be right now, I would say we have gotten a tonne of investment and we'd be looking for customers to try this first. The answer is the opposite, and

I actually would rather be in this position than the other. We have an initial site in New Zealand that's going to demonstrate the hardware, and I won't say too much more, but should be groundbreaking very soon. In the Dallas Fort Worth area, there are six cities that have brought to us proposals and now they're competing to say, "Who gets to be the first spot in the US? Who wants to commercialise this technology and bring it to their city first?"

It's a wonderful place to be. I'd say a number of those projects are likely to happen in sequence over time, but picking the one to be first, we have a good finance partner called Plenary Americas that can provide the project finance for these. And puts us just in a great position to find the right place to demonstrate this technology. And then beyond that, I think we have inbound traction that is all we can handle. We're doing hardly any outbound sales. We have from the ski resort, from amusement industry, from real estate and from cities themselves, both in the US, Middle East. We were actually profitable last year just on customer studies. It's not where we plan to make our money. I don't want to be a studies company, but it's a great place to be to see this inbound traction.

Andy:

Now that's interesting because we've got a lot of business leaders who are listening right now who may be seeking to deliver radical change in their organisations too. What advice or observations would you have for them?

Jeral:

There's two sides of the advice. One is for the person who is the innovator, one thing I hear a lot is, "You'll find your internal champion." No, you are the champion. You will have to be the champion. Yes, you need to have supporters and champions above you and the level above that, and you're going to have to find out. But the feeling that sometimes comes out of those is that you're going to be able to hand this off and someone else will be the champion. You're just going to have to say, maybe you're not the most charismatic person. Maybe you're not the outgoing networker. But if you're going to make that happen, you're going to have to be that, you are the champion. Now from the other side, you're a manager trying to say, "My employees keep bringing me crazy ideas." I think there's a little bit of peeling back the layers of the onion you're going to have to do.

It's very likely that they're solving a problem that you can't see. Maybe you don't understand it, and it's because you don't see the problem from their perspective. We presented our solution to some billionaire real estate developers who it went surprisingly flat, and I realised only later, they're not the ones sitting up till midnight trying to figure out how they squeeze a million square feet of new development in with only 2000 parking spaces, they're not seeing it. And so as a manager, when people are bringing you what seems like crazy ideas on why they're bringing this to me, at least if it's the employees that you trust, dig deeper, figure out maybe that maybe there's a crazy idea. But because they're solving the wrong problem, and if you educate them on what actually is the problem the company's facing, they can come up with a better idea. But it goes both ways. The innovator and the innovator's manager both have responsibilities here to come together and figure out right solution to right problem.

Andy:

Now this podcast miniseries is called Outpacing Change, which I guess by definition is all about looking forward and seeing what the future holds. In your industry, Jeral, I'm very interested for you to perhaps paint us a picture of what you see as the future of travel if it's done well. The science fiction of course, would have us flying around in electric cars and maybe even teleporting in a kind of Beam me up, Scotty, kind of Star Trek way. But aside from the kind of speculative stuff that we see in science fiction, what's your vision for the future of travel?

Jeral:

Well, the people around me, I say there's two visions. The optimists have a utopian vision that usually involves us all having autonomous vehicles or personal flying vehicles. And now we can live on the mountains on our four acre plot where we can live along coastal bluffs where no cars could ever access. And then we can fly away to the city or to the mountains whenever we want.

And then there's the pessimists that have a dystopian vision. And in those visions, we all have these personal vehicles and autonomous vehicles. So we can live in the mountains on four acres, so we can live along the coast and we can go anywhere. It's the same vision, but is it the positive or the negative consequences you're looking at? And I think a lot of people see transportation, they just judge it on the first order effect.

It's going to change this thing I do today and how is it going to change it? Boy, I wish I'd lived in the mountains. It's going to let me live in the mountains. They kind of don't think through the second order of if everybody lives on four acres in the mountains, the mountains are going to look pretty ugly and it's just not going to be special. Moreover, if you think about the climate crisis we're in, your carbon footprint is half about how you move around and about half of it comes from how you live. Transportation dictates urban form. You give people this ability to be spread out and you're not going to have those clusters of community. You're not going to have the clusters of neighbourly. And the data shows. People generally are happier knowing neighbours being in a nice community, not too dense, but not too sparse.

Going back into the story, those are the kind of places Google was creating, these wonderful mixed use open space, but yet with some pockets of density mixed in. When you get to my personal vision, that's mine as well. It's this wonderful city where you can get around. Your kids have a good school, you have a happy life. Kids can play with their friends in real life. They can bike, they can scooter around. You've got restaurants, you've got coffee shops. It's a happy world. And the transportation system just should have been in the background enabling that to happen. It should not be what dominates your life.

Andy:

Love it. So we've reached my favourite part of the podcast now, Jeral, which is where we do our quickfire questions. All of our guests get to answer these and we want to hear the first thing that comes into your head when we ask you these. So question one, how would your colleagues describe you in three words?

Jeral:

Curious, creative, determined.

Andy:
Great. Next question, if you could have a coffee meeting with any leader from the past or present, who would it be?

Jeral:

Oh, without question, President Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and I'll say not now, but after the stupid war is over and he has a little bit of free time. I want to hear how did he go from comedian president to somebody who I am sure is going to surpass Churchill as one of the greatest wartime leaders of all time.

Andy:
All right. Well, let me know when you have that coffee because I'm joining you for that one. That sounds amazing. Next question, what is the biggest myth or misconception about your industry?

Jeral:

The misconception is that it's tricky and difficult. It's fundamentally simple. People want to move conveniently, safely, where they want to go, when they want to go. And the fastest way possible in any solution that doesn't deliver those is going to lose out to something that does.

Andy:

Next question. When it comes to generating new ideas, are you a morning person or an evening person?

Jeral:

Morning shower for sure.

Andy:

On [inaudible 00:21:19] tricky, isn't it? Because if you're in the shower, you can't write your ideas down.

Jeral:

It's a good filter. If it doesn't stick with me for a couple of showers, it probably wasn't a good idea.

Andy:

Good test. Good test. All right. And final quickfire question, can you name one book or podcast that you'd recommend for business leaders?

Jeral:

Oh, on the innovation fronted, have to narrow it down to Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore or Innovator's Dilemma. But in management in general, for an innovative place, I'd pick Corps Business, Corps is like Marine Corps, which it's about the Marine's philosophy applied in a business setting. And it's very surprisingly relevant to an innovative business setting.

Andy:

Wow. Now that sounds fascinating. That's that's a great recommendation. Thank you for that. And finally, before we close things off, I want to take us back to little eight year old Jeral, who's at home. He's playing with his train sets back home in Texas. What would you say to him now?

Jeral:

I would say if you know your passion, if you have that hobby, it's a blessing. As I mentioned, when I went to business school, I was at Stanford, which is just about as good as it gets. And so many of my highly intelligent, high performing classmates didn't know what they wanted to do in life, and I couldn't comprehend that. That's when I, for the first time, realised that knowing my passion is such a blessing. So if you've got that, if you know your passion, dive in, have fun, and make something happen.

Andy:

I think that's great advice for all young people out there who have got dreams or big ideas. Jeral, so thank you so much for ending our interview on such an inspiring note.

Jeral:

You're welcome. It's great to be here, Andy.

Andy:

Thank you for listening to Ashurst Business Agenda, and thanks again to our guest, Jeral Poskey from Swyft Cities. Now, if you were hearing the conversation that we had and you were trying to picture what the transportation mode looks like, obviously it's quite hard to do that with an audio podcast. We recommend that you go to swyftcities.com to get a visual representation of what the transport looks like. It's quite remarkable. The place to go then is S-W-Y-F-T-C-I-T-I-E-S.com. This episode was part of our special Outpacing Change miniseries where we speak with innovators and disruptors who are changing the world around them. So make sure you don't miss any of our future episodes. Please subscribe to Ashurst Business Agenda on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, do feel free to leave us a rating and a review. Until next time, thanks again for listening. And goodbye for now.

Host:

If you enjoy Ashurst Business Agenda, why not check out our other two podcast series as well. Ashurst Legal Outlook explains the emerging legal trends and requirements of our fast changing world. And ESG Matters at Ashurst reveals how business leaders are rising to mounting environmental, social, and governance challenges. You can listen and subscribe to Legal Outlook and ESG Matters wherever you get your podcasts.