🔒 Lockstop: Secure the Bike, Save the World

Season 13 Premiere: How a former Marine is helping cities ditch cars for bikes & turn bike racks into data goldmines PLUS Gnara Launches Burton Ski Wear!

As a Marine intelligence officer, Mike was trained to identify vulnerabilities. Now he’s using those skills to solve a problem affecting 2 million Americans every year:

Rampant bike theft in cities across America.

If you’re like me, you’re probably thinking, “That doesn’t seem like a very big problem - at least not a venture-scale problem.”

And you’d be right! Lockstop is a bit of a trojan horse.

The Bigger Problem

Of the one billion car trips that we take in the United States each day, 50% are within two miles of their destination.

So why don’t more people ride bikes? That’s exactly what cities are asking, but they lack the data to convert drivers into riders.

So Mike took his experience building threat level vulnerability assessments for the U.S. embassy and created the most tamper proof bike lock known to man… that also happens to collect a treasure trove of data cities need.

The data they capture earns the city more federal grant money - which means they can buy more bike locks and capture more data! A beautiful flywheel ⚙️

The Business Model

Mike says that for every 150,000 people in a city's population, Lockstop aims to deploy 100 devices. Which sounds like… not enough.

As Jesse Middleton pointed out:

“[some cities] wouldn't even look at a project that costs less than a $100k. They can't wrap their heads around that.”

Lockstop could be leaving money on the table. But Mike says 291 cities gets them to $60 million in annual revenue in five years.

For now, Mike and his team are focused on proving the model works at a small scale with their first two pilot cities: Tulsa, OK and Bentonville, AR.

What makes this smart lock ‘smart’?

Drawing from his background, Mike approached bike security like he once did embassy protection:

“You can’t make anything completely defensible. So what we did is we just made it the hardest target in a city.”

The result? A smart lock that takes 65 seconds to cut through - and each Lockstop device is packed with security features:

• 👂 Audio sensors trained to detect grinding sounds from theft attempts

• 🔊 100-decibel alarm system that activates when tampering is detected

• 🚨 Automatic alerts sent to authorities during active theft attempts

• 🔐 Patent-pending mounting system that makes the lock nearly impossible to remove from bike racks

But the technology goes far beyond security. Each device is a self-contained IoT hub featuring:

• 🌡️ Environmental sensors for micro-climate data

• 📱 Motion detectors that double as trip counters

• 📡 GSM connectivity for real-time monitoring

• 🔋 Low-energy Bluetooth with two-month battery life

• ☀️ Solar trickle charging (coming soon) to extend battery life

It's a true IoT device that, as Mike puts it, functions like "a Ring doorbell for public spaces" - protecting bikes while collecting valuable data about how cities move.

Yes, that stache deserves an applause 👏

Mike is looking for $1.5M in VC funding to scale to 291 cities in five years. But will his “no checks under $100k” approach leave him backpedalling?

Tune in and find out.

Watch Mike's full pitch on YouTube and Patreon OR listen in your favorite podcast player 🎧

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Get your Burton ski bibs & base layers with the patented GoFly® Pee Zipper System.

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