Why I Founded Lacuna
In 2009, I learned I was dying from multiple myeloma, a rare form of blood cancer.
This news hit as I was preparing to take one of my previous companies, Pacific Biosciences, public. Owing to new therapies that had recently become available (and no small amount of luck), I was able to beat my cancer. By April 2010, I was in remission; by October 2010, PacBio was public.
But I wasn’t the same person.
There are any number of things in life that can cause you to rethink your priorities—mine happened to be cancer. For me, this meant that professional success alone was emptied of a lot of the meaning I’d assigned to it. I wanted to impact more than the bottom line. And I wanted to work with people who felt the same.
After PacBio, I started a company called Sensity Systems (later acquired by Verizon). We had an idea for creating safer, more engaged communities through smart city technology. This meant I got to spend a lot of time with cities; specifically their departments of transportation. I came to understand two important things:
The people who work in city government care deeply about what they do. They work hard to better the lives in their communities. This may sound obvious, but when you’ve spent your career in a world where success is measured mostly in sales and profits, it’s inspiring.
Most companies don’t really, truly grasp city challenges. They (we?) are too focused on selling a product to hit a business goal. Companies serve shareholders. Cities serve the public.
The question that led to Lacuna was this: How could I apply what I knew—namely, technology, as well as lots of talented people—to make the biggest difference for quality of life in cities?
The Idea
The public right-of-way—in plain terms, our streets and sidewalks—is being tested like never before. Popular scooter programs, rideshares, and food services have all materialized in the last few years to meet the changing demands of the public. Autonomous vehicles and delivery drones are, depending where you live, here today or coming soon. And to try to manage this modern onslaught, cities have only the tools they’ve ever had: signs, cones, and paint.
Think of it this way: our streets and sidewalks represent an inflexible supply, confronting an exploding demand.
The driving idea behind Lacuna was to see if there might be a way to make that inflexible supply… flexible. How? By providing cities technology that would enable them to (a) better understand and forecast how public streets are being used, and (b) apply rules and policies for those streets digitally and flexibly, instead of having to call up and roll out more signs, more cones, and more paint.
If all this sounds like problems for a time before the pandemic, think again. In fact, COVID-19 has made the problem all the more clear. Today, public officials are grappling with making sure we can all safely navigate cities while maintaining social distancing, declaring certain areas off limits to vehicle traffic, and repurposing or restricting certain streets and curbs for emergency purposes. All with little more to manage these changes than exhausted workers, makeshift signs, and tape.
Starting point: the City of Los Angeles
Through our wholly-owned subsidiary, Ellis & Associates, we got our start working with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation on its most immediate issue: micromobility. In early 2018, tens of thousands of e-scooters operated by several independent companies descended upon the city almost overnight. You’ve probably heard the story, or lived it. These scooters often ended up being used and left in all kinds of “unconventional” locations—the middle of the L.A. river, on private property, or in huge, chaotic piles in high-tourist areas.
Facing a management and enforcement nightmare, some cities made an understandable single-policy decision: ban the scooters. Others like L.A. saw the promise of better equity and sustainability promised by scooters—if only they could find a way to bring masses of this new vehicle type into compliance with acceptable uses for the public right-of-way.
To ensure permit compliance, Los Angeles needed to understand the neighborhoods where scooters were deployed , and when they moved. Building on an innovative solution that L.A. had already developed, we worked with the City to help connect micromobility operators and the City via APIs. Shortly after it launched, complaints about scooters from residents fell by 73% percent. The program has been a success by all measures and continues on today.
L.A. decided to make the solution available to any city anywhere by contributing it as open source software. It forms the foundation of the Mobility Data Specification (MDS), an open source framework used by more than 50 cities in the U.S. and dozens around the world, in conjunction with the Open Mobility Foundation.
Of course, scooters were only the beginning. L.A. envisions connecting other modes of transportation very soon. In our own expanded products, whether for cities or for airports, we’re continually looking at how digital management of streets and curbs makes for broader mobility, safer streets, and better use of public infrastructure.
Our work with L.A. represents the opening steps in that journey, one that all of us here at Lacuna hope will align modern mobility with the public good.
