Скачать или смотреть Randall Jacobs - THESIS Bike

Randall Jacobs, Co-Founder of THESIS Bike drops in to talk about the development process and vision for the OB1 bicycle.

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THESIS OB1 Specifications

CRAIG: All right. Hello everyone. Today we've got Randall Jacobs from THESIS Bike here, live in person. We're going to talk to him about the THESIS Bike Company and what his inspiration was. We actually just got back from a sample ride here in Marin county riding the new OB1 bike and I'm really excited to introduce everybody to Randall. So thanks for joining us.



RANDALL: Thanks for having me.



CRAIG: I always like to start by finding out a little bit about your background as a rider. Did you start more on the mountain bike side or on the road side?



RANDALL: So I started racing mountain bikes as an undergraduate. I was playing football and broke my foot. Cycling was the first thing I could do and I took to the bicycle on the mountain bike side and did the collegiate series, found that I was reasonably good at it and stuck with it. It's become a real lifestyle ever since.



CRAIG: And did that lead you into other elements of the sport?



RANDALL: I went on to move overseas for a period and rode on and off. When I was 25, I had a life event where my father became sick. I was looking at where he was. He had a brain tumor at the time, so pretty bad prognosis. I said, what are the things I'd like to have accomplished in his position? Being a pro athlete was one of those things. So I started training full time. I was lucky to win a couple of national championships as an amateur shortly after he passed and then spent the subsequent couple of years living out of my Honda Element traveling around the country with a fleet of bicycles that was worth probably 5X what the car was worth.



CRAIG: So you're racing on the national mountain bike scene at that point?



RANDALL: Yeah. I was, you could say, pack fodder on the US Cup circuit, and then I'd have a few good results in the local circuits.



CRAIG: What a great journey. Spending that much time doing it. I think it's something that a lot of people aspire to just following their dreams of bike racing and going out there and doing it and it's certainly not without its sacrifices.



RANDALL: It's certainly is. I was fortunate in my case in that I had started a career in international trade and supply chain architecture where I could work remotely anywhere in the world. So in that regard it didn't cost too much, but you definitely put certain other things on hold being on the road all the time.



CRAIG: So when you hung up your racing cleats, what was next for you professionally?



RANDALL: From there I started a product development company where we were working with the same set of Chinese manufacturers that I had cultivated during my period running product and market development for the Chinese trading and manufacturing company. I then sold that company to one of our partners and went to work for Specialized in 2013. At Specialized, the Diverge project was in its early days. I actually ended up naming that bike and was the product developer for the project, so doing all the bike builds and negotiating all the deals with the vendors and so on, and coordinating the product and supply chain sides.



CRAIG: So you were helping sort of spec out the supply chain and the specifications for the original Diverge bike while you were there?



RANDALL: Correct. And doing a lot of the field testing and component compatibility testing to make sure everything was fully dialed, which is where you see my obsessive attention to detail come in.



CRAIG: The Diverge bike, it was really one of the first production, quote unquote gravel bikes to hit the market from a big manufacturers that right?



RANDALL: For sure. The first bike that was called a gravel bike. I mean, there had been people riding such bikes for quite some time. When that bike came out, it was the early days of drop bar disc brakes, which really opened up a lot not just for braking power and modulation, but also for tire clearance. That was a key enabling technology that allows you to have the sort of bikes we have today, the other one being tubeless tires. And in today's world, tubeless tires with really wide rims allows you to have a bicycle, a drop bar bike, that is fast like a road bike on the road and as capable or more so than what a mountain bike would have been not too long ago.



CRAIG: Gotcha. So the Diverge, was it the end all be all? Was it everything you wanted to make in a gravel bike?



RANDALL: No. Of course, there are constraints on what we were able to do at that time for a variety of reasons. When you work for a big company, there's always going to be product decisions that are more due to a cost structure or needing to support a certain margin and marketing story. So with the OB1 it...