Meet Christopher McKenzie | Engineer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Christopher McKenzie and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Christopher, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
I felt an obligation to help ameliorate the chaotic climate we are headed towards and had a vision of what the future will have to look like. I believe I can help to make that necessary future more real sooner and help stave off the most dire potential consequences.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
For any business I have to recommend a careful study, not a read, but a study of the following authors: Al Ries. Jack Trout, Clayton Christensen, Andy Grove, James Womack, Geoffrey Moore, Steve Blank, and Jim Collins. However long that looks I promise that’s my short list,

They’ve taught me to not look at things as success and failure but instead signals with an opportunity to listen and respond.

I run an electric microcar rental program. My initial market hypothesis was there was a demand problem with the market. I’ve come to realize that’s incorrect. Instead there is a supply mismatched with demand and it is fundamentally a logistics and distribution problem.

Here’s the dilemma: The demand is higher than the available supply but the available supply isn’t completely called for..

This is where markets, in the abstract, come in. They are the logistical solutions that permit the supply to meet the demand.

Currently these marketplaces are inefficient with a poor matching and distribution ability. Of course we’re talking in the abstract; there’s legal, safety, cost and infrastructure challenges that must be overcome

The realization here is services such as Uber and Airbnb, that’s what their true nature is. They are functionally ebays in this sense, a different marketplace architecture to match two sides.

Trying to solve this before Geoffrey Moore’s chasm is crossed is how to get marketplace Takt time (from Womack) down below infinite. (I’ll assume you did a few months of studying after reading the first paragraph before reading this).

The conventional route to this is to increase overhead and thus increase cost which is one of the reasons why early products are so expensive.

But oftentimes you no longer meet the market under that condition. Figuring out how to resolve that by listening and responding is my current effort.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Let’s try to stay in theme. I’d direct them to the Online Archive of California. We can study the failures that led to successes all around us. How the unfinished Venice canals of California informed the construction of Marina Del Rey for instance.

Los Angeles is a changing landscape like that. Places of luxury become places of poverty and go into luxury again. Seeing how the buildings we’ve shaped have shaped us and how culture comes from that in different areas is endlessly fascinating

These are all human systems at work, intentionally or otherwise

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I strongly believe the road to success can only be paved with failure. Regardless of how fruitful an effort is, it is part of the necessary steps towards the eventual goal.

For a more direct answer and specifically with respect to climate change the podcast work of Alex Smith on Radio Ecoshock is academically outstanding and I’ve listened to the Maria Gilardin’s TUC radio for 25 years. They both do excellent work.

Website: Reefdrive.com

Instagram: @Reefdrive

Facebook: @Reefdrive

Image Credits
The personal photo is with Oregon governor Meg Whitman. The one with the man and woman, the man is Culver City mayor Alex Fisch. Nobody else photographed is a public figure but all gave explicit consent