THE STORY
Where it all began.
Forrest North first dreamed of building an electric motorcycle when leading the Stanford University Solar Car Team in 1998. Seven years later, he joined Tesla Motors working with many of his old Solar Car teammates to build the world's first performance electric sports car.
Edward West first met Forrest while working on the Yale University Solar Car. Later, the pair worked together building laboratory robotics for a small bay area startup, before Edward left to earn his MBA in sustainable management from the Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco.
Mason Cabot was an electronics guru with 10 years of experience at Intel. Forrest introduced Mason to motorcycling, and within a few months, Mason was hooked. It wasn’t long before he gave up owning a car completely.
Three guys in a garage.
The three founders set up offices in Mason's garage, blocks from the historic Mission Street in San Francisco. Under the name "Hum Cycles", the company began bootstrapping their way through the California Cleantech Open, the largest cleantech business plan competition on the west coast. In July 2007, they bought the company’s first motorcycle, a 1994 Ducati 900. They began the task of stripping out the engine and converting it to electric drive. Two months later, the three founders had turned that classic Ducati into one of the highest performing street legal electric motorcycles in the world.
The prototype proved the team's claims. Every rider who got on the bike was enthusiastic, saying it was unlike anything they had ever ridden before. Armed with their first business plan and the prototype, the team placed 2nd in the Cleantech Open.
Launching the company.
Success in the CCTO enabled the founders to raise their first round of funding. They begin building the second prototype: an electric sportbike built from the ground up with performance that would shift the paradigm of electric vehicles. In February 2009, with that prototype complete and having grown the company to fifteen people, the founders left the name Hum Cycles behind. The company launched onstage at the TED Conference in Long Beach under its new name: Mission Motors.
