Disrupting Car Culture with Selana and the Bondi Boys
🛴 What happens when tech optimism meets regulatory reality?
In this episode of Impact Innovators at the Fireside, I sat down with Max Schalow 👨🚀 and Chingiskhan Kazakhstan 🤠 — the founders of SELANA, Bondi and FounderFuel.vc — for a candid conversation about urban mobility, regulation, and the slow, gritty path from idea to impact.
What started as a student project — sparked by a shared box of Chinese takeout — evolved into a five-year journey through Dutch regulation, system design, and safety compliance, all in service of a simple but radical question:
Can we make cities less dependent on cars?
We talk about:
- Their evolution from ambitious students who found "study itself a bit boring" to mobility pioneers
- How car culture shapes urban design (and why it's so hard to challenge)
- Why designing an approved e-scooter turned out to be more ambitious than launching a new mobility platform
- Their vision of cities where "there is no need for personal vehicles" and how e-mobility fits into that future
- What it takes to bring hardware into a heavily regulated European market
If you know Max and Chingiskhan even a little, you know how **relentless** they are. Few people bring the same level of fanatic energy to solving a problem — or to navigating Dutch regulation for five years straight.
It was a pleasure to sit down with them at the campfire for Impact Innovators at the Fireside, and to take their new, fully certified e-scooter for a spin through the forest. It rides well — sturdy, road-legal, and clearly designed with intention.
E-scooters, of course, aren’t new. But their approach is different: long-term, regulation-first, and deeply systems-aware.
What I’m still curious about is this:
- Will it be enough to move the needle on how cities move?
- Can this kind of focused persistence — paired with smart tech — really reshape the way we think about personal mobility?
I don’t have the answers. But I do think their story is worth listening to.
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