Technology

Gogoro, the Taiwanese electric vehicle company, revealed its newest vehicle today, a lightweight scooter designed for people who want something smaller than one of the companySmartscooter mopeds, but more powerful than an electric bike. Called the Viva, the scooter can run for 85 kilometers on one of Gogoro swappable batteries, which are charged at the same stations as its Smartscooters.

Horace Luke, co-founder and CEO of Gogoro, tells TechCruch that the Viva was created as an environmentally-friendly alternative to 50cc to 100cc gas scooters. It will be available starting in October, launching first in Taiwan next year before being released in some international markets.

Made from recyclable scratch-proof solid-core polypropylene and available in five color combinations, the Viva weighs 80 kilograms and has up to 21 liters of storage. It will retail at USD $1,800, with about 100 optional accessories available, including baskets and racks.

As in many other Asian cities, mopeds are popular in Taiwan and serve as the primary vehicle for many drivers, transporting multiple passengers and deliveries. Luke says Gogoroscooters now account for 95% of the countryelectric vehicle market share and about 17% of all new vehicles sold in Taiwan, including gas ones.

Viva was created to attract customers who don&t want to deal with the costs, including maintenance visits and parking, of owning a bigger moped.

&The Viva is aimed toward the population going no more than 5 kilometers a day, who don&t want to worry about scratches, cost of ownership, having to take it to the shop for maintenance or parking,& he adds. &We have 17% market share and now the question is how do you get to 25% or 35% market share?&

Like Gogoromopeds, the Viva is also connected to the companyiQ system, which lets users unlock their vehicles and monitor mileage and maintenance with a smartphone app. With Taiwanese government subsidies for electric vehicles, it will cost NTD $25,980 (about USD $837), making it competitive with the pricing of high-end electric bikes. Gogoro will also offer two years of free maintenance for Vivas sold in Taiwan.

Gogoro has now sold more than 200,000 Smartscooters and is present in international markets including the European Union (through a partnership with scooter-sharing service Coup), South Korea, where it recently launched electric scooters designed for delivery drivers, and Japan. It also runs a mobility platform designed to be a white-label solution for ride-sharing companies.

Research when to sell shares in a privately held company, and the results may have you laughing — not because they&re funny but they&re because therean almost comical amount of information available out there. From blog posts to advertisements to advertorials to calculators, the data is overwhelming to the point of being useless.

Ita problem that Matt Venables and Tom Hennessy — both former execs at the peer-to-peer payments company Circle — experienced first-hand across numerous startup jobs. The more they looked to understand what their equity was worth and how to sell it without making a massive financial misstep, the more frustrated they felt.

Enter Vested, their three-month-old, Boston-based startup, one that is already backed already with $1.2 million from UnderscoreVC and Boston Seed Capital, and which — if they&re exceedingly lucky — will become the first stop for many thousands of startup employees who are in the same boat that the two once were.

What these individuals will find, promises Vested: access to secondary outfits that offer employees liquidity and to loan providers, but as crucially, they say, plainly explained information around taxes, along with competitive data about different industries and other recent stock sale information. More specifically, Vested will make available on its platform a lot of data thatright now tricky to find but that VCs and data analysts tend to use, including public records filings, salary information, and 409a valuations.

Hennessey explains the pitch this way: &Matt and I have both some sold shares on the secondary market, and the process was non-transparent and not a fair process. But we realized the problem is much bigger than that — that the bigger issue is really around private equity compensation. The misunderstanding starts from day one. We&d love to capture employees before they ever sign an offer letter, then keep them along the way, so they understand at what points it makes sense to exercise their options and why.&

Ultimately, the goal is guide more employees to exercise responsibly and to convert option holders into shareholders, because the popular alternative, apparently, is for employees to do nothing at all. Says Venables, &Something like 80 percent of options are ever exercised. Itabysmally low because people are confused, they wait too long, and [the rising value of their holdings] triggers the [alternative minimum tax]. A lot of people leave their jobs within a couple of years and they just decide itnot worth the hassle.&

Of course, itvery early days. Venables and Hennessey say they&ve already spoken to numerous secondary exchanges that want to work with Vested, which will serve as a kind of offer aggregator. To motivate the exchanges to put their best foot forward, Venables adds that, &In time, the most compelling offers will be surfaced first& to employees open to selling some of their holdings.

The same will go for lenders offering non-recourse loans to Vested visitors who want to exercise more options than they can afford at the moment, say the founders.

As for Vestedbusiness model, the idea is to receive a finderfee from both the exchanges and the lenders. The company also plans to offer a low-cost subscription product that goes above and beyond what an employee can find by by visiting Vestedsite. One idea is for them to receive push notifications when a buyer expresses interest in their companyshares, though Venables and Hennessey say they&re contemplating a host of other bells and whistles, too.

Step one, naturally, is to build up awareness around Vested, and then attract employees in search of better, clearer, more actionable information. In the meantime, the duo may need to watch out for the 600-pound elephant in their space — Carta, which helps private company investors, founders, and employees manage their equity and ownership and that raised a big round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz earlier this year to build out a secondary marketplace.

What if Carta tries killing off Vested before it ever has a chance, we asked the founders on a call earlier this week.

Vested instead sees the two as complementary. Says Venables, &We&ve talked with Carta. Carta is building a structured secondary marketplace, one thatreally [catering to] employers. We&re building Vested 100 percent for employees.&

Pictured above from left to right: Vested cofounders Tom Hennessey and Matt Venables, along with their VP of Design, Nat Tarbox.