In 2010, Nick Foley was working in a New York bike shop when he met Ryan Rzepecki, a transportation planner who had recently been driving horse-drawn carriages in Central Park and was looking for help building bikes for his startup, which later became Jump Bikes.
Mr. Foley—now the head of product at Jump, which was acquired by Uber earlier this year—has become a key player in Uber’s drive to expand its fleet of thousands of electric bikes and scooters into millions around the world. He is one of a handful of people helping to shape an industry that seemed to come out of nowhere in the U.S. this year, as scooter and bike startups burst onto the scene backed by a rush of money from Alibaba, Alphabet, Lyft, Tencent, Uber and nearly every top VC firm.
