The formula for a successful business revolves around the problems it’s able to solve. Recognizing pain points for potential customers is key, but the formula for how those issues are addressed is what differentiates an average product from a great one. When it came to mountain bikes, many brands in the world were building good bikes, but none of them provided the highly specialized components that some avid riders were looking for.
To really make a dent in an industry requires more than a passive interest in the product. You must have an obsession, something that really drives you towards evolution. You must want it even if you’re only creating for yourself. It takes a vision to solve a problem, but it takes a visionary to solve it well. And if you build it, they will come.
These are all thoughts from our guest featured in this recent podcast, P.J. Tolentino, Founder and head engineer at Rurok Industries. Tolentino is the textbook example of someone who transformed their passion into a career. He and his team have built a successful company by dreaming up all the ways to make mountain bikes better and then actually doing it. Their hyper-focused attention to detail has made their bikes stand out from the crowd.
In this episode, John Fox, VP of Marketing, Mainstream Engineering, Siemens Digital Industries Software, interviews Tolentino about how Rurok Industries got its start and the team’s unparalleled passion for the sport. The team’s dedication to constant innovation continues to pedal this specialized mountain bikes brand forward as it swiftly gains global brand recognition.
Getting a startup off the ground is no easy endeavor. Office space, supplies, employee salaries and overhead are all vying for a piece of a lean budget. We believe your CAD software should be a solution, not a problem. If you’re an early stage startup in business for less than three years, you can now apply to get Solid Edge for free. With no application fee!
Click here to apply today!
I’m John Fox and welcome to Startups, a podcast where we talk to entrepreneurs and learn how they turn great ideas into successful, profitable companies. In this episode, we explore how a mechanical engineer and biking enthusiast has built a global business that designs and makes innovative high-performance bikes by using advanced digital technologies to gain a competitive edge. My guest today is P.J. Tolentino, founder, and head engineer at Rurok Industries. Tell me a little bit about your company, how you started it and where you got that name.
P.J. Tolentino.
Okay, so, let me start with the name first. That name in our local dialect, which is Filipino, translates into ‘peak.’ And then all our bikes are named after mountains in the Philippines. For example, our very first bike — we call it the Rurok Cordillera — that’s a homage to the peak of the Cordillera mountain ranges. So yes, we are a performance mountain bike company. We love riding bikes.
Rurok was born out of our obsession with bikes. We were really obsessive mountain bikers, and probably drank too much coffee and had all these ideas on what would make a better bike than what we were riding back then. It’s this obsession that grew too much and we couldn’t sit still until we see it in real life. That’s really how it all happened. That’s how our first product, the Cordillera was born.
There are a lot of bike makers out there. What’s different about your bikes? What’s your differentiator?
This differentiator, at the core of why we existed, was about our idea of making a better bike than what we’re currently riding. So, we strongly feel that if we’re going to be building a bike, there has to be something different about it. We don’t think it’s a good use of our time for just making another good bike — there are so many good bikes out there.
Our goal is to really make something that no one has done before, no one has explored or tried doing before. For example, we’re really proud of a certain feature in one of our bikes, it’s a geometry adjustment feature. I’d say riders like other mountain bikers can relate when I say that, we really go crazy over a 1.5° change in the head tube angle or 1.5-in. change in wheel diameter. In the feature that we put into one of our bikes, we are able to change that. No other bike can change the configuration like how we do it with our bike. So, for example, I swapped out the wheels on my bike to match the trail I’m planning to ride, and I can’t do that with any other kind of bike.
Right. And your customers, they look at a feature like this and say, “Hey, this is one of the reasons why we bought your bike.”
Exactly. This is something that no other bike has. It follows a real need of mountain bikers because we’re all crazy about all these angles, inches, diameters. So yes, that’s something that people are really looking for.
And this is something that makes a difference during a race? Is that what you’re saying?
It’s the whole performance of a bike. The kind of mountain biking that we’re after is on the performance side. We go over really rough terrain, really gnarly, lots of jumps, lots of big rocks. Our lives depend on how our bike performs. It’s a mixture of all these different performance parameters like stability, how well it handles, how well it turns in corners. So, all that consider, that’s what people are looking for.
We kind of jumped right into the product, but I’d like to step back a bit and talk about how you created the company and what challenges you faced. I mentioned it a little bit in the beginning. Can you have a great idea? Maybe you had a great product design, but that’s very different from creating a company. What types of challenges did you face in the beginning?
We never thought we would turn this into a business. We were just friends who were obsessed with bikes. None of us had business experience. To be honest, we were just content on like, “Hey, what if we sell our current bikes, and then use the money that we got from selling the bikes and get our own special bike that we designed ourselves that no one, no other person had?” We will be fine with that.
Then we showed it to everyone. And suddenly, we noticed that people are really interested in it. So, we said, “Okay, people are trying to get in it, maybe we should start putting this into production.” That’s how we started, that’s why we started the business. Like I said, we’re not business people. We really struggled on the business part. We did not know how to handle the operations, how to deal with our distributors, things like that. The biggest challenge that we had is more on the business side: how do we sell this? Where do we sell this? How do we get more customers? One very significant challenge that we had was competition. Like I said, all other bikes out there, they’re all really good. So, it took a lot of effort to get our brand out, and to let people know what we stand for.
Technology plays a big role in your company. On your website, I noticed the term ‘swarm optimization’ that sounds really interesting. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yes. I’m really excited to be explaining this thing. One of our goals with the latest bike is to get a really good suspension design. When you talk about bicycle suspension, you have your shock absorber, of course, and then you have all these linkages, pivot points, linkages; whenever you hit the bump, your rear tire compresses the linkages, and then that in turn compresses the shock absorber, you have your suspension.
Designing the suspension layout, that would mean like how long would the linkages be? Where do you put the pivot points? That’s actually a very, very difficult thing to do. There are plenty of ways to calculate the performance of a suspension layout and it involves a lot of geometry. It involves a lot of math, a lot of lengths, angles, instance centers. It’s very involved.
When we set forth to design our latest bike, we had really high design goals. We wanted to be very optimized and we quickly realized that our design goals, like the performance that we want to reach, it’s super impossible for a human being to figure out how to achieve those goals, because all the math is very, very complicated. This is where swarm optimization comes in — we actually wrote our own little software code. This software code does what a human will do. It will design a suspension layout randomly. Put it in space and then it will do the math and calculate the performance. And then it will keep on doing this, millions and millions of times for several hours. Then after calculating all the different layouts, the software will then choose the best one. By doing that, we are able to optimize it way, way better than if we just as humans do it ourselves.
I know you’re also doing a lot with generative design, including around the componentry that you’re using in production right now. Could you talk about generative design? What is it and how can you use it?
Generative design, I honestly believe that that is the future of design. The way I think about it, it’s as simple as I as the end-user have my design requirements for a certain part. I want it to be this long. I want the holes to be here. I want it to be this strong. I don’t want it to break this way, and then this part is going to be stressed in a certain direction. I know all of these things because I’m the user, and then traditionally engineers will calculate it by hand or use finite element analysis to see which parts are stressed.
Generative design is a game-changer for us because it eliminates that human step of trying to calculate and trying to find out for ourselves, what is the best design possible because the generative design will just design the optimal part for us. So, this method of letting the computer design that part, that’s what we used for our latest product. Using generative design and Solid Edge, we just tell the software, the generative design, to design a part for us, and then we get a part, and then from that part, we machine it and put it in the bike. It’s that simple.
Yes, it’s very cool. And the designs you come up with using this approach, maybe would have never existed before in that way. It’s something, when you look at this thing, a human would not come up with this. It’s like completely optimized kind of algorithmically, right?
Yes, definitely. I’m so fascinated by it because I believe this is the first time that a computer, a software program, has contributed creatively, has given its own creative inputs. The computer is creative now. It’s not just a tool, like a ruler or a pencil for us to draw and to mark out the lines. It actually contributed, what length to do it, what thickness to do it. So yes, that’s just so fascinating for us.
You’re a Siemens customer, you mentioned Solid Edge — how has Siemens been able to play a part in your endeavors as a startup?
Siemens was a big enabler of a lot of what you wanted to do. So yes, Solid Edge enabled us to take our ideas, validate those things digitally, and then fabricate it into reality. So that’s Solid Edge. We’ve collaborated a lot before. Those collaborations have benefited me in more ways than one. Those speaking engagement, it really gave us a lot of exposure, not just to our customers, but also to other people within the industry. We got into contact with a lot of them.
And then also joining the conventions, it really inspired us with more ideas. In fact, John, I don’t know if you know this, or if I told you about this, but while we were in Singapore, I was in a car with one of Siemens engineers. He was talking about parametric optimization, which uses swarm optimization. We got a little chat and then that’s where it clicked. Just being exposed to the other Siemens engineers that definitely inspired us to give us ideas and stuff like that.
We’re recording this in September 2020. A pandemic is in the news. It’s affecting our lives and how we do business as a startup, how is it affecting you? And what are the challenges you’re facing in this area?
I’ll start with something positive. One small silver lining with everything going on is that people started to ride bikes a lot more. This is observed across the border, across everywhere. Because everyone has to stay home, had to change their lifestyle, people started buying bikes and riding bikes and going outdoors a lot more. So, in terms of how that affected us, there was a surge in demand across the whole bike industry, high demand for all kinds of bikes, that we actually ran out of inventory. One of our challenges right now is that we had to quickly ramp up production amidst a global shortage in raw materials. So yes, kind of like a small silver lining.
Yes, on the demand side. Can you talk about your company, you’re pretty globally distributed, right? How you’re grappling with that everybody in different locations. And probably, I would expect, you can’t travel as much as maybe you’d like to or have in the past.
Yes, that’s right. I think that’s both an advantage and a disadvantage for us. What I mean is that it’s in our nature as a small startup company, to be very agile and flexible. Working remotely was not like a very big change for us because that’s how we’ve been operating for the most part. We all want to be working at our own time. For example, the designers like to work at our own workstations, and then the best meeting we had is when we all meet up in trailers and ride our bikes, and go out for a ride. So that’s our meeting points.
I think the difference now is that all this solidified the remote nature of how we do our business. We fully embraced all the collaboration tools at our disposal. So, definitely like Teamcenter share, we use those kinds of software to share our designs within our team and to our suppliers. And then chat tools, of course, that’s very important right now. We more often than not communicate our ideas through those channels. That’s how we do operations. We have one person doing the operations in the warehouse, and then we communicate to that person via chat, so stuff like that. So, we were kind of doing that thing before but this time it solidified the need for us to embrace those tools, those communication tools at our disposal.
Let’s switch gears a little bit and think about the future. What challenges do you anticipate going forward from here? Increased demand is a nice challenge, right? What else?
Well, right now, it’s really the competition. Because the challenge is across the whole industry. I would say that that means that there are more competitors are able to come into play. That’s why even though there’s a surge in demand across the whole world, that also means that everyone has to step up and do our best and do good in order to succeed, in order to compete.
Also, another challenge, because we are more of a performance-oriented bike company, we do a lot of mountain bikes, and these mountain bikes are ridden by the enthusiasts, the racers, the really obsessive bikers. There is a bigger surge in demand for the beginner bikes, those who are just starting to ride bikes, and maybe even not mountain bikes, people who want to ride bikes out in the street — or use it for daily commute or personal transportation. For those areas, we see that both as a challenge and an opportunity for us. So, we’ll see how that or where that will take us.
I know, one of the things you’re grappling with is just growth, like the more demand you need to expand on top of your growth and geographically. So, initially, Philippines based, how you’re handling, like scaling up and just growing from maybe a local brand to now what’s really a global brand, right?
Cordillera.
Yes. We take our mantra of making better bikes seriously. That is, for us, the key to breaking into the global market. The international bike community wouldn’t bat an eye if you were just making another good bike. But with all the unique features that we put on our bikes; everyone gets really curious, and that really gets us noticed.
For example, we were really pleased that this year, for example, because of the uniqueness of our bikes, we just opened two new distributors here in the U.S., and then we had our first bike review from a U.S.-based bike reviewer. And then we are getting naturally growing into other areas; the U.S. is one big target for us so that’s what we’re focusing on right now. But we get riders from the Middle East, Singapore, Australia — we’ve been getting orders from all of these different countries. And I think that’s because our bikes are unique. And that’s because of our mantra, we make better bikes.
Terrific. You have a number of bike designs; talk a little bit about your product line and which bikes are best for which people.
Kanlaon.
Right now we have three bike models. We’ll start with our very first bike, which is the Cordillera. It’s a full-suspension bike, and that means it’s a bike with both suspension on the front tire and suspension on the rear tire. It has 150 millimeters of travel, that’s the length of hard suspension compresses and think about that as the longer the travel, the more aggressive it is because you’re putting it into more of a bigger terrain, bigger challenges, more aggressive trails. The Cordillera is 150 millimeters. It’s the perfect all-mountain bike; it’s an all-around bike, you can bring it anywhere. You can take it on your weekend ride and you can also take it on an all-day epic towards one mountain and stuff like that. It’s our do-it-all bike.
Our second product, that is the Kanlaon, it’s a hardtail. When you say a hardtail, you have your front suspension on the front tire, but there’s no suspension in the rear. For us at Rurok, we think that a full-suspension bike is very capable, it can do anything. But we think that a hardtail bike is essential, you should have a hardtail bike first before getting a full suspension bike, stuff like that. Because there are a lot of things that you can learn with a hardtail bike that you will skip over when you’re riding a full-suspension bike. This hardtail bike that we have, the Kanlaon, has our unique geometry adjustment feature that you can swap around different wheel sizes, different wheelsets, we think that that makes the bike very, very versatile.
Halcon.
The last product that we have is the Halcon. If the Cordillera was an all-around bike, the Halcon is a do-it-all bike. It’s a bike that has no limits. It is the ultimate aggressive bike for doing whatever you really want to do with it. It has longer travel, it has all the features that we had. It has the generatively optimized linkages, making them very stiff, it has the adjustable travel, it has the swarm optimized suspension. It’s our ultimate bike right now.
What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs like yourself? And I know readers will have early-stage startups, very early stage, some a bit more advanced, and probably a lot of people who are just thinking about making the leap. What advice would you offer?
I’ve been really thinking about that a lot recently. I’m going to go against the grain of what most people think about when they think about startups or giving advice to startups. The usual answer to that question is that running a startup is hard work, you need to work hard, you follow your passion. If it’s your passion, just keep on doing it. Work hard, never give up.
Lately, I’ve been thinking that it might be good thinking about it from a different perspective. Entrepreneurs, startup founders, should consider going with the flow. Go along where the business takes you. Sometimes if something is really, really hard, you’re trying to work hard to see something work. If you’re really, really working hard and you’re really struggling, maybe that means that you shouldn’t be working hard — and that the flow is telling us to go somewhere else. Maybe that’s a good time to pivot. Let go of whatever you’re thinking of.
Check out the original podcast here: https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/podcasts/startups-digitalization-to-realization/riding-to-the-top-the-story-of-rurok-industries-with-pj-tolentino/
Getting a startup off the ground is no easy endeavor. Office space, supplies, employee salaries and overhead are all vying for a piece of a lean budget. We believe your CAD software should be a solution, not a problem. If you’re an early stage startup in business for less than three years, you can now apply to get Solid Edge for free. With no application fee!
Click here to apply today. It’s easy!
Filed Under: Software • simulation, ENGINEERING SOFTWARE, SPONSORED CONTENT
