It's clear from the beginning that something is different about this couch. It’s a beaten-up gray and has the word “Boosted” written across the back in blocky orange letters—as in Boosted Boards, America's favorite purveyor of electric-powered skateboards. Oh, and instead of feet, the couch has two Boosted longboards supporting it.

The biggest hint that this is no ordinary couch, though, is the guy sitting on the rightmost cushion holding two pistol-shaped remote controls and wearing a big grin. This is John Ulmen, Boosted’s cofounder and CTO. “Scoot all the way over,” he says to me, “to balance the weight.” He’s about to start the couch, and he doesn’t want me to go flying off.

The couch is outside Boosted’s office in Mountain View, California, in the parking lot. Some cars, a basketball hoop, and a skate ramp serve double duty as a makeshift obstacle course. Fingers on triggers like an old-timey cowboy, Ulmen squeezes both remote controls and the couch starts moving. He guides us easily around corners and over bumps—this ain't his first couch ride—before suddenly flicking one lever backward and one forward, sending the couch spinning like a top. Ulmen looks over at me and laughs, his shaggy hair whipping in the wind. Then he slows it down and hands me the remotes. My turn to drive. "It's really easy," he says. "We take it out on the street sometimes."

Inside Boosted's large warehouse of an office, Ulmen and his team have Boosted just about everything. The couch, a surfboard, a toboggan, basically anything with a place to sit or stand and room for wheels and a motor. The only thing the company sells, at least for now, is a longboard—essentially a super-sized skateboard with subtle tweaks that make riding easier and more comfortable than the classic style. In four years on the market, the bright orange wheels and black decks of Boosted boards have become staples on the streets of San Francisco, New York, and other cities where nerds don’t like their Rockports to touch concrete.

Now, Boosted’s second-generation board is about to go on sale, and the company faces all sorts of competition for the last-mile geek-transport market. Ulmen and his team are racing to make sure their company still makes the most fun, most practical, most awesome electric skateboard on the planet. And after that? “In the future, you’ll have ride-sharing, you’ll have public transit, you’ll have private vehicles,” says Sanjay Dastoor, Boosted’s CEO. “Some of them will be autonomous. Some of them will be driven by people.” And some of them, he says, will have Boosted’s bright-orange logo on the side.

At the Boosted offices, anything that could have wheels...gets wheels. Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED

From There to Here

Like so many things in Silicon Valley, Boosted began as a cure for a white guy's laziness. As a Stanford grad student studying robotics, Ulmen shuttled among a teaching gig and two labs, each at different corners of the sprawling campus. He got tired of walking (and being late) and bought a Loaded Dervish, a bouncy bamboo longboard, to help him get around. He'd never been a skater before, he says, but "I loved it, because I could carry it into class with me. If I needed to go somewhere, I’d just stand up, walk outside, drop it on the ground, and go." No bike racks, no parking spots. Simple.

Ulmen's laziness caught up to him again: He got tired of pushing the board around all day. "So I figured, hey, I'm just going to see if I can get an electric longboard. This seems like something that should exist." He went shopping, and found … not much. "It was all this old lead-acid battery technology," he says, which hadn't come far since Jim Rugroden, another walking-averse student, built the gas-powered MotoBoard in the 1970s.

Boosted in Brief —————-

A Boosted Board is an electric longboard, an extended skateboard with motorized wheels that will take you up to 22 mph. The battery's good for about six miles on a charge. You steer with your feet, and speed up and brake using a handheld throttle. There are many boards like Boosted, but none more popular or loved. Boosted's second-generation board starts shipping this month, and starts at $999. The board's a fun ride, but Boosted also hopes it's part of a new kind of vehicle, meant to make dense areas a lot easier to navigate and make big cities feel a little smaller.

He knew how motors and batteries worked, and even where to get them. So over the next few months, Ulmen cobbled together $1,000 or so (for parts) and built himself an electric longboard. It went about 25 miles an hour and didn't have brakes. "I'd just haul ass around campus," Ulmen says, "and then footbrake. So I'd go through shoes really fast." The board had no protective housing, no weatherproofing. The remote was a huge RC plane controller, with a rubber band on the throttle stick to pull it back when he let go. It looked bad. But as Ulmen rode, people would stop him and ask him: Where can I get one? "I realized at that point that there is something here," he says.

Ulmen connected with Dastoor and Matthew Tran, two other Stanford robotics students who’d been working on their own board, equipped with casters that let riders shred like a snowboarder. "The idea was that this is something people could use to get around these high-density areas, whether it's a campus or a city,” Dastoor says. He and Tran had the vision; Ulmen had the board. They were a perfect match.

In the summer of 2012, after a few months and many revisions later, Ulmen, Tran, and Dastoor got into both Stanford's StartX program and the famed Y Combinator incubator. They had big plans for a splashy Kickstarter and a big company kickoff, but one of their new investors talked them into first doing a beta test. +++inset-left

Boosted CEO Sanjay Dastoor. Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED