This is Exit Interview, an occasional interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

CityRyde leadership is making some big changes.

The bike sharing consulting practice is due to relaunch under a new brand and, as of next week, the startup’s co-founders will be leaving University City to make their headquarters elsewhere.

CEO Timothy Ericson and COO Jason Meinzer, the startup’s two co-founders, have decided that if their six-person startup is going to continue to grow traction, the Quaker City isn’t the place to do it.

“Philadelphia claims that they want to be the greenest city in America, however they are the only major city in the Northeast that does not have direct plans to launch a bike sharing initiative,” said CEO Ericson, 25, a native of Fair Lawn, N.J. who says he fell in love with his new city while studying at Drexel. Despite both having Drexel ties, he met his co-founder Meinzer, 28, while they were in London. The pair visited Paris to see the launch of that city’s bike-sharing program, which prompted their venture.

The departure of an entrepreneur named Meinzer may sound familiar, considering that just in September Jason’s brother Ryan, who was behind language learning tool PlaySay, told Technically Philly that he was leaving and taking his startup with him to D.C.

Next week, Dec, 1, CityRyde leadership, too, will officially move, setting up shop in Cambridge, Mass. — which is to Boston about what Conshohocken is to Philly, if Conshohocken was home to two of the most respected universities in the world.

Below, Ericson discusses why this is the right move and if there’s anything Philadelphia could do about it.

Edited for length and clarity.

Why is Boston a better fit than Philadelphia for CityRyde?

A few months back we decided to apply to the TechStars Boston program. Since that decision, we have spent a lot of time getting to know the Boston community. We were impressed with the community as a whole, the talent that we would have access to and the companies and mentors that were located in the area.

We determined that one of the best ways to demonstrate our commitment to the TechStars program would be for the management team to relocate to Boston. We are still in the application process, but we feel that it is the right move regardless of our acceptance into the program. A lot of the companies in our industry, such as Zipcar, one of our investors from the most recent round, and the law firm we use, are all located in the Boston area.

For the time being we are still planning to keep our University City office [at 32nd and Arch streets, where two of six employees will remain], as we still have some team members that will remain in the area.

Why is Boston the right move, outside of applying for the TechStars program there?

After making the decision to move to Boston, we realized that other cities like Boston just offered more in terms of support, mentorship and investment.

We found ourselves gaining traction with various groups in cities other then Philadelphia. Moving to Boston in bittersweet, I really enjoyed my time in Philadelphia and have made great friends and business connections but to really get our business to the next level, we needed to move to the city that could help us accelerate the traction we already built while in Philadelphia.

Was there a specific event or moment that you realized you wanted to move the company?

It was the application process for TechStars Boston program that made us realize that there was a lot of potential in the Boston area. Going through that process forced us to spend a lot of time getting to know the community and after awhile the decision was easy. After being involved in another entrepreneurial community, we started to see differences in the level of talent, companies and mentors in the area.

Was there anything that could have been done differently to keep you?

I think Philadelphia has a growing community of great entrepreneurs and companies but is still lacking behind other locations likes Boston and California.

All of the investment money that we ended up accepting was from entities outside the Philadelphia area. I think that the industry we are in, bikes and carbon credits, just did not fit the investment style of the investors in the region. Philadelphia claims that they want to be the greenest city in America, however they are the only major city in the Northeast that does not have direct plans to launch a bike sharing initiative.

There has always been a major push for bicycle sharing in Philadelphia, even before most of the other major cities in the U.S., yet it looks like we will be the last in the Northeast to launch one. It is really frustrating to be in the bike sharing industry and live in a city that doesn’t even have one.

Could you see yourself bringing CityRyde back to Philadelphia?

The next few months are going to be very uncertain, as we are really considering the move a pilot test to see if it will fit for us long term.

I wish that there was one thing I could list here that would motivate us to move back to Philadelphia but for all of the reasons listed previously, moving to Boston just makes sense at this point for our company. We will, however, miss the extremely low cost of living compared to Boston and other entrepreneurial hot-spots.

When someone you meet from outside the region asks about Philadelphia and its tech community, what do you tell them?

I would tell them I consider it to be a growing community. There is a lot of potential with great programs such as the Baiada Center at Drexel University, Dreamit Ventures and Philadelphia Startup Leaders. I cannot stress enough how important the Baiada Center was to helping our company get to the point where we are at today. If it was not for the Baiada Center, we would not be having this conversation today because CityRyde would not still exist.

What is the perception you most often find of Philadelphia?

I think that most people who have not spent time here are unaware of the growing entrepreneurial community. I know first hand that once someone gets to know the community, their expectations are certainly surpassed. Philadelphia has a reputation, a long standing problem the city is working on, where we are losing talent after graduation from the great universities located in Philadelphia to other cities.

What advice or specific action would you take to improve the tech community here and retain others in the future?

I am not sure that there is anything I can pinpoint specifically that would help improve the community. Our company was located in Philadelphia for three years and during that time we just kept getting traction with investors, partners and mentors from other cities. Just as a startup business needs to find their competitive advantage, I think Philadelphia needs to find its niche in the entrepreneurial marketplace.

This is Exit Interview, an occasional interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

Big corporate technology companies have long been fertile ground for new waves of innovation.

Stars from Microsoft, IBM, Google and the like can take what they have learned to a place of greater flexibility and agility for startups and ventures that push bounds. In Philadelphia, the promise of a workforce developed by telecommunications giant Comcast is often hoped to be our answer for cultivating future technology leaders.

But, of course, it won’t always happen that way.

After two years, Joanne Cheng is leaving her role as Comcast software engineer for Boulder, Col. to become a Ruby/Javascript developer for a small performance monitoring company called Absolute Performance, Inc.

In her spare time, Cheng, 25, was something of a civic hacker, working on the OPA Data Liberator project from the Philly Tech Week BCNI Hackathon and the Philly SNAP healthy food text messaging tool developed at Random Hacks of Kindness.

The central New Jersey native got her Comcast gig right after graduating from Rutgers University with a music degree — yes, she’s a classically trained trumpeter.  A Graduate Hospital resident and bicyclist, below, Cheng talks to Technically Philly about perceptions, retention and what she’s working on now.

What are the primary reasons you left Philadelphia?

I’m not an aspiring founder, an academic genius or a programming “rock star,” I’m just someone who’s trying her hardest to improve her skills and push her career as far as it can go.

However, I had trouble finding jobs in Philadelphia that were a good match, and I didn’t hear back from most of the companies here. Eventually, I started looking elsewhere. Surprisingly I had interviews with the handful of jobs that I applied to in other cities, but only one interview in Philadelphia.

Joanne Cheng at the Philly Tech Week BCNI Hackathon

Was there a specific event or moment that you realized you had to/wanted to leave?

A few months ago, I went to San Francisco for a hack day and found myself in an office for a weekend with 150 other hackers working on projects. The concentration of intelligence and enthusiasm was so exciting.

It was surreal to ask the person next to me about a Javascript sound API I was toying with and then hear, “The guy who wrote it is sitting back there.” I think that event, combined with my bad luck in Philadelphia, made me realize me that I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for here.

Was there anything that could have been done differently to keep you?

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Philadelphia.

If I had found a great position with a similar work environment in Philadelphia, then I may have stayed. I have a lot of reasons to love living here — my neighborhood Graduate Hospital, concerts, restaurants, the Reading Terminal Market, public art, bike trails, Fairmount park, the list goes on.

I was never bored in this city and was always finding new gems. At the same time, I was fed up with things like unpredictable SEPTA bus service, the constant presence of street trash, the threat of closing libraries, new casinos, and the daily reports of severe crime in familiar neighborhoods.

While I think I may have had a fulfilling career here, I wasn’t satisfied with the direction the city was heading.

Also, it’s tough to compete with mountains so close to the office and a huge network of well maintained bike trails  — sorry, Center City, Spruce and Pine street aren’t enough.

Do you think you would return to Philadelphia under appropriate circumstances?

My family lives in the area, so I’m required to come back for the holidays. [laughs] But in all seriousness, I would love to see how the city develops in the next couple years. If a good opportunity arises, then yes.

When someone you meet from outside the region asks about Philadelphia and its tech community, what do you tell them?

It’s full of down-to-earth and welcoming people. It’s really easy to get involved, no matter what your skill set.

The community is fueled by a small group of dedicated and humble individuals. And I love the push for open data and community service in this city’s tech community.

Programming was something I wanted to do on-the-side. I was a music major in college who took a few computer science courses and campus IT jobs on the side, with the idea that it would provide a good “day job,” since my chances for full time employment as a classical musician were slim.

I enjoyed the work as time went on, but because of my unusual situation, a few negative classroom and work experiences, and my general shyness, I was committed to the idea of doing things myself.

However, once I finally started going to hack days in Philadelphia and working with other friendly, intelligent individuals, I became much more motivated and positive about being a developer. In a bigger city, I may have been much more intimidated.

What is the perception you most often find of Philadelphia?

People say, “it’s dangerous, dirty.”

I also find that most people I meet here either grew up in the area or moved here out of obligation. I hear mostly positive things from people who live here, but for most of the young adults I met who are in school or starting their careers, Philadelphia is just a nice place to start.

What’s the latest you’re up to that we can plug or look forward toward?

I’m using my time between jobs to work on rewriting some of my music toys for iPad.

Watch a demo below.

Google Maps new biking directions feature shows safe-to-ride bike paths in green. It's not the path we'd take to Citizen's Bank Park, but hey, Google does no evil, right?

You could say we’ve been welcoming of spring and the onset of the 2010 Grapefruit League. A bike ride down to Citizen’s Bank Park in a few weeks? Count us in. But how best to get there?

Google has launched a beta and buggy version of its new bike-friendly Maps features, including directions that utilize Philly bike paths and landmarks of local biking facilities, the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia reported this morning.

The route Google provided in a directional search from Fishtown to CBP, though it’s not quite the route we’d opt to take, may be one we ought to try. The directions provide fairly accurate time estimations based on an 8-10 mile-per-hour jaunt.

As the coalition points out, it’s difficult to map the intricacies of biking a city like Philadelphia�that awfully bumpy ride North on Third street above Chinatown might appeal to riders looking to avoid traffic, or the busy but easy-cruising Columbus Boulevard might attract those who appreciate a bike path with their high-speed vehicles. But Google is tracking faulty recommendations down to individual street intersections.

We’re looking forward to those bike-suitable paths through New Jersey, which are all-but-absent from Google’s maps, yet. Like baseball, we couldn’t be more excited about the Shore, either.

Afshin Kaighobady outside his new Mount Airy electric-assist bicycle shop on Oct. 8, 2009. Photo: Pam Rogow for Technically Philly

It was a yellow bicycle. That much Afshin Kaighobady remembers clearly.

On cool mornings in 1969, the 10-year-old would ride to the bakery near his home in Tehran to buy his mother fresh bread. Riding on the flat roads of Iran’s sprawling capital city at the foot of the Tochal mountains, Kaighobady can still remember his pride for riding his bike with just one hand, the other clutching a warm piece of naan fresh out of the bakery’s diesel-powered flames.

“The steam would pour off it, and so one bite and then another and soon I’d half finish the bread that was nearly as tall as I was, all the while steering this long, yellow treasure,” he says.

It is there, in Tehran in 1969, that Kaighobady first fell in love with bicycles. It is here, in the far hillier expanses of Mt. Airy in 2009, that Kaighobady, now 50, is hoping to create love for that transport’s next generation.

This Thursday, from 2 to 7 p.m., he’s hosting an opening reception for Philly Electric Wheels, his shop in this northwest Philadelphia neighborhood that he boasts is the first store in Pennsylvania, perhaps even the tri-state area, to exclusively sell and service electric-assist bicycles.

And he’s trying to convince the region that these bikes could be a large part of a greener, more comfortable, more practical way to commute.

THE BICYCLES

Philly Electric Wheels or, yes, PHEW, if pressed, came to mind after Kaighobady watched his wife Meenal Raval use an electric bike to commute to work and found a buzz around her method of transport. Since opening his store Oct. 1, he’s spending his days offering free test rides — also available at this Thursday’s reception — to show people just how practical his bikes are.

“They have everything that is good about regular bicycles,” he says. “But with the option to have someone gently push you in the back when you’re going up a hill or speeding in bad weather.”

He currently stocks 16 models from four bicycle lines — Currie Technologies, EcoBike, eZee, Ultra Motor — all of which cost roughly a penny a mile to operate, range up to 40 miles per charge, can cruise as fast as 20 miles per hour and require no license.

The cheapest model he currently stocks is $500 — the starting cost of a new traditional bicycle at many bike shops — and the most expensive is $2,700. A removable battery powers the bikes and are plugged into the wall, to be charged as easily as a cell phone battery, though it’ll take five to six hours for most bikes.

All bicycles come with warranties, many including a one-year maintenance guarantee from Kaighobady himself.

And Kaighobady, with an engineering degree from the University of Bridgeport and a background in tinkering, is probably someone from whom you want a warranty.

HIS BACKGROUND

After leaving Iran in 1979 — unrelated to that country’s Islamist Revolution, he says, though that year “something big happened there” — Kaighobady followed family to Oklahoma City. He built a computer consultancy firm on the East Coast, and then moved to Mount Airy in 2000 with wife Meenal, a native of India.

“This neighborhood has been very good to us,” he says.

He’s been involved in a half-dozen eco-ventures, though PHEW is his first swing at retail. Since 2006, the couple has tried to create a low-carbon household, which fits well into living down the block from his store. Also, the store is located in Green on Greene, a mixed-use building with a mission of sustainability. An environmentally friendly household-products manufacturer is also based there.

Kaighobady has used his mechanical mind for greener transport before.

In July 2007, he finished making a homemade electric-powered Volkswagen Vanagon, and says two men who claimed to be Chevron employees in March 2006 paid $3,900 for a 1979 Jetta he rigged to run on a biodiesel from used fryer oil.

“But these bikes,” Kaighobady says, in his stark corner storefront, a half dozen store models carefully arrayed on the hardwood floor, “are really going to be part of the future.”

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Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly’s tech scene, but aren’t necessarily technology focused. See others here.

TicketLeap saved bicycle racing in Philadelphia.

Or at least the Center City-based event-planning ticketing service provider was one of many partners that helped make sure the 25th annual Philadelphia Cycling Championship was possible, even after a city budget hole left the international race short $500,000.

The company doubled their ticketing of VIP seating with merchandising and donation soliciting to help bring cash to the June 7th race, famed for its chase of the “Manayunk Wall”

While they were saving racing, TicketLeap was also introducing Anywhere, which just might be the first product allowing users to create a virtual box office out of an Internet-enabled computer.

The product is aimed at event organizers of any size, helping them handle online ticket sales on the phone, at a venue door or otherwise.

Watch a demo below

The cloud-based software includes bar code scanning, priority seating and other venue customization. The company, whose services are used by more than 8,000 venues and organizers nationwide, charges a fee for each ticket sold. No software, hardware or contracts are required, and setup is free and available online.

“It’s only a matter of time before every ticket you buy comes from web-based ticketing software like this,” TicketLeap CEO Chris Stanchak said in a press release. “There’s really no comparison when it comes to cost, convenience and flexibility.”

And who wouldn’t use a ticketing service that supports athelticism and your right to scream at competitive bicyclists with a beer in your hand at nine a.m.?

TicketLeap has other regional users, including the city’s annual video game expo and the Philadelphia Force — yes, that’s right, your hometown professional women’s softball team, says company spokesman Blake Jennelle.

Get your tickets while you can.