Cognition Cyclery: Downtown San Mateo's Ultimate Bike Shop

To be fair, even at 29, Kopf looks younger than he is, but if you’re looking for the boss, even his employees jokingly tell you to “look for the really young guy.” Besides, if you’re living on the Peninsula, you know that when it comes to business, 30 is the new 50.

Kopf and Cognition Cyclery are prime examples of the Bay Area’s new generation of young, ambitious entrepreneurs tapping this market’s abundant resources to build exciting new businesses from the ground up.

In the middle of Silicon Valley, during one of the worst economic climates the U.S. has ever seen, he decided to start a bike shop. Like, an actual, physical bike shop… without an online retail presence. In 2010, still working his way through college as a bike store employee, Kopf signed a lease on a retail space in Mountain View to start his own business.

“We started out with like 20 bikes on the floor,” Kopf said. “People thought we were a modern art museum.”

“That was our Launchpad for slowly and organically growing the business to the point where we started to see the ceiling of what the business could do in terms of the volume of bikes we could fit in the space,” Kopf explained. “About five years after that we started to think maybe we should do another store.”

OK, so Cognition is not the first bike store in the neighborhood, but it is the first of its kind in the neighborhood. Neither is Kopf the first entrepreneur to start a brick and mortar retail space, but he is of an increasingly rare breed here in the Bay.

Kopf is a savvy businessman, and he saw a huge gap in the high-end bicycle market between his Mountain View store and San Francisco. Having spent most of his life on the Mid-Peninsula, he figured downtown San Mateo for the perfect up-and-coming neighborhood to fill that gap.

Thanks to a unique partnership with Specialized Bicycles, Cognition was able to expand into what is now the largest bike shop on the West Coast by square footage and yet remains through and through the vision of Kopf and his team.

“Brands like Specialized, they see tons of value in brick and mortar, tons of value in being able to interact with the community at that level,” Kopf said of the manufacturer’s investment in locally owned bike stores.

The new space affords Kopf and his team the ability to continue “adding more and more to the experience factor.”

Cognition has invested $100,000 in fitting tools, tech, and staff, for example, and those fittings are so popular that they are booking out two weeks in advance.

“Fit has become recognized as being more important than it ever used to be,” Kopf said. “People are recognizing the health benefits, the injury prevention… it’s definitely become a much bigger part of our business, and we want people to be comfortable and have a good time when they are riding.”

What exactly is a fitting session?

“A proper fitting is one of those experiences you can only get by going to a place that dedicates space to that,” Kopf said. “And working with our fitters is a super cool experience… It’s all over the map. As simple as a half hour, ‘I need to figure out where my seat height is supposed to be,’ to us using 3D motion capture systems to pinpoint down to the millimeter every sizing aspect of a bike. So anywhere from half an hour invested by the customer to three and a half hours.”

With the Mountain View store being awarded as one of the top 15 Specialized retailers in the world (they do sell other brands, by the way, including Cervélo

and Niner), and the San Mateo store fast approaching the same numbers, Cognition is all about the future.

In a few years’ time, the Cognition team is hoping to have a third location in the Bay Area that will expand the “experience factor” even more, making Cognition Cyclery not just a place for people who want to buy bikes, but a place for bike culture to exist, expand, and thrive.

What that culture looks like is anyone’s guess, but e-bikes will definitely be at the forefront as the technology advances, the offerings increase, the prices go down, and more people are able to access these new rides.

“We’re in a really difficult to explain era with bicycle retail right now,” Kopf said. “The sport as a whole is more popular then ever with a bunch of new segments. Gravel road is new, and that’s taking off. Bikepacking is taking off. Of course road and mountain have been growing little by little in the last 15 years, and now we’re seeing all time highs for female cyclists.”

Kopf feels that “the onus is on us that are still thriving in retail to find brands, equipment, and product mixes that represent the best in the industry,” as well as evolving what it means to be a bike store in order to maintain the brick and mortar bike culture.

In the heart of the tech industry, where online is king, that is a heavy burden for such young shoulders, but Kopf and Cognition are more than ready for the road ahead, and downtown San Mateo is lucky enough to be along for the ride.