9 ms·

Bird CEO on scooter startup copycats, unit economics, safety and seasonality

72 points by orarbel1 8y ago

jjeaff 8y ago
So what is the VC angle with these super high valuation scooter startups? It doesn't seem very defensible. The barrier to entry isn't very high. And it doesn't seem that customer loyalty would be much of a factor. The most obvious strategy I see is that the VCs think they can pump these companies then dump them on the open markets and cash out before thousands of global, regional, and local competitors flood in and make their non defensible positions obvious.
- arkitaip 8y ago
  Pump and dump. Once the IPO is over and they had their ROI they don't care about what happens to investors or the company.
  - Chris_Chambers 8y ago
    Why is this insightful comment being downvoted? I suppose Bird allocates a budget for vote manipulation on aggregator sites, unless random people are actually autonomously doing that work for free. I’m not sure which would be more depressing.
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
  Electric scooters are a fruiting body of the electric car industry (brushless hub motors, batteries etc wouldn't have gotten so developed just for scooters) Maybe the scooter rentals are propping up another of the vc's concerns?
  - taneq 8y ago
    All of it came out of mobile phones and r/c hobby gear IMO.
keerthiko 8y ago
I still think Bird's success is merely symptomatic of American shortsighted solutions to systemic US urban planning issues. I doubt this will reach the same level of popularity in cities/countries with great public transit, highly walkable streets, and good existing last mile solutions (bikeshares, bikelanes, high bus coverage), but I'm happy to eat my words if I'm just not seeing it and folks from Amsterdam, Seoul, Tokyo, NYC or Berlin would like to chime in and prove me wrong. The biggest challenge I see of existing well-executed public transit/cities is last mile coverage for handicapped/disabled folks and sufficient infrastructure for them in stations without having to resort to uber/lyft for <1mile transit. If Bird/scooter industry expanded into solving these problems I would greatly celebrate. I get frustrated seeing Bird celebrated as the next coming of the steam engine, when it barely moves the needle for regular transit, without remotely addressing the biggest long-standing issues of the space.
- shereadsthenews 8y ago
  Americans will try literally anything as long as it is neither sensible land use nor proven transportation schemes. This scooter stuff is extremely appealing to the American mind.
  - RobLach 8y ago
    What about the American mind makes electric scooters so alluring? That statement sounds ridiculous.
    - shereadsthenews 8y ago
      I don’t know and I can’t explain it. If you mention a train to an American they will start talking about how far it is from Miami to Seattle as if that matters and despite the fact that Ohio is more densely populated than Spain. If you bring up walking someone will ask how you can walk home from the grocery store, apparently unaware of the fact that 95% of people bring home their food by foot. If you talk about biking Americans will wonder about rain and snow, as if nobody bikes in Netherlands and Finland. It’s a strange, willful ignorance that allows Americans to look around and say “what this town needs is a hyperloop.”
Tiktaalik 8y ago
Scooters are only truly safe in a separated bike/scooter lane, so given that cities have to invest in that infrastructure, they should ban Bird and others and only allow their own bike/scooter systems that are integrated into their own public transportation networks.
- elcomet 8y ago
  Cars are only safe in a separated car lane, so why not ban cars, remove the car lanes and transform them into bike / scooter lanes ?
  - Tiktaalik 8y ago
    Good idea.
  - ardy42 8y ago
    > Cars are only safe in a separated car lane, so why not ban cars, remove the car lanes and transform them into bike / scooter lanes ? Because streets were designed as car lanes, and bikes/scooters are niche transportation technologies [1] when compared to cars? [1] Bikes and scooters are really only useful for short-distance individual transport. They do not handle long distances, groups, and cargo very well.
    - megy 8y ago
      Except they were not. Cars are just too dangerous to have anywhere near people. They should be banned from cities and suburbs. 40,000 people die every year in the US because of cars. Dumbest idea ever.
      - ardy42 8y ago
        > Except they were not. 99% of the streets for miles and miles around me were built after the invention of the car for near-dedicated use by automobiles, and those that were not were converted to that design. > Cars are just too dangerous to have anywhere near people. They should be banned from cities and suburbs. You say that, but I'd like to see you move your family to new house without using an automobile to move your stuff.
paulsutter 8y ago
Bad title - article does not cover unit economics at all (it's barely mentioned) > The pair hit on a number of topics, including the unit economics, safety and seasonality of the scooter business
- m4x 8y ago
  It is discussed in paragraphs 4-7. No real figures are given, but you wouldn't expect them to be in an informal interview.
  - paulsutter 8y ago
    Here's the meatiest statement. Not very useful. > What we see on the unit economics of those, it’s like night and day
baby 8y ago
Meanwhile in San Francisco we are stuck with two unknown companies, a very low amount of scooters, no scooters in the evening (after 9pm I think?), and you can't ride one if you don't have a driver license. For a tech-pole, it is quite a backward city.
- walshemj 8y ago
  Do you think riding a scooter that can go 20mph shouldn't require a driving licence - which is a very low bar in the states I believe.
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    You can ride a bike much faster with no license.
    - shard972 8y ago
      Well it's a given bike riders should be licensed and plated. It's insane that in many places bike riders using the public roads don't require 3rd party insurance.
      - baroffoos 8y ago
        For what purpose other than locking kids and poor people out of the world and worsening traffic and health issues. If 2 cyclists crash in to each other they will cause minimal property damage and any medical costs should be covered by the government. There are so many other situations where people can accidentally cause property damage that don't require insurance. Its just the cars have a very high risk of causing huge amounts of damage very easily.
        justapassenger 8y ago
        > any medical costs should be covered by the government Why? If I get sick, I need to go bankrupt if I don't have an insurance, but if I run a stop sign on a bicycle, government should pay for medical bill? This would make more sense in countries that have universal healthcare. USA isn't one of those.
nradov 8y ago
Can we please get parked scooters off the sidewalk where they present a safety hazard to visually and mobility impaired people?
- shard972 8y ago
  Sometimes with progress, you gotta break a few legs.
  - bcOpus 8y ago
    Sometimes with progress, you gotta break a few legs. Where “progress” is synonymous with “profit” and the things being broken aren’t yours. Having said that if you’re volunteering, I know a guy with a hammer.
    - shard972 8y ago
      I'm just making an observation of the facts, not positing a moral good or bad to progress.
      - thecatspaw 8y ago
        Its not a true oberservation of facts though. Progress is achievable without any breaking of legs
        shard972 8y ago
        Name one technology disruption that caused no pain for anyone? With user taxi drivers lost their monopolies, the car put horse and buggies out of business, amazon put many retailers out of business etc. etc. I can't think of one advancement that had 0 negative effects on anybody. I don't even know why someone would argue otherwise, i thought this was a pretty common position in somewhere like HN. Sure you can say that the overall benefits were easily worth it, but its irrelevant to my point that there is always eggs broken along the way.
  - 8y ago
dawhizkid 8y ago
Any cities with outdoor moving sidewalks? I seem to only see those in airports but a giant moving sidewalk would be awesome
- dpeck 8y ago
  Las Vegas has some, but they seem to breakdown with any rain (like a lot of things in Las Vegas). It seems like the currently deployed tech would only work in a few locales.
retrohellscape 8y ago
Bird is how I can be sure that I should just ignore everything I hear about where to find success. Because, for fuck’s sake, their manner of innovation was to look at bike shares, and do scooters instead. And this is a fucking retarded idea, up there with the Juicero, and yet wowee, shit tons of cash getting thrown around. There’s actually no way to predict how retarded success might actually be sometimes, no matter how many times success is also sensible. We like the sensible success stories more, and claim that they are more valid, but that doesn’t dispell the very real existence of completely useless companies that are also successful. It’s like hating some of your more unbearable co-workers, despite the fact that they actually pull some weight no matter how awful they really are to behold. On a macro scale, this means sometimes, shitty companies with stupid ideas (scooters that homeless people can grift charger duty on) carry the day. Fuck me. I hate this shitty future.
W-Stool 8y ago
Here in Reno we have Lime bikes (the scooters were withdrawn after being deployed without city permission) and they are almost like litter - they are laying around all over the city but I almost never see anyone riding one. I'm all for bikes and bicycling but the fact that they have no designated docking stations means people leave them everywhere and to this old fart it is borderline blight.
- baby 8y ago
  oh so the space cars take to park and to ride is not an inconvenience? You're funny.
  - stevehawk 8y ago
    his point, using your analogy, is that cars have a designated parking space, but these dockless vehicles do not.
    - IshKebab 8y ago
      Most cars are just parked on the side of the road. At least in the UK. Not really "designated parking spaces". Sure now they accept it and draw white lines sometimes, but I bet it wasn't like that when cars were first introduced.
  - W-Stool 8y ago
    I rarely see cars parked in the middle of the sidewalk obstructing walkers or prank-parked in the middle of a grassy park. Lime bikes on the other hand ... every day.
    - baby 8y ago
      cars parks next to roads, and drive on roads, that take a huge chunks of space forcing us to walk or ride bikes and scooters on a tiny space. I see people are pro-cars here.
idoco 8y ago
<Shameless-plug> My analysis of Bird's unit economics in Tel Aviv: https://twitter.com/ido_co/status/1080883756184023041 https://twitter.com/ido_co/status/1080883756184023041 </Shameless-plug>
- forcer 8y ago
  your comment is 100x more informative and interesting than the main article :)
  - idoco 8y ago
    Thanks. I tried to post it to HN but got no traction :)
    - LowLevelHacker 8y ago
      Hn people don't know what's good for them and they hate anything new.
- wink 8y ago
  > A Bird costs ₪5 to unlock and ₪0.5 per minute of use ($1.34 and $0.13). Wow, I find that pretty expensive. I don't have scooter numbers for comparison and no idea aboul general cost of living in TLV, but in Munich I pay - 1 EUR for 30min of rental bike ( negligible yearly cost of 3 EUR/year) - 2.80 EUR for public transport (1.40 for short trips) So yeah, the scooter is electric, but are people really using them for > 10minute rides? Apparently they do. > The average ride duration was 15.5 minutes.
  - idoco 8y ago
    Yes, that is quite expensive. TLV also has Mobike non-electric bikes for about $1 per 30 min. But take into consideration, that non-electric bikes are not very practical commute option during the Israeli summer (for most people). Public transport (Bus only) is quite ineffective because of congestion.
IshKebab 8y ago
> “The deeper I get into transportation, the more I realize we don’t need autonomous vehicles, we don’t need tunnels, all we need are more bike lanes,” he said. Well said.
LowLevelHacker 8y ago
I know a guy who has taken dozens on bird scooters, replaced the motherboard, removed these sticker and resells them for $200 on Craigslist. If I know of this one incident, how many must have been taken like this! How can bird survive?
donkeyd 8y ago
Bird is trying to land (pun intended) in Amsterdam, but from what I've heard they're already losing so many employee scooters in the canals that it's becoming a problem. I already predicted this would happen when I first read about Bird online... I hate that Im right about how shitty people are.

72 points by orarbel1 8y ago

So what is the VC angle with these super high valuation scooter startups? It doesn't seem very defensible. The barrier to entry isn't very high. And it doesn't seem that customer loyalty would be much of a factor. The most obvious strategy I see is that the VCs think they can pump these companies then dump them on the open markets and cash out before thousands of global, regional, and local competitors flood in and make their non defensible positions obvious.

arkitaip 8y ago
Pump and dump. Once the IPO is over and they had their ROI they don't care about what happens to investors or the company.
- Chris_Chambers 8y ago
  Why is this insightful comment being downvoted? I suppose Bird allocates a budget for vote manipulation on aggregator sites, unless random people are actually autonomously doing that work for free. I’m not sure which would be more depressing.
xkcd-sucks 8y ago
Electric scooters are a fruiting body of the electric car industry (brushless hub motors, batteries etc wouldn't have gotten so developed just for scooters) Maybe the scooter rentals are propping up another of the vc's concerns?
- taneq 8y ago
  All of it came out of mobile phones and r/c hobby gear IMO.

keerthiko 8y ago

I still think Bird's success is merely symptomatic of American shortsighted solutions to systemic US urban planning issues. I doubt this will reach the same level of popularity in cities/countries with great public transit, highly walkable streets, and good existing last mile solutions (bikeshares, bikelanes, high bus coverage), but I'm happy to eat my words if I'm just not seeing it and folks from Amsterdam, Seoul, Tokyo, NYC or Berlin would like to chime in and prove me wrong. The biggest challenge I see of existing well-executed public transit/cities is last mile coverage for handicapped/disabled folks and sufficient infrastructure for them in stations without having to resort to uber/lyft for <1mile transit. If Bird/scooter industry expanded into solving these problems I would greatly celebrate. I get frustrated seeing Bird celebrated as the next coming of the steam engine, when it barely moves the needle for regular transit, without remotely addressing the biggest long-standing issues of the space.

shereadsthenews 8y ago
Americans will try literally anything as long as it is neither sensible land use nor proven transportation schemes. This scooter stuff is extremely appealing to the American mind.
- RobLach 8y ago
  What about the American mind makes electric scooters so alluring? That statement sounds ridiculous.
  - shereadsthenews 8y ago
    I don’t know and I can’t explain it. If you mention a train to an American they will start talking about how far it is from Miami to Seattle as if that matters and despite the fact that Ohio is more densely populated than Spain. If you bring up walking someone will ask how you can walk home from the grocery store, apparently unaware of the fact that 95% of people bring home their food by foot. If you talk about biking Americans will wonder about rain and snow, as if nobody bikes in Netherlands and Finland. It’s a strange, willful ignorance that allows Americans to look around and say “what this town needs is a hyperloop.”

Tiktaalik 8y ago

Scooters are only truly safe in a separated bike/scooter lane, so given that cities have to invest in that infrastructure, they should ban Bird and others and only allow their own bike/scooter systems that are integrated into their own public transportation networks.

elcomet 8y ago
Cars are only safe in a separated car lane, so why not ban cars, remove the car lanes and transform them into bike / scooter lanes ?
- Tiktaalik 8y ago
  Good idea.
- ardy42 8y ago
  > Cars are only safe in a separated car lane, so why not ban cars, remove the car lanes and transform them into bike / scooter lanes ? Because streets were designed as car lanes, and bikes/scooters are niche transportation technologies [1] when compared to cars? [1] Bikes and scooters are really only useful for short-distance individual transport. They do not handle long distances, groups, and cargo very well.
  - megy 8y ago
    Except they were not. Cars are just too dangerous to have anywhere near people. They should be banned from cities and suburbs. 40,000 people die every year in the US because of cars. Dumbest idea ever.
    - ardy42 8y ago
      > Except they were not. 99% of the streets for miles and miles around me were built after the invention of the car for near-dedicated use by automobiles, and those that were not were converted to that design. > Cars are just too dangerous to have anywhere near people. They should be banned from cities and suburbs. You say that, but I'd like to see you move your family to new house without using an automobile to move your stuff.

paulsutter 8y ago

Bad title - article does not cover unit economics at all (it's barely mentioned) > The pair hit on a number of topics, including the unit economics, safety and seasonality of the scooter business

m4x 8y ago
It is discussed in paragraphs 4-7. No real figures are given, but you wouldn't expect them to be in an informal interview.
- paulsutter 8y ago
  Here's the meatiest statement. Not very useful. > What we see on the unit economics of those, it’s like night and day

baby 8y ago

Meanwhile in San Francisco we are stuck with two unknown companies, a very low amount of scooters, no scooters in the evening (after 9pm I think?), and you can't ride one if you don't have a driver license. For a tech-pole, it is quite a backward city.

walshemj 8y ago
Do you think riding a scooter that can go 20mph shouldn't require a driving licence - which is a very low bar in the states I believe.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  You can ride a bike much faster with no license.
  - shard972 8y ago
    Well it's a given bike riders should be licensed and plated. It's insane that in many places bike riders using the public roads don't require 3rd party insurance.
    - baroffoos 8y ago
      For what purpose other than locking kids and poor people out of the world and worsening traffic and health issues. If 2 cyclists crash in to each other they will cause minimal property damage and any medical costs should be covered by the government. There are so many other situations where people can accidentally cause property damage that don't require insurance. Its just the cars have a very high risk of causing huge amounts of damage very easily.
      - justapassenger 8y ago
        > any medical costs should be covered by the government Why? If I get sick, I need to go bankrupt if I don't have an insurance, but if I run a stop sign on a bicycle, government should pay for medical bill? This would make more sense in countries that have universal healthcare. USA isn't one of those.

nradov 8y ago

Can we please get parked scooters off the sidewalk where they present a safety hazard to visually and mobility impaired people?

shard972 8y ago
Sometimes with progress, you gotta break a few legs.
- bcOpus 8y ago
  Sometimes with progress, you gotta break a few legs. Where “progress” is synonymous with “profit” and the things being broken aren’t yours. Having said that if you’re volunteering, I know a guy with a hammer.
  - shard972 8y ago
    I'm just making an observation of the facts, not positing a moral good or bad to progress.
    - thecatspaw 8y ago
      Its not a true oberservation of facts though. Progress is achievable without any breaking of legs
      - shard972 8y ago
        Name one technology disruption that caused no pain for anyone? With user taxi drivers lost their monopolies, the car put horse and buggies out of business, amazon put many retailers out of business etc. etc. I can't think of one advancement that had 0 negative effects on anybody. I don't even know why someone would argue otherwise, i thought this was a pretty common position in somewhere like HN. Sure you can say that the overall benefits were easily worth it, but its irrelevant to my point that there is always eggs broken along the way.
- 8y ago

dawhizkid 8y ago

Any cities with outdoor moving sidewalks? I seem to only see those in airports but a giant moving sidewalk would be awesome

dpeck 8y ago
Las Vegas has some, but they seem to breakdown with any rain (like a lot of things in Las Vegas). It seems like the currently deployed tech would only work in a few locales.

retrohellscape 8y ago

Bird is how I can be sure that I should just ignore everything I hear about where to find success. Because, for fuck’s sake, their manner of innovation was to look at bike shares, and do scooters instead. And this is a fucking retarded idea, up there with the Juicero, and yet wowee, shit tons of cash getting thrown around. There’s actually no way to predict how retarded success might actually be sometimes, no matter how many times success is also sensible. We like the sensible success stories more, and claim that they are more valid, but that doesn’t dispell the very real existence of completely useless companies that are also successful. It’s like hating some of your more unbearable co-workers, despite the fact that they actually pull some weight no matter how awful they really are to behold. On a macro scale, this means sometimes, shitty companies with stupid ideas (scooters that homeless people can grift charger duty on) carry the day. Fuck me. I hate this shitty future.

W-Stool 8y ago

Here in Reno we have Lime bikes (the scooters were withdrawn after being deployed without city permission) and they are almost like litter - they are laying around all over the city but I almost never see anyone riding one. I'm all for bikes and bicycling but the fact that they have no designated docking stations means people leave them everywhere and to this old fart it is borderline blight.

baby 8y ago
oh so the space cars take to park and to ride is not an inconvenience? You're funny.
- stevehawk 8y ago
  his point, using your analogy, is that cars have a designated parking space, but these dockless vehicles do not.
  - IshKebab 8y ago
    Most cars are just parked on the side of the road. At least in the UK. Not really "designated parking spaces". Sure now they accept it and draw white lines sometimes, but I bet it wasn't like that when cars were first introduced.
- W-Stool 8y ago
  I rarely see cars parked in the middle of the sidewalk obstructing walkers or prank-parked in the middle of a grassy park. Lime bikes on the other hand ... every day.
  - baby 8y ago
    cars parks next to roads, and drive on roads, that take a huge chunks of space forcing us to walk or ride bikes and scooters on a tiny space. I see people are pro-cars here.

idoco 8y ago

<Shameless-plug> My analysis of Bird's unit economics in Tel Aviv: https://twitter.com/ido_co/status/1080883756184023041 https://twitter.com/ido_co/status/1080883756184023041 </Shameless-plug>

forcer 8y ago
your comment is 100x more informative and interesting than the main article :)
- idoco 8y ago
  Thanks. I tried to post it to HN but got no traction :)
  - LowLevelHacker 8y ago
    Hn people don't know what's good for them and they hate anything new.
wink 8y ago
> A Bird costs ₪5 to unlock and ₪0.5 per minute of use ($1.34 and $0.13). Wow, I find that pretty expensive. I don't have scooter numbers for comparison and no idea aboul general cost of living in TLV, but in Munich I pay - 1 EUR for 30min of rental bike ( negligible yearly cost of 3 EUR/year) - 2.80 EUR for public transport (1.40 for short trips) So yeah, the scooter is electric, but are people really using them for > 10minute rides? Apparently they do. > The average ride duration was 15.5 minutes.
- idoco 8y ago
  Yes, that is quite expensive. TLV also has Mobike non-electric bikes for about $1 per 30 min. But take into consideration, that non-electric bikes are not very practical commute option during the Israeli summer (for most people). Public transport (Bus only) is quite ineffective because of congestion.

IshKebab 8y ago

> “The deeper I get into transportation, the more I realize we don’t need autonomous vehicles, we don’t need tunnels, all we need are more bike lanes,” he said. Well said.

LowLevelHacker 8y ago

I know a guy who has taken dozens on bird scooters, replaced the motherboard, removed these sticker and resells them for $200 on Craigslist. If I know of this one incident, how many must have been taken like this! How can bird survive?

donkeyd 8y ago

Bird is trying to land (pun intended) in Amsterdam, but from what I've heard they're already losing so many employee scooters in the canals that it's becoming a problem. I already predicted this would happen when I first read about Bird online... I hate that Im right about how shitty people are.