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Bird Acquires Scoot
- escoz 7y agoI guess this explains the Bird scooters parked around SF downtown over the last few days.. :)
- haldean 7y agoI love Scoot but I'm still peeved at the way Bird handled rolling their scooters out in SF. I trusted Scoot to do the right thing when it came to engaging the city and making sure they use public infrastructure responsibly, but I have none of that trust for Bird. I guess we'll see how it goes, but maybe it's just time to buy my own GenZe :(
- asveikau 7y ago> maybe it's just time to buy my own GenZe I used scoot for a bit before deciding to buy a Vespa in SF. It was a good preview of what the scooter commute would look like. (Obviously the 150cc scooter is more powerful.) I know I am not the only one who went this route. I would hear from strangers on scooters in SF who said something similar.
- diffset 7y agoI did the exact same thing. Used Scoot for years in SF and just bought a Sprint 150. It's nice being able to go up hills full speed now.
- yellowapple 7y agoI'm considering the same thing, though I'm mildly leaning toward the GenZe scooters Scoot (supposedly) uses. Eventually I'd like to get my Class M and go full-motorcycle, but I figure starting with a scooter would be good practice (not to mention it wouldn't require getting the Class M first).
- haldean 7y agoI don't think it's "supposedly", they're all GenZe-branded.
- yellowapple 7y agoYeah, "apparently" probably would've been the more apt word. That said, I'm pretty sure it's only the seated scooters that are GenZe-branded, given that (AFAICT) GenZe doesn't make kick scooters.
- asveikau 7y agoIn California last I checked you need an M1 for a 150cc scooter. But not for the genze stuff I guess.
- jdreyfuss 7y agoYeah Bird's rollout in SF put them in a very negative light for a lot people (myself included). Perhaps there's more acceptance for scooters this time around, so it'll go better for them.
- smaili 7y agoPro tip: if you want to get acquired by your competitor just have SF grant you a permit they can't have :)
- joewadcan 7y agoFunny, but doubtful that's it even the majority of the reason for this acquisition. Do you really think there's $25M in profit by operating one of many scooter rental services in San Francisco? I'm sure the permit was a nice to have, but Bird's got a bunch of reasons to acquire Scoot. Experience with motorized scooters (which Bird just announced their own variant), an existing software team, a "kleenex"-level trademark, not to mention keeping it away from their competitors.
- viscanti 7y ago> Do you really think there's $25M in profit by operating one of many scooter rental services in San Francisco? How many of Bird's other moves seem to be driven by profit? They seem to be at a point where they're fighting to still exist in a year or two. Given that, they'll want to take some big risks to give themselves as much of a chance as possible.
- joewadcan 7y agoFair point on profit vs growth. But the idea that a mid sized city's scooter permit was the sole reason for the acquisition still doesn't seem reasonable. Possible, just not reasonable
- jpeg_hero 7y ago>But one detail in particular caught my eye. About 24 percent of Uber’s bookings—all the money that customers pay through the app and in cash, including driver earnings—occur in just five cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and São Paulo. >For a company that operates in more than 700 cities, including quite a few giants—Mexico City, Tokyo, Paris, Lagos, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Mumbai, to name a few—that concentration gives Uber a surprising vulnerability at the local level. And they know it. Acquisition for just SF could be sole justification. If pattern is similar to Uber, SF would be one of the 5 core markets for Bird.
- minimaxir 7y agoThe purchase price was apparently about $25M, which I'm assuming is not a 10x exit (the exact amount they raised is unclear). https://twitter.com/Katie_Roof/status/1138913835606089729 https://twitter.com/Katie_Roof/status/1138913835606089729
- freewilly1040 7y agoAs per the linked article they raised $47M
- omarchowdhury 7y agoThen it's likely the founders and team walked away with nothing from the sale.
- Ecco 7y agoWell, if both those numbers are right, they should be entitled to a share of the -$22M value they created. So I hope for them they walked away with nothing from the sale!
- throw03172019 7y agoWhy would you want them to walk away with nothing?
- likpok 7y agoBecause GP is suggesting that they created -$22M of value. So walking away with 0 means that they're collecting much more value than they created.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- robhunter 7y agoLikely not - venture capital investments have at least 1x liquidation preferences. The founders likely got nothing.
- s1mon 7y agoWell, now SF will no longer be infested with so many scooters with branding saying coot or cool after "modification".
- lucasmullens 7y agoInstead we'll get Turd scooters (apparently someone's doing this all over LA): https://www.reddit.com/r/birdcharger/comments/9hs068/has_anyone_seen_these_new_turd_scooters_around/ https://www.reddit.com/r/birdcharger/comments/9hs068/has_any...
- ibash 7y agoWhat are the different ways this could play out for scoot's service?
- nikodunk 7y agoI'd assume Scoot can now grow faster, while being less constrained by capital when expanding to new locations like Spain and Chile (buying more scooters every time). At the same time Bird can benefit from Scoot's operational experience, which at this point must be iterated and relatively efficient. From what I've heard from regular users though, Scoot's service is already pretty good. I even know two super-users who promote it to everyone they know all the time, and use it every day to commute from Richmond <> Downtown.
- rasz 7y agoone less bankruptcy
- blkhp19 7y agoMaybe they'll finally have the resources to make a proper app. For context, they went web view -> react native, and both iterations were among the worst apps I've used on an Apple device. It's a shame that companies don't take pride in the UX they create, but I guess they were probably eng resource constrained.
- perfmode 7y agoApparently money can’t buy engineers.
- luckydata 7y agoI think the problem was not enough money for engineers, so they had to make a bunch of compromises.
- xenospn 7y agoHow much does it cost to hire an engineer who can properly scale images?
- broknbottle 7y agoit can't be too hard to find somebody on fiverr to do it for a cool $5.00
- perfmode 7y agoand how much did they raise?
- umeshunni 7y agoYou're right on the money here. Scoot was undoubtedly the worst app I've used in recent years. I liked their scooters but their app had a laggy webview and all the images were squashed and in the wrong aspect ratio. I assumed this was a problem only on Android and that they were just a hipster head-in-the-sand company like Snap, but guess it was just crappy developers.
- 7y ago
- paxys 7y ago"Bird acquires San Francisco scooter permit"
- spyspy 7y agoThat’s what I first thought as well. They’ve literally bought their way back into the SF market after being snubbed.
- alexeichemenda 7y agoHa - first thought come that came to my mind. I wonder if SF city council will appreciate this move. If this was a purely "permit" driven acquisition, I'm surprised Bird won the bidding price vs the larger scooter companies. If this was for the technology (including the lock), then I'd be curious if this really adds value to Bird (as a comment below explains it very well, scooters can be profitable within 2 weeks so a % of theft is acceptable)
- spyspy 7y agoI’d expect to see more consolidation in the market in the next few years as Bird/Lime/Uber/Lyft gobble up the smaller players.
- Jommi 7y agoNo way they can be proftiable ın 2 weeks. Where did you read that?
- spyspy 7y agohere’s an article on the economics. it doesn’t assert 2 weeks but it might not be wildly far off https://qz.com/1325064/scooters-might-actually-have-good-unit-economics/ https://qz.com/1325064/scooters-might-actually-have-good-uni...
- baby 7y agofreaking victory if you ask me, San Francisco has been completely backward on this scooter permit. There's never any scooters around, they are not available passed a certain hour in the evening, and above all they require you to have a US driver license. They are doing everything to incentivize people to learn how to drive and own a car... I've never felt corruption before moving to San Francisco. There's money everywhere you walk, but there's the largest concentration of homeless people in the street (and they're not just homeless, they are junkies as well). Rent is completely absurd, and that's because no buildings can be built anywhere (if you look at the population of San Francisco 10 years ago, it hasn't moved). Public Transport is absolute shit, which makes it a hassle for a lot of people to live here because they need to commute every day to suburbs.
- Ramiro 7y ago$25 million sounds pretty low. Guess they just bought the existing stock scooters and the SF permit? It would extremely funny if the city didn't allow for the permit to be transferred :P
- throw03172019 7y agoFire sale? $47M injected into Scoot.
- aresant 7y agoHandful of interesting points: a) Scoot raised something like $47,000,000. This article reports a cash and stock deal of $25,000,000. b) Scoot launched in 2012 and spent their first 6 years renting mopeds and electric bikes, only recently launching what we all think of as "scooters" in late 2018. c) The founder illustrates what Scoot saw as a gigantic problem in the space - theft and vandalism (1). He then wrote a follow-up post a few months later illustrating their solution - a proprietary lock adapter from their bike sharing network (2). I wonder if we'll see this technology rolled out @ Bird? (1) https://medium.com/@mbkeating/what-we-learned-from-our-first-month-of-operating-scoot-kicks-dcd9a677db15 https://medium.com/@mbkeating/what-we-learned-from-our-first... (2) https://medium.com/@mbkeating/one-of-our-kicks-was-stolen-last-weekend-8cfdf94979b6 https://medium.com/@mbkeating/one-of-our-kicks-was-stolen-la...
- dcolkitt 7y ago> The founder illustrates what Scoot saw as a gigantic problem in the space - theft and vandalism Is this actually a serious impediment to the scooter business model? Bulk electric scooters can be sourced from Chinese manufacturers for <$200. The ride sharing services charge $0.15/minute. You breakeven in 24 hours of ride time. Assuming 30% utilization during peak hours and 10% off hours, the payback time is less than two weeks of deployment. You'd have to expect 5-10% of your fleet to be vandalized/stolen every day, before it breaks the margins.
- TallGuyShort 7y agoTheir costs are higher than just the scooters. Not intimately familiar with either business, but I'd expect the scooters themselves to be on of the smaller costs. The infrastructure to charge them I'd expect to be one of the bigger ones, at least early on. Maybe on an on-going basis if that requires people to go retrieve scooters, etc. And I'd want a proprietary lock long before theft had actually eliminated my entire margin.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bruceb 7y agoThey city of SF has said Bird can't layoff any Scoot employees if they want to take over Scoot's permit. >Among the conditions SFMTA asked of Bird is one Scoot employees may be >celebrating: Reiskin told Bird it must maintain the “same or greater number of >employees that Scoot has employed during the pilot” to also operate at the “same >or higher” compensation, including benefits, and to maintain Scoot’s commitment >to labor harmony in San Francisco. https://www.sfexaminer.com/the-city/formerly-ousted-e-scooter-company-bird-purchases-rival-scoot-and-acquires-sf-permit-in-the-process/ https://www.sfexaminer.com/the-city/formerly-ousted-e-scoote... Not sure how enforceable this is.
- arcticbull 7y agoEnforcement action can be as simple as not issuing a permit renewal when this one expires.
- Stryder 7y agoWould be great to see if this one sticks, but I have a sneaking suspicion that managers will just find novel ways to get people to leave.
- sulam 7y agoThis does not say you can't lay someone off. What it says is that you can't RIF the team. You can fire people and hire others, possibly much cheaper others. IOW, this is a very weak requirement.
- eridius 7y agoYou can't hire cheaper others because of the "same or higher compensation" bit. The only reason to fire anyone from Scoot is if they're genuinely not good at their job and you can replace them with someone who performs better at the same pay.
- rhizome 7y ago"Unenforceable" under what principle or flaw?
- freewilly1040 7y agoI don't understand how Scoot's permits to operate dockless scooters / bikes / whatever relates to the Lyft lawsuit over their exclusive right to operate in SF. Not a lawyer but the wording I saw seems like Lyft is likely to prevail there.
- eridius 7y agoScoot doesn't operate bikes. They operate electric mopeds and kick scooters. Lyft is suing over bikeshare. AFAICT Scoot is not related to the lawsuit.
- eridius 7y agoPlease tell me they'll keep the Scoot branding. Scoot's brand is much better than Bird's, and in particular the red Scoot mopeds are quite distinctive and fun whereas black Bird ones wouldn't be.
- knur 7y agoThey will. In fact, they will most likely operate under Bird's Platform product, which basically mean they will be more or less independent except they will use Bird's backend, firmware, client, etc.
- mjn 7y agoIt's the wrong number of letters, though. Here in Washington, DC, we currently have six licensed scooter companies: Bird, Jump, Lime, Lyft, Skip, and Spin. Through advanced statistical analysis, I've therefore determined that four letters is the correct number of letters in a scooter company name. "Scoot" needs to lose one somehow!
- eridius 7y agoTo be honest, I'd be quite happy if Scoot stopped doing kick scooters and just focused on mopeds, and ran the kick scooters under the Bird name instead. I don't actually like the kick scooters, so they just clutter up the Scoot app and make it harder to see at a glance where the mopeds are.
- asdfman123 7y agoCan we talk about just how patently ridiculous this headline sounds? Lots of adults involved, lots of smart people, lots of big money, seven figure contracts. Bird acquires scoot: https://gfycat.com/genuineseverefruitfly https://gfycat.com/genuineseverefruitfly
- DeonPenny 7y agoThank god, scoot had the worst scooters. The best locks though. Their scooters at most went 12mph while others go 15+. Hopefully, they bring those bird scoots back to sf.
- gyrgtyn 7y agothey have the scoots