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Bird, once valued at $2.5B, just filed for bankruptcy
- josefresco 3y ago> The global shutdown of major cities in the Covid pandemic hit the scooter startup hard, forcing it to pull all of its scooters from US and European markets Why did something like COVID effect the use and "contactless" rental of scooters? Was this just collateral damage or did specific changes on laws/regulations cause the pull out?
- ImPostingOnHN 3y agoIt is possible that potential customers just had fewer events and open places worth scooting to.
- brvsft 3y agoI would also wager that potential repeat customers eventually just bought their own scooter. It's not like they're particularly expensive. If you really enjoyed using one of these, why rent? (I know there are reasons, e.g. I wouldn't want one of those batteries in my house at all. But my point is simply that they can be inexpensive, especially compared to the price of renting.)
- ImPostingOnHN 3y agoFor me, the biggest advantages are having one around whenever I need it, even if I didn't plan for it, and being able to leave one out of the way anywhere and not have to worry about using it to get home (might prefer a walk), or it getting stolen. It would absolutely be cheaper to buy one of my own, likely several times over by now. I'm mostly paying for the convenience.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- recursivecaveat 3y agoI would guess fewer urban commuters due to work-from-home plus retail slowdowns?
- turboponyy 3y agoLess people outside -> less scoots
- evo 3y agoI suspect if you're wary about fomite spread of disease (later shown to be airborne for COVID but initially assumed), then it's easy to pick up a phobia of grappling the handlebars of a scooter that a stranger has recently used. Additionally, at least anecdotally here, as the city centers hollowed out of normal business/leisure traffic, a lot of the rental vehicles were visibly breached and used by homeless folks, which often tarnished the literal appearance and reliability of the rental units in addition to damaging the brand.
- vladvasiliu 3y agoI don't know about other locales, but here, in France, people weren't supposed to wander too far away from their homes. Basically, you were only allowed to go to work if you absolutely couldn't work from home – and many people were staying home because their businesses were shut down. You were not supposed to go visit a friend on the other side of town. "Non-essential" stores were closed, so no reason to go too far away (and if your closest grocery store is far enough to take a scooter, you're probably not living somewhere where they are present).
- libraryatnight 3y agoIt would be so rad if I could walk to the grocery - I'd get hit by a car for sure though :(
- soco 3y agoBut how long was that restriction in place?
- vladvasiliu 3y agoIIRC there were three "lockdowns" over 1.5 years. The first was around 2 months, the second somewhat shorter (6 weeks IIRC) and the third around a month. However, in between, business was not always fully back to normal. For example, many bars, restaurants and theaters were still closed or operating under restrictions, like only being able to receive public outside (which, of course, required an outside area) and with "social distancing" (which required a large outside area).
- asdajksah2123 3y agoCitbike in NYC, a bike share program, saw record usage during and post COVID. If COVID really hurt Bird, what it might be indicating is that Bird's primary user was tourists rather than locals using it as a mode of transportation.
- bionsystem 3y agoIt has nothing to do with COVID. The stock was trading at $250 a share in october 2021, and started to drop afterwards, way after vaccines and restrictions in US/EU. It's just some lame excuse like inflation last year, rates now, and whatever is going to hit the news tomorrow.
- xeromal 3y agoWe weren't allowed to go the beach here in SoCal. If you can't go outside, why would you need a scooter
- b112 3y agoMost places, outside of a few weeks here and there, were still a-ok with you going places. Just not all places. But, another perspective.... do you want to take a bus, packed with people? Or even an uber, enclosed? Or, a scooter which you can wipe down the handlebars on? I'd have thought scooters would have soared during the pandemic.
- barryrandall 3y agoThe user base where I lived mostly consisted of tourists, commuters going from a parking garage to an office building, commuters going from apartments to office buildings, and unsupervised minors doing unsupervised minor things. All but the last group disappeared during the pandemic.
- manmal 3y agoWay less office workers and students went to work and school, and this made up a big part of their traffic.
- easton 3y agoDidn't they just buy Spin?
- blacksmith_tb 3y agoThey did[1]. Which makes me wonder if they'll all end up in junkyards, they're packed with batteries, and even RPis[2]... 1: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/19/bird-acquires-spin-scooters-from-tier-for-19m/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/19/bird-acquires-spin-scooter... 2: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-4bs-inside-spin-scooters https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-4bs-inside-sp...
- saalweachter 3y agoUsually it's a bankruptcy auction. Lotta great stuff at bankruptcy auctions. Sure, you can see it as preying upon others' misfortune, but you can also look at it as helping make their creditors whole.
- rchaud 3y agoNot a single word about revenue or profits, just about how much it was 'valued' at. A lot of VC money is just holding up Potemkin villages of 'innovation'.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoPerhaps because most would assume that Bird never earned any profit. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BRDS/bird-global/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BRDS/bird-global/n... https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1861449/000186144922000221/exhibit991-earningsrelea.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1861449/000186144922...
- troupo 3y agoBecause that's the true "innovation" that has been coming out of Silicon Valley for the past 10 years or so: losing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars for years without as much as a hint of a plan to become profitable.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoSounds like a pump and dump with extra steps. Hype up any obvious future failure to pump the stock to crazy valuations, then dump and leave the suckers holding the bags. All enabled by zero interest rates, and VCs were willing to fund some because they knew there's gonna be other suckers out there to enable them to raise the valuations.
- mistrial9 3y agomaybe rental scooters at scale with tracking are not really a great market innovation?
- yowlingcat 3y agoI think the key is the "D word" here, which is distribution. The reason why Uber worked is because there was a giant inventory of vehicles owned would-be drivers ready to service a population looking for that service. But there's no such parallel for rental scooters. In that case, the only capital efficient go to market would be to partner with brick and mortar partners who already have an extensive market presence (and ideally rental infrastructure); of course, that would've made Bird a fundamentally different company. In the form in which it was conceived and went to market and subsequently folded -- I fully agree with you that no, it makes zero sense to build out all of that infrastructure from scratch and try to capture market share.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoHow do you go bankrupt as a company renting powered scooters, which are possibly the cheapest possible mode of transportation just above a Craigslist bike? Incredible
- r00fus 3y agoTheft or other losses, cost of roving charging vans and personnel, etc.
- ToucanLoucan 3y agoHonestly alongside everything else (people hated them and their chargers, they got stolen constantly, etc. etc. etc.) the scooters themselves have collapsed in price, you can pick one up at Best Buy now for like $500. And yeah that's a lot but most of the people who were interested in renting them were a little upmarket anyway, so once they became affordable(ish) why would you rent one when you could own one?
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoWhat I want to know is where I can (legally) pick up used Bird or Lime or Spin or Ofo or Skip scooters. Are they all going in the trash?
- ToucanLoucan 3y agoAlmost certainly. I've seen photos of the acres and acres of perfectly good ebikes being piled up. Makes me absolutely sick to see such utter waste.
- Syonyk 3y agoHey, at least you see the waste... think about how much ewaste is invisible. :(
- Keegs 3y agoI had the same question a month ago when Revel ended its moped sharing program. What do you do with a fleet of several thousand electric mopeds? Apparently, send them all to recycling plants.
- hiatus 3y agoSimilar article on the same subject also discussed previously, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38706781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38706781
- diogenescynic 3y agoGood riddance, they've made cities worse and more dangerous. Can't tell you how many times some idiot on a Bird scooter going down a sidewalk has almost hit me or my kids. I've also seen several wipeout when going over track tracks.
- bionsystem 3y agoI'm so glad Paris banned them, it was a mess and very dangerous.
- danesparza 3y agoUnfortunately, I don't think they're gone yet. They just filed for bankruptcy protection. Cities are still littered with their scooters - and no clear plan to clean them up. We should probably publish COO Steve Schnell's address and send him all the scooters littering the cities. You know ... just as a drunken prank. Reference: https://www.businessinsider.com/bird-coo-drunk-pretend-fired-workers-slack-joke-prank-report-2020-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/bird-coo-drunk-pretend-fired...
- marssaxman 3y agoBird going out of business will not hurt all the other scooter rental companies. Personally I love electric scooters and use them frequently; they are a great amplifier for walking & transit.
- zwieback 3y agoHow is the scooter rental market in general? In Portland I pretty much just see Lime now and maybe one out ten is being used, others are parked at the top of steep hills.
- floren 3y agoI used them a bit in Denver this fall. There were plenty of Lyft and Lime scooters around (I used the Lyft ones, because I already had the app installed). People were about 50/50 on riding them in the (pretty damn decent) bike lanes vs being sociopathic assholes brushing past pedestrians on the sidewalk.
- linuxftw 3y agoWhat's worse: being hit on foot by a scooter, or being hit on scooter by a city bus?
- floren 3y agoBeing hit by a city bus is unlikely--they're loud, they're in the traffic lanes (not the bike lanes), they move predictably. Being hit by shithead teenagers doing stupid burnout tricks on their rental scooters, on the sidewalks? Probably happens to somebody every day.
- wgjordan 3y agoRelated: Scooter startup Bird is seeking a $2B valuation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17293571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17293571 - June 2018 (269 comments) Bird has raised $100M for electric scooter sharing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16555913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16555913 - March 2018 (146 comments)
- osierjtilsja 3y agoHah. The last time I saw Bird in the news was when they were throwing a tantrum and leaving SF because "strangling government regulations" were ruining their business. Someone in SF city government pointed out that all their competitors were making record profits and said Bird was run by spoiled rich kids with very bad business sense. Goodbye Bird. I lived in Austin when you rolled out your terrible service there and I won't miss you at all.
- pasttense01 3y agoWhich competitors in this business are making significant profits?
- KyleBerezin 3y agoSometimes, the candle that burns brightest is actually just a dumpster that is on fire.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoIt's wild to me how these things get these valuations. It's just a scooter and an app. There's demonstrably barely any technical moat here. The only possible way to stay afloat at that kind of value long term is if your scooters are somehow substantially better and your competitors can't ever catch up, you managed to freeze out everyone else though aggressive lobbying, or you manage to somehow be the only socially acceptable option to some group of fashion victims who care what colour paint their tech company uses. Plus you've weighed yourself down with thousands of just about the fastest-depreciating device you can physically make.
- slibhb 3y agoThe birds in my area are falling apart so I'm not shocked to hear the company is doing poorly. I'll be sad if renting scooters is no longer an option. If I was designing a city, I'd ban cars except for a few prominent roads and make rentable electric vehicles the norm. You'd gain a ton of real estate by not needing parking spaces/garages. Plus cars are a slow way to get around cities due to traffic and lights/stop signs every block.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoDid the founder and initial investors make money? This article says they didn't but usually that is the only real goal and rest is all a story sold to the next dummy. He does have properties in the 20 millions in Miami though. https://news.crunchbase.com/real-estate-property-tech/bird-founder-miami-mansion-travis-vanderzanden/ https://news.crunchbase.com/real-estate-property-tech/bird-f...
- kangaroozach 3y agoAny word on this? How much did they cash out before it hit the pavement?
- kangaroozach 3y agoThis was inevitability was obivous to me when I realized that A) It cost like $5-$10 to go just a short distance. B) Any regular commuter could just buy their own scooter for basically the cost of a bicycle. The economics just didn’t make sense.