Bird, once valued at $2.5B, just filed for bankruptcy(businessinsider.com) |
Bird, once valued at $2.5B, just filed for bankruptcy(businessinsider.com) |
Uh, they started lending operations in 2011. How long is that pre-profit growth mode expected to last? Another decade?
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BRDS/bird-global/n...
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1861449/000186144922...
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?
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...
Personally I love electric scooters and use them frequently; they are a great amplifier for walking & transit.
Plus you've weighed yourself down with thousands of just about the fastest-depreciating device you can physically make.
https://news.crunchbase.com/real-estate-property-tech/bird-f...
Scooter startup Bird is seeking a $2B valuation - 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 - March 2018 (146 comments)
1: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/19/bird-acquires-spin-scooter...
2: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-4bs-inside-sp...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Because storing them and dealing with them is a massive pain. I use these scooters way more than I use my bike, and it's not because I don't want to pedal.
When I go out on a scooter I like the flexibility of leaving it at the first place I go. This prevents me from needing to leave my bike parked overnight if I decide to go somewhere else that isn't bike friendly. Not to mention that stealing scooters is really easy and bringing them inside most places isn't really an option.
Doing that with your own one has downsides as you have to carry it along all the time.
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).
- You know when you pick it up that it's going to function well, because you maintain it
- You know it isn't going to have sticky handlebars because the last person to use it was eating a candy bar
- You know it'll be charged, assuming you keep your devices charged
VCs do however get a fee for assets under management, so they win even if their investors lose.