
Bird is the fastest startup ever to reach a $1B valuation - sverige
https://qz.com/1305719/electric-scooter-company-bird-is-the-fastest-startup-ever-to-become-a-unicorn/
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Terr_
Okay, but due to inflation they won't be the last, because $1B is a goalpost
that keeps getting easier to hit as time goes on.

Tune in later for "Stock market breaks record -- again!" or "World population
breaks record -- again!".

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drb91
Adjusted for inflation, how does this compare to past startups? It’s easy to
discard the result, but it seems silly when you could actually evaluate
whether this is a meaningful milestone or not.

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tvladeck
Well, without knowing the liquidation preferences it’s impossible to tell what
the common stock is actually valued at.

Better to think of it as the price of a call option on equity at an (unknown
to us) strike price (the liquidation pref). And then when you pretend that’s
the price of common stock and extrapolate out you get a $B, or two.

~~~
lquist
That’s fair but if I may use some heuristics here if they are able to get
investors like Sequoia and Accel the round is almost definitely competitive
enough that they can dictate terms and get clean term sheets

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dpiers
Jet.com hit it faster. As did APUS Group and Rong360.

Article is based on a false premise.

~~~
tristanj
Completely right on the false premise. The author forgot about the ICO craze.
Multiple crypto startups reached billion dollar valuations in just weeks
though ICOs.

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scruffyherder
I've never heard of bird, is it like the dozens of 'me too' companies that
litter the streets with their shitty bikes in China?

The only way I can see money is to round these bikes up, crush them and melt
them for the Aluminum.

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microdrum
Pretty much. More likely that Bird turns out to be an ingenious conspiracy of
the PRC to sell more Xiaomi devices than an actual business.

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jpeg_hero
Seems like an anti-signal: not great comparisons: Desktop Metal, Essential
Products, letgo.

Not exactly setting the world on fire.

~~~
daveguy
I was going to say something similar. I would like to see time to unicorn vs
time duration of company.

Not just because of the example companies that didn't do well. I expect a
rapid valuation like this is almost guaranteed to be too fast for management
to handle or too fast for the investors to actually know whether it is that
valuable.

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sudhirj
Is that a big deal? If I raise a million dollars to buy a million dollars
worth of gold, then my company is worth a million, but it doesn’t feel like
I’ve done anything much.

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repsilat
Bird's book value is nowhere near a billion dollars, though. And putting a
billion dollars together (to whatever approximation startup valuations can be
considered "value") is pretty impressive no matter how you do it -- pile of
gold or otherwise.

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adamnemecek
It’s crazy that a startup bound by logistics is growing this fast.

~~~
drewmate
I don't see how a scooter rental like this can be anything but a race to the
bottom. I have used competitors' services (though never Bird) and they work
just fine. There's no network effect with a fleet of drivers like Uber/Lyft.
I'll happily use the app of whichever scooter is cheap and right in front of
me.

~~~
beamatronic
What if you don’t already have their app. Then there is friction. I am about
20 feet away from a Bird scooter but under the present circumstances I’m not
interested in creating an account, etc.

~~~
z6
Well, if (when?) uber/lyft enter the market, you probably already have their
apps, so this is a non-issue.

For others, I think if you have competent product people, you'd limit
registration to a phone number and offer apple/android pay. With iOS 12, for
example, it would be so seamless since it can auto-fill confirmation codes. So
all you'd have to do is put in your phone number and you're logged into a new
account.

~~~
ericpauley
Better yet just make the scooters tap to pay on device.

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pessimizer
Will they be able to flip it before the hype dies out?

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theDoug
This is absolutely not true. I buy a billionth or trillionth of various
friends' bad ideas for a dollar time and again, producing equal or higher
valuations instantly. I've been doing this for more than a decade.

~~~
wtvanhest
I bet you dont even get liquidation preferences or prefered dividends! Got to
get those terms locked in and you could value it for trillions.

Who cares if you get a minimum of 2x on your investment? Just keep calling
what you are buying from your friends 'equity' and let them have their big
valuations!

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joejerryronnie
Man, it's really interesting to see the tech hype cycle again and again and
again. The amazing thing to me is that real companies actually do emerge from
this, and usually not the ones everybody is fired up about initially.

It's easy to be cynical (I'm certainly guilty) but this attitude, hubris, and
unfettered optimism is what it takes to consistently create disruptive
companies.

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masonic
I suspect that people will develop a cookbook method for taking a given
scooter, quickly stripping away the tracking and locking elements, and just
using or reselling as a generic scooter.

There will be instructional videos on YouTube -- something like phone rooting
how-to videos... or how :CueCat scanners were repurposed to generic scanners.

Craigslist is a ready marketplace for stolen property anyway.

~~~
rorykoehler
Why would anyone want to buy a scooter from craigslist when you can just walk
outside and use the one on the street?

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DanBC
You steal them form where they are and sell them where they aren't.

See bike share schemes for an example of this happening already.

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rorykoehler
Negligible impact though. Most people don't have the appetite to engage in
criminal activity, even once removed criminal activity. Also this is built
into the pricing so we all end up paying for it.

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lafar6502
and why some crappy scooters? for 1 billion we should be riding unicorns

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pedalpete
What are people's thoughts on how Bird can maintain marketshare compared to
something like Uber/Lyft.

Like bike sharing, scooter sharing isn't a marketplace (right?), the only
thing stopping competitors is the purchase of scooters, and building an app.

Does Bird have a highly defensible position I'm not understanding?

~~~
bmelton
I honestly don't know what they might have other than early mover advantage,
but in this case, that could be huge.

I was in a DC suburb last week looking for parking, and found two parking lots
across the street from each other. They were both 'smart' parking lots, in
that I could pay to park with an app. One of the lots was ParkMobile, which
I've used before, and the other was another vendor (I don't remember which)
that I hadn't. The latter was the far more convenient spot, but I was in a
hurry, and I've used Parkmobile in the past, so I already have a login,
payment details saved, etc.

The thought of taking the time to download a new app, go through the
registration process, pull out a credit card, type it in, save it, and
potentially put my data out there for more risk? It seemed like a lot to do
relative to circling the block again, even in traffic.

~~~
tehlike
Sounds like something that could be solved with integrations into apple pay
etc.

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recharged93
Great, a scooter in the rain, cold, wearing a suit/dress, and avoiding traffic
and people. Carrying nothing...With crappy tires.

Yep, a unicorn business...

~~~
wmurmann
It's not for every climate, sure. However, I ride one to work once a week and
it always brings a smile to my face. You can't go 5 minutes in LA without
seeing someone on one.

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jacknews
Isn't a common valuation formula "2x revenue", so 1B valuation implies about
500m revenue? I don't see many on that list qualifying.

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alasdair_
>Isn't a common valuation formula "2x revenue"

No.

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jacknews
[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/ev-revenue-
multiple.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/ev-revenue-multiple.asp)

EV/R is typically 2.x I think. Of course it's a very faulty metric, but as a
ballpark figure I think it's useful as a 'bubble' indicator.

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lafar6502
yeah, why not 1 trillion

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mar77i
SCNR [https://i.imgur.com/Y6UTfwG.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Y6UTfwG.jpg)

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tristanj
This article is wrong, Binance reached a billion dollar valuation in less than
6 months. And they’re profitable.

~~~
TylerE
ICO scam with made up volume..

[https://news.bitcoin.com/study-finds-3b-worth-of-faked-
crypt...](https://news.bitcoin.com/study-finds-3b-worth-of-faked-
cryptocurrency-volumes-and-wash-trades/)

~~~
tristanj
Please do some research before you post. Where is your evidence that Binance
is an "ICO Scam"? Binance is clearly past the ICO stage and has grown into an
actual company.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-28/crypto-s-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-28/crypto-
s-billionaire-trading-king-has-suddenly-run-into-problems)

Binance is one of the most credible cryptocurrency exchanges out there. They
are the #1 exchange by traded value. As I stated before, they are profitable,
and based on the value of BNB they achieved a $1B valuation in less than 6
months. The article you posted doesn't disprove _any_ of these points. The
article barely addresses Binance in the first place. In fact, it actually
supports them as Binance makes profit off wash trades.

Furthermore, as others have pointed out, the article is fundamentally wrong as
in fact other companies have reached a $1B faster than Bird has.

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anonytrary
Cryptocurrencies, albeit experimental, have given us an blazingly fast way to
value things. At least a few ideas out there have reached multi-million[0]
dollar valuations in a matter of months or less by representing their projects
with a coin/token.

[0] I'm sure there are disagreements on how legitimate this is (e.g.
manipulated or inflated valuation). If we're talking about "how fast you can
inflate your valuation", cryptocurrencies are necessarily part of that
conversation, and so far, they are much more direct ways of achieving just
that.

~~~
joejerryronnie
ICO's have reached multi-million dollar valuations in a matter of minutes.
Caveat emptor.

~~~
anonytrary
> multi-million dollar valuations in a matter of minutes

"matter of months or less" covers this.

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joejerryronnie
Technically, yes that statement does cover all smaller increments than
"months". But, practically speaking, I think of several days as the lower
boundary of that statement rather than minutes.

