
Bird Acquires Scoot - cdepman
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/12/bird-confirms-acquisition-of-scoot/
======
aresant
Handful 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...](https://medium.com/@mbkeating/what-we-learned-from-our-first-month-
of-operating-scoot-kicks-dcd9a677db15)

(2) [https://medium.com/@mbkeating/one-of-our-kicks-was-stolen-
la...](https://medium.com/@mbkeating/one-of-our-kicks-was-stolen-last-
weekend-8cfdf94979b6)

~~~
dcolkitt
> 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.

~~~
arcticbull
The Information reported they (Bird) were paying $551 with a goal of reducing
it to $360 per scooter. The unit economics are pretty atrocious, tbh. These
scooters aren't designed for continuous operation out in the wild, for the
average American girth, on anything other than a flat surface -- so they break
a lot.

The average lifespan is 32 days (median 28) -- and only goes 85 miles over 70
trips. Average is 1.63 miles per trip, 18 minutes long, and 3.49 rides per day
on average. That's why scooter rides are so expensive compared to JUMP, for
instance. [1] Some napkin math indicates they lose (at minimum) $267 per
scooter.

[1] [https://www.theinformation.com/articles/inside-birds-
scooter...](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/inside-birds-scooter-
economics)

~~~
knur
This was true back then, when Bird and most other companies were using m365
and esx scooters. The newer generation of scooters is way more durable, and
have better battery life. The reality now with scooters like the Bird Zero is
that churn is at least 10 months, which is more than enough to pay the vehicle
and operational cost 7.5x

Disclaimer: I work in this space.

~~~
liyanage
I'm curious, do you know what scooter model Skip uses in SF? I've also seen
Bird use it in San Jose and possibly elsewhere. It has a Segway label.

That model is fantastic. Very pleasant brake, and it is much more powerful
than the one Scoot uses. The Segway one gets me up some of the hills in SF,
whereas the Scoot one is woefully underpowered, a joke for a hilly city like
SF.

~~~
therein
They are decent scooters but I wish they had suspension + pneumatic tires. I
still find the retail M365 to be much more pleasant to ride.

I actually fell pretty hard from a Skip scooter going slightly downhill in SF
because their active breaking gave up on me while going downhill (maybe 20deg
angle, not even too steep) I could have dealt with that but even worse it
would keep turning itself on and off so the traction would keep changing,
because the power connection must have been loose (or battery too low -- this
was before they started warning you about a low battery on the app) or
something.

They did at least add that battery warning, though. That was an important
update.

~~~
mertd
Do you mean 2 degrees? 20 is very steep.

~~~
justinc8687
20 degrees seems about standard for San Francisco. That's only a 5% grade in
road parlance.

~~~
michaelt
20° is a 36.4% grade [1].

New Zealand's Baldwin Street [2] is the world's steepest residential street,
according to Guinness World Records, with a slope of 19°.

San Francisco's Filbert Street has a gradient of 17.5° [3] and that's that's
steep enough that it has _steps_.

Of course, a road can be "very steep" and "normal for SF" at the same time!
IMHO even if a road is very steep, if you're hiring scooters in a city the
brakes (and geometry) should be good enough that an average rider can safely
descend the city's steepest roads.

[1] [https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/slope-degrees-gradient-
gr...](https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/slope-degrees-gradient-grade-
d_1562.html) [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_Street](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_Street)
[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filbert_Street_(San_Francisco)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filbert_Street_\(San_Francisco\))

~~~
therein
The way that I was trying to eyeball it was "45° is is kind of like a
stairway", this was probably half as intense as that. :)

------
paxys
"Bird acquires San Francisco scooter permit"

~~~
baby
freaking 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.

~~~
notyourwork
> freaking victory if you ask me, San Francisco has been completely backward
> on this scooter permit.

Backwards in what sense? As a rider of the Muni I'm personally tired of
stepping over scooters near Folsom/Embarcadero and regularly almost getting
side swiped walking on the sidewalk. I think scooters are a viable mode of
transportation but my safety isn't something I'd like to risk due to Bird's
lack of willingness to work with the city and provide a safe deployment.

Also, I'm not sure exactly what you're point is. It seems you are conflating
homelessness, high cost of living with Bird's scooter transportation.

~~~
baby
Stop spreading FUD. There are no problems of badly parked scooters in SF.

My point was that the city council here is doing so many bad things it's not
even funny anymore

~~~
Sebguer
"No problems"? Seriously?

I live in a city much smaller than SF that just got beset by these stupid,
worthless electric scooters and people drop them literally everywhere. I can't
imagine SF is somehow /better/ about this.

~~~
baby
and you don't get upset by cars? You probably dream in a lovely walkable city
then!

~~~
fyfy18
My city has also recently got them. Parking isn't so much of an issue (there
aren't that many yet, and our sidewalks are quite big so there is a lot of
space) it's just how people drive them. Mainly I'm just concerned how long it
will be until someone is killed, and then the city will most likely outright
ban them even though they are a good idea.

Most cyclists ride on the pavement as it's not really safe to ride on the
road. They are lots of potholes and drivers aren't really aware how to share
the road with cyclists. Maybe scooters can help change this, but anyway.

At pedestrian crossings, cyclists are required to dismount and walk their bike
across. The majority of crossings don't explicitly stop traffic, but require
traffic to yield to pedestrians. There are a lot of junctions with traffic
lights where if you turn off the main route, as you turn you need to yield to
pedestrians. If a bike is coming at 15km/h towards the crossing, your chances
of seeing it are a lot less, hence the law. Scooter riders of course don't
follow that rule, and at night with their dim lights (which may be coming from
behind you, so in your blind spot) you aren't going to see them.

Once I was driving along a fast three lane road. The speed limit is 40km/h,
but most people do 50-60. There were two scooters coming the wrong direction
in one of the lanes - there was a perfectly useable sidewalk that they could
have used.

Another time I pulled off from a red light, going straight across a junction.
A scooter drove across the pedestrian crossing parallel in the same direction,
then at the end swerved right in front of me, switching from the pavement to
the road.

I think part of the issue is that you pay per minute. It causes people to rush
and act irrationally, rather than taking their time and being safer. I've seen
the same happen with car sharing schemes where you pay per minute.

~~~
piva00
My city got scooters some months ago, they were rolled out slowly but now we
got 5+ different companies on this space.

My impressions are generally the same, people simply can't act safely on
scooters. I commute by bike every day to work and just this week I've seen:

\- Two teens riding one scooter, going in and out of the bike lane in one of
the heaviest traffic avenues, they got out of the bike lane around a bus stop
and fell. Right in front of a bus that was stopping, the driver managed to
stop the bus less than 30cm away from the duo.

\- A tourist riding a scooter on the wrong way of the bike lane got out of the
sidewalk and into the bike lane crashing head first into the cyclist in front
of me. I had to stop and give assistance as the tourist guy hurt his wrist
quite badly and the cyclist hit his knee on the pavement.

\- A scooter ran through the red light on the bike lane by a pedestrian
crossing and hit a girl on the crossing, nothing major but, again, completely
unsafe.

This is JUST THIS WEEK, I've seen similar egregious behaviour of some riders
for at least the past 4-5 months... It needs to be fixed somehow, I wouldn't
like a ban but this can't keep going on this way.

Even more as this happened in another city here in Sweden just last month:
[https://sifted.eu/articles/voi-under-attack-from-swedish-
age...](https://sifted.eu/articles/voi-under-attack-from-swedish-agency-after-
scooter-death/)

~~~
stef25
New forms of transport surely need some getting used to. I remember reading a
story about the very first demonstration of a train in the UK. People got run
over cause they weren't used to things moving so fast.

When you first ride a motorbike you get very distracted by the way the
throttle and brakes work, and their position.

Probably same story with scooters. Or they're just idiots who don't understand
basic traffic rules.

Also, there's plenty of accidents happening with conventional bicycles. Tyres
get stuck in tram rails, car doors swinging open ... I once fell on an oil
slick on a round about in front of a bus. Not a reason to ban bicycles.

------
blkhp19
Maybe 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
Apparently money can’t buy engineers.

~~~
luckydata
I think the problem was not enough money for engineers, so they had to make a
bunch of compromises.

~~~
xenospn
How much does it cost to hire an engineer who can properly scale images?

~~~
broknbottle
it can't be too hard to find somebody on fiverr to do it for a cool $5.00

------
bruceb
They 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-
scoote...](https://www.sfexaminer.com/the-city/formerly-ousted-e-scooter-
company-bird-purchases-rival-scoot-and-acquires-sf-permit-in-the-process/)

Not sure how enforceable this is.

~~~
sulam
This 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
You 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.

------
minimaxir
The 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
As per the linked article they raised $47M

~~~
omarchowdhury
Then it's likely the founders and team walked away with nothing from the sale.

~~~
Ecco
Well, 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
Why would you want them to walk away with nothing?

~~~
likpok
Because 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.

------
smaili
Pro tip: if you want to get acquired by your competitor just have SF grant you
a permit they can't have :)

~~~
joewadcan
Funny, 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
> 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
Fair 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

------
Ramiro
$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

~~~
kibibyte
Permit transferred already, but with some strings attached
[https://mobile.twitter.com/fitzthereporter/status/1138904732...](https://mobile.twitter.com/fitzthereporter/status/1138904732561371136)

------
eridius
Please 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.

~~~
mjn
It'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
To 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.

------
ibash
What are the different ways this could play out for scoot's service?

~~~
nikodunk
I'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.

------
asdfman123
Can 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)

------
escoz
I guess this explains the Bird scooters parked around SF downtown over the
last few days.. :)

~~~
knur
Not really. That's just Bird Rentals, which is a different strategy Bird was
trying in SF to penetrate that market

~~~
escoz
Thanks, I had no idea of this.

------
haldean
I 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
> 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.

~~~
yellowapple
I'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
I don't think it's "supposedly", they're all GenZe-branded.

~~~
yellowapple
Yeah, "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.

------
freewilly1040
I 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
Scoot doesn't operate bikes. They operate electric mopeds and kick scooters.
Lyft is suing over bikeshare. AFAICT Scoot is not related to the lawsuit.

------
DeonPenny
Thank 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.

------
throw03172019
Fire sale? $47M injected into Scoot.

------
gyrgtyn
they have the scoots

------
s1mon
Well, now SF will no longer be infested with so many scooters with branding
saying _coot_ or _cool_ after "modification".

~~~
lucasmullens
Instead we'll get Turd scooters (apparently someone's doing this all over LA):
[https://www.reddit.com/r/birdcharger/comments/9hs068/has_any...](https://www.reddit.com/r/birdcharger/comments/9hs068/has_anyone_seen_these_new_turd_scooters_around/)

