
Bird CEO on scooter startup copycats, unit economics, safety and seasonality - orarbel1
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/03/bird-ceo-on-scooter-startup-copycats-unit-economics-safety-and-seasonality/
======
idoco
<Shameless-plug>

My analysis of Bird's unit economics in Tel Aviv:

[https://twitter.com/ido_co/status/1080883756184023041](https://twitter.com/ido_co/status/1080883756184023041)

</Shameless-plug>

~~~
wink
> A Bird costs ₪5 to unlock and ₪0.5 per minute of use ($1.34 and $0.13).

Wow, I find that pretty expensive.

I don't have scooter numbers for comparison and no idea aboul general cost of
living in TLV, but in Munich I pay

\- 1 EUR for 30min of rental bike ( negligible yearly cost of 3 EUR/year)

\- 2.80 EUR for public transport (1.40 for short trips)

So yeah, the scooter is electric, but are people really using them for >
10minute rides?

Apparently they do.

> The average ride duration was 15.5 minutes.

~~~
tapland
In Sweden there is Lime competing with the Swedish VOI.

They both charge 10 sek (USD 1.1) to unlock, where VOI charges 0.165 and Lime
charges 0.330 per minute.

Bus stops are everywhere and a single ticket costs $2.75 where a 24 hour
ticket in the same city zone costs $5.50 (so you always get this if
returning), in addition to 25% off any rider in addition to the first on the
ticket.

Riding to work (5 min) and back from the grocery store to home (another 5)
costs me $5.5 on a Lime, the same as the bus which allows me to ride anywhere
for 24 hours, and $3.86 on a VOI.

For any distances longer than that I'd rather take the bus, since it's warm,
comfortable and a notably safer ride.

~~~
CaptainZapp
In Switzerland Lime had to recall their scooters (at least in Basel and
Zurich)

This was due to the unfortunate fact that the breaks suddenly engaged in mid
ride with partially grave consequences.

It's a bit of a bummer when your scooter schreeches to a grinding halt, when
going 25 KM/H.

The potentially bad thing is that your insurer may balk on your claim.

------
jjeaff
So what is the VC angle with these super high valuation scooter startups? It
doesn't seem very defensible. The barrier to entry isn't very high. And it
doesn't seem that customer loyalty would be much of a factor.

The most obvious strategy I see is that the VCs think they can pump these
companies then dump them on the open markets and cash out before thousands of
global, regional, and local competitors flood in and make their non defensible
positions obvious.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
Electric scooters are a fruiting body of the electric car industry (brushless
hub motors, batteries etc wouldn't have gotten so developed just for scooters)

Maybe the scooter rentals are propping up another of the vc's concerns?

~~~
taneq
All of it came out of mobile phones and r/c hobby gear IMO.

------
W-Stool
Here in Reno we have Lime bikes (the scooters were withdrawn after being
deployed without city permission) and they are almost like litter - they are
laying around all over the city but I almost never see anyone riding one. I'm
all for bikes and bicycling but the fact that they have no designated docking
stations means people leave them everywhere and to this old fart it is
borderline blight.

~~~
baby
oh so the space cars take to park and to ride is not an inconvenience? You're
funny.

~~~
stevehawk
his point, using your analogy, is that cars have a designated parking space,
but these dockless vehicles do not.

~~~
IshKebab
Most cars are just parked on the side of the road. At least in the UK. Not
really "designated parking spaces". Sure now they accept it and draw white
lines sometimes, but I bet it wasn't like that when cars were first
introduced.

------
paulsutter
Bad title - article does not cover unit economics at all (it's barely
mentioned)

> The pair hit on a number of topics, including the unit economics, safety and
> seasonality of the scooter business

~~~
m4x
It is discussed in paragraphs 4-7. No real figures are given, but you wouldn't
expect them to be in an informal interview.

~~~
paulsutter
Here's the meatiest statement. Not very useful.

> What we see on the unit economics of those, it’s like night and day

------
IshKebab
> “The deeper I get into transportation, the more I realize we don’t need
> autonomous vehicles, we don’t need tunnels, all we need are more bike
> lanes,” he said.

Well said.

------
nradov
Can we please get parked scooters off the sidewalk where they present a safety
hazard to visually and mobility impaired people?

~~~
shard972
Sometimes with progress, you gotta break a few legs.

~~~
bcOpus
_Sometimes with progress, you gotta break a few legs._

Where “progress” is synonymous with “profit” and the things being broken
aren’t yours. Having said that if you’re volunteering, I know a guy with a
hammer.

~~~
shard972
I'm just making an observation of the facts, not positing a moral good or bad
to progress.

~~~
thecatspaw
Its not a true oberservation of facts though. Progress is achievable without
any breaking of legs

~~~
shard972
Name one technology disruption that caused no pain for anyone?

With user taxi drivers lost their monopolies, the car put horse and buggies
out of business, amazon put many retailers out of business etc. etc.

I can't think of one advancement that had 0 negative effects on anybody. I
don't even know why someone would argue otherwise, i thought this was a pretty
common position in somewhere like HN.

Sure you can say that the overall benefits were easily worth it, but its
irrelevant to my point that there is always eggs broken along the way.

------
baby
Meanwhile in San Francisco we are stuck with two unknown companies, a very low
amount of scooters, no scooters in the evening (after 9pm I think?), and you
can't ride one if you don't have a driver license.

For a tech-pole, it is quite a backward city.

~~~
malandrew
You need a driver's license? Why?

~~~
keerthiko
From the article:

> On safety: In the year or so that scooters hit the mainstream in the U.S.,
> there were casualties. Moreover, many — kids included — realized just how
> easy it is to get away with scootering sans helmet, while others rode
> throughout the night. Bird, to keep children off scooters, at least,
> requires customers to provide a driver’s license when they sign up. Given
> the number of issues that have arisen as scooters become increasingly
> popular, improved safety measures are bound to be in the news in the year
> ahead.

Apparently it's for a reason colinear to needing licenses to drive cars, ie,
to limit irresponsible scooterers and minors who tend to disregard rules and
be the most brash riders.

It just so happens it's also conveniently a great way to keep poor people and
homeless people from making use of this even if they had the money for a ride,
but then again maybe that's for their own good.

~~~
baby
It happens to also penalize people who are of age but do not have a driver's
license, like me. Why would I need to learn how to ride a car to drive these?
No way.

------
keerthiko
I still think Bird's success is merely symptomatic of American shortsighted
solutions to systemic US urban planning issues. I doubt this will reach the
same level of popularity in cities/countries with great public transit, highly
walkable streets, and good existing last mile solutions (bikeshares,
bikelanes, high bus coverage), but I'm happy to eat my words if I'm just not
seeing it and folks from Amsterdam, Seoul, Tokyo, NYC or Berlin would like to
chime in and prove me wrong.

The biggest challenge I see of existing well-executed public transit/cities is
last mile coverage for handicapped/disabled folks and sufficient
infrastructure for them in stations without having to resort to uber/lyft for
<1mile transit. If Bird/scooter industry expanded into solving these problems
I would greatly celebrate. I get frustrated seeing Bird celebrated as the next
coming of the steam engine, when it barely moves the needle for regular
transit, without remotely addressing the biggest long-standing issues of the
space.

~~~
ggm
I (also?) think these disruptive transport plays are a bit grubby, and
probably predating public transport shared costs and the commons. Here in
brisbane, they basically became scofflaw over "riding without helmet" and
"riding on pavement" to force the issue. Why the state authorities caved
instead of taking them to the cleaners is beyond me.

We've already started to have drunks on scooters, elderly people feeling
exposed to random vehicle hits, no-helmet fine issues, public nuisance,
juicers hiding scooters to game the demand pricing/charging..

What we _needed_ was integrated public transport on a non-profit basis. Lower
cost fares, better integration. We got half of it. A really good high
circumference e-ticket integrated fare scheme, but not cheap and with some
serious computer-systems weaknesses. The transport planners are obsessed with
reducing public cost, not with increasing public utility.

~~~
MauranKilom
It might just be me, but I'm having a hard time following your post due to
these terms:

> scofflaw

> taking to the cleaners

> juicers

I normally would just go look it up, but this is a high density of
jargon/colloquialisms. Or maybe it's not and I just never heard them, but I'm
just offering my data point here.

~~~
robkop
Juicers is a lime only term afaik (it referd to someone who charges lime
scooters) and the rest are reasonably common Australian expressions (maybe
scofflaw is a little less common).

~~~
masonic
In U.S. vernacular, "juicer" generally connotes someone using performance
enhancing drugs.

------
dawhizkid
Any cities with outdoor moving sidewalks? I seem to only see those in airports
but a giant moving sidewalk would be awesome

~~~
dpeck
Las Vegas has some, but they seem to breakdown with any rain (like a lot of
things in Las Vegas). It seems like the currently deployed tech would only
work in a few locales.

------
donkeyd
Bird is trying to land (pun intended) in Amsterdam, but from what I've heard
they're already losing so many employee scooters in the canals that it's
becoming a problem. I already predicted this would happen when I first read
about Bird online... I hate that Im right about how shitty people are.

------
Tiktaalik
Scooters are only truly safe in a separated bike/scooter lane, so given that
cities have to invest in that infrastructure, they should ban Bird and others
and only allow their own bike/scooter systems that are integrated into their
own public transportation networks.

~~~
elcomet
Cars are only safe in a separated car lane, so why not ban cars, remove the
car lanes and transform them into bike / scooter lanes ?

~~~
ardy42
> Cars are only safe in a separated car lane, so why not ban cars, remove the
> car lanes and transform them into bike / scooter lanes ?

Because streets were designed as car lanes, and bikes/scooters are niche
transportation technologies [1] when compared to cars?

[1] Bikes and scooters are really only useful for short-distance individual
transport. They do not handle long distances, groups, and cargo very well.

~~~
megy
Except they were not.

Cars are just too dangerous to have anywhere near people. They should be
banned from cities and suburbs. 40,000 people die every year in the US because
of cars. Dumbest idea ever.

~~~
ardy42
> Except they were not.

99% of the streets for miles and miles around me were built after the
invention of the car for near-dedicated use by automobiles, and those that
were not were converted to that design.

> Cars are just too dangerous to have anywhere near people. They should be
> banned from cities and suburbs.

You say that, but I'd like to see you move your family to new house without
using an automobile to move your stuff.

~~~
max76
A single digit percentage of suburb and city traffic in the United States are
for activities that genuinely benefit from cars. Use a commercial vehicle to
move your stuff, but for day to day travel many people use trains, bikes, or
legs to move their families from location to location. We should be investing
our transportation budget into more efficient methods than residential vehicle
usage for daily commuting.

~~~
ardy42
> A single digit percentage of suburb and city traffic in the United States
> are for activities that genuinely benefit from cars.

Citation needed. Your use of "genuinely" indicates to me that there's a large
subjective component to that statistic. I'd believe that it's physically
possible to replace 99% of "suburb and city traffic" with "trains, bikes, or
legs." However, I'm not at all convinced that 99% does not "genuinely benefit"
from cars. My guess is that such replacement probably requires a strong
ideological commitment to car-disuse [1] in order to persevere in the face of
real drawbacks.

[1] I know several people with such ideological commitments.

