
Scooter startup Bird is seeking a $2B valuation - ilamont
https://www.axios.com/scooter-startup-bird-is-seeking-a-2-billion-valuation-1528813078-11187061-2a49-440c-a2e6-65e74faad5ec.html
======
lpolovets
As an investor who has looked at this space a little bit + talked to other
investors who have backed some of these companies, it seems like:

\- the economics of scooters are great (very quick payback periods for the
scooters). At a few bucks per ride and maybe a dozen rides per day, it doesn't
take that long to pay off a $300 or $500 scooter.

\- most people that try scooters seem to really enjoy riding them.

\- an individual scooter doesn't last super long and needs to be serviced a
lot and then replaced.

As an investor, the main thing I'm stuck on is what the moats could be in this
business. Brand is a potential moat, but the two biggest companies in this
space already have good brands so that's not helpful for me as a seed
investor. And I'm not sure if brand would be enough for people to walk an
extra block or two if there are closer scooters nearby.

People talk about network effects, but I am skeptical. First those network
effects are local. Second, it doesn't take _that_ much money to blanket a city
with scooters and break the network effect. My napkin math for SF is that it
would cost <$1.5m to put a scooter on every other block
([https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/992503477149450240](https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/992503477149450240)).
If that's accurate, then it's not going to be a big barrier against any well-
funded company.

Maybe one moat could be scooter durability. If your scooters are 2x more
rugged, then your margins and economics are a lot better, and you can use the
additional profits to outspend your competitors on customer acquisition. We'll
probably find out what moats do (or don't) exist here over the next few years.

~~~
dnomad
The dockless approach doesn't work. People rightfully hate the race-to-the-
bottom that leads to bikes/scooters being dumped everywhere. Once you accept
the dockless approach doesn't work there's three interesting possibilities:

1) The city picks a winner. This could be done fairly by auctioning off a five
year contract or it could be done via corruption. Either way the scooter
companies should be taking the millions they've raised and greasing officials.

2) Establish a market for docks. There's an interesting opportunity here in
that scooter "stations" don't need to be the sort of big official stations
that have beeen deployed for bikes where each station holds 30+ bikes. You
could imagine a lot of small business, stores, etc. offering to host small
stations that hold 4-5 scooters on their own private property. The scooter
companies would then either race to lease as many of these stations as
possible or would be forced to pay each time a scooter of theirs gets docked
at the station. The winner is the company that owns the most stations. That's
a real moat and the stations become real assets.

3) The simplest solution is probably to just to give people scooters. Let
people "lease" a scooter and trade in these "leased" scooters at any time
24/7\. Trade ins need not be a big centralized, complicated thing; you could
imagine something like a scooter delivery service. In <20 minutes an Uber
shows up and drops off a new scooter and collects an old one. Don't charge
people if the scooter is stolen or breaks but do charge people if their
scooter is left on the sidewalk and gets seized by the city. Then it would be
up to individuals to make sure their scooter doesn't get left on public
property. Scooters are so small -- and only getting smaller and more portable
-- that you could imagine that most people won't mind stashing them under
their desk/in their office.

All three of these possibilities btw lead to a single winner. At the end of
the day, like with most transportation plays, you're looking at powerful
economies of scale where the big guys only get bigger. It's a market to invest
in if you think you can pick the winner cuz that winner probably will take
all.

~~~
woolvalley
I don't think the docked approach works well either, because the heavyweight
docks are never close enough to where you want them to be.

It's really just a parking problem. We don't want another cable company /
taxis v2 and 'pick' a winner with horrible service. You mandate that these
things need to be locked to something and most of the problem resolves itself.

Businesses that want it to be easier to shop where they are will install bike
racks. The city will fund new bike racks with scooter permits. You could even
allow scooter companies to install and pay for new bike racks themselves as
they probably understand demand dynamics far better than random cities. If the
scooter companies install the racks, you just have to say they can be used by
everyone and are owned by the city.

We don't need heavy duty docking systems that are exclusionary to one docking
company. A simple cheap metal bike rack that everyone can use will be plenty
enough and more economically efficient.

You can also detect if the renter rider puts the scooter in the right area or
if someone is screwing with the scooters after the fact with accelerometers.
You could even detect if they are in a tipped over state or not.

~~~
DrScump

      You can also detect if... someone is screwing with the scooters after the fact with accelerometers
    

How does that help you? You can't _do_ anything about it.

~~~
woolvalley
It's how you attribute parking tickets. If you can tell the renter did the
action, then you can pass the ticket to them, which incentives them to keep it
upright. It also lets you put them back up with workers:

[https://www.limebike.com/blog/new-tech-helping-lime-keep-
bik...](https://www.limebike.com/blog/new-tech-helping-lime-keep-bikes-
electric-scooters-upright)

Also by locking the devices the likelihood of them falling or being in the way
is low.

~~~
DrScump

      If you can tell the renter did the action
    

But you can't, without onboard video, anyway. Anybody wanting to steal or
vandalize a scooter won't do so on one for which they are (or just were) an
active renter.

    
    
      by locking the devices the likelihood of them falling or being in the way is low
    

I don't get that at all. All locking does is prevents unpaid usage as a
scooter; it doesn't prevent theft, vandalism, or bad acts with it (e.g. piling
a bunch of them in the CEO's driveway as a protest).

~~~
woolvalley
But why as a renter would you want to only vandalize / steal the scooter that
you just used, vs just stealing / vandalizing the hundreds of other scooters
out there? It lets the companies collect statistics on who is more likely the
doing the bad behavior, careless customers or random assholes?

The biggest complaint with these scooters is they are in the middle of the
right of the public right of way and laying down on the street in an
inefficient manner.

If they are locked to something, they would be outside of the right of way
since lock points tend to be on the edges of sidewalks. If you put the lock on
the correct point on the scooter, it will be fairly difficult to knock them
over, vs the light tap you need today.

Locking also reduces the instances of impulsive bad acts, since now you need
some sort of specialized power machinery to remove the items. And barriers to
impulsiveness is a big factor in reducing crime. Did you know for example
crime tends to happen more at the bottom of a hill vs the top of a hill?
Because people don't want to walk up hills because it's extra effort.

On top of that, nobody has been complaining about personal bike ownership,
which today follows a model of being locked to things.

JUMP bikes in SF for example follows this model, has been around before the
scooter boom. I haven't heard a single complaint about them other than
positive complaints such as 'why aren't there more?', and 'why are they
restricted to an area?' The scooters on the other hand have had a bunch of
negative complaints.

------
alasdair_
In the spirit of dumping potentially dangerous clutter on the streets and
leaving it up to the cities to pay for the cleanup, I'm now taking seed money
for my "handgun as a service" business.

I'm going to blanket key areas with handguns that you can unlock with an GPS-
enabled app. Once you're done using them ($1 per minute and $20 per-bullet,
with "surge" pricing in active-shooter situations), just leave them anywhere
in the city for the next user/child to stumble across.

Anyone want to fund me?

~~~
jlebar
> In the spirit of dumping potentially dangerous clutter on the streets and
> leaving it up to the cities to pay for the cleanup ...

In the same spirit, I was thinking of starting a car rental service. :)

~~~
alasdair_
>In the same spirit, I was thinking of starting a car rental service. :)

Good! Car rental services pay taxes for each vehicle they sell and an
(implied) per-mile tax from gas taxes. They are also banned from sidewalks.

~~~
mikeash
Bikes and scooters are banned from sidewalks in a lot of places too, but it
doesn't seem to take.

------
arosier
After 160 hours spent operating as a "charger" in SF, for both Bird and Lime,
this space is interesting. Here's my "back of the napkin math":

$300 - vehicle cost (based on alibaba Xiaomi m365 estimates)

$8 - average fare (unknown)

3 - rides per day (based on 90k rides in the first 30 days)

$12 - daily cost of charging per vehicle

1% - daily fleet loss (might be closer to 2%)

1% - daily maintenance required (might be closer to 2%)

After 100 days: 0 vehicles remaining

Current return on capital: -8%

Dynamic areas of the unit economics:

\- Increase number of fares per vehicle (increased battery life)

\- Increased average fare (increase pricing)

\- Decrease vehicle charging cost (current rate could be cut by about 65% to
maintain competitive hourly compensation for type of work)

\- Decrease loss rate by implementing some sort of lock- tethering system

~~~
maxk42
I don't know about the accuracy of your numbers, but the fleet loss at least
is wrong.

1% daily fleet loss would leave 36 - 37 vehicles remaining after 100 days.

~~~
taytus
Day 1->99% Day 2->98% Day 3->97% Day 100->0%

~~~
olasaustralia
That's not how it works. (1-1%)^100=37%

------
dylanz
Lime just dumped 140 scooters in Santa Barbara and they immediately got
impounded. The city is going to charge them a $100 fine for each scooter. I'm
assuming that's a drop in the bucket compared to their revenue and the cost of
working out adoption specifics with local government.

~~~
sschueller
Could have avoided that by just asking for permission first.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Sometimes it’s easier to ask for forgiveness.

------
philip1209
Let's see if Softbank chooses a winner in the scooter market - I wouldn't be
surprised if they came in with a ~$500M investment in Bird or one of its
competitors.

~~~
gordon_freeman
or both.

~~~
philip1209
I'm no expert, but - from what I've read - Softbank comes in and offers the
dominant player a huge amount of money for a bigger chunk of equity than you
were expecting to give up. It scares away all of the other investors, who
withdraw their offers and leave Softbank as the only offer. If you turn down
Softbank, they go to your biggest competitor and make basically the same
offer. That amount of cash doesn't guarantee a winner, but it gives one
company room for a lot more mistakes, and no other VC will back other players
with the same amount of cash.

So, back to your comment - "or both" \- my interpretation is that Softbank
wants to create an uneven playing field. Whereas, at the seed level, it's ok
to spray and pray because expected returns are so much greater.

------
anamoulous
Dean Kamen must be sitting out on his private island asking himself "WTF???".

~~~
RandallBrown
Wow, the Segway Minilite is only $300. [https://www.amazon.com/Segway-
miniLITE-Balancing-Transporter...](https://www.amazon.com/Segway-miniLITE-
Balancing-Transporter-
Integrated/dp/B074CYX5PT/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1513714136&sr=8-3&keywords=segway+miniLITE)

Fill the sidewalks with these and you could have your own startup!

~~~
TomK32
doh, i'm over the max payload.

~~~
komali2
220lbs is a surprisingly low payload... Depending on height it's not at all
difficult for even a healthy person to be that weight, let alone someone that
lifts or is a bit chubby.

I wonder what kind of wiggle room there is?

~~~
usaphp
Hmm, I don’t know a lot of healthy people who weight over 220 lbs.

~~~
xyzzy_plugh
I have plenty of athletic friends who are at least 6 feet tall and weigh more
than 220.

~~~
walshemj
As one person I worked with in the health area BMI isn't that helpful when it
comes to large guys 6 2 and up who do sports - the example they gave was the
props in a premiership rugby team.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Yeah, BMI is not always relevant if you ignore the body fat percentage.

~~~
noir_lord
I'm 6ft, Have a 32" waist and a BMI of 26.5 (making me 'overweight').

BMI is terrible except as a very quick "You really shouldn't be 35 on the BMI
scale" sanity check.

------
bjourne
I don't get it. If scooters are so great, then why doesn't everyone just buy
their own? Seem much simpler than checking them in and out of special built
bike racks.

~~~
j9d
This is really bad logic. This is the same thing as saying, "If cars are
really that great, then why doesn't everyone buy their own? Seems much simpler
than using Lyft"

~~~
visarga
Almost everyone does, though.

~~~
alasdair_
>Almost everyone does, though.

Not in London (or, indeed, much of the UK). Not in Manhattan. Not any city
where parking can take 20 minutes to find and costs $30+ a day.

------
iseff
There's almost no clearer indication that the speed of business is quickening
at an amazing pace. In the scooter world, the land grab is on, and everyone is
looking at ride sharing as the obvious analog, which means raise a lot of
money, expand to new cities, and earn market share... quickly.

Whether a couple (or all) of these companies flame out remains to be seen, and
is probably likely. But there's also likely to be a winner in this category.
And the winner is likely to be worth a lot of money. These companies likely
don't "deserve" their valuations based on current metrics like revenue, but
the market potential is huge, the growth is high, and the capital requirements
are large... so investors seem more than willing to make bets.

~~~
alex_young
This sounds exactly like the ridesharing model. Drown the market in money,
kill off your competitors by undercutting on price, then jack up prices to
make a business.

The problem, like ridesharing, is once you start raising prices, you just lost
all of your customers to a new competitor that hasn't spent all of their
money.

I don't see how this model can possibly work. The barrier to switching is
almost 0 to the user - you can already see that by looking at the Uber & Lyft
tags on every car you get in. Installing another app isn't as hard as swapping
insurance providers or mobile platforms.

~~~
nugget
>then jack up prices to make a business

Of course this hasn't happened in the rideshare market yet - it's cheaper than
ever before. I've found Uber Express prices to be almost unbelievably cheap
recently.

Seems like there's at least some non-zero chance that these prices remain low
until autonomous vehicles make them permanent and sustainable.

~~~
ebikelaw
UberX prices have done nothing but increase in San Francisco for years. The
minimum fare went from $5 to $7, the service fee from $1.35 to $2.20, etc.

~~~
jonknee
> UberX prices have done nothing but increase in San Francisco for years

So, like everything else in SF then.

~~~
komali2
....yes

Also in the world...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation)

------
colept
Loved BIRD when they first started here in San Jose but now they're painfully
slow (~12mph) while Lime has managed to keep top speed around 20mph.

BIRD has an edge in terms of availability but I find myself taking one to find
a Lime.

~~~
kylec
I played around with the scooters in San Jose during WWDC last week, and I
have to say that I preferred the Bird ones. While the Lime ones did have a
faster top speed, they were also slower to accelerate. When driving on the
sidewalks there's a lot of slowing down, so getting back up to speed quickly
is more important in my opinion. Plus ~12mph is fast enough IMO, it feels
dangerous to go much faster than that.

~~~
jessaustin
Why are you driving on the sidewalks? Please stop doing that!

~~~
kylec
With a top speed of ~12mph, the scooters are way too slow for the road. It's
much safer on the sidewalks. The sidewalks in downtown San Jose are also quite
wide, so there's plenty of room for pedestrians and scooters to share.

~~~
jessaustin
I'm going about that my speed on my bicycle, much of the time. "Too slow for
the road" has a meaning on the interstate highway. Someone who says that about
city streets needs to go back to driver's ed. It's fine that the speed limit
is 35mph. If you can drive that and safely pass slower traffic, do so. If you
can't, slow down!

~~~
nathanaldensr
Perhaps the argument amounts to "driving a scooter on the road makes me feel
unsafe, and I'd rather make others (pedestrians) unsafe to make myself feel
safer." Seems typically selfish.

------
cabaalis
They hit a big setback here in Nashville. People are leaving these things all
over the place. The city is looking to regulate these types of devices.
Please, Bird, don't pull another Uber. This is not an existing market to be
disrupted. Work with the municipalities to get a working framework in place so
we will all be better off.

~~~
wpietri
As far as I can tell, it is exactly the Uber "I do what I want and fuck you"
model. It's really disheartening to see startups still cargo culting that.

I honestly didn't have a big issue with powered scooters until they turned
into VC-funded litter all over my city. They were clearly in the category of
"experimental vehicle", like e-bikes, the tourist GoCar things, Segways, and
whatever those one-wheeled feet-wrapping things are called. They were small in
number, their users were responsible participants in traffic, and it was
interesting to see where they went to. And I'm a big fan of the Go Bike bike
sharing program, which worked closely with the city to integrate well into the
urban environment.

But suddenly, a few different startups seemed to believe that they could turn
the sidewalks into their place of business, turning a lot of untrained goofs
loose with a powered vehicle. Even if I were chill about the probably-illegal
taking of public space for private profit (and I'm not), the sudden rise in
dangerous idiots on the streets is a big deal for me.

Now my general feeling with these clowns is "Oh, fuck me? No, _fuck you_." I'm
generally very pro-entrepreneur, but if my city bans these clowns, I will shed
no tears. Let them serve as a warning to future overly entitled entrepreneurs.

~~~
tyu100
I think absolutely the opposite: this is a hugely positive disruption in North
American cities. Car-centric urban design is such a disastrous problem in so
many ways: land use, pollution, cost and so on, that we need massive and
immediate disruption that's not going to happen from government fast enough.

The amount of land used and traffic problems caused by these scooters is
_nothing_ compared to how much public space is dedicated to moving and storing
cars for personal use and is a actually a massive improvement. Additionally,
if you've seen their actual use patterns in cities like Washington D.C.,
because of their dock-less nature and ease-of-payment they are being used by
lower-income populations that don't use bike share or other similarly
centrally planned options.

Scooters are hugely benign civil disobedience that are helping with what is
probably the biggest problems in the world: pollution from personal
transportation, whether carbon or localized exhaust. I am cheering them on
completely and hope to see more similar disruptions that help the world and
make investors rich.

~~~
wpietri
Car-centric urban design certainly needs a change. I haven't owned a car in 20
years, and would love to see improvement. But I don't think you can have
"massive and immediate disruption" to urban design. It's literally set in
concrete. And as I said, I'm all for people trying out scooters.

That scooter-spam startups are a smaller problem compared to cars does not
make the problems not exist. It especially does not remove the problem of
entrepreneurs shifting negative externalities of their business models on to
anybody who doesn't protest loudly enough.

------
Tiktaalik
NA cities have never built high quality separated bike lane infrastructure to
make it all that safe to ride a bike or scooter on the road.

What happens when someone riding one of these gets killed by a driver?

~~~
cbhl
Bikes are in a no-mans land because of speed differences -- they're too slow
to go on the road, and too fast to safely mix with pedestrians on sidewalks.

I personally prefer dockless bikes over scooters, but I will admit that
scooters are safer because of their lower top speed. This makes it reasonable
to mix scooters with pedestrian traffic provided that the sidewalk is wide
enough.

The key to making bike/scooter-sharing work is to make the infrastructure
cheap, incremental, and easy. Google ran into the same problems with GBikes
blocking ADA ramps and front doors that cities are seeing with scooters. One
big thing that helped was converting a few parking spaces into bike parking
(literally just green paint and a few signs), and putting friendly "don't
block ADA parking or ramps" signs up.

If you want to prevent "deaths from drivers", the highest impact thing would
be to work on self-driving cars (join the great engineers at Waymo, Cruise, or
even Uber).

~~~
kwindla
> This makes it reasonable to mix scooters with pedestrian traffic provided
> that the sidewalk is wide enough.

Respectfully, please no no no no no. People were riding scooters on the
sidewalk all over San Francisco and it definitely did not feel safe to be a
pedestrian. In my opinion (no data, just individual experience), no city that
I've ever visited has typical sidewalks that are wide enough to mix walking
traffic with ~10mph, not very maneuverable, wheeled vehicles.

------
xiaosun
At what point is a scooter considered abandoned property? What's preventing me
from just taking the scooter off the street and hoarding them?

~~~
giarc
Do you just take cars that haven't been driven in a week? Why would a scooter
be any different?

~~~
woolvalley
Mostly because a car is too heavy :p

------
sschueller
With these startups it seems the only barrier to entry is money. Who ever can
raise more can buy more scooters.

Risky however if cities ban them and/or roll out their own.

~~~
visarga
That would be myopic - scooters are more city friendly - almost zero pollution
and waste less energy. Instead they should expand the bike lanes everywhere.
One serious advantage of scooters over bikes is that you don't arrive full of
sweat at your destination.

~~~
Symbiote
If you're adding a motor to the scooter, you may as well add one to the
bicycle and have better handling and a higher speed.

~~~
joeblau
That's effectively what Jump Bikes are. I took one last week in SF and they go
about 30 miles an hour with very little effort. They aren't fully electric
though, just electric assist.

------
ggg9990
What’s the moat for a company like this? Seems like nearly no network effect.

~~~
_lex
Possible moats:

1\. the cost of having and maintaining a fleet of scooters 2\. the network of
flexible staff charging scooters 3\. proprietary battery packs 4\. the network
of flexible staff moving the scooters to better locations 5\. exclusive access
to a scooter with a performance profile that the rest of the market cannot
match (think tesla). x. contractual moat

1) will not stop startups with access to funding from entering the market.
Providing service will require a fleet of these lite EVs and as the economics
becomes obvious, the companies will merge (so they share overhead costs) until
there are only one or two fleets.

2) Is very short term, because eventually the companies will figure out that
they can get their users to charge the scooters themselves - by literally
bringing their own battery pack (it's pretty portable - see
[https://electricscooterparts.com/batteries.html](https://electricscooterparts.com/batteries.html))
to the scooter and plugging their battery in. The scooters will validate the
powersource to ensure it's safe and that will be the end of the "paying random
people to charge scooters" business.

3) They can't even charge for proprietary battery packs and use that sunk cost
as a moat, because with VC money, competitors will just give away their own
proprietary battery packs. Maybe the switching cost will be the time it takes
to receive your free battery pack in the mail, but you'd just order a free one
from each competitor in your area, so this is an insignificant moat.

4) Is also relatively short term: They will also eventually tell users where
they are allowed to leave the scooters, and charge people who don't comply.
They may frame it as a discount, but.... In the end the hard work will be
outsourced to customers, which means there will really not be lock in. Any
leftover work will eventually be done by professionals, or maybe by a smaller
network of people moving scooters, if they are cheaper.

5) This is the best moat, but it's similar to the moat iphone used to have.
They will need patents and to basically be on the forefront of the industry,
forever. Boosted Boards is likely to wind up occupying this position, though
they are likely to not directly operate their scooter rental product, but
instead sell the scooters in an exclusive agreement to a particular company
that turns around and wins the market with lower costs and higher reliability.
Boosted would use their monopoly position to extract as much profit from that
partner as is possible while allowing the partner to still be cheaper than
getting and maintaining other scooters. Eventually their partner will try to
clone their product and get it cheaper elsewhere, unless Boosted's patent game
is very strong.

x) I think there's another possible moat. A particular service provider may be
able to force users to agree that they only use their own boards in order to
have access to lower marginal cost. Users may get a discount for not having
the competitor's app on their phone. Alternatively, a provider might allow
users to buy like $500 credit up front for a significant discount to achieve
similar impact.

~~~
lnanek2
Scooters have actually been getting slower, not faster. Bird has been
replacing 15mph models with 12mph in Santa Monica. These are no doubt cheaper,
but also elicit less complaints from pedestrians and helps please the city
council - who already hates them and is ordering them to remove 2/3 of their
scooters.

As for battery packs. There is no way that will happen. Riding a short term
over-priced rental scooter instead of walking or taking a bus or owning a
cheap crappy bike is a luxury. The only people you could convince to charge
the scooters for you carrying around battery packs is poor people and they
aren't the target market. People here say they are into "Birding" meaning they
go around bars on birds at night socializing. That's the sort of customer they
have. They aren't going to carry battery packs around for the company.

------
thisisit
There has been sudden glut of articles about scooter startups here on HN and
elsewhere. And I am scratching my head trying to understand what exactly is
the end game plan here? If self driving cars and Uber etc succeed then all
commuting will be through cars, how will these scooters fit in that picture?

~~~
Eric_WVGG
Lots of folks think self-driving cars are just replacing one problem with
another. (A car, after all, is a really a moving room; but we don't want to
move rooms, we want to move people.)

[http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/05/technology/bikes-disrupt-
car...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/05/technology/bikes-disrupt-
cars/index.html)

~~~
jgh
Although electric scooters aren't a great replacement for self-driving cars in
a lot of places that aren't California.

~~~
woolvalley
You can bike in london and seattle too. Even in snowy canada.

~~~
jgh
Bikes have bigger wheels than scooters.. Try an electric scooter in a few
inches of slush ;)

------
shahbaby
As a frequent Uber user who just purchased an ebike, I don't think I would
have been interested in a service like this.

E-bikes/scooters are no where near as expensive as a car. No insurance or gas
payment and the maintenance cost is nothing like that of a car.

E-bikes/scooters also don't require a specialized parking space.

E-bikes/scooters can be charged from home.

These are some of the reasons why owning an E-bike/scooter is much easier than
owning a car and therefore fewer people will be interested in a pay-per-use
service.

------
dazhbog
I wonder how much they are buying those scooters from Xiaomi.

~~~
supahfly_remix
me too. On ebay, a m365 costs about $500 and takes a month to arrive.

~~~
microdrum
Only because the vc money is buying all this Chinese scrap metal! Price in
bulk via PO is $225.

------
donpark
Two issues worth mentioning IMO:

\- daily loss rate could escalate as thieves get better & friends join in.

\- personal injury - you're encouraging people to ride scooter without a
helmet.

------
koverda
That's an insanely fast rise in valuation.

------
TaylorSwift
How does one actually invest into these startups? Are there requirements? It
doesn't look like google is much help here.

~~~
confounded
By being a partner at an established venture capital firm.

------
vlucas
From the article:

> This would be just weeks after it raised $150 million at a $1 billion
> valuation, and only three months after raising at a $300 million valuation.
> Venture capitalists have never before participated in such a rapid and
> rocketing price spike.

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DeonPenny
Undervalued 100%

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koverda
what makes you say that?

