Bird, once valued at $2.5B, just filed for bankruptcy (opens in new tab)

For Bird, they were sold on a SPAC at $154, so mission accomplished for the VCs. Retail is left holding the bag now.

Because that's the true "innovation" that has been coming out of Silicon Valley for the past 10 years or so: losing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars for years without as much as a hint of a plan to become profitable.

Perhaps because most would assume that Bird never earned any profit.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BRDS/bird-global/n...

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1861449/000186144922...

Never herd of a Potemkin village, had to look it up Thank you for the metaphor

I don't know about other locales, but here, in France, people weren't supposed to wander too far away from their homes. Basically, you were only allowed to go to work if you absolutely couldn't work from home – and many people were staying home because their businesses were shut down.

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).

Citbike in NYC, a bike share program, saw record usage during and post COVID.

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.

I suspect if you're wary about fomite spread of disease (later shown to be airborne for COVID but initially assumed), then it's easy to pick up a phobia of grappling the handlebars of a scooter that a stranger has recently used.

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.

We weren't allowed to go the beach here in SoCal. If you can't go outside, why would you need a scooter

It is possible that potential customers just had fewer events and open places worth scooting to.

The user base where I lived mostly consisted of tourists, commuters going from a parking garage to an office building, commuters going from apartments to office buildings, and unsupervised minors doing unsupervised minor things. All but the last group disappeared during the pandemic.

I would guess fewer urban commuters due to work-from-home plus retail slowdowns?

Less people outside -> less scoots

It has nothing to do with COVID. The stock was trading at $250 a share in october 2021, and started to drop afterwards, way after vaccines and restrictions in US/EU. It's just some lame excuse like inflation last year, rates now, and whatever is going to hit the news tomorrow.

Way less office workers and students went to work and school, and this made up a big part of their traffic.

Unfortunately, I don't think they're gone yet. They just filed for bankruptcy protection. Cities are still littered with their scooters - and no clear plan to clean them up.

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...

I'm so glad Paris banned them, it was a mess and very dangerous.

Bird going out of business will not hurt all the other scooter rental companies.

Personally I love electric scooters and use them frequently; they are a great amplifier for walking & transit.

I used them a bit in Denver this fall. There were plenty of Lyft and Lime scooters around (I used the Lyft ones, because I already had the app installed). People were about 50/50 on riding them in the (pretty damn decent) bike lanes vs being sociopathic assholes brushing past pedestrians on the sidewalk.

Any word on this? How much did they cash out before it hit the pavement?

Which competitors in this business are making significant profits?

You get high on your venture capital supply and then remain so disconnected from reality that you don't worry about profits, costs, use, repair, charging, or just about anything else, figuring you can "gig economy worker" your way out of it. Lose money on every transaction, but plan to make it up in volume once you take over the entire market for it. And then realize, rather late, that there are other people in the space, it's not a hard space to get into, and nobody actually really likes you in the first place for your model of "dump semi-loads of scooters first, ask permission never."

Theft or other losses, cost of roving charging vans and personnel, etc.

Depends entirely on if enough people actually rent them. And do the rents cover cost and the charging and so on...

If we’re going to spend half a billion dollars for a company to hire a few hundred people and then fail, I wish it was for a better cause.

Honestly alongside everything else (people hated them and their chargers, they got stolen constantly, etc. etc. etc.) the scooters themselves have collapsed in price, you can pick one up at Best Buy now for like $500. And yeah that's a lot but most of the people who were interested in renting them were a little upmarket anyway, so once they became affordable(ish) why would you rent one when you could own one?

They did[1]. Which makes me wonder if they'll all end up in junkyards, they're packed with batteries, and even RPis[2]...

1: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/19/bird-acquires-spin-scooter...

2: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-4bs-inside-sp...

I think the key is the "D word" here, which is distribution. The reason why Uber worked is because there was a giant inventory of vehicles owned would-be drivers ready to service a population looking for that service.

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.