Bird Acquires Scoot
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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...
(2) https://medium.com/@mbkeating/one-of-our-kicks-was-stolen-la...
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.
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...
Disclaimer: I work in this space.
Curious how they know the scooters will last 10 months when new versions can't have been out in the wild in quantity for more than a single quarter.
To be clear, I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm just hoping to learn more about whether it has yet.
[1] https://qz.com/1561654/how-long-does-a-scooter-last-less-tha...
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.
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.
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... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_Street [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filbert_Street_(San_Francisco)
https://www.mi.com/global/mi-electric-scooter-pro/
https://store.segway.com/ninebot-kickscooter-max
and I've seen other like those too. Are all those just some rebranded chinese frame?
However there are some potential caveats which could turn the whole game around. The thing is that when doing scooter profitability calculus, there are few inputs that when changed can have a massive effect. Some of these could be: Scooter durability, Scooter Battery life, Effect of theft & vandalism, cost of charging.
But it should also make you think: Bird isn't worth much.
Scooter and bike rental companies aren't worth much. They never have been.
In the hypothetical case that they were buying Lime instead, the number would be at least 50 times bigger.
it doesn't always work out that way, but it has sometimes in the past for big payouts, so it's a common strategy and economic forecast indicator.
Bird, Scoot, Uber, Lyft and everybody else has yet to demonstrate that by scaling dramatically that they lower their costs enough to break even, much less generate SaaS margins.
Until then... They are highly speculative businesses.
The fact that Bird got 10x as much VC money and targeted hundreds of cities from the get-go doesn't make Bird any better, it just means Bird went the "large funding" route.
Vandalism is a far bigger problem for them, though, since most people don't have the skills(or rather the confidence) to hotwire a Bird scooter.
I don't have much sympathy for these scooter companies, though, since their MO is to illegally dump scooters in cities and beg for forgiveness later.
I've found no information at all on how the wrecked scooters get recycled. You can't necessarily just repair scooters infinitely, and I imagine a lot of them just go into a dumpster because it's cheaper just to buy more scooters from Xiaomi.
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.
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.
My point was that the city council here is doing so many bad things it's not even funny anymore
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.
“Good morning," said the little prince.
Good morning," said the merchant.
This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need for anything to drink.
Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.
Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week." And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"
Anything you like..."
As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.”
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.
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...
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.
Well, while you were typing this comment somebody probably got killed by a car in your city. Why are you concerned about an imaginary problem that hasn't even happened yet? If everyone rode a scooter or a bike instead of a car there'd be much less road fatalities.
* allow people without US driver license to use them
* allow people to drive these in the evening
* have more of them (it's always hard to find one)
>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...
Not sure how enforceable this is.
IOW, this is a very weak requirement.
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.
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.
>For a company that operates in more than 700 cities, including quite a few giants—Mexico City, Tokyo, Paris, Lagos, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Mumbai, to name a few—that concentration gives Uber a surprising vulnerability at the local level. And they know it.
Acquisition for just SF could be sole justification.
If pattern is similar to Uber, SF would be one of the 5 core markets for Bird.
I would like to see more scooters. There is a shortage of scooters and ebikes in the popular Caltrain <> downtown route.
I'd be interested in learning if anybody takes the BART into SF and then uses Scoot or something similar. I imagine that would be more successful since there are many more stops downtown.
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.
Bird acquires scoot: https://gfycat.com/genuineseverefruitfly
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.
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).
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.