Bird potentially insolvent after overstating revenue for 2 years | Hacker News Reader

Bird potentially insolvent after overstating revenue for 2 years

techcrunch.com

25 pointsintunderflow18 comments

I’m shocked, SHOCKED that using VC money to dump scooters in random cities and then pay people to run around and pick them up in trucks to charge them is not a sound business practice.

I agree it seemed like a dumb business model. What I find interesting was an article I saw recently that suggested cities that banned these rentable scooters saw an increase in average commute time. I would not have guessed enough people used these things to have any measurable difference in commutes.

Unit economics aside, a lot of people use them out here and they made a big enough impact that several people purchased their own after trying them. They probably get the most usage around concerts and conventions. Of course the economics do drive the sustainability of the business.

I'd be interested to see a cost breakdown. I found the scooters useful at $5-$10 a ride, which certainly covers the cost of a scooter, electricity, and a guy to drive around in a van.

My first guess would be that theft and vandalism made the system fail, at least in major American cities.

I never got over the fact that a scooter rental was about the same price as a car rental. Though, perhaps that's why Car2Go didn't survive.

Does it? If you aren't getting a bunch of scooters at once, the cost of the driver and the van adds up. And these companies have a bunch of expensive software engineers that need to be paid too.

The company my dad worked for once ran a program enabling temporary bike access during the London Olympics. They underestimated the cost of getting the bikes to the places they needed to be to maximize utilization and ended up losing a bunch on the contract.

In the future, someone will write an excellent recap off all these VC-funded bullshit tech disrupter companies that failed.

It truly seems that the worlds wealth has been sucked up by a handful of playboys who treat it as nothing but numbers on a screen. The money being pumped into these useless companies could change the world for the better. But they’d rather play games.

Like the original Asus netbooks, the commercial success of this model will not be its legacy; its legacy will be a new solution for urban micromobility.

You mean subways, trams, trolleys, and buses?

If you persuade the NIMBYs that is.

No, specifically not those. Subways are great for moving masses of people in a city, but they have long lead times in building and require some amount of density. I rather liked living in London, but say I wanted to go from my flat by China Wharf to play some footy at Burgess Park? 10 min on a bicycle, except I'd lose my bicycle. So 10 min on this scooter thing, or it's half an hour by bus or walk.

Or say I wanted to go down to my office in Levallois-Perret from where I'm staying in Gennevilliers. 20 min by bicycle / scooter. 40 min by metro / bus.

There are a diversity of destinations and rail is great, but it's no substitute for micro-mobility. And that's in London/Paris where trains are every few minutes down to every minute. In America? Subway is not competitive for these distances.

NYC spent $2.4 billion to extend one subway line 1.5 miles. I’m only jokingly suggesting this, but that’s enough to buy about 5 million electric scooters in a city of 8.5 million people.

The more I read about Startups / VC the more I think it is a scam similar to the blockchain scams. Just more elaborate. VCs should be the pinacle of deep thinking, meanwhile they pump money into the most ridiculous ideas, never doing due diligence and sometimes enabling outright fraud.

There do appear to be similarities in the sense that the whole enterprise is based on the idea that the valuation of tech companies will always rise, so as long as you make sure you have hands in enough pies you will make money. What those pies are is basically immaterial.

But that’s where the similarities end. Crypto “investors” were putting in money into a scheme where the money’s only use was marketing so the next round of “investors” would buy at a higher price.

VC money was being used for building actual businesses that for the most part provided some value to their users, even if they were trying to make up for unit losses in volume.

Like, Bird may be insolvent and fold. But it did provide millions of real trips. What did Solana do that was of any use?

I'm waiting to see defunct scooter art used in an exhibit at MOMA.

Twas a good era in creativity as I recall

Those scooters were destined to be e-waste the minute the corporation was formed.

Why would working scooters be "e-waste". They're still worth hundreds of dollars.

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