Blood, Guns, and Broken Scooters: Inside the Chaotic Rise and Fall of Bird
wired.com
wired.com
The answer was, “winter’s not that bad, I ride to work on a Bird sometimes in winter.” I’ll just say that it did not help with my fears about Bird’s business model.
If I had known they were public I would have shorted the stock.
Offload all the risks to others so you can show tremendous growth and exit at high valuations leaving the entire mess to be picked up by others, yet again.
There are bike share systems across the world doing very well. Growing steadily as per demand and run by a single company. They don’t need “private contractors” to cook up their books.
It’s just a completely awful state of affairs today where creating a new company basically means using technology to offload risk and costs onto “gig workers”.
There are real and genuine businesses that can be built. But no one wants to build a business. They want to build the next Uber ie, find ways around laws and worker protections to pad their pockets while pretending they are entrepreneurs.
What's the net revenue (gross minus what)?
> If more than 10 percent of his fleet turns red, John can get chewed out by a Bird manager, and he has been told he could lose some scooters for breach of contract.
What are these contract "fleet managers" paying off, if Bird still owns the scooters, and if Bird can also take back whatever rights the fleet manager has been paying for?
This sounds like franchise fees with extra steps.
There's just not enough money in there for the US techies level of grift they are accustomed to in working for near-monopoly behemoths like Apple/Google.
Especially in a non-zero interest rate environment, putting money into these companies is essentially financing the upper-middle-class lifestyle of tech workers. The only way this appeals to you as an investor is if you think you can sell this kind of business to a company like Softbank, while somehow hand-waving the huge inevitable losses.
And they will almost always be right because most companies fail.
Identifiying companies that will fail is not hard. Identifying those that will succeed on the other hand is very hard.
No one in my city thought this business model would work. The only reason it raised so much money is because VCs are idiots who don't understand how society works outside of California.
There are plenty of well-off places with mild climate where using a scooter all year around is feasible.
But do micro mobility companies have the scaling potential/dynamic of a Google or Facebook (which would justify the way they raise money)?
I don't think weather is the problem here.
Near Ithaca, NY we have a lot of rain and (usually) snow in the winter. I think a hardy person could commute on a bicycle much more than 80% of the time.
It rains a lot in the Netherlands and people ride bikes a lot anyway; I think it is not so cold, I hear it is unusual that it freezes enough for people to skate on their canals these days.
In the U.S. the moment it snows the governments will send out a bunch of people and equipment to clear out the roads. In Northern European countries they will do the same for the bike lanes as well.
The VC money forced Bird and others to unprofitably expand, which is why all those countries had scooter rentals.
My impression is that my fellow Americans are way too pessimistic about city improvements, and also that Bird did the world’s worst job of getting cities to meet them halfway.
Edit because I just thought of something else - if they were truly savvy, they would have made an industry consortium to lobby for shared infrastructure, to split the shared costs and increase their chances of getting favorable laws passed.
The problem with these businesses is that they raise money as “tech businesses”, which gets them much higher valuations, but also makes them spend way more on engineers to justify that “tech” tag.
They were very proud of some patterns that I found a bit ridiculous, not to mention expensive.
Direct competition because there's no barrier to entry and little locking/loyalty.
Indirect competition from ebikes, public transit, and purchasing scooters.
As are food delivery and taxi services, but VCs and sovereign wealth funds have sunk untold billions into them. Usually the pitch has some pipe dream angle like "self-driving robotaxis" that makes it sound more visionary than it is. I have no idea what Bird's equivalent was supposed to be.
The fleet managers do not own the scooters, which is the most important capital. They lease some support vans, rent warehouse space and own some minimal capital, such as tools and a stock of spare parts. It's a low risk business with fairly predictable revenue streams, that's cheap to wind down when your main customer goes under.
And it's not a gig economy job, these fleet managers had set up businesses and employed other people. They certainly have no right to make money before Bird or at the expense of Bird's investors. It was simply a bad business and they made a wrong decision to pursue it.
One takeaway from the long-running US experiment with sky-high incarceration rates is that you can't imprison your way out of a crime problem. In spite of locking away so many people, there's a huge issue with criminality that's ingrained in many subcultures. It makes me think maybe China's social credit system might be more effective than what we have now.
https://arigatojapan.co.jp/japans-unique-vending-machine-cul...
on the other hand we got this bad boy
https://www.telephonecollectors.info/index.php/browse/docume...
which was almost indestructible. (Back in the roaring 90's I saw a black man tear one out of an exterior wall somewhere in the West 50's in NYC)
But there was that spate of recent sushi shop licking incidents. Not the same type of destruction, but related, I would assert.
A system such as a social credit system can have an impact on culture. But it’s not a prerequisite. Regardless of what methods you use to shape a culture, it takes lifetimes to build the good aspects.
At the point that the social credit system was conceived (2000-ish?), China's crime rate was like 2-4x lower than the US's most recent lowest year.
What they did have back then was a population rapidly getting richer (or at least pulling astounding numbers of people out of poverty). In the US we saw major shift in like 1975-ish when wage growth basically stopped, even though productivity continued to go way up.
Edit: Reading the parent post again, it's crazy how "anti-freedom" it is. Accepting corporate framing of labor-law violations as fact in one paragraph, then advocating for a surveillance state in the next. Crazy stuff to see on "Hacker" News.
Uber is or was happy to refer you to a partner that will lease or rent you a car.
Not op, but…
1. Very low SES folks.
2. Very high SES folks.
Different types of crimes, different levels and types of enforcement/convictions, but seems to be true from my experience.
The absence of race in my two groups is intentional — SES is typically a better predictor of behavior than race.
Please clarify your recently self-invented TLA (three letter acronym) at least once in your response to reduce the cognitive load on your fellow reader.
Actually in this case the TLA would be more accurate as a TLA (two letter acronym) because Socioeconomic is just one word only...
“Self-invented”… hilarious.
This is a relatively common term of art used in discussions of social science (e.g., psychology, political science, economics, etc.).
I probably could have clarified, but I think the meaning should be easily inferred from the context. Plus, it’s easily confirmed with a quick look up (two taps on my phone) or search.
Example of source that shows that it’s not something I just made up:
Not passing judgment on that either, but I think the way to break that cycle is through high quality education combined with better security measures. The mental math is different for different people, when you believe that the risk of punishment for committing a crime is statistically low and the rewards are high (which will vary depending on your economic conditions). So make the rewards seem low by raising their economic conditions, and make the risk of punishment higher.
If Bird was a "constellation of small businesses" those businesses could take their scooters to a competing network, or start their own local scooter share. Bird retained ownership of the scooters in what sounds like a very lop-sided and exploitative agreement.
Or the reality of most participants in an MLM.
There is no reason we can't be like Japan --well, almost. It is harder to achieve in such a diverse population than in a less diverse population. Never the less, if we worked hard at it we could come somewhat close.
This whole Bird situation is horrible. Plenty unfortunate people made an investment in becoming fleet managers. Some are now bankrupt.
This is bad. However, if they were in the Chinese social credit system, their lives would be ruined forever. This black stain would follow them around everywhere, for the remainder of their lives.
In the US there is a liberal bankruptcy system. It allows people who for various reasons failed at their venture to have a clean start after some time passes.
Bankruptcy sucks. It’s a major life-impacting event, even in the US. But you can recover from it. You can have a fresh start.
I see the appeal of a social credit system. The US has some diminished version of it. But it is not as absolute and draconian as China’s, and that is a feature that many people fail to appreciate.
It’s not that hard to appreciate though. Imagine yourself failing at your business venture. Really picture it. Don’t make excuses that “I would be smarter than that.” Just imagine a really unlucky situation. And now think about which system would you rather be in.
Paraguay conclusively proved that yes, you can.
Lots of discussion about the bankruptcy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38706781
This difference of topic is also why you see such a different discussion in this thread.