I know a guy who has taken dozens on bird scooters, replaced the motherboard, removed these sticker and resells them for $200 on Craigslist. If I know of this one incident, how many must have been taken like this! How can bird survive?
Bird CEO on scooter startup copycats, unit economics, safety and seasonality
121–130 of 132 posts
Re: Bird CEO on scooter startup copycats, unit economics, safety and seasonality
#122Re: Bird CEO on scooter startup copycats, unit economics, safety and seasonality
#123Bird is trying to land (pun intended) in Amsterdam, but from what I've heard they're already losing so many employee scooters in the canals that it's becoming a problem. I already predicted this would happen when I first read about Bird online... I hate that Im right about how shitty people are.
Re: Bird CEO on scooter startup copycats, unit economics, safety and seasonality
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about the American mind makes electric scooters so alluring? That statement sounds ridiculous.
I don’t know and I can’t explain it. If you mention a train to an American they will start talking about how far it is from Miami to Seattle as if that matters and despite the fact that Ohio is more densely populated than Spain. If you bring up walking someone will ask how you can walk home from the grocery store, apparently unaware of the fact that 95% of people bring home their food by foot. If you talk about bikin…
All these statements are nonsense.
There are train lines from Miami to Seattle, and the US rail system is the most efficient in the world for metrics it cares about: $/ton and on-time.
Miami to Seattle is ~4400km, which would be 11 hours at 400 km/h without making any stops, or 4 hours longer than a flight.
Many cities were built with automobiles as assumed modes of transport, so walking with groceries would be silly as you're expected to purchase more than you can carry from a more centralized store. The tradeoff for being reliant on a car is the cost of goods are lower in bulk. People walk home with groceries all the time in cities built before the automotive age. For example, everyone walks home with groceries in Manhattan.
People cycle all the time in rain/snow in northern US cycling friendly cities. Actually the best cycling cities in the US include Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and New York, which all have very rainy/snowy seasons.
No one is building hyperloops seriously. They're fun projects for bored wealth.
Re: Bird CEO on scooter startup copycats, unit economics, safety and seasonality
#125Here in Reno we have Lime bikes (the scooters were withdrawn after being deployed without city permission) and they are almost like litter - they are laying around all over the city but I almost never see anyone riding one. I'm all for bikes and bicycling but the fact that they have no designated docking stations means people leave them everywhere and to this old fart it is borderline blight.
oh so the space cars take to park and to ride is not an inconvenience? You're funny.
I rarely see cars parked in the middle of the sidewalk obstructing walkers or prank-parked in the middle of a grassy park. Lime bikes on the other hand ... every day.
Re: Bird CEO on scooter startup copycats, unit economics, safety and seasonality
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
oh so the space cars take to park and to ride is not an inconvenience? You're funny.
I rarely see cars parked in the middle of the sidewalk obstructing walkers or prank-parked in the middle of a grassy park. Lime bikes on the other hand ... every day.
cars parks next to roads, and drive on roads, that take a huge chunks of space forcing us to walk or ride bikes and scooters on a tiny space. I see people are pro-cars here.
Re: Bird CEO on scooter startup copycats, unit economics, safety and seasonality
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need a driver's license? Why?
From the article: > On safety: In the year or so that scooters hit the mainstream in the U.S., there were casualties. Moreover, many — kids included — realized just how easy it is to get away with scootering sans helmet, while others rode throughout the night. Bird, to keep children off scooters, at least, requires customers to provide a driver’s license when they sign up. Given the number of issues that have arisen…
It happens to also penalize people who are of age but do not have a driver's license, like me. Why would I need to learn how to ride a car to drive these? No way.
Re: Bird CEO on scooter startup copycats, unit economics, safety and seasonality
#128Can we please get parked scooters off the sidewalk where they present a safety hazard to visually and mobility impaired people?
Can we please reduce the space cars use so that we can take advantage of it as bike/scooter riders or pedestrians?
Re: Bird CEO on scooter startup copycats, unit economics, safety and seasonality
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what entitles drivers to make the streets very unsafe for everyone?
The democratic law of the land. I don't like it any more than you do - I'm all for increased penalties when drivers kill people, and/or banning cars from city-center streets - but society functions when people follow the democratic process to change laws they disagree with rather than just breaking them.
Breaking laws is almost always the first stage of having them fixed. People can now see there is a demand for electric scooters and they need a safe way to ride them. Without riding them on the footpath there would never be any visible demand for them and everyone would just continue driving to work.
Re: Bird CEO on scooter startup copycats, unit economics, safety and seasonality
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm just making an observation of the facts, not positing a moral good or bad to progress.
Its not a true oberservation of facts though. Progress is achievable without any breaking of legs
Name one technology disruption that caused no pain for anyone?
With user taxi drivers lost their monopolies, the car put horse and buggies out of business, amazon put many retailers out of business etc. etc.
I can't think of one advancement that had 0 negative effects on anybody. I don't even know why someone would argue otherwise, i thought this was a pretty common position in somewhere like HN.
Sure you can say that the overall benefits were easily worth it, but its irrelevant to my point that there is always eggs broken along the way.