61–70 of 75 posts
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For Bird, they were sold on a SPAC at $154, so mission accomplished for the VCs. Retail is left holding the bag now.
J need to start shorting these IPOs on day one.
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For Bird, they were sold on a SPAC at $154, so mission accomplished for the VCs. Retail is left holding the bag now.
Someone should go to jail for that, but it is a highly regulated market, so it is ok.
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Sounds like a pump and dump with extra steps. Hype up any obvious future failure to pump the stock to crazy valuations, then dump and leave the suckers holding the bags. All enabled by zero interest rates, and VCs were willing to fund some because they knew there's gonna be other suckers out there to enable them to raise the valuations.
The zero interest rates make getting loans cheap, but aren’t there angel investors who lose their investments recommended by VCs?
VCs do however get a fee for assets under management, so they win even if their investors lose.
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Someone should go to jail for that, but it is a highly regulated market, so it is ok.
SPACs (basically going public as a shell corp) are chosen specifically because it allows company insiders to cash out their equity without disclosing as much as regular IPO companies.
Good riddance, they've made cities worse and more dangerous. Can't tell you how many times some idiot on a Bird scooter going down a sidewalk has almost hit me or my kids. I've also seen several wipeout when going over track tracks.
Personally I love electric scooters and use them frequently; they are a great amplifier for walking & transit.
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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?
What I want to know is where I can (legally) pick up used Bird or Lime or Spin or Ofo or Skip scooters. Are they all going in the trash?
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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.
What's worse: being hit on foot by a scooter, or being hit on scooter by a city bus?
How do you go bankrupt as a company renting powered scooters, which are possibly the cheapest possible mode of transportation just above a Craigslist bike? Incredible
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?
Doing that with your own one has downsides as you have to carry it along all the time.
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It is possible that potential customers just had fewer events and open places worth scooting to.
I would also wager that potential repeat customers eventually just bought their own scooter. It's not like they're particularly expensive. If you really enjoyed using one of these, why rent? (I know there are reasons, e.g. I wouldn't want one of those batteries in my house at all. But my point is simply that they can be inexpensive, especially compared to the price of renting.)
Hah. The last time I saw Bird in the news was when they were throwing a tantrum and leaving SF because "strangling government regulations" were ruining their business. Someone in SF city government pointed out that all their competitors were making record profits and said Bird was run by spoiled rich kids with very bad business sense. Goodbye Bird. I lived in Austin when you rolled out your terrible service there and…