It's a bummer to see what I think is a good idea in theory be hated because the people who implemented it did such a bad job in practice.

The idea of having a fast, easy, low emission and cheap way to get around short distances in a city without needing a car or having to bring a bike or similar is awesome.

Unfortunately, instead of solving the things citizens disliked about them (sidewalk parking/riding, inexperienced riders, rapid expansion) the companies decided they should just take the Uber approach and bulldoze any opposition with money. This made them a symbol of tech and gentrification for many, a symbol of growth and change for others, and aligned basically everyone in the city against them.

Scooter startups have in my opinion totally missed their target market.

Sit looking at a scooter on a street in a city, and you'll see perhaps 10,000 people walk past the scooter before one person uses it.

So, in the 'go short distances' market, walking has 99.99% of the market, and the scooter industry has 0.01% market share.

In my view, that's a total failure. Scooter companies should have interviewed each person who walked past a scooter and asked themselves, why didn't that person use our product?

In many cases, it's a combination of cost, friction of setting up an app and account, and fear of something going wrong and being fined (for example, parking the scooter out of the operating zone).

Scooter companies should have solved all those issues. You should be able to use the scooter entirely for free, without an app or any registration, perhaps limited to 10 minutes or 5 mph.

Then, encourage people to pay for more time or more speed when they become accustomed to being able to get around quicker.

I don't think $2000 and under devices belong in the rental space, in most situations.

That's the real issue at hand here. Scooters are light enough that someone can just buy one and carry it around with them all day. At $5+ a ride, it isn't long before people would rather just buy one of their own.

Bikes are at least large enough to be a hassle to carry around.

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Consider computers (and no, not cloud computers. Like normal office computers). There was a time when timesharing computers was popular, when computers were $100,000.

Similarly, back in high school, one local entrepreneur gave a talk to my school. He explained that 3d printers, while their costs were going down, were still too expensive to own. He predicted 10 years before 3d printers were popular for home labs (and it turns out he was right). In those 10 years, he made money by renting out university-level / research 3d Printers (no one wanted to buy $100,000+ printers anymore, everyone saw the writing on the wall and would rather rent), so the rental company did well, albeit only temporarily. (Overall, the talk was about "risk taking". In this case, the calculated risk that he'd make money before the business opportunity closed as 3d printers became cheaper)

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But these Bird scooters look like they're around $500? If you're using the thing like 2 or 3 times a day, it won't take long at $5 / ride before it makes more sense to just buy one for yourself.

My family went to Washington DC recently and there were perhaps 4 companies providing scooter rental. I found out that if I rented one, I could not then rent one for my teenager. That was a fail. Then, the scooter I rented happened to be in a "no park zone." I could rent the scooter, but not return it to the exact place I'd rented it from. So I had to go out of my way to park the stupid thing. My wife rented hers from the exact same spot, but then immediately a "no ride zone" was triggered, so she had to push it for 1/2 a mile before she could actually ride it, all the while paying per-minute fees for the rental.

It cost us probably $20 to go 3 blocks. It was not nearly as simple as scan to ride, ride, scan to park.

I wonder if these wild valuations could be kept in check if there were a way to short/buy puts on private companies. There's positive pressure on valuations from the funding, but scant negative pressure.

Scooters-as-a-service can probably be a profitable business worth millions, but you had to be really out of touch to think it could be worth billions.

I wish we would build social housing for people with some of the money our society throws in the burning dumpster of startups.

See how they do social housing in Vienna (it's nice).

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl...

This is not even a hindsight 20/20 situation.

The math never made sense. They were too brittle to make the LTV turn profitable. Maybe people were hoping for subsidies?

Practicality-wise, they neither belonged to the sidewalk (too fast) or the road (can't deal with obstacles).

I personally could not be happier with Bird's downfall. I was seriously thinking of running (as a one-issue candidate lol) for some City office in Santa Monica to get them off the streets. It was absolutely bonkers how terrible it was when they're weaving past you while driving, how terrible it was with people leaving them in front of my apartment building, and how terrible it was that the majority of folks taking advantage of them were out-of-towners anyways. This one time when I was walking home from a bar, some poor girl face-planted off a scooter in the middle of the street, she started crying, bleeding/etc. and myself and a few other bystanders had to call 911 to make sure she's okay and taken care of.

So the vibe of cool cities like Santa Monica were totally ruined by these annoying "micromobility" startups, but also from a business standpoint, the idea also made no sense. All their pivots (in particular: what do you do with used scooters?), fell flat. With that said, I do know folks that worked at Bird (mostly ex-Uber or from the LA tech scene), and they were super smart, motivated, and driven people.

Squandered is a bit harsh. I don't have skin in the game either way, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a profitable business to be built once the dust settles. It can be hard to know in advance just how big that market would be, and how defensible.

One place the scooters work well is in both Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine. The app for the scooter is the same as a popular taxi app and connected to it. Simple as scan the QR code and ride away. Leave it wherever. They still work great even in war time.

Based no how they mostly seem to be used in Berlin, scooters are predominantly a joyride thing for teenage to 20-something boys, doubling as status signaling given their relatively high costs (for this demographic)

As a middle-aged dude, I find them quite awkward to navigate and much prefer a car, and I have literally never seen an older person use them. Are people commuting with those? I guess it happens occassionally, but the predominant use case, at least in Germany, seems just-for-fun cruising. Probably not a powerful or frequent enough thing to justify lofty valuations, and given the externalities (cluttering sidewalks, or folks having to fish them out of lakes and rivers) probably a net negative for society, too.

Wouldn't like to see them banned out of principle, but I assume it'd make sense for cities to ask providers for some upfront deposit in case the provider can't ensure proper clean up etc...

Maybe last-mile mobility is a problem that requires public-private partnership.

Public communication does not need to bring profits, it needs to serve the citizens. If public communication limits need for parking space, limits traffic jams and polution, that's a win.

A number of cities introduced city-wide bike sharing networks that are paid, but subsidized. Sometimes it was more successful, sometimes less, but at least a few cities proved it can work. They can also work with the public transport card, removing the need for an app.

Maybe the same can be applied to scooters? With the current approach they'll disappear in a few years, as their prices are too high, but having to maintain and charge them daily adds a lot of operational costs.

This one is actually a true stumper. Like the segway, urban short to medium distance transportation is a problem but somehow it's still not clicking. I think streets need to be free of cars for people to ride these. Would be an interesting experiment.

Normally I despise defending VCs, but:

First, I think a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand the mandate of VCs. The firms themselves receive funding from limited partners, who are often very large pools like the California State Pension or Yale University. Those pools are almost all deployed into very low-risk asset classes, like bonds. A very small amount, say like 2-3% is invested in the PE/VC asset class, thereby diversifying and giving that fund some upside plays in their overall portfolio.

Now, because the VCs were given the mandate by their LPs to find home runs and not a bunch of singles and doubles, this changes the logic by which they make their decisions. You may have heard of the pejorative "lifestyle business" in this context, but it's the reason why a lot of small businesses or low-upside startups don't get funded: they just don't have enough TAM to justify a potential home-run outcome.

Second, if we look back to when Bird and Lime blew up, it was still very, very early for these businesses and their breakout trajectory probably didn't look all that dissimilar from other home runs. (Lots of analogues here: how did Clubhouse look in it's early metrics? Probably a lot like Facebook. HQ Trivia probably looked a lot like Zynga's first breakout game.) It's only in hindsight where you're able to look back and see that adoption wasn't what they thought and cities were more adverse to it and so on, but it doesn't mean the investment logic at the time was flawed -- it just means that it didn't work out. Again, any VC will tell you that they'd rather invest 100 times in something with a 1% chance of being Uber than invest in 100 mom-and-pop shops.

I'm sure many people will say "I guess, but it was obvious that they weren't going to make it!", to which I say, yeah, maybe. But it was probably obvious that Uber wasn't going to become Uber until they did; you only need to have in a portfolio to make it because you become A16Z or USV. And if the metrics from the first year look like Uber and the default gameplan is investment-driven, loss-heavy aggressive growth, then it doesn't seem like such a bad bet.

My small European city of 500k people had at least 9 (!) scooter brands last summer: Bird, Tier, Lime, Voi, Bolt, Zeus, Dott, Ryde, Surf. An article I found says there were actually 12 (!).

As a result, last fall, there were a total of about 25,000 scooters out clogging the streets, enough that the city administration decided to establish a city-wide limit of 8,000 scooters. This spring, the city kicked out all but three services: Voi, Tier, and Bolt.

As a consumer, I like scooters a lot, but market fragmentation was frustrating (one app for every service), and these days you can rarely even find a scooter when you need one. I ended up going back to using my bike.

For all the people somewhat defending the VC's: Nah.

One point I haven't seen here is the extent to which these things just littered cities; there's something of a "tragedy of the commons" type argument here.

Honestly, I'd be interested in favor of a bigger movement for individuals to hack and "steal" them for keeps.

(Note the quotes around steal, please. I am a lawyer and I do not believe I am inciting an illegal action because I believe there's a very strong legal argument as to their status as mislaid or abandoned property.)

America is hard to say because it's a bit of a conservative place and highly tuned to reject anything novel on "dangerous" grounds. But I'm curious about urban micro mobility in developing South and South East Asia.

This stuff must have failed there, but I wonder why it didn't displace a 50 cc motorbike. Storage capacity? Range? Ease of refuel?

Recently in Berkeley, California we got a bunch of new players: Veo, Superpedestrian, and Spin, which is an older company but just arrived here. So they are still chasing the dream, despite the money pit.

For the customer these scooters and bikes are cheaper than the bus at distances of 1 mile and at longer range if you value your own time.

As a method of urban transportation escooters have been relatively successful (at least in Europe). But this hasn’t translated into profitable businesses due to the lack of a strong technical moat: it’s too easy to clone Lime, Byrd, etc, especially with cheap capital availability.

This is the result this idea deserved.

Here’s a better idea: finance individual scooter purchases/leases as a business. Manufacturing will match actual not falsely inflated demand, and people will take better care, not just leave their scooter lying about on sidewalks and crosswalks.

It was obvious as it was happening. this made me laugh: https://twitter.com/jaltma/status/1089589379406848000

and instant grocery startups

Genuine question: do VCs ever get fired by their firms, or forced to be fired by the LPs?

There are a lot of VCs just play the sheep and don’t seem to know shit. I’m just curious what happens to bad VCs..

Didn't they ultimately fail because they are very unsafe ?

Always a pleasure to see scummy monopolists lose billions and fail to achieve their monopoly.