(upbeat music)
- All right, so by the end of this panel
we will be crowning a winner of the Scooter Wars
so do your best, no pressure though, no pressure.
Yeah, so obviously, big news actually happened
in your world in this last month, Katie,
is that another AMBER Alert possibly?
That is unfortunate.
So Katie, Bird bought Scoot,
which was pretty big news in the micro-mobility space.
I know that you said you're not really able
to talk too much about what that means for Scoot
but does this kinda signal the beginning of consolidation
in the scooter space do you think?
- I think there was a lot of talk and written about,
this is the year of consolidation
and this is clearly a signal of one direction this could go.
I think it makes a lot of sense
for these two companies, in particular, to come together.
Bird has scaled in an incredible way
in the past year and a half.
Scoot has been around operating
in a few strategic cities for many years and is multimodal
and has built really strong relationships
with city governments
and there's strategic reasons for us to come together
and we're really excited to kind of bring our unique skills
and bring micro-mobility to more cities around the world.
Does it signal consolidation for the whole industry?
I think there's still a lot of room
for different operators in different cities.
What we found in our experience at Scoot
is every market is super unique.
Because we are operating physical assets on the ground
it's not just about creating a marketplace
and matching supply and demand,
it's also about occupying public space
and being kind of a productive contributor
to a city's mobility solutions.
And I think that there's a lot of small operators
in Europe, in Latin America, and in the US
that are offering something unique
and there's gonna be a space for them.
And the question will really be about how it's funded
and for Bird and Scoot, there was an opportunity
to kind of leverage our resources
by bringing the two companies together.
- And Nick, I mean, you have some experience with this.
Uber of course bought JUMP,
I guess it was early last year?
- That's right.
- Do you have any advice for Katie?
You know, like being sold to (laughs)
being sold to another company that was once a competitor?
- Yeah, I mean, we were really excited to join Uber
because it was at a moment
where we recognized that this was actually
a dramatically larger opportunity and problem
than really any startup is equipped to handle.
I will say that the experience
of taking off on a micro-mobility rocket ship
as you scale something like we did
to being huge globally is incredibly fun
and an amazing learning experience
that also takes an enormous amount of energy.
I think the way this whole industry needs to scale
as we realize that really this problem should be solved
with more rigor than building cars are solved with
or deploying nationwide train systems are solved with
and that's the kind of solutions that you can bring
when you're part of a much larger company.
- Yeah, so I don't know about everyone else in the audience
but to me, a lot of these scooters
kind of look and feel the same
and honestly, partly that's probably because, Tony,
your company supplies a lot of these providers
with those exact same scooters.
How did you end up in that position?
Well, congratulations,
'cause you must be making a ton of money,
but how did you kind of become like the scooter provider?
- I think we are fortunate in a way
that we had a little bit headstart.
So having our supply chain based in China
have some advantage in terms of having the capacities
and also a lot of the sort of
engineering supply chain knowhow were based in China
so we had a little bit headstart.
And the other thing is the micro-mobility kind of movement
in a way started with bicycles, right?
If you look at the ofo and Mobike.
So we had like a couple of years of headstart
in this whole, the dockless business model,
and also kind of the biggest testing ground in China
so we kind of benefit from that.
And also we were able to see,
almost three or four years ago,
that scooter form factor is really
sort of the ultimate form factor for consumers at the time
so we were able to ramp up productions,
and obviously with our partnership
with Xiaomi and some other partners,
we were able to be the sort of leader
in this scooter business to begin with.
So we had a little bit of learning curve behind us
so essentially, the headstart helped quite a bit.
But of course, to maintain that leadership
is actually quite challenging as well
so we can talk all about that.
- Yeah, because I mean, now you see,
more companies are actually deciding
to build their own scooters in-house.
And Shalin, I know that Skip is actually coming out
with a new scooter, I believe it's next month.
How did you kind of think about that product?
And more importantly, making it different
from what's already out there?
- Yeah, that's a great question.
First I wanna acknowledge what's been a tremendous,
fruitful partnership with Segway-Ninebot,
clearly has done amazing things in the industry
and has helped a ton of the operators bootstrap services
that have helped with the last mile transportation problem
in a bunch of cities.
We believe that building the best product
certainly starts with the scooter.
And the learnings we've had in operating
in Washington, D.C., Portland, for a bit,
San Francisco, of course,
recently launched in Austin and San Diego,
are that we have to put the rider first.
And that means when we think about reliability,
longevity, depreciation, theft and vandalism,
a whole bunch of the things we'll talk about,
especially when it comes to unit economics, of course,
but also for the rider
and their interaction with the scooter,
we need to rethink the scooter from the ground up.
So we have been working on
our custom-built scooter, custom-designed scooter.
We tweeted it probably a month or two ago
but we're excited to announce
that we're gonna be rolling it out in the next month or two
in a test program in San Francisco.
We'll have about 50 scooters on the ground.
It's gonna be an integrated lock-to mechanism,
we'll have swappable batteries.
Standard things that a lot of the folks are working on,
wider base boards, larger wheels,
bigger headlights, et cetera, et cetera.
But the point is, a lot of our focus with this iteration
of the next scooter, and future ones,
is how do we put the rider front and center?