Company of the Year Bird BirdBird Is the Word
E-scooters are a controversial business. Don’t expect Bird’s driven founder, Travis VanderZanden, to apologize for his.
The first 10 Birds descended on Santa Monica, California, in early September 2017. Within days, this small migration became more like an invasion. Soon, locals woke to see Birds scattered across the city’s sidewalks and bike paths and on the boardwalk at Venice Beach—some 250 e-scooters left by the fledgling startup Bird Rides, along with instructions on how to rent them using an app. No one had invited Bird to Santa Monica. There were also no laws that specifically banned (or permitted) Bird’s business— the closest were the city’s regulations governing sidewalk food stands. “We are not selling hot dogs and tacos,” Travis VanderZanden, Bird’s founder, CEO, and head provocateur, said in March. “We felt we were in a gray area.”
VanderZanden wasted little time exploiting that area, alerting Santa Monica mayor Ted Winterer, via a LinkedIn message, that many more Birds were coming. “We have $3M in venture funding to focus on the traffic and parking problems in Santa Monica and Venice,” the message read. “I’d love to work together.” The mayor’s response was far less chummy, perhaps because VanderZanden’s missive had landed after those Birds had. “If your company is the one deploying electric scooters in the public right of way,” Winterer shot back, “my understanding is there are serious legal issues with doing so.” He then pushed VanderZanden off to other city officials.
But many residents of this beachfront community—long a haven for cyclists, skateboarders, inline and roller skaters, and Razor scooterers—proved far more enthusiastic. Chaos quickly ensued. Citizens piloted Birds on the sidewalk (illegally). Teens caused mayhem by ignoring traffic laws while double-riding. Pedestrians tripped over discarded scooters that clogged the walkways. There were accidents, serious head injuries—Birds zip along at 15 miles an hour, and few trying them out wore helmets—and hundreds of tickets issued to riders. There was a protest. There was a counterprotest. Six months after the scooters appeared, Bird agreed to pay $300,000 to settle a nine-count misdemeanor criminal complaint levied by the city attorney’s office.
In other words, everything went more or less according to plan. Bird unleashed a cultural phenomenon, sparked a VC frenzy, and remains the clear leader of a renegade group of e-scooter rideshare outfits that includes Lime, Scoot, Skip, Spin, Jump (owned by Uber), and Lyft, with more seemingly arriving every day. (See “Mapping the Scooter-Verse,” page 106.) “Bird is the classic example of a startup looking like a toy and people underestimating and dismissing it,” says David Sacks, an early PayPal executive who invested in the company’s seed round. “It’s low-cost transportation that’s perfect for cities.”
Which is why Bird has taken flight like few other startups. “Bird might be the fastest-growing company ever,” says Mark
Suster, the managing partner of Upfront Ventures, which invested in each funding round. “It could be the fastestgrowing company to a billion- dollar run rate in history.” As of November 2018—just 14 months after its stealth launch—Bird’s annual revenue run rate was well above $100 million, says VanderZanden. (In June, Bird told investors its run rate was $65 million.) Bird also rose to unicorn status faster than any other startup, notching a $2 billion valuation in less than a year, according to PitchBook, which shares an owner with Inc. To put that into perspective: Airbnb took nearly three years to reach a $1 billion valuation—and Uber needed four.
In the company’s first 14 months, Birds landed in more than 120 cities, some small, like Russellville, Arkansas, and some large, like Los Angeles. They’re in Paris, Antwerp, Tel Aviv, London, and Mexico City. There have been more than 10 million Bird rides. And since Bird has taken in $415 million in funding, it has the capital to get to many more cities, and fast.
When Bird comes to your town, transportation options—and the streetscape—change immediately. You find scooters speckling sidewalks and public spaces all over town. You use the Bird app to rent one for $1, plus a per-minute charge of 15¢ to 20¢, depending on the city. When you’re done, you end the ride, the wheels lock, and you leave the scooter wherever, for whomever. Bird is boldly making the case that untethered e-scooters (“dockless,” in scooter-speak) have a better claim to public space than cars— indeed, that e-scooters can take cars, including Ubers and Lyfts, off the road and contribute to greener, less congested cities.
Organizing random transportation is a complex task. Bird imports e-scooters from China, and then installs a minicomputer (a “Bird brain”) to connect a scooter to the company’s software platform. After this modification, the company can see where every Bird is located, lock and unlock the wheels and motor, and throttle a scooter’s speed remotely. “It’s not as easy as building an app and putting the scooters out there,” says VanderZanden. And every night, a motley swarm of freelance Bird “chargers” must gather all the e-scooters wherever they’ve been parked (or
abandoned), recharge them, and redistribute them to designated “nests,” where riders can easily find them for the morning’s commute (see “Nocturne: The Secret Life of Birds,” right).
With the hyperfocused VanderZanden, Bird has the kind of leadership needed to handle the difficult mix of technology, logistics, and politics it requires. A serial entrepreneur who’s not yet 40 but who’s already earned and left a few scars in his career, he is an acknowledged ops maestro and a veteran of both Uber and Lyft. Under VanderZanden, the company has yoked a powerful entrepreneurial vision to a huge mission: to change urban transportation utterly. For its audacity and ambition, for its ferocious execution skills—for demonstrating, even, that sometimes entrepreneurship requires playing in a gray area rather than wearing a white hat—Bird is Inc.’ s Company of the Year.
You might say that public transportation is in VanderZanden’s blood. His mother, Robin, operated a Valley Transit city bus in his hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin. His father left the family shortly after Travis was born, and Robin often had to bring her son along to work. “I remember watching her drive, watching how public transit worked and how the routes worked,” VanderZanden says. “And seeing all the friction—riders need to time their pickups and drop-offs perfectly with the schedule.” Other kids were playing video games. Young Travis was spotting market inefficiencies.
In 2002, after graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire with a computer science degree, VanderZanden packed up his forest-green Pontiac, borrowed money from his older sister, and headed for San Diego to find a job. He did, becoming a product manager at Qualcomm, where he worked on the cellphone application platform BREW, which allowed third-party developers to create and sell games, ringtones, and other apps. As VanderZanden put it: “We were basically building the App Store years before the iPhone even existed.” In 2005, he started night classes at the University
of Southern California, driving twice a week to L.A. to get his MBA. “A little crazy, in retrospect,” he says. It meant eight hours of driving for every four hours of classes. “Everyone thought I wouldn’t finish. They told me it was too far and how it didn’t make sense. But out of stubbornness, I finished.”
In 2008, he quit Qualcomm and moved to Austin, where he started his first company, QikCom, an enterprise chat app. (“A bad name,” he admits.) One day, he recognized a name among the new sign-ups for the fledgling service: David Sacks, who’d recently founded a rival called Yammer. Sacks was checking out the competition, but VanderZanden saw an opportunity and asked Sacks to have dinner.
Sacks quickly realized QikCom was a one-man band, plus a few freelancers. But he was impressed enough to hire the frontman: VanderZanden started the sales team at Yammer and became its chief revenue officer. By 2011, though, VanderZanden had quit to start another company, this one called Cherry, an on-demand car-wash app. “A terrible idea,” he told attendees at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit in October. “Don’t try that.”
Even after VanderZanden left Yammer, Sacks remained intrigued. “He is a natural entrepreneur with a combination of vision, the ability to execute, and a certain impatience,” says Sacks. He invested in Cherry. Two years later, when it
“I pulled it out of the box, and the thing looked like Steve Jobs himself had designed it.” —Bird founderTravisVanderZanden, on his first look at the Xiaomi M365 e-scooter,which ultimately became Bird’s flagshipvehicle
sputtered, Sacks discovered he wasn’t the only one to recognize VanderZanden’s talent: In 2013, Lyft bought Cherry, and promptly made VanderZanden its COO.
Shortly thereafter, VanderZanden became a one-man soap opera. When Lyft founders Logan Green and John Zimmer began selling shares, VanderZanden asked permission to sell even more, but the board did not approve. According to a source familiar with the situation, VanderZanden then pushed the board to explore selling Lyft to Uber. When the talks fizzled, he called a board member— Geoff Lewis, then with Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund—with an ultimatum: Make me CEO, or I resign.
See ya, the board responded. “It was a failed CEO coup, and felt very mercenary,” says the source, who describes VanderZanden as a talented but power-hungry executive who’s determined to win. “You need executives who are competitive, but Travis is out for Travis and Travis alone.” (VanderZanden would not comment on those events.)
He quickly landed at Uber, as vice president of driver growth. Just as quickly, Lyft sued in November 2014, alleging he breached confidentiality agreements and stole company secrets. VanderZanden countersued, accusing Lyft of accessing his personal text messages and emails, thus setting off a two-year court battle that ended with a confidential settlement in June 2016.
In September 2016, VanderZanden left Uber, telling colleagues that he wanted to spend more time with his family. This was when bikesharing firms like Ofo were making a splash in Asia, and just four months before Lime—then a bikesharing company—was launching in cities and on college campuses across the U.S. Meanwhile, companies like Boosted Boards were making electric skateboards popular. (Boosted founder Sanjay Dastoor now leads e-scooter company Skip.) Amid all that, VanderZanden credits a holiday with his family for giving him the idea for Bird.
On Christmas 2016, he gave bicycles to his daughters, who were then 3 and 5, and spent the day teaching them how to ride. But the very next morning, they woke him up with an urgent question: Daddy, can we ride our scooters again? Forget those shiny new bikes—they still loved the