I discovered scooters recently and have rode them in three major cities during the past month. I have to say it is the most genius consumer tech product I've seen in a long time. I instantly felt a sense of "wow" after riding the first one (bird). The entire experience is so simple, so elegant (ui/ux), cheap, efficient, and most importantly FUN. I looked up bird and lime to discover they'd each received over 400M in funding and it makes perfect sense to me. This is a disruptive technology that's going to see major adoption in every city across the entire planet. You have to ride one to understand, especially in an urban, downtown, waterfront or metro type area. They're going to easily cut into bikeshare and short-trip rideshare services. Take a ride and you'll see, #scootlife!

Also worth noting, none of the technology is itself "new", but rather bird & lime particularly have packaged existing technologies together to make a product with all the qualities mentioned above. Innovation is usually just a twist on something that's already out there.

> This is a disruptive technology that's going to see major adoption in every city across the entire planet.

Disruptive pioneer is not necessarily good investment even if the base idea is solid.

In the Dot-com bubble (1995-2000) many companies with good ideas eventually failed. There were several online book retailers, web search companies and online shopping sites, even online food delivery services. They were highly valued, but most of them went bankrupt. Amazon two Google survived (It took over decade for Amazon's stock valuation to recover).

We have now transportation boom. When the boom goes bust and regression hits, most run out of money and go bankrupt.

I liked it so much, I bought my own for my commute. It kept me from buying a second car, and ultimately saving 25 miles of driving each day.

Why didn't you buy an electric bike? For 25 miles that would be way more comfortable.

Holy crap. You ride on one of those standing electric scooters for at least 37 minutes each way?! (20 mph) That's a long time... I could understanding biking but not stand up scootering.

It's just standing for 37 minutes. I suppose you engage your core a bit here and there, but it really isn't an exercise like biking would be.

I love these scooters BTW, super convenient!

Sounds like 25miles total. 12.5 each way.

25 miles is a lot for a scooter

A 1x return on a large investment like these would not be good for a venture fund. They probably need to return 3x on the whole fund to get their carry/bonus, so a 3x return for a given investment is the bare minimum for success. They almost certainly would not have made these investments unless they believed they could make a return of >3x.

> They almost certainly would not have made these investments unless they believed they could make a return of >3x.

Softbank isn't like a traditional VC. They structured their fund like private equity where they retain a percentage of returns above x% per year. In addition to this, they take a 1% management fee regardless of returns.

For most VC's, you'd expect the carry to represent the majority of incentive. But, Softbank is unique in that their fund is $100bn. They take home a hefty $1b in management fees regardless of how their portfolio performs.

I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if they make 'safe' bets for the sake of boosting their allocation numbers, even if they think there's a nil chance of 3x EV.

Bird's latest round was led by Sequoia and Lime's latest round was led by GV, so I am not sure why the Softbank is relevant.

Perhaps Softbank funds the next rounds, but GV and Sequoia are still going to be looking for a much bigger exit than 1x.

Curious: What kind of preference is normal at this stage?

Fenwick publishes a quarterly survey of market terms for VC rounds. Their Q3 2018 report suggests ~10% of rounds are being done with a liquid pref >1x, and those terms are almost always between 1-2x. Given that these stats are for series A-E rounds, I would expect the liquid pref in these mega rounds to be very close to 1x if not 1x exactly. Source: https://www.fenwick.com/FenwickDocuments/Silicon-Valley-Vent...