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A comment on Bird lays off up to 5% of workforce. Parent comment

Re:Bird lays off up to 5% of workforce by pmart123 on Thursday March 14, 2019 @10:37PM (#19395955)
When a startup is roughly a year old, and its rival just raised $300M, alarm bells should go off in investor's heads, "If both these companies started a year ago, and it only takes $300M to fund the next one, and none of them have IP or even make their own scooter, maybe we shouldn't do this since there are no barriers to entry."
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Re:Bird lays off up to 5% of workforce by AndrewKemendo on Thursday March 14, 2019 @10:50PM (#19396015)
only takes 300M

That seems like quite the barrier to me. Also crazy to think that 1/3 of a billion dollars is considered trivial barrier.

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Re:Bird lays off up to 5% of workforce by pmart123 on Friday March 15, 2019 @12:26AM (#19396535)
https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/tiger-global-closes-bigg...

If you throw in NEA's new fund, that's five funds where $300M is less than 10% if they did the whole round, and if the economics are great, a bunch of growth equity funds.

It's crazy to me that you'd invest that much without having more data on the unit economics given none of these companies even have an advantage on making the underlying scooter. The more scooters you have and the more market share you have, the faster your bleed money. If the unit economics were great with off the rack scooters, what's to stop Lyft/Uber from adding a scooter option given they already have the demand side of "trying to get somewhere"?

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Re:Bird lays off up to 5% of workforce by Twirrim on Thursday March 14, 2019 @11:15PM (#19396130)
I was looking at the figures in that article and was just horrified at the sheer environmental impact of this whole fiasco.
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Re:Bird lays off up to 5% of workforce by evan_ on Friday March 15, 2019 @04:04AM (#19397598)
Have you seen the pictures of what must be tens of thousands of bike share bikes just sitting, unused, likely never to be used, in fields in China?

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversup...

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Re:Bird lays off up to 5% of workforce by saddestcatever on Friday March 15, 2019 @10:22AM (#19399940)
Wow. That's incredible. Thanks for sharing!
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Re:Bird lays off up to 5% of workforce by pmart123 on Friday March 15, 2019 @08:04AM (#19398860)
Wow. Those pictures are ridiculous.
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