Our first Bird experience was a lot of fun. We loved the beach boardwalk ride experience… gliding along effortlessly through a soothing seascape (video).
These electric scooters are dockless. You find one lying around (they were scattered around everywhere), use the mobile app to unlock and ride, and leave it wherever you end up.
Bird grew from 0 to a $1B valuation in 8 months, led by Sequoia. “Tech investors have never before participated in such a rapid and rocketing price spike.” — Biz Insider
And that comes after a huge influx to others: bike and scooter sharing companies raised $260M in the first five months of 2018 according to Pitchbook.
The founding CEO of Bird, Travis VanderZanden, came from Uber and Lyft prior. He saw the data showing 40% of urban rides being under 2 miles, and during rush hour, taking longer than it would take by foot.
With Bird and Lime and Ofo and Spin, we see a Chinese business copied in America. In China, there are more than 10,000 eBike and eScooter manufacturers, up from 1,300 in 2012. Ofo has a $3B valuation and 9 billion rides logged already; Mobike was acquired for $2.7B by Meituan-Dianping. I tracked the rise of e2W vehicles in China from 1994 to 2010 as it crossed 150 million, and wrote “The scale is staggering — in a couple years, there will be more EVs in China than passenger vehicles in the U.S. And the U.S. was the largest passenger vehicle market in the world.”
A little 2018 update: you can browse “108,579 products found from 10,857 Electric Bicycle manufacturers” at Made-In-China.
According to the EU’s official journal, imports from major Chinese e-bike manufacturers jumped 82% in 2018. — Electric
My daughter figured out how to use some as manual scooters…. #FreeBird 
And here is my post and 
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