Congratulations, Bird!
We’re pleased today to congratulate Travis VanderZanden and the Bird team on their NYSE listing, and on taking the next step in their journey to increase global availability of sustainable transportation.
It’s been just over three years since a few of us took our first Bird scooter ride down the Santa Monica boardwalk, on our way to meet with Travis and the early Bird team. At the time Bird had launched in just 5 cities but the product-market fit was instantaneous. The company grew rapidly by delighting riders and offering a win-win value proposition to cities across the country: more transportation options for commuters, less traffic congestion, and at long last a way to decrease carbon emissions at scale. From that early footprint of 5 cities Bird has grown to serve more than 350 regions across 4 continents, engineered 4 generations of its own hardware from the ground up, powered more than 100 million rides globally and eliminated more than 10,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions. From Chicago and New York to Palermo and Tel Aviv, Bird today is woven into the modern urban fabric.
Travis’ entrepreneurial journey has been riddled with both thrilling breakthroughs and unforeseeable setbacks. Bird made its initial mark by reimagining urban transportation. But just as the company geared up to accommodate peak ridership demand in the early spring of 2020, the Covid-19 global lockdown forced the team to reimagine ridership once again. Bird’s story is one of innovation, perseverance and grit, but it is just getting started. As we all take back to the outdoors, and as we return to the daily work commutes and new city adventures that brightened our lives before the pandemic, Bird once again is there for our delight. Driven by surging consumer demand and guided by a durable business model forged during the constraints of a pandemic, Bird is better positioned than ever to fulfill Travis’ original entrepreneurial vision.
Bird’s story is also one of firsts: it was the first to introduce shared mico-electric vehicles, the first to voluntarily implement safety measures like age limits and speed caps, the first to design and build its own hardware, and today the first micromobility company to trade as a public stock. We applaud Travis and the Bird team for the grit it took to get to this milestone and for the ongoing vision that will propel Bird from here.