YouSaid · the spoken record

Wayne Ting

lines on the record: 80
first: 2025-01-30
most recent: 2025-01-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Thank you so much for doing this. Really, really enjoy this conversation. Love your podcast. Keep doing your great work because I think you bring a conversational tone to important conversations that then I think disarms the, I feel like you have a great touch in the way you interview people. Doesn't feel like a business interview”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People usually don't ask about my recovery journey. And I'm Harry, I'm really glad he brought it up because it's really important part of who I am today and the leader that I hope has become. I think people are afraid to, if it's too personal or too prime.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would probably try to see my friends, my family, my significant other. The people of my life really is the thing that makes this life worthwhile. I threw myself a big fortieth birthday party a month before my stroke and a hundred friends from around the world flew in to Santa Fe, New Mexico where I was living at the time to celebrate.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would love to be the CEO of Lyon. When I was in the hospital, the thing that I thought most about was how can I get back to work? A lot of people say like, what did you change after suffering a stroke? And I think a lot of people maybe think the answer would be, oh, I want to have this big change in my life. The thing that always really struck me was when I debated deeply, do I want to quit my job, go do something totally different, especially if life is short. Is this what I want to spend the rest of my life doing? And the incredible thing is when I really ask myself that question, I was like, yes, I want to, even if I'm going to die in the next five years, I want to be spending the next five years working on Lime's mission to decarbonize transportation. The hospital was in a rehab, in inpatient rehab the next day after I left the hospital. I went back to work full-time.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it was nothing very hard. I came out very young though. I came out to my parents when I was, I think like 11 years old. So I think the hardest thing was, I think my mom was like, do you even know what you're talking about? What does it mean to be gay when you're 11? And I think that's a fair question. But I remember thinking like whatever people are describing, that doesn't feel like reflects who I am. And I felt like I wanted to be honest and transparent with my parents about it.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's not being spent focused on how do we build a better business. So this, can I bring my full self and be accepted at work is so important to us. And I'm very, very proud that most people at line feel like they can. They can be their full self. But the fact that a lot of people don't feel like they can bring their full self to work is maybe the answer to your question, Harry, that I still think there's a lot of work to be done.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I absolutely still believe there is a lot of biases that exist in all workplaces. And maybe even in our own hearts that we are not unconscious biases for sure real. And there's more we can do to make sure that people feel heard and included in the workplace. One of the things I'm most proud of at line, we do a biannual company survey on employee sentiment. The question we score the highest is, do I feel like I belong? Can I bring my full self to work? And like 90 plus percent of Limer say they believe they can. I'm gay and I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. I was an immigrant from my parents are from Taiwan, moved to Nebraska when I was young and the feeling of trying to fit in was always this thought that's kind of in your head. I think the difference between inclusion, the opposite of inclusion is fitting in. And it's spending any second of your life thinking about how do I fit in so I can be accepted in this environment is wasted time.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think diversity and inclusion, the commitment for diversity and inclusion at a company feels very, very different than maybe some of the criticisms that you hear about wool culture.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll say this for lying because so many companies have backed away from the goals of diversity and inclusion. I feel this is a year where we really leaned forward because it is not, we didn't do it because it was a fad. We did it because it was the right thing to do. We absolutely believe a company benefits when it has diversity of thought. The most dangerous place to be is groupthink. When everyone thinks the same, that's very dangerous for a company. True genuine commitment to recruiting people of all backgrounds makes LIMA better company. And this year was a year where I feel like a lot of companies, especially around LGBTQ rights, you felt like I saw a lot of companies pull back on what they did for pride. This is your line doubled down on making sure that our customers and our employees know that these are things that we believe in regardless of whether or not it's in vogue, whether or not it's cool or not. And I do hear and understand some of the criticism of Wolf culture.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“May not be the type of answer you're looking for, but I'll say I'm a strong believer in Silicon Valley and the tech community. If you ask me for the last like decade, I would have said this belief in diversity, equity, inclusion is a genuinely felt moral principle. But if you ask me now, I'm not sure. I feel like what shocked me is how many companies, how many VCs have abandoned the values of diversity, equity, inclusion over the last year to now openly mocking it in ways that I could have never expected before.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably be San Diego. Gangs of people coming into San Diego and stealing the bikes and scooters and driving into Mexico. So it was hard for us to police and react to it.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The use of tariffs in kind of like some of these Chinese electric vehicles, both in the United States and in Europe, I feel like is justifiable because you want to make sure people have a level playing field. I think one of the lies of the last couple of decades is that free trade benefits everybody. It doesn't benefit the person working on the factory plant for the last 20 years who's going to lose this job and have no ability to find a new job. domestic production of cars is crucial and not only for economic consumption, job creation, but also to ensure that in the long run there is a domestic capacity to produce cars. So I think creating some tariff so we can level the playing field between domestic producers and foreign producers feels fair.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe micro mobility is the future of urban transportation that in 20 30 years we're going to be shocked that we had a system where each person owned a car and drove themselves in a 4,000 car. Cars on a global basis kill more than 1.3 million people every single year. We don't even talk about it. We accept that as the cost of doing business. Imagine if, like when 737 Max killed a couple hundred people, we grounded the plane and said, we're not going to allow this to fly until we figure out what's wrong. The number of people that are killed on a car is multitude, magnitude greater. And we just accept it as the way we do business and the cost of living in urban society today. We're going to look back 30, 40 years from now and be like, that was insane. The amount of waste, money, and pollution that we were willing to accept for a little bit of convenience is absolute insanity.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paralyzed and trying to imagine how do you make a comeback, you don't feel like you are alone on that journey. And that was the thing that was probably the scariest. I was like, am I the only CEO who's going to have to figure out how to overcome a stroke and get back to work and hopefully lead Lyme to hire greater heights? But the more we talk about it, the more we support each other. Hopefully the less table it becomes as a topic.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thoughtful in the response that he gave. And the biggest thing he said to me was you got to let that go. You can't spend your life worrying about how you're going to be the person that you were. This is your new reality. How do you make the best out of this new reality that you live in? That's the only question you should be asking yourself. And hearing that from somebody like Mark, who's been a phenomenal CEO in his term out of Oscar, has been one of the most incredible things I've seen over the last couple of years, but also the kindness that he took two hours out of his busy day just to listen to me. And almost like play the role of a psychologist and the feedback and the advice he gave me was so wonderful. The positives of this year struggling with a stroke is that I got to meet a lot of people. Almost every CEO that I meet have had their own health struggles and have had their own challenges. And how do we normalize all of us talking about them more so that when you are in a hospital, half”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Myself asked, but the person I am today sometimes isn't matching kind of my own self-perception. So I feel like a lot of my days are filled with disappointment, disappointment in myself, disappointment in how I perform. I've really enjoyed this conversation with you, Harry, but I'm sure the second we get off this podcast, I will be very disappointed in myself in so many different ways, places where I didn't answer the question correctly. It's hard to go through a moment where you used to be this person and now you're a different person and you're still doing your very best, but those two things don't match up. I would say one person I want to give a shout out to is Mark Bertolini, the CEO of Oscar Health. He wrote a great book about his health struggles and he suffered, I believe, a ski accent. His book is fantastic. I think it's called Visionary Leadership. To his credit, somebody introduced us and he spent two hours over Zoom just listening to me complaining about all the challenges I face. And he just was so”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harry, first, thank you for asking that. I actually public about having had a stroke earlier this year, in part because when I was in the hospital recovering, I was like Googling around trying to find CEOs who've gone through something similar. And what was surprising to me was I found not a ton of examples of CEOs talking about health struggles. I think part of it is that when you do kind of a podcast where you do media, you want to put your best foot forward, whatever that means. And that doesn't mean talking about where people are struggling. And so I remember when I couldn't find a ton of examples, I remember thinking to myself, I need to go out there and talk about my health struggles more publicly. So it's less of a taboo. I do think this has been the hardest year of my life on a personal basis. And I think the hardest thing is that when you suffer a stroke, like I still can't move my left arm and my left hand, there's a lot of like physical neurological ailments that you're struggling to get through. And I still remember the person I was and the person that I still see.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Lyme's business metrics is in a great spot. I think most of the things we got to get ready are around kind of internal controls, how fast we can close a book, how quickly can we like file a 10K, 10Q, the types of things that are part of like that are necessary and critical to be a public traded company. But as a private company, you're not thinking about filing your 10Q in seven days after the quarter.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's probably still more work we need to do internally around things like accounting and controls that probably will take a bit more time to be ready.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These markets go through kind of these trends. There's moments where there's a lot of IPOs that go out and there's a lot of interest invest in IPOs. And then the mood shifts. And then people are less willing to invest in IPO. And certainly it would impact how much money you can raise, the valuation you can get. You can't ever time the market. But I think being generally in an upcycle, in an IPO pro psycho is probably helpful for an IPO.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Lime is a great future candidate as a publicly traded company. We are the market leader in a very fast-growing industry with a big TAM. And we have demonstrated over many years a differentiated financial results, both in top line growth and in bottom line. So I feel like Lyme is a great candidate to be public one day. When and whether we do it, a lot of it does depend on the macro environment. I think it was great to see service tighten go out.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know if we ever shared that, but I would say we have a convertible round. So I don't know if there's any specific valuation to the round.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a marketplace out there. If every VC is telling you I'm willing to give you money at this lower valuation, that it may just be the reality you face. And I think as CEOs, as managers facing reality is super important. Living in fantasy always results in worse business outcomes.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. I think any CEO, any founder cannot use downround willy-nilly because investors have believed in you, invested in you, and downrounds are very, very destructive for your investor base. And when you lose that trust, it's hard to get it back. But I would also say when I see companies sometimes unwilling to raise around because it's going to be lower than this like fictitious number they have in their own head. I see this with like IPOs now where like companies are like, oh, well, I can't go public unless I hit the valuation I had in 2020. And that valuation is fake. And then so you're making a rational business decision because you're trying to hold on to a dream, a pipe dream that never should have happened in the first place. I think it's important to not be so keyed in on evaluation unless you believe that valuation is justified in today's world. And whether or not you should raise and on what valuation it”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we have our own hardware, because we have our own operations, because we have great operators on the ground, if we buy a competitor, we may not want their hardware. That's a lot of lost CapEx. We may not want to use their operators. We may want to take our own operational model and put it over their business. So by doing that, we're actually essentially saying we don't, we're not really buying much when we look at M&A. So instead, the alternative is like, can we invest an equivalent amount of money that would take to buy that company and invest in our own business? Will we get a better ROI, better return on that capital invested than buying a company? Because usually you have to pay up to get control.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're absolutely right. We haven't done much MA. The only we've done two M&A deals. One is to buy jump from Uber. And I think that was an incredible deal. It came with a lot of cost because it was a down round for our prior investors. What it allowed us to do was to really deeply integrate with Uber and become the micro-ability provider on the Uber platform. And that was critical. And it also allowed us to get the capital we needed to survive the pandemic. Line wouldn't have survived if we did not do that deal. But I think most M&A deals are value destructive. And that's probably the thought that's always in the back of my head as I think about new M&A deals.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is the biggest change in mindset. I would say my first four years as CEO, I was constantly worried about line going out of business, even as we kind of got out of the pandemic. And I remember I would wake up in the middle of the night just worried about the company because I felt so responsible. All of the people who stayed at line, who believed them, gave me a chance. I felt enormously responsible to them enormous like debt of gratitude to the employees especially, but certainly to the investors who believed, who invested in Lyme, to Dara, to uber. And this feeling like, oh, we could fail at any time. Just wait on me, wait on me all the time. I never slept while I was always waking up in the middle of the night, worried about A or B. I would go, I would go, I would fall asleep dreaming about lying and everything that could go wrong with lying. Number one, we got to self-sustaining free cash flow positive. It was the first time in many years where I stopped dreaming about lime. I dream about Lyme now.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You are, unless you can generate cash flow from your own operations. Last year was our first year getting to unlever free cash flow positive. So we were able to fund all of our capital expenditure and all of our growth from our internal profits. And that is a big turning point for line, for micro mobility generally, because now we're able to continue to grow our business without this forever treadmill or raising more money from VCs because we can, we've been able to fund our capital expenditure investments from profits from the business. Before when somebody raises more money, we're like, wow, we got to go raise more money. But now I'm like, we can actually just, we can generate our own cash flow for that investment.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a fair push, Gary. I do think without the early funding line wouldn't be where it is today. But if the funding continued to flow without real assessment of whether or not a company is doing a good job or bad job, I think line would not be the global leader right now because it would allow our kind of worse managed competitors to continue to scale and grow and gain market share through simply taking VC money and setting it on fire.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Focused on the short term. And I felt like that's much harder to compete with an irrational competitor with unlimited funding. But when all of the VCs moved on and it was hard to raise money, that's when focusing on the great operations, great hardware, great government relations, that's when those investments actually started paying dividends. Being in a hype psycho is actually bad for startups because it makes it allows you to not actually focus on the things that truly matter.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. I would say these hype cycles are generally bad for companies because it allows them to avoid learning hard lessons. I feel like Lyme couldn't really assert our leadership in the industry until VCs kind of moved on. If you could always raise money, even if your results are bad, it masks your bad operations. And it actually also masks a better business because you can always raise more money to them plow it back into growth, into discounts. And you can discount your weight to a lot of market share. One of the things that I'm very proud of with Lime's financial results is that we've been able to sustain 30% growth, 30% top line growth over four years, top line Kager. But each to the last four years, we expanded our margins, which means that we weren't just growing by irrationally discounting. But if you have unlimited venture capital and more to come down the road, then you can start acting in ways that are not focused on building a good long-term business.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tactics. I think Paul was describing good ways to manage a company. But then he assigned, these are what founders do, these are what hired managers do. And I just don't know if that's necessarily true.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I read Paul's blog. I feel like he was describing just good management hygiene. But then he called it founder mode. I feel like digging into details, making sure you trust but you verify is what all good CEOs must do. The reason why my fellow was crucial to start my tenure by traveling the world and seeing warehouse up close is that I can't trust if Harry tells me everything is going well in XYZ city, but the results are terrible. Going there and seeing and double clicking and making sure that people know that you're somebody who will dig into the details is crucial to driving the results that you want. But at the same time, I think delegation, like making sure you hire great people and delegating and giving them the wrong way to run is also, I think, not a higher management specific trait. I think great founders who make the transition and stay with a company oftentimes employ the”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never promise people this is the only round because you never know because you're doing it as a way to save the company, to bring the cost in line with the revenue expectations. If the world gets worse, if your revenue expectation gets worse, then you likely need to bring your cost down even further. So unless you are 100% sure you can make that promise, don't promise people.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we did end up doing two rounds of layoffs. And I would say that is never a good thing. Like when you're doing layoffs, it's always, if it always feels so painful, too painful. But I would say it's never painful enough. The most painful thing is coming back three months later with another round of layoffs. And I would say not cutting deep and hard enough was probably one of the worst decision.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Best decision. So we shut down operations. At the beginning of COVID, we shut down operations in most of our markets, which then also drove down a lot of the revenues. And one of the best decisions was LIME is actually a solution for COVID because people were looking for open air, single passenger ways to move around, but restarting our business on a global scale pretty soon after COVID, when we still didn't have all the information was critical. Getting us back into the rhythm of the offense, I think nothing is waiting around for the world to end on you is not a good place to be. We needed momentum. We needed to show that we can generate revenue.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would say cutting deeper than maybe you would expect was really important because if we come back for another round of layoffs, that's when I think a management team really loses credibility. So we thought it was important for us to cut deep and cut quickly.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Single day for an hour, for months. And we just start by saying, what are all the biggest problems? And let's just go around the horn. And everybody had different problems. Because even with a new capital, there's still lots of challenges dealing with, do we restart business? What are we going to do with certain? And that's what we've got to bring our costs down. So when I first joined, it was also immediately clear we need to go through layoffs and cost cutting. And it's always hard when you're doing that and you're new to a job and you're trying to establish credibility because that is one of those things that sometimes can hurt trust and hurt credibility. One of the lessons you learn is that sometimes in life you just have a choice between bad and worse. I think trying to take over a business in the middle of a transportation business in the middle of COVID, most of our choices were bad. So in those moments, the worst thing you can do is not make a decision because now you're bad and worse decision becomes worse and worser. So making a call quickly”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hardest part is like you're trying to learn how to be a CEO, you're trying to build your own credibility with the team, but we didn't have like floors to walk, meetings to sit in on. And as you want to demonstrate progress quickly, but I would say to the credit of the leadership team, I think that the leadership team that Brad and Toby Bill was quite strong. And a lot of them did leave the company because it wasn't clear where line was going. But I have a lot of respect for the people who stayed, who gave me a chance, who took a chance on me. We met every single day for now. Every day we wake up, we kick off a Zoom meeting with the entire executive team. And it was just all the problems we're facing in the world. Let's put it out on the table. I think in a crisis, you want to make sure information is flowing, that people are honest. I can't help you solve something that I don't know exists. So information flow and creating a trust-based relationship with the executive team was super important in those early months. Remember, we met everyone.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Micro mobility business called Jump. I pitched Dara at this idea of letting them sell jump to us so we can then bring the two business together, take out costs, and then we can be the micro mobility option on Uber. And to Dara's credit, he led the round and through that round I became CEOs. I became CEO after COVID had started when this round came together.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we started like every company builds a budget and a plan for the year. In 2020, we had our budget, we had our plan, but nobody builds a plan where your revenues fall 90, 95% in a matter of days, which is what happened in the early weeks of COVID. We knew going into 2020, we needed to go raise more money. But suddenly what we thought was maybe six months of runway was like 20 days of runway because all of our revenues went away. You still had a lot of your costs. You have warehouse costs. We have employees on the payroll. So suddenly you had all this cost and then your revenue went away completely. And we needed to raise emergency funding to get through COVID at a moment where I would say transportation so much was unknown in the beginning of 2020. And transportation was not the sexiest place to put your money going into COVID, given all the uncertainty. This is also where I would really give Dara a lot of credit because we went to Uber and Uber at the time owned and operated their own.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Idiosyncratic reasons, but like I would say we hate losing. And that culture of hating losing probably more than liking winning drives a lot of our success.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lina has won almost every competitive RFP since we launched. This is why when we do lose a competitive RFP, I remember a very, very deeply.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Convincing more second tier cities to take a chance on micromobility that this is a solution for your city has been, I would say, a longer journey. But I think it also means there's an enormous amount of growth that's still ahead because most smaller secondary cities still don't have micromobility.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The places where I think it's been hardest to convince the local regulators to help to bring microbiality in are probably smaller second tier third tier cities. One of the things that surprised me when I first joined Lyme, my expectation was we were only going to work in the biggest mega cities in the world where density congestion, affordability, the problems of transportation are most acute. I think what surprised me is that we actually do really well in smaller cities. We do really well in places like Omaha, Nebraska, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Oklahoma. We really do really well in Milton Keynes in the UK. Places where the regulators may not, this may not be the first solution they think about.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I actually, first, I want to say enormous respect for Marcus. Marcus actually is developing their own hardware. He and I caught up recently. I was surprised that he was developing his own hardware. But to his credit, I believe they are doing it. I trust he's telling the truth. So Bold may be the other player that's developing their own hardware. The challenge with buying off the shelf is that, Harry, if my business is to sell you more scooters and parts, I'm not so incentivized to make the decay rate low, make it more efficient. Because the better my scooters are, the less money I make. There is a disincentive for off-the-shelf hardware manufacturers to make their hardware better.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a winner take most market dynamics. So being number one has a lot of advantages. Going back to the point about reliability and Reichert as a customer, you want to be on the platform with the most number of drivers. And the drivers want to be on the platform with the most number of riders. So when you are the number one platform on reliability, you suddenly gain a bunch of market share because that reliability is a positive flywheel. More of drivers want to be on the number one platform, more riders want to be on the number one platform that then further improves the reliability of the system, which then draws more customer in. Similar dynamics exist in micromobility because scale gives you more data. We talked about kind of demand forecast and we have more data to then build better supply positioning, better demand forecasting tools. The more cities we win, the more line is the obvious choice for other cities to pick when they're thinking about which operators to go with. Every city wants to know you're bringing the best and latest technology. Lime is the only operator.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the hardest part is that there's not one thing. Whenever I do these interviews, people say, what's the one thing that you did right? I'm like, it's doing a thousand little things right. It is a true game of inches. And when you do a thousand little things better than your competitors, then you have a different business model. And the great thing is when it's a thousand little things, it's also hard to replicate. What I love about the business model is that Lima has been advertising. We're profitable, free cash flow positive in a very public way. When most of our competitors have not been able to deliver similar results, even though there's clearly a way to do it. And I think the reason why they haven't been able to replicate is because it's very hard to do what we do.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. As long as the incremental revenue between the two locations is greater than the cost, it will cost us to hire you to go move it for us. So every move task has to be ROI positive.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Higher revenue potential position, if that incremental revenue is more than the cost that we will pay to move that scooter or bike, it creates an automatic move task in our system. And then so how an operator, how they move around a city, what they do next is controlled by the software. So we, in many ways, it is our operations.”
2025-01-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source