Bird founder Travis VanderZanden is selling his Miami mansion
The Coral Gables property is now worth more than TVZ's entire Bird stock holding
Hello and welcome to Oversharing, a newsletter about the sharing economy. If you’re returning from last time, thanks! If you’re new, nice to have you!
I’m back in London after bouncing around the U.S. for a few weeks. I’m also trying something new with Oversharing. Instead of publishing the weekly roundup for free, I’m going to make some of the deeper dives—like today’s post—public and put the roundup behind the paywall. It’s an experiment! Always be hustling! We’ll see how it goes!
Last summer, as Bird was gearing up to go public via SPAC, Bird co-founder and chairman Travis VanderZanden bought a mansion.
The 13,816-sq-ft waterfront property in Coral Gables, a ‘garden city’ just outside Miami, Florida, befit an e-scooter mogul. It boasted nine bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, a wet bar, wood and marble flooring, a gym, a private dock, and an “infinity-edge pool and spa.” It also came with a four-car garage, though surely a micromobility acolyte like VanderZanden had no use for that.
Built fairly recently in 2015, 325 Leucadendra Drive nonetheless had a dramatic history. The property was sold in 2016 for $16.5 million to Samark Jose Lopez Bello, an alleged Venezuelan drug trafficker who now features on ICE’s “most wanted” list. In July 2020, after Lopez Bello’s properties had been seized, the home was sold by the U.S. Marshals Service at a public auction for $12.25 million. The new owner, 777 Florida Properties LLC, flipped it to VanderZanden for $21.8 million, a 78% markup, almost exactly one year later.
So I have some good news for all the Silicon Valley billionaires searching for their next home: 325 Leucadendra Drive is back on the market.
Back when VanderZanden purchased the mansion, both he and Bird were riding high. In May 2021, the company announced plans to go public in a SPAC deal that valued it at around $2.3 billion and provided $160 million in fresh capital. The “business combination” solidified VanderZanden’s control of the company. Per the prospectus, VanderZanden would get 34.7 million shares of common stock, equal to 11.8-13.2% of ownership, plus more than 70% of voting power, thanks to a dual-class stock structure that gave him control of Class X shares with 20 votes each compared to regular Class A shares with one vote. On a call with investors that May, VanderZanden said Bird was “at an inflection point” with a “clear path to company-level profitability.”
I mention all this because it might explain why that summer the Bird co-founder decided to buy a former drug trafficker’s mansion for $21.8 million, even as he was reportedly still attempting to unload the Bel Air property he purchased from Daily Show host Trevor Noah in September 2020 for $21.7 million in cash. (TVZ did manage to sell another home in Santa Monica for $9 million, a tidy profit over the $8.1 million he paid in September 2018.) Unlike VanderZanden’s all-cash purchaes in Bel Air and Santa Monica, the Coral Gables property had a $13.2 million mortgage, according to data from PropertyShark. That, plus the subsequent collapse of Bird’s stock price, might also help to explain why 325 Leucadendra Drive is up for sale now.
I obviously don’t know the details of TVZ’s personal finances, and neither he nor Bird comms responded to my questions about the Coral Gables proprety, but here is some basic back-of-the-envelope math based on publicly available documents:
In Bird’s registration statement from November 2021, VanderZanden owned 35,268,992 shares of common stock, equal to a 12.9% stake in the company and 74.2% of voting power, thanks to those Class X shares (identical to Class A other than in voting rights). At Bird’s $8.40 closing share price on Nov. 5, its first day of trading, that stake would have been worth about $296 million
In Bird’s most recent proxy statement ahead of its annual shareholder meeting this past June, VanderZanden held 35,657,642 shares of common stock, for 12.8% of ownership and 74% of voting power
On Monday Oct. 10, 2022, Bird (BRDS) closed at $0.3675 per share
At $0.3675 per share, VanderZanden’s 35.7 million shares of Bird stock would be worth about $13.1 million, a staggering 96% drop in value from November 2021
Lest you forgot, $13.1 million is less than the reported value of the mortgage on VanderZanden’s Miami mansion. It’s about 60% of what he paid for the property last summer. Or, as CrunchBase observed late last month, “Bird Founder’s Stake Now Worth Less Than His Miami Mansion.”
Presumably, VanderZanden has sources of wealth other than his Bird shares. Before he founded the e-scooter firm, TVZ had various other positions including chief operating officer at Lyft and VP of global driver growth at Uber (yes, he was the other Uber Travis), back when those companies were still young and in their growth-at-all-costs phase. In 2014, TVZ was accused by Lyft of stealing confidential documents before he left for Uber and soliciting other Lyft employees to leave too. VanderZanden settled the lawsuit on undisclosed terms in 2016, shortly before the case would have gone to trial. The point, aside from the dubious reputation of startup bros named Travis, is that VanderZanden was early and fairly high up at both Lyft and Uber, and you’d imagine he made a good amount of money from that.
Since Bird went public, VanderZanden has sold only a small amount of Bird shares, roughly 857,000 worth $1.38 million, according to SEC filings. The two most recent transactions, 511,000-odd shares worth $265,000, were sold to cover tax obligations related to restricted stock units, a common practice among U.S. corporate execs. I point this out because it’s another good illustration of the ramifications of Bird’s stock price collapse. The further the share price falls, the more shares VanderZanden has to sell just to cover basic tax withholding obligations.
Anyway, with Bird BRDS 0.00%↑ trading as a penny stock, it seems safe to say that a good chunk of VanderZanden’s wealth these days is tied up in his Miami mansion. The home is listed for $39.9 million, an 83% markup on what VanderZanden bought it for last year (not to mention the equivalent of 35% of Bird’s market cap at the current share price). That sounds like an ambitious ask, though Miami’s luxury property market was one of the hottest in the world last year and is expected to stay hot through 2022, according to a research forecast from global property consultancy Knight Frank. Who can say! The next owner might be out there! Plus if there’s one thing we know VanderZanden is definitely good at, it’s selling overpriced assets.
Notes:
Bird comms was displeased with a couple things in my previous post on their management team departures. I’ve made one correction regarding the order of Shane Torchiana’s promotion to CEO.
EMEA spokeswoman Amy Grimshaw expressed by email that: “Your drawing over the management slide does not reflect that Travis has become chairman. You have a cross through his name which according to your key, suggests he has left the company which is not the case.” To this I can only say that I am not a graphic designer and did my best with the limited markup tools available in Skitch, and also that I didn’t cross out Travis’s face, only his CEO title. Also, it says in the first paragraph of the post that VanderZanden is board chairman.
Grimshaw also asked me to keep in mind that Bird is “always happy to check for accuracies before you publish as we do with other journalists.” I don’t want to lend any credence to this claim, but if you’re a journalist letting Bird vet your stories before publication—please don’t do this. Oversharing never would.