Bird's management team flies the coop
The latest shakeup saw Shane Torchiana replace co-founder Travis VanderZanden as CEO
Two weeks ago, Bird announced insider Shane Torchiana would replace Travis VanderZanden as CEO, completing a management shuffle that has steadily stripped the Bird co-founder of power. Before elevating Torchiana to CEO, the board in June promoted him to president from COO, before which he was SVP of corporate development and strategy.1 Both the CEO and president titles were previously held by VanderZanden, who no longer features anywhere on the Bird management team page, though for now he remains chairman of the board.
While VanderZanden has been the biggest shakeup to Bird’s management team, many of the top people have left or stepped back to advisory roles in the past year. At the same time that Bird announced Torchiana’s appointment as CEO, it also said Ben Lu, an external recruit, would replace Yibo Ling as CFO. In fact, since Bird BRDS 0.00%↑ went public via SPAC late last year, more than half of its management team has turned over. Other prominent departures include:
Head of comms Rebecca Hahn, who left for Twitter in July
General counsel Wendy Mantell, who transitioned to a consultant role after the SPAC deal closed last fall and was no longer working for Bird as of April 2022, according to her LinkedIn profile
Chief vehicle officer Scott Rushforth, who stepped back to an advisor role for one year as of Sept. 22. Per an SEC filing, Rushforth will receive a $400,000 consulting fee, company-paid COBRA premiums, and continued equity vesting as an advisor. A Bird spokeswoman told me the company hasn’t appointed a new chief vehicle officer.
SVP of revenue Tom O’Brien, who transitioned to a part-time advisor role in August, per his LinkedIn page
Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch and a Bird board member who resigned with the CEO change, with Torchiana expected to fill his seat. Kan was a VanderZanden acolyte. In July 2018, he boasted on Twitter about Bird’s “amazing growth trajectory” and described his initial investment as “founder driven, because I believe in Travis VanderZanden and had a relationship.”
In other words, a lot has changed in the span of a year! When Bird was shopping around its SPAC in 2021, the first point of its “Why Bird wins” investment thesis was its “visionary, founder-led management team with a culture of innovation.” On the one hand, this is par for the course in Silicon Valley, where VCs ‘invest in people’ based on ‘vibes.’ Some amount of management turnover is also arguably healthy following an IPO or SPAC, as steering a public company requires different leadership skills than scaling a privately held startup. On the other, it’s notable just how much management churn Bird has experienced in the past 12 months. Or, as my friend said when I showed him this image, “yikes, that looks like a WeWork management tree.”
Management isn’t the only thing to change since Bird started trading publicly on the New York Stock Exhange on Nov. 5, 2021. Over the past 11 months, the e-scooter stock has lost 95% of its value, most recently closing at $0.40 per share. In June, the NYSE warned Bird that it risked delisting after its average stock price fell below $1 for 30 consecutive trading days. Bird has six months to rectify that by getting its closing price above $1 on the last day of a month, and its average share price above $1 over the 30-day period of that month. With the six-month window halfway elapsed, the stock so far shows no signs of recovering and instead has fallen even further. After Dec. 31, Bird still has until its 2023 annual meeting to fix things as it’s notified the NYSE that it intends to consider other options such as a reverse stock split that would require stockholder approval.2
That stock price chart is an unfortunate mirror image of this growth chart Bird teased in its investor dek last year:
No timeline or y-axis? Add that to the axes of evil files!
Also, remember when Bird was “on track to outpace DoorDash”? (Bird has done $115 million in revenue so far this year, about 30% of the way toward that $401 million year-end target from the investor dek.)
Ok, enough investor dek charts, back to reality.
Thanks to the collapse of its stock price, Bird now has a market capitalization of $110 million. That’s a sad 4% sliver of the $2.8 billion private valuation that Bird peaked at in January 2020 and roughly 10% of the $1.1 billion in financing that investors poured into it. Since the start of the year, Bird has laid off 23% of staff and scuppered its nascent retail sales business. The company has repeatedly promised to be profitable on an adjusted basis in the third quarter, when it should realize the bulk of its savings from cost-cutting. In Q2, Bird posted a $310 million net loss, which it attributed largely to impairments and write-offs on the value of long-lived assets, on $77 million in revenue, and an adjusted ebitda loss of $19.1 million.
On top of these financial woes, Bird has also struggled with super low utilization. In the second quarter, ended June 30, Bird’s fleet of 110,000 deployed vehicles (mostly e-scooters, but some e-bikes) averaged just 1.5 rides per day. Believe it or not, that was an improvement on the first quarter when deployed vehicles averaged just 1 ride per day. One!!!! Those poor scooters, spending most of their days locked up, or worse, lying on the ground, waiting for a rider to rescue them. In its SPAC investor dek, Bird forecast 1.9 avg. rides per deployed vehicle in 2022, which isn’t impossible, but would take a really strong second half (2.5-2.6 avg. daily rides per quarter) to achieve.
Torchiana has promised to use the rest of this year as well as the next to “recalibrate our deployment strategy to match increased local supply with local demand in cities, and for pricing structures to continue to shift to better fit with an increase in commuter use cases.” It’s the right idea, but at this point it could take more than a deployment strategy shift for Bird to rebound. Maybe that’s why so much of that visionary, founder-led management team took flight.
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Updated 10 October 2022 to correct that Torchiana was promoted from SVP of corporate development to COO and then to president, not directly from SVP to president.
Updated 11 October 2022 to include additional context from Bird on its plans to cure its stock price non-compliance, including with options like a reverse stock split that require shareholder approval.
When blitzscaling was sweeping across Silicon Valley, Bird became a poster child of the belief that the venture with the most VC money has an unassailable competitive advantage. At the time, Bird became the fastest venture to achieve unicorn status.
But what Bird really demonstrated was that when a company with a flawed business model attracts the most money, its race for global domination often turns into a race to oblivion.
As for the new CEO, I'm glad you write more clearly than Torchiana's statement of Bird's strategic intent, which sounds like a tortured mashup of consultantese English.