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

Summary

Summary of 20VC Episode: Wayne Ting on Lime's Transformation and Leadership

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
• Host: Harry Stebbings
• Guest: Wayne Ting, CEO of Lime
• Release Date: January 27, 2025

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1. Introduction

In this compelling episode of The Twenty Minute VC, host Harry Stebbings sits down with Wayne Ting, the CEO of Lime, to delve into Lime's remarkable turnaround from a struggling micromobility startup to a global leader in the industry. The conversation covers Lime's operational strategies, financial recovery, the impact of COVID-19, and Wayne's personal journey overcoming a stroke.

2. Challenges at Lime Before Wayne's Tenure

Wayne Ting begins by sharing the dire situation Lime faced when he joined the company. “When I first joined Lime, I think we were losing $3 for every dollar of revenue. The daily decay rate was 3%. So in the course of 30 days, your entire fleet was gone...” ([00:00]). This unsustainable financial state threatened Lime's survival, setting the stage for the necessary transformations ahead.

3. Wayne's Mentorship at Uber

Prior to Lime, Wayne worked under Dara at Uber during a tumultuous period for the ride-sharing giant. He credits Dara with instilling strong ethical values and effective leadership. “Dara brought a very unique set of leadership traits that in many ways challenge Uber to think about how can we be a better company and a better team.” ([04:30]). This mentorship underscored the importance of doing the right thing in business decisions.

4. Joining Lime and Initial Challenges

Wayne joined Lime in early 2018 when the company was rapidly expanding globally, primarily focusing on scooters. The primary challenge was Lime's "upside-down" business model, characterized by high operational losses and a rapid scooter decay rate. “The business was completely upside down,” he explains ([07:21]), highlighting the urgency for a strategic overhaul.

5. Data-Driven Solutions and Operational Improvements

Recognizing the lack of accurate data, Wayne spearheaded the development of DataLine, an internal tool to monitor operational metrics across regions. “We need to give him real accurate data so that he can make the right decisions.” ([07:50]). By focusing on key metrics like trips per vehicle per day and revenue per trip, Lime could identify inefficiencies and areas for improvement.

6. Hardware Innovations and Reducing Decay Rate

A significant shift involved investing in proprietary hardware. Unlike competitors who used off-the-shelf scooters, Lime began designing and engineering their own models. Wayne details the enhancements made to reduce the decay rate: “Swapping costs were cut by half. It remains our biggest cost, but it was crucial for profitability.” ([25:25]). Innovations such as swappable batteries and air-filled tires improved durability and user experience, drastically lowering the daily decay rate from 3% to a sustainable annual rate.

7. Financial Turnaround and EBITDA Achievement

Through meticulous operational improvements and hardware investments, Lime transformed its financial trajectory. “Last year we did over $90 million in company-wide EBITDA.” ([16:27]). This turnaround not only stabilized the company but also set Lime apart from competitors who were unable to achieve similar financial health.

8. Impact of COVID-19 and Emergency Funding

The COVID-19 pandemic posed unprecedented challenges, causing a steep 90% drop in revenues. Wayne recounts the critical decision to secure emergency funding through a deal with Uber. “The Uber Deal That Saved the Company” ([34:07]), he explains, emphasizing that Lime wouldn't have survived without this infusion of capital during the crisis.

9. M&A Strategy and Uber Deal

Wayne reflects on Lime's cautious approach to mergers and acquisitions. The strategic acquisition of Jump from Uber was pivotal, providing necessary resources and integrating Lime's operations with Uber's platform. “Line wouldn't have survived if we did not do that deal.” ([34:14]). However, he remains wary of M&A, viewing most deals as potentially value-destructive.

10. Go-to-Market Strategies and Competitive Edge

Lime's expansion blueprint involves engaging with local regulators to address urban transportation challenges. Wayne highlights Lime's success in winning competitive RFPs with a over 90% win rate globally. “Lime is the only operator scaled operator today that develops our own hardware in house.” ([29:48]). This technical and operational superiority ensures Lime remains the preferred choice in various markets.

11. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Lime

Wayne underscores Lime's commitment to diversity and inclusion, stating, “Our genuine commitment to recruiting people of all backgrounds makes Lime a better company.” ([55:27]). Lime conducts biannual surveys, revealing over 90% of employees feel they belong and can bring their full selves to work, fostering a culture of inclusion and preventing groupthink.

12. Personal Journey: Overcoming a Stroke

A deeply personal part of the conversation revolves around Wayne's stroke and his subsequent recovery. He shares, “One person I want to give a shout out to is Mark Bertolini, the CEO of Oscar Health... 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.” ([48:59]). This experience reshaped his leadership approach, emphasizing resilience, authenticity, and the importance of support systems.

13. Future Outlook and Going Public

Wayne expresses confidence in Lime's readiness to go public, highlighting Lime's strong financials and market leadership. “We have demonstrated over many years a differentiated financial results both in top line growth and in bottom line.” ([47:03]). However, he acknowledges that timing for an IPO depends on the macroeconomic environment and internal readiness, particularly in areas like accounting and regulatory compliance.

14. Final Thoughts and Quickfire Insights

In the concluding segments, Wayne shares his visionary belief in micromobility as the future of urban transportation. “I believe micromobility is the future of urban transportation...” ([52:47]). He passionately critiques the societal acceptance of car-related fatalities and envisions a shift towards sustainable, efficient transportation solutions. Additionally, he touches on topics like trade, vandalism issues in specific cities, and the importance of maintaining company values in fluctuating cultural landscapes.

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Notable Quotes:

• “When I first joined Lime, I think we were losing $3 for every dollar of revenue.” — Wayne Ting ([00:00])

• “Dara brought a very unique set of leadership traits that in many ways challenge Uber to think about how can we be a better company and a better team.” — Wayne Ting ([04:30])

• “Swapping costs were cut by half. It remains our biggest cost.” — Wayne Ting ([25:25])

• “Lime is the only operator scaled operator today that develops our own hardware in house.” — Wayne Ting ([29:48])

• “Our genuine commitment to recruiting people of all backgrounds makes Lime a better company.” — Wayne Ting ([55:27])

• “Micromobility is the future of urban transportation.” — Wayne Ting ([52:47])

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Conclusion

Wayne Ting's interview on The Twenty Minute VC offers an in-depth look into Lime's strategic overhaul, operational excellence, and resilient leadership. From battling financial instability and navigating a global pandemic to embracing diversity and overcoming personal health challenges, Wayne's journey exemplifies the multifaceted demands of leading a global micromobility company. His insights not only shed light on Lime's success but also provide valuable lessons for startups aiming to achieve sustainable growth and industry leadership.

Transcript

[Wayne Ting]

When I first joined Lime, I think we were losing $3 for every dollar of revenue. The daily decay rate was 3%. So in the course of 30 days, your entire fleet was gone. So the business was completely upside down, I would say. My first four years as CEO, I was constantly worried about Line going out of business. Line wouldn't have survived if we did not do that deal.

[Harry Stebbings]

This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And I've wanted to make this show happen for a long time. I live in London and here line bikes, they're everywhere. But most people think that micro mobility providing is a bad business, that these companies lose money. Well, lime did over $600 million in gross bookings with 90 million in EBITDA last year. They're the global leader and they've proved all the naysayers wrong. And so today I'm thrilled to sit down with Wayne Ting, Lime's CEO, to discuss what Lime have done and got so right that so many others bluntly have got so wrong, and how they built the global leader that they have. But before we dive in today, it can be difficult to build a team that's aligned on everything from values to workflow. But that's exactly what Coda was made to do. Coda is an all in one collaborative workspace that started as a napkin sketch. Now, just five years since launching in beta, Coda has helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. With Coda, you and you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications, and the intelligence of AI, all built for your organization. Coda's seamless workspace facilitates deeper collaboration and quicker creativity, giving you more time to build. And whether you're a startup looking to organize the chaos while staying nimble, or an enterprise team looking for better team alignment, CODA matches your working style. To try it for yourself, go to Coda iO20VC today and get six months free of the team plan. For startups, that's Codacoda iO20VC to get started for free and get six, three months of the team plan. Now that your team is aligned and collaborating, let's tackle those messy expense reports. You know those receipts that seem to multiply like rabbits in your wallet, the endless email chains asking, can you approve this? And don't even get me started on the month end panic when you realize you have to reconcile it all. Well, Pleo offers smart company cards, physical, virtual and vendor specific, so teams can what they need while finance stays in control. Automate your expense reports Process invoices seamlessly and manage reimbursements effortlessly, all in one platform. With integrations to tools like Xero, QuickBooks and Netsuite, Pleo fits right into your workflow, saving time and giving you full visibility over every entity, payment and subscription. Join over 37,000 companies already using Pleo to streamline their finances. Try Pleo today. It's like magic, but with fewer rabbits. Find out more at PLEO IO 20 VC. And don't forget to secure trust with your customers. Trust isn't just earned, though, it's demanded. That's why over 9,000 companies, including Atlassian, Core and Factory, rely on Vanta to automate their security compliance. So Vanta helps businesses achieve certifications like SoC2 and ISO 27001, turning months of tedious work into this beautifully fast and straightforward process. Their platform automates compliance across over 35 frameworks. It centralizes workflows and it proactively manage risk, all while saving you time with automation and AI. So whether you're just starting or scaling your security program, Vanta connects you with auditors and experts to get audit ready quickly and build trust with your customers. Get $1,000 off your first year by visiting vanta.com 20vc. That's v a n t a.com 20vc. You have now arrived at your destination.

[Unknown]

Wayne, I am so excited for this.

[Wayne Ting]

Dude.

[Harry Stebbings]

Listen, I heard so many good things.

[Unknown]

From Blake Byers, from Jeff Jordan, from Sarah Smith. So thank you so much for joining me today.

[Wayne Ting]

Harry, thank you so much for having me. Very excited for the conversation.

[Harry Stebbings]

Dude, I can't wait. I told you.

[Unknown]

Listen, I come out of my apartment every day and there's like 50 limes in front of my house. So I think of you every day in the most romantic of senses.

[Harry Stebbings]

I want to start though.

[Unknown]

You then work for Dara at Uber, who has had the most incredible journey with Uber over the last few years. What did you learn from Dara through her his mentorship?

[Wayne Ting]

Dar came into Uber at a very difficult transition and I think what was really amazing was how quickly he reset the tone at the top. I remember one of the first things he did was he, he wanted to put out new values for Uber. There was a lot of criticisms about kind of the way Uber was acting or the way Uber was competing. And I remember the one value that he put out that was. That resonated the most was do the right thing. It sounds cliche and shallow, but I can't tell you how much it resonated with people all throughout the company. Winning is not enough. We win while doing the right thing. We win while doing the ethical thing. We win while treating each other with respect. When I saw was that there was different paths to success and Dara brought a very unique set of leadership traits that in many ways challenge Uber to think about how can we be a better company and a better team.

[Unknown]

Can I ask you, how do you think about doing the right thing in a multi participant economy? And what I mean by that is if we think about say Uber in that case raising prices, it's doing the right thing. Maybe for supply and demand, it may be doing the right thing for drivers, it's not doing the right thing for consumers.

[Harry Stebbings]

And so doing the right thing is.

[Unknown]

Always held in the context of the beholder. How do you think about that?

[Wayne Ting]

It's really important not to make business decisions, moral decisions. I would actually take pricing out of a moral context. Companies throughout the world raise prices, lower prices millions of times a day. Amazon probably does it a million times in one day just on their own platform. Raising prices, lowering prices is not a moral decision. It's a business judgment call. And I think when we bring moral dimensions through business judgment calls, we actually shut down debate prematurely. Because if I'm saying I'm not going to raise prices because I'm doing the right thing, then that assumes the person arguing for raising prices doing the wrong thing. So it's very dangerous, I think, to, to put in moral consequences into a regular business decision. And so I think there are good arguments for why companies may need to raise prices.

[Unknown]

We have those learnings, we have that time with Dar and Uber and then we decide to join Lime. Talk to me about that. That was in 2018 at a time when it was a fricking hot space, like the hottest of spaces. I remember. Where was lime at in 2018 when.

[Wayne Ting]

You joined Lime had been around for just over a year and I think it was probably at the time 100 plus markets.

[Unknown]

100, 100 plus markets.

[Harry Stebbings]

It was just bikes, just scooters.

[Unknown]

What was it?

[Wayne Ting]

So limit started as an E bike business and then sometime in, I think early 2018, I made a transition to go hard into scooter. So it at that point majority scooters and had just made a decision to go global. So it was expanding rapidly in Europe at this time.

[Unknown]

So we're expanding rapidly in Europe, we're doing scooters. How was the business at that point for you coming in? When you think about your experience there, what were the biggest challenges for you coming into Lime at that Point the.

[Wayne Ting]

Biggest challenge was that the business was upside down at that point. I remember digging into the P and L of the business. I think we were losing $3 for every dollar of revenue. And the biggest thing was the hardware. The industry had taken personally used scooters and put it into a commercial space. And so these were not designed for commercial use at the time. This is six years ago. And I think the average scooter only lasted 30 days. The daily decay rate was 3%. So in the course of 30 days your entire fleet was gone. And you can't run a business that is a hardware capex intensive business if every 30 days you need to buy a whole new fleet. So the business was completely upside down. And now that we didn't have great data either, like one of the most. One of the first things I was really keen on doing was we got to establish ground truth, what was even happening. So I remember I was meeting with the head of Europe when I first joined and he was telling me how profitable he was and I was like, doesn't seem like it from what I can see. But the fact that he didn't know if they were profitable or not is a failure of the company because we need to give him real accurate data so that he can make the right decisions. If he thinks he is printing money when the opposite is true through then we have not set him up for success. So I spent a lot of that first couple of months building out data line which is a internal tool to give us like accurate data across hundreds of operational data, operational metrics for every region. And we can, we can pull up to like the global level, down to the city level.

[Unknown]

What were the metrics that mattered when you established that data foundation? What were the ones you really honed in on?

[Wayne Ting]

So I think like any business, you care about demand. So like what's the trips per vehicle per day? What was your revenue per vehicle per day? How many riders do you have? What was the retention of that rider? Then you care about your bottom line.

[Unknown]

Metrics just staying on that one because we could have trips per vehicle per day and that could be very high but in very short trips and so not as much money or it could be very long. So how do you think about the right metric to choose in that regard?

[Wayne Ting]

Ultimately you want to be generating more revenue than your costs. And so we were looking at the economics also on a trip basis. So if I think about total revenue, it's the number of fleet, total fleet multiplied by revenue per fleet, multiplied by trips per vehicle per Day gets me. The total trips multiplied by revenue per trip gets me to total revenue. And so what you had was a lot of short trips. So low rpt, low revenue per trip trip. And that was insufficient to generate a profit. And that's not a good business. And you want to make sure you have the right cost metrics. And the biggest cost metrics at the time was simply how long our scooters lasted. So we were very keenly focused on daily decay rate. Now we look at decay on an analyzed basis, but at the time we were focused on how many scooters do we lose today because we were losing so many scooters.

[Unknown]

What were you losing on a daily decay rate?

[Wayne Ting]

3% daily decay on a global basis. So in 30 days you lost your entire fleet.

[Unknown]

What did you do when you saw that? Wayne, you're an incredibly data driven, analytical smart guy.

[Wayne Ting]

You're like, I remember two thoughts. One thought was, did I make a terrible mistake? Because I don't think I fully understood how upside down the economics of the industry were. And the second was, I need to get out there to really understand what was happening. So I then spent the next three months traveling to warehouse after warehouse and probably visited a hundred warehouses. And I would just sit in the warehouse and watch what people were doing. I went to the best warehouse and I went to the worst warehouse and I spent the most amount of time sitting in the worst warehouses and just watching people trying to understand why is it that we couldn't make money? Like, what are we doing incorrectly?

[Harry Stebbings]

Take me to the best.

[Unknown]

What made the best the best and so efficient? From a capital perspective, from an operations.

[Wayne Ting]

Perspective, the thing that I think was the biggest difference was the leader of the, of the team, the general manager. We copied Uber's kind of general manager model. We had a distributed decision making process where each GM in the markets were the CEOs of their market. They could make decisions about where to invest, how to control their costs. And the biggest difference was where was the gm? The best markets? The GM knew all the, all the mechanics by name. They were walking the floors. I remember I went to the worst market and I sat there for eight hours. I was doing my emails, sitting in the middle of the warehouse and I was just watching what everyone was doing. And eight hours later I walked out. I was like, I figured it out. And I went to the GM of that market. It was in southern France. I was like, in the eight hours I sat there and you know, I'm here. You never came in one time. You never, you Never walked around the floor. And then that guy over there has been fixing the same scooter for eight hours. He doesn't know what he's doing at all. He is just wasting time. And the fact that you haven't walked up to him and asked why he's spending so much time on a single scooter, he's just screwing that one screw and unscrewing that same screw. Great operations requires a hands on approach. You got to know what's happening to know what is going well, what is going poorly. And the quality of the leader was the biggest differentiator between a good warehouse and a bad warehouse.

[Unknown]

What was the best warehouse?

[Wayne Ting]

The best warehouse that I visited on that trip I thought was the DC warehouse. And we had a, we had a gentleman who was the general manager at the time, who was a military veteran and he just had a way of thinking about running the warehouse in the same way that you would think about a military team. Everybody had a role and the expectations were clear and people are held accountable for results and that made all the difference. Everybody, how many scooters you fix in a day was clear. We write it on the, on the piece on board. So, so it's visible to everybody. There is celebration when you did well and there's accountability when you did not. That visibility is super important. And so when I, when I went back to hq, my biggest question was if the insight is that the quality of the general manager, the visibility and accountability was the difference between a good and a bad warehouse, how do we build that into our software? It's not rocket science. We can replicate a lot of the things that a good manager is doing in the software. So everything that a mechanic would do we would track in the, in the app. So if Harry took out a scooter, we would be like, how long did it take Harry to fix that scooter? How many spare parts did he use? And then what was his productivity for the day? But then also of the three scooters that he fixed, when was the next time it broke? How many days did it take before it broke as a substitute for quality? And then through that we created a point system to rank the best mechanic to the worst mechanic. When you created visibility in the work people did and then you created this point system, now you can hold folks accountable. So Harry is the best mechanic. If you're doing a good job, you want to be recognized and celebrated like all of us do. And so when you create visibility in the software that we were using, it made people want to Work harder because they want to be recognized for their good work. It also created accountability for the folks who were underperforming, either not fixing any scooters or fixing it poorly. And so by replicating the what I saw and observed in the field into the software, we were then able to take the learnings from one market and bring it across the world.

[Unknown]

What's your turnaround time?

[Harry Stebbings]

Because I guess the velocity with which.

[Unknown]

You can turn around a scooter is very important to your actual ability to drop cash to the bottom line. If it takes a week to fix versus a day, you've got six extra days of usage for sure.

[Wayne Ting]

So we care a lot about downtime. Downtime is when a scooter is not out in the field generating revenue. It could be down because the battery is dead. It could be down because it's in the warehouse and broken. But downtime is costly to the business because you have an upfront capital expenditure and you want to be generating as much profits as possible as quickly as possible to pay back for that hardware. So you can now generate incremental profits on top. And so downtime is very, very costly for sure.

[Unknown]

How on earth do you turn it from a 3% daily decay rate to an annual decay rate?

[Harry Stebbings]

What are the changes that you drove.

[Unknown]

To improve in such a magnitude?

[Wayne Ting]

One major thing was an investment in proprietary hardware. Every other operator in our industry buys off the shelf hardware. But every scooter and bike you see on Lime's platform, we design, we engineer, we produce and we operate ourselves. That is more expensive. But we do it because we believe fundamentally you can drive right customer preference if you cannot differentiate. So we want to build something that's differentiative so that customers is willing to walk further and pay more to use Lime.

[Unknown]

Why would they walk further and pay more to use Lime over another scooter?

[Wayne Ting]

Because the experience is differentiated. And so for example, our scooters are have air filled tires versus like a solid tire. That means that you can have air, can run out, could be ruptured, but it's a much better, better ride experience. We also have a lower step on, step off height so it's easier for somebody and safer for people to stop a scooter or bike. We also work. So if you look at our scooters, it has a swept handlebar, it looks like a bike handlebar versus kind of a straight across. That means that your elbows can be considered on your side, it's more comfortable, especially if you're going long distances.

[Unknown]

You would push back on me When I say it's a commoditized industry, I.

[Wayne Ting]

Think it's absolutely not a commoditized industry. If you just look at the results. And the result is that Lime five, six years ago Lime was one of many, many, many operators. Today Lime is the clear global leader and we are the market leader in almost we operate. Last year we did over $600 million in gross bookings. Our four year top line CAGR is 30%. In each of those four years we expanded our profit margins and last year we did over $90 million in company wide EBITDA. The same year our biggest competitor went to chapter 11. So if it was commoditized, then we would have the same financial results as everybody else. But we've been growing in a differentiated rate and delivering a differentiated bottom line. The proof is in the results.

[Unknown]

Do you think it's because, and you have to choose one here, do you think it's because you've mastered unit economic efficient maintenance growth that you became profitable and you won? Or do you think it's because of the little things that delivered a better consumer experience? If you had to choose which one?

[Wayne Ting]

I think both are super important. But I think the incremental operational improvements that allowed us to generate profits over the last five years is probably more important than the incremental rider experience. I do think profits then allow us to invest more in more capital expenditure to build a bigger fleet, to invest more in our software and our hardware. And this matters because reliability is the most important thing in transportation. You're going to pick the platform that is more reliable. Here you mentioned when you walk out of your apartment, your flat, you can always get a line that allows you to give up your car and transition, hopefully your transportation into micro mobility. But if you walk out of your apartment when you need transportation, you can't get it. It's very, very hard for you to, to give up your car and to ride bikes mostly. So reliability is crucial. This is why when we increase our fleet in a market, we actually see our trips per vehicle per day go up. Our utilization goes up. It's counterintuitive. When you grow your supply in most businesses, the utilization per unit goes down because the demand usually doesn't go up faster than your supply. But our industry, we see the opposite. As we grow our supply, our utilization on a unit basis goes up because more people now can reliably choose Lime as their transportation default.

[Unknown]

Is there a cap to that? Is there an asymptote where the more you increase supply, it does not increase Demand effectively or not? Actually, have you not seen that in any market yet?

[Wayne Ting]

Intellectually, I assume there's an asymptote. So far in markets we see incremental supply drives more demand for the entire network.

[Unknown]

When you expand into a new market, what does that expansion playbook look like? And can you just break that down for me?

[Wayne Ting]

So I think it starts with talking to local regulators and governments. And I think we started by talking about what I learned in government. And it starts with we want to be there to solve a problem for the city. In transportation. The biggest challenges in transportation are affordability, congestion and carbon emissions. And then you convince the city to launch a pilot and there's a competitive RFP process through that pilot where you maybe do a one year pilot or two year pilot and they invite multiple players to come and compete in that competitive rfp. And we actually like the competitive RFP process for two main reasons. One is that it actually naturally reduces the number of competitors you have in a city because the city is not going to pick 20 different players, they're going to pick between one and three. And the second thing that we like about it is Lime is really, really good at winning competitive RFPs. We have a greater than 90% win rate of competitive RFPS on a global basis and we renew our permits at a greater than 95% rate.

[Unknown]

Who is the competitor that you most respect when you come up in an RFP against?

[Wayne Ting]

The competitor that I spend most of my time thinking about is the car. The car is our biggest competitor. The majority of car trips are under 5 miles. In cities, the most common number of people in a car is one person. If we can convince all the people driving for three miles, four miles by themselves to give up that car and use a bike and scooter instead, that is the biggest opportunity for growth and that is our biggest competitor.

[Unknown]

How much does it cost to launch London?

[Wayne Ting]

To launch. To launch a city probably doesn't cost that much. You need to get a warehouse. So there's some costs upfront. You need to buy the scooters and bikes, you need to hire an operations team. You have to keep paying them if there's no revenue stuff to pay them. So probably tens of millions of dollars to launch a city. But then scaling the fleet over time, there's incremental investments. Maybe you need to get a second warehouse over time, that's when it becomes more expensive.

[Unknown]

What have you noticed in terms of payback periods on new city launches and how has it changed over time?

[Wayne Ting]

That's a great question. Harry so when, when I started the payback was never because we were the scooters didn't last long enough to pay back the scooter or the bike. By building, investing in our own hardware, focusing in on these game of inches micro improvements, we want to be 1% better at everything we do. And when you do a thousand things 1% better, you now have a very different business than all your competitors. Today our global payback on our hardware is less than eight months when we deploy. And this is pretty consistent in big cities, small cities all around the world. When we deploy our hardware we can pay back within the first year in a last for more than five years from the 30 days I was describing before. So you have four more years of cash flow generation after you've paid back.

[Unknown]

Your hardware five year lifetime.

[Wayne Ting]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

That's insane. To what extent is that actually realistic with advancements in technology? And what I mean by that is will consumer demand get used to newer types, faster types, more comfortable types and actually you'll just need to upgrade them sooner than that because of consumer demand.

[Wayne Ting]

We've been historically upgrading our fleet more frequently because I think that each upgrade was a big jump in improvement. Certainly our Gen 4 scooters and bikes, which is what we have in London, was a big improvement over our Gen 3 and it actually allowed us to have a breakthrough in our, in our P and L. But today I think the quality of our gen 4 is good enough where I believe we can operate the Gen 4 for much longer than we've done the Gen 3 and Gen 2.5 in the past. My expectation is we're not going to have to upgrade our hardware at the same frequency as we've done in the past. And because they're pretty high quality, riders are willing to stay with it for longer.

[Unknown]

How did Gen3 to Gen4 produce a breakthrough in the P and L? I'm fascinated by that.

[Wayne Ting]

So we were talking about we design our hardware. Part of it is on kind of writer preference but the other part is we track everything our mechanics do and we're trying to figure out how do we reduce the time it takes for our mechanics to do everything so that by doing that we can then improve productivity and then drive down costs. And it is a game of inches. A lot of these things are tiny, imperceptible things. We have a down tube in the scooters and we like increase the length of the, of the connector so it takes less time to connect the connector with the CCU. That saves let's say 30 seconds, 40 seconds. When you do that thousands of times, and our latest bike, for example, the battery pack sits behind the chair. An operator, when they swap the swappable battery, sometimes would have to move the chair up and down an inch or two to get the battery out again. That's maybe 20 seconds, 30 seconds. But when you multiply that by millions of times, that becomes real dollars for the real cost to the P and L. So we made it so that an operator can always swap a battery, regardless of any. They don't have to make any incremental changes to the seat. And we started to share parts between our Gen 4 scooters and our Gen 4e bikes. One major breakthrough is that we move from fixed batteries to swappable batteries. So before, at the end of each day, we need to pick up every scooter and bike in a city, drive it back to the warehouse, charge it overnight, and the next day drive back thousands of bikes and scooters to the city, deploy it in again. But now, with swappable batteries, you can come in with a, with a cargo bike, you can have hundreds of battery packs just in that cargo bike. And you can swap all the bikes and scooters in a region. And because they share the same battery packs, it now increases the density of, of the work, which then improves productivity and then drives down the cost per swap.

[Unknown]

Wow. So I can now, as a battery replacer, go around, replace the batteries where they are on a bike and roll and do 2, 3, 400 in a go?

[Wayne Ting]

Absolutely, yes.

[Unknown]

Wow. How did that change your economics? Because that was the. Awesome.

[Harry Stebbings]

Respectfully, I would see people pick up.

[Unknown]

Bikes at the end of the day and I'd be like, oh, this business, it's just hard. It's really hard.

[Wayne Ting]

It's really hard.

[Unknown]

Yeah. How much did that change the economics of the business doing swappable batteries?

[Wayne Ting]

Swapping costs were cut by half. It remains our biggest cost. And so we're constantly thinking about how do we continue to improve swapping costs. Imagine, Harry, you're working for a line and we're asking you to pick up the scooters, drive it home, charge it, drive it back. The next day. You're going to want us to pay you for all that time and effort versus swapping a battery that takes 15 seconds, 20 seconds.

[Unknown]

Do you pay them on battery swapped or on time?

[Wayne Ting]

We work with logistic partners in the cities we're in, and they have employees as part of their small mom and pop business. And we pay the logistics partners on a per swap basis.

[Unknown]

Why don't you do it yourself? I'm just intrigued. On the vertical integration, you make the fricking scooters yourself, they're designed, manufactured, owned by you. Why not own actually the battery replacement supply chain as well?

[Wayne Ting]

We do in the sense that all of the battery swapping operations is controlled by our software, which we build in house. Some of our competitors franchise the whole thing and really leave it up to the mom and pops kind of logistics partners to do what they need. But we have great software that dictates how an operator moves around a city, where they go next. All of our tasks within the software is automatically created. So I'll give an example which is we also do a lot of move tasks in a city, so we have a machine learning demand algorithm that predicts where we think trips are going to come from in all the cities we're in by the block, by the half block. So the next six hours we can say we think this block will do this many trips or the next 12 hours will have this much demand. And if there is a position of our scooter or bike where we believe by moving it to a higher revenue potential position, if that incremental revenue is more than the cost that we will have paid 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.

[Unknown]

Our operations that is fascinating. So if I go and leave it by a remote river in London and it's like, obviously not in a optimized revenue location, it will set a move task for it to be moved back towards a more central business district.

[Wayne Ting]

Absolutely. As long as the incremental revenue between the two locations is greater than the cost, it will, it will cost us to hire you to go move it for us. So every move task has to be ROI positive.

[Unknown]

Dude. What's the most hard part of the business? And what's the part of the business that everyone thinks is hard but actually is quite simple?

[Wayne Ting]

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.

[Unknown]

Do you have to be number one in a city for the business to be an overriding success?

[Wayne Ting]

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 rideshare. 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 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 won't 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 micro mobility because scale gives you more data. We talked about kind of demand forecasting. We have more data to then build better supply positioning, better demand forecasting tools. The more cities we win, the more. Lime 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 scaled operator today that develops our own hardware in house. Everybody else buys from the same Chinese manufacturers.

[Harry Stebbings]

Are you sure?

[Unknown]

Can I be dire a little bit contrary? Are you sure? Because Marcus at Bolt very clearly said they were the only ones.

[Wayne Ting]

So you're right. I actually first I want to say enormous respect for Marcus. Marcus, actually Marcus is developing their own hardware. He and I caught up recently and I was surprised that he was developing his own hardware. But to his credit, I believe they are doing. I trust, 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. And the longevity and decay rate of the hardware is the key unlock to profitability in this business, which has been.

[Unknown]

The hardest city to Win.

[Wayne Ting]

The places where I think it's been hardest to convince the local opera, local regulators to help to bring micromobility in are probably smaller second tier third tier cities. One of the things that surprised me when I first joined Lime, my expectation was we were only going to work in the biggest mega, 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 so 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 second year cities still don't have micro mobility.

[Unknown]

Wayne, which city are you not number one in yet that you would most like to be number one in?

[Wayne Ting]

LIME has won almost every competitive RFP since we launched. This is why when we do lose a competitive rfp, I remember a very, very deep.

[Unknown]

Which one do you remember most deeply?

[Wayne Ting]

The ones that I probably carry the most pain is Lyon in France, Calgary in Canada.

[Unknown]

What happened?

[Wayne Ting]

The 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.

[Unknown]

I love so many elements of how you think. I love the competition, I love your hatred of losing. I love your. Dave Brailsford is the English cycling coach, talks about improving 1% and everything is a game of inches. I absolutely love that Wayne, talking about the 1%. One thing that's not 1% is Covid. I spoke to Jeff Jordan, I spoke to Sarah before they were like the business fell off a fricking cliff. Can you just take me to Covid? You were just CEO at that point.

[Harry Stebbings]

How was it?

[Wayne Ting]

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, you 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 micro mobility business called Jump. I pitched Dara this idea of letting them sell, sell Jump to us so we can then can. We can bring the two business together, take out costs, and then we can be the micromobility option on Uber. And to Dara's credit, he. He led the round. And through that round I became CEO. So I became CEO after Covid had started. When this round came, came together.

[Unknown]

How much did Uber invest in that round?

[Wayne Ting]

I think the total round was $140 million.

[Unknown]

Fantastic. So we finally have 140 million from Uber.

[Wayne Ting]

Not all of it was from Uber. In fact, yeah, sure, less than half is from Uber.

[Unknown]

Okay, but we get a good cash injection. We're now not 20 days from Runway, so that's helpful. How did you integrate into the management team? Dude, in Covid remote, like take me to that.

[Wayne Ting]

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 built was quite strong. And a lot of them did leave the company because it wasn't clear where Lime 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 an hour. 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 every 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, do we. What are we going to do with certain like. And also we got to bring our costs down. So when I first joined, it was also immediately it was 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 your bad and worse decision becomes worse and worser. So making a call quickly and I would say cutting deeper than maybe you would expect was really important because if we gone back for another round of layoffs, that's when I think a management team really loses quick credibility. So we thought it was important for us to cut deep and cut quickly in that period.

[Unknown]

What was the best decision you made? What was the worst decision?

[Wayne Ting]

Best decision. So we, 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, global scale pretty soon after Covid, when we still didn't have all the information was critical at 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 need to show that we can generate revenue.

[Unknown]

So that was a good thing. Coming back as soon as possible. What was the worst decision?

[Wayne Ting]

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, 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. Probably the worst decision.

[Unknown]

Is there anything you do differently having been through layoffs now?

[Wayne Ting]

Never promise people this is, this is the only round because you never know because you're the, you're, you're doing that 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 costs down even further. So unless you are 100% sure you can make that promise, don't promise people you're not going to have. This is the only round of layoffs and I see that happening with friends and like CEOs all the time. They, they promise and then they have to break their word. When you break your word, then people start questioning other decisions that you have.

[Unknown]

People start questioning other decisions you have absolutely. They less so do when you're a founder. I feel, and I'm intrigued to hear your thoughts on Founder Mode. We saw Paul Graham be very effective in expelling his thoughts on Founder Mode and the benefits of it. How do you feel about Founder Mode given the context?

[Wayne Ting]

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 I felt it 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's going well in XYZ City, but the results are terrible. Going there and seeing and double clicking and making sure that people, 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 Runway to run is also, I think, not a hire management specific trait. I think great founders who make the transition and stay with a company oftentimes employ the same tactics. And I think Paul was describing good ways to manage a company, but then he assigned these are what founders do, these are what hire managers do. And I just don't know if that's, that's necessarily true.

[Unknown]

I agree and I think a lot of VCs followed it a little bit too much. And when I think about VCs following things too much, I think about kind of hype cycles and frenzies in funding environments. And it was an incredibly heated environment that you were in, being bluntly, the scooter environment and the micromobility environment. How do you oscillate or reflect on VC hype funding environments and think about them today?

[Wayne Ting]

That's A great question. I would say, I would say these hype cycles are generally bad for companies because it allows them to avoid learning hard lessons. I feel like Lime 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 then plow it back into growth, into discounts and you can discount your way 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 CAGR. But each of 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, but instead focused on the short term. And I felt 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 great operations, great hardware, great government relations, that's when those investments actually started to paying dividends. Being in a hype cycle is actually bad for startups because it makes, it allows you to not actually focus on the things that truly matter.

[Unknown]

But would Lime have got to where you got to without the huge amounts of cash? Like was the incredibly, incredibly large cash reserves necessary to kick start, continue, sustain, to get to the point where you then need to refocus.

[Wayne Ting]

I think that's fair, that's a fair push. Gary, I do think without the early funding Lime wouldn't be where it is today. But if the, 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 worst managed competitors to continue to scale and grow and gain market share through simply taking VC money and setting it on fire.

[Unknown]

When your competitor raises a ton of money, are you forced to as well?

[Wayne Ting]

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 Lime for micro mobility generally because now we're able to continue to grow our business without this forever treadmill of raising more money from VCs because we can, we've been able to fund our capital expenditure investments from profits from the, 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.

[Unknown]

How does that change your mindset as a CEO? You now no longer at the whim of someone else, you don't have a begging bowl.

[Wayne Ting]

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 Lime who believed in me 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 Lime, to Dara, to Uber. And this feeling like, oh, we could fail at any time just weighed on me, wait on me all the time. And I never slept well. 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 Lime and everything that could go wrong with Lime. Number one. We got to self sustaining free cash flow. Positive was the first time in many years where I stopped dreaming about Lime. I dream about Lime now, but in a good ways. Not, not in, not in worry about. We're going to be out of business.

[Unknown]

A bit of a interesting one which is like when it comes to M and A, you actually haven't done much M and A. When you reflect on that. Was that the right decision? And if I were to push you, is there any M and A that you wish you had done first?

[Wayne Ting]

You're absolutely right. We haven't done much M and A. The only eminent we've done two, two M&A deals. One is to jump from Uber. And I think that was a 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 mobility provider on the Uber platform. And that was critical and it was 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 and A deals are value destructive. And that's probably the thought that always, that's always in the back of my head as I think about new M and A deals.

[Unknown]

Why so?

[Wayne Ting]

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 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 and 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, get control.

[Unknown]

You mentioned down round that that is a poisonous word to most founders is. Do you think that we overestimate the negatives of down rounds?

[Wayne Ting]

I do. I think any, any CEO, any founder, cannot not use down round willy nilly because investors have believed in you, invested in you. And down rounds 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, like 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, hit the valuation I had in 2020 and that valuation is fake. And so you're making irrational business decisions 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, not be so keyed in on a value on a valuation unless you believe that valuation is justified in today's world and whether or not you should raise and at what valuation. If there's a marketplace out there, if every VC is telling you I'm willing to give you money at the lower valuation, that 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.

[Unknown]

Wayne, what was your latest valuation?

[Wayne Ting]

I don't know if we ever shared that, but I would say it was a convertible round. So I don't know if there's any specific valuation to the round.

[Unknown]

How do you feel about Going public. Wayne, the business is profitable as you said. 90 and EBIT. Fantastic.

[Harry Stebbings]

Amazing turnaround.

[Unknown]

How do you feel about going public?

[Wayne Ting]

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 Lime 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 titan go after.

[Unknown]

Why is that you think that the macro environment won't bluntly give you a multiple or a valuation that's attractive enough? Is that it?

[Wayne Ting]

Basically I feel these markets go through kind of these like 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. And then the mood shifts and then people are less willing to invest in ipo. And certainly it's a. 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 up cycle in an IPO pro cycle is probably helpful for an ipo.

[Unknown]

Do you think you're ready today? If the market was there, would you be ready to go out?

[Wayne Ting]

I 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.

[Unknown]

Is there anything with the business metrics that you think would need to be changed to get ready to go public?

[Wayne Ting]

I think Lime'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.

[Unknown]

Can I ask a final one? And I hope it's okay to be personal. Blake said that I should ask about it, so I hope it is. But we can add it out if not. He said that you suffered from a stroke. How did that impact you, how you lead, how you think as a leader? I'm just really interested by that, Harry.

[Wayne Ting]

First, thank you for asking that. I actually, I've been pretty 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. 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 myself as, 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. 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. 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 accident. 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 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 Margaret, who's been a phenomenal CEO and his turnaround of Oscar has Been one of the most incredible things I've seen over the last couple 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 the 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 it more so that when you are in a hospital half paralyzed and trying to imagine how do you make a comeback there, 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 higher, greater heights? But the more we talk about it, the more we support each other, hopefully the less taboo it becomes as a topic.

[Unknown]

I mean, it's something that makes me quite emotional, to be honest. Quite. Wayne My mother's got multiple sclerosis and so she's certainly not what she used to be in terms of physical. And I remember once she said to me, I'm very scared that I won't be able to hold your children and you won't trust me to look after them. And I always remember her saying that to me because that was probably the most heartbreaking thing for me. Me. And by the way, now she walks two marathons a weekend with me, Pilates instructor and fitter than me and everyone. But she had to go through a finding the new reality. And she doesn't go to the gym, she walks marathons instead.

[Harry Stebbings]

I would love to do a quick fire with you.

[Unknown]

So I'm going to say a short statement. You're going to give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

[Wayne Ting]

Let's do it.

[Harry Stebbings]

Okay, so what do you believe that.

[Unknown]

Most around you disbelieve?

[Wayne Ting]

Wayne I believe micromobility 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, 5,000 pound tank around a city generating the biggest carbon pollution of the last hundred years and killing over 1.3 million people a year. This is the fact that always shocks me that we don't talk enough about cars on a global basis. Kill more than 1.3 million people every single year, 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, what's wrong. The number of people that are killed on a car is multitude magnitude greater. And we just accept it as a, 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.

[Unknown]

I'm going to throw a grenade in here, Wayne. Should we allow Chinese cars to be sold in our cities? These are heavily subsidized to destroy our local economies and allow for a new Chinese monopoly to be created. Should they be allowed to be sold in our cities?

[Wayne Ting]

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 his job and have no ability to find a new job. And 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 tariffs so we can level the playing field between domestic producers and foreign producers feels fair.

[Unknown]

What city has the highest vandalism, vehicle destruction rate?

[Wayne Ting]

It would probably be San Diego. Gangs of people coming into San Diego and then stealing the bikes and scooters and driving into Mexico. So it was hard for us to, to like, police and react to it.

[Unknown]

Drive them to Mexico.

[Wayne Ting]

Yeah. And then they were pretty good selling for parts.

[Harry Stebbings]

What's the most profitable city?

[Wayne Ting]

The most profitable city probably London.

[Unknown]

What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

[Wayne Ting]

This 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 asked me for the last like, decade, I would have, 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, never expected before.

[Unknown]

And you think we should return to the diversity equity inclusion prioritization?

[Wayne Ting]

I'll say this reliantly 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. And our true genuine commitment to recruiting people of all backgrounds makes Lime a better company. And this year was a year where I felt 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 a year line double 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 or whether or not it's cool or not. And I do hear and understand some of the criticism of WOKE culture, 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 woke culture.

[Unknown]

Do you think lesbian women and gay men are still prejudiced against or discriminated against in professional settings in leadership?

[Wayne Ting]

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, to make sure that people feel heard and included in the workplace. One of the things I'm most proud of at Lime, we do a. 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 limers say they believe they can. I'm gay and I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. I was in. I was an immigrant from. My parents are from Taiwan. Moved to Nebraska when I was younger, 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. 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 online 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.

[Unknown]

I'm sorry to be so personal, but we have, you know, millions of listeners now and many gay listeners as well. Was coming out a hard process for you? You mentioned kind of timely as parents in the middle of growing up in Nebraska, maybe. Was that a hard process?

[Wayne Ting]

Yes, it was something 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.

[Unknown]

And they were good.

[Wayne Ting]

They were very supportive and to their credit.

[Unknown]

Tell me, you can be CEO of.

[Harry Stebbings]

Any other company for a day.

[Unknown]

Which company would you most like to be CEO of for a day?

[Wayne Ting]

I would love to be the CEO of Lime. 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 want to quit my job, go do something totally different, especially if life is short? Is this why what I want to spend the rest of my life doing? And the incredible thing was when I really asked 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. I left the hospital. I was in a rehab, in an inpatient rehab. The next day after I left the hospital, I went back to work full time. Time.

[Harry Stebbings]

If today was your last day, what would you do?

[Wayne Ting]

I would probably try to see my. My friends, my family, my Significant other, the people of my life really is the. The thing that. That makes this life worthwhile. I threw myself a big 40th birthday party a month before my stroke, and a hundred friends from around the world flew into Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I was living at the time, to celebrate. And I remember thinking, like, how meaningful that. That. That birthday was. And then when I was. When it wasn't clear, I was thinking, like, maybe, like you don't. When you're going through a stroke, you actually don't quite know how serious it is because the only thing you can tell is watching the faces of the nurses and the doctors to try to assess how worried do they look. At some point, I was like, I think they look really worried. I should probably be worried. And I remember thinking to myself, I'm so glad I threw a birthday party for myself, because I got to say goodbye to all my friends and my family. And that was very, very meaningful to me. And if I. If I was going to die tomorrow, I would love to try to gather as much of my friends as I can. So many of them, like, flew out to see me the day they found out I was sick. That support, that. That bond is the thing that I would. I most cherish my life.

[Unknown]

One of my dearest friends, Shaq, had a heart attack. And he said, you know what I was thinking when I hear beep, beep, beep, beep on the thing? Only thing I thought was, I would give anything and everything just to be okay again. I would just give everything. I just always remember that when I wake up in the morning, I'm like, I'm good. That one really stuck with me. Final one for you, Wayne. I've loved this. What question are you never asked by team members, by journalists, by investors, by.

[Harry Stebbings]

Board members that you're like, I feel.

[Unknown]

I should be asked that more.

[Wayne Ting]

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 to become. But I think people are afraid to if it's too personal or too prime.

[Unknown]

Is it difficult in your relationship?

[Wayne Ting]

Yes, I think that the hardest thing is. So I'm married. My husband is an academic. And I think the hardest thing is that he did not sign up to be a caregiver. And in the same way that my life was changed fundamentally, his life was changed in a big way. And I think that creates his own tensions because in some ways, I can't escape my, my current being and my own recovery journey. But the person oftentimes bearing the greatest responsibility, bearing a lot of the cost is actually him. So I think it creates some natural tensions and like kind of new ways we're going to have to work together. But also it means that I need to think about how do I not be such a burden to him, to my family, to all the people who are supporting me day to day.

[Unknown]

Listen, Wayne, you are exceptional. I liked you so much from the little incremental 1% improvements. I'm inspired by you bluntly from hearing the recovery journey. What you've done with Lime is incredible. Like, you know, from me to you, I've never met you before, dude. Every day I see thousands and thousands of people on limes around London. The impact you have on the world is amazing. So thank you, thank you for joining me and I've loved doing this.

[Wayne Ting]

Harry, 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.

[Harry Stebbings]

I mean, what an amazing story. What an incredibly hard business to run and run so efficiently. Incredible journey and want to say huge thank you to Wayne for sharing that. If you want to watch the show you you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC. But before we leave you today, it can be difficult to build a team that's aligned on everything from values to workflow. But that's exactly what Coda was made to do. Coda is an all in one collaborative workspace that started as a napkin sketch. Now, just five years since launching in beta, Coda has helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. With Coda coder, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications, and the intelligence of AI, all built for your organization. Coda's seamless workspace facilitates deeper collaboration and quicker creativity, giving you more time to build. And whether you're a startup looking to organize the chaos while staying nimble, or an enterprise team looking for better team alignment, CODA matches your working style. To try it for yourself, go to Coda iO20VC today and get six months free of the team plan. For startups, that's Codacoda iO20VC to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan now that your team is aligned and collaborating. Let's tackle those messy expense reports. You know those receipts that seem to multiply like rabbits in your wallet? The endless email chains asking can you approve this? And don't even get me started on the month end panic when you realize you reconcile it all. Well, Pleo offers smart company cards physical, virtual and vendor specific so teams can buy what they need while finance stays in control. Automate your expense reports, process invoices seamlessly, and manage reimbursements effortlessly all in one platform. With integrations to tools like Xero, QuickBooks and Netsuite, Pleo fits right into your workflow, saving time and giving you full visibility over every entity, payment and subscription. Join over 37,000 companies already using Pleo to streamline their finances. Try Pleo today. It's like magic, but with fewer rabbits. Find out more at Pleo IO 20 VC and don't forget to secure trust with your customers. Trust isn't just earned, though, it's demanded. That's why over 9,000 companies, including Atlassian, CORA and Factory, rely on Vanta to automate their security compliance. So Vanta helps businesses achieve certifications like SoC2 and ISO 27001, turning months of tedious work into this beautifully fast and straightforward process. Their platform automates compliance across over 35 frameworks. It centralizes workflows and it proactively manages risk, all while saving you time with automation and AI. So whether you're just starting or scaling your security program, Vanta connects you with auditors and experts to get audit ready quickly and build trust with your customers. Get $1,000 off your first year by visiting vanta.com 20vc that's V-A N T A.com 20vc as always, I so appreciate your support and stay tuned for an incredible show on Wednesday. This company that we're featuring does over 500 million in revenue. They don't agree with titles you've probably never heard of the founder or the company. It is an incredible story, so stay tuned for that.