Thursday, March 14, 2019

Bird Cuts Five Percent Of Staff, Says Report

Santa Monica-based scooter rental service Bird has laid off approximately 5% of its full-time staff, according to a report on Thursday, in what has been attributed to an effort to "contain costs". The report said 40 people were laid off. The move follows similar cuts over at the scooter department of Lyft, which laid off approximately 50 people in its bicycle and scooter operations, just ahead of an expected IPO filing. In Lyft's case, most of those employees were part of a startup called Motivate, which was acquired by Lyft about three months ago. Bird is in a battle with a large number of "last-mile" scooter companies, including Lime, and which now also includes Uber, Lyft, and even scooter manufacturer Razor, which launched its own scooter rental service in December in Los Angeles. Bird has been attempting to expand as quickly as possible into new markets, even launching a service called Bird Platform that lets other entrepreneurs buy and maintain their own fleet of "Bird" branded scooters in their own market.