Lime CEO on $90M EBITDA and Surviving COVID

\"Never promise people this is the only round because you never know... When you break your word, then people start questioning other decisions that you have.\"

• Be cautious in making promises during uncertainty.
• Maintain trust by being honest about the situation.
• Communicate transparently about challenges and decisions.

\"These hype cycles are generally bad for companies because it allows them to avoid learning hard lessons... When all the VCs moved on... that's when focusing on great operations... started paying dividends.\"

• Avoid reliance on ample VC funding.
• Focus on sustainable operations.
• Strengthen fundamentals during tough times.

\"We believe fundamentally you can't drive right customer preference if you cannot differentiate... we want to build something that's differentiated so that customers are willing to walk further and pay more to use Lime.\"

• Differentiate products even in crowded markets.
• Improve customer experience to drive preference.
• Invest in unique features to stand out.

\"We have a machine learning demand algorithm that predicts where we think trips are going to come from... Every move task has to be ROI positive.\"

• Utilize AI for demand forecasting.
• Automate tasks with software.
• Ensure operational actions are ROI positive.

\"We went to Uber and Uber at the time owned and operated their own micromobility business called Jump... I pitched Dara this idea of letting them sell Jump to us... Lime wouldn't have survived if we did not do that deal.\"

• Identify strategic partnerships with mutual benefits.
• Be bold in proposing crucial deals.
• Leverage partnerships in tough times.

\"You just have a choice between bad and worse... making a call quickly... I would say cutting deeper than maybe you would expect was really important because if we come back for another round of layoffs, that's when I think the management team really loses credibility.\"

• Act decisively in crises.
• Prioritize transparency and credibility.
• Make proactive cuts to avoid repeated layoffs.

\"We actually like the competitive RFP process... Lime is really, really good at winning competitive RFPs. We have a greater than 90% win rate...\"

• Embrace regulatory processes to reduce competition.
• Excel in RFPs to secure market entry.
• Leverage strengths to achieve market leadership.

\"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.\"

• Increasing supply enhances reliability.
• Reliability attracts more users.
• Scale supply strategically to boost demand.

\"I spent a lot of that first couple of months building out data.lime, which is an internal tool to give us accurate data across hundreds of operational metrics for every region...\"

• Develop internal tools for accurate data tracking.
• Use data to understand and improve operations.
• Track key metrics to enhance performance.

\"By building, investing in our own hardware, focusing in on this game of inches, micro improvements... When we deploy our hardware, we can pay back within the first year, and it lasts for more than 5 years from the 30 days I was describing before.\"

• Invest in proprietary hardware to control quality.
• Focus on incremental improvements to reduce costs.
• Achieve better unit economics through strategic investments.