The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 44 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Smith: Lime could become the world's largest transportation company
“I believe they have a shot at being the largest transportation company in the world.”
Lime Has Not Yet Hit a Demand Limit for Incremental Supply Growth
“Intellectually, I assume there's an asymptote. So far in markets we see Incremental supply drives more demand for the entire network.”
CEOs Should Never Guarantee to Employees That a Layoff Is Final
“Never promise people this is the only round because you never know because you're the, 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, the…”
Lime Is the Only Micromobility Company Building Proprietary Hardware
“I think every other operator in our industry buys off the shelf hardware, but every scooter and bike you see On Lyme's platform, we design, we engineer, we produce, and we operate ourselves.”
Initial Corporate Layoffs Are Rarely Deep Enough, Destroying Management Credibility Later
“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.”
Increasing Lime's Fleet Supply Counterintuitively Boosts Per-Unit Utilization
“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…”
Emil Michael: Pay-to-play recaps never work for tech startups
“These pay to play things never work. It didn't work at bird. It didn't work at Lime.”
Lime is already profitable in dozens of individual city markets
“We already have dozens of markets of profitable.”
Smith: Bain expects Lime to generate a 15x to 20x return
“My bet was really believing that Lime is the ability to get us positive economics and more than 15 to 20 X from here.”
Mignot: Lime and Dott will ultimately succeed in micromobility
“I still think that some companies will do well, actually, in that space. I think Lime is, is doing well. I think Dot is doing pretty well. I think they will be okay at the end, but it's clearly, you know, it's been a really, really difficult space.”
Lime's System Only Generates Scooter Relocation Tasks If ROI Positive
“Every move task has to be ROI positive.”
Lime Lost $3 for Every $1 of Revenue When Wayne Ting Joined
“When I first streamed Line, we were losing three dollars for every dollar of revenue.”
Lime's Early Scooter Fleet Suffered a 3% Daily Decay Rate
“The daily decay rate was three percent. So in the course of 30 days, your entire fleet was gone.”
Lime Hit $600M Gross Bookings and $90M EBITDA in 2023
“Last year, we did over six hundred million dollars 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 ninety million dollars in company-wide EBITDA.”
Lime's Metrics Are IPO-Ready, but Internal Accounting Controls Need Upgrading
“I think Lime's business metrics is in a great spot. I think most of the things we've got to get ready are around kind of internal controls, how fast we can close a book, how, how quickly can we, like, file a 10 K, 10 Q, the types of things that are part of, li…”
Lime Achieves Hardware Payback in Under One Year With Five-Year Lifespans
“When we deploy our hardware, we can pay back within the first year, and it lasts 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 your hardware.”
Lime Would Not Lead Micromobility if Unvetted VC Funding Had Continued
“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 Lime would not be the global leader right now because it would allow our kind of worst managed competitors to continue to scale and gro…”
Lime Would Not Have Survived the Pandemic Without Acquiring Jump
“Line wouldn't have survived if we did not do that deal.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber's past allocations into hardware products were a mistake
“We're not particularly good in hardware, and I think our investment or the capital that we allocated in hardware in the past was a mistake.”
Lime deliberately rejected Uber's playbook of launching without prior city approval
“When we started a company that the proven formula, which is a uncommon common practice, That idea to get into a city. Well, you know Uber established it, right? You just go to the city, you launch the service, and talk about it with the city after that. And we…”
Lime spends zero dollars on paid user acquisition, says CEO Brad Bao
“We don't spend a penny on user acquisitions”
Smith: Lime is the first company since Facebook to show such hyper-growth
“Lime is the first company I have seen since my time at Facebook showing that kind of sort of tornado of growth and insane momentum.”
Lime Achieves an Over 90% Win Rate in Competitive City 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.”
San Diego Suffered Lime's Highest Vehicle Theft Rate Due to Gangs
“In the history of Lime, it was, it would probably be San Diego. We were seeing actually like 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 like police and react to it.”
Wayne Ting Feared Lime Would Go Bankrupt for His First Four Years
“I would say my first four years as CEO, I was constantly worried about Line going out of business.”
Wayne Ting Believes Lime Is a Strong Candidate for an Eventual IPO
“I think Lime is a great future candidate as a public, publicly traded company. We are the market leader in a very fast growing industry with a big tan, and we have demonstrated over many years a differentiated financial results, both in top line growth and in …”
Wayne Ting Cannot Move His Left Arm Following a Recent Stroke
“When you suffer a stroke, like, I still can't move my left arm and my left hand.”
Lime Achieved Unlevered Free Cash Flow Positivity to Fund Internal Growth
“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”
Uber Provided Under Half of Lime's $140M Emergency COVID Funding Round
“I think the total round was a hundred and forty million dollars. Not all of it was from Uber. In fact, I think less than half is from Uber.”
Lime's Cash Runway Shrank to Just 20 Days in Early 2020
“Suddenly what we thought was maybe six months of runway was like, 20 days of runway because all of our revenues went away.”
Lime's Revenue Dropped 90% to 95% in Days at COVID-19's Onset
“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.”
Personal Cars Are Lime's Main Competitor, Not Rival Scooter Companies
“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 five miles in cities, and the mode of passenger is one. The most common number of people in a car is one person. And s…”
Lime Cut Battery Swapping Operational Costs in Half With Swappable Batteries
“I think our swapping costs were cut by half.”
Lime aims to replace 20-30% of city traffic within five years
“And for five years that what I really hope is for the cities that we're operating in, that we may not be able to cut the traffic by 50% yet, but at least that we can lift it from one percent, two percent today to, you know, 20, 30% of that. The of the car traf…”
Hire executives 12 months before you need their full team built
“So for us, the way I look at it is that just imagine that a talent or a executive that imagine the team he or she will be managing 12 months from now. So therefore that you bring them on 12 months earlier and give them the opportunity to build that team over t…”
Lime captures majority market share with only half the deployed fleet
“There are many markets that we are half of the fleet that will have way more than half of the market share that representing it.”
Wayne Ting Intends to Spend the Next Five Years Leading Lime
“Even if I'm going to die in the next five years, I want to be spending the next five years working on Lyme's mission to decarbonize transportation.”
Lime Uses Machine Learning to Predict Trip Demand by the Half-Block
“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.”
Wayne Ting Visited 100 Lime Warehouses in Three Months During Turnaround
“So I then spent the next three months traveling to warehouse after warehouse. I probably visited a hundred warehouses, and I would just sit in the warehouse and watch what people were doing.”
Wayne Ting Returned to Work Full-Time the Day After Stroke Rehab
“The next day after I left the hospital, I went back to work full time.”
Lime released four major hardware vehicle generations within 12 months
“We started building our hardware team and doing the vertical integration started day one. And what it enabled us to do is in the last 12 months or so that we released Four major versions of the vehicles, and one generation after generation that we improve on t…”