Meanwhile, Europe is producing its own rivals, including Voi, Tier, and Wind.Lawrence Leuschner, the cofounder and CEO of the Berlin-based scooter startup Tier, thinks he can beat out the competition because the firm is more efficient.
Much like other scooter companies, Tier works by unlocking an individual scooter through a phone app. How much you pay per ride depends on the city. In Berlin, for example, you can unlock a scooter for €1 and pay €0.15 per minute of use. His argument is that investors are looking for long-term sustainable growth versus the growth-at-all-costs mentality pioneered by Uber, Silicon Valley's original buzzy mobility startup.But Leuschner's remarks are part of an emerging narrative of investors needing to look beyond endless growth as the key metric for tech startups. The tepid floats for Uber, Lyft, and the office-sharing firm WeWork have signaled that pure growth fueled by huge amounts of money is a risky strategy.