Bolt, Usain Bolt's e-scooter startup, has disappeared almost overnight from six US cities.
👉 Background: Usain Bolt is, of course, the retired Jamaican sprinter known for holding several world records and several power poses. He’s also the founder of an e-scooter company operating across the US and Europe.
👉 What happened: Bolt, the e-scooter company, started back in 2018, but it looks like Bolt could be finished already. It has disappeared almost overnight from six cities in the US. We’re talkin’ scooters dead on the streets… no one answering the phones. Just gone!
👉 What else: Bolt posted a statement saying one of its investors didn’t come though... And being one of the trailblazers in a new industry can require a lot of capital.
💡The micromobility industry is an incredibly exciting industry, but also incredibly capital intensive.
💡 In other words, it takes a lot of money to create an industry from the ground-up. And that means these companies are likely to be loss-generating for a long period of time.
💡And there’s no guarantee the company value will increase. Bird, another e-scooter startup went public at a $2.3 billion valuation in May 2021, but now it's worth only $135 million. So the lesson is micromobility is definitely popular, but it miiiight not be valuable.
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