To stick with this one losing idea that really by the time I got to Zynga, I was just not going to do that again. And I think that's a big message in the book and I think I still need to hear that message today because we fall in love with our ideas.
Yeah. How much, like to you, what is the balance between some ideas? I find this in consumer quite a bit more than enterprise because it typically is a lot more defined. But in consumer, there's ideas that I've been pitched and I'm like, that's a terrible idea, and then the founder just does it and it totally works. And sometimes it's unpredictable. I think you can tune your intuition like quite a bit, but it can never be 100% crystal ball. You just know exactly whether an idea is going to work or not. Like what has been your framework? What's the point where you're like, I'm not 100% sure this idea will work, but it's worth putting in the three weeks or three months or whatever time is necessary to actually get the reality check to the idea?
Well, I think that we have idea veins or instinct veins, and so there's a zone that you have an instinct around. And then I have this framework: proven and better new, which is a way to derisk that and keep ourselves out of trouble. So, it's like just narrow down where your idea is new or novel, and wherever it's not, look for what's already proven and copy it. People like Nikita Bier have really been good at that. They've done the same product over and over again and it's worked each time. So I think that at least means you're not going to fail for the wrong reason, and you get a lot more shots on goal. And in consumer, even more than enterprise, it really is if you test more ideas in a week than the industry you're in contests in a year, you probably have a four or five times advantage, higher odds of success. And I'll also say that the reality in consumer is, you know, where you see traction there's a good idea, and where you don't see traction is not a good idea. And that might sound kind of dumb, but I find in consumer you're better off backing an unproven entrepreneur who's found product market fit for whatever reason than a proven entrepreneur like me with no product market fit. And that's just an unfortunate reality.
I have a bunch of questions. I have a fun thought exercise. So, John and I have had this debate: is it possible to build a competitor to Instagram? And I think that I would like to see someone try because I believe the capital markets are in a state right now that even though it's insane and there's a 99% chance it doesn't work, there's going to be people that would take the bet. You have Instagram, one of the most popular products in the entire world, and the company is very focused on other things, like AI and now a cloud business. Maybe the company overall doesn't fully appreciate just how amazing the business is. It still continues to grow. So I want to believe it's possible for a smart team to go and create something that would actually compete in that category. John is like, it's just not possible, it's over, network effects and scale. But I want to believe. I'm curious what your view is.
Well, one of these instinct veins that I talk about is the cocktail party. Originally there was a cocktail party on Napster, then on Friendster, then Facebook, and now Instagram. Once the cocktail party is there and working, it is hard to get people to move. But these cocktail parties can wear out and lose their excitement or appeal. In the case of Instagram today, I think it's lost a lot of its original value to us, which was social networking, the serendipity of a cocktail party. For maybe business reasons, they pursued engagement, wanted to be more like TikTok, get you more entertainment via Reels. So I think that opens up an opportunity. I don't know if you guys spend much time thinking about Net Promoter Score. It used to be really popular. There's a funny thing: I would bet that today users of Instagram probably have an NPS of 35, and the day they quit it's like quitting cigarettes, probably minus 35. That's usually a sign of weakness in your product or brand. On the exit, they're not promoting it; in fact, they're proud they've given up this bad habit. But what I would say is, there probably has to be something new to get consumers to move. We are lazy and apathetic with low attention spans. No one's downloading new apps. So there has to be something probably AI and agents that pulls you into a new cocktail party. I do believe it'll happen. Even though I'm skeptical about the particular go-to-market, I'm curious on your read on the state of venture capital.
You know, on the exit, they're not promoting it. In fact, they're proud they've given up this bad habit. And what I would say though is... The only thing, the only thing, it's a small sample size, but the friends that I know that quit Instagram, they end up still sending me memes from their business accounts. They can't give up the addiction.
Yeah. I think they're actually signaling that they've quit, but they're still having a cheeky drag here and there. I got to say, I got my drags down to like I probably use Instagram once a month, and then I find myself just drawn into time wasting. I'm on Twitter or X. That's my social network, my drug of choice. I tell myself it's more valuable content, but that's what we do. I look at it as an opportunity to do whatever the inverse of meditation is. Meditation, you sit and let thoughts flow through. This is like adding 20 new ideas to your head every 10 seconds.
You know, that's what we do. I look at it as... But it's addictive, whatever it is. But I would say that it's probably you need a shift. You need something new to get consumers to move. We are lazy and apathetic with low attention spans. No one's downloading new apps. So there has to be something probably AI and agents that is the new thing that pulls you into a new cocktail party.
But I do believe it'll happen. Even though I'm skeptical about the particular go-to-market, I'm curious on your read on the state of venture capital because if you go back to Zero to One, the sources of monopoly power, network effects are one of the four. They're very enduring and everyone believes that network effects will endure even in the age of AI. So I have been surprised even though I can't think of how to disrupt an established social network, I've been surprised that we haven't heard about a $1 billion pre-market round to buy their way into network effect.
Yeah, you can build a new social media company, but you need billions of dollars. TikTok is evidence of that. TikTok was spending how much money on Meta, Snap, all other platforms, probably the biggest advertiser on the internet for a while. I think they were getting their users from social networks. But your question on venture capital, why aren't we seeing this funded? I think you got to pull the camera back and also say we're not seeing a lot of consumer being funded. It almost feels like it's not investable right now. I think Y Combinator probably less than 10% of their companies are consumer. I'm investing in some consumer but it's after I see traction. It feels unpredictable and completely uncertain before there's traction. Distribution is pretty broken even though AI feels like a new platform at a consumer level it's not. We have a portal in GPT, but we also have to remember we're so early. GPT is a single player experience. There is no multiplayer version of cloud or GPT. There is no app connection. None of the things that enabled Zynga, YouTube was started on top of MySpace. There isn't an obvious way to jumpstart distribution. VCs rightly want to see something predictable. The small number I invested in a company called FOMO announced a big round last week and I only invested after they proved traction.
Sure. Yeah. How do you think vibe coding, agentic coding is going to change or is already changing game development? Because it feels like we should be seeing AAA games produced by solo developers. I don't know if that's more of a VC backable strategy or opportunity, but it feels like we're very close to some inflection point there. The indie dev community is already booming, but how do you think it'll play out? A thousand flowers bloom, happy bar simulator and the simulators are fun, but I'm just wondering if you think that there's a business opportunity there or if it will just be more like the D-to-C boom where there were a ton of small brands, a couple breakouts, but by and large it was just a ton of solo entrepreneurs on Shopify today. It's a $280 billion industry that doesn't seem to have any innovation.
You know, I think games have gotten really boring and have stagnated. I think it's because distribution's broken. Will AI change distribution? Probably on a pretty small level. The only place I think it could is enabling much faster testing of ideas, like what some hyper casual game companies like a company called Raleigh that Zynga was brilliant at. They would figure out what was tick-tockable, make a game in a week called High Heels that became number one. I don't see anyone really using AI effectively to do that. So then you get to, okay, AI can reduce the cost. I think it is making headway in reducing the cost, but you don't get hits in games because of less cost. You get hits because of more dimensions you can innovate on. I think AAA will come down from $100 million to maybe $30 million, but I don't think that's going to spark growth in the market. It's fascinating that I can't think of a single media asset, game where AI created the hit factor. We go back to the Harry Potter Balenciaga video that was one of the first AI videos that went super viral. People were like, 'Wow, this is actually entertaining.' And it's always the human that used the AI to do something they wouldn't have done. If they had just had an idea pre-AI, they wouldn't have paid for all the CGI. The human still is the hit maker. Even if it's awkward, when we were doing games with Flash, we were able to innovate and test really quickly, put things out in a day or a week. Now in the app store and Unity, it's slower. But AI is really well suited for web languages and web gaming. Web gaming is 1.9 billion out of 280 billion. A lot of people are betting Three.js will unlock innovation and growth, but you're going to have to see people embrace web gaming, which is a tough bet.
What do you think? How would you how do you think Apple should approach vibe coding? It feels like an interesting challenge. They don't necessarily know how they want to approach it. They've made it hard for these apps. They froze updates on a bunch of apps and said your business is over until we figure something out. Clearly they want to make money from it and they want to protect users. Developers are going to be annoyed. Good developers will be annoyed at both things. It seems like a tough one where users are clearly going to want modular software that they can create and multiplayer experiences they can imagine and share with friends, but it feels at odds with all of Apple's principles.
Yeah, 100%. I don't think there is a real incentive for Apple to do anything about that. That's not the energy I get from Apple. That's not the vibe is vibe coding. I don't even see Apple doing anything to help distribution of the apps that are put out on their platform now. I have a hard time seeing them motivated to help people put out tons more apps. I think it's more likely that logjam gets broken because somebody makes an app container that Apple allows people to keep changing massive amounts of change of content inside, almost like a Roblox. But it hurts my brain to figure out how that's going to happen. And vibe coding. I think Claude Code, Codex, automating coding using co-working agents, obviously that has legs. But vibe coding almost feels like the misstart we had with blogging and GeoCities where everyone was going to make their own website and they did and they just weren't very good. There weren't really websites that blew up that were built on GeoCities.
Yeah. We we are like it feels like we're very close to being able to effectively vibe code an iOS app in the cloud, deploy it to TestFlight, get that app back on your phone, close that loop entirely in an Apple compliant way. It couldn't go viral because it's not in the store, but you might be able to have your agent submit it to the store and wait two weeks, which might be an acceptable flywheel for some developers. The technology is going to get there quicker than the distribution and the ideas. I think you're spot on. And the ability to test, I'm also surprised this far into the AI cycle that the first thing we'd see is top of funnel massive testing using ads and links and tell your agent to spend all night testing and come back with the winning variant. I don't see one successful company or service offering that. I don't find any founders doing that. It's more you can build something in three months that would have taken a year or two. So it's more I can get to my prototype faster, but not I can test a lot of ideas faster.
Yeah. Speaking of ads, do you think hyper casual games should be allowed to advertise with fake CGI versions of a different game to promote the install of their very basic pick-three game?
Wow. Now we're getting to ethics. Should they be allowed at a morality level? I'd say it's misrepresenting. I wouldn't blame Apple for taking somebody down for that because it's misrepresenting things. It's a bad user experience. What I would be okay with is what we did in the beginning of Zynga: I'd put up a link for an amazing new game you want to try and it would go to 404 page not found because I was just testing for heat and interest. Or eventually we got more sophisticated and said you'll be the first to know about this game. I had an experiment record the fake game, have an agent vibe code you a real version of the fake game because a lot of people want to play the fake game, but the fake game doesn't have the flywheel of you will keep playing it. You'll play it for a couple minutes and then get bored, so they have to funnel you to something else.
Jordan, I had a product in college. I was taking a lot of film photos and there was a 30-minute drive to the closest place to get film developed reliably. I wanted to make a subscription service where they would send you rolls of film and you send it back. To test it, I ran Facebook ads at a landing page. I got a $20 CAC. Ended up not pursuing it, but I refunded everyone because I wasn't able to offer the service. Best way to test something.
Yeah. Back to the book. Peter Thiel did a Reddit AMA after Zero to One launched and someone asked him what is the Straussian reading of Zero to One and he said, 'Don't become an entrepreneur,' which is very funny. What is the Straussian reading of Life at the Speed of Play? I would say don't become a product founder. Don't do it if you want to make money. Don't go be a product founder if you think this is the best path to be rich and successful. I end the book by saying, 'How ambitious are you?' Everyone says I'm an 11 on a 10 scale. But the flip side is, what are you willing to sacrifice to get there? Would you toil in obscurity for 10 years to have an 80% chance of the greatest home run of your life, or would you take an 80% chance of a first base hit in one to two years? Most people would take the latter, and that's why they stay in their jobs. Even once we go found a company, we make compromises to derisk it.
Is that the correct question to ask to assess someone's level of ambition? Should you ask them 80% chance of a home run in 10 years versus 20% chance of a base hit? Or are there other questions you can dig into when talking to a founder to assess their ambition?
I think you can pretty quickly get a sense of what's motivating somebody and why they're doing this. The best founders have a passion that goes beyond this one business or opportunity because it's probably going to fail. I think there's a question like why are some founders repeating success and some have one big success. It is about your commitment and willpower. If you're more committed to winning than being liked or respected, that's the thread I look for. There are moments where as a founder we have to have real courage, but it's not courage to go against the world; it's usually courage to go against our own team, our own investors because we've promised them things and we have to tell them we are wrong. You come in on Monday and say, 'I just saw a competitor's product and what we're doing is totally wrong.' People have complained that working with me is like third grade soccer: every Monday I want to chase another ball. They're not wrong. I'm trying to be intellectually honest and I can burn people out that way, but it's because I'm more committed to winning than harmony or keeping this team with me.
Yeah. So it's so interesting because I've been in that mode too, third grade soccer strategy. I think that comes from knowing that what you're working on is something wrong with the idea at least in the early days. With our podcast early on, even when we had 100 viewers, I didn't have that third grade soccer strategy. I just knew this is a good product because people I trust said it's great. We had blinders on. But when you're in that mode where you're trying another variation, it comes off as scattered. But if you're able to admit that you're scattered because something is fundamentally wrong with the approach, that's intellectual honesty.
You knew you liked this product. You had feedback loops. You felt good about it. If it's not catching on yet, I think it's a marketing question and a patience question. That's different than feeling in the pit of your stomach that it's just not that good. A lot of times we're so hopeful about a product we're building, and then when we finally see it, it's never as good in code as it was in our mind. That's happened so often in games. We think it will be so cool, then we build it and say 'ah' or we see a competitor who has that and I want to send them a thank you note for building my bad idea. When you do find the person, you're not asking 'is this right?' You're not asking others' opinions.
You mentioned a bucket list. Everyone should build a house, everyone should write a book. Was taking a company public on your bucket list before you did it? Was it appropriate to have it on that list? What was that like?
Well, this is the second company I took public. I had a company called Support.com that I took public in 2000 on the last day of the IPO window because it was enterprise software. Our VCs had no interest in the company until the consumer fell apart. We had $170M in bookings. We were able to go public. I think it's a false dream. By the time I got to Zynga, I didn't want to go public. We were forced to go public. We were incredibly profitable, had over a billion dollars on our balance sheet, but were forced because of SEC rules which Obama changed with the Startup Act. There's all this pressure because people want your stock and they find ways to buy it through side letters. That's exposing you. We see it happening now with Anthropic. They write really mean letters scaring them. In the end, the SEC will see you as responsible for anyone who bought it. We were forced to go public. So were Facebook, LinkedIn. Companies like Stripe have put it off for years for good reason. Anyone who tells you there's anything that's going to help your company about going public is probably lying. Now SpaceX and large cap AI companies need access to capital markets, so they optimize for that. If you don't have that need, there is no benefit, only bad. So many employees leave because they say, 'I always wanted to be at a company that went public, it was on my bucket list. Goodbye.' You give them liquidity, they're gone. Your culture changes. Michael Dell once told me the biggest reason to go private was to control communications with employees because they get their views from stock chat rooms and not from him. Going public gives you five other jobs as a CEO that you don't need. You should be focused on product, customers, not investor relations.
Yeah, makes a ton of sense. Well, the book is Life at the Speed of Play. It's available everywhere books are sold. Congratulations on the launch. Let's do this again soon. I have a million more topics we can go all over the place.
Yeah, there's so many more topics to get into. This would be great. I'd love to talk about my broken internet strategy of public stock investing.
Yeah, we didn't even get to Snapchat.
Yeah, we didn't get to Snapchat. That's a whole show.
Yeah, that's a whole show. Let's do it soon. Come back at one. Maybe have me and Evan on together. We can debate whether this whole journey into AR goggles is the best thing.
Shareholders love the specs.
Shareholders really love the specs. We'll get to that. Well, thank you.
No, I mean, wait till we see how many sell. I'm pricing in 20 pairs. But I think it could surprise to the upside.
It could. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a great rest of your day. Great to see you, Mark. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers.
Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. [laughter] Mark just gave the anti-ad for going public. Hey, if you need to raise capital, if you want to raise the most capital, you got to go to the New York Stock Exchange. That's the endorsement that we're proud to give. Our next guest is in the waiting room. Shub Sinha from Integral is the co-founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. How you doing?
I'm doing okay. Thanks for having me.
Just okay? On this big day?
I'm riding the highs and the lows. Getting back up right now. So excited.
That's pretty normal for the entrepreneurial journey. But take us through your entrepreneurial journey. How did you get here? What are you building? What's the news today?
Yeah, definitely. Well, I'm excited. Today we actually just announced an $18 million Series A for my company, Integral. It was a good warm-up hit. Had to get the real hit in there. We like to warm up the gong on this show. Double hit. I don't think we've done that before. There's a warm-up hit and then the real hit. That was special for Integral. So tell us about Integral.
Yeah. So what Integral does is we sanitize proprietary real-world data sets such that AI builders can get very bespoke, very sensitive data sets. But data holders can also make sure that privacy and compliance is adhered to. This looks like medical records, financial transactions, etc. A lot of this contains the real world human behavior patterns that people like you and me have. There are individuals and enterprises who are now monetizing it since AI companies and AI builders want it. The builders want the signal, not the secret values. Integral sits in the middle to ensure through privacy engineering that we retain utility and signal while ensuring privacy and regulatory and contractual compliance.
Yeah. So how about this for an example? There have been examples of a company buying a company just for the data around how that company was operating, like for the Slack. But you can imagine Slack has so much information that is signal but not necessarily information that should be available for people working at the labs to see, like PII.
That's right. Folks at the labs don't necessarily want to see that. They want the context. It's a real win-win for data holders who want privacy and trust and revenue, and for the AI builder who wants to ensure they're not stepping into anything they shouldn't, but they get that value.
What are some types of companies that have valuable data that don't know it's valuable and could monetize it by working with you?
For sure. That's one of the bets we're making: this new proprietary data economy of individuals and enterprises. We've seen across the board, given the newness of the economy and types of data sets. For example, mid-market hospitals that see compressing revenues but have a treasure trove of data because they focus on a rare disease or specific procedure not available elsewhere. Fitness apps where people log entire lives. These apps have free or paid users. They can monetize that real world signal to keep the app free. It becomes circular because as AI gets better, these same companies will use it. It's a real win-win.
What's the state of the art in sanitization, maintaining privacy? We talked to Ed and Tai from the National Design Studio on Monday. They shipped a less than 15 meg small language model for sanitizing documents in the browser efficiently. Are you using open source models? Do you need frontier models for data sanitization? And is there worry about data flow back if using closed source models?
For sure. There are a variety of solutions mixed with human services and teams of PhDs. But that's first layer. Where Integral specializes is healthcare, which has all proprietary data. Your doctor should not put your data on the internet. As far as we can tell, they're not.
I told my doctor, go ahead. Because it would be embarrassing for everyone else if your lean muscle mass and body fat percentage got leaked. If your test levels leaked, you'd be accused of doping.
Are you when did you make the switch from AirPods to wired?
I'm also a wired headphone guy. I hit number five on AirPod replacement and went wired. Turns out it's a fashion statement in New York. I'm rocking both sides.
I think it is entirely superior, even before the fact you can get a bunch of pairs of wired headphones, have them everywhere, for the cost of one pair of AirPods. So maybe we're ahead. Congratulations on the round. Business makes a lot of sense. Excited to see where you go with it.
Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye.
Let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is Wayne Tang from Lime coming in on IPO day. Wayne, how are you doing? Congratulations. Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Talk to us about the journey to get here today. What does it feel like? What's going through your head right now?
It's been a long journey and I feel great to see Lime go public today. It's certainly not been a linear journey. There have been a lot of companies in micro-mobility and Lime is the last man standing in a very tough industry. We are the only ones that have built a scalable, sustainable, profitable business. That's why we've earned the right to be a public company. To see Lime trade publicly is validation of the hard choices we made, but also a lot of sacrifices to get to this point.
Yeah. What changed culturally recently or what is the culture like? Because it feels like the key to this business is operational efficiency, excellence, not having side quests. Operational efficiency is key.
You're absolutely right. It's a game of inches. Our average vehicle generates $7.50 of revenue a day. We have to charge, fix, position the vehicle. We do all that and generate 50% plus cash margins on that $7.50. Because of those margins, we pay back our vehicles in less than one year. Small mistakes add up quickly and the business becomes upside down, which you see with our competitors. It's not for lack of capital; many raised more money. Obviously it's hard because if it was easy, they would have done it. It requires a clear view of what matters. With limited resources, we focus on great hardware, software, operations, government relations, and deprioritize everything else.
What is going on on the supply chain side? Is there a constraint on battery capacity because of AI demand? Feels like AI is sucking up every possible piece of the supply chain from coatings to everything that generates power. Is that a constraint or an opportunity for demand to reduce battery prices or extend life?
I haven't seen a shortage on battery cells to date. One advantage Lime has is we are vertically integrated in hardware and software. We design every ebike and e-scooter in-house, control supply chain, outsource manufacturing. Since Lime is the world's largest purchaser, suppliers give us warning of shortages and want to sell to us. I have seen a shortage and inflation in memory chips due to AI driving up demand for high-end memory chips. Even if we use midrange memory, we see significant price inflation. If you don't lock in supply, there won't be any available in 2027-2028. Because Lime is the global leader, suppliers come to us early to secure supply and lock prices before inflation. That's an advantage of being vertically integrated. It's a real game of inches.
To we have to look ahead on not just what's going to happen this year but what's going to happen in the future. The other supply chain challenge we navigated this past year was liberation day. So the president announced a series of tariffs and some of these tariffs were 150% on some countries. But because Lime controls our own supply chain prior to 2026, we started to diversify where we are doing our manufacturing. In fact, we stood up full manufacturing capacity in three different countries. And what that allows us to do is depending on the policies of the day, we could work with different vendors to ensure that not only do we have the right supply, but that we are optimizing for any sort of tariff headwinds that we see. If you're buying off-the-shelf hardware from the same Chinese manufacturer, these are not tools in the box for you. And I feel like a lot of our competitors really couldn't navigate whether it's the tariffs or any sort of component shortages in the same way that Lime can. This is also where scale matters. We are in a winner-take-most market similar to Uber and Lyft and DoorDash and food delivery and winner-take-most market. It's great to be the winner and that's Lime. It sucks to be second and third place because you don't have the same reliability, the same scale to invest in software, hardware, capital expenditure and you don't have the scale to actually build proprietary hardware. It doesn't make sense to build your own scooter and e-bike if you only have a fleet of a thousand vehicles because you have to amortize that R&D cost over a much smaller fleet. We're able to have an independent product strategy because Lime operates over 300,000 bikes and scooters in 230 cities, 29 countries around the world. That scale advantage only accelerates now that Lime is public because we have more capital to invest in the business. I think we realize it's important to be vertically integrated. We realized the importance of scale and we built a business to capture those competitive advantages early which is why Lime is here and most of our competitors are bankrupt or not doing very well.
Yeah. Uh, if you could rewind to the early days during the height of the competitive dynamics between you know you and Bird and other players, how would you have, knowing everything that you know now, what would you have done differently?
I think there's lots of small things I would do differently, but I think the overarching strategy was the right one and I think it's proven out by Lime's going public today. I think it starts with I remember early days of Lime and people still have this debate in Silicon Valley and it really is a false choice which is is growth more important or profitability more important and that's not really you need to get your unit economics right to earn the right to grow rapidly.
And the incentives in the early days were so that it really incentivized the wrong behavior because nobody was making money. The only way to survive is to open up incremental venture capital. And when venture capital firms are saying that what we're going to value you on and what we're going to give you money on is growth, it incentivizes companies to chase after unprofitable revenue and frankly unsustainable growth even if it doesn't make financial sense.
Yeah. And that would be even like markets that turned out to not be a great fit for this type of mobility solution. Is that an example? Because I imagine like LA is an interesting city because it's so dominated by cars and I just remember when I moved to LA during the early days of this war that you guys had during the heyday of Bird Graveyard and all those accounts that probably made everyone's life a lot harder. But it felt like if you're just chasing growth, you're going to go into markets that are not even that great because if you don't get that revenue growth, your competitor is going to and they're going to be able to raise more capital, etc. Capital fight.
Exactly. And in fact, one of the first things I did when I became CEO is shrink our footprint. Because if you're running a coffee shop and you were losing money at every single cup of coffee, you should probably sell fewer cups of coffee and figure out how to make money before you started opening up new coffee shops. And that was the reality of Lime eight years ago. I think I want to say our gross margins were negative 300%. Every dollar of revenue, we lost three bucks. It was like before we think about growth, let's fix that. We should be making money at the trip level, at the scooter level. So, we shrunk our footprint, focus on the things that matter, fix our unit economics, and then really accelerated growth once we got that right.
And I think the companies that really had a growth at all cost mentality, even when it doesn't make financial sense, actually raise more money for a period of time, but the law of economics catches up to everybody. You can be economically irrational for a period of time, but you can't be economically irrational forever. Even the dumbest VC at some point figures out the game. And I think when the irrational funding left the industry, that's actually when Lime's competitive strengths really became more obvious because we were not competing on our ability to raise more capital and to burn it faster. We started to compete on the quality of our hardware, the quality of our operations. And I actually think getting past the hype cycle was a major reason why Lime is here. If we're still in the middle of the hype cycle, then we'll be on that treadmill of crazy growth. Burn all this money to raise more money to burn more of that in order to raise more money. And I think that's a losers game.
Yeah. Congratulations to the whole team. I'm sure when you took the job as CEO, maybe eight out of your 10 closest friends were like, 'You're absolutely crazy for taking that job.' But you did it. You got it here. Very cool. Congratulations.
I actually was texting with her. The night I got this job, I was having drinks on the rooftop of a friend's house and I was there with six friends from Uber. Every single person is like, 'This is such a dumb decision. It's a no-win job. You will never be able to turn this around. You should have never done this. You locked yourself into a trap that you can't get out of.' And I just recall, I mean, the fact that you mentioned that, I recall this conversation. I was texting with that group of people being like, 'Remember what you said to contrarian.' Right.
The victory lap. You deserve a drink on top of a roof deck. Hopefully you get one. I'm sure it's been a long day.
No, I literally knew. I knew. I was like, these guys, I'm sure around a lot of smart people. It was very contrarian to go and do this. And congratulations on an incredible moment.
Thanks so much. Really appreciate it. And congratulations on all your success as well. This is a great podcast. Really, really appreciate it.
We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.
Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our next guests are from Assort Health. We have the co-founders and co-CEOs.
Coco Alert. How you guys doing? Welcome to the show.
