Wayne Ting, CEO @Lime: From Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | E1252

Lime CEO Wayne Ting explains how the company went from losing $3 per dollar of revenue to $90M EBITDA through hardware ownership, battery swapping, and operational discipline.

• Lime’s early scooters lasted only 30 days with a 3% daily decay rate, making the unit economics fundamentally broken at launch.
• Proprietary hardware design (vs. off-the-shelf Chinese hardware) is Lime’s core moat; every competitor buying OEM has no incentive to reduce decay rates.
• Switching from nightly fleet retrieval to swappable batteries cut swapping costs by half — still the largest cost line in the business.
• Lime did over $600M gross bookings in 2024, $90M EBITDA, 30% top-line CAGR over four years, while its biggest competitor filed for Chapter 11.
• The $140M Uber deal (buying Jump) in COVID saved Lime from ~20 days of runway and made Lime the micromobility option embedded in the Uber platform.
• VC hype cycles are net-negative for startups: unlimited capital masked bad operations and allowed irrational discounting that delayed real business-building.
• Lime wins >90% of competitive city RFPs and renews permits at >95%; the car — not Bird or Bolt — is cited as its primary competitor.
• Wayne Ting suffered a stroke in 2024, is still partially paralyzed in his left arm, and returned to work full-time the day after leaving inpatient rehab.

2025-01-27 · Watch on YouTube