Lime CEO Wayne Ting needed brain surgery to survive a massive stroke. Less than two years later, he led his electric scooter company in an initial public offering that raised $1.7 billion.
While hospitalized last year, Ding said he could find no other examples of CEOs speaking publicly about stroke recovery. Now, he wants to be someone people can turn to for help and guidance, he told Business Insider’s Katie Roof on Wednesday on “Tech Insider: Growth Mode,” sponsored by Fidelity Investments.
“In Silicon Valley, you want to be hardcore,” Ding said. “You can’t be motivated; you have to be super-motivated. Frankly, showing vulnerability and showing that you’re a human being is not the image a lot of CEOs want to portray.”
Ting linked his fight to Lime’s tumultuous road to its IPO in July. The company has struggled for years against scooter rivals like Bird in the notorious micromobility industry and has seen revenue drop 95% during the pandemic.
Financial improvement, he said, is like stroke rehabilitation, requiring “1% improvement” every day.
Lime used to have to replace its entire fleet every month, he said. Now, the company’s redesigned e-scooters and bikes have a lifespan of more than five years. Adoption takes time, Ting noted: San Francisco’s mature market is currently growing at 100% year over year.
Former Uber chief of staff Ding also touted the need for sustainability, which he said he emphasized repeatedly under Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Ding said that when Khosrowshahi joined Uber, he revolutionized a culture in which employees believed there was “no line we weren’t willing to cross.”
Now, as Din sees it, “Winning at all costs is a crazy idea.”
“If you don’t do the right things, you can win for a long time, but things will eventually catch up with you,” Ding said.
Uber owns about a quarter of Lime and allows users to order scooters on its app, which helped power Lime’s victory in the so-called “scooter wars” of the 2010s. Lime raised about $167 million in its IPO. The company’s shares soared in late summer and have since fallen back to its listing valuation of about $1.7 billion.
The main competitor Bird, whose market value once exceeded Lime, filed for bankruptcy at the end of 2023.
Ding said that during Lime’s IPO roadshow, questions about Bird came up again and again. Ding said Lime’s scale, improving unit economics and financial growth convinced Wall Street this summer that the company could succeed where Bird failed.
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