Andrew Savage / Lime
What is the micromobility revolution? It’s the movement of trading gas pedals for handlebars to make urban transport easy and more affordable. In this episode of Start Here, we sat down with Andrew Savage, founding team member and VP of Sustainability at Lime, the world’s largest shared electric vehicle company and the force behind the e-scooters and e-bikes you’ve probably seen zipping through traffic jams in your city. Andrew breaks down how Lime has helped replace over a billion kilometers of car trips with clean, electronic rides and explains why this matters for our cities, our wallets, and the health of our planet!
Are you interested in learning more about Vermont’s entrepreneurial success? Make sure you check out our Instagram and LinkedIn, or simply get the scoop from our newsletter!
Andrew Savage 0:04
I think the biggest thing is providing rider safety so people feel comfortable getting out there on a bike or a scooter. Ridership increases by the nature of more people riding because people feel safer. It’s not a one plus one equals two, but it’s a one plus one equals 3x
Nicole Eaton 0:21
Welcome to start here the podcast sharing the stories of active, aspiring and accidental entrepreneurs. Today we sit down with Andrew Savage, Vice President of sustainability and founding team member of lime, the world’s largest shared Electric Vehicle Company. I’m Nicole Eaton and I’m Dave Bradbury. Today we’re recording from the new VCET recording studio in downtown Burlington. Vermont.
Dave Bradbury 0:48
Andrew, welcome back. Great to have you in the house here. What is lime and why do 24 million people love it?
Andrew Savage 0:57
It’s great to be back. Thank you for having me so. Lime is a shared electric micro mobility company. We offer e bikes and E scooters in over 250 markets across the globe. We’ve provided over a billion kilometers and trips. And yeah, I think we’re just getting going. I think the micro mobility revolution is here, and we’re hoping to keep that going. And what, what form of micro mobility Do you now offer? Yeah. So we have primarily an E scooter, which you’re familiar with, as I know, yeah, love it, e bike, which people are very familiar with. We’ve actually just introduced two additional products, which are a little bit of a hybrid of both of those. So we have a lime bike, which we is a sort of a lower, smaller form factor, just we got rider behavior information that said, hey, we want a easier step over smaller wheel e bike, essentially. And then we have a pretty fun product, which is lime glide, which is a hybrid between an E bike, so you’re sitting down, but it doesn’t have any pedals, so it’s just like a scooter. It’s like a sit down scooter. So we’re rolling that out in a number of markets around the globe, and in many ways, both of those are a response to rider interest and behavior, and also our desire to be able to serve both more riders and longer trips. So some people might feel more comfortable sitting down over a 345, mile trip, which is trips that we want to start serving more of in cities. So cool. That is so cool. It’s like, kind of like a moped, yeah, exactly. It’s a light moped, very accessible. And what we found was the, you know, we started out with pedal bikes. We weren’t using E bikes at all. We then had a three gear pedal bike. And then we very quickly realized, within the first six months of starting the company, that we wanted the ES test option, that that was, you know, the lithium ion batteries, the electric motors had all sort of come together in terms of advancement, that it was a possibility that we could offer that. And so we went to an E bike. But right as we went with the E bike. E scooters started taking off. And so what we actually found was the scooter itself was a gateway to all these products. We’re finding more and more interest in the bike now, but people realize through the scooter that you didn’t have to get all sweaty or get your pant legs dirty or all those things that people think of when they think about biking in a city to move around. And so the scooters help people re think mobility. And now we’re actually doing, you know, a lot of work around the bike product as well as the scooter.
Dave Bradbury 3:27
Wow, do you think there could have been any shortcuts, you know, over these years, right, to figure that out? Or, like, sometimes when you see new modalities, new technology, you go through these adoption curves, and it’s really trial by error, learn, iterate, get the first adopter wave through, get the next like, I mean, I suppose the next micro mobility company will have all this advantage, right? They wouldn’t have had to go through these, these steps, sure?
Andrew Savage 3:53
Yeah, it’s funny going through it. It’s hard to recognize the steps that we could have avoided. In many ways, they all seem logical, and they fit with the time and fit with the technology. So it’s a little hard to think we could sort of rewrite history or rewrite technology and say, let’s just go straight to the lime glide or the new E bike. We sort of had to learn along the way. And many ways, the riders, the public, had to sort of learn along with us and figure out what do they want? And we adapted to that.
Nicole Eaton 4:20
Wow, that’s so cool. So lime is a mission driven company built on sustainability, not only for the environment, but also for your pocket. And so how do you balance the two?
Andrew Savage 4:34
Yeah, I mean, I think we on the mission front, from a sustainability perspective, we set really ambitious climate goals. We have a goal to be net zero by 2031 one of the most ambitious goals that is out there in industry right now. And it’s something I, in my role, obviously follow very carefully and and work really hard to help the company achieve and, and we’ve been ahead of target. So even though we set, you know, a lot of companies set, really. Ambitious targets, and then they say that they’ll get, though, get there in the last three years, and you sort of don’t really believe them. We’ve really we’ve been trending ahead by a couple years every single year, and so that’s super important to the company. It’s important to the mission. It’s important to our riders. It’s important to our cities. And then at the same time, we’re a business, and we, you know, want to help riders get into micro mobility in an affordable way, so they can replace car trips, replace trips on Ubers, Lyfts and taxis. And so we really think about ways that we can make the product more available and affordable to riders through different programs, through passes, et cetera, et cetera. So we really think about our own mission around decarbonization and our mission to provide as many rides as we can to riders.
Nicole Eaton 5:47
Wow. And so what are you doing to, you know, keep staying ahead of the target. Like, how are you operating and running that?
Andrew Savage 5:55
Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, it’s so many different things, but we are doing things, everything from, I mean, first off, we measure our emissions every year, so we have to know how we’re doing. So like, part of is, like, you got to know where the hot spots are. And so we’re doing a lot of innovative things around logistics, for example, of how do we get our vehicles to our markets in a lower carbon way? So we just announced a partnership where all of our American imports are transported from port to our distribution hubs on electric trucks, which is a great innovation, apparently, actually, in Europe, it’s much harder to do. We are using HBO 100 which is a biofuel, and it’s 90% less carbon than traditional diesel. So like that, we recognize that distribution of our freight was a hot spot from a carbon perspective, so we’re looking to address it similarly. Our vehicles themselves use a lot of aluminum, and aluminum is a more intense metal to fabricate, so we’re sourcing and looking to find more opportunities for sourcing low carbon aluminum for things like the housing, where the battery is, certain components of the scooter that helps drive down carbon. So really, we look at where the carbon is, and we look at all right, what are the solutions out there in the market to help us bring carbon down?
Dave Bradbury 7:12
I think it’s really been great. How you, a couple years back, you began to offer to plant a tree, right for riders if they wanted to round up a little bit like explain what that is, and has it been successful?
Andrew Savage 7:24
Yeah. So we have a program called lime hero, and it operates around the globe. And in many ways, we allow local markets. So our local teams, we try to give some autonomy to the local teams that operate in our in our cities, the chance to have different partnerships, either with nonprofit organizations, mobility organizations, planting tree organizations, and in some ways, that’s a really great way to tie the mission to ridership. We did a really exciting initiative where we were offering a new pass to riders, so a lower cost, like monthly pass. And we said, hey, look, every time we have one of these passes sold, we’re gonna actually buy plant a tree through a program in that individual’s name. We did it across the different regions around the globe. It was a great way to have a net positive benefit of folks doubling down on our service. We wanted to show that we appreciated them, and we were able to have, you know, folks that were committing to us know that we were paying for a tree on their behalf. So by no means a climate panacea, but it’s one of those things that ties the mission to our support for the riders that we’re serving.
Nicole Eaton 8:35
Yeah, wow. I was gonna say I you know, limes Instagram and social media is amazing. And I was looking at all of the partnerships that you had, and wanted to ask, is that a huge part of Lyme strategy with reaching areas across the globe, and why are partnerships so important? And now, after you saying that going on a local level is genius, I didn’t even think about tapping into that, but could you just explain the partnerships and why that’s a huge part of the strategy?
Andrew Savage 9:06
Yeah, sure. And I share the admiration for our social media team. I mean, they are so good at what they’re doing, and I think bring such an authentic voice to the conversation. So appreciate you saying that. Kudos to the team that runs that they have done an amazing job.
Dave Bradbury 9:21
I’m like, watching other people have fun on Yeah? I’m like, I’m like, wow, how sad is my life here, yeah, Friday night, right?
Andrew Savage 9:27
Yeah. I mean, they really like, I think have done a great job. It’s a good example of bringing authenticity, a little bit of edge to the conversation. I mean, we are pretty edgy about car use, and, you know, we did, you know, the team had a great initiative in a past Valentine’s Day where they wrote or helped sort of create these sort of breakup letters with your car. And like they find ways of being culturally relevant and edgy and on brand and on mission, which I think is just awesome. But to get to your point, around local markets, you know, we operate in 250 markets around the globe, and we try to give a significant amount of autonomy to those local teams. I mean, not only do the local ops team run the P and L, but they also think about what is the most valuable partnership for the local market, and they are the ones who know best, right? And when you’re running a global business, you really just can’t be doing that from a single central place, right? LA, Chicago, DC might be very different from London, Barcelona and Tel Aviv, right? And we want to give the autonomy to local teams to be able to run markets well and find those partnerships that have the most impact.
Dave Bradbury 10:40
And you have a pretty high profile partnership with Uber, is that? They seem like a competitor. How did that come about?
Andrew Savage 10:48
Well, they were a competitor, and it’s a great question. So right now, as you mentioned, we are integrated into the Uber app. So if you are in London, for example, you pop open either Google Maps, you’ll see us alongside other mobility options, including taxis and ride hail. But if you open up the Uber app, you’ll see an alternative option to to a car with the lime products. So bike, Scooter, whatever’s in the market. And essentially, they the partnership is, of course, they take a little bit of revenue from that. They’re an investor in lime, and so in some ways, it serves their interest to serve more trips. They actually found that the short haul trips that we provide most, you know, the one kilometer, two kilometer, three kilometer trips, actually one, they have a significant carbon impact that they want to help solve. But two are kind of costly for them. They’re drawing riders away from longer trips. Drivers don’t want to do those short hauls. So in many ways, it’s, you know, like any good business partnership, it’s a true win, win. And cities love it, because they’re seeing us directly find ways to create a mode shift. And for us, the mode shift that is most impactful is when we can take people out of a car, out of a taxi, or ride hail vehicle and replace it with a fully electric bike or scooter. And so, you know, across the business, we’ve provided over 100 million trips that have prevented car trips. So our riders are having a significant impact on reducing congestion, reducing carbon and reducing local particulate emissions in cities that we serve.
Dave Bradbury 12:21
Do you think the average consumer, whether your customer or not like, understands what sustainability is now, you know, or you need to take air time or words to sort of educate on, hey, this is the pollution avoidance here, or the decarbonization results, like, are we sophisticated enough, on average, to kind of get it?
Andrew Savage 12:46
You know, I don’t think so. I don’t say that to diminish the my respect for riders and their capacity to understand these things, but I think often people will relate to things that are just the most relevant to their lives. So, for example, can I take a bike or a scooter and avoid a bus transfer that might have me miss dinner time with the kids? That’s what is so relevant to people. So can I get home more efficiently, more affordably, I think, sort of a next level, sort of appreciation is, Am I doing something that I intuitively have a sense helps the environment and is lower carbon? I don’t think that we’ll get to such a deep level of, you know, what is the mode shift of lime, and how does it compare numerically to a ride, hail trip from Uber? I don’t think that’s really the level that people are getting to, but they also have a decent sense of what is sort of on its face better for the environment. But I do think people have a real tactical, tactile relationship with do I get home more efficiently? Do I get home with some more fun and some joy, or do I make it home for bedtime with the kids? Like that’s what matters to people?
Nicole Eaton 13:58
I want to talk about the branding of lime and the strategy that goes along with that. I know we talked briefly about the social media and the marketing, but how important is the brand of lime?
Andrew Savage 14:14
Well, you know, I think in many ways, people outside of the organization are probably better equipped to share that answer. I mean, I think, you know, I was just recently in London where Lyme is truly used as a verb, which any company wants to be in a place where they’re used as a verb, right? I’m going to go take a lime to x. Or, Hey, should we take, should we go lime like that. That suggests a cultural relevance and and if you go to a place like London, you can see how culturally relevant the mobility service is. And so, you know, I think, you know, again, like people outside of the company, I think can better reflect on like, what does the brand mean, and how does it reflect on the business, et cetera. But I think of it as you know, how are we relating to people, and how are people relating to us, and if we’re being used as a verb, and these markets are on the globe, I think that suggests that we’ve sort of reached a place of permanence and relevance and impact.
Nicole Eaton 15:10
Yeah, and I guess to follow that, how, how does Lime Connect with the customers? You could say, like, are there specific customer teams that really, I guess my question is, how are you getting, you know, the feedback and the information from your riders?
Andrew Savage 15:26
Yeah, it’s a sort of many prong process. And, you know, I think the nice thing about scooters and bikes in the way that we operate is, at the most sort of basic level, we interact by them being out on the, you know, parked on the sidewalk outside of the walking lane of travel, so people can see them, and then they relate with them. They’re like, Oh, maybe we should take this mode instead of taking a car, for example. So I think what’s different about our business compared to most, is we don’t spend much on marketing like because they market themselves. We’re in these markets, and people see it, and they have a level of cultural understanding of how to use the product. And then I think we spend a lot of time trying to understand our riders through conversations and testing. So when we come out with a new product, like we talked about with like the lime glide, or lime bike, we’re asking people, we’re saying, what’s working, what’s not what do you what do you like? What don’t you like? Back to when I was in London, I joined a commuter Club, an event that the team was local. Team was hosting, and essentially it was during peak commute hours in a pretty dense area of travel in a park, and we had a pop up there, and the team was there, and riders are stopping by, and you can’t help but get feedback from people when you’re doing things like that. We’re obviously providing helmets to them and and we’re making ourselves culturally relevant to them, but they’re also providing just as much feedback to us.
Dave Bradbury 16:53
My experience has been, anybody that cycles a lot has an opinion about the gear. So it’s not just a Vermont thing, Nicole, right? Really cool. I want to talk about you, talk about your the local markets and the teams. I mean, did you set up this foot? It was like one city at a time, right? Because weren’t part of your early career. Was this intersection of sort of forward policy with mobility like, are you still fighting those battles to open up markets, or is it more a mature footprint and it’s kind of tuning, maybe the specific vehicle or bike that they want?
Andrew Savage 17:33
Yeah, it’s definitely a much more mature market. I mean, eight years ago, there was no what we call dockless bikes bikes or scooters in any markets. And what we were doing is bringing a new product to the market that cities and the public had to really adapt to. And frankly, there were no rules that governed that behavior. And so when we would go to cities, they very often had an incumbent Bike Share operator, usually are always a station based operator. So in many ways, we were going to these cities in direct competition with publicly funded Bike Share programs with very little regulations. So we’d go to them, and sometimes it would be just get a business license, or are we being treated like a concession that’s selling T shirts on the sidewalk are like, what are we? And so it was very difficult. It was very tactical in terms of how to get into each and every single market. Fast forward to where we are today, eight and a half, almost years later, and the markets matured where now cities are issuing RFPs, and they’re saying, we want one, two or three operators. We want them for this period of time, and you have to meet this certain criteria, and we’re going to select the best ones. So they’re going to look at environmental performance, operational performance, hardware, different characteristics of a business, and they’re going to decide, all right, who’s the best bet. And that’s where we see the regulation and the regulatory environment now. And that was a that’s a that’s a big change from eight years ago.
Dave Bradbury 19:02
I remember when you first, you know, encouraged me to get on a line bike. Was in Austin, Texas for a conference. Yeah, it was the, literally, the Wild West. There was probably five or six companies competing. Scooters were everywhere from the river to the front door at the hotel, and surprisingly, there were more scooters at the time at the back door to the hotel. Oh, interesting that I believe the workforce was using as a better form of public transportation. So there might be two out front and 20 out back, which was just something I never would have guessed. Yeah, data probably shows,
Andrew Savage 19:33
Yeah, we’ve definitely seen that the workers that work off hour shifts when public transportation is less reliable, or may not be running as consistently or regularly. That’s a huge market right there, because they have a transportation need. I mean, originally, the business was started to help solve and connect that sort of first and last mile. I use mile in quotes because, you know, now it could be three miles or four miles, but the goal was to help sort of bridge that gap at between public transportation and the final destination, or being able to go sort of intra city, from, you know, your office to a business meeting without having to get in a car or public transportation, if that wasn’t running in that in that short haul, to these things where you see other use cases, where people are using it because off hours, there is, or it’s cheaper than the automobile. Now, right, the economics have changed, and one of the things not to go back to London, but it’s just such a great example. But when I was there, every single time I looked at the map, and it was faster to take a bike that predominantly bikes there, and obviously far more affordable. And that was everything from the 35 minute bike ride from the warehouse up north to a 10 minute bike ride within the city. Like it span the gamut of the trips that I wanted to take. And obviously, being in the business, I’m always looking at all right, are we on par financially? Are we? Can we get there faster? Like, what’s the friction? And it’s it was amazing to see that the friction really wasn’t there.
Dave Bradbury 21:01
Wow, whoa, I have one more question. Can I do that? Yeah, so just your career, right? I mean, it’s been a lot of work in policy and communication, and again, I’ll call it forward leaning policy, as well as this sort of fascination with tech, like, Why? Why? Why? What drew you to that sort of intersection, and is it as exciting today as it was 810, 12 years ago?
Andrew Savage 21:33
Yeah, I think that the thread that may tie might tie it all together is this notion of like climate tech and climate solutions, even when I was working in policy, I was working for Congressman Welch, now US Senator Welch, I was working on climate work and policy around decarbonization, or energy efficiency, and later joined the solar industry in Vermont and served on the National Board for the solar industry, and then later with lime. All through all that work, I think then the driving force has been, how can we create an economy of the future that relies less on carbon fuels and pollution? And you know, I think I initially saw that policy wasn’t moving fast enough, and thus I moved into the private sector tech space, where I think often advancements can move more quickly and pull policy makers along. And so in many ways, it’s just been a drive to see, how can we decarbonize faster, and that’s at the lime level, or at the industry level, that I think is just so important.
Dave Bradbury 22:36
I’m so glad you ignored my advice to, like, not go west and work for this weird mobility company back in the day. So, you know, you love being proven wrong. And I’m like,
Andrew Savage 22:46
You have given, you have given advice to so many people over the course of this work at VCET that you had to be wrong at one point.
Dave Bradbury 22:56
Like, that’s like, a fail. I have, like, a folder of like, advice big fails.
Andrew Savage 23:01
Was it a really thin folder? I hope.
Dave Bradbury 23:05
The wins are bigger.
Andrew Savage 23:06
So in your defense, though, we can joke about it, I do think that, so regardless of decisions back then, eight plus years ago, you know, in many ways, you never know. You never know what is going to be around the next corner, like you could go start a carbon benefits platform for employees, which is something we were talking about, and that could turn a corner, and suddenly Amazon’s buying it. You just don’t know. And so in many ways, we can look back and say, yeah, like lime has made some headway in the last eight years, and we hope in the next eight years and beyond, but I think in the startup environment, you just can’t know. And that’s one of the beauties of doing it. Why people do do it? Because there’s some risk and some excitement and some sort of cutting edge nature
Dave Bradbury 23:48
Yeah. I mean, I love being proven wrong. It’s like, it’s such a learning opportunity for our team, right?
Nicole Eaton 23:53
Why are you looking at me??
Dave Bradbury 23:54
Well, nothing, you’re wrong. But I’m just like, I’m like, you know, the worst thing you could do is always think you’re right, right, not have the humility or the curiosity to say, oh, let’s learn about that. And I think that’s, I don’t know. That’s what I get jazzed about here at VCET, even when I’m wrong. So.
Andrew Savage 24:09
It’s fair we’re all wrong sometimes. And I could probably list many handfuls of things that we were wrong about over the course of the trajectory we’ve been on.
Nicole Eaton 24:21
I mean, I can totally go off of that. I do want to ask, how do you move forward when you notice there have been mistakes, I assume, even if there’s, you know, mistakes in the bike or a scooter, how do you how does lime go through that with having what is it? 24 million riders now?
Andrew Savage 24:39
Yeah, I think the key is, is being able to acknowledge where there is an issue within the company and finding a quick way to correctively act. And I think, you know, any business that’s scaling and growing, it has to be thinking about that, and has to be thinking about, Okay, how are we offering the best service that we can? How are we responding to our own execution, but also the world around us. I mean, talk about sort of the world around us being in a sort of tumultuous time with everything from tariffs to changing climate policy to mobility just fundamentally changing. Like, we have to constantly be adapting to the world around us.
Dave Bradbury 25:18
Like, when the forest fires are raging, right? People aren’t going to be on their bikes, right? So that you know, you see that in real time, I suspect, dips in usage in certain cities and markets.
Andrew Savage 25:28
Yeah, or Taylor Swift comes to a market to perform, and suddenly you see an astronomical increase in ridership, like you have to sort of span the gamut-
Dave Bradbury 25:38
Deos T swift ride a line bike??
Andrew Savage 25:40
I have not seen Taylor Swift riding a line bike, but plenty of a list celebrities have, and it’s always fun when we see them do that. It makes it feel all the more culturally relevant.
Nicole Eaton 25:51
It’s amazing.
Dave Bradbury 25:55
What policy changes or improvements here in the States, the US in particular, do we still need to see more micro mobility options, you know? And whether that’s for rural markets like Burlington and other small cities, right? Because we’re not the same size as London or LA, right? You know, if you had like, three things, that would be great to just sort of flip the lever on. What do those look like?
Andrew Savage 26:20
Yeah, I think the biggest thing is providing rider safety so people feel comfortable getting out there on a bike or a scooter. I mean, I think a lot of people would be inclined to take a trip on a bike or scooter, but they don’t necessarily feel safe or have a comfort level. And so we tend to share aggregated data with cities so that they can help provide protected bike lanes, or even just painted bike lanes, so people know that they have a space that is being carved out for them. In many ways, ridership increases. It’s by the nature of more people riding because people feel safer. It’s not a one plus one equals two, but it’s a one plus one equals 3x and so I think it’s an important facet of trying to find a way to get people to feel more comfortable. The second thing, I think, is just smart policies around dense urban environments. So across Europe, there are a lot of zones within the Center City that have different structures, policy structures around dissuading people from taking a private vehicle into the dense urban center. Now, that does not work in rural areas or even a Burlington Vermont, but it’s definitely worth thinking about in the major metro areas. For rural areas, I think that is still a nut that’s really hard to crack. Right? You need scale, you need the right product, and frankly, it hasn’t been done yet. I think it’s ripe for some one or something to fill that gap, because we know we certainly have transportation challenges at the rural level.
Dave Bradbury 27:54
Maybe you could come up with a lime snowmobile?
Andrew Savage 27:57
Yes, I know, right?
Dave Bradbury 27:53
That would be baller.
Nicole Eaton 27:54
That would be awesome. How long does it take to put out a new product? Roughly?
Nicole Eaton 27:58
It’s a several year process, because we’re both doing initial rider behavior queries. We’re taking that back with an in house hardware team developing a prototype, going back to riders understanding, do they like it? What needs to be changed, making those changes, and then putting into production, and then getting and then getting it into markets. So we launched, for example, the two new products that I mentioned in Zurich and in Atlanta. We’ve been testing those, they’ve gone great. And so now we’re adding, you know, more than a dozen markets to our distribution for those products.
Dave Bradbury 28:36
So you feel, you still feel like, you know, the startup phase has passed, but you haven’t lost the nimbleness.
Andrew Savage 28:43
Yeah, you raise a great question, like every time the company gets bigger, by every stage, like the nimbleness goes down, and that happens at almost any company. And I think that goal is to figure out how to retain a level of nimbleness and startup culture while embracing the maturity of a more mature business. Of you know, doing things that are expected of a more mature business.
Dave Bradbury 29:06
So what’s more fun about that for you and your job, like now that you’re at scale?
Andrew Savage 29:11
Scale is a lot of fun, because you just know that you are having impact. I mean, I think you know we were talking earlier that we now provide six trips every second, every second of the day, on average, around the globe, that is super fun, because you’re seeing the cumulative impact of many, many, many, small behaviors at the same time. Like running a business that has more internal bureaucracy and is less startupy, there’s something that’s not as fun about that, right? So, you know, I’ll take both. It’s been fun to be on the journey and in many ways, appreciate where we’ve come from, acknowledge that that was pretty fun when we had no idea what the regulation is going to look like. Now it’s pretty nice to know what the regulations look like and really be scaling and have what I think is a more sustainable business, not just environmental, environmentally sustainable, but financially we’re making money turning free cash flow. And we always knew that until we reached that point of free cash flow, we weren’t going to have the long term, enduring impact that we wanted to have. It can’t just be we want to do good for the environment. We’ve got to be a good business that can stand on its own two feet or two wheels.
Dave Bradbury 30:15
Right, no margin, no mission, kind of kind of thing, right? You know, back in the day when it got going, there was a lot of competition and a lot of hot money coming in to sort of see what would stick, and there seem to be fewer options. But the ones that are there are better, maybe because they’ve working more proactively with the host cities for expectations and lanes and where to put bikes and whatnot. But it’s, I don’t miss the Wild West days.
Andrew Savage 30:42
Yeah, it was a wild west, and I think those that are still operating have been battle tested, and have had to perform, and they had to perform for riders, they had to perform for cities. And that’s where we remain resolutely focused, because those are our two core customers
Nicole Eaton 30:58
In terms of scaling. Do you find that cities are approaching lime, or is lime just going to cities and pitching the data that you have from other cities?
Andrew Savage 31:08
Yeah, I think it’s more that cities are recognizing the transformative impact that Micromobility can have. They’re recognizing their challenges of reaching either lower carbon or less congestion, and they’re looking at the suite of solutions that they can offer, and shared micro mobility is right up there among those sort of tools in their tool belt. And so they’re coming to the industry and saying, okay, industry, we want to select two or three operators, and we’re going to give you five year run rate, a runway to run the business, and we expect a, b and c performance requirements. So it’s sort of a bit of a two step, where we’re providing the solution, they’re requesting it, and then we work together on what they need to help have it be a successful program. So things that we do now that we weren’t capable of doing eight years ago is, for example, having certain zones within a city that are slow ride zones because there’s higher congestion because of pedestrians or parking zones where we say, Look, you can’t park in X, Y or Z place because it’s too congested. So we try to use-
Dave Bradbury 32:14
That’s a little frustrating sometimes-
Andrew Savage 32:16
Absolutely right
Dave Bradbury 32:17
Because when I want to get off the bike, I’m ready right?
Andrew Savage 32:19
Often, cities may put things in place that aren’t as supportive or thinking about the rider, but I totally get it. It’s happened to all of us
Dave Bradbury 32:31
Have you been on a line, scooter or bike Nicole?
Nicole Eaton 32:33
No, my thing is, I, I don’t, I don’t want to get hurt, so I’m like, I’m scared to get on.
Andrew Savage 32:39
Good news, 99.99% of all of our trips are incident free, which is something we continue to try to improve on. But you know, it’s a real, it’s, it’s worth it’s, I’m glad you shared it, because it’s something that is real. It’s exists for so many people. And I think the best thing we can do is have more people out there so that people like you see that it can be done safely, that you’re not the only one out there. And in sort of, in many ways, the rising tide occurs, and people feel like there’s a level of safety. And frankly, I still travel when I’m traveling for business, and I’m know I’m going to be in a line market, I’m bringing my helmet.
Nicole Eaton 33:17
Yeah, true. I mean, I will say the only time I’ve had on an electric scooter was a razor electric scooter, and I fell off and, like, broke my wrist.
Dave Bradbury 33:29
You were harmed by that, that totally different product, right? So I want to go to some of the mentoring you’ve done through the years, right, in addition to helping up us when we call looking for help for somebody, but I think you’re still a mentor at the Harvard I lab or Innovation Lab, which is great. I’ve done Tech Stars when they had their sustainability accelerator. So why is that important to you? And what do you get out of sort of offering advice to other founders?
Andrew Savage 33:59
Yeah. I mean, we went through all of it at Lyme. I mean, the high growth, raising money, ups and downs, pandemic that almost took out the business, scaling globally. Not to say that we’ve seen it all, because there’s still plenty more. But I think with that comes a level of experience that I think, and I hope, can help other startups. And as I mentioned earlier, I’m really committed to the climate tech space and finding other solutions that can help decarbonize, particularly transportation, but decarbonize at large. And so I think these forums that you mentioned are just really fun opportunities where I get as much out of the help that I’m giving as I think the startups get I hope that I offer some help, but I just enjoy it. I think that the journey of going from starting with almost nothing and envisioning a different future is really exciting, and I think it’s fun to be along that journey with others, even as Lyme progresses to a point where we have more maturity and there’s just a little less of that Startup environment, as we were talking about earlier.
Nicole Eaton 35:01
Yeah, and for those who don’t know, Andrew is a 2024, time 100 climate innovator, which is really exciting.
Dave Bradbury 35:14
Was that a hell of a party. Or what was your one?
Andrew Savage 35:17
There was one, I think you had, like, three weeks notice to then fly to wherever cop was. I think it was in the Middle East last November, at that time I was like, that is a wonderful acknowledgement. I was appreciative of it, but I wasn’t gonna fly three quarters of the way around the world to join the party, but if they want me back at any other you know, potential COP climate conferences I’m happy to join. But no, it was, you know, it was great to be recognized. I think in many ways, just a reflection of what lime has achieved in the team in our decarbonization goals. And in many ways, I’m so indebted to the team across the business, from hardware to logistics to operations. That is, they’re doing the hard work to help us run a more efficient business and a lower carbon business, and that’s in many ways, what was being, I think, acknowledged.
Nicole Eaton 36:03
Okay, it’s time for the magic wand question, what founder or leader, past or present would you like to chat with and why?
Andrew Savage 36:16
I know we’ve gone back and forth about how difficult this question has so much practice, yeah, and I’m gonna maybe break the rules a little bit, but you didn’t set too many rules just now, so I’m gonna go for it. So my dad, who has passed away, but started with his brother in Vermont, the Red Sox fantasy camp in the 1980s would just be so fun to talk with now, having matured a bit having been a parent longer, and just to understand his journey through that startup experience, I remember going to bed and hearing the sound of envelopes being printed, because the next morning we were going to be like sticking sticky addresses on those envelopes going out the door And just to start up a business without the internet, and to be starting something that was physical, but had this sort of New England and greater than New England presence, I just think it was so fun to talk with him about that and the journey between starting it, how they started it, his work with his brother, I just find the whole thing to be interesting that I never had The maturity to be able to ask him. And so I just think, you know, knowing what I know now, I’d love to sort of hear that story from him.
Nicole Eaton 37:29
That’s a great answer.
Dave Bradbury 37:30
It totally is way better than our answers would be if we were ever prompted for that question.
Andrew Savage 37:35
All right. Well, you got time to think about it. You got a few more episodes to think about.
Dave Bradbury 37:37
We sure do. And Andrew, thank you so much again for coming in to visit, and congratulations on your career and the progress with lime. It truly is amazing how far it’s come. Thank you. Wish you would come. I’m gonna ride one. Yeah, let’s get you on one, right? Yeah?
Andrew Savage 37:53
Well, thank you for having me. Really appreciate it and love what you guys do here at VCET, and such an important role that you play in the community. So keep up the good work.
Dave Bradbury 37:58
Yeah, we’ll try and thank you. This has been start here podcast sharing the stories of active, aspiring, accidental entrepreneurs. This series is brought to you by the blunt Center for Emerging Technologies. Now let’s go lime!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
