Lime CEO Wayne Ting needed brain surgery to survive a serious stroke. Less than two years later, he’s navigated his e-scooter company to a $1.7 billion IPO.
When he was in the hospital last year, Ting said he couldn’t find examples of other CEOs who had publicly spoken about their stroke recovery. Now, he wants to be someone people can go to for help and guidance, he told Business Insider’s Katie Roof at Tech Insider: Growth Mode, sponsored by Fidelity, on Wednesday.
“In Silicon Valley, you want to be hardcore,” Ting said. “You can’t be pumped; you have to be super pumped. Showing weakness and showing that you’re a human is frankly the image that not a lot of CEOs want to portray.”
Ting tied his fight to the tumultuous road that Lime took to its IPO this July. The company fought for years with scooter rivals like Bird in the infamously tough micromobility industry, and weathered a 95% drop in revenue during the pandemic.
He said that financial improvement, like stroke recovery, required getting “1% better” every day.
Lime used to have to replace its entire fleet every month, he said; now the company’s redesigned e-scooters and bikes last more than five years. And adoption takes time, Ting noted: the mature market of San Francisco is now growing 100% year-over-year, he said.
Ting, a former chief of staff at Uber, also touted the need for sustainability, something he said he had hammered in under Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. When Khosrowshahi joined Uber, Ting said he overhauled a culture in which employees thought “there was no line that we’re not willing to cross.”
Now, as Ting sees it, “Win-at-all-costs is an insane idea.”
“If you’re not doing the right things, you can win for a long time, but things will ultimately catch up to you,” Ting said.
Uber owns about a fourth of Lime and lets users book its scooters on its app, providing a boost that’s helped Lime emerge as a victor of the 2010s’ so-called “scooter wars.” Lime raised around $167 million in its IPO. The company’s stock price swelled higher in the late summer and has since dropped back to around its listing valuation of $1.7 billion.
Chief rival Bird, which was once worth more than Lime, filed for bankruptcy in late 2023.
Ting said that questions about Bird popped up again and again during Lime’s IPO road show. Lime’s size, its improving unit economics, and its financial growth convinced Wall Street this summer that the company could succeed where Bird failed, Ting said.
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