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

When I first joined Lime, we were losing three dollars for every dollar of revenue. The daily decay rate was 3%, so in the course of 30 days, your entire fleet was gone, so the business was completely upside down. I would say my first four years as CEO, I was constantly worried about Lime going out of business. Lime wouldn't have survived if we did not do that deal.

Ready to go? Wayne, I am so excited for this, dude. Listen, I, I heard so many good things from Blake Byers, from Jeff Jordan, uh, from Sarah Smith, so thank you so much for joining me today.

Harry, thank you so much for having me. Very excited for the conversation.

Dude, I can't wait. I told you, listen, I come out of my f- apartment every day and there's, like, 50 Limes in front of my house, um, so I think of you every day in the most romantic of senses. Um, I want to start, though, you then worked for Dara at Uber, who has had the most incredible journey with Uber over the last few years. What did you learn from Dara through his mentorship?

Dara also, Dara came into Uber at a very difficult transition, and I think what was really amazing was how quickly he reset the tone at the top. And re- one of the first things he did was he wanted to put out new values for Uber. There was a lot of criticisms about kind of the way Uber was acting or the way Uber was competing and I remember the one value that he put out that was, that resonated the most was, "Do the right thing." It sounds cliché and shallow, but I can't tell you how much it resonated with people all throughout the company. We don't... Winning is not enough. We win while doing the right thing, we win while doing the ethical thing, we win while treating each other with respect. And what I saw was that there was, there was different paths to success and Dara brought a very unique set of leadership traits that in many ways challenged Uber to think about how, how can we be a better company and a better team?

Can I ask you, how do you think about doing the right thing in a multi-participant economy? And what I mean by that is, if we think about, say, Uber in that case, raising prices is s- doing the right thing maybe for supply and demand, it may be doing the right thing for drivers. It's not doing the right thing for consumers, and so doing the right thing is always held in the context of the beholder. How do you think about that?

We have a similar debate here. I would say it's really important not to make business decisions, moral decisions. I would actually take pricing out of a moral context. Companies throughout the world raise prices, lower prices millions of times a day. Amazon probably does it a million times in one day just on their own platform. Raising prices, lowering prices is not a moral decision. It's a business judgment call, and I think when we bring moral dimensions to business judgment calls, we actually shut down debate prematurely. Because if I'm saying, "I'm, I'm not gonna raise prices because I'm doing the right thing," then that assumes the person arguing for raising prices is doing the wrong thing, so it's very dangerous, I think, to, to, to put immoral consequences into a regular business decision. And so, (clears throat) I think there are good arguments for why companies may need to raise prices.