- Lime, a popular scooter company announced that it is shuffling around its management team
- Brad Bao (co-founder) is going to become the CEO and is succeeding Toby Sun (co-founder) for this position.
- Joe Kraus is getting promoted from COO to president
Popular scooter company Lime recently announced it is shuffling around its management team. Lime co-founder Brad Bao is becoming the CEO. Bao is succeeding co-founder Toby Sun in this position — who has been CEO of Lime since the company was founded in January 2017.
Going forward, Sun is going to report on Bao and is going to focus on future research and development along with overseeing the company culture, according to Forbes.
Plus Lime is going to promote COO Joe Kraus to the president role, which is the position previously held by Bao. This means that Kraus is going to oversee the day-to-day operations of the company, marketing, and work closely with city officials. Kraus used to be a partner at Google Ventures before he left to join Lime six months ago.
Kraus will be overseeing the company’s day to day operations, as well as taking on responsibility for Lime’s city relationships, business development and marketing and communications. And Bao is going to head up more of the business operations and oversee larger teams.
“Having Brad focusing on the now and me focusing on the future is something I feel really really excited about,” said Sun in an interview with Forbes. “Brad was my mentor and my trusted business partner for a long time, so I feel (confident) in having him lead the day-to-day.”
Since Lime launched a couple of years ago, it grew at a rapid pace. The company originally started out as a bike sharing service, but then it pivoted to scooters slightly more than a year ago. Now the total number of scooter rides it has seen since launching is 50 million.
Now Lime has more than 700 employees across 25 countries and 5 continents. In terms of funding, Lime raised about $777 million and has a valuation of about $2.4 billion.
Having Bao in the chief executive seat at this stage of the company makes sense because he has experience in scaling startups. Forbes pointed out that Bao spent eight years growing Tencent’s operations in the US. And Sun specializes in forward-thinking rather than scaling operations.
Somesh Dash, a general partner at IVP / investor in Lime, told Forbes that this shift in management could be compared to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page setting the CEO role to Eric Schmidt and Twitter rotating the CEO position between Ev Williams, Dick Costolo, and Jack Dorsey. “A sign of a great team is that the founders can end each other sentences. They are really so symbiotic,” added Dash via Forbes.
