Lyft poaches Bird’s head of vehicle product

Shared electric bicycle and scooter providers are constantly at war with every other — whether it’s battling for a working permit in a highly coveted market, raising a enormous round of financing or making a key hire. Nowadays, the war continues with Lyft’s recent hiring of Eugene Kwak, Bird’s now-former mind of vehicle product. Kwak’s first day as Lyft’s thoughts of hardware product for bikes and scooters was last Monday.

Bird was on a tear at the time, between knowingly raising a enormous D round in a $2.5 billion evaluation and was among the very first scooter startups to set up its custom-built scooter. The on site scooters, formerly overseen by Kwak, have shown to have a positive impact on Bird’s device economics.

Bird includes ‘positive unit economics’ using its custom scooter model, CEO states

“Eugene has been a member of our really robust vehicle design and technology team that’s direct by Scott Rushforth, Bird’s Chief Vehicle Officer, a Bird spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We wish Eugene all the very best in his future projects. ”

Lyft, on the other hand, remains relying upon Segway because of its own scooters . This hire, but signs Lyft’s shift to deploying scooters built in house.

Along with Kwak’so hire, Lyft has spent the past few months beefing up its own bikes and scooters hardware team to be able to maintain iterating on its own goods. Before that month, Lyft additionally caused Marc Fenigstein, co-founder of the now-defunct electric bike company Alta Motors. Fenigstein is Lyft’s product lead for new vehicles.

Last month, Lyft caused Mark Holveck in Tesla, where he served as a senior manager for the technology research and development team. In Lyft, Holveck is your head of hardware engineering.

“We couldn’t be more excited to bring these 3 leaders to choose our hardware team to the next level,” Lyft Head of all Bikes and Scooters Dor Levi explained in a statement to TechCrunch. “They bring expertise from a number of the highest hardware technology companies in the market, and we look forward to keep on offering best-in-class mobility alternatives into our riders to help them easily get around their towns. ”

Lyft is undoubtedly hitting its stride as a multi-modal transportation supplier. So far, Lyft operates its bikes and scooters in 20 markets. Only last week, Lyft had a significant legal triumph if a judge allowed the company a preliminary injunction to prevent San Francisco from offering licenses to additional bike-share services.

Though Lyft is more recent to this micromobility area than Bird, it’s noteworthy that the company poached a key member of one of its main competitor’s teams. Given the relative newness of this distance, any little bit of a leg up on the competition will surely help.

I’ve reached out to Bird and will upgrade this story if I hear back.

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