Bird

Andrew was one of the first people to show me the Bird app before it launched. He kept pinging me to take a closer look at the company, which eventually led to my scooter ride with Justin Balthrop in Santa Monica and the start of my Bird chapter. We later worked together there as Bird grew.

Björn and I partnered across years of Bird product work, including integrations that brought Forest and Lyft into Bird's broader mobility ecosystem. When he joined, he kept reminding me how impressed he was by Habitat. By then I thought of Habitat as simply the operating system we ran on, so his perspective was a valuable reminder to step back and recognize what the team had built.

Chan and I joined Bird on the same day. He helped lay the company's original technical foundation using then-emerging tools such as Kotlin and Dropwizard, and his instincts for performance and scale influenced many of the systems we built as Bird grew.

David was the visionary founder behind Geni and Yammer, and we worked together across both companies. He later became an investor in Bird. Today he is a Founder and Partner at Craft Ventures, whose portfolio spans companies including Uber, Airbnb, Anduril, Bird, and many other defining technology businesses. He is also an active co-host of the All-In Podcast.

Jason fundamentally restructured and rebuilt Bird's iOS application, transforming it from a mostly prototype experience into a fast, responsive mobile platform. He also led the Bluetooth integration and app-to-scooter communication that connected the rider experience directly to Bird's vehicles.

Jonathan led or contributed to more Bird initiatives than a short list can capture. His scope included government compliance products and strategy, rider and operator experiences, international expansion, payments and fintech, and retail and consumer products. We partnered across a number of those efforts as Bird's platform expanded rapidly.

Justin recruited me to Bird and served as CTO during its fastest years of growth. We worked together as the company expanded from a small Santa Monica startup into a global mobility platform.

Datadog was Michael's daily instrument, and his dashboards were masterpieces. For nearly every question, he could pull up an existing dashboard or build a new one in seconds. His attention to p99 performance, reliability, and anything the team could instrument and improve helped keep Bird's systems grounded in evidence as he led the engineering organization.

Prat joined Bird as an engineer after I interviewed and vouched for him in 2018. He worked on my team building internal administration systems and later GovTech products during the early Culver City years, then successfully transitioned into product management as the company evolved.

Vlad and I formed Bird's original core backend team. We worked together across charger tools, an early multilayer map-management system for scooters, chargers, nests, and field operations, the RBAC authorization system that remains foundational to Bird's administration tools, agreement management, and many other operational platforms. Our pattern was consistent: take a sprawling problem, break it into manageable pieces, and build the system Bird needed to operate.