Telehealth for Your Pooch: Culver City's Airvet Raises $14M Series A
Eric Zassenhaus
Eric Zassenhaus is dot.LA's managing editor for platforms and audience. He works to put dot.LA stories in front of the broadest audience in the best possible way. Prior to joining dot.LA, he served as an editorial and product lead at Pacific Standard magazine and at NPR affiliate KPCC in Los Angeles. He has also worked as a news producer, editor and art director. Follow him on Twitter for random thoughts on publishing and L.A. culture.
Culver City-based Airvet's mission to connect more pets with vets is getting a boost.
The company announced Friday they have raised $14 million in a Series A round to expand their telemedicine and telehealth veterinary network.
CEO Brandon Werber said he's seen the number of users and doctors on its platform surge during the pandemic, as homebound pet owners scrambled to find pet care online. The company — which was launched in 2018 — now has a network of 2,600 veterinarians across 43 states, according to Werber.
The raise was led by Canvas Ventures and includes funding from e.ventures, Burst Capital, Starting Line, TrueSight Ventures, Hawke Ventures, Bracket Capital, Michael Stoppelman, and several major veterinary industry leaders. dot.LA founder Spencer Rascoff is also an investor.
Pet owners can download the app on Android or iPhone and set up a meeting with a licensed vet for a $30 flat fee per session. There's no time limit per session. Werber said often those sessions include follow-ups.
About 71% of pet owners go to Google or social media to answer their questions about their pet's odd behavior, Werber said, where they often get amateur advice that can put their furry friends at risk. That, he says, is the behavior he hopes Airvet can change.
He adds the platform isn't intended to replace in-person vet visits, but to give people unsure of whether to take their pet in another option.
"So the goal for us, isn't to say 'hey, use Airvet instead of going to the (vet's) office', it's 'use Airvet instead of going to Google,"' he said.
Werber is the son of "veterinarian to the stars" Dr. Jeff Werber, a regular face on KTLA who counts Demi Moore, Rod Stewart and Nick Jonas's pets among his patients.
Werber calls his father the company's chief vet officer and the inspiration for the platform.
Photo courtesy of Airvet
"The vet industry has no face," he said. "People don't know their own vets' name, 50% of pet owners don't even have a primary vet."
Telehealth has been growng in popularity during the pandemic, and healthcare apps like Cloudbreak and GoodRx have been expanding their businesses rapidly. Virtual veterinary medicine would be a logical next step.
Airvet provides both telehealth and telemedicine. The difference is subtle but important in veterinary medicine. Any user can download the app to get recommendations and suggestions from licensed vets. But only veterinarians who have an established relationship with the animal and the owner can actually prescribe drugs or care. In most states, that must be done in person, largely because a pet can't describe pain over video chat the way a human can. A vet often has to be physically present to assess the animal's condition.
Airvet can help establish those relationships, but for many, the app might be most useful to figure out whether their pet's condition is serious enough to require a visit to the local vet.
"Part of our business is we partner with vet hospitals [...] so that they can practice telemedicine with their own clients," Weber said, adding that the app can also be downloaded by "any pet owner in the country for telehealth and they can get advice and guidance and support and things from vets on demand 24/7."
Werber says the app's aim is to provide everyone the experience he had with his father, one of the nation's most recognizable vets, and someone he had on call at any time of day.
"I want every pet owner to know that they have a vet in their pocket, and if anything were to happen, day or night — even three in the morning — they can tap a button and a vet will be there to talk to them within a minute or less." Werber said.
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Here’s how L.A.’s Curative Plans to Move Saliva-Based COVID-19 Testing to Other U.S. Cities
May 04 2020
Fred Turner, the 25-year-old founder of Curative Inc., is the man behind L.A.'s push to bring universal testing to the region. But, he has bigger plans.
Turner, an Oxford dropout, just landed a deal with the Air Force to test military worldwide and he's now eyeing national expansion for his startup. By the end of this month, the company he started months ago is expected to pump out more than a million test kits a week.
"We are a strange company because our goal is to essentially put ourselves out of business," Turner said.
<p>Turner, who was named UK Young Engineer of the Year at age 17 when he built a DNA machine from his bedroom to figure out why his brother had red hair and he had brown hair, turned his focus to coronavirus in January. He upended his life as head of Shield Bio, which sought to eliminate sepsis, and moved to Southern California after a local venture capitalist connected him with a lab that he could build out for COVID-19 testing. </p><p>Curative Inc. was born. </p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://dot.la/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzE4NjM5Ni9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxMTkyMDg3Mn0.Fy0dtjHfIsqIXJAOI7MUohie11857cWDACI3OksmLt4/image.jpg?width=980" id="515a2" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="7ee43a7a9c8e7ea09bd6cdb251d45ace" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Curative, Inc. Founder Fred Turner is the man behind L.A.'s push to bring universal testing to the region.
<p>For weeks he lived in hotels as he created what has become the backbone of testing in America's second largest city. The company, one of the few saliva-based tests that have gotten emergency approvals from the FDA, has a 10% false negative rate, according to their own non-peer reviewed studies. Turner argues the rate is better than most of the nasal swab testing out there and oral tests, which can be self-administered, are the only way the country can reopen quickly.</p><p>He is now operating two labs, one in San Dimas another in Washington D.C., with plans for several more across the nation. Meanwhile, the rest of the country is watching to see if Los Angeles' promise of universal testing meets the expectations with some already complaining about the difficulty of securing an appointment.</p>
<p><strong>dot.LA: Curative is responsible for 95% of Los Angeles COVID-19 tests. Can you meet the demand for universal testing?</strong><br/></p><p><strong>Curative, Inc. Founder Fred Turner:</strong> We will be able to fulfill demand. There's more infrastructure that needs to be put in place. With the collection site, the mayor's office has been working hard to scale those up and make sure that the collection site infrastructure is in place. On the lab side, we definitely have enough capacity to serve the area.</p><p>In (the San Dimas) lab we have capacity for about 20,000 per day. We're going to be scaling this lab up to 30,000 over the next week or so, eventually, probably slightly more than that. </p><p>Ultimately, the goal is to do as many tests as we need to reopen the country and I think we've had many different estimates of how many that might be. I've heard estimates (that it will take) as high as five million tests a day to reopen, but the current supply chain is nowhere near going to be able to keep up with that. The next goal we are shooting for is a million tests a week by about mid-May, end of May.</p><p><strong>If we're testing more people will that strain the turnaround time? Right now, I understand it's about 24 to 72 hours. Can you take it down to several hours or even minutes?</strong></p><p>We are always aiming to push it down. I think it can be pushed under 24 hours, but we tend to focus more on scaling it up at that point. I think 24 hours is around optimal as you bring on more capacity. We're obviously being careful to match the capacity coming into the lab against the turnaround. </p><p><strong>Curative is one of the few companies that the FDA has provided emergency approval for use of a saliva test. Do you think this is the answer to universal testing nationally?</strong> </p><p>Oral fluids is the technical term, which is slightly different from saliva. Our protocol involves having the person cough first, which releases virus from the upper and lower respiratory tract. Some of that is then caught in the saliva, and also viruses in the saliva. The idea is you're effectively sampling multiple sites at once, which we think gives a slight increase in the sensitivity of the testing.</p><p>Self-collected sampling has got to be the way forward. There's just no way that we can do a million nasal pharyngeal swabs, or we call them 'brain swabs,' it's just not practical. We don't have the medical staff, and as a country we just can't do that many swabs. And so the way forward is going to be self collection. That's the only thing we can do at scale.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-youtube">
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="93ba4781c410d06eb2cfed59cce147a8"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LNopEE7lC6E?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Covid-19 Oral Fluid Test Kit Instructions</small>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNopEE7lC6E&feature=emb_title" target="_blank">www.youtube.com</a>
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</p><p><strong>Curative recently secured a contract with the Department of Defense. What's next?</strong><br/></p><p>We haven't settled on the exact number, but we will be in a large number of states. That is the plan, building out the infrastructure for this kind of testing. We can take the L.A. model and scale it across the country. We have a version of the drive-thru software that other cities and states can take. We have all the training material. We have a team that fly around the country setting up these drive-thru sites. We have really tried to make a plug-and-play package where cities and states that want to launch drive-thru testing, we have everything they need. </p><p><strong>Is Los Angeles a testing ground and a proving ground for national efforts?</strong></p><p>Yeah, I think Mayor Garcetti has definitely demonstrated what can be done if the city moves very quickly to build out the infrastructure, I do think the drive-thru testing, walk through testing is going to be an essential component of this.</p><p>It's just much faster to get the samples to the lab than shipping it out and then shipping it back again. The infrastructure piece is critical for getting these tests out there and we're working with several other states now on building out a similar infrastructure. Some of them have existing programs that we would be plugging into and expanding, and some of them are looking to roll out their own similar programs. You can test a lot more people with the oral tests with far fewer staff.</p><p><strong>What are the challenges with the supply chain in terms of making your tests more widely available?</strong></p><p>We need more plastic, more robots, more people. Most of the components that go into these tests are just already maxed out in their production capacity. And so we've been throwing online a bunch of internal production, such as injection molding to make our swab kit tubes, as well as bringing on other sources of similar materials that are not being used for COVID-19 testing and validating them for COVID. So for the swabs, for example, we use a swab type that is usually used for testing clean rooms. It works just as well for COVID testing, but nobody else is using it for that purpose. </p><p>We don't want to be competing with other people, stopping them from getting access to resources. We want to bring on new supply so it's not a zero- sum game, and the total amount of tests will increase. But, I think distribution is going to be a bigger bottleneck over the next month. Los Angeles has done a fantastic job in building out infrastructure and collection. That needs to happen now across the whole country. </p><p><strong>What would it take to meet national demand?</strong></p><p>It would take a network of multiple labs that we are calling gigalabs that can process 50,000 to 100,000 tests a day across the country and a significant scale up in the production of the physical components that go into the tests. We've been investigating lab sites in a few states, something central like Texas or Colorado. </p><p><strong>Are you concerned that you have too high of a false negative rate at 10%?</strong></p><p>All COVID tests will have false negative rates. In our studies, we demonstrated that the sensitivity is at least as good if not better than the nasal pharyngeal swab tests. So, there will definitely be false negatives as there will be in every test, but we think the data supports us having a low rate of false negatives. The sensitivity is about 90%.</p><p>When you include all patients, the nasal pharyngeal came in at about 79%. A new (non-peer reviewed) Yale study shows a higher sensitivity from saliva and all fluids than the nasal pharyngeal. I don't think we have the evidence to say that we're better yet, but we have the evidence to say that we're at least equivalent. The ease of doing oral tests and the accessibility is obviously significantly better. We're not using PPE. We're not exposing healthcare workers. It's just a much easier test to roll out that people can test themselves.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-proxy-image">
<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Florida_National_Guard_%2849677710741%29.jpg" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vbWVkaWEucmJsLm1zL2ltYWdlP3U9JTJGd2lraXBlZGlhJTJGY29tbW9ucyUyRmYlMkZmOSUyRkZsb3JpZGFfTmF0aW9uYWxfR3VhcmRfJTI4NDk2Nzc3MTA3NDElMjkuanBnJmhvPWh0dHBzJTNBJTJGJTJGdXBsb2FkLndpa2ltZWRpYS5vcmcmcz0yNzMmaD1hZDI1NWIwOTNkYWE5ODBjMzU4NjMzYWM0YmE2OGYwYmYxZGRlMGNmYjFlNjdjNDhlMjQxZTZkZDZjZDE3YzNhJnNpemU9OTgweCZjPTEzMDE3NDMyMjYiLCJleHBpcmVzX2F0IjoxNjE0NzExNjkyfQ.BvjB0Zw5cLoqqcX5ba4uhPBwCzyao_4h0HSdTdD7IEk/img.jpg" id="cbbc9" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="8965d4da3c9fec19960a954cded4abca" /></a>
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</p><p><strong>At one point, Curative was attempting to roll out at-home testing and then had to pull back after FDA warnings. Will you be making home testing kits again?</strong><br/></p><p>I can't give a time estimate but we are actively working with the FDA right now. I think their concern is "can people adequately collect the sample, or will they do it wrong, and then get a negative test result," which is incorrect. Our plan is to use telemedicine observation. What we've seen in our clinical studies is that if you give people the chance to do it wrong, they will do it wrong. In fact when you have somebody observing, they read the instructions better and they collect a better sample. We're still working on the pricing and potentially looking at whether there is federal or state reimbursement for some of that testing and the potential of billing insurance. </p><p><strong>Tracing technology has been promising. Do you have any plans to tie tests to these applications to testing?</strong> </p><p>We've had several conversations with contact tracing apps and we continue to work in collaboration with public health departments in their contract tracing efforts. Having the test is obviously one thing, but you have to use the information to actually stem the tide of COVID infection. And so, it is an essential step in working closely with various people. </p><p>I do like the app-based models where you obviously want to maintain people's privacy, but having people opt-in to share their location history if they test positive so you can contact nearby people.</p><p><strong>What does Curative do once there's a vaccine? Are you obsolete?</strong></p><p><strong></strong>The U.S. needs to maintain some kind of spare capacity so that next time we are not having to build all of this during a pandemic. But we are a strange company because our goal is to essentially put ourselves out of business. Ultimately, and I say this to everyone we hire, we don't know how long this will go on for. We want to provide as many tests as needed, but the goal is to end COVID and not be doing COVID testing anymore.</p><p><strong>Curative took off in March when you arrived in Los Angeles from Silicon Valley, how has the journey been for you personally?</strong></p><p><strong></strong>I don't have very much free time, but it's been a lot of fun to be able to work at this pace and have the support of people like the city, the mayor's office to really just do what is needed to scale this up. When we work with suppliers, and we say we're doing COVID testing, they just move heaven and earth to make things happen. It's been really inspiring to be a part of that push forward.</p><p>We are just pushing as hard as we can to scale up as fast as we possibly can and bring on as much testing as we can. The city opening up testing to everybody is kind of a culmination of that. We're making about 50,000 kits a day right now and we want to make that as widely available as we can. I would like to get a little more sleep. </p><p><em>The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. </em></p><p><em>Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that Curative's saliva tests have a 10% false positive rate. In actuality, the tests have a 10% false negative rate.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
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Last Friday morning, 406 Bird employees – who had been working from home for two weeks because of the coronavirus and bleary-eyed from putting in longer than usual days in an unprecedented effort to rapidly wind down global operations in cities around the world – received a generic-sounding Zoom webinar invitation titled "COVID-19 Update."
Travis VanderZanden, 41, a former top Uber executive who founded Bird only three years ago, had abruptly cancelled the previous Thursday's regular biweekly all-hands meeting, referred to internally as Birdfams. He had not addressed Bird's thousand-plus employees since they were forced to leave their offices, so most employees assumed he was giving an update on the company's response to the worsening global pandemic.
But some grew suspicious when they noticed the guest list and host were hidden and they learned only some colleagues were included. It was also unusual they were being invited to a Zoom webinar, allowing no participation, rather than the free-flowing meeting function the company normally uses. Over the next hour, employees traded frantic messages on Slack and searched coworkers' calendars to see who was unfortunate enough to be invited.
"It should go down as a poster child of how not to lay people off, especially at a time like this," said one employee.
<p>
Before the novel coronavirus brought the world to a halt, Bird had been on an exceptionally meteoric rise, even by the frothy standards of what now seems like a bygone era of venture capital that brought ever-ballooning valuations to all manner of companies. In 2018, Bird
<a href="https://www.inc.com/magazine/201902/will-yakowicz/bird-electric-scooter-travis-vanderzanden-2018-company-of-the-year.html" target="_blank">became the fastest company in history</a> to reach unicorn status. Shortly after that, it achieved a $2 billion valuation in less than a year and <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/20/bird-hits-10-million-scooter-rides/" target="_blank">announced it had expanded to 100 cities with 10 million scooter rides. </a>
</p><p>
In late January, Bird raised another $75 million of Series D2 funding at a $2.77 billion valuation. But less than two months later, the company suddenly found itself mostly shuttered at the worst possible time during the crucial post-winter months when it counts on earning most of its revenue after bringing scooters out of what employees refer to as "hibernation." During a pandemic the last thing people want to do is touch a shared scooter, if they're going anywhere at all.
</p><p>
Employees say the company has swiftly responded to by far the biggest crisis in its short history more severely than it has publicly let on, suspending operations in every market and slashing its workforce by 40%, a figure based on the global Slack channel all employees are required to join that includes about 1,060 employees. (A Bird spokeswoman declined to comment on the figure and referred to an earlier
<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/27/bird-lays-off-about-30-of-workforce-amid-covid-19-pandemic/" target="_blank">TechCrunch article</a> that put the percentage at "around 30%.")
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<a href="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjkwOTAyNS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzMTI0OTg2OX0.XjPdxZkwuisNDImEtwwoQ63ghrehyPCc0kvnTjOYu_U/img.jpg?width=980" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjkwOTAyNS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzMTI0OTg2OX0.XjPdxZkwuisNDImEtwwoQ63ghrehyPCc0kvnTjOYu_U/img.jpg?width=980" id="35f71" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="7ab06b443949dadce4c1e665c412a90d" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" /></a>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">It Felt Like a Black Mirror Episode;' The Inside Account of how Bird Laid off 406 People in Two Minutes via a Dystopian Zoom Webinar</small>
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<a href="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjkwOTAyNS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzMTI0OTg2OX0.XjPdxZkwuisNDImEtwwoQ63ghrehyPCc0kvnTjOYu_U/img.jpg?width=980" target="_blank">assets.rebelmouse.io</a>
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</p><h3>
<a href="https://dot.la/st/newsletters" target="_self"><em>Sign up for dot.LA's daily newsletter to catch every headline</em></a></h3><em><a href="https://dot.la/st/newsletters" target="_self"></a></em><p><em><a href="https://dot.la/st/newsletters" target="_self"></a></em></p><p><a href="https://dot.la/st/newsletters" target="_self"></a><a href="https://dot.la/st/newsletters" target="_self"></a>Bird's Santa Monica headquarters has been particularly hard hit. Whenever the office is able to reopen, there will be fewer than half as many workers as before Coronavirus. </p><p>
This account, which includes many previously unreported details, is based on a review of internal memos and a recording of the now infamous Zoom meeting obtained by dot.LA as well as extensive conversations with more than half a dozen Bird employees at all levels of the company who were laid off. Most requested anonymity so as not to jeopardize their severance or future job prospects.
</p><p>
Bird declined to make anyone available for an interview or even fully answer a list of written questions, instead sending a statement to dot.LA: "Layoffs are never easy or comfortable to do and COVID-19 has impacted the way they are done in at least the near term...We are eternally grateful to the impacted individuals and wish that the entire situation could have been avoided."
</p><p>
Employees describe being thrilled to join such a fast-growing startup brimming with talent that had a lofty mission to forever change the way people are transported all around the world. Last year,
<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/04/linkedin-top-us-start-ups-to-work-for-in-2019.html" target="_blank">LinkedIn named Bird as one of the hottest startups to work for in the U.S. </a>
</p><p>
The now sadly common occurrence of reducing headcount, as employers like to call it, during coronavirus is challenging when face-to-face meetings are not possible. However, Bird employees say they are disheartened by how coldly Bird handled the reductions.
</p><p>
"Lots of companies have to lay people off right now," said Jenny Alvauaje, a 23-year-old Bird data scientist who was dismissed after a year and half at the company. "People will recognize the companies who did it well and the ones that didn't. I hope Bird is the one that is remembered as one who did it poorly."
</p><p>
"It felt like a Black Mirror episode"<br/>
</p><p>
At 10:30 a.m., employees logged onto Zoom but were greeted only by a cracking silence. Meetings at Bird are usually always punctual and more frenzied Slack messages followed.
</p><p>
"Is there audio? Why can't i hear anything?" Alvauaje messaged her colleagues.
</p><p>
"We never start late," another employee remembers thinking. "This is strange. Something feels off."
</p><p>
For the next five minutes, employees stared at a sparse slide with a dark grey background that said only "COVID-19."
</p><p>
"It was not our brand color or font, which frankly was unsettling in a way I couldn't articulate," Alvauaje said.
</p><p>
Thinking there were technical difficulties, some employees logged-off and were never able to return to the meeting. Then, after five minutes of dead air that seemed like an eternity, a robotic-sounding, disembodied voice came on the line.
</p><p>
The woman began by acknowledging "this is a suboptimal way to deliver this message." Then she cut to the chase: "COVID-19 has also had a massive impact on our business, one that has forced our leadership team and our board of directors to make extremely difficult and painful decisions. One of those decisions is to eliminate a number of roles at the company. Unfortunately your role is impacted by this decision."
</p><p>
The meeting was scheduled to last half an hour but ended up going for only two minutes. Towards the end of the monologue, as the woman started talking about the future of Bird, she sounded like she was getting choked up and was trying to hold back tears.
</p><p>
"It felt like a Black Mirror episode," Alvauaje said. "This ominous voice came over and told us we were losing our jobs."
</p><p>
Almost no one recognized the voice, and there remains disagreement about who had the unfortunate job of delivering the message. But this much is clear: It was not VanderZanden or a top executive.
</p><p>
"It was a cowardly move," said a Bird manager. "Travis did not want to deliver the news."
</p><p>
"It sounded like a recording and it was very strange and ominous," said an operations employee.
</p><p>
VanderZanden, who Tweets sparingly and has been silent on the messaging service since late January, defended the meeting Saturday in a reply to a recounting of the meeting that had gone viral: "We did NOT let employees go via a pre-recording. It was via a live zoom mtg (not ideal either) b/c we're all WFH during COVID. Video was turned off which we thought was more humane. In retrospect, we should've made 1on1 calls to the 100s impacted over the course of a few days."
</p><p>
VanderZanden's defensive replies and an internal memo have been his only comments about the layoffs. In its statement, the company said, "we purposefully and intentionally did not have any video on to protect privacy as we delivered the news live to individuals. A live speaker delivered the news in real time over the web-based call and a slide was projected outlining additional information including four weeks of pay, three months of medical coverage and an extended timeframe to exercise options."
</p><p>
Most employees dot.LA spoke with still believe the call was pre-recorded. They say it's hard to otherwise explain how the message could be delivered so robotically, but some also say at this point the distinction is moot.
</p><p>
"It might as well have been a recording given the lack of human interaction," said one staffer.
</p><p>
Making it more surreal, some people were logged out while the brief speech was still underway. As the voice on the line was speaking, employees stared at their computer and began to take in the news that they were losing their jobs. Then their screens suddenly went dark and their company issued MacBooks restarted. By 10:40 a.m, everyone was locked out, just as employees were frantically trying to exchange personal numbers and emails on Slack and take screenshots of their contacts. They wondered why they were being cut off then since they had just been told their last day was not until April 3rd.
</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-youtube">
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="626fe1804ddc5277611af080e9a479f8"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wxTYKCOnRe4?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Bird Layoffs: An Audio Recording</small>
<small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxTYKCOnRe4&feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">www.youtube.com</a>
</small>
</p><p>
A month earlier, someone in Bird's IT department had been tasked by his superiors to write a script that would allow the company to instantly shut down all of a user's accounts – computer, email, Slack – with the click of a single button, according to an employee. He was told the script would be used for general off-boarding rather than the mass layoff that he ended up being included in. Last Friday, the script seems to have been activated early.
<br/>
</p><p>
Some employees, who had the day off or were working a later shift, did not understand why their computers were restarting and why they could not log back in. Others tried in vain to join the webinar and got a message saying it was full, likely because Bird's webinar license didn't accommodate enough attendees. Some employees did not realize what was going on until they saw a brief
<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/27/bird-lays-off-about-30-of-workforce-amid-covid-19-pandemic/" target="_blank">TechCrunch article posted at 11:26 a.m. </a>
</p><p>
According to Bird's statement, "HR representatives, managers, and/or executives personally reached out to all individuals directly as a follow up." But few employees have seen any follow-up. It did not help that many managers were included in the layoffs and had no idea who on their team had been cut. Some resorted to messaging their reports on LinkedIn to see if they still worked at the company.
</p><p>
The next day, one employee received what seemed like a heartfelt note of gratitude from his boss's boss thanking him for what he had contributed during his 18 months at Bird, but he soon discovered he had gotten a form letter. "Seven of my contemporaries said they had received the exact same message," the employee said. "I realized he had just copy and pasted it."
</p><p>
Workers were told they would be receiving three months of healthcare benefits but when they looked into it, they discovered the company is actually only providing coverage until April 30th. After that employees have the option of enrolling in COBRA, according to an off boarding memo obtained by dot.LA.
</p><p>
"I can't pay the $600 out of pocket for that," said one employee. "I'm just going to go on MediCal." (A Bird spokeswoman clarified Wednesday: "All impacted employees will receive three months health coverage paid for by Bird. Ensuring these individuals were taken care of through June during the global pandemic was key and we wanted to go beyond the industry standard.")
</p><p>
Employees say Bird seems primarily concerned about getting their now locked laptops back, which are mostly MacBook Pro's for older employees and the cheaper MacBook Air's for newer staffers, who joined in an era when the company became more focused on cutting costs.
</p><p>
"IT will send a box with a return shipping label to retrieve company assets (e.g., Laptops, chargers, and badge)," the company stated in its off boarding memo. "All items should be put in the box and mailed back to us by April 15."
</p><p>
The company has been less specific about how employees will get back the items they left at their desks when they walked out of the office for what turned out to be the last time nearly three weeks ago. It is a sad fact of the COVID-19 era that laid off employees do not even get to clean out their own desks.
</p><p>
"They said any personal items would be sent back to us 'eventually,'" said one staffer. "There's a lot of stuff on desks and monitors that belong to employees of the company."
</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-proxy-image">
<a href="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48562756236_09520feb24_b.jpg" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vbWVkaWEucmJsLm1zL2ltYWdlP3U9JTJGNjU1MzUlMkY0ODU2Mjc1NjIzNl8wOTUyMGZlYjI0X2IuanBnJmhvPWh0dHBzJTNBJTJGJTJGbGl2ZS5zdGF0aWNmbGlja3IuY29tJnM9OTM2Jmg9NGVjZWMzMTZjODQ4NmUzMzQ1NmVhNDdjMjdlMGQ3N2RhMTcwMTk4Njk2YTY3MWZmOWJlOWUxMjA0MDg4Yzc2NiZzaXplPTk4MHgmYz0xNzE4ODY0MTk4IiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNjE0MTc5MH0.13ycKgxRoo3jVy5hqiTUvFJHjF2ZomcsH0pQTvhV_to/img.jpg" id="6acac" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="f6ac43014ab514277b604d3d896f002d" /></a>
<small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">
<a href="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48562756236_09520feb24_b.jpg" target="_blank">live.staticflickr.com</a>
</small>
</p><h2>A workforce decimated</h2><p>
Almost no division was spared from wrenching cuts, from engineering to data to government partnerships to legal.
</p><p>
"Pretty much everybody I worked with was let go," said one operations employee. "They eradicated whole teams."
</p><p>
Several employees noted that the cuts included some viewed internally as superstars. They also noticed that the layoffs will result in a much less diverse company.
</p><p>
"It seems like they got rid of the majority of women and people of color," said one staffer. "In engineering they got rid of the only women in significant leadership."
</p><p>
"As far as I know, the folks that are left from my immediate team consist of all men, most of whom are white," Alvauaje wrote in a
<a href="https://medium.com/@jennylihoward/covid-bird-scooters-layoffs-and-relationships-cc151428ee67" target="_blank">Medium blog post.</a> She said her data team was reduced from around 50 to just five people. "When your C-Suite looks the way Bird's does (the way many do, in tech and otherwise) and your data team follows suit, you cannot best serve the communities you pretend to care about," she wrote.
</p><p>
Laid off employees have joined an ex-Bird Slack group to share job leads and try to process what happened. "There's a lot of dark humor being passed around," said one employee.
</p><h2>"This could not have happened at a worse time"</h2><p>
When the coronavirus hit, many Bird employees were busy coordinating taking scooters out of "hibernation" for the busy spring and summer months, a period known as "Spring Push." The company brings in little revenue in the winter, banking on ridership to return in warmer months.
</p><p>
"This could not have happened at a worse time for the company so that's why this happened so quickly," said one employee.
</p><p>
Bird's biggest competitor, Lime,
<a href="https://www.li.me/second-street/healthy-people-healthy-cities" target="_blank">announced March 21st</a> that it was "winding down and pausing" service in all markets except for South Korea. Bird did not follow suit, at least publicly. Its last announcement about COVID-19 came on March 12th - which seems like a lifetime ago in this rapidly changing environment. The blog post said only that the company would be cleaning scooters more frequently.
</p><p>
"The only cleaning I was aware of was when they were putting them away," said a Bird operations employee. "They have been rapidly removing scooters from marketplaces and putting them in sleep mode. Externally they were not telling customers that. They weren't telling people they were removing everything."
</p><p>
Bird would not directly address whether the company has suspended operations in all markets. "Our decision to temporarily pause or reduce our fleet in some cities is very fluid as the response to and recommendations regarding COVID-19 evolve," a spokeswoman said Wednesday afternoon in an e-mail to dot.LA. "Our actions are in line with voluntary, as well as mandatory measures set by governments for businesses. We will continue our close dialogue with local officials in each of the cities we provide our service and will again offer full fleets of our safe, clean transportation alternative as soon as possible."
</p><p>
The last weeks at Bird were particularly frantic for many employees because the company was doing something no rapidly growing unicorn ever wants to do: scaling back its operations as quickly as possible.
</p><p>
"My sole focus the last weeks of my employment was reducing operational spend as much as I could," said a manager. "My department had quite a bit of spending. I was told to get it to zero."
</p><p>
This manager was part of a team of about two dozen employees responsible for planning Bird's response to the novel coronavirus.
</p><p>
"I thought cuts were likely coming at some point," said the manager. "But I did not expect to be cut in the first round."
</p><p>
Like others, he heard about the call when he logged onto the Zoom webinar. He wished he had at least had enough time to say goodbye to his team.
</p><p>
"The leadership at Bird handled this in an immature manner,' he said. "The world deserves to hear about it."
</p>
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