Tier's Co-Founder donating 100% of his shares to Climate Impact with Lawrence Leuschner

Climate Insiders

Lawrence Leuschner is the Co-founder and CEO at Tier, Europe's largest micro-mobility startup based out of Germany.

You can now ride TIER’s electric scooters, bikes and mopeds in over 130 cities, from London and Paris to Berlin and Dubai.

They were founded in 2018 and today they count more than 900 employees, have raised more than $650m, and did 6 acquisitions to consolidate their leadership.

There's a lot we will learn in this episode from Lawrence as a top entrepreneur but also an impact investor. Lawrence has pledged his entire stake in TIER into his own Cimpact fund. I'm very curious to learn more about this.

Listen and Learn

• How Tier started as the David vs Goliath in the mobility space against heavily capitalized US competitors (2:00)
• How Tier quickly became #1 in the Apple Store globally, ahead of WhatsApp (3:30)
• What happened to the millions of cheap Chinese bikes that disappeared overnight from Europe (4:00)
• Why the e-mobility landscape isn’t set and will continue evolving over the coming years (5:00)
• Why the initial model of e-scooters wasn’t sustainable with batteries lasting weeks (6:00)
• Repair, maintenance and recycling is now the name of the game (7:00)
• The new battery design coming in the next year continue pushing in a sustainable direction (8:00)
• The actual impact profile of e-scooters and how they manage to be net positive today (9:30)
• Today, 20% of Tier’s rides are replacing car rides, while 80% are replacing foot, bikes and public transportation (11:00)
• How they intend to replace to 80% (13:00)
• Growing 100% year-over-year (14:00)
• How they added 150,000 bikes by acquiring (15:00)
• Lawrence’s #1 learning from the past 2-3 years that he wishes he had known before (16:00)
• Why one of Tier’s four core values is to “trailblaze” (17:00)
• How hiring key people that have been on this rodeo is critical to enable growth (18:00)
• How to hire the best people in the current talent war, especially against companies that are printing money like Google and Amazon (19:00)
• Why Lawrence decided to create his own impact fund: Blue Impact ventures (20:30)
• How Lawrence decided to allocate all his shares of Tier into Blue Impact (21:00)
• Blue Impact’s playbook of decision to operate with minimal resources (21:50)
• How Lawrence ensured an evergreen structure for Blue Impact (23:00)
• The walk with his partner that convinced him to dedicate 100% of his shares to Climate impact (24:30)
• Rapid fire round (26:30)
• Tips and advice to help people penetrate the Climate community and get their dream job (29:00)
• The accelerated learning curve: what you learn at Tier in 1 year is what you learn in a corporate in 5 years (31:00)
• An experience at a startup is the biggest leverage in your career (33:00)
• How more collaboration between investors can help change Venture Capital from within (34:00)

Show Links

• Lawrence's LinkedIn
• Tier Mobility
• Video of Tier's products
• Donating 100% of his shares and exit proceeds via founders pledge
• Acquisition of NextBike by Tier
• How green are electric scooters?
• Blue Impact Ventures