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Lime's CEO shares how he overcame a stroke to take his company to a $1.7 billion IPO By Stephen Council You're currently following this author! Click to unsubscribe from email alerts. and Katie Roof You're currently following this author! Click to unsubscribe from email alerts.
Wayne Ting, Lime's CEO, speaks with Business Insider's Katie Roof. Stephen Council/BI Lime CEO Wayne Ting needed brain surgery to survive a serious stroke. Less than two years later, he's navigated his e-scooter company to a $1.7 billion IPO.
When he was in the hospital last year, Ting said he couldn't find examples of other CEOs who had publicly spoken about their stroke recovery. Now, he wants to be someone people can go to for help and guidance, he told Business Insider's Katie Roof at Tech Insider: Growth Mode , sponsored by Fidelity, on Wednesday. "In Silicon Valley, you want to be hardcore," Ting said.
"You can't be pumped; you have to be super pumped. Showing weakness and showing that you're a human is frankly the image that not a lot of CEOs want to portray." Ting tied his fight to the tumultuous road that Lime took to its IPO this July. The company fought for years with scooter rivals like Bird in the infamously tough micromobility industry, and weathered a 95% drop in revenue during the pandemic.
He said that financial improvement, like stroke recovery, required getting "1% better" every day. Lime used to have to replace its entire fleet every month, he said; now the company's redesigned e-scooters and bikes last more than five years. And adoption takes time, Ting noted: the mature market of San Francisco is now growing 100% year-over-year, he said.
Ting, a former chief of staff at Uber, also touted the need for sustainability, something he said he had hammered in under Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. When Khosrowshahi joined Uber, Ting said he overhauled a culture in which employees thought "there was no line that we're not willing to cross." Now, as Ting sees it, "Win-at-all-costs is an insane idea." "If you're not doing the right things, you can win for a long time, but things will ultimately catch up to you," Ting said. Uber owns about a fourth of Lime and lets users book its scooters on its app, providing a boost that's helped Lime emerge as a victor of the 2010s' so-called "scooter wars." Lime raised around $167 million in its IPO.
The company's stock price swelled higher in the late summer and has since dropped back to around its listing valuation of $1.7 billion. Chief rival Bird, which was once worth more than Lime, filed for bankruptcy in late 2023. Ting said that questions about Bird popped up again and again during Lime's IPO road show.
Lime's size, its improving unit economics, and its financial growth convinced Wall Street this summer that the company could succeed where Bird failed, Ting said. Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at scouncil@businessinsider.com , or over text, Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 415-757-8198.
Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. Read next Stephen Council You're currently following this author! Click to unsubscribe from email alerts.
Stephen is a senior tech reporter at Business Insider, covering OpenAI, Anthropic and the ecosystem around the leading artificial intelligence companies. Previously he covered technology at SFGATE, and has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Information and CNBC. He studied journalism and economics at Northwestern University.
His work has earned an SF Press Club Investigative Reporting Award and, in 2025, SPJ NorCal’s Excellence in Journalism Award for Technology Reporting. Stephen lives in San Francisco. Contact him via email at scouncil@businessinsider.com , or on Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 415-757-8198.
Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely . Katie Roof You're currently following this author! Click to unsubscribe from email alerts.
Katie is Editor at Large for Business Insider and also a Global Reporter for the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, working with sister publications including Politico and The Telegraph. She has been a frequent television commentator and on-stage moderator. She is an LA Press Club award winner for her reporting on SpaceX and has broken more than 1,000 stories, which also earned her the TBPN accolade "scoop athlete of the century." Tech IPO Leadership More
Source: Business Insider
