Bird Global, Inc. (NYSE:BRDS) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Tom White: Okay, that’s helpful. I appreciate the direction there. Maybe just one last one, if I could, maybe for Shane. Shane, you talked a little bit about kind of the initiatives around optimizing vehicle placements? I guess can you help me understand? Is that mostly a technology thing? Is it kind of optimizing or fixing some part of the fleet manager monitors? Because I sort of thought that was kind of one of the things that the fleet managers were supposed to be incentivized to do and be nowhere to put them, just given that they’re kind of in market, et cetera?

Shane Torchiana: Yes, that’s actually an excellent question. Look, both pieces are pretty important. And I would call one — you could call it technology or maybe just a complex analytical problem, sort of piece number one. And then piece number two is what I would call change management and getting folks on board to follow the recommended locations. On the first piece, that effort is done, at least version one of it is done. No doubt there will be a version two and a version three in the future. I would say that’s about one third of the effort. Two thirds of the effort is the actual change management to get folks to adopt the recommendation, whether they be the small percentage of cities that we’re doing in-house or the majority percentage of cities that are managed by fleet managers, where we can obviously make suggestions to them, but given our independent contractors, can’t tell them exactly what to do.

And we’re deep into that. The analytical process is done. And then we’re deep into that change management process right now. And I think I may have alluded to this last quarter, that’s why this overall evolution should be measured in quarters as opposed to in weeks or in months. So it takes a few quarters to fully wrinkle out that change management process.

Tom White: Okay. Thank you very much.

Shane Torchiana: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question is from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Eric Sheridan: Thanks so much for taking the questions. Maybe a few if I can. Any update on cohort behavior or existing more mature markets sort of customer growth so we can better understand some of those core markets that are going to be around for the longer term and sort of make the base of revenue going forward and how they may be behaving? That’s number one. Number two would be elements of the cost run rate you gave us. Is that the right cost run rate to think about remaining flat through all of ’23, or is that really just highlighted as an exit rate for ’22 as opposed to illustrative of how should we think about cost for ’23? And then the last one, I think it’s being a third in. Obviously, when you put something out, like going concern over the next 12 months, investors are going to ask a lot of questions about what the underlying assumptions are.

So in terms of burning through the remaining cash, if something doesn’t present itself on the financing front, can you give us a little bit better sense of what assumptions you’re making over the next 12 months in terms of what the business model looks like to get from point A to point B? Thanks so much.