Travis VanderZanden

Education and early career

VanderZanden attended University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire from 1997 to 2002, receiving a Bachelor of Business Administration. He worked as a product manager at Qualcomm starting in 2002, and received an MBA from the USC Marshall School of Business 2007 while working there.
After leaving Qualcomm, he was Chief Revenue Officer for Yammer from 2009 to 2011, then left to co-found Cherry, an on-demand car-wash service. He was CEO of Cherry until 2013, when the company was acquired by Lyft, and he was brought on as Chief Operating Officer. He left Lyft for Uber in October 2014; Lyft sued him for allegedly breaking his confidentiality agreement, and the lawsuit was settled for undisclosed terms with VanderZanden denying any wrongdoing. VanderZanden then left Uber in October 2016.

Bird

VanderZanden founded Bird in summer of 2017. The company deployed its first scooters that September, before raising a $15 million Series A round of financing in February, 2018. In October of 2018, Bird released its latest edition of the scooter, Bird Zero, which was designed and built in partnership with Okai.  As of 2019, the company is now in 120 cities across the globe.  The company is valued at $2 billion and taken in $415 million in funding. To date, Bird has provided more than 10 million rides. The company currently receives $1.27 on every Bird ride taken, which is inclusive of all costs.  VanderZanden was a speaker at TechCrunch's Disrupt SF in October 2019.