OCTOBER 2018 FORBES ASIA | 25THE MOST COMMON way to get
around Silicon Valley—the sprawl-
ing cluster of suburban Northern
California towns that the world’s most
influential tech companies call home—
is still by car. But dockless electric
scooters may be a close second. Walk
around downtown San Jose or Palo
Alto and you see streets filled with elec-
tric scooters, moving and parked, with
either the Bird or Lime brand.
The latter, with its lime-green color
scheme, stands out more. It’s also been around longer, and according to
some, it is a superior ride.
As someone who covered Shenzhen’s dockless bike startups at an
early stage—and witnessed their failed attempts to break into the NorCal
market—I figured these dockless, smart electric scooters that users pick
up, ride and then park anywhere in a city were made by American com-
panies borrowing the idea from China and applying it domestically.
Little did I know that Lime had serious Chinese roots. LimeBike
cemented its base in San Mateo (another suburb in NorCal) and re-
cently got $335 million in funding from American tech giants Uber and
Alphabet (parent company of Google), but the founder of Lime, Toby
Sun, is a native of Shenzhen; Lime’s first investor was Shanghai native
Thomas Yao, cofounder of IMO Ventures.
While the words “Designed in California” are proudly displayed on
the scooter’s front plate and Lime’s website has that stereotypical Sili-
con Valley hipster Millennial vibe, Yao says Lime’s roots are Chinese.
“[Dockless bike/scoooter share] is a Chinese innovation,” Yao told me
during a recent meeting. “And my firm [IMO Ventures] specializes in
bringing over innovations from Asia to the West.”
Yao did more than just write a check to Sun. Ac-
cording to Sun, Yao helped provide the engineering
team that built LimeBike’s first batch of bikes and
scooters. “[Thomas] and IMO Ventures were very
important in helping Lime’s vision when it first
started,” Sun said. “Lime leveraged [Yao’s] cross-
border domain expertise and cross-border team
recruiting.”
Started in 2016 by Yao and four partners, IMO
Ventures has invested in more than 20 projects,
all Asian startups that have made their way, or are
planning to make their way, to the U.S. or Europe.
IMO Ventures’s other well-known investment is
PayTM, India’s dominant digital-wallet startup.“Mobile payments is quite behind in the U.S.,
compared to Asia,” Yao said. “So we are hop-
ing something like PayTM can be brought
over.”
Throughout our talk, it was evident that
Yao feels that the U.S. is lagging behind China
in the use of smart apps for life’s daily activi-
ties. Another idea his firm is looking into is
bringing to the U.S. a mobile app that allows
users to pay for parking without having to
deal with meters and fiddle with credit cards
or coins. In his words: “Parking in the U.S.
right now is also behind.”
Of course, Yao is in this business not only to
make life more convenient for Americans—the
electric scooter boom has made short com-
mutes in Silicon Valley so much easier—but
also because there’s a lot of money involved.
“We launched Lime in America instead of,
say, in China, not just because there was less
competition, but because you can obviously
price higher in the states than in China,” Yao
said, pointing out that an average ten-minute
ride on a dockless bike in China costs roughly
5 yuan ($0.50), whereas a ride in the U.S. costs
over a dollar. “We only look to bring over
companies and business models with a proven
track record of success in Asia,” Yao said. “We
don’t take much risk in terms of business
models.”CHINESE LIMES
THOMAS KUHLENBECK FOR FORBESBEN SIN IS A HONG KONGBASED CONTRIBUTOR TO FORBES.COM WHO WRITES ABOUT CONSUMER TECH.
TECHNOLOGY BEN SIN // GADGETMAN
FLime’s first investor, Thomas Yao of IMO Ventures, and Lime founder Toby Sun.