Just a block from Caltrain’s Fourth and King streets station, city leaders and employees from micromobility company Lime celebrated Lime’s new headquarters at 444 Townsend Street with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday. The ribbon itself was fittingly attached across Lime’s electric bike, glider, and scooter.
It marks a new era for the company, which first launched its electric scooters on San Francisco streets in 2018 alongside a few other companies. Lime’s new 29,000-square-foot location is twice as large as its previous location and will house about 150 full-time Bay Area employees, the company said. In July, the company went public on Wall Street.
Lime CEO Wayne Ting said that as the lease at its previous headquarters at 85 Second Street neared expiration, he questioned whether to stay in the city.
“Is this still a good place to build a business? Is this still the best days of San Francisco behind us?” Ting said. He credited the leadership of Mayor Daniel Lurie and his office to convince the company that the “best days of San Francisco are ahead.”
“This is our home. This is where Lime was started,” Ting said. “This is where we’ve scaled this business. This is where we have built every buy-in scooter you see on the streets across 230 cities, 29 countries, and five continents.”
The new headquarters includes a hardware lab, where approximately 50 employees in the Bay Area work on designs and prototypes of devices, with several teams working in the lab, including mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and industrial design teams, Xander Skieller said, Lime’s director of product development.
The Voice was given a tour of the lab, but photos were not allowed.
Inside the lab were 3D printers for lab employees to print three-dimensional parts that could be tested on a device right away to see how a new feature would look proportionally and ergonomically on the device, Skieller said.
In the EE lab, or electrical engineering lab, Skieller said employees work on in-house components.
“Whether that’s a printed circuit board, or even something we’re going to solder ourselves to either rework a circuit board or even make a quick test board ourselves … we’re able to actually test all the electrical functionality that we’ve designed into our vehicles and our city tech as well,” Skieller added.
With Lime continuing to make the city’s permanent home, Lurie had this ask of the company’s employees to be part of the city:
“Get involved in our schools, get involved in our parks and our libraries. We need the 150 people that are even coming to this office and the thousands around the world to be engaged in our cities.”
When Lime first launched its scooters in the city, it wasn’t so rosy, but the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency created a permit program that put regulations in place. Spin is another scooter company part of the permit program.
Now, city departments, including the mayor’s office, are working to address street safety issues not just with scooters (standing or sitting), but also with electric bikes, electric motorcycles, and mopeds. The city is looking to form an e-mobility working group that would include mobility companies, advocacy organizations, and merchant groups, among others.
Recommendations from the working group are expected to be released next spring.
