E-scooter company reportedly laid off 406 people in 2-minute Zoom call

FILE - Electric scooters of startup Bird are parked in a maintenance hall in Marseille, southern France, on November 18, 2019. FILE - Electric scooters of startup Bird are parked in a maintenance hall in Marseille, southern France, on November 18, 2019. Photo: Gerard Julien / AFP Via Getty Images Photo: Gerard Julien / AFP Via Getty Images Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close E-scooter company reportedly laid off 406 people in 2-minute Zoom call 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

On March 27, electric scooter startup Bird reportedly sent out calendar invites to several hundred employees for a "COVID-19 Update" Zoom meeting, according to The Verge. Once employees logged onto the one-way meeting, a woman’s voice began reading a script, informing the attendees that they had all been laid off in a 2-minute speech. Bird's founder and CEO, Travis VanderZanden, was not even the one delivering the bad news — the chief communications officer was chosen for the job instead, The Verge reported.

Then, the meeting abruptly ended and everyone’s email and Slack accounts were reportedly instantly deactivated.

The Santa Monica-based startup had laid off 406 employees out of the company’s 1,400 or so worldwide. But this apparently wasn't employees' first encounter with sudden layoffs.

Back in March 2019, former employees interviewed by The Verge said that the office was having a pizza party when some employees were called into a conference room, laid off with a brief speech and then escorted out of the building by security guards. Bird denied the "pizza party," but did confirm that 4 percent of the Bird workforce was laid off in March 2019.

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The Verge article takes a deep dive into Bird's alleged company culture of high turnover, lack of professionalism from leadership, backtracking on benevolent gestures (after publicizing its free helmet program, Bird lobbied with the California government against helmet requirements), tensions between the company’s hourly wage earners and management, issues of diversity and inclusion and an overall dubious business model.

Read the full Verge story here.

Madeline Wells is an SFGATE associate digital reporter. Email: madeline.wells@sfgate.com | Twitter: @madwells22