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Lawrence Leuschner
CEO & Co-Founder at TIER Mobility
Lawrence Leuschner is a prominent entrepreneur and climate action advocate based in Berlin, Germany. He is best known for his role as the CEO and Co-Founder of TIER Mobility, a leading European micro-mobility company that he established in July 2018.1 TIER Mobility aims to change urban transportation by offering sustainable electric scooters, bikes, and mopeds in over 130 cities across Europe and beyond.
Professional Experience
TIER Mobility: As the CEO and Co-Founder of TIER Mobility, Leuschner has been instrumental in driving the company's mission to provide greener alternatives to traditional urban transportation. Under his leadership, TIER has become Europe's leading player in the micro-mobility sector, focusing on climate-neutral operations and sustainable business practices.1
Blue Impact: In September 2019, Leuschner founded Blue Impact, an investment fund dedicated to supporting climate "activist" entrepreneurs. Through Blue Impact, he has pledged his entire stake in TIER to further the climate mission, with all profits being reinvested in the fund to support early-stage teams working on climate change solutions.1
Climate Activism
Leuschner is a Founding Supporter of Leaders for Climate Action, an initiative launched in August 2019. As part of this group, he collaborates with over 100 leading German digital entrepreneurs to promote sustainable and ecological development across Germany and Europe. Their activities include:
- Making their companies more climate-friendly
- Reducing personal CO2 emissions
- Promoting innovation in climate protection
- Advocating for immediate CO2 pricing
- Pushing for nationwide expansion of renewable energies1
Recognition
Leuschner's entrepreneurial efforts have been recognized in the business community. He was a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award in both 2020 and 2021.1
Language Skills
He is proficient in multiple languages:
- German (native or bilingual proficiency)
- English (full professional proficiency)
- Spanish (elementary proficiency)1
Lawrence Leuschner's career demonstrates a strong commitment to combining entrepreneurship with environmental sustainability, positioning him as a leader in the fight against climate change through innovative business solutions.
Highlights
📢 TIER and Dott to form the European champion of shared micro-mobility📢
Kicking off 2024 with some exciting news for TIER and the industry more broadly: we've spoken for a long time about how the industry needs to consolidate and today is a big milestone in that journey, with TIER and Dott joining forces!
In 2023, every micro-mobility provider had to place a big emphasis on getting to profitability, TIER included. As per my last post, we had to re-evaluate our strategy and approach, making some difficult decisions and efficiencies. As a result, we made some big strides towards profitability.
In 2024, we are focussed on accelerating that work to achieve profitability, and market consolidation is key - unlocking new markets, economies of scale and an expanded vehicle portfolio.
In Dott, we have found a great partner:
💚 We share the same values and priorities: delivering reliably and responsibly for users and cities, with a commitment to sustainability at our core. 📈 Combined, we are the market leader by revenue in the majority of European markets 🤝 Great teams! It has been great working with the Dott team to chart our shared vision for 2024 and beyond.
Now for some personal news…
This announcement is a change for TIER but also for me! I will be stepping away from the day-to-day management of the company, transitioning from CEO to Chairman of the Board in the coming weeks.
It has been an incredible journey co-founding and then leading TIER for the last 5 years, from being Number 5 in Market Share in 2018 to Market Leader in 2023/24. Back in 2018, I could never have imagined the crazy journey I was about to embark on - racing to build the app, win markets, engineer hardware, partner with cities, develop new features and run operations for completely new vehicles. And you can throw in a global pandemic with lockdowns! It has been an incredible experience, and I am particularly proud that, through it all, we stuck to our values, with sustainability at our core.
I have had the honour of working with great minds who helped build TIER into the European leader it is today. I had no experience in mobility when we started, so I want to thank everyone in my team, my co-founders and our investors for helping me - I learnt a lot from all of you. Now, as we move into a new year with a new combined entity, it is the right time to hand the baton to someone else…
..And I will be handing the CEO baton to Henri Moissinac! Henri is an incredible leader who brings a wealth of experience - not only building his own business - online-bazaar - which he later sold to ebay, but also building the mobile platform for Facebook and, of course, navigating micro-mobility with Dott. I have immense confidence not only in Henri, but in the broader joint leadership team and the strategic direction we have set. I look forward to watching them take TIER from strength to strength while I continue to support our collective vision as Chairman of the Board.
It has been an incredibly hard year for the majority of entrepreneurs, start-ups and scale-ups. This also applies to us at TIER Mobility. High inflation and the cost of living crisis have dominated the news in 2023, and the knock-on impacts of reduced consumer demand and confidence makes for a difficult business environment.
Nearly every business that was previously focussed on growth and expansion has written or spoken about the sharp pivot we've had to make to focus on profitability. Unfortunately, these things can't happen overnight - it takes time and a lot of effort to change track. 100% of the company focus has been on execution to profitability - working with every employee at TIER to reduce our operational losses and work towards profitability.
We have made insane progress on this in a short space of time:
- As a group, we improved our EBITDA from -63% in 2022 to be on track for -15% in 2023.
- We achieved profitability for the last 5 months
- For 2023, we anticipate we will be profitable on an annual basis for 80% of our markets, including some of our largest - Germany, the UK and France.
- We managed to make our ebikes a success, achieving profitability for this vehicle in 2023. It's not about scooters, it's about micro-mobility as a whole
A huge thank you to everyone who has worked on this - it's been a lot of hard work and long days.
But we haven't made it to profitability yet, which means there's still more we need to do and decisions we need to make for 2024. With not enough visibility on how and if markets will recover, we have to presume demand in 24 will look like demand in 23. This means that to get to profitability, we need to bring our cost base down.
Unfortunately, this means that we will be making layoffs in a number of countries today - roughly 22% of our combined Central and Regional workforce, with the majority of affected roles sitting centrally.
It is a difficult day at the end of a difficult year. Everyone has worked incredibly hard to get us much closer to profitability, but the external factors have just limited what we could achieve.
The people leaving us today are extremely passionate, driven individuals who will be an asset to any company. The decision we have made today has nothing to do with their performance and should not detract from how much they gave to this company.
I remain truly grateful to them for choosing to join our mission to change mobility for good and I want to thank them for everything they have done for TIER.
