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Imagine founding the most quickly unicorn in history, spending $22 million on a former Venezuelan drug trafficker鈥檚 Miami mansion, and then realizing your stake in the company is now worth less than your house.

Yes, it does sound like fiction. But that actually is the situation facing , founder of e-scooter network .听

VanderZanden, who this past week from his post as Bird CEO, was expecting his stake to be worth hundreds of millions when the company inked a in the spring of 2021 to go public through a SPAC merger. The agreement reportedly set a valuation around $2.3 billion for the then 4-year-old company, of which VanderZanden owned a roughly 13% stake.

As it happened, the timing of the SPAC deal coincided with a growing tech world fascination around Miami, which had been attracting an influx of prominent VCs and crypto entrepreneurs. Though Bird was founded and based in Santa Monica, VanderZanden joined the Florida-bound flock and went house shopping. Bird also later moved its headquarters to Miami.

VanderZanden鈥檚 Florida starter home was a splashy one. In August 2021, shortly before the merger closed, the scooter mogul a $21.8 million mansion in a posh waterfront gated community in Coral Gables. Featuring nine bedrooms, 11 baths, an infinity edge pool and private dock, the property checked the boxes one would expect at that price point.听

The home also comes with an interesting history. It was purchased in 2016 by a Panamanian shell company linked to Samark Jose Lopez-Bello, a narcotics trafficker on the ICE . The federal government later seized the property and reportedly it in 2020 for $12.5 million.听

By the time VanderZanden came around in 2021, scooters were looking like a much more attractive and legal path to fast wealth. Bird鈥檚 following the SPAC deal announcement called for the company to have an initial offering value in the billions. VanderZanden鈥檚 ownership stake, at that point, looked like enough to afford a whole portfolio of similar mega-mansions

High-flying Bird falls to earth

Things didn鈥檛 work out that way. Bird stock has been heading steadily downward since shortly after the merger closed in November, hitting a new trough around 33 cents per share this week. Bird鈥檚 market capitalization is a mere $94 million now. And VanderZanden鈥檚 stake鈥�13% in the last annual report鈥攊s worth around $12 million.

Given this decline, it鈥檚 not surprising to see that the Florida mansion is back on the market. This time, per , there鈥檚 a $39.9 million 鈥攁 surprisingly ambitious markup for such a short duration of ownership.

Notably, this isn鈥檛 the only mega-mansion that VanderZanden has purchased, or even the highest-profile one. In 2020, he paid $21.7 million to buy a Bel Air mansion formerly owned by Daily Show host . (That went up for sale again too, though it鈥檚 unclear what the current status is.) Before that, the would-be scooter mogul bought an $8.1 million Santa Monica property, which he shortly resold for $9 million.

It鈥檚 also unclear whether Bird is VanderZanden鈥檚 only source of wealth. He served as COO of from 2013 until 2014, and left work as VP of global driver growth at in 2016, before launching Bird. (Lyft later him for allegedly breaking his confidentiality agreement, before settling for an undisclosed sum.)

One thing that is clear, however, is that VanderZanden did not become as rich as he expected to become with Bird. Nor did a host of the company鈥檚 very high-profile investors, including , which led its Series C and D, and , which led the Series B.听聽

The scooter space, in general, just didn鈥檛 work out as planned for the early mover crowd. As we documented a couple months ago, VCs pumped billions into the space, only to find that public markets weren鈥檛 at all receptive to hoped-for valuations.

For what it鈥檚 worth, VanderZanden鈥檚 tony Florida enclave also doesn鈥檛 look like the kind of place where scooter networks would work. In a gated community where homes come with multicar garages, it鈥檚 pretty well assumed that last-mile transport comes with four wheels, not two.

Illustration: Dom Guzman