Before there were scooters, there were hammocks. Lawrence Leuschner's father imported goods from Latin America, and some of them came back defective. Most were thrown away. The teenage Leuschner struck a deal to take the damaged ones for nothing and sold the seconds at flea markets near his hometown in the Taunus.
He has described the next step as a relief. Online auction sites such as Alando and eBay meant he no longer had to stand at a market early on Sunday mornings. He could sell from home.
The break grew into an 18-month trip through Asia and California, including eight months driving a VW Bulli from Patagonia to Mexico.
A couple of years later, just as he turned adult, he and friends started Trade-a-Game, a marketplace for used video games. He left his studies for it. Angels, among them Oliver Samwer, backed the team, and in 2006 they moved to Berlin. Later, after watching An Inconvenient Truth, he pushed the business into used electronics. It became Rebuy, now a market leader in Europe. In a podcast he put it simply: a person always needs a purpose.
Then, after more than ten years as CEO, he stopped. In 2017 he took a sabbatical, went surfing, and stepped back from daily work at Rebuy while remaining a shareholder. The break grew into an 18-month trip through Asia and California, including eight months driving a VW Bulli from Patagonia to Mexico.
In San Diego in April 2018 he saw people riding e-scooters and enjoying themselves. He thought it could become big. He believed Europe's dense cities were even better suited to it. With Matthias Laug, an early Lieferando figure, and Julian Blessin, who came from Bosch's scooter-sharing venture Coup, he started Tier. Only three months separated the business plan from the first test market, funded by a rushed seed round.
The founders made one unusual choice. Instead of the American model of freelancers charging scooters at home, Tier ran its own workshops. Leuschner admitted the first scooters did not last long. By June 2019 the company reported two million rides.
The boom had a price. In August 2022 about 180 people lost their jobs and expansion stopped as the company turned toward profitability. In 2023 it sold the Spin business to Bird for $19M. In March 2024 it merged with Dott, backed by a €60M equity injection, and by October the Tier name had gone from the app. The combined group reported €173.3M revenue for 2025.
Leuschner's story is a long way from the hammock stall, yet it follows the same rule. He kept finding value in what others discarded, whether a returned hammock or a second-hand game console, and acted on it fast.