Ofo

How it happened

Ofo was a pioneer of China's dockless bike-sharing boom, plastering cities with bright-yellow bikes and racing rival Mobike worldwide; backed by Alibaba, DST and others, it reached a ~$3B valuation in 2018. Outspending rivals proved ruinous: a mid-2018 cash crunch left some 11 million users demanding their deposits back, the website went dark in February 2019, and bankruptcy followed. Glassdoor reviews called the death early — from mid-2018 staff were flagging funding stress and describing the business as dying, and overseas employees blamed a secretive Beijing HQ that distrusted its own local teams, took months to approve trivial spending, left vendors unpaid, and gutted country teams in layoffs that arrived with barely a word of explanation.

Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.