Travis VanderZanden is ready to fly the very fancy coop. Though it’s been barely six months since the Bird founder paid “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah $21.7 million for a snazzy Bel Air mansion, the scooter king is flipping the contemporary estate back onto the market.
The new price? It’s just a few feathers under $25 million, which nets the buyer a secluded spot on a quiet cul-de-sac in upper Bel Air sporting a 10,000-square-foot, glass-clad residence with six bedrooms and nine baths. Not to mention some pretty jaw-dropping design elements — like an 11-foot pivoting front door, an Impala Linear limestone staircase, polished glass flooring, 24-foot ceilings and automated walls of glass by Fleetwood, just to name a few amenities. There’s also a gated driveway and three-car attached garage with glass doors, complete with a smoky tint for privacy.
Now in his early 40s, VanderZanden served as COO of Lyft from 2013 until 2014, when he left the company to become vice president of arch-rival Uber. Lyft wound up suing the Wisconsin native for allegedly breaking his confidentiality agreement, with VanderZanden settling with the company for an undisclosed amount while admitting no wrongdoing. He went on to found Bird, an electric scooter-rental service, in 2017.
In 2018, Noah purchased the all-new spec home, designed and developed by builder Jacob Cohan and architect Cyrus Harouni of Hafco & Associates, for $20.5 million. Just over two years later, the South African native shelled out $27.5 million to upgrade to an even larger modern Bel Air manse about a mile away, which necessitated the sale of the smaller property to VanderZanden.