Scooter-sharing startup Bird has hired former Lyft policy executive David Estrada to be its chief legal officer

Bird, a scooter-sharing startup, is hiring yet another former Lyft executive to help lead its team.

The company, which was co-founded by former Lyft and Uber executive Travis VanderZanden, has hired David Estrada, Lyft’s former VP of government relations, to be its chief legal officer.

Estrada has spent the better part of the last decade helping Silicon Valley companies that are often working on new transportation options navigate sometimes murky regulatory waters.

Before his time at Lyft, Estrada was the legal director at X, the Alphabet company focused on “moonshots.” At the time, Google X housed the company’s self-driving car project, which is now an Alphabet company called Waymo.

After Lyft, Estrada spent a little more than two years as the chief legal officer at flying car company Kitty Hawk, which is run by Sebastian Thrun and backed by Alphabet CEO Larry Page, who pioneered Google’s self-driving project.

Now, Estrada — who spent his time at Lyft in the trenches of local regulatory battles as the company launched into new cities — is taking on the challenge of e-scooters.

Scooter- and bike-sharing companies like Bird are coming up against regulatory hurdles reminiscent of those that Uber and Lyft faced when the companies were first expanding across the U.S.

These new players are also navigating similar market dynamics, competition from entrenched incumbents and sometimes even the same use cases. The introduction of e-bikes and e-scooters makes companies like Bird a direct threat to Uber’s and Lyft’s short-distance trips.

That’s why we’re seeing a number of these dockless companies tapping into the pools of former and current ride-share executives and investors:

• Dockless bike startup Jump, which shares an investor — Menlo Ventures — with Uber, brought on Uber’s former head of driver product as an adviser.
• Competitor Limebike has Jeff Jordan, a partner at Lyft investor Andreessen Horowitz, on its board.
• Former UberChina executive Davis Wang is the CEO of Chinese dockless bike-sharing company Mobike.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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