Polymarket just brought on one of Silicon Valley’s most aggressive growth operators. Travis VanderZanden, the founder of e-scooter company Bird and a former senior executive at both Uber and Lyft, has joined the crypto prediction market platform as its chief growth officer.
A blitzscaling resume meets prediction markets
VanderZanden’s career reads like a case study in hyper-growth playbooks. He held senior roles at Lyft before jumping to Uber between 2014 and 2016, during the period when both companies were locked in a brutal fight for rideshare dominance.
He then founded Bird in 2017, the e-scooter startup that became synonymous with the “move fast and deploy everywhere” approach to urban mobility. Bird operated under VanderZanden’s leadership until 2023.
VanderZanden’s appointment reportedly came in early August 2026, first surfacing via Bloomberg on August 4 before being detailed more broadly on August 11.
