Big Technology Podcast - Lyft's New CEO Has a Plan To Compete — With David Risher

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

David Risher is Lyft's new CEO. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a frank discussion about his plan to put the company back on the right track after it's spent years languishing. Tune in for a frank discussion of the economics of ride hailing, the reality of leading a company after its founders depart, and Risher's plan to compete in a category that hasn't traditionally been easy to succeed in. We also discuss autonomous driving (but recorded ahead of my recent experience in San Francisco)e. This is Risher's first podcast interview as CEO. Please give it a listen and enjoy! --- If you enjoyed this episode, or the podcast in general, please mark five stars on Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify. It helps a lot. Thank you!

The new CEO of Lyft gives his first podcast interview since taking the job. That's coming up right after this. LinkedIn Presents. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today. David Risher, he's the CEO of Lyft. He's a few months into the job, and he's here to tell us how it's going. Can't wait for this discussion.

David, welcome to the show. It's great to be here, Alex. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on. So let's zoom back to when you first took the job. I did some reading this morning, try to figure out the clips of what the environment was like. This is straight from the AP story.

You're smiling, so I think you know it's coming. This is what the AP says. The shakeup comes about a month after lift disclosed that it suffered a $58 million loss for the final three months of last year, more than doubling the same 2021 period and provided a dismal outlook for 2023 that deepened a downturn in lift stock, which has pushed its shares below $10, a roughly 80% drop from their price at the end of 2019. Why did you take this job?

That's a great setup. I mean, look, there's so much opportunity. I mean, the article said it right, you know, sort of in black and white. You know, this is a company that really pioneered ride chair. You know, back in the day, 15 years ago, ride share meant either take a taxi, which wasn't a thing, or, you know, maybe jump in a black car. And then Lyft really innovated around this peer-to-peer driving idea, the idea of a friend kind of coming you up and coming in and picking you up. And that's what really opened this whole market up. And millions, billions of people now have used it and love it, riders and drivers.

But the truth is, I think Lyft went through a bit of a tough time, you know, and it's sort of a tale as old as time. A company starts off and just is hitting on all cylinders and then gets thrown a couple curveballs, COVID being a pretty significant one, maybe makes a couple of decisions that in retrospect, you know, even the founders wouldn't have made if they'd known what was coming. But anyway, and then at a certain point, you sort of get to the thing where you say, gosh, it's maybe time to take a fresh look at what's going on. And so, you know, ever since starting, you know, the idea of focusing really hard on what

riders want and what drivers want and building a great business on top of that was just super appealing. What were some of those mistakes that the founders made that they wish they would have had back? You know, I think there are probably two that in retrospect they might have done differently. I think one was around the beginning of COVID when they did, and none of us knew what was going to happen. Of course, we have to sort of put ourselves back in 2020 and remind ourselves that you know, at the time, it might have been a three-month thing, it might have been a six-month thing. Nobody knew. Nobody knew. But they made the decision sort of to double down on kind of their existing business ride share, and then they had already started kind of an expansion in other

transportation modalities. You know, they had a big idea of really being the world's best transportation network. And so they were, you know, doing some work with public transportation, bikes, rental cars, and so on and so forth. And the problem with that is at a time when nobody wants to go anywhere. Being long on transportation is tough. Yeah. So that was clearly a big decision. Again, you know, hard to know whether if COVID had ended in two weeks or two months, things would have been very different. But it didn't, of course. And so that was one thing. And the second thing was, you know, as COVID ended and, you know, things started to sort of normalize, the company was under a huge amount of pressure from its investors to start to turn profit or to sort of make real progress

short's profitability. And the problem with that, there's nothing wrong with that in the long term. You have to be a profitable business in order to survive. But the problem that started to create internally was they had a lot of things going on because of the first thing I said. And so instead of sort of going into hyper-focus mode on that, they decided to do something else, which was raised prices a little bit, maybe even cut driver pay a little bit, do some things around the edges that they thought we're going to be fine. You know, sort of no one would notice or maybe the competitor would follow, or whatever it is. It didn't really work out. Didn't really work out. We started to lose market share. And if you start to lose market share in a duopoly, in a two-person

market, and you're doing it in a way that's not very customer-friendly or you're doing it because you haven't been customer-friendly, gosh, things can start to unravel. And you saw it. You saw it play-up. So that was, I think both of those were decisions they would have made differently. I can tell you a little bit, well, why they didn't change them as fast as they might have and so forth. But at the end of the day, that was it. And so I decided to do something different. Yeah, and the founders, Logan and John were beloved inside the company and the industry looked at them fairly positively. I actually spent two New Year's riding around with John as he did his annual New Year's lift driving experience. It was fun. It was great. And it was really an opportunity

for me to come like spend a couple hours with him and really think about, you know, or speak with him about where this business was going. So I'm curious from your perspective, just from like a leadership standpoint. How do you come in and establish yourself as the guy, you know, after those two leave? Well, that's a good question. I mean, and the funny thing is, and this will sound like, be yourself. You know, so I'm sort of lucky. If I look at my experience, you know, I got to be at Microsoft in the 90s at the time, a company that really was innovating around technology, Windows 3-0 and so on and so forth, really ushering in the graphical user interface. I was at Amazon in the late 90s, 2000s, really focused on customers.

And then I ran a nonprofit for a lot of years, really focused on figuring out how to do big things, get kids reading, but with limited resources. So I was lucky. I got to draw on all those experiences. You know, how can you really focus on getting the technology right? How can you really focus on customers, like a laser? And that's probably the single biggest thing. And then how can you do it with limited resources?

And so, you know, that's just what I did. I will tell you that two other things, though. it wouldn't have worked if John and Logan hadn't been so incredibly gracious and really sort of thoughtful and introspective and generous with how they passed the baton. It's hard as a company that you've founded to pass the baton to somebody else and not, you know, feel like you sort of want to interfere or sometimes even, you know, against your best intentions undercut. They did none of that. They did none of that.

They were incredible. Set the organization up for such success by being really gracious and thoughtful about how they transition to me. So that's that up to time. And then, you know, I happen to have a sort of a lot of energy. That's true. And that helps too because it gives people a sense of gosh, you know, it's sort of a new, you know, kind of a bit of a new era. And it looks like this guy might be able to help us pull it off. That's right. So how do you get the job, by the way? You were on the board? Did you raise your hand for it? Or were you like the guy in the meetings at the board that spoke up? And then the board was like, why don't you take over? How did that happen? It was more like the second than the first. But no,

so here's exactly what happened. At the end of last year, Logan came to the board and let them know that after 15 years of running the company, and literally running a 24 by 7, you know, I mean, this is a company that operates around the clock. It's operationally intense and so forth. It tried to be put out of business by Uber a bunch of times. Anyway, all sorts of stuff. Over 15 years. He said, you know what? I'm about to turn 40 years old. It's time for me to start the next chapter of my life. And so when he said that, and John kind of followed suit. He said, you know what, kind of Logan and I are. sort of join on this one. It's time. So the board did what boards do. They hired a search firm. I think they talked to maybe about 100 different candidates, or at least screened maybe 100 different candidates for the job. I think they narrowed it down to a short list of 10 to 15. But then something interesting happened and very unexpected. I was literally taking a walk one afternoon in between meetings. And my phone rang in the board chair, Sean Agarwal, was on the line. And he said, David, I have an offer for you that I think that you might not be able to refuse.

And I said, you know, Sean, what do you, what, and honestly, at that point, I thought he was maybe going to try to convince me to join the audit committee or something like that. See, something that nobody wanted. Anyway, but he said, no, look, Logan, John and I have been talking for the last couple of months as we've been interviewing people. And we've been sort of in the background ranking these people against you and saying, who would we rather have run the company? And we'd rather you, at least throw your hat in the ring. then just sort of limit us to just the external candidates we've seen. And I said, you know, look, I said, of course, I'm very flattered. It's very kind. But no, it doesn't make any sense. You know, I've got a great life and I'm doing all these things, getting kids reading, and so on and so forth. But, you know, one thing led to another.

They were quite persistent, but also I kind of opened my mind to the idea. My wife and I talked about it. And, you know, one thing led to another. I had to compete for the job, of course. I had to fit together a hundred-day plan. I had to do all the things. But I got really excited pretty fast at the idea of building something really cool for customers using all the skills that I'd have. Yeah. So, okay, so we've talked a little bit about

your starting point, right? So you come in, the company's really in a rough spot. You have opportunity to build, opportunity to shape it in your way. You're clearly the choice that, you know, the company's leadership wanted to put in place. Now the question is, what do you do? So let's go back to that AP article, if you don't mind. So this is from, again, from the day that you were named new CEO, while Uber's ridership has bounced back to people. pre-pandemic levels, Lyft hasn't yet found a way to get back on track, causing its losses to mount an investors to bail on its stock. Uber diversified its operations to include food delivery, a popular option during government lockdowns that kept people in the habit of opening

the Uber app. So talk a little bit about like, all right, there's opportunity, but you're way behind here. And so what did the economics of running this business look like? I mean, you talked a little bit about how there was a loss of riders and drivers. And you, of course, need to be profitable. So talk a little bit about, you know, from the business of the business, the economics, like what do you think about when you think about, you know, what you're doing with Lyft and what you need to do with Lyft to get it on the right trajectory. Yeah. So a great question. Here's how I think about it. Lyft has, and this is just purely from a business perspective, right? Lyft and any ride share company has a fixed cost base of X, whatever it might be.

When I took on the job, it's called a billion dollars in round numbers, a fixed cost. So that's just a chunk of money that it costs to keep the lights on at that time. So think about this way. Every time you get in a car as a rider, you pay a fare. The driver gets a chunk of that. our insurance companies and other people get pieces of that, and then we get to keep what's left over. Now, if you don't have enough riders, and let's just, we're going to use completely illustrative numbers to be clear. Let's just say we make a buck a ride, just to, again,

make the math. Well, that tells you you got to have a billion rides just to cover your cost, right? Sort of, that's the arithmetic. Well, we, so, so that tells you, in a sense, that lays out your plan right there, because you kind of have to do two things. You got to figure out how you're going to get your ride volume up, and you've got to figure out how you're going to get your cost down, if you want to be properly, which we do. So that's what we did. So we started to get a ride volume up by doing some starting, frankly, fairly basic ways, you know, making sure that we're paying our drivers what they deserve so that they don't get

annoyed at us, making sure we charge our riders sort of in line with what Uber is charging them, at least as a starting point. You know, maybe we can go a little lower sometimes, maybe a little higher sometimes, basically try to be in line. which allows you then to compete in other ways. We can talk about that, you know, after. But first step is just kind of match. And then on the cost side, you've got to cut costs.

You got to cut costs. Unless you think you're going to get to a billion rides, you know, the day after tomorrow, but that's going to take some time because that's a big number. So we cut costs. And you've probably read those articles as well, $330 million of cost. Now, that's hard to do because cutting costs, you know, theory sounds like one thing. But in practice, what it really means is laying people off. And so we had a layoff.

It was painful as layoffs are. I think we did as good a job as we can, and I'm pleased to say that many of the people, even people who were frustrated by the whole thing, now, you know, have new jobs and so forth and so on. So these things that kind of this kind of ugly side of capitalism. But anyway, that's sort of what we did. And that was the sort of beginning. And then the third thing is we started to market ourselves a little bit.

Can come back to that in a second. But those were the sort of basic steps. Yeah. Let's talk about the layoff quickly. So you laid off, I think reports are more than 1,000 people. Correct me if I'm wrong. But I want to ask you, you're, you come in. this is one of the things that happens often when a new CEO comes in as they lay off.

I mean, one of the examples we talk about often on the podcast is Elon Musk and Twitter. And it's a lot of people to cut. So how do you affect, how do you cut? I mean, how do you do a layoff effectively? You know, you're just really ramping up to learn the business. Are you, like, how are you sure that this is like the right people even? I mean, and I also need to ask you, did you take inspiration from like the magnitude of cuts that Elon Musk made at Twitter? because that's the sort of meme that everybody talks about is that he like freed companies up to cut

people. So I'm curious both of those sides of that questions. Yeah. Let me start from the end and work backwards. No, I didn't take any inspiration for me on mosque. I think he did a terrible job. He did a terrible job. I mean, they're better and worse ways to do layoffs. I think he figured out a way to do it worse than just about anyone else had ever done it before. So not particularly interested in following that leave. But I understand the sentiment of your question. The question is sort of, you know, did that sort of make it okay? No, it did. We needed to do it no matter what. We just did. And the answer to your first question, how do you know? You know not by talking about the individual people, honestly, you know because you start to say, okay, eyes on the prize. We've really got

to focus on getting drivers, what they need to be successful, and riders thrilled every time they take a lift. And so anything that doesn't fall pretty squarely in that category is something that we have to look at and decide whether or not we can afford to continue to do. And so, you know, you heard me talk in the earliest days about focusing on ride share. Focusing on ride share, because, again, we had a bunch of other things. And you'll see, anyway, again, that's maybe for the future. But anyway, so as you start to focus on one thing, you start to look with a new eye at some of the other things you're doing that aren't kind of on strategy.

And I think to your point about, you know, new CEOs do this often. There's truth to that. But I think there's a reason. And it's not because new CEOs are terrible people or, you know, like to come in and do awful things. It's because new CEOs have a particular advantage, which is that they can look at things unburdened by history. And so they're looking going forward.

You know, what is the opportunity here? Not, you know, what did I think two years ago when it started this project? Or, you know, trying to unfall in love with something. I'll tell you a quote, Satya Nadala, who's the CEO of Microsoft, sent me a very nice note when I took a good job. And we were talking about this and that. And he said, look, life, because I talked about how much I was learning. And he said, life is all about learning.

Actually, I think he said leadership is all about learning and unlearning and learning. And it's that second part, the unlearning that's so, so hard to do. And new CEOs have a bit of a pass on that. They don't have to be burdened by all the learnings of the past. I've got my own unlearning to do, but I don't have to unlearn stuff that other people started. So I think that's kind of what happened. Okay. So now we can talk about profitability.

I was just checking. It doesn't seem like Lyft has been profitable ever. There's a, I think, an interesting meme in tech or there's some truth to it that like you have the big, you know, seven companies that are like really cranking as far as a business. And then we've really yet to figure out whether some of these others are businesses. like a Lyft or an Uber or an Airbnb, the darlings of the previous era of tech, right? The in between, you know, the formation of the Facebooks and the Googles. And now many of them aren't profitable. People wonder, like, you know, whether they actually, there was so much excitement around

these businesses. And now it's like your public companies now and still no profitability. So what do you think about that? And is there a real road to profitability for Lyft? Yes, there is. And the key, though, is, first of all, it is a scale business. And for the last couple of years, again, I don't want to blame everything on COVID, but it's been hard to continue on the path of scale at a time when no one wanted to move around.

So anyway, that's a little bit of a side issue, but also quite important, very different dynamic than, for example, what Amazon has faced or Facebook has faced or, you know, others, where the pandemic, arguably, was a net positive. But anyway, even if I set COVID aside, this is, it is an operationally complex business. I'll say that again. You know, you're talking about millions of riders, millions of drivers, being matched, you know,

24 hours a day, seven days a week, you know, all over. Hard to get right. Point number one. Point number two, it's not a business that lends itself to high margins. Right. So search does, right? For sure, you can see that. Retail doesn't, particularly, I'm talking about Amazon, but Amazon was ruthless at the beginning,

and I was part of that at figuring out how to keep costs really low. And then they also made a very smart decision in the 2000s where they really focused on Amazon Web Services and growing that as a real driver of profitability, which also gave them some cover. And so on and so on. So when you look at some of the other businesses you talk about, it's not that they're any less complex. But they have alongside that complexity, in general, a particularly high margin business that can really help them, you know, weather a bunch of storms and so forth and so on. We don't have

that. We don't have that. And either does Uber. So that makes the challenge higher for us. But now the question becomes, well, how do you know it's going to be profitable? I mean, I can see the numbers internally. We can't talk about this now, but I externally. But I can tell you that as ride volumes increase as we continue to optimize our cost position. And in particular, in particular, as we really focus on our customers, we can figure out ways to make more money. And the reason I say that last piece is because customers are willing to pay more over time. If they have a service that provides them enormous value, we have a base service that provides people a huge value every single day, and then we can build on top of that. And again, something you and I can talk about a little bit more

later. But that's, in part, one of the ways you get to profitability is you move beyond just getting the basics right, which is kind of where I would argue we are right now, and really kind of get to that next stage. Yeah. So one of the ways that people were saying that these companies would get to profitability was that they were going to get to autonomous driving. I mean, people, when I speak to people about the Uber business, for instance, they always said, look, like, this business doesn't work or the valuations don't work unless we get to autonomous driving. And with Lyft, it's not even, you know, abstract things. So I'll tell you like what happened when I was speaking with John back in 2017 when I was there with him for New Year's.

You know what? Let me just read a piece of the story and then we can go there. So this is from 2017. So at the start of 2016, autonomous vehicles were still abstract, much hyped, but little used in the real world. By the end of the year, autonomous driving became much more real when Uber self-driving cars hit the streets of Pittsburgh and San Francisco, and the company's autonomous truck made its first delivery. I mean, wow, this is really like stepping in a time machine here. And here's the line about Lyft. Lyft is getting in on the self-driving action, too.

This year, it plans to introduce autonomous driving cars along some fixed routes. I mean, 2017, it felt like I would be stunned if you told me we're going to be sitting here in 2023 asking, when is self-driving going to happen. And here we are. What's going on? Yeah. So I think you're putting your finger on two things, actually. I think one is, you know, how, you know, we as human beings, we like to take a couple of data points and extrapolate out and see patterns, you know, and sometimes they don't work out. That's for sure. Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah, I think we, everyone got a little ahead of themselves on self-dry. You've mentioned Elon Musk already. He's fairly famous for getting a little ahead of himself on that one. But look, I think, so two things. First of all, self- driving cars will happen. And in 2017, it was kind of science fiction.

In 2023, it happens every day here in San Francisco. There is not a day where I don't see two or three in a 15-minute period roaming around, you know, the city. It's one city. It's not during rain. You know, it's, you know, caveat, caveat, caveat. But it's happening. And so that's a thing. And I'll tell you a little story.

I was in a lift myself a couple of nights ago. It's actually a couple of weeks ago, I guess, at this point. And as my wife and I were coming home from dinner, a self-driving car drove biased. Actually, it was three of them, to be honest. They tend to kind of go in the herds. And my driver said, oh, yeah, check that out. I said, yeah, they're everywhere. And he said, yeah, it's really interesting.

You know, they're already better drivers than I am. And he was six years old. He said that I've got 60-year-old eyes and they've got sensors that, you know, they just built yesterday. So, you know, it was, so even, even people who you might think might be, you know, skeptical about self-driving cars are worried even. They're sort of saying, yeah, they're kind of part of the landscape. The other part of your question, though, is, is it needed to be profitable? No, absolutely not. Absolutely not.

And I think even that suggests something that I just don't think is true. I don't think it's, it will be a long, long, long time before there are enough self-driving cars on the road to be significant in most places. You know, it's still R&D land. I mean, these cars cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per car. And that's only recovering a small amount of R&D that's gone in to building these. And let's not think that the R&D is done. In other words, it's not like you spend a bunch of money and then you just get to sell a bunch of cars and make the money back. No, you're going to continue to spend a bunch of money.

So I think the idea that somehow self-driving cars are going to be like super cheap or something like that. You know, like, okay, there's no driver. I get that. But there's a lot of other costs that normal cars. don't have, I think that's not super likely. And I think for the absolute foreseeable future, a hybrid model, in other words, some self-driving cars, but many cars driven by driver is much more likely. Right. So, okay, so we're going to be dealing with the current economic situation and the current technology for a while. You mentioned a few times that your business is really

predicated on scale. You've helped increase the market share of Lyft a little bit since you've taken over. You're up to around 30% now. But Uber is still a vast majority. So I'm puzzled by the situation where it's going to take scale, but you're, you know, a very clear number two in the market. So how does that, how do you figure that out? Yeah. Well, first, I mean, I appreciate you're acknowledging that we've increased our share. And I think that's actually quite important. You know, it's not a leading indicator of particularly anything. It's more of a trailing indicator. good things for your riders, you do good things for your drivers, your share should increase. And ours has gone from 26 to 27, to 28, to 29, to 30.

We're actually just above 31 if you look at some of the public data now. And that's over a fairly short period of time. It may not sound like a lot, but actually, honestly, it is a fairly significant move over such a short period of time. You know, Pepsi would kill for that kind of share gain versus Coke over any reasonable period of time. So anyway, on the one hand, pleased with what's happening, because it shows that we're doing the right thing for riders and drivers.

on the other hand to your point still got a long way to go and i think the way at least i think about it is the first thing you have to do is get the basics right but then you have to remind people why it's important that lift exist and i'll give you a couple of ways to think about it i think at the most basic level you as a rider want to have two apps on your phone you want two ride share companies to exist because guess what one of us is sometimes don't let you down. I hope it's never us, but it's going to happen. And so you're better off having two in the marketplace, actively competing with each other. So you get out of the movies and for whatever reason, one guy takes a long time, one guy's short or one guy's prices

are high, the other guys, whatever it is. Okay. Just think about that for a second. If everybody had two apps and if prices were more or less the same and we were competing in other ways, but let's set that aside for just a second, we'd have 50% market share. Now, we're not there because a lot of people don't have two apps. You kind of alluded to one reason before. Uber's done a nice job with their Uber Eats. And so that's a thing. There's some problems to it too.

But let's give them a little credit. But anyway, so to start with you, kind of do the basics, right? Maybe you get to 50-50 just that way. No, but probably not. You probably have to remind people that you exist. You probably have to do a little bit of marketing. And so, you know, if you've been on TikTok recently, you might have seen some of the TikTok ads we've started to play around with.

I've been on social. You've been on Twitter. on threads. You see some of the, I think our social guys are having a great, great time right now, having a lot of fun on threads. But, you know, this is kind of far. And you've found someone named Uber who can't use the Uber app and you've, like, threaded with them? Exactly right. There's a family whose name is Uber. They're like banned from Uber because Uber thinks they're imposter's or something. They thought they're exactly some scammers.

So they get, like they try to sign up for Uber. And they get this thing called like invalid. Like, okay, actually, you're not invalid. Your team just happens to be Uber. So anyway, yeah, we find that social media guys out of them. And it's kind of hilarious. We gave them a gift certificate and another, you know, pink customers for life. So you start to do that kind of thing.

You start to remind people that you kind of want to companies out there, you know, kind of fighting for business a little bit. And then here's where I'll end on this point. You know, I drive for Lyft as well. And so when I drive for Lyft, of course, the first question out of when I'm, mouth is why did you choose Lyft? And I am so happy to report the number of people who say, you know what? I like Lyft better. You guys have values that align with mine. You're a friendlier company. You treat your drivers better. We have evidence to back these things up, by the way. I think we are a friendly

company. We definitely treat our drivers as well. So anyway, little by little, you start to differentiate yourself as a brand, as a service provider because we create new services. And that's kind of how these things go. You're going to do carpools again? uh no not well uh it's an easy question a hard answer first so never say never right sure and in fact we do a limited amount of carpooling type stuff uh particularly around universities and some other particular settings where where that makes us but broadly speaking i don't think i think it's a great example of a company getting it wrong and here's what i mean by that let's step back for a second as a as a rider you want options right you want two apps maybe but

even within an app you maybe want a way to save a little money sometimes versus uh you know versus not and all of us everyone likes the deal so uh you have two different companies here you've got uber and let me describe their approaches on the uber side they have this thing which is kind of a carpooling type feature um kind of works like this you ask for ride, a car point picks you up, you start on your way, and then instead of going from point A to point B, all of a sudden, point C kind of inserts itself because you've got to take a left turn to pick up another rider. And then point D inserts itself because you got to drop off that other rider. And then finally you get to point E, which obviously is where you wanted to go in

the first place, but it took you longer. And in the meanwhile, you're kind of going left and right and strange way. You don't really like it as a driver, excuse me, as a rider, because it's sort of frustrating. And then drivers don't really like it either. And then drivers don't really like it either. Every time they do another pickup and drop off, it's kind of a, yeah, it's a, it's a little noise. So anyway, but that's how they solve that problem. And they're very proud of it. And I'm excited that they're proud because I think it's a credit experience. What have we done?

We've done something called wait and save. Very simple. If you're willing to wait a little bit longer, have a little bit wider window on when the car picks you up, you save, you save $2, $5, $10,000, whatever it is, depending on the length of the trip. Very straightforward. And we have found that we're so about 30% of our rides are wait and save rides. That's a very big number. and what that suggests is customers really like it, back when we did share, because we were actually the ones who pioneered that one, I think we got up to maybe 15%, maybe something like that, because people don't really like it. And then COVID came and nobody liked it. So, but it's a great example of two different companies. And maybe we'll get it right someday. I don't know, who knows, but I know this. It's cool to have two companies trying to focus on the same problem. And at least in my view, one solving it in a customer-focused way and one solving it in a non-customer focus. Yeah. So what is the focus? You're focusing on ride sharing. What does that mean? for biking. I mean, I'm a user of city bike. I use it with the Lyft app in New York. And I'm sure when

I'm in San Francisco next week, I'll be doing the Lyft bike there. Is that something you're still committed to? Yeah. So first thing I have to say, I use it too. I use it almost every day. In fact, I just used it 15 minutes ago to get to work this morning. Yeah, I look, I think biking is the future in a lot of ways. I mean, not for everybody, of course. But it's good for cities because it's, you know, it's greener, it's less polluting. It's a new mode of transportation. that in fact often is faster than cars if you've got, you know, gridlocked and parts and so on and so forth. It's good for you, you know, healthy, gets you out.

It's fun, particularly on e-bikes. You know, anyone who takes an e-bike, you know, they immediately tell tender for people how awesome e-bikes are. Yeah, those things are too fast, but anyway. It depends. It depends. Yeah, you have to get used to it. You have to get used to it.

It's like a mini motorcycle. Go ahead. Well, it's not as fast on motorcycle. But anyway, so look, so bikes are awesome. Now, and in city bike, you mentioned city bike. I mean, just to give you a sense of the scale of that, we give over 100, thousand city bike rides a day, a day in New York City. That's a big deal. That's, if you just look at that as a public transportation network, it's like, it's like the 30th biggest transportation network

in the world or something like that. So it's just in New York City. It's huge. And you see bike lanes everywhere and all the stuff. So all that is all this great. We look at our bike business, very important to our customers, important to cities, important to the future, the planet, important to everything. But for us, we're also trying to think pretty carefully about how we can really give it the energy and focus it needs, considering that we're really focused on ride share. And so it's an active conversation internally. And I'll just sort of leave it there.

But we're super committed to the mode of transportation for sure. Yeah. Okay. So you mentioned that you drive. Yeah. You know, I think that's good there from Uber just like had this big, we've talked about it on the pod, but had this big splashy profile in the Wall Street Journal.

Talk about it. He's finally driving six years on to the job. Maybe we'll talk about that in the second half. But, I mean, I think it is a moment that we should pause. and talk a little bit about driver safety. So there was a story out of Washington, D.C., it's a very tragic story. Nasrat Ahmed Yard, he was 31 years old. He was a translator for the U.S. Army and Afghanistan and moved to the U.S. to escape Taliban violence.

He was shot and killed in D.C. I don't know if maybe you have some information. Was he on the clock? And I don't think these were passengers or not. But I don't know if you've commented on this publicly before. I'm curious if you could share your perspective. and your thoughts here? I mean, my big perspective on him is it's an incredibly tragic situation, awful.

I mean, absolutely awful. He had driven for Lyft. It wasn't, he wasn't actually a Lyft driver at that moment, but he had driven for Lyft, and it's absolutely awful and unacceptable. Maybe a long conversation about gun safety and so forth and so on, but that's a distraction. It's just absolutely awful. Look, driver safety is super important.

And of course, you'd expect the CEO of Lyft to say that, but it's really true. It's really true. It's actually an area where drivers and riders have exactly the same perspective. You know, they both want a safe ride. And we invest an enormous amount, an enormous amount into safety, both for riders and drivers. I'll give you a couple of examples. In every car, there are two people in every car. There are two people in every car.

And they both matter exactly the same amount. So, exactly the same amount. We have to take care of them both. We have to give them both a great experience. I'll talk about from the rider experience just because that's probably more familiar to most of your listeners. From a rider perspective, we will do things

and you might have gotten this yourself where we will, of course, we've added in safety features like you can alert us if something's going wrong during the ride. You can get a response from ADT. They will call 911 for you. They will leap into action. This has happened.

I've seen what happens when this is lucky. It's very rare, but that's what happens. That's the extreme case. There are many other cases that are much less extreme. You know, you feel uncomfortable and you're, of course, allowed and courage to report that information. There's never any retribution for any of that. So we spend a lot of energy making sure our riders feel safe. You even, and perhaps you've gotten this notification, if it takes you longer than we expect to get to your destination, or if it looks like you're going way off route, you know, we'll send you an alert saying, are you okay?

We want to make sure everything is okay. Yeah, I have gotten that. It's very interesting. Yeah, yeah. So it's a real focus. And then on drivers, we do a lot of upfront. front work, making sure that we give them information about how to anticipate potentially, you know, what can be a difficult situation. Of course, all of our drivers themselves go through

background checks and so on and so forth. But, you know, you know, crazy things can happen. And sometimes terrible, terrible, tragic things can happen. So all I can say is just, it's an area of just massive and ongoing focus for us to try to figure out how to create a safe experience as we can. David Risher is here with us. He's the CEO of Lyft doing his first podcast interview since taking over. We'll be back right after this. Hey everyone, let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative

takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less, and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like you. the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcasts with David Risher. He's the CEO of Lyft.

And you're also employ like 37 at Amazon? I was. That's right. So I'm kind of curious what you've definitely employed some Jeff Bezos systems at at Lyft. You have the David at email similar to how it's David at Lyft, right? similar to how Jeff Bezos has, I think he still has Jeff at Amazon.com, and he actually reads those. What sort of Amazon leadership lessons are you putting into place inside Lyft?

By the way, the idea of like, it's so interesting because Lyft is this, you know, kind of viewed as this kind of warm and fuzzy culture and Amazon, you know, public imagination is the opposite. So it is kind of interesting seeing the two meld in some way. Go ahead. That's an interesting observation. Yeah, I mean, you know, I learned so much from Jeff, so much from Jeff. And but the single biggest thing was if you obsessively focus on your customers, again, we have writers and drivers as ours, you will build a great business. And it's almost, you know, just like the sun will come up tomorrow morning. You know, you have to work at it.

It doesn't come automatically. But but it will have a single biggest thing for sure. But that's so easy to say, and yet really hard to pull off day after day after day. And I'm actually, I'm glad you bring up my email address. Yeah, it's David atliff.com. And I read those. You know, I'm not the only one who reads those, to be honest. I have other people who also help me out trying to sort of sort through.

And it's one of the first things I do every single morning. My staff knows this because shortly after I wake up, I read them. And then shortly after that, they sometimes get messages that have questions. So Jeff Bezos used to send those forward them with questions. question marks when he didn't like what he was seeing. Do you do the same thing? I don't. I've read that. I've never been on the receiving end of just a question mark email.

No, that sounds pretty scary. Yeah. No, I don't do that. No, but I will sometimes say kind of like, you know, kind of what's going on here. Like, this doesn't sound right to me. I'll tell you, I'll give you an example just from last night. Last night, someone found me, I actually got contact with me in a different way on social media.

And they described with such clarity what was going on. It was very frustrating. They were a driver who was very frustrated about a certain set of things. And I responded to him, and he within, even have his, it's probably, I'm not sure that this is okay to do, but we'll see if we can do this kind of in real time here. Maybe I can make any of the emails that you're getting. Yeah. Well, I'm, I'll, oh, you know what?

It's going to take me a second to find this. But anyway, he responded to me within, so I responded quite quickly. And he said, just the fact that you responded means so much to me. That's all he said. And because he just identified some issues, which we're going to look into. But in a certain sense, it starts with just being willing to listen and just being willing to act on that, not just sort of have it go into some, you know, some filter system. So anyway, that's a start.

But it's not the ending point. The ending point is you've got to really have empathy. You've got to really put yourself in the shoes of customers. And you have to figure out a way to make sure that the whole organization is doing the same. And here I'm just going to quote Jeff. I mean, Jeff talks about three types of companies, the ones that are customer focused, the ones that are product focused, the ones that are competitive. focus. And as he says, all three can be successful. All three can be successful. There's no

necessarily right or wrong answer. But at least in his view, and I've come to appreciate this view, if you've got to choose one, choose the customer way. And that's how I, that's how I run the business. Yeah. And so Jeff Bezos also had his senior leadership team, the S team. You have your own senior leadership. You have like a fun name for it. It's like the supernova of supporting, you know, superstars. What is it? Talk about how you run this. That's not us. That's somebody else. I think, so we actually, it's funny you say that we actually are just renaming it. We just renamed it a couple of days ago. It's called the PDT, purpose-driven team.

And the reason we call it the purpose-driven team is, you know, I mentioned quickly in the first half of the pod, this idea that an organization has to have a reason. That's to have a Y. And we have a Y in our name. So I guess in some ways, that comes for free. But we have to have a Y-W-H-Y. And our Y, bigger than just building a profitable business, bigger than building a business that's great for shareholders and employees and so on. All those things matter. But really, our Y has to do with bringing people together. And I want to riff on this for just a second if you'll indulge me. There are so many things in our daily lives, so many mechanisms that keep us on the couch watching a movie at home, eating pizza alone to sound a little tragic about it. divided as a country, so from the biggest to the smallest, on our phones, loving Twitter,

sure, maybe not so much anymore, loving threads because it's kind of fun, whatever it might be, whatever it might be, so many temptations to interact directly with technology. But Lyft isn't that. Lyft is not that. There's no interest in just interacting with technology to come to sleep. It's about getting you out. You've got to get out to see your friends. You've got to get out to go to work.

You've got to go to take a trip. Whatever it is. You've got to go pick up your mom, whatever might be. And so, and that, and in some ways, there's a quote that I'm kind of falling in love with, which is, what if the next social app is Lyft? And think about that, because that's what we really, really want. We want people out. We want people about.

We want people connected. I think it's a society I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it just left. So I see that as a very, very important role we play in the world. And anyway, I'll just stop there. Yeah. There's a couple more things I definitely want to get to before we go. So part in the harsh transition, but artificial intelligence is sort of,

animating the tech sector right now. And it seems to be that, you know, there's a lot of talk about it. People are buying a ton of GPUs. And this is pushing up the stock of like seven companies, which we talked about in the first half. And, you know, the rest of the tech industry is like, huh? And I'm curious, like, you're a CEO of a public tech company. It'd be great to have your thought on this one.

And like, am I alone in thinking that, you know, we still need to see products from these companies, especially, I mean, I'm also in particular curious how you think Amazon is going to handle this. Yeah. Well, I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask about the Amazon question. I can speculate. But I can tell you that it is a game change. You like speculation here.

We encourage it. And it usually doesn't stop me. So anyway, I'll get there. But no, look, it's a game changer. It is. And, you know, the hype cycle is little nuts. And, you know, that's, you know, discount that by a little bit. But we've used artificial intelligence.

you sort of, let's say, it used to be called machine learning now, but for a long, long time. And you can hear about generative AI. And that's exactly. So that's the big new thing. Generative AI is the big new thing. And oh my God, we see it all the time. We see it as a way of course, let's just to start with the absolute basics to help our engineers be more productive because it kind of kind of help them write code more efficiently. Let me ask you about that.

You know, I just want to, sorry to interrupt you, but this GitHub, you know, the co-pilots out there. Yeah. Every CEO I speak with, say, yeah, we're doing it. And then I say, have you seen the productivity increase yet? And they're like, I'm still looking for it. Is that, is that, are you there? Here's no. And I know, but I think I know why.

Because so right, so I was talking to an engineer just yesterday on this. And he said, you know, it's probably saving me about a half an hour a day of menial work. And that's the very important part, by the way. So that's just a half an hour a day. It's the stuff that he didn't wake up getting excited to do. And now something else does it. But I will tell you, I suspect that half hour is somewhat offset by playing around. and goofing around and trying to figure out what's going on,

you know, and how does it work and so forth and so on. So, you know, there's often, I'd say, a j-curb of these things, right? Things get less productive before more. I don't know. Right now, it's probably more like 50-50. In other words, for every minute you spend goofing around, you get a minute of productivity back, something. But you're not going to see massive productivity gains in the short term.

What you will see, though, are developers, engineers, hopefully, hopefully, saying, I'm able to spend my same X hours a day doing stuff that I enjoy more, having a better time, and having higher quality results. A lot of the stuff that's getting done now, around using AI for engineers, aside from completing lines of code and so forth, is test suites, right? And testing, some people love it. A lot of people don't love it so much. But over time, if you get better testing, you have higher quality. So I think the quality will improve

faster than productivity. I think productivity will follow up. But let me move beyond that, because I think that's just sort of a starting point. It's a little bit technical. The way we've traditionally used ML machine learning inside is driver, rider, matching, right? Millions of drivers, riders, and lots of data, right? Oh, rogue gets closed. How do we think about that? Well, we can use AI to sort of predict or to kind of see patterns and say, oh, that road traffic is closed, so let's root people around it.

That's, you know, kind of basic stuff. But it's hard, but it's kind of basic. But now come to a world where you as a rider have a problem. You know, I lost my iPhone. Oh, my God. Right now, terrible, it's terrible. It's the worst. It's a terrible feeling.

You almost feel like you're naked. So, and right now, honestly, it takes us a little bit too long to kind of do. with it. It's hard for everybody. You don't necessarily have a way to get in contact with us because your phone isn't there. Then your phone's moved around the city because it's in a car and all this or stuff. But we can look at that and we can use some fairly trivial, honestly, but still requiring a little bit of sophistication algorithms to try to sort of detect that maybe even before you know it. Because typically if you get out of the car, then your phone stays in the car, something strange just happens. It's sort of obvious. So that's a sort of way.

A lot of customer service really can be improved with AI, not just cost out, all that sort of stuff people think about. But you literally can get a faster, better response, you know, using your eye. And then for drivers, I think there's so many interesting opportunities for us to figure out a way to help drivers figure out, for example, how to make more money. Drivers want to make more money. And by the way, this is a little bit of a side brag. But, you know, our driver earnings are up about 10% since we started to roll out some new features recently. Because we really do want our drivers to make more money. There's a cap. I mean, obviously they can't take all the money, otherwise we get none of the money. But anyway, we want them to make more

money. AI can help. It can help by giving them, gosh, we've looked at what you do here. Here's some times of day that you might want to drive based on your patterns that you seem to like to drive around this time of day. But if you're driven on Tuesday instead of Wednesday, you might have made a little bit more money, safety too, right? We can start to try to figure out ways to say, and we already do this to a certain extent,

gosh, your driving is a little bit more aggressive than some people's. And so you might like that style, but I'm here to tell you, you know, you're actually putting yourself a little bit of vehicular danger when you do that. So I think there's so many ways. Yeah. Okay, we have just a few minutes left. I have three questions for you. So let's see if we can lightning around our way through the end here.

Yeah. Let me get the actual step because I want to talk to you about executive compensation. So your counterpart at Uber, Darra Koshasawi, made $24 million last year and Uber stock fell 40% last year. Should Dara make less money and how much money do you make? And do you think that's fair? Okay. A lot packed into that. That's a hard lightning round. I'll say this. Whether you should make more or less money, that's, you know, their board can figure that out. Here's what I know. My compensation is 90 plus percent, 98 percent, I don't know, tied to our stock performance. And that was a conversation I had with the board when I took the job. I said, I don't really want stock that kind of vests over time, independent of how I do or shares that are given to me, independent of how the company does. That to me doesn't seem right. What I do, I think is appropriate for CEOs, is to have my stock very, very tightly tied to company performance. And so as our stock goes up, more shares get released. If our stock doesn't go up

at all, I get paid just to pay salary. Okay. I think that's a good system. That's better than the other one. I can comment on it. It's not a problem. Go for it. Yeah. I saw on Twitter there was someone saying massive scam going on with Citibike that there are teens that are scratching out and removing numbers on the e-bikes so they can have a permanent hold on the bikes, basically allow it to reserve. You can reserve it so no one else can scan them or get the number. Are you aware of this? What do you think about it?

Yeah. Yeah. And we're stopping. How? I don't want to go into details. But yeah, no, for sure. It's super annoying. One of the things that is quite irritating to me personally is, you know, this is property.

It is literally like there for public use. And then, yeah, some people occasionally figure out ways to, stealing things. And stealing doesn't work for me. I don't think it's a good idea. So we're going to stop it. Okay. You're going to see what happens there. I've seen it on my local one also. So raising my hand, too, saying this is an issue. Okay. The last one is I asked people on threads and Twitter, you know, what I should be asking about riot hailing. And we had some person say, I'm just going to quote him, Brian Morrissey, who writes the rebooting, friend of the program. He goes, why did they lie about how far the car, far away the car is? So. I think that's a little bit harsh, but I have had situations where, like, you know,

even this past weekend, I was like in a kind of a remote part in New York and, you know, request a lift that says it's going to be there. You know, we'll find you a car within eight minutes or whatever, and it never shows up. So, you know, what's going on there? Yeah. So we don't lie and we tell the truth, as we know it. Sometimes things happen, right? Traffic happens, traffic jat happens, whatever, whatever.

The case you're talking about, very, very frustrating. You know, you have to remember that when you push that button, we're starting, we start immediately to look at who can pick you up the fastest. But it's not entirely our decision, right? We put it out there. We make a good guess how fast we think you're going to match with the driver, but drivers can say yes or no. And if several drivers say no, then we have to do a certain set of things that try to figure

out ways that, you know, broaden the circle to more people and so on and so on and so forth. And sometimes we get it wrong. We try to be as accurate as possible. It serves nobody, nobody for us to be inaccurate. So no incentive at all for us to get that one wrong. You might think we have, nah, it's not. It's just busy off and you won't drive or ride with this again. So that's bad.

But we have work to do and we do it every day to try to make those estimates better and try to give drivers fewer reasons to say no because that ultimately is what's driving. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I think just as a user piece of feedback is, it would be great to have a notification that says like you might be in a Lyft desert. I know that's probably counterproductive to what you guys are trying to do, but I think that would be, you know, it gives you an opportunity to more quickly look for another means of transportation as opposed to holding the app open as your battery goes down and praying that

someone will accept your ride. That's a good suggestion. I like that. David Richard, thanks so much for joining. It has been a ton of fun, Alex. Thanks for the questions, even the harsh and probing ones were fun. So thanks for doing your homework, too. Of course.

Questions were great. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you rolling with all of them. Hopefully we can make this a recurring thing. We'd love to have you back. I look forward to it. All right, everybody.

Thank you so much for listening. Thank you, David, for being here. Thank you, Nate Galatony for handling our audio. Lift, I'm not, Lyft for making this happen. LinkedIn for having me as part of your podcast network. And most of all, to all, to all of you, the listeners, appreciate you being here week after week. We'll see you on Friday for another show where we break down the news. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

You know, Thank you.