Latest / Masters in Business / BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher

Transcript

BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · Masters in Business

0:02
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. This is Masters in
0:11
Speaker 1: Business with Barry Ritholts on Bloomberg Radio.
0:17
Speaker 2: This week on the podcast Man, was this a fascinating conversation?
0:20
Speaker 2: David Rischer is CEO of Lift since the past three years.
0:24
Speaker 2: He's been on the board for the past five years.
0:27
Speaker 2: What a fascinating discussion about a company that is probably
0:31
Speaker 2: an app on your phone and you may not be
0:34
Speaker 2: aware of all the different things they do, from bike
0:39
Speaker 2: share to autonom's vehicles, to fleet management and everything in between.
0:45
Speaker 2: I thought this was absolutely fascinating, and I think you
0:48
Speaker 2: will also with no further ado, my conversation with Lift's
0:52
Speaker 2: CEO David Risher.
0:55
Speaker 3: Thank you, Berry, Hi, I'm happy to be here.
0:57
Speaker 2: I'm thrilled to have you. Before we start talking about
1:00
Speaker 2: your technology background, I got to roll a little further back.
1:05
Speaker 2: Bachelor's in comparative literature from Princeton. That doesn't sound like
1:10
Speaker 2: the sort of career plan for someone who's going to
1:13
Speaker 2: work his way through technology companies. What was the original idea?
1:17
Speaker 3: So this goes way back, and the funny thing is
1:19
Speaker 3: even to high school. My mother bought an Apple to
1:24
Speaker 3: computer a million years ago to help her run a
1:26
Speaker 3: small business that she was running, and I sort of
1:29
Speaker 3: got into technology that way. I will admit. Part of it,
1:31
Speaker 3: I think is I had terrible handwriting, and so when
1:33
Speaker 3: I used the computer to you know, to print out stuff,
1:37
Speaker 3: you know from my high school, you know, English teacher,
1:39
Speaker 3: she could finally read what I was what I was writing.
1:41
Speaker 3: Probably gave me a better grade as a result. But
1:44
Speaker 3: so I sort of got into computers a little bit
1:45
Speaker 3: as a kid, ended up at Princeton writing my thesis
1:49
Speaker 3: on a computer again, and this is a million years
1:51
Speaker 3: ago when that wasn't normal. And so I found myself
1:54
Speaker 3: just interested in technology. And after you know, going to
1:57
Speaker 3: a consulting firm for a couple of years to learn
1:59
Speaker 3: about the business world and going to business school, I
2:02
Speaker 3: found myself as an intern at Microsoft, you know again
2:06
Speaker 3: back in nineteen ninety it was and sort of the
2:08
Speaker 3: rest is history.
2:09
Speaker 2: So Harvard Business School, we know what that typically leads to.
2:14
Speaker 2: I'm curious, how did the humanity's background help shape the
2:18
Speaker 2: way you think about business, about leadership, about working with people.
2:23
Speaker 2: What was the upside of humanities for you?
2:25
Speaker 3: You know what. I really appreciate the question, and I
2:28
Speaker 3: actually think it's it's more relevant now than ever. Look,
2:31
Speaker 3: the humanities is all about, you know, curiosity and understanding
2:34
Speaker 3: and maybe even empathy. Right, If you read a book,
2:37
Speaker 3: you have to understand you're exposed to different people's perspectives. Right,
2:41
Speaker 3: It's almost like you're crawling inside someone else's brain, particularly
2:44
Speaker 3: if you're reading fiction. And so to a certain extent,
2:47
Speaker 3: I think it's you know, nothing could prepare you better.
2:50
Speaker 3: Now you have to have an analytical brain. You might
2:52
Speaker 3: also have to be good with numbers in business. But
2:55
Speaker 3: the humanities world, I sort of think of it as
2:57
Speaker 3: this kind of magic. You know, vaccination against irrelevant because
3:00
Speaker 3: that curiosity is always going to matter, and it certainly
3:02
Speaker 3: helped me through my whole, my whole career.
3:05
Speaker 2: I love that answer. So you intern at Microsoft, you
3:10
Speaker 2: end up beginning your career there where you helped to
3:12
Speaker 2: launch their first database product, Access. Tell us about that.
3:16
Speaker 3: Sure, So Microsoft was, you know, famously ahead in or
3:22
Speaker 3: at least getting ahead, let's say, with the launch of
3:24
Speaker 3: Windows in word processing, in spreadsheets, of course, And again
3:28
Speaker 3: this is sort of ancient business history, but it's it's
3:30
Speaker 3: sort of a fascinating tale of a technology shift completely
3:34
Speaker 3: reshuffling the deck away from old companies like word Perfect
3:37
Speaker 3: and Lotus one, two three. We don't even know who
3:39
Speaker 3: those companies are anymore because Microsoft took over that space,
3:42
Speaker 3: and it's really because Windows shifted the platform. We might
3:44
Speaker 3: come back to that idea, you know when we talk
3:46
Speaker 3: about autonomous cars, but they didn't have a database, and
3:49
Speaker 3: that was sort of the third big product that a
3:50
Speaker 3: lot of companies wanted. I helped develop it. I was
3:54
Speaker 3: the first product manager on them. And really all that
3:57
Speaker 3: meant is my job was to go around and watch
3:59
Speaker 3: other people you use competing products at the time paradox
4:02
Speaker 3: debase again, products that don't even exist anymore, and try
4:05
Speaker 3: to pay attention to what they were doing with these products,
4:07
Speaker 3: how were they using them, where were they stumbling? And
4:09
Speaker 3: that was my first role, and in a sense it
4:11
Speaker 3: has been, you know, one of the most important jobs
4:13
Speaker 3: I ever had, because it's what sort of taught me
4:15
Speaker 3: about understanding what customers want.
4:17
Speaker 2: Huh. Interesting, And then you founded Microsoft Investor and launched
4:21
Speaker 2: that product. Yeah, that is so far afield from databases.
4:27
Speaker 2: What led to that transition?
4:29
Speaker 3: Okay, so you're making me realize that there's a theme
4:31
Speaker 3: of my life. I hadn't really thought of before, which
4:33
Speaker 3: is platform ships. So when I joined Microsoft, Windows was
4:36
Speaker 3: the product, right, this was the thing that was going
4:38
Speaker 3: to run you know, software, And of course it become
4:41
Speaker 3: incredibly successful. But then, you know, nineteen ninety five, ninety
4:44
Speaker 3: ninety six, ninety ninety seven comes around, the Internet is here,
4:47
Speaker 3: and Microsoft, like any tech company at the time, had
4:49
Speaker 3: to figure out its Internet strategy, and it decided that
4:53
Speaker 3: there were a couple of key products that needed to
4:56
Speaker 3: be available on the World Wide Web. Again, I think
5:00
Speaker 3: the Information super Highway literally was the way people talked
5:03
Speaker 3: about it is crazy, so cliche, so cliche, but there
5:06
Speaker 3: it was no one even knew how to talk about
5:08
Speaker 3: the thing. So anyway, and I had been, you know,
5:11
Speaker 3: a little bit interested in personal finance. U you know,
5:14
Speaker 3: a couple of star threads came together. Microsoft tried to
5:16
Speaker 3: buy a company called into It so very successful, was unsuccessful,
5:19
Speaker 3: blocked because of the Justice Department. And so we decided
5:21
Speaker 3: we need personal finance. And I said, you know what,
5:23
Speaker 3: why don't we develop this product a personal finance product
5:26
Speaker 3: for the Internet, not as package software.
5:29
Speaker 2: Huh really really interesting. And then staying with the theme
5:34
Speaker 2: of platform shifts. Employee number thirty seven at Amazon that
5:39
Speaker 2: is just an absolutely bonker's number. Yeah, senior VP of
5:44
Speaker 2: US Retail. When you joined the firm, revenue was fifteen
5:49
Speaker 2: million dollars. You helped ramp that up to four billion dollars.
5:53
Speaker 2: So that's right obvious question. When you join Amazon, did
5:56
Speaker 2: you have any idea with the behemoth it would become
6:00
Speaker 2: or was it still hey, we're hanging on our fingernails
6:03
Speaker 2: and maybe this will work out, or anywhere in between.
6:06
Speaker 3: It was sort of both at the same time, you know,
6:09
Speaker 3: and it was almost always going to be one or
6:11
Speaker 3: the other. Right, So I remember, I'll tell you a
6:15
Speaker 3: little of the story of how I got there. So
6:17
Speaker 3: my phone ring one day at Microsoft and it's this guy, Jeff,
6:21
Speaker 3: and he's doing a reference check of a woman who
6:24
Speaker 3: used to work actually at Microsoft in the personal finance group.
6:26
Speaker 3: So it all kind of connects, and so we get
6:29
Speaker 3: to talking and one thing leads to another, and he's
6:31
Speaker 3: very precise about the way he's asking questions. Remember, the
6:33
Speaker 3: company had maybe ten people at this point, was very
6:36
Speaker 3: very small, very very small. But he had a big vision.
6:40
Speaker 3: You know, he was going to be Earth's biggest bookstore.
6:42
Speaker 2: Wait, hold on, let me just stop you. When you
6:44
Speaker 2: say this guy Jeff. Yeah, this isn't just some guy
6:49
Speaker 2: in HR Jeff Bezos is calling you to do a
6:52
Speaker 2: background check on a potential hire.
6:55
Speaker 3: That's exactly it. That's exactly so go on, Jeff. So
6:58
Speaker 3: Jeff calls me. At the time, he was just this
7:01
Speaker 3: guy Jeff.
7:02
Speaker 2: Hey, David, some guy named Jeff on the phone, pretty
7:05
Speaker 2: much back background check for an employee. So what was
7:08
Speaker 2: that conversation?
7:09
Speaker 3: Like, well, so he had, you know, to take you
7:12
Speaker 3: back then, but in a sense, it's still the Jeff
7:15
Speaker 3: you know today. He had a plan and it was
7:18
Speaker 3: a twenty five question plan for the phone call, right
7:20
Speaker 3: and to this day, the question I remember the most
7:24
Speaker 3: clearly was it's very clear you were a fan of
7:27
Speaker 3: this person. Give me an example of a job that
7:31
Speaker 3: she wouldn't be a good fit for. And it was
7:33
Speaker 3: such a clever question because inevitably in background checks you're
7:36
Speaker 3: trying to say nice things about the person. But this
7:39
Speaker 3: is an invitation to say, well, you know, maybe you know,
7:43
Speaker 3: a very detail oriented job might not be the best fit,
7:45
Speaker 3: or maybe something that you know manages a lot of people,
7:48
Speaker 3: because she has something like this that would give people
7:50
Speaker 3: a little sense or give him some sense of where
7:52
Speaker 3: an area to probe mort is. Anyway, at the end
7:54
Speaker 3: of that conversation, literally forty five minutes into it, he says,
7:57
Speaker 3: you know, you sound like a good guy. Said, oh,
7:58
Speaker 3: you sound like a good guy as well. And so
8:00
Speaker 3: a couple of days later, he and McKenzie his wife
8:02
Speaker 3: at the time, and Jen my wife currently still and
8:05
Speaker 3: I went out to dinner, got to know each other,
8:06
Speaker 3: and over the course of the next year, got to
8:08
Speaker 3: know each other a little bit better. And then I
8:10
Speaker 3: ended up applying for this job to help to help
8:13
Speaker 3: Amazon grow beyond just books. That was really the job.
8:16
Speaker 2: And how'd that work out? Worked out?
8:19
Speaker 3: Pretty well? Yeah, it worked out pret but you know what,
8:21
Speaker 3: it wasn't obvious at the time. So, you know, he
8:23
Speaker 3: during the interview, I remember, he said, look, if we
8:26
Speaker 3: play our cards right, and as you say, it was
8:27
Speaker 3: a fifteen point six million dollar store at the time,
8:30
Speaker 3: so tiny, tiny little thing. He said, if we play
8:32
Speaker 3: our cards right, maybe by the year two thousand, this
8:35
Speaker 3: is a nineteen ninety six, we might be a billion
8:38
Speaker 3: dollar company. Maybe maybe, but a lot has to go
8:41
Speaker 3: right in order for that to happen. Obviously, we got there,
8:43
Speaker 3: and then we got you know, far beyond. But there
8:45
Speaker 3: were all kinds of people who, frankly were sort of
8:47
Speaker 3: rooting for our failure. You know, competitors, you know, Barnes
8:50
Speaker 3: and Noble at the time, a bunch of Wall Street
8:52
Speaker 3: analysts who thought this was just you know, some sort
8:54
Speaker 3: of crazy ponzis. Can know where it was.
8:56
Speaker 2: Buy anything on the Internet. What are you guys doing?
8:58
Speaker 2: This is a dumb idea.
9:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally, totally well. And not only that, but also
9:04
Speaker 3: the costs are going to be huge. You're gonna have
9:05
Speaker 3: to build out of the distribution centers and warehouses sometime.
9:08
Speaker 3: You know, this cost of it. The internet is unproven technology,
9:11
Speaker 3: all sorts of things.
9:12
Speaker 2: No one's giving you a credit card over the correct
9:16
Speaker 2: I remember getting from my college roommate, which was decades
9:19
Speaker 2: before Amazon formed an Amazon Gift certificate. And the first
9:25
Speaker 2: time you go through the experience of buying something, it's like, oh,
9:30
Speaker 2: this makes perfect sense. I don't have to I don't
9:33
Speaker 2: have to go to the store, I don't have to
9:35
Speaker 2: waste time. This is great. I mean, there's certain stores
9:38
Speaker 2: are fun to browse, but like the mundane sort of stuff.
9:42
Speaker 2: He was just decades ahead of everybody else.
9:46
Speaker 3: In that way, and in realizing that it's really the
9:50
Speaker 3: customer experience and customer obsession that's going to drive your
9:53
Speaker 3: continued growth because all those things are true. And as
9:57
Speaker 3: he would say famously, you're always one click away from competition.
10:00
Speaker 3: So that's the downside, right is how do you continue
10:02
Speaker 3: to compete in a world where theoretically someone else could
10:04
Speaker 3: start having someone else could start, and someone else can start,
10:06
Speaker 3: and you don't have any geographic advantage over them.
10:09
Speaker 2: And they kind of owned that space for the longest time. Really,
10:13
Speaker 2: it was only the pandemic where people were out of
10:16
Speaker 2: things that it forced everybody all right, now I have
10:19
Speaker 2: a Target account, Now I have a Walmart account, Now
10:22
Speaker 2: anybody else who could deliver. And what's been surprising is
10:26
Speaker 2: how they've just powered right through hasn't really slowed them
10:29
Speaker 2: down very much.
10:29
Speaker 3: That's right, that's right.
10:31
Speaker 2: So you go from Amazon, you kind of tap out.
10:35
Speaker 2: A couple of years later, you teach at the University
10:38
Speaker 2: of Washington's Business School. You were elected Professor of the
10:42
Speaker 2: Year in two thousand and four, and then you spend
10:45
Speaker 2: thirteen years running World Reader, a nonprofit dedicated to helping
10:49
Speaker 2: children learn to read and underserved communities. This is yet another.
10:56
Speaker 3: Chef, right, yep?
10:57
Speaker 2: What was it? Just like, all right, I have my
11:00
Speaker 2: Microsoft stock, came in Amazon recovered from the dot com implosion.
11:05
Speaker 2: That's doing fine. I could just do something for fun.
11:07
Speaker 2: What was the what was the shift? Thinking behind the shift?
11:11
Speaker 3: You know, you know, it wasn't that. Actually it was
11:13
Speaker 3: sort of a different thing. So you asked me, you know,
11:15
Speaker 3: a couple of questions ago, what my career idea was
11:17
Speaker 3: as a kid. Honestly, if I had had to guess,
11:20
Speaker 3: I might have said, you know, I'll be maybe I'll
11:23
Speaker 3: be an English professor someday or something like that. Like
11:25
Speaker 3: I'd wanted to teach and I loved reading, and so
11:28
Speaker 3: this was a way for me to bring together a
11:30
Speaker 3: couple of different things in my life. Obviously books and
11:32
Speaker 3: literacy because that was sort of the passion and focus,
11:34
Speaker 3: but also technology. The thesis of the company was kids
11:38
Speaker 3: are going to read using tech, and that's how it's
11:41
Speaker 3: gotten to be, you know, millions and millions of kids
11:43
Speaker 3: later are all reading on the platform. It started out
11:45
Speaker 3: with Kindle, a product I know something about because of
11:47
Speaker 3: my Amazon days, and brought you know, sort of technology
11:51
Speaker 3: and reading together. So that was really the focus.
11:53
Speaker 2: And then what ultimately ended up bringing you back into
11:57
Speaker 2: the corporate sector after you know, a long time. I'm
12:00
Speaker 2: in academia and nonprofits.
12:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, so so here it was. You know, one day
12:06
Speaker 3: my phone rings and a guy named Sean agerwal Is
12:09
Speaker 3: on the other end of the line. Sean and I
12:12
Speaker 3: had worked together many years before, back at Amazon. He
12:14
Speaker 3: was my kind of finance partner. He had subsequently become
12:17
Speaker 3: an investor and then the board chair of Lyft, and
12:20
Speaker 3: he and John and Logan the co founders of Lyft.
12:23
Speaker 3: Really we're looking to do something quite unusual at the
12:25
Speaker 3: board level, which was bring someone in who is a
12:28
Speaker 3: real customer advocate. So boards, you know, for those of
12:31
Speaker 3: you who haven't gotten a chance to be exposed to
12:33
Speaker 3: a board, you know, they typically are made up by
12:37
Speaker 3: you know, kind of finance people, you know, business strategists,
12:41
Speaker 3: you know, maybe you know, maybe people who have built
12:43
Speaker 3: companies before. But often by the time you get to
12:45
Speaker 3: sort of the board level of a company, you're pretty
12:47
Speaker 3: far away from the customer. And John and though and
12:49
Speaker 3: again to their credit, said you know what, we need
12:51
Speaker 3: some more customer advocacy right from the top. We need
12:53
Speaker 3: some more support frankly for that kind of vibe as
12:56
Speaker 3: well as someone who'd helped scale a company like Amazon.
12:59
Speaker 3: You know, I also learned a lot about competing at
13:01
Speaker 3: Microsoft and even at world Reader. You know World Reader nonprofits.
13:04
Speaker 3: People sort of look at them and think they're not
13:06
Speaker 3: very much. But it's very, very difficult to actually scale
13:08
Speaker 3: a nonprofit because the funding is always tightened so forth.
13:11
Speaker 3: So I think they were looking for someone with a
13:12
Speaker 3: combination of scaling experience but also real customer advocacy, and
13:16
Speaker 3: so I joined the board as a result.
13:18
Speaker 2: And then eventually a couple of years later, you get
13:22
Speaker 2: offered the role of CEO. What was that, like? How
13:25
Speaker 2: did that come about? Frequently board members, or I should
13:29
Speaker 2: say infrequently board members become CEO. Is that doesn't sound usual?
13:35
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, so finnally enough. And this one, I'll sort
13:38
Speaker 3: of slow the story down again or this time because
13:41
Speaker 3: it actually was Sean Agerwall again. So same board chair,
13:44
Speaker 3: he calls me up. It happened to be on Valentine's Day,
13:47
Speaker 3: of all day, so I remember the day in twenty
13:49
Speaker 3: twenty three. And then the backstory here is John and
13:53
Speaker 3: Logan again, the co founders have left. This is what
13:55
Speaker 3: they had been doing for fifteen years, NonStop. It was
13:57
Speaker 3: literally their first job out of college founding this whole
14:00
Speaker 3: new company. You know, was standing the onslaugh on an
14:02
Speaker 3: incredibly competitive environment, an incredibly operationally complex environment, twenty four
14:06
Speaker 3: hours a day, seven days a week, for a year.
14:08
Speaker 3: After a year, so at the end of the prior year,
14:11
Speaker 3: they said to the board, you know what, it's time
14:12
Speaker 3: for us to move on. We've sort of done what
14:14
Speaker 3: we need to do. And frankly, the company is going
14:16
Speaker 3: through a bit of a tough time financially and operationally,
14:19
Speaker 3: and I think they realized that they were sort of
14:20
Speaker 3: getting to the end of what they could really where
14:22
Speaker 3: they could really help. So the board did what it does.
14:25
Speaker 3: You know, boards do this. They form a special committee,
14:27
Speaker 3: they start to recruit look around. I wasn't on the committee.
14:30
Speaker 3: I was sort of watching, you know, from from a side.
14:33
Speaker 3: But as they say, then my phone rings one day
14:35
Speaker 3: and a Shawan on the phone with John and Logan
14:37
Speaker 3: and they basically say, you know what we've been thinking
14:39
Speaker 3: and as we've been looking at external people, frankly, we
14:43
Speaker 3: think we might have the right person to at least
14:45
Speaker 3: apply for the job. Let's be clear, apply for the
14:47
Speaker 3: job sitting right here, you know, on the board and
14:51
Speaker 3: I said, what are you talking about? They said, we're
14:52
Speaker 3: talking about you, David. I said, absolutely not really. Your
14:56
Speaker 3: frust reaction was, hey, thanks, but no things. Zero percent chance,
14:59
Speaker 3: zero percent. Wow. I literally said, you should hang up
15:02
Speaker 3: the phone right now because you got better things to do.
15:05
Speaker 3: There's just no way. But you know what, as the
15:07
Speaker 3: day wore on, I found myself saying, you know what,
15:09
Speaker 3: this is a really interesting opportunity. How many people, you know,
15:13
Speaker 3: get this opportunity to run it? And I never run
15:15
Speaker 3: a public company before. I mean, my god. But at
15:17
Speaker 3: the same time, I had learned some things at Microsoft,
15:19
Speaker 3: I learned some things at Amazon, I learned some things
15:21
Speaker 3: at World Reader. I learned some things in various different
15:23
Speaker 3: ways of my life. And I had a lot of
15:25
Speaker 3: passion for the company having been on the board, and
15:27
Speaker 3: also a real understanding that as a board member you
15:30
Speaker 3: really only have so much power and influence. It's fairly limited.
15:33
Speaker 3: But as a CEO it's a different thing. So anyway,
15:35
Speaker 3: one thing led to another. I applied and went through
15:38
Speaker 3: kind of a harrowing experience but ended up getting the job.
15:40
Speaker 2: Huh really really fascinating. So we mentioned earlier you joined
15:44
Speaker 2: the board in twenty twenty one, you're named CEO in
15:47
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three. When you joined the company, they were
15:53
Speaker 2: still reeling from the pandemic and all the factors that
15:57
Speaker 2: that drove the company was losing not only losing money
16:01
Speaker 2: but also losing market share to their big competitor Uber.
16:05
Speaker 2: What did you find when you looked under the hood?
16:07
Speaker 2: What surprises were awaiting you as CEO?
16:11
Speaker 3: So the first maybe meta observation, and you're teeing it up,
16:15
Speaker 3: is gosh, you're on the board of a company for
16:17
Speaker 3: a couple of years. You kind of think you know
16:19
Speaker 3: the company. You don't really know the company. I mean,
16:21
Speaker 3: if any board members are out there, you think you do,
16:24
Speaker 3: and you probably have a pretty good sense of certain things.
16:27
Speaker 3: But you get in there and everything is ten times
16:28
Speaker 3: you know, bigger, worse, better, all the things than you realize. Okay,
16:32
Speaker 3: what did I see? I saw a company that had
16:35
Speaker 3: some real innovative spirit at its core. Remember Lyft was
16:38
Speaker 3: actually the one that really revolutionized ride share. So the
16:41
Speaker 3: other guys they came up with a sort of black
16:43
Speaker 3: car concept and you know, black car on an app,
16:45
Speaker 3: but it was really Lyft that said, you know what
16:47
Speaker 3: it can be anyone with a prius, you know what
16:48
Speaker 3: I mean, anyone can pick up. So this company had
16:50
Speaker 3: innovated from the early days, but honestly, it's innovated spirit
16:54
Speaker 3: had maybe gotten a little the best of it, tried
16:56
Speaker 3: few too many things, spread a little too thin, losing share,
17:00
Speaker 3: and its core business, as you say, not priced well,
17:04
Speaker 3: you know, not paying competitively. So a number of different
17:06
Speaker 3: just basic issues. So what do we do the first
17:09
Speaker 3: frankly couple of weeks. Well, first thing is lower prices.
17:12
Speaker 3: We were just priced too high. That'd be really yeah,
17:14
Speaker 3: I can't operate.
17:15
Speaker 2: And did you do a big instead of announcements around that,
17:17
Speaker 2: because twenty twenty three is still kind of a blur
17:20
Speaker 2: to me.
17:20
Speaker 3: So we didn't. And here's why. In order to withstand
17:25
Speaker 3: a price drop, because it's a very competitive business and
17:28
Speaker 3: you're doing a lot of volume, so if you drop
17:31
Speaker 3: your price, you've got to make sure you can pay
17:32
Speaker 3: for We had to do some other things as well.
17:34
Speaker 3: So for example, we had to reduce our cost significantly,
17:38
Speaker 3: so we laid off about it's about a third of
17:41
Speaker 3: the company and yeah, twenty six percent actually of the company,
17:44
Speaker 3: and I think about a three hundred and thirty million
17:46
Speaker 3: dollars of savings. That was a very very significant shock
17:49
Speaker 3: to the company. By the way, we also had to
17:51
Speaker 3: raise driver pay, so we had a lot to pay for.
17:53
Speaker 2: We also used simultaneously lowing prices for lift and yet
17:58
Speaker 2: bumping up prices for drug That's right. That sounds like
18:01
Speaker 2: that's going to cause us a big problem for profits.
18:04
Speaker 3: So that's exactly right. So in order to pay for it,
18:06
Speaker 3: you have to figure out how to pay for it.
18:07
Speaker 3: And frankly, our cost structure was just sort of out
18:09
Speaker 3: of control. We were doing too many things, We had
18:10
Speaker 3: too many people, and by the way, those people were
18:14
Speaker 3: all working remotely, which makes it quite difficult to really
18:17
Speaker 3: kind of change the culture to a customer obsessed culture,
18:20
Speaker 3: which was my other big thing. So and by the way,
18:23
Speaker 3: we were also overpaying in stock based compensation, which was
18:26
Speaker 3: bugging investors. So in the first couple of months, you know,
18:29
Speaker 3: it wasn't really the time to be bragging. It was
18:31
Speaker 3: the time, frankly, to be saying, Okay, we've got some
18:33
Speaker 3: things to fix, and let's really focus on that. So first,
18:38
Speaker 3: you know, call it you know, thirty sixty ninety days.
18:40
Speaker 3: It's fixing some basics, but also reorienting the company back
18:44
Speaker 3: towards its customer obsessed roots. And I'm still very I
18:48
Speaker 3: guess i'd say proud of this. The second the first
18:50
Speaker 3: meeting I had of the day was literally getting my
18:52
Speaker 3: computer or my laptop, and a second meeting ten o'clock
18:54
Speaker 3: in the morning Monday morning, I said, let's start talking
18:57
Speaker 3: about a product that's now called Women plus Connect, trying
18:59
Speaker 3: to get drivers and women riders.
19:01
Speaker 2: Such a great idea, especially given the mayhem across the
19:05
Speaker 2: street from it.
19:05
Speaker 3: I appreciate your saying that, and it's it really matters
19:09
Speaker 3: and so.
19:10
Speaker 2: And this is something the company and I'm sorry to interrupt, please,
19:13
Speaker 2: it's very visible on the app, like that choice, which
19:17
Speaker 2: shows some thoughtfulness. And oh there's this problem. How about
19:22
Speaker 2: we have send a woman drive for you and you
19:23
Speaker 2: don't have to worry about what you're hearing about elsewhere exactly.
19:27
Speaker 2: It just makes so much sense.
19:28
Speaker 3: So I really appreciate you saying that. It was an
19:30
Speaker 3: easy decision. From that sense, all you have to do
19:33
Speaker 3: is talk to ten women and say we you know,
19:34
Speaker 3: what do you think? And they say wow, gosh, particularly
19:36
Speaker 3: late at night, maybe in a new city, maybe after
19:38
Speaker 3: a long day. It's just not my jam to be
19:40
Speaker 3: talking to a dude sor ry dudes, you know like that.
19:43
Speaker 3: But but but sometimes the easiest ideas are also the
19:47
Speaker 3: most complicated. There are all sorts of potential legal issues,
19:49
Speaker 3: all sorts of operational issues. They're even to a certain
19:52
Speaker 3: extent cultural issues of like is this going to be okay?
19:54
Speaker 3: But I was like, you know what, I think it's
19:55
Speaker 3: going to be okay. I think it's going to be okay.
19:57
Speaker 3: So that was an early decision we made. It came
20:00
Speaker 3: that was in April twenty twenty three. We launched that
20:03
Speaker 3: later that year, and it was really exciting for the
20:05
Speaker 3: company to say, you know what, we can do big
20:06
Speaker 3: things again and we can start to innovate again on
20:09
Speaker 3: behalf of customers. Huh.
20:11
Speaker 2: Kind of fascinating. Coming up, we continue our conversation with
20:14
Speaker 2: David Rischer, CEO of Lyft, discussing the future of ride
20:20
Speaker 2: share technology. I'm Barry rid Holts. You're listening to Masters
20:23
Speaker 2: in Business on Bloomberg Radio. I'm Barry Ridolts. You're listening
20:36
Speaker 2: to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest
20:40
Speaker 2: this week is David Rischer. He is the CEO of Lyft,
20:43
Speaker 2: one of North America's largest and fastest growing ride sharing network.
20:48
Speaker 2: So over the next year or so, you return lift
20:51
Speaker 2: to profitability. On the most recent reported quarter, first quarter
20:54
Speaker 2: twenty twenty six, over twenty eight million active riders, nearly
20:58
Speaker 2: five billion in gross books, one point seven billion in revenues,
21:02
Speaker 2: just about one hundred and thirty three million in eb
21:05
Speaker 2: of the profits. So the combination of restructuring the company,
21:10
Speaker 2: attracting higher paying more drivers, and discounting prices for riders
21:19
Speaker 2: put you on the right foot. How do you build
21:22
Speaker 2: on that? What's the next step to maintain that momentum?
21:25
Speaker 3: Well, so, in some sense nothing changes. In some sense
21:28
Speaker 3: everything changes. Okay, So what doesn't change customer obsession is
21:30
Speaker 3: still driving profitable growth. That's just going to be a
21:32
Speaker 3: theme I just go with forever. I you know, maybe
21:35
Speaker 3: I've drank a lot of the Jeff Bezos cool egg,
21:36
Speaker 3: but it seems to be working out pretty well. So
21:39
Speaker 3: so one other financial metric that has been interesting to
21:43
Speaker 3: watch is when I joined, we were losing about three
21:45
Speaker 3: hundred million dollars, consuming abot three hundred million dollars in
21:48
Speaker 3: cash over twelve months. We're now jettering about one point
21:51
Speaker 3: one billion dollars in cash over the over twelve months. Okay,
21:54
Speaker 3: so what that allows us to do is invest in
21:56
Speaker 3: the future. What does that look like. Certainly it looks
21:59
Speaker 3: like internationalks mansion. So that's been one thing we've been
22:01
Speaker 3: at for about the last year, which is, you know,
22:04
Speaker 3: Lift was sort of almost say, caught a little bit
22:08
Speaker 3: in sort of a US centric view of the world,
22:11
Speaker 3: and it just doesn't make sense. Once you have a
22:13
Speaker 3: product that scales really well and it's sort of a
22:16
Speaker 3: fixed cost based type of thing, you really want it
22:19
Speaker 3: to be around as much the world as possible so
22:21
Speaker 3: you can run as much volume through that platform as possible.
22:24
Speaker 3: So we bought a company called free Now last year.
22:26
Speaker 3: It's a European taxi aggregator free Now Free Now Yeah, yeah.
22:30
Speaker 3: It is Europe's biggest taxi aggregator, which means that if
22:33
Speaker 3: you want a taxi and you're in a place like
22:35
Speaker 3: Barcelona or London or pick your favorite city. They operated
22:39
Speaker 3: nine countries, the free nowp is going to be your
22:41
Speaker 3: best way to get it. That gives us a great
22:43
Speaker 3: platform for expansion, even when it comes to autonous vehicles.
22:46
Speaker 3: We'll come back to that, I'm sure you know. In
22:48
Speaker 3: a couple of seconds. So that's one direction of expansion.
22:50
Speaker 3: You think of that as out overseas. Another dimension is
22:54
Speaker 3: up up market. You just kind of refer to this
22:56
Speaker 3: soft again. It's sort of started. Its tradition was as
23:00
Speaker 3: kind of a relatively inexpensive, very available ride share option,
23:05
Speaker 3: but it wasn't as strong and kind of the black,
23:07
Speaker 3: you know, kind of luxury segment. We bought a company
23:09
Speaker 3: called TBR last year. TBR is a high end chow
23:12
Speaker 3: for a company. We also have a very very good
23:14
Speaker 3: lift black product. In fact, if you're listening to this,
23:17
Speaker 3: I promise, if you haven't tried it, give it a try.
23:19
Speaker 3: I think you'll like. It's actually our highest rated product.
23:21
Speaker 3: You know, a nice black car comes and pick you up,
23:23
Speaker 3: picks you up. So that's another area of expansion for
23:26
Speaker 3: us because that gives us frankly more margin to play with,
23:29
Speaker 3: but it also allows us to talk to a segment
23:31
Speaker 3: that we haven't talked to very much. And then of
23:33
Speaker 3: course autonomous vehicles. So these are all nice uses of cash.
23:38
Speaker 3: Once you're generating cash, you can start to either acquire
23:40
Speaker 3: companies or you can invest in things that then grow,
23:42
Speaker 3: you know, build sort of the next chapter of growth.
23:44
Speaker 2: So I appreciate you mentioning the various tiers. There's this
23:50
Speaker 2: tendency to think of the consumer, especially the American consumer,
23:54
Speaker 2: as one thing, but we both know that's not true.
23:57
Speaker 2: You get to crunch a whole lot of data. What
23:59
Speaker 2: do you seeing in terms of income, geography various times
24:04
Speaker 2: a day? Like what do the metrics tell you about
24:07
Speaker 2: the different flavors of consumers using lift?
24:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is such an interesting issue and it's not
24:15
Speaker 3: something I really appreciated. We're going to do about a
24:17
Speaker 3: billion rides this year, and so to your point, with
24:19
Speaker 3: a billion rides, you kind of get a sense of
24:22
Speaker 3: how people are spending their time during the day. So
24:24
Speaker 3: I'll tell you two things that are growing quite quickly.
24:26
Speaker 3: One is party time. And it might be funny to
24:29
Speaker 3: start there, but party time, so I actually say what
24:31
Speaker 3: that means. What that means is a Thursday night for
24:34
Speaker 3: a really Friday night and Saturday night. Call it nine
24:36
Speaker 3: to midnight. And it is really interesting. I think this
24:40
Speaker 3: not just post COVID, but I think frankly, a little
24:43
Speaker 3: bit of app fatigue is driving people to say, you
24:46
Speaker 3: know what, let's actually get out and spend our lives
24:48
Speaker 3: out in the real world instead of spending all of
24:50
Speaker 3: our lives on apps. So I think that's actually I'm
24:53
Speaker 3: quite comforted by that, and it's actually a big part
24:55
Speaker 3: of our sort of overall purpose is to serve and
24:57
Speaker 3: connect people. A lot of passionate about that. At the
24:59
Speaker 3: same time, commute well, and I do think this is
25:01
Speaker 3: a certain post COVID thing where people were sort of thinking,
25:03
Speaker 3: maybe we'll just be in our houses the rest of
25:05
Speaker 3: our life working remotely. It turns out a lot of
25:07
Speaker 3: companies and a lot of people are saying, I want
25:09
Speaker 3: to get back to work. And I think these things
25:11
Speaker 3: are somewhat connected. Sorry for sounding a little bit like
25:13
Speaker 3: a social psychologist a little bit, but I mean, gosh,
25:16
Speaker 3: I'm met my wife at Microsoft. You know, a lot
25:18
Speaker 3: of people have really significant life events that happen at
25:22
Speaker 3: work that are not just work right, and so I
25:24
Speaker 3: think there's a little bit So anyway, when I look
25:26
Speaker 3: at things like commute hours, and then travel continues to
25:28
Speaker 3: be really strong as well, I think, and this is look, I'm,
25:31
Speaker 3: you know, million years old now. When I was a kid,
25:33
Speaker 3: the idea of you know, getting on a plane and
25:35
Speaker 3: going overseas was I mean, I might as well say
25:37
Speaker 3: you'll go to the moon. Now, you know, twenty and
25:39
Speaker 3: thirty year olds, they're like, yeah, I'll sort of take
25:41
Speaker 3: a trip overseas, or I'll go to you know whatever,
25:43
Speaker 3: Nashville for the weekend or something. So anyway, I think
25:46
Speaker 3: these are pretty big, you know, real societal shifts as
25:48
Speaker 3: people want to kind of be out in the real world.
25:51
Speaker 2: I'm kind of fascinated by the idea of party time
25:53
Speaker 2: because there's always pre drive apps is There's was always
25:58
Speaker 2: the question I've had two I guess I'm driving tonight,
26:03
Speaker 2: so I stop here. But if you're out on party
26:06
Speaker 2: night and you know you're taking a car home, you're
26:09
Speaker 2: not afraid about having a second with their drink. You
26:11
Speaker 2: can kind of relax a little bit. Getting pulled over
26:15
Speaker 2: is not a problem. If you're in somebody else's lift.
26:19
Speaker 3: It's exactly right. It's so again if you zoom out,
26:22
Speaker 3: so you know, Wall Street looks at companies like ours
26:24
Speaker 3: quarter by quarter and it sort of drives you crazy.
26:27
Speaker 3: But if you zoom way way out, you know, let's
26:31
Speaker 3: look at that from a different dimension. Now, average car
26:35
Speaker 3: right now, fifty thousand bucks a year. Okay, average monthly
26:37
Speaker 3: payment eight hundred bucks insurance, it cost you another couple
26:40
Speaker 3: hundred bucks. Gas might cost you another one hundred bucks
26:43
Speaker 3: or so at least now, and then service will cost
26:45
Speaker 3: a little bit more of that. Okay, So that's plan A.
26:47
Speaker 3: And by the way, if you take on all that responsibility,
26:50
Speaker 3: there's no texting and there's no drinking. I mean that's
26:53
Speaker 3: right now. Plan B. Pay twenty bucks getting a lift,
26:56
Speaker 3: someone else does the driving, text your heart to get content,
26:59
Speaker 3: drink as much as you if that's if that's your
27:01
Speaker 3: job and it's you know, twenty bucks, not you know,
27:03
Speaker 3: eight hundred bucks. Time plus plus plus plus plus. So
27:06
Speaker 3: just just looking out again, you're sort of asking about
27:08
Speaker 3: kind of segments and sort of you know, maybe a
27:10
Speaker 3: little bit the role of technology in society. I think
27:14
Speaker 3: I still think we're actually at the at the beginning
27:15
Speaker 3: stages of a lot of these changes, and we and
27:17
Speaker 3: sometimes again people have been around for a while don't
27:19
Speaker 3: even realize how much the world has changed that way.
27:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, fascinating data point. I saw it was actually a
27:25
Speaker 2: couple of years ago. The number of kids under nineteen
27:28
Speaker 2: that haven't gotten a driver's license is kind of like
27:32
Speaker 2: when I was growing up, you couldn't wait to get
27:35
Speaker 2: your driver's license because that meant freedom. There wasn't an
27:38
Speaker 2: internet with three channels, plus some people started getting cable
27:42
Speaker 2: like it was a very different world back then. That's right,
27:45
Speaker 2: And now it's like, yeah, maybe I'll get a license,
27:47
Speaker 2: maybe I won't. How do you think about marketing to
27:50
Speaker 2: that demographic?
27:51
Speaker 3: Well, so one of the things I learned from Jeff
27:54
Speaker 3: again it was, as you can imagine, quite an influential
27:56
Speaker 3: boss for me, is you know, build your business is
28:00
Speaker 3: on things that don't tend to change, not things that
28:02
Speaker 3: are that are sort of ephemeral. So what are some
28:05
Speaker 3: things that don't that aren't going to change? Okay, again,
28:06
Speaker 3: people are going to want to get out, either to
28:08
Speaker 3: the doctor or to you know, go to a bar.
28:10
Speaker 3: So that's that's a that's a good bet. People are
28:13
Speaker 3: also going to want to save money, and so a
28:15
Speaker 3: lot of our focus right now and you're going to
28:17
Speaker 3: see started a lot of marketing around this is save
28:21
Speaker 3: money check lift. Now. I want to be super clear here,
28:24
Speaker 3: it's not if I look at the competitor that we
28:27
Speaker 3: always have a better price. Of course, we try to,
28:29
Speaker 3: but we don't always you know, sometimes you know, all
28:31
Speaker 3: sorts of things happen. But over time, if you check
28:34
Speaker 3: both apps, you're going to save some money. And certainly
28:36
Speaker 3: compared to buying a car of your own and dealing
28:38
Speaker 3: with all the maintenance, you're going to save some money.
28:39
Speaker 3: So it's not the only thing I want to say,
28:41
Speaker 3: but I actually think it's an important thing to say,
28:43
Speaker 3: particularly in a world of sort of some economic instability.
28:46
Speaker 3: Is this is a good way for you to save
28:47
Speaker 3: some money. And frankly, I'm proud of our cost position.
28:50
Speaker 3: I'm proud of our ability to offer a great price
28:52
Speaker 3: every single day, you know, billion times a year.
28:54
Speaker 2: So let's talk about you versus your competitor. Lift has
28:58
Speaker 2: always been framed as of the underdog to uber. Is
29:02
Speaker 2: this kind of a coke and PEPSI story? What what
29:05
Speaker 2: are the advantages of being number two? Remember the old
29:09
Speaker 2: was it?
29:09
Speaker 3: Avis?
29:10
Speaker 2: We're number two too? We have to try harder.
29:13
Speaker 3: Absolutely, So I like being number two. And it's maybe
29:16
Speaker 3: a funny thing to say, but I do think it
29:18
Speaker 3: means you try harder. You wake up every single morning
29:20
Speaker 3: and you say, I got one job, which is to frankly,
29:22
Speaker 3: you know, do a great job for my riders and
29:23
Speaker 3: my drivers, such that maybe over time I can you know,
29:27
Speaker 3: I can, I can overtake the other guys. You know,
29:30
Speaker 3: I guess the way to think about that is, I
29:33
Speaker 3: think the right number of ride share companies in most
29:37
Speaker 3: markets is probably two. You know, it's a it's a
29:40
Speaker 3: capital intensive business, not because you own the cars, but
29:43
Speaker 3: because you own a lot of server capacity, and you know,
29:45
Speaker 3: it's quite complicated to figure out you know, pick up
29:48
Speaker 3: and drop off locations and customer service. People leave their
29:52
Speaker 3: phones in the car about eight thousand times a week.
29:54
Speaker 3: You know, it's just all sorts.
29:56
Speaker 2: Of right, especially Friday party night.
29:58
Speaker 3: Right there, you go, it all kind of comes together.
30:00
Speaker 3: There is something, There is something to that. And by
30:02
Speaker 3: the way, we have really cool innovation coming out there.
30:04
Speaker 3: We'll bring your phone back to you automatically. But that's
30:06
Speaker 3: a separate story. But anyway, so in a funny way,
30:10
Speaker 3: it's it's it's not a bad thing to be in
30:12
Speaker 3: sort of a two player position because you really only
30:14
Speaker 3: have one competitor, and frankly, if you spend too much
30:17
Speaker 3: of your time thinking about that one competitor, you're probably
30:19
Speaker 3: losing the script. Because guess what, there are a lot
30:22
Speaker 3: of drives rides that people aren't even taking on rideshair
30:24
Speaker 3: at all. Okay, so you know, back to this question.
30:26
Speaker 3: You know we're a customer obsess company, and you know
30:29
Speaker 3: this is going to be the thing. This is why
30:30
Speaker 3: we're growing, you know, mid single mid double digits, you know,
30:33
Speaker 3: fifteen to twenty percent a year on ear. It's why
30:35
Speaker 3: we've become profitab it's why we're spinning off cash. And
30:38
Speaker 3: I think that is a good place to be, particularly
30:40
Speaker 3: when I look at the other guys who I tend
30:42
Speaker 3: to think of, frankly as a more I'll call them
30:44
Speaker 3: sort of financially and maybe maybe technologically driven. Maybe I
30:47
Speaker 3: don't know exactly how they describe themselves, but but I
30:50
Speaker 3: don't get the customer obsessed vibe. Huh.
30:53
Speaker 2: So that's kind of interesting. Let's talk about an example
30:58
Speaker 2: where there's no customer are obsessed vibe. So I use Lyft,
31:02
Speaker 2: I use Uber. It feels like on Uber, the way
31:07
Speaker 2: it measures time is sort of an alternative reality. Hey
31:11
Speaker 2: we'll find a driver in three minutes. It takes nine minutes.
31:14
Speaker 2: Hey the car'll be here, but in eleven minutes, it's
31:17
Speaker 2: there in twenty three minutes.
31:18
Speaker 3: Like they.
31:21
Speaker 2: The app is very full of bs. It consistently lies
31:26
Speaker 2: I'm curious, it's just just a logistical issue that everybody
31:30
Speaker 2: has to deal with. Or and we know a lot
31:33
Speaker 2: about the history and culture of your biggest competitor, is
31:36
Speaker 2: this a culture problem that you know their history has
31:41
Speaker 2: a lot of bad behavior, a lot of let's just
31:45
Speaker 2: call it questionable legality. I wouldn't go so far as
31:49
Speaker 2: to say fraud, but they did a lot of bad things.
31:52
Speaker 2: Does that show up in how the app behaves? Or
31:55
Speaker 2: is this just no Google Maps is tough to work with.
31:58
Speaker 2: This is a logistical challenge.
32:00
Speaker 3: You know it is. It is a logistical challenge. But
32:04
Speaker 3: but I think you're Look, I'm not going to character
32:06
Speaker 3: you did a marvelous job characterizing me.
32:09
Speaker 2: I'm I've got liability for slams.
32:12
Speaker 3: Are fantastic, exactly. So Barry's got a whole second.
32:16
Speaker 2: Hold on, Well, you were a lawyer, right, yes, yes,
32:18
Speaker 2: Oh there we go. But I'm recovered. I understand recovered lawyer.
32:21
Speaker 3: But you did just hear a lawyer very carefully parts
32:23
Speaker 3: of these words. Okay, listen, I won't comment on that.
32:26
Speaker 3: What I will say is we are very focused. For example,
32:28
Speaker 3: you're talking about reliability. Oh my goodness, you talk to
32:31
Speaker 3: my team and they will, they will they roll their
32:34
Speaker 3: eyes maybe would be one way to say it. But
32:36
Speaker 3: the number of times I talk about reliability internally is
32:39
Speaker 3: is high because I am obsessed by saying we're going
32:41
Speaker 3: to make a promise, we're going to meet the promise,
32:43
Speaker 3: And starting in a couple of weeks, we're actually starting
32:44
Speaker 3: to do some more work to actually surface that promise
32:47
Speaker 3: even a little bit more visibly. We do it today
32:50
Speaker 3: for airport pickups. If we're more than ten minutes late
32:52
Speaker 3: for airport pickups, we pay you up to one hundred bucks,
32:54
Speaker 3: no questions asked. Really yep, and we rarely have to
32:57
Speaker 3: do that. Our reliability rate is above ninety nine percent
32:59
Speaker 3: for schedule report pickups. Yeah, so we're very very focused
33:02
Speaker 3: on that. You know, I will say, look at business school,
33:06
Speaker 3: there's a very famous class which has a weird technical name,
33:09
Speaker 3: but it's basically about incentives and behavior. And what's the
33:13
Speaker 3: name of the class, Like I was in physical a
33:16
Speaker 3: long time ago, I think it's called CCMO is the
33:18
Speaker 3: is the and I don't even remember what it stands
33:20
Speaker 3: for anymore. It's probably called something different today, but it
33:24
Speaker 3: really is about how incentives drive behavior, you know, financial
33:28
Speaker 3: incentives and other incentives, and an incentive alignment and so
33:31
Speaker 3: forth and so on. There is an incentive in the
33:37
Speaker 3: the sort of the on demand app world not always
33:41
Speaker 3: to be truthful because if you if you over promise
33:44
Speaker 3: something and then you kind of hook a person in,
33:46
Speaker 3: you know, what are they going to do if they
33:48
Speaker 3: cancel or whatever. It's just going to take them more time.
33:50
Speaker 3: So and that is an evil and pernicious problem that
33:54
Speaker 3: is kind of baked into the model, and we just
33:57
Speaker 3: reject it wholeheartedly. Doesn't mean we never make a mistake,
34:01
Speaker 3: but if your car shows up later then we estimated
34:04
Speaker 3: it's not it's because we made a mistake, and we
34:06
Speaker 3: are trying over and over and over and over again
34:09
Speaker 3: to eliminate those their defects right and then start to
34:11
Speaker 3: guarantee it over time.
34:13
Speaker 2: So you are crunching a lot of numbers, You're seeing
34:16
Speaker 2: a lot of data in real time. I'm kind of
34:19
Speaker 2: fascinated by the concept of what at lift HQ the
34:24
Speaker 2: dashboard looks like, what sort of data you're you're watching constantly?
34:28
Speaker 2: What's the most surprising set of numbers or charts that
34:32
Speaker 2: come across that.
34:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a great question. I mean, yes, So
34:36
Speaker 3: the answer first is just you know, validate. The premise
34:38
Speaker 3: is absolutely you know, an enormous amount of real time data,
34:41
Speaker 3: you know, two to three million rides every single day
34:43
Speaker 3: and now worldwide, so we're very active and in fact,
34:46
Speaker 3: we have whole cool maps that are you know, simulations
34:49
Speaker 3: in such a behavior, particularly around storms and all sorts
34:52
Speaker 3: of crazy steps. Anyway, back to your question, Look, there
34:55
Speaker 3: are a couple of metrics that I think might surprise
34:57
Speaker 3: you that we pay as much attention to as we do,
34:59
Speaker 3: and I'll give you a specific one because it kind
35:01
Speaker 3: of helps tell the story. When I joined, about fifteen
35:04
Speaker 3: percent of the time drivers would cancel on you. Now
35:07
Speaker 3: this is infuriating, really yeah, that high.
35:10
Speaker 2: I mean every now and then on your competitor, i'll
35:13
Speaker 2: see your cancelation, but typically it's Russia hour, someone's stuck
35:17
Speaker 2: on the other side of the city. They're not going
35:19
Speaker 2: to make it, so rather than get that ding, they
35:22
Speaker 2: just cancel and find someone by them.
35:24
Speaker 3: So today's world, it is less than four and a
35:28
Speaker 3: half percent on our app. So we've brought it down
35:30
Speaker 3: by a factor of three. Yeah, exactly less and so
35:34
Speaker 3: oh no, yeah, no, that's it's just slightly around that, Yeah,
35:38
Speaker 3: so how have we done that? Well, it's not just
35:42
Speaker 3: there on the other side, it's maybe we didn't give
35:44
Speaker 3: them enough information right up front, right, so for example,
35:49
Speaker 3: how much they're going to make or what neighborhood are
35:52
Speaker 3: they going to drop you off at? Maybe and by
35:55
Speaker 3: not enough information, maybe we gave it to them, but
35:57
Speaker 3: the font was a little bit too small for them
35:59
Speaker 3: to see it right, or maybe it wasn't on the screen,
36:01
Speaker 3: you know, quite long enough, or maybe we gave you
36:04
Speaker 3: a ride that we didn't know was very very unlikely
36:08
Speaker 3: for you to want because of your past history or
36:11
Speaker 3: whatever it is. So now we spend a lot of
36:13
Speaker 3: energy and we've just been grinding away this year after
36:16
Speaker 3: year after year because it's so infuriating to riders. That's
36:19
Speaker 3: an example of a sort of specific metric that we're
36:21
Speaker 3: looking at, you know, by the day.
36:23
Speaker 2: Huh. Really really interesting. Two kind of related questions to
36:28
Speaker 2: the growth of Lift. Your last quarter's earnings call you said,
36:33
Speaker 2: or maybe it was a previous one, twenty seven percent
36:35
Speaker 2: of North American rides or linked to a corporate partnership Chase, DoorDash, United, Hilton,
36:42
Speaker 2: et cetera. What is that strategy? Is that about customer
36:46
Speaker 2: acquisition margin, like what goes into those sort of big partnerships.
36:50
Speaker 3: Sure, so you know, as you say, we have, we
36:54
Speaker 3: have tens of millions of people who use our service
36:57
Speaker 3: every quarter. It's about fifty million a year. And again
37:01
Speaker 3: this is back to sort of the Amazon philosophy. You've
37:03
Speaker 3: got to compete for those customers, right, You've got to
37:05
Speaker 3: compete because you know they have alternatives and in fact,
37:08
Speaker 3: there's you know, another company out there that some people know. Okay,
37:12
Speaker 3: So one of the ways you compete is you say, gosh,
37:14
Speaker 3: it's not just about the ride, it's about the relationship.
37:17
Speaker 3: And maybe it's a relationship you already have with another company.
37:20
Speaker 3: So you mentioned United Airlines. United Airlines has now been
37:23
Speaker 3: a partner of ours for about the last six months.
37:25
Speaker 3: It's been a wonderful partnership already because the United Airlines
37:28
Speaker 3: Mileage Plus program is incredibly well built out. People are
37:32
Speaker 3: very very loyal to it. What can you do on
37:34
Speaker 3: Lyft You can now earn miles so that you can
37:37
Speaker 3: take a vacation, you.
37:38
Speaker 2: Know, same with Hilton Honors, and same.
37:40
Speaker 3: With Hilton Honors exactly. There We've been a partner for many,
37:42
Speaker 3: many years. The big innovation on the mileage plus side
37:45
Speaker 3: is you can actually spend your miles on lift as well,
37:47
Speaker 3: which almost feels like free rides. Right. It's just like,
37:49
Speaker 3: you know, you get you know, two hundred miles for
37:51
Speaker 3: five hundred miles whatever for taking an airline trip, and
37:53
Speaker 3: you spend you know, a small segment of those on
37:55
Speaker 3: a lift ride. So these partnerships, you sort of asked
37:59
Speaker 3: what their sort of the method behind it is. It's
38:04
Speaker 3: about customer acquisition, for sure, but it's also about customer retention,
38:07
Speaker 3: you know, because if you're in the United ecosystem or
38:10
Speaker 3: on the DoorDash side, or Hilton or Alaska Airlines or
38:14
Speaker 3: built primarily here in New York City and other cities
38:16
Speaker 3: where they are active, and you want to either earn
38:18
Speaker 3: or burn miles or points, I'm more a great place
38:21
Speaker 3: to do that.
38:22
Speaker 2: Huh. Really really kind of interesting. I read an article
38:26
Speaker 2: from Reuter's Smaller US markets and college towns have been
38:30
Speaker 2: meaningful growth drivers. Curious, why are those markets underpenetrated? What
38:36
Speaker 2: did you guys figure out that?
38:37
Speaker 3: So part of it there has been just a little
38:40
Speaker 3: bit of you know, you might say, neglect from the
38:42
Speaker 3: right business for a while, and we realized about eighteen
38:46
Speaker 3: months ago that a large part of the town. Just
38:50
Speaker 3: to frame this again, total addressable mark total, this warm
38:53
Speaker 3: market exactly about one hundred and sixty billion rides a
38:56
Speaker 3: year that people take in their private cars across the
38:58
Speaker 3: United say it one hundred and sixty billion. And remember
39:00
Speaker 3: do a billion, the other guys might do three or four,
39:02
Speaker 3: maybe two or three billions. So four billion out one
39:03
Speaker 3: hundred sixty million, Okay, So there's a lot of adjustable
39:06
Speaker 3: market left for us to go to. And we've been
39:09
Speaker 3: in places like New York and San Francisco and Chicago
39:11
Speaker 3: for over a decade right now. But some of these
39:13
Speaker 3: smaller towns, you know, the Indianapolis of the world, the
39:16
Speaker 3: Saint Louis Is the world, as well as college towns
39:19
Speaker 3: where basically, you know, nobody has a car compared to
39:21
Speaker 3: the population. You know, they just look like good opportunities
39:24
Speaker 3: for us. They're complicated from a marketplace management perspective because
39:28
Speaker 3: anytime you go to a newer geography, you've got a first,
39:31
Speaker 3: make sure you've got enough drivers because otherwise it takes
39:33
Speaker 3: too long to get picked up, and you've got to
39:35
Speaker 3: make sure you've got enough riders because then driver. If not,
39:38
Speaker 3: then riders drivers won't make enough money. So it's it's
39:40
Speaker 3: quite complex to invist. The chicken and egg problem is
39:43
Speaker 3: the chicken egg from over and over again, which again
39:45
Speaker 3: is why back to an earlier part of the conversation,
39:48
Speaker 3: it's really quite hard at this point to come into
39:50
Speaker 3: the market fresh. You know, you're not going to find
39:52
Speaker 3: a lot of folks who want to come into a
39:54
Speaker 3: well served market. But anyway, so we just started to
39:56
Speaker 3: focus on and our data scientists and our mar marketers
40:00
Speaker 3: really kind of went to town and it's been a
40:02
Speaker 3: big source of growth.
40:03
Speaker 2: Huh, really really interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation
40:07
Speaker 2: with David Rischer, CEO of Lyft, discussing the future of
40:12
Speaker 2: transportation technology. I'm Barry Ridults. You're listening to Masters in
40:16
Speaker 2: Business on Bloomberg Radio. I'm Barry Ridults. You're listening to
40:32
Speaker 2: Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special fascinating
40:36
Speaker 2: guest is David Riescher. He is the CEO of Lyft,
40:40
Speaker 2: and we have been discussing the future of transportation technology.
40:46
Speaker 2: We have to talk about AI. We have to talk
40:48
Speaker 2: about autonomous vehicles. But before we do, I have to
40:51
Speaker 2: ask you two really interesting questions. One is, how do
40:56
Speaker 2: you solve the problem of even so people leaving their
41:01
Speaker 2: phones in the car and when they get out and
41:04
Speaker 2: suddenly it's a big penal. They asked, somebody has to
41:06
Speaker 2: come either drop off the phone or whatever. How do you,
41:11
Speaker 2: as a customer obsessed company, how do you solve that problem.
41:15
Speaker 3: I so love this question because it is an experience
41:18
Speaker 3: every single one of us has had, and it is
41:20
Speaker 3: both infuriating and incredibly stressful because all of a sudden
41:24
Speaker 3: you realize, oh my god, my entire life is driving
41:27
Speaker 3: in the wrong direction and I don't even know how
41:29
Speaker 3: to contact the company at this point, okay.
41:31
Speaker 2: Close to the number is on your phone.
41:33
Speaker 3: And the phone is in the car, and you're like,
41:34
Speaker 3: I want to hold my phone to call the phone,
41:36
Speaker 3: but I can't do that. It's very, very stressful. So
41:38
Speaker 3: here's what we've done. We actually are working. We're doing
41:41
Speaker 3: a huge amount of work on this just to be
41:43
Speaker 3: really customer set. The first thing is automatic detection. So
41:47
Speaker 3: if the phone starts to travel away with the driver
41:50
Speaker 3: after you know you've been dropped off, yeah, that immediately
41:53
Speaker 3: automatically alerts the driver there's probably a phone in your backseat.
41:57
Speaker 3: It requires a little bit of work on the rider's side.
41:59
Speaker 3: We're still trying to figure out how to riders to
42:00
Speaker 3: opt into this because they have to share a little
42:02
Speaker 3: bit more information. But we're still working on that. But
42:05
Speaker 3: regardless of whether it happens automatically or manually, the second
42:08
Speaker 3: thing is we've got a whole web portal, so you
42:10
Speaker 3: don't actually have to use your phone. You can and
42:12
Speaker 3: you don't have to log in. But really the big
42:14
Speaker 3: innovation is this. We used to have it's called sort
42:17
Speaker 3: of out of band, so the whole like return the
42:20
Speaker 3: phone thing, it becomes almost a separate process. And frankly,
42:23
Speaker 3: in the past it's almost felt like a bit of
42:24
Speaker 3: a negotiation with you in the driver and nobody liked it.
42:27
Speaker 3: The drivers didn't like it because it felt like it
42:29
Speaker 3: was sort of an annoyance. The riders didn't like it
42:31
Speaker 3: because they're like, oh my god, I sort of feel
42:33
Speaker 3: like I'm being held hosted here, a terrible thing. Now
42:35
Speaker 3: it's a whole automated process, and basically what we realize
42:38
Speaker 3: is we should just treat it like any other ride.
42:41
Speaker 3: So it's basically the phone is getting a ride back.
42:43
Speaker 3: So what you get to say as a rider is yes,
42:45
Speaker 3: please bring my phone back. I know exactly how much
42:48
Speaker 3: is going to cost. It's going to cost just the
42:49
Speaker 3: exact same amount as if I'd taken a ride to
42:51
Speaker 3: that exact place where the phone is, and the driver
42:54
Speaker 3: gets it in their queue, just like they would get
42:55
Speaker 3: any other ride request, and it gets returned to you typically.
42:59
Speaker 3: I was just looking at this data and it changes
43:01
Speaker 3: every single week. But we're now getting to the point
43:02
Speaker 3: where a large percentage of our phones are being rider's
43:06
Speaker 3: phones are being delivered back within an hour, which is
43:08
Speaker 3: the apps of cold Stand.
43:09
Speaker 2: So let's use technology and cut that on the app
43:15
Speaker 2: opt in to avoid leaving your phone in the car
43:19
Speaker 2: via Bluetooth, not on each ride, but just once on
43:21
Speaker 2: the app, and then when the person when the ride
43:25
Speaker 2: is over, you've arrived and the person gets out, if
43:28
Speaker 2: the phone doesn't leave the car right there, and then
43:32
Speaker 2: the driver should lower the window and say, hey, you
43:36
Speaker 2: let that car you're in the back seat. If that technology,
43:40
Speaker 2: and that doesn't seem like you're changing or creating new technology,
43:43
Speaker 2: You're just applying existing technology. Why take an hour? Why
43:47
Speaker 2: not take thirty seconds?
43:49
Speaker 3: And this is now where you realize that all technology
43:51
Speaker 3: problems are ultimately human problems because in order for that
43:54
Speaker 3: to happen, a person has to have opted in. They've
43:56
Speaker 3: got to click a button. Most people are either skeptical
43:59
Speaker 3: of that or they're not paying attention. So now that's
44:02
Speaker 3: our trick, is to try to figure out a way
44:03
Speaker 3: to really encourage people to do that. As you say,
44:06
Speaker 3: you only have to do it once. But that's going
44:07
Speaker 3: to be the next big, next big focus.
44:09
Speaker 2: So let's stay with that theme before we really move
44:11
Speaker 2: too far away from people and towards technology. You drive
44:16
Speaker 2: for lift every six weeks or so, which seems kind
44:19
Speaker 2: of bonkers. What what have you learned sitting in that
44:23
Speaker 2: seat that you can't learn from the executive suite or
44:27
Speaker 2: the boardroom?
44:28
Speaker 3: So much, so much? And I know, uh, you know,
44:32
Speaker 3: we're all busy people, you know. Here, I am busy
44:35
Speaker 3: senior executive CEO of company. And my god, you know what,
44:38
Speaker 3: I got time, right, I got time. I can't jump
44:41
Speaker 3: in the car. So and here's why. So I learned
44:43
Speaker 3: stuff about being a driver and I learned something about
44:45
Speaker 3: being a rider every single time. So I'll give you
44:47
Speaker 3: an example of each very quickly. On the driver side,
44:49
Speaker 3: I learned how important a feature is that we've developed
44:52
Speaker 3: over years and refined called uh stay within area. And
44:56
Speaker 3: that's because there are actually two features next to each other,
44:59
Speaker 3: one stay with a narrow one arrive on time. Let
45:00
Speaker 3: me actually focus on a arrive on time. What that
45:02
Speaker 3: means is I've got a kid to pick up at
45:04
Speaker 3: the end of the day, or I've got a date
45:06
Speaker 3: with my wife tonight, or I've got a doctor's when
45:07
Speaker 3: I'm a three o'clock in the afternoon, and so I
45:10
Speaker 3: need to figure out a way to organize my life
45:12
Speaker 3: such as my last ride is going to put me,
45:14
Speaker 3: you know, right where I need to be by a
45:16
Speaker 3: certain time that you know, if I look at the
45:18
Speaker 3: gig economy, one of the real gifts of the gig
45:20
Speaker 3: economy is it allows you to integrate your work into
45:23
Speaker 3: your life in new ways. Again, I don't have to
45:26
Speaker 3: call my boss and tell them I'm going to be
45:27
Speaker 3: late today. I don't have to do anything like that.
45:29
Speaker 3: But sometimes I do have other things in my life.
45:31
Speaker 3: Maybe it's another job, maybe it's an obligation with my
45:34
Speaker 3: you know, with my parents, or whatever it might be.
45:35
Speaker 3: So anyway, that's a feature. It worked pretty well when
45:38
Speaker 3: I started. It works very well now, And in part
45:41
Speaker 3: it's because I give a lot of feedback to the
45:42
Speaker 3: team about how to how to make that better and
45:44
Speaker 3: how important it is to get that exactly right. And
45:47
Speaker 3: then on the rider's side, I mean, every time I
45:50
Speaker 3: take you a rider in the car, and of course
45:52
Speaker 3: I asked them why they chose us versus the other guys.
45:55
Speaker 3: Sometimes it's because they say, oh, Chase Sapphire Reserve. I'm
45:58
Speaker 3: a Chase Saffire Reserve a car holder, and you guys
46:00
Speaker 3: have a relationship with them. That's great. That gives me
46:02
Speaker 3: a little bit of data of how important it is.
46:04
Speaker 3: That's a points relationship, points relationship, and you get all
46:07
Speaker 3: sorts of You get ten dollars every single month to
46:09
Speaker 3: use as lift credit. And look, I can look at
46:11
Speaker 3: the data just like anyone else and realize the number
46:13
Speaker 3: of people who are using that. But there's just no
46:15
Speaker 3: substitute hearing somebody you know go off about how they much,
46:20
Speaker 3: how much they love that card and how important that
46:22
Speaker 3: partnership is to them. As a generic example. And then
46:25
Speaker 3: a specific example involved a woman that I gave a
46:28
Speaker 3: ride to. This is now about almost two years ago,
46:30
Speaker 3: but it still really, you know, kind of resonates with
46:32
Speaker 3: me where she would wake up every single morning and
46:35
Speaker 3: depending on what the price was of getting from her
46:38
Speaker 3: home to her job, because the prices would bounce around
46:41
Speaker 3: a lot, she would either take a lift or maybe
46:43
Speaker 3: take the other guys, or drive herself or stay home.
46:47
Speaker 3: And it was a source of stress and concerned her
46:49
Speaker 3: every single day. She would literally wake up an hour,
46:51
Speaker 3: you know before she had to leave, just to sort
46:53
Speaker 3: of check prices. And it just made me realize how
46:55
Speaker 3: much surge pricing is is customer hostile, nobody nobody like.
47:01
Speaker 2: It starts to drizzle a little bit and suddenly it's
47:03
Speaker 2: a thirty dollars surcharge, and I know people are infuriated
47:07
Speaker 2: by it.
47:07
Speaker 3: And they should be. And here's the problem. This is
47:10
Speaker 3: the difference between you know, if you're an economist, you
47:13
Speaker 3: love this, right. It's all supply demand balancing in real time.
47:16
Speaker 3: It's just unbelievable, like a like a perfect science experiment.
47:19
Speaker 3: And if you're a real person, it just it just
47:21
Speaker 3: bugs a crappety you. So it really drove home to
47:24
Speaker 3: me how frustrating this was. And it was literally a
47:26
Speaker 3: Friday morning when this woman had donuts and she was
47:28
Speaker 3: bringing them in to see a coworker for his birthday
47:32
Speaker 3: and she's like, I can't work from home today. I'm
47:33
Speaker 3: so glad that Lyft was, you know, was reasonably priced.
47:36
Speaker 3: So that's what's led us to both take about fifty
47:38
Speaker 3: million dollars a year out of surge pricing. We've really
47:40
Speaker 3: tried to get rid of it as much as we can,
47:42
Speaker 3: can't completely eliminate it, and also introduce a product called
47:45
Speaker 3: price lock that allows you to lock in a price
47:46
Speaker 3: on a route.
47:47
Speaker 2: So tell us a little bit about price lock. What
47:50
Speaker 2: does that do? Yeah, so I'm not familiar with that
47:52
Speaker 2: aspect of the yep yep.
47:54
Speaker 3: So what it's really meant for people who commute the
47:56
Speaker 3: same root every day and they don't want the route
47:58
Speaker 3: to go from twenty to thirty to four because you
48:00
Speaker 3: say it right, and by the way, to be very clear, like,
48:02
Speaker 3: there are good reasons for surge pricing, right, it's a
48:05
Speaker 3: very good way for us to encourage drivers to drive
48:07
Speaker 3: when there's more demand than their supply. But because it's
48:10
Speaker 3: very frustrating for riders, we want to give people a
48:12
Speaker 3: way to kind of opt out of it. So for
48:14
Speaker 3: a given route, you know, from point A to point B,
48:16
Speaker 3: if you want to lock in a price, we basically say,
48:19
Speaker 3: here's the average price over the course of a month.
48:21
Speaker 3: If you want to lock in, I think it costs
48:22
Speaker 3: four ninety nine a month per root. That's all it takes.
48:25
Speaker 3: And it's been super popular for people who just want
48:27
Speaker 3: to get that out of their lives.
48:28
Speaker 2: Huh, really really really kind of interesting. So let's talk
48:31
Speaker 2: a little bit about autonomous driving. I was in San
48:35
Speaker 2: Francisco last month. Way mos are everywhere, that's right. Tell
48:40
Speaker 2: us a little bit about what lift wants to do
48:43
Speaker 2: with autonomous vehicles or these just shiny objects or these
48:47
Speaker 2: the future.
48:48
Speaker 3: They're the future. They're the future. It will take a
48:51
Speaker 3: long time for this future to come. It will be
48:53
Speaker 3: very unevenly distributed, but they are the future. And the
48:56
Speaker 3: basic reason why is they are a reliable product, and
49:00
Speaker 3: they're a safe product.
49:01
Speaker 2: You know, it's safer than human drivers. They are substantially right.
49:04
Speaker 3: And it's because they not only know the policies, but
49:07
Speaker 3: they follow the policies. You know, they tend to follow
49:09
Speaker 3: the rules and they don't get distracted, you know. So
49:11
Speaker 3: not to say some crazy thing won't happen one time
49:13
Speaker 3: out of a million, but ninety nine point nine nine
49:16
Speaker 3: nine percent of the time they'll do the thing that
49:17
Speaker 3: you expect a car to do, which is, you know,
49:19
Speaker 3: keep it. It's it's right or safe. So so okay,
49:22
Speaker 3: so that's that is coming. So now, you know, as
49:25
Speaker 3: a as a business person, you know, you have you
49:28
Speaker 3: have a choice to make, right. You can either embrace
49:30
Speaker 3: this or you can sort of not. And and the
49:34
Speaker 3: thing is, in a sense it's a choice, but in
49:35
Speaker 3: another sense it's not. Because you've seen Kodak you know whatever,
49:39
Speaker 3: full right, But by.
49:40
Speaker 2: The way, Kodak invented the digital camera but didn't want
49:44
Speaker 2: to accounibalize their own film business, and how did that
49:46
Speaker 2: work out?
49:47
Speaker 3: Exactly? Not not so well. And then you look, on
49:49
Speaker 3: the other hand at maybe a company like Netflix that
49:52
Speaker 3: invented the DVD by mail business just sort of you know,
49:56
Speaker 3: you know, sort of set Blockbuster aside, but did such
49:59
Speaker 3: a good job surfing from that to you know, streaming
50:02
Speaker 3: and now to original content. Right, they're a great company
50:05
Speaker 3: in so many ways, but they were they were relentless,
50:09
Speaker 3: fearless about cannibalizing their own business to sort of, you know,
50:13
Speaker 3: get to the next thing. So that's the shift that
50:15
Speaker 3: we're right in the early early early days of it
50:18
Speaker 3: will be another platform shift. But we're in a very
50:21
Speaker 3: fortunate position. And here's why. You know, we have millions
50:24
Speaker 3: of riders, We have millions of billions, billions of data
50:29
Speaker 3: points about pickup and drop off location and pricing and
50:31
Speaker 3: so forth and so on, and we have a whole
50:33
Speaker 3: subsidiary called flex Drive that does fleet management, which I
50:36
Speaker 3: can come back to in a couple of seconds. But
50:38
Speaker 3: these are going to be some of the building blocks
50:40
Speaker 3: of the self driving or I really should say hybrid
50:43
Speaker 3: network of the future, because that's the last thing I'll say.
50:46
Speaker 3: Just as sort of intro self driving cars are going
50:48
Speaker 3: to come little by little by little by little, human
50:50
Speaker 3: drivers are going to be around for a long, long,
50:53
Speaker 3: long time. There is not enough self driving cars in
50:55
Speaker 3: any given market to satisfy peak demand on you know,
50:59
Speaker 3: Friday afternoon at five o'clock rush hour or what have you.
51:01
Speaker 2: So this is not a three, four or five year transition.
51:04
Speaker 2: This is a ten to twenty year transition. Is that
51:06
Speaker 2: about right?
51:07
Speaker 3: Think about it as a decade transition. Yeah. And even again,
51:10
Speaker 3: the word transition I think is maybe, you know, not
51:12
Speaker 3: quite right, because the economics of an expensive car don't
51:17
Speaker 3: really lend themselves to having a whole bunch of them
51:19
Speaker 3: sitting around at two in the morning empty. You really,
51:22
Speaker 3: I think, want a hybrid network for a long long
51:24
Speaker 3: time for human reasons too, right, You might want someone
51:27
Speaker 3: to help you with your luggage, or maybe even someone
51:29
Speaker 3: to ask you how your day was. But the economics
51:31
Speaker 3: of it make it such that it's much more likely
51:34
Speaker 3: this will be a hybrid network for at least a
51:35
Speaker 3: decade or more.
51:37
Speaker 2: So that kind of raises an interesting question. What exactly
51:41
Speaker 2: is Lyft? We know it's a ride hailing company, it's
51:45
Speaker 2: also a transportation market clearing mechanism, it's a consumer brand,
51:50
Speaker 2: and it's also a logistics platform. Like where is the
51:55
Speaker 2: future growth coming from?
51:56
Speaker 3: I mean, you know a little all the above, right,
51:58
Speaker 3: So as you say, I mean the thing people know
52:01
Speaker 3: lift the most for are you know, human driven cars,
52:05
Speaker 3: you know, picking you up and dropping off. And as
52:07
Speaker 3: we were just saying, that will become a mix of
52:09
Speaker 3: human driven and you know, frankly robot driven cars. What
52:12
Speaker 3: you may not know is Lyft also runs the bike
52:14
Speaker 3: shore system. Here in New York City where we're.
52:16
Speaker 2: City bikes are run by Lyft. I do not know that.
52:19
Speaker 3: That's exactly right. So we run city Bike, We run
52:21
Speaker 3: the program in San Francisco, we run the program in Chicago,
52:24
Speaker 3: we run the program in Boston, in Portland, Oregon. And
52:27
Speaker 3: then we also supply the technology and the bikes in London,
52:31
Speaker 3: in Barcelona, in Madrid, you know, many many countries around
52:35
Speaker 3: the world. This may seem like sort of a small thing,
52:38
Speaker 3: but if you've been to a city like New York
52:41
Speaker 3: or London, you'll know that cities are very very aware
52:44
Speaker 3: that they want sort of multimodal transportation. So that's going
52:47
Speaker 3: to be, you know, a big part of our future
52:48
Speaker 3: as well. And then look, you know, someday, who knows,
52:51
Speaker 3: maybe boats, maybe vertical takeoff, airlines, you know, who knows.
52:54
Speaker 3: But I will tell you that our real focus right
52:55
Speaker 3: now and we will always be is this. This is
52:58
Speaker 3: our sort of purpose is sur and connecting. I want
53:01
Speaker 3: people to be out and about and connect with each
53:03
Speaker 3: other in any possible way we can. That's really what
53:05
Speaker 3: I want.
53:06
Speaker 2: So you mentioned London, Yeah, what are the plans for
53:10
Speaker 2: by do robotoxis in robo in London. This is going
53:14
Speaker 2: to be a pilot program that could potentially scale up
53:18
Speaker 2: dramatically like the Weimos in San Francisco.
53:21
Speaker 3: That's right. So again, let's think about the self driving
53:24
Speaker 3: car world for a couple of minutes. The technology is
53:27
Speaker 3: being developed worldwide. It's being developed in the United States.
53:31
Speaker 3: Weaimo of course is the leader, really the worldwide leader. Zooks,
53:35
Speaker 3: which is owned by Amazon, is much much smaller, but
53:38
Speaker 3: you know, trying very hard to come up behind Waimo.
53:40
Speaker 3: And then there'll be you know, many others, including maybe
53:42
Speaker 3: in Nvidia and companies that aren't even really in the
53:44
Speaker 3: space now, but we'll want to sell their technology to
53:47
Speaker 3: different Oh yeah, it's different car manufacturers. There's also technology
53:52
Speaker 3: coming out of China by do is sort of the Google.
53:56
Speaker 3: You think of it as kind of the alphabet of China.
54:00
Speaker 3: And there are many many others. There's a company called
54:02
Speaker 3: we Ride. There's a company called Pony, There's a company
54:04
Speaker 3: called Momenta. There's a company called Jie. I was just
54:07
Speaker 3: in China a couple of weeks ago looking at the
54:09
Speaker 3: incredible just growth of technology there, both hardware and software
54:13
Speaker 3: type technology. Okay, so that's all background. It's going to
54:17
Speaker 3: be deployed worldwide and in the United States, Chinese technology
54:22
Speaker 3: is not super welcome for obvious reasons, but Europe is
54:24
Speaker 3: taking maybe a little bit of a more sort of
54:27
Speaker 3: economical approach where they're kind of looking at different technology
54:30
Speaker 3: providers and saying, let's experiment. So in London we're partners
54:33
Speaker 3: with by Do. By Do has a very very highly
54:36
Speaker 3: regarded self driving platform and we're just in the early
54:39
Speaker 3: days of rolling it out there. It's called an art
54:41
Speaker 3: six car. This is sort of behind the scenes stuff
54:44
Speaker 3: and it literally just rolling off boats right now and
54:46
Speaker 3: it'll be commercialized next year.
54:48
Speaker 2: So I'm looking at the current crop of autonomous vehicles,
54:53
Speaker 2: which are essentially converted traditional cars, But you really do
54:59
Speaker 2: you need that front driver's see? Can you change up
55:02
Speaker 2: the internal layer? Like what are autonomous vehicles going to
55:05
Speaker 2: look like? Not in twenty sixty but in a couple
55:09
Speaker 2: of years.
55:10
Speaker 3: Yeah. So again, it's such an interesting time to be
55:13
Speaker 3: in this industry. And it's exactly you know, as you're saying, like,
55:16
Speaker 3: do you really need a steering wheel? Do you really
55:18
Speaker 3: need you know, accelerator and breaks? You know? Zeokes as
55:21
Speaker 3: they say they're in Amazon subsidiary, they would say you
55:23
Speaker 3: absolutely don't. And they have a purpose built vehicle that
55:26
Speaker 3: doesn't have either one of those things now for regulatory reasons,
55:29
Speaker 3: for human acceptance reasons, and so forth, for manufacturing reasons,
55:33
Speaker 3: that's going to be slower to roll out because you
55:35
Speaker 3: can't rely on, you know, the big OEMs to produce
55:38
Speaker 3: a car like that that's its own vehicle. So I
55:41
Speaker 3: think what you're going to see over the next three
55:42
Speaker 3: to five years is an enormous amount of new innovation
55:46
Speaker 3: in the in the car space. It won't just be
55:49
Speaker 3: you know, there won't be a driver. It'll be you know,
55:51
Speaker 3: you'll have seats that face each other. You know, you'll
55:54
Speaker 3: have seats that completely recline because you've got more space
55:57
Speaker 3: in there. You'll have different luggage configurations. You'll have some
56:00
Speaker 3: of them will feel more like you know, party buses,
56:02
Speaker 3: some of them maybe you know, corporate shuttles that just
56:04
Speaker 3: don't have drivers. A lot of new stuff is going
56:06
Speaker 3: to come in the next couple of years, step by step,
56:08
Speaker 3: because again, you know, hardware is hard. It takes a
56:10
Speaker 3: long time to build it out. But you know, you
56:12
Speaker 3: look five years out and I think you're going to
56:13
Speaker 3: see a lot of cars look pretty different from what
56:15
Speaker 3: you see today.
56:16
Speaker 2: I'm unfamiliar with Zekes and Amazon's relationship with them. But
56:20
Speaker 2: if I recall correctly, Amazon was an early investor, took
56:24
Speaker 2: a big chunk.
56:24
Speaker 3: Of Rivian, that's right.
56:25
Speaker 2: And all of the electric Amazon delivery vehicles you see
56:30
Speaker 2: are essentially the Rivian platform repurposed for commercial use. That's right,
56:36
Speaker 2: Zooks plus Rivian is that the direction Amazon is going?
56:39
Speaker 2: And do you guys, does Lift whose CEO has a
56:44
Speaker 2: relationship with Jeff have a relationship with Amazon.
56:49
Speaker 3: We do have a relationship with Amazon. Of course we're
56:51
Speaker 3: huge consumers of AWS, which is andy current CEOs you know,
56:56
Speaker 3: kind of kind of pride and enjoy and for sure
57:00
Speaker 3: we'll end up using uh, you know, we'll look, everyone
57:03
Speaker 3: is going to end up partnering with everyone. That's That's
57:05
Speaker 3: the interesting space we're in right now is if you're
57:08
Speaker 3: in the if you're in the business of developing a
57:10
Speaker 3: self driving car, it's billions of dollars of R and
57:13
Speaker 3: D billions of dollars, and so you want as many
57:15
Speaker 3: customers as possible. And then if you're in our business
57:17
Speaker 3: and the business of moving people around and connecting people,
57:20
Speaker 3: you want to have multiple suppliers of that technology so
57:23
Speaker 3: you're not beholden to anyone. Some of that is just
57:26
Speaker 3: being you know, a smart you know, business person. But
57:29
Speaker 3: some of it also is you know, technology goes through
57:31
Speaker 3: its own you know, fits and starts. Look at what
57:33
Speaker 3: happens with the airline business when all of a sudden,
57:36
Speaker 3: you know, Boeing has a problem with one of its
57:37
Speaker 3: its units. Uh, you know, they stop manufacturing those for
57:40
Speaker 3: a time or they're grounded. So I don't want to overdramatize,
57:43
Speaker 3: but you know, anytime new technology comes out, you're going
57:45
Speaker 3: to find you know, some of that happens as well.
57:46
Speaker 3: So all of us are kind of in multiple Uh
57:49
Speaker 3: you know, let's say maybe polyamus relationships might be one
57:52
Speaker 3: way to well.
57:53
Speaker 2: Don't you have to be play? You can't lock into
57:56
Speaker 2: platform dependency too early, otherwise you end up owning beta
58:00
Speaker 2: max and what good is that? And I know half
58:03
Speaker 2: our audience has no idea what.
58:04
Speaker 3: The hell that is?
58:05
Speaker 2: So there we go it old school reference. Yeah, but
58:07
Speaker 2: what I mean when you commit one way? So let's
58:11
Speaker 2: talk a little more about the autonomous ride hailing. What
58:16
Speaker 2: are the big concerns? Is it safety? Is it regulation?
58:19
Speaker 2: Is it winning the consumer's trust? What are the economics
58:23
Speaker 2: of managing a fleet like that?
58:25
Speaker 3: Again, so many interesting questions here. Let's start with the
58:27
Speaker 3: customer side of things, right, So the first order of
58:30
Speaker 3: business has to be building customer trust and adoption for
58:33
Speaker 3: this new technology, because you know, it's a car that
58:36
Speaker 3: drives itself, which is magical but also can be a
58:39
Speaker 3: bit intimidating or you know, even scary for people who
58:42
Speaker 3: you haven't seen the technology. Lift obviously has a lot
58:45
Speaker 3: of value to add right there, because it's a brand
58:47
Speaker 3: that already people trust, they understand, you'll be able to
58:50
Speaker 3: opt in or opt out of getting it. I was
58:52
Speaker 3: just in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago, or we're
58:54
Speaker 3: have an experiment, small deployment with a company called Mame Mobility,
58:58
Speaker 3: which is also in the self driving car space. They're Toyota,
59:01
Speaker 3: Siennas they pull up to you and all of a
59:04
Speaker 3: sudden you get in. It's kind of a whole different
59:05
Speaker 3: type of experience from which you've probably experienced in the past.
59:08
Speaker 3: But because it's got lyft behind it right on the
59:10
Speaker 3: door already, people sort of say, okay, great, I kind
59:12
Speaker 3: of understand this company and know something about it. Okay,
59:14
Speaker 3: that's great. So then you kind of have to work
59:16
Speaker 3: yourself down the stack. There's all sorts of technology problems
59:19
Speaker 3: that you have to solve as you integrate their platform
59:23
Speaker 3: and us, and then someone's got to manage these cars.
59:26
Speaker 3: And this is worth talking about for a couple seconds.
59:28
Speaker 3: In traditional ride share, the driver is responsible for their
59:31
Speaker 3: own car, right they put gas in it, or they
59:34
Speaker 3: charge up if it's electric, They keep it clean, hopefully
59:36
Speaker 3: they keep it maintained and so forth. But in the
59:40
Speaker 3: self driving space, at least for the next three to
59:42
Speaker 3: five years, most of the car ownership are going to
59:45
Speaker 3: be professional fleet owners. Know they're going to buy twenty fifty,
59:48
Speaker 3: one hundred, five hundred, and they're going to kind of
59:51
Speaker 3: manage these as a fleet, and that means that they've
59:53
Speaker 3: got to be again charged and maintained and cleaned, but
59:56
Speaker 3: they have to be done at kind of at a
59:57
Speaker 3: professional level. That's the sort of stage where we're in.
1:00:00
Speaker 3: We've had a subsidiary for many years called flex Drive.
1:00:03
Speaker 3: We actually own about ten thousand cars on the lift
1:00:06
Speaker 3: platform for drivers who don't want to drive their own car,
1:00:08
Speaker 3: and we are responsible for maintenance and keeping them cleaned
1:00:11
Speaker 3: and so forth and so on. So we actually bring
1:00:13
Speaker 3: a lot to that as well. And I think that's
1:00:15
Speaker 3: one of the reasons why we like the economic profile
1:00:17
Speaker 3: of self driving cars. They don't have insurance as high,
1:00:20
Speaker 3: for example, as personally driven cars. But also we like
1:00:24
Speaker 3: the economics of our fleet management subsidiary and think we
1:00:26
Speaker 3: can service these at an industry leading rate and therefore
1:00:30
Speaker 3: hopefully make more money on the asset than anybody else.
1:00:33
Speaker 2: Is there still going to be a future for people
1:00:35
Speaker 2: who today you would think of owner drivers who just
1:00:39
Speaker 2: want to own autonomous vehicles and lease them out or
1:00:43
Speaker 2: send them out into the lift network. Like I'm crunching
1:00:46
Speaker 2: the numbers in my head as we're speaking, and I'm like, oh,
1:00:48
Speaker 2: that could be a ten to twelve percent return on investment,
1:00:52
Speaker 2: not bad when bond yields are four percent, three and
1:00:55
Speaker 2: a half percent, one hundred percent.
1:00:57
Speaker 3: I mean, there will be a time where, you know,
1:00:58
Speaker 3: if you fast forward, you know, five years or whatever,
1:01:00
Speaker 3: maybe more many people individual owners have cars that can
1:01:04
Speaker 3: drive themselves. And then there's a question to your point
1:01:06
Speaker 3: of can you put that on the network? The answer
1:01:08
Speaker 3: is absolutely, you'll be able to put it on the
1:01:10
Speaker 3: lift network and it'll come back again, cleaned and charged.
1:01:13
Speaker 3: Because of the flea management side of things.
1:01:15
Speaker 2: That sounds really really interesting, you know, it's funny because
1:01:19
Speaker 2: when the ride apps first came out, there was a
1:01:23
Speaker 2: little bit of a lag before people got comfortable. What
1:01:27
Speaker 2: do you mean I'm getting into a stranger's car. I
1:01:30
Speaker 2: imagine we're going to go through the same thing. What
1:01:32
Speaker 2: do you mean I'm getting into a car with no driver.
1:01:36
Speaker 2: It feels like the transitions are happening faster and faster,
1:01:40
Speaker 2: same sort of question. This isn't a ten twenty year thing.
1:01:43
Speaker 2: This is a couple of years before people are forget
1:01:48
Speaker 2: people under thirty who adapt so rapidly, the middle part
1:01:52
Speaker 2: of that age bell curve, the thirty to sixty. They're
1:01:56
Speaker 2: going to adapt to this pretty quickly over the next
1:01:58
Speaker 2: couple of years. How do you think about the different
1:02:00
Speaker 2: segments of consumer when it comes to autonomous driving?
1:02:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I think as you're suggesting, you know,
1:02:07
Speaker 3: younger people do tend to take up new technology, you know,
1:02:10
Speaker 3: pretty quickly. But in this case, I do believe that
1:02:12
Speaker 3: many people, after they've had a couple of rides and
1:02:15
Speaker 3: realize that it feels very safe and reliable, I think
1:02:18
Speaker 3: they'll flip from skeptic to kind of fans, you know,
1:02:20
Speaker 3: pretty quickly. Now, I will say policy makers, you know,
1:02:24
Speaker 3: they have their own you know issues, so and some
1:02:27
Speaker 3: of that can be very local. So you may find
1:02:28
Speaker 3: some cities that just say we just don't want them
1:02:30
Speaker 3: on our streets for a period of time. You may
1:02:32
Speaker 3: find conversely, other cities that say, bring them because we
1:02:34
Speaker 3: want to feel like a city of the future. So
1:02:36
Speaker 3: I think there are going to be some policy issues.
1:02:37
Speaker 3: There are also some infrastructure issues. Remember that, you know,
1:02:40
Speaker 3: av's also tend to be evs. Evs require charging. Charging
1:02:44
Speaker 3: requires infrastructure, and not every city is going to have
1:02:47
Speaker 3: the amount of electrical power. I mean, this is kind
1:02:51
Speaker 3: of a side issue. But if you listen to you know,
1:02:53
Speaker 3: Jensen for example at Nvidia talk about what could end
1:02:56
Speaker 3: up holding the United States back from its next pick leap,
1:02:58
Speaker 3: a lot of it comes down to power structure in
1:03:00
Speaker 3: this country, right, So anyway, so there are many different
1:03:03
Speaker 3: kind of bits and pieces all the way from consumer
1:03:05
Speaker 3: adoption to physical infrastructure to policy and so forth. But
1:03:09
Speaker 3: I think again, over the next three to five years,
1:03:11
Speaker 3: I think you're going to see a real shift, mostly
1:03:12
Speaker 3: because consumers are going to try them and like them,
1:03:15
Speaker 3: and then they're going to be saying, hey, you know,
1:03:16
Speaker 3: faster please.
1:03:17
Speaker 2: So here's the crazy thing. About avs that I'm still
1:03:21
Speaker 2: kind of shocked about that relies on visual on lidar,
1:03:26
Speaker 2: on radar and all these other technologies, but there isn't
1:03:29
Speaker 2: a whole lot of infrastructure built into the roadway grid.
1:03:33
Speaker 2: Wouldn't be that difficult to create a series of RF
1:03:38
Speaker 2: devices that specifically geared for autonomous vehicles that like, every
1:03:45
Speaker 2: now and then if you're letting the car drive yourself
1:03:48
Speaker 2: and there's an exit or a merge or like, it's
1:03:53
Speaker 2: not great with those sort of things today because there's
1:03:58
Speaker 2: no real infrastructure. It's relying on a technology not built
1:04:03
Speaker 2: for autonomous driving. Is there any sort of motion towards Hey,
1:04:07
Speaker 2: let's everybody that's doing autonomous come up with set of
1:04:10
Speaker 2: standards and have the government implement this into the highway system.
1:04:16
Speaker 3: I mean, the short answer is no today and long
1:04:20
Speaker 3: term for sure. And the reason no today frankly is again,
1:04:25
Speaker 3: you know, anytime you see these platform ships, you always
1:04:27
Speaker 3: have competition for sort of who gets to sort of
1:04:30
Speaker 3: own the platform, right, and individual companies all have a
1:04:33
Speaker 3: huge incentive to say, you know, I want to do
1:04:35
Speaker 3: it my way, because if my way becomes the standard,
1:04:37
Speaker 3: then everyone else kind of follows along me and I
1:04:39
Speaker 3: get to sort of set the standard. Over time, though,
1:04:41
Speaker 3: you tend to see that those things that doesn't become
1:04:45
Speaker 3: a long term competitive advantage typically, particularly for this sort
1:04:49
Speaker 3: of infrastructure, And so I would fully expect over time,
1:04:52
Speaker 3: it's just in the same way that you can start
1:04:53
Speaker 3: to see charging networks kind of harmonize, that you'll see
1:04:56
Speaker 3: some sort of you know, kind of federal level. But
1:04:58
Speaker 3: we're years before that, right.
1:04:59
Speaker 2: We did see that sort of standardization take place in
1:05:02
Speaker 2: a lot of other technologies, and suddenly you're not competing
1:05:06
Speaker 2: on a standard, you're competing on highest quality, lowest price,
1:05:10
Speaker 2: et cetera.
1:05:11
Speaker 3: Exactly right.
1:05:11
Speaker 2: But you would think that if the cars literally knew
1:05:15
Speaker 2: exactly where the road was, it would be even that
1:05:18
Speaker 2: much safer.
1:05:19
Speaker 3: You would think. But I would say right now that
1:05:22
Speaker 3: the technology is evolving so quickly at the car level,
1:05:27
Speaker 3: and really the safety is very, very, very impressive. And
1:05:30
Speaker 3: and of course, look, I know, you know, tomorrow morning
1:05:33
Speaker 3: you're going to open up, you know, a newspaper or
1:05:35
Speaker 3: an app, and you're going to read about some strange
1:05:37
Speaker 3: thing that happened, you know, in some strange part of
1:05:39
Speaker 3: the of the world with a self driving car. And
1:05:41
Speaker 3: I'm going to tell you that that is going to happen,
1:05:43
Speaker 3: and that's you know, one in a million as opposed
1:05:46
Speaker 3: to you know, one in you know hundreds, which happened
1:05:48
Speaker 3: every single day with human drivers.
1:05:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, those are the clickbait headlines, not the statistically significant practice.
1:05:54
Speaker 2: All right, So last question before I get to my
1:05:57
Speaker 2: favorite questions, I ask, well, my guests, when it comes
1:06:00
Speaker 2: to transportation technology, what are we not discussing as a society,
1:06:06
Speaker 2: as a government, as consumers that we really should be.
1:06:09
Speaker 2: What is kind of getting overlooked in this rush to
1:06:12
Speaker 2: new technology? It could even be something that you guys
1:06:15
Speaker 2: are focused on, but a lot of people don't realize
1:06:18
Speaker 2: is oh no, this is really significant and the public
1:06:21
Speaker 2: hasn't quite grocked this yet.
1:06:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I'm going to come back to the
1:06:26
Speaker 3: basic role that technology plays in people's lives to help
1:06:30
Speaker 3: them live their absolute best lives. I'll tell you something
1:06:33
Speaker 3: that I have a lot of passionate about personally, and
1:06:36
Speaker 3: that is as people live longer lives, one of the
1:06:39
Speaker 3: things that is very predictive of their quality of life
1:06:42
Speaker 3: is how much time they're spending with other.
1:06:43
Speaker 2: People out socializing.
1:06:45
Speaker 3: Exactly, very very highly predictive of a healthy long life,
1:06:50
Speaker 3: and as we as a country are getting older, which
1:06:53
Speaker 3: we are demographically, that is going to be an enormous
1:06:57
Speaker 3: shift where you have so many more people in their sixties, seventies,
1:07:00
Speaker 3: even eighties who want to live healthy, vibrant lives. And
1:07:03
Speaker 3: so one of the things I'm really quite proud of
1:07:05
Speaker 3: with Lyft is, you know, Lift Silver is a particular
1:07:08
Speaker 3: product line that we've developed over the last year that's
1:07:10
Speaker 3: really focused on, you know, helping older folks get out.
1:07:13
Speaker 3: The app's a little easier to use, the cars are
1:07:15
Speaker 3: really easier to get into, the drivers a little bit
1:07:17
Speaker 3: more experienced. I think that sort of the intersection between
1:07:21
Speaker 3: societal trend and the type of work we do in
1:07:23
Speaker 3: transportation is really quite deep, and you know, maybe just
1:07:26
Speaker 3: as important ultimately as you know all of our conversation
1:07:28
Speaker 3: around medicine and so forth and so on, is keeping
1:07:31
Speaker 3: people out and about. And I know it's you're an
1:07:33
Speaker 3: or ring where I am as well, it's a uh
1:07:35
Speaker 3: or maybe or not.
1:07:36
Speaker 2: I don't know, No, I am. My wife wanted to
1:07:38
Speaker 2: get so we got a pair and she got bored
1:07:41
Speaker 2: being told she's stressed all the time and stop wearing it.
1:07:44
Speaker 2: So now I'm wearing funny, so we both we each
1:07:46
Speaker 2: have one, and I'm the only one who still.
1:07:47
Speaker 3: Wears how funny. Okay, actually my wife and I did
1:07:49
Speaker 3: the same. She said, I get a little tired of saying,
1:07:51
Speaker 3: you know that it's telling me exactly I'm stressed or
1:07:53
Speaker 3: I'm not sleeping well. But at least for me, it's
1:07:55
Speaker 3: a sort of nice nudge to get good sleep and frankly,
1:07:57
Speaker 3: to kind of keep an active life. And so so
1:07:59
Speaker 3: I see this space the transplation pieces is somewhat similar, like,
1:08:02
Speaker 3: I want technology that kind of helps me live my
1:08:04
Speaker 3: best life, and I think transportation plays a big role there.
1:08:07
Speaker 2: All right, so let's jump to our speed round our
1:08:10
Speaker 2: favorite questions, starting with tell us about your mentors who
1:08:14
Speaker 2: helped shape your career.
1:08:16
Speaker 3: Oh gosh, I love this question because I think it's
1:08:19
Speaker 3: so important for us to remember that we all stand
1:08:20
Speaker 3: on other people's shoulders. A list a few. Of course.
1:08:24
Speaker 3: I've worked for Jeff Bezos a lot. I've mentioned him,
1:08:26
Speaker 3: but I wanted other people first, Big Boss, a guy
1:08:29
Speaker 3: named Todd Nilsen. Todd really taught me the power of
1:08:33
Speaker 3: a great story and also the importance of really listening
1:08:38
Speaker 3: and watching closely customers, so he taught me to big
1:08:40
Speaker 3: things there. And then a guy named Peter Spirow. He
1:08:43
Speaker 3: was the board chair World Reader for many years. He
1:08:45
Speaker 3: and I sort of knew each other back in the
1:08:46
Speaker 3: Microsoft days, but was the board chair for the nonprofit.
1:08:49
Speaker 3: I ran so focused on the team, so focused on
1:08:52
Speaker 3: the team. You're only as good as your team. Really
1:08:54
Speaker 3: learned a ton about management and leadership from Peter.
1:08:57
Speaker 2: Huh, really interesting. Let's look about books. What are some
1:09:00
Speaker 2: of your favorites. What are you reading currently?
1:09:02
Speaker 3: Oh Man, I just finished a book called Good People.
1:09:07
Speaker 3: So I tend to read some fiction and some nonfiction.
1:09:09
Speaker 3: So I'm currently reading a book called Apple and China,
1:09:12
Speaker 3: all about Apple's entrances into China and ultimately the importance
1:09:15
Speaker 3: that China has and frankly the power that China now
1:09:18
Speaker 3: has over Apple. And then Good People is a fictional
1:09:22
Speaker 3: book about an Afghan Afghanian a family from Afghanistan that
1:09:26
Speaker 3: moves the United States and is either a model family
1:09:33
Speaker 3: or terrible people. And it's very very hard to know which,
1:09:35
Speaker 3: and it's sort of the book sort of flips back
1:09:37
Speaker 3: and forth. Remember when I said the books kind of
1:09:38
Speaker 3: teach empathy and sort of different respectives. This one does
1:09:41
Speaker 3: a good job of that.
1:09:42
Speaker 2: Huh. Really interesting. What about streaming? You listen to any
1:09:46
Speaker 2: podcasts or Netflix, Amazon, whatever? What keeps you entertained?
1:09:50
Speaker 3: I do. I am a podcast guy. I have to say, though,
1:09:54
Speaker 3: I'm kind of traditional when it comes to podcast I
1:09:56
Speaker 3: listen to The Daily from the New York Times pretty regularly,
1:09:58
Speaker 3: and I think most of it is because I have
1:10:00
Speaker 3: so many things in my life that are sort of
1:10:02
Speaker 3: There's so much content that comes at you that's sort
1:10:05
Speaker 3: of superficial, and at least with The Daily, I feel
1:10:08
Speaker 3: like I get to go a little deeper on a subject.
1:10:11
Speaker 3: You know. It tends to be a kind of a
1:10:12
Speaker 3: half an hour, you know, deep dive on a particular thing,
1:10:15
Speaker 3: and I do feel particularly I also read The New
1:10:17
Speaker 3: York Times. I know it's sort of traditional in that way.
1:10:19
Speaker 3: So if I read an article and then I kind
1:10:21
Speaker 3: of hear a podcast on the same topic, I do
1:10:22
Speaker 3: feel like I've actually gotten maybe a little bit smarter
1:10:25
Speaker 3: about something, you know, beyond the surface.
1:10:28
Speaker 2: Let me just push back, ever so slightly on how
1:10:31
Speaker 2: The Daily has evolved, because when it first came out
1:10:34
Speaker 2: and I was a regular listener, I don't want anybody
1:10:38
Speaker 2: telling me about the story that's in the paper that
1:10:42
Speaker 2: I can read. They used to kind of do the background. Hey,
1:10:45
Speaker 2: how did you start investigating this? What led to this?
1:10:48
Speaker 2: Tell us some interesting stuff that didn't make it into
1:10:50
Speaker 2: the article. It was really inside baseball and that stuff
1:10:54
Speaker 2: is kind of fascinating now whenever I check it out.
1:10:58
Speaker 2: It's the person I don't want to say reading the story,
1:11:01
Speaker 2: but it it feels like they've left a lot of that,
1:11:05
Speaker 2: you know, behind the scenes stuff back three years ago.
1:11:09
Speaker 2: It's still It's become one of the biggest podcasts in
1:11:12
Speaker 2: the world.
1:11:12
Speaker 3: It's a giant. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's interesting.
1:11:16
Speaker 2: Anything else, anything else you listen to or watch.
1:11:19
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, I'll mindless TV. I love, but
1:11:22
Speaker 3: I can embarrass myself. But tell me all that that
1:11:25
Speaker 3: sort of stuff. Yeah, I We'll stick with the daily.
1:11:27
Speaker 2: We are in the golden age of mindless TV. And
1:11:30
Speaker 2: it's not you know, if you're watching The Crown, or
1:11:34
Speaker 2: Landman or three Body Problem. There's so many fascinating shows
1:11:39
Speaker 2: out there. It's not like garbage Time like it was
1:11:42
Speaker 2: when I was a kid.
1:11:43
Speaker 3: You are right about that, and I will say that
1:11:45
Speaker 3: my wife and I became obsessed with the pit as
1:11:47
Speaker 3: many people are. It is funny. It almost makes you
1:11:50
Speaker 3: feel like, you know, halfway to being an er doc myself,
1:11:53
Speaker 3: by the way you are not, so don't think that
1:11:55
Speaker 3: that's true. But what is hilarious is my wife's tolerance
1:11:58
Speaker 3: for some of the gore stuff is a little lower
1:12:01
Speaker 3: than mine. So she watches the pit with her hand
1:12:03
Speaker 3: kind of half in front of her face.
1:12:04
Speaker 2: The whole time. My wife did. We watched the first
1:12:06
Speaker 2: couple episodes. She's like, this is just too much. It's
1:12:09
Speaker 2: like you want to relax, and it's very but it's
1:12:12
Speaker 2: a great cast and it's a great setup for stories.
1:12:15
Speaker 2: Final two questions, what sort of advice would you give
1:12:18
Speaker 2: to a recent college grad interested in a career in
1:12:22
Speaker 2: either technology or business.
1:12:25
Speaker 3: So my advice here tends to be it's always sort
1:12:30
Speaker 3: of the same. And here's how there's so much temptation
1:12:34
Speaker 3: when you're picking your job early on to pick something
1:12:37
Speaker 3: that that sort of seems like it's going to be
1:12:39
Speaker 3: good on your resume, or maybe is going to make
1:12:42
Speaker 3: you a lot of money, whatever it is. This is
1:12:44
Speaker 3: sort of the temptation because it's so sort of in
1:12:46
Speaker 3: the air, maybe now more than ever because of social media,
1:12:50
Speaker 3: and oh man, the people that I see succeed are
1:12:53
Speaker 3: really the ones that say, yes, I have an economic reality.
1:12:56
Speaker 3: I have to sort of do better than that. But
1:12:58
Speaker 3: once the economic you know, reaction has been met, it
1:13:01
Speaker 3: is all about pick something you think you're really going
1:13:03
Speaker 3: to love and are going to be good at, are
1:13:05
Speaker 3: going to be good at. And I say that, like,
1:13:06
Speaker 3: you have to be a bit introspective of this. You know,
1:13:09
Speaker 3: maybe you love you know, selling, okay, great, so take
1:13:11
Speaker 3: a sales job. Maybe you love listening to customers. Great,
1:13:13
Speaker 3: take maybe a marketing job. Maybe. But I'm trying to
1:13:16
Speaker 3: make this sound maybe a little bit more interesting than
1:13:18
Speaker 3: follow your passions, because that's so trite, But there is
1:13:20
Speaker 3: something to it that really kind of being introspective about
1:13:23
Speaker 3: what you think you're going to just jump out of
1:13:25
Speaker 3: bed every morning and love doing tends to be a
1:13:28
Speaker 3: much more powerful predictor of long term success than people
1:13:31
Speaker 3: who try to optimize for that short term sort of
1:13:33
Speaker 3: get rich quick type of thing and then find themselves
1:13:36
Speaker 3: later realizing, shoot, this isn't really my thing. It's somebody
1:13:39
Speaker 3: else's thing. Huh.
1:13:40
Speaker 2: Really really good answer, and our final question, what do
1:13:43
Speaker 2: you know about the world of consumer facing technology and
1:13:47
Speaker 2: apps that would have been useful to know twenty five
1:13:50
Speaker 2: thirty years ago when you were first getting started.
1:13:53
Speaker 3: Wow. Okay, that's also a really interesting question. You know,
1:13:57
Speaker 3: I think I've probably gone through a similar arc to
1:14:00
Speaker 3: other people where I, you know, in the nineties, maybe
1:14:03
Speaker 3: even early two thousands, was sort of a universal techno optimist.
1:14:07
Speaker 3: I probably was in the camp that said technology is
1:14:10
Speaker 3: such a powerful force for the good. And you see
1:14:14
Speaker 3: me try to harness it with World Reader specifically, of course,
1:14:17
Speaker 3: trying to technology and get people reading. In that case,
1:14:21
Speaker 3: it did work. We've gotten over twenty two million people reading,
1:14:23
Speaker 3: so that's awesome, but oh man, it is hard not
1:14:27
Speaker 3: to see some of the just terrible costs we've paid
1:14:30
Speaker 3: as a society. And so I think maybe more of
1:14:33
Speaker 3: a mindset than a particular thing of just just be
1:14:36
Speaker 3: really aware that technology is so powerful and man, oh man,
1:14:39
Speaker 3: with great power comes that great responsibility. And I'm just
1:14:42
Speaker 3: a big believer that, you know, our best leaders now
1:14:45
Speaker 3: and I'm not necessarily putting myself in the category but
1:14:48
Speaker 3: are being really thoughtful about, you know, the good of technology,
1:14:50
Speaker 3: but also really trying to avoid some of the problems.
1:14:53
Speaker 2: Good answer David, thank you for being so generous with
1:14:56
Speaker 2: your time. This has been absolutely fascinating. We have been
1:15:01
Speaker 2: speaking with David Rischer. He is the CEO of Lift,
1:15:04
Speaker 2: one of North America's largest ride sharing networks. If you
1:15:08
Speaker 2: enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any
1:15:11
Speaker 2: of the six hundred and thirty nine we've done over
1:15:13
Speaker 2: the past twelve years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Bloomberg,
1:15:20
Speaker 2: wherever you find your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss
1:15:24
Speaker 2: fine and thank the crack team that helps me put
1:15:26
Speaker 2: these conversations together each week. Alexis Nordega is my video
1:15:31
Speaker 2: and podcast producer. Jean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke
1:15:36
Speaker 2: is my producer. I'm Barry Britoltz. You're listening to Masters
1:15:40
Speaker 2: in Business on Bloomberg Radio.