State of Play in the Rideshare Wars — ft. David Risher, CEO of Lyft

This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab.

I'm Kathy Jones, Schwab's chief fixed income strategist, and I'm Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist.

Between us, we have decades of experience studying the indicators that drive the economy and how they can have a direct impact on your investments.

We know that investors have a lot of questions about the markets and the economy, and we're here to help.

Join us each week as we explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds and what sectors of the stock market are outperforming?

So Kathy will analyze what's happening in the bond market and at the Fed, and I'll give you our latest analysis of the equities market and the U.S.

economy.

And we often interview prominent guests from across the world of investing and business.

So download the latest episode and subscribe at Schwab.com slash oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

Today's number, 6,600.

That's how many Americans applied for UK citizenship last year, a record high.

Ed, did you hear about that tragic auto accident where Megan Markle was disfigured and burnt alive?

I didn't.

Well, we can wish, can't we?

Listen to me.

Markets are bigger than us.

What you have here is a structural change in the wealth distribution.

Cash is trash.

Stocks look pretty attractive.

Something's going to break.

Forget about it.

What did the American say when he was watching the British porno?

What?

The British are coming.

The British are coming.

I heard that one.

You heard that one?

I've heard that one.

You know what?

You and I have really never shared.

I don't know how you feel about Harry and Megan.

How do you feel about them?

I hate them.

I'm a huge, yeah, I really do not like Megan Markle.

I love the story of a 40-year-old divorcee saving a prince from the horrors of Buckingham Palace.

Do you remember when we were at the Soho house in Austin for South by Southwest, where your very generous boss decided to take the whole Profit Media team?

Just saying, and we saw Megan and Harry.

They were eating next to us.

Were you you at that that was the one dinner I did not make the entire team sat next to them and I was and I was busy in my hotel room anxiously prepping to do my first live podcast so I didn't see them but the rest of the team did okay so let me just tell you

After seeing them, I 100% get it.

She is so scorching hot.

We all knew that.

I feel bad now making fun of them because I just totally get it.

I 100% get it.

A few years ago, when you wrote a post about Harry and Megan,

and you had one line that I think was my favorite line that you've written before, and you were talking about how, you know, Megan's terrible for all these reasons.

And then you were like, but we have to give her credit for doing something that we all strive to do.

And that is convince our spouse that their family is terrible, which I totally.

But I've never heard

it that way.

It's very true.

It's a favorite.

Yeah.

Your family's awful.

Let me give you a little

insight tip, a little pro tip.

By the way, just to be clear, I love my girlfriend's family.

I'm totally kidding.

If anyone's listening, I love them.

You're still working it.

I get it.

I get it.

You're still trying.

Anyways, let me give you a little tip because I get the sense you're barreling

towards marriage and kids and all that good stuff.

Is that once the key to having a great relationship, I have the best relationship with my in-laws.

There's only two things you got to remember.

One, don't communicate with them, right?

That is when it all comes off the rails, is when you start talking to them.

And all of a sudden, you're, you're sort of like, you're interested to ask your father-in-law why he likes Trump.

Okay.

Just don't, don't talk to them.

And hope they, hope they speak really poor English.

Actually, my in-laws speak pretty good English, but it's not their first language.

And my father-in-law doesn't, he doesn't hear great.

It just works out so well.

And just buy the dad a Mercedes every three years.

Boom.

That's not that great advice.

That's not that actionable for me right now, aside from buying the Mercedes.

But what else can I do?

I think that's the key.

I remember, although

I knew I liked my current partner's mother when I picked her up.

And I was going to basically taking her to New York with me.

And I heard her over saying to her husband, he didn't even bring a goose.

Like I'm taking their daughter.

I should have brought a goose or something.

I thought that was funny.

Like, your mom said I should have brought a goose for you in exchange for you.

You're worth a goose.

Anyways.

Ed, what's going on?

Didn't understand that one as much as I usually do.

But I rarely do.

The British are coming.

Anyways.

All right.

Get on to the headline.

Oh, wait.

We don't have headlines today?

What's going on?

No, we don't have headlines today.

We've just got a conversation.

We're speaking with David Rischer, who is the CEO of Lyft.

What an amazing company.

They're just dominating right here.

Oh, wait.

Never mind.

Never mind.

Sorry about about that.

Sorry about that, Ed.

Careful.

He's actually a really nice guy.

He texts me.

I know.

That's the problem, Ed, just as someone who's clearly strategically absconding my identity.

Pretty soon I'm going to walk into my house and you're going to be there with your socks off hitting my kids.

Like you are definitely usurping my identity right now.

Don't get to know these people because you like them.

Right.

And you stop speaking openly and honestly about them.

And I've gotten to know David a little bit and I like him.

He's a very nice guy.

Very thoughtful.

Should we bring him in?

Let's bring him in.

Okay, let's do it.

David, thank you for joining us on the program.

Super good to be here.

We're going to start with, I mean, we have a, I have a lot of questions for us.

Okay, lay them on me.

We're going to start with just Lyft

and the ride-sharing market specifically, and then we'll get into some broader topics about you and about your career.

We were just talking off Mike earlier.

You wrote a senior thesis that was somehow more boring than mine, which we can maybe talk about later.

But for now, let's start with Lyft.

You are the CEO.

You became CEO back in 2023.

And at the time, Lyft had about 26% market share in the US.

The rest was Uber.

Today,

Lyft's market share is larger.

It's around 30%, a little higher.

But the rest is still Uber.

And Uber's at this gigantic $200 billion market cap.

Lyft is at $7 billion.

So I know I'm sure you get this question all the time, but it's sort of the question that we all have to ask.

And that is, how are you competing with Uber?

The other guys, they do their thing.

But I'm actually much more interested in the 160 billion rides that people take every year in their car, in their own private car, just in North America.

That's my biggest competition is actually inertia, you know, and the couch and your own car.

Like that's the competition.

And so we need, I mean, it's great that we picked up share.

I'll tell you about that in a second.

But what has really driven our growth, and it's been very significant growth.

You're talking about 13%, well, 15%, 17%, 19%, 15%, 14% now

on sort of $16 billion of booking, 800 million rides a year, 1.5 million drivers on the platform.

These are big numbers.

How do you grow such big numbers?

You don't just compete against your competitor.

In fact, if you focus on that, you lose.

What you do is you focus on your riders and and your drivers.

That's how you win.

And that's why we're now, you know, making money, printing cash.

Our service letters are better than ever, you know, and on and on and on.

And in a way, that's the answer to how you compete with the other guys, too.

You just do better.

You just do better.

And that's why we've picked up share.

Is this a question you get all the time?

I'm assuming it is.

I mean, it is and it isn't.

So people talk a lot about the competition.

The funny thing is that

I actually think it's part of the problem of the rideshare industry, or maybe has been for a while, is I think it got people stuck in this sort of zero-sum mode.

You know, they win, you lose, you win, they lose.

And I think it sort of ignored the much bigger question, which is, this is a good product.

This is a product that's part of people's lives, at least from our perspective, 2 million times a day, 800 million times a year.

So for me, the bigger question is, why haven't we all grown more?

And I think the answer is a lack of innovation.

And I think part of lack of innovation is because there's been that whole competitive dynamic and so focused on each other instead of focusing on customers.

So that's the big shift for me.

So what is that tangible divergation?

Why do you think you're able to grab share if you're on a very basic level?

Is it a cost advantage?

Because is it a culture advantage?

You know, co-compsi, why is Pepsi different here?

Our purpose is to serve and connect.

That's what we do every single day.

We wake up, we've got 3,000 employees, we've got 1.5 million drivers.

And the idea is how can I serve riders and drivers better than they've ever been served before?

And how can we connect them to the people and places they love?

So that's where we start.

Okay, so how does that manifest itself competitively?

Let's look at drivers for a second.

Drivers right now have a 29-point preference for driving on our platform versus on the other guys.

29 points.

That's internal data that we do every quarter.

We can share the data with you.

And it's been a remarkable sort of divergence over the last year in particular.

So that's a form of competition, right?

We're competing for the same driver base.

How are we winning?

Well, we have a 70% earnings guarantee.

We have an AI assistant that helps people plan their drives.

We have an accomplishment letter.

So you compete at sort of the street level and you say, how can we grab more preference from drivers?

And when drivers drive more for you, it allows the marketplace to work better, you know, yada yada.

Okay, how do you compete for riders?

We give better service.

Now, people don't necessarily know that right now.

And I grant you that.

I grant you that.

Right now, yes, we have a smallest price advantage, but frankly, that's tiny.

And we compete, frankly, on price sort of by matching.

Like we, we, you know, that's not really sort of a competition area as much for us.

We really want to compete on service.

I'll tell you something.

Today, we will pick you up about 30 seconds faster than our competition does on average, which is very significant considering we're a third their size.

I will tell you that our driver cancellation rate, and it's a lot of data, but here we go, when I started was about 14%.

So 14% of the time a driver will cancel on you.

Now it's down to 4.9%.

So we just over and over and over and over again provide better service.

And the reason that that, or the way that shows up, and the reason therefore it allows us to kind of claw back share is because it increases new rider activation for sure, but frequency.

And that's a huge part of it.

A huge part.

A lot of people know about ride share, but people only take it two or three times a month.

If we can do better service, they come back to us, they ride more.

And so that's why we've been growing so much.

Fortunately or unfortunately for you, Uber's become a verb or is synonymous with ride hailing.

And so you have to, you know, you're Avis.

You need to try harder.

But you're finding that consumers,

are they more loyal?

Is it

that that what sounds like a better offering, and by the way, I think focusing on the drivers is actually a very smart thing to do.

But do you see in consumer survey data that your riders are more loyal and willing to pay a price premium?

Or how does that manifest in terms of consumer feedback?

So the short answer is they are more loyal.

And they are getting more loyal every day.

So our frequency has never been higher.

Both our new riders and our frequency has never been higher.

I'm going to take a little bit of an aside and I'll come back.

I drive for Lyft about every six weeks.

And one of the things that I hear, I hear a couple of, because I always ask, I ask, why did you choose Lyft today?

And typically the responses come in a couple of categories.

Some are functional.

You know, you were faster than the other guys, you know, lower ETA.

Your price was lower.

Sure.

Then there's what I might call partner driven.

You know, I'm a Chase Sapphire Reserve holder, says a rider, and therefore, because I get points, I use you guys.

You know, these these sorts of things and we have a lot of partner door dash is a huge partner of ours a huge huge partner of ours and that becomes a big significant growth driver so those are those are sort of semi-functional kind of maybe maybe functional adjacent then you get stuff like i like your values more i just think you're a better company i can feel it i can feel the way your drivers talk about you versus the other guys and you get a whole bunch of other things the way it shows up most consistently on the financials is growth and again taking share as i mentioned when i started out we were 26 then 27 then 28 then 29 then 30 percent we're We're touching 31%.

It's not what motivates me every morning.

It's a trailing indicator, but it shows that step by step by step by step.

And then there'll be some step changes, which maybe we'll talk about another time.

But things like lift silver and some other things that really expand the market.

So it's tricky.

Look, it's a duopoly.

I mean, let's use the word, right?

And there are two people who are fighting it out every single day.

And

we fight super, super hard.

And it's great for, frankly, the whole industry.

you know, it grows the whole town because you got two people who are fighting for every single thing.

And then little by little, you pick up share.

And so, you know, start 26, then you go to to 30, then maybe you go to 35, maybe you go to 40.

And maybe the market goes, you know, and doubles and doubles again as

new things happen.

I think one of the big topics also right now in ridesharing, one is delivery.

And that's been a big investment from Uber.

And you mentioned that you have this partnership with DoorDash, which I would like to hear more about.

And the second is autonomous driving.

And, you know, you've obviously got Waymo, which is expanding.

You've got Tesla rolling out their robot taxi.

I know that Uber is also working on a lot of autonomous vehicle projects.

They're partnering with Waymo.

Talk a bit about what you're doing in terms of delivery and also

after that, in terms of autonomous driving.

Do you see?

It seems as though that's where ride sharing is headed at this point, that that's how these companies will expand.

I'm wondering if you view that the same way over at Lyft.

We decided a while ago.

So as you you mentioned, I've been in the job now about two and a half years, a little less.

And my big focus right from the beginning is customer obsession is what's going to drive profitable growth.

And as you mentioned, when I started, we were losing money.

Now we're making money.

So the thesis is sort of being

proven out.

One of the sort of, let's say, corollaries to that is focus really helps.

And so we're really focused on rideshare and doing a great rideshare experience.

And thus, for that reason, we've decided that partnership is a better strategy than trying to incorporate food delivery ourselves.

We've partnered with the best in breed.

DoorDash actually dominates the other guys in food delivery, certainly in the United States and actually much of the world.

And it's a great partnership.

And it's one of those partnerships.

It's quite, it's early.

It's only been about six months.

But gosh, man, you look at the number of, I mean, we blew away.

So Tony, who's the CEO of DoorDash, and I were on sort of a daily email the first couple of days.

We announced a partnership and we each had our own internal goals of how many people would link their accounts over the first date week month.

And I mean, we blew them away.

We basically, what we thought was going to be a six-month project turns out to be like a three-week thing of activation and literally over a million riders linking their accounts just in the first couple of weeks because they got points and rewards on both platforms by doing so.

So, long way of saying, I think partnering with the best of breed is great.

And if your riders can literally, you know, order DoorDash as they're coming home at night and get a bonus from it, so that by the time it's home, they've got an extra perk, they've maybe got a discount on their ride, and their food's been delivered.

It's great from a rider perspective and does everything you want it to do.

I think that's a good lead-in to the AV question because I think one of my big questions about AVs is how is the business going to work?

And so far, it has been largely a partnership setup.

There are questions over how viable that is, especially when it comes to Uber,

where there are questions over, you know, does Uber lose some leverage if the only way that they're getting into autonomous vehicles is through forming these partnerships where they're reliant on other companies to build those vehicles for them.

There was a time when they were maybe going to build those autonomous robot taxis themselves and they decided, no, we're going to take the partnership route, which is what you've done as well.

You've decided we're going to partner with DoorDash instead.

So I guess I'm interested in why does the partnership route make the most sense

and how will that play out in the robot taxi business in the long term?

Is that the Lyft strategy?

The networks that create hybrids between human-driven and machine-driven, robot-driven vehicles, they're going to win.

And the reason they're going to win is because from a customer perspective, of course, AVs are novel right now, but eventually they just become commonplace.

They're just another way to get around.

They have certain advantages, they have certain disadvantages.

They don't pick up your luggage for you, but they don't listen to you while you're talking on the phone.

Okay.

So you're going to want them as part of your network.

Absolutely, you are.

But you can't only have robot taxis.

You can't.

They're just not enough.

They're not enough at the end of the Taylor Swift concert.

They're not enough at five o'clock at night or nine o'clock in the morning.

They're not enough when it it starts to pour down raining and everybody wants to take a ride share.

They're not enough because in rural areas, they're just, it's going to take years and years and years.

Even the most aggressive estimates, and I'm going to set Tesla aside for a second because they're very hard to model, but the most aggressive estimates, which is a funny understatement, hard to model.

Anyway, so like, but it's,

you know, maybe it's 30,000 cars by 2030, something like that in total

in the U.S.

that are robot taxes.

Okay, again, we have 1.5 million drivers on the platform.

Each one of them has a car.

And the other guys have, you know, call it a similar number, maybe bigger.

So

you're going to want some sort of hybrid, because most customers aren't going to want to have five different apps depending on what city they're in or whether it's raining or not or whatever, whatever.

Okay.

So now the question becomes, well, do you want to sort of fully integrate or do you want to partner?

And I'm going to get like, Scott's a professor.

I'm going to get a little professorial for a second.

Apologize in advance, but like think of the whole value chain here.

Like you've got the OEMs, the people who make the cars.

Okay.

Then you've got the tech providers, the A-B tech providers, right?

That might be a mobile eye or it might be a Waymo.

Then you've got the whole financing thing.

Somebody's got to buy these things and own these things.

They're expensive assets.

Then you've got what we call fleet management.

Someone's got to keep them clean.

Someone's got to keep them maintained.

Someone's got to keep them ready to go on the road.

Then you've got all the

what we call marketplace, so the supply-demand matching stuff.

And then you have pricing and ETA, customer service, all these other things.

So each one of these is its own thing.

And you could try to do all of those things.

Sure, you could.

You know,

that would be an unusual strategy because most people aren't great at everything from making cars and tech to customer service and marketplace and all the rest you can do it though if you tried but it's very very expensive or you can say well let me specialize so what we specialize is in the marketplace stuff and the demand management we've got three million people out every day who open up our app and then we have this whole thing called flex drive which is a fleet management system that runs about 15 000 cars on it right now it's garages it's maintenance it's all kinds of stuff it's charging it's tire pressure it's all the stuff to keep all that's an asset we have so we believe that our assets all of our customers all of our customer service all of our demand management, all of our pricing, all of our ETA estimation, gate codes for millions of planned communities, pick up and drop off, all these things that take years and years to build, plus fleet management, that's what we bring to the table.

The last thing I'll say is, and you kind of mentioned this before, of course, if there were only one supplier of AV tech, that'd be awkward for us because then we'd be beholden to somebody who's got tech, which is pretty cool.

It's safe and novel and all sorts of cool things.

But that's not the case.

That's not the case.

There's so many, I mean, you just, you can't even throw a stone without, you know, of course there's mobile eye, of course, there's Tesla, of course, there's Waymo, of course, there's Zeus, of course, there's, and then you get to the Chinese guys.

Of course, there's Pony AI, and there's WeRide, and there's Baidu, and there's BYD.

And then you get to the people you haven't even heard of yet.

Maybe Nvidia gets into the space.

Maybe, you know, OpenAI gets into the space.

And then there are guys in the garage who are just thinking about it today, who haven't even thought about it, you know, how they're going to solve all the problems.

So I think the chance of there being, let's call it supply concentration is very, very low.

I think the chance of demand aggregation mattering a lot and fleet management and pricing being important, plus a hybrid network of millions of drivers is very high.

And that's why I think we win.

And I think we become the best way for people to commercialize these very expensive assets, put them on our network and just go, go, go.

So you have about 24 million, my understanding, as active users on your platform, which is a lot of people.

And consumers are lazy, or I find they are, and that is they're used to your app, they're used to your interface, and so they're just inclined to

get their rides through Lyft.

Do you think, what's your gut telling you?

Do the Waymos and

the Teslas and potentially the NVIDIA's and the other people that come in, do you think they sit back and say, okay, we want to be the operating system and the technology and partner with the people who have already acquired these people and are used to a certain user interface, the Lyfts and the Ubers of the world?

Or do you see them going vertical?

Are you,

and what is Tesla's,

to the extent you've had conversations with them or not, what does your gut tell you?

Are these companies going to be suppliers or are they going to go vertical and then compete against you?

I think you right now are sitting in the boardroom of Waymo and asking yourself that question.

And I think the answer right now, and I'm not betraying confidences, I think you can just see this as you look at what the different companies are doing, is people right now are going for optionality, right?

It's very, again, we can come back to Tesla because it's a bit of a special case.

It's more of a future possibility rather than a present day thing.

But if you look at the present day, and let's just look at Waymo, who's obviously very, very advanced in this space, they are simultaneously promoting Waymo 1, which is their own product, as well as partnering with others who can provide the demand for them.

And then they're effective with the supplier.

And it's possible that that is stable.

I mean, in other words, that you can do both, right?

Many companies have done this.

They have their first-party apps and then they let third parties on the platform, right?

That's a way that companies work sometimes.

I happen to believe, of course, I'm partisan, but I also think that there's some data to back this up, that the dominant strategy will be the partnership strategy because I think it's more capital efficient.

It's very expensive to run, to build and run a rideshare system.

It's very, very expensive.

Again,

you have to think, go down a path for two seconds.

3 million people a day open your app.

Every single time they open an app, they're seeing five different, then they put in a destination.

They're seeing a whole bunch of different prices.

Every one of those prices has to be calculated in real time.

Every one of those ETAs has to be calculated in real time.

Those routes have to get vended out to a bunch of different drivers.

And then depending on various dynamics, you know, whatever, you got to

the supply is not constant.

Drivers are coming on and off the platform.

You say, well, maybe EVs aren't, but they need to be, because guess what?

Sometimes you're going to have a lot of demand, sometimes not.

So it's a math.

The math problem is huge.

The compute is huge.

And then there's all the customer service and all these other things.

The point is, building and maintaining that and getting it better every single day for every single airport and every single small town and now over in Europe as well, it's expensive.

So I think if you're, sorry for the long answer, but I think if you're the rational player says, I will mostly focus on building something that is unique and super high quality and super safe, and I'm going to try to sell it to as much many people as possible.

Maybe I'll experiment with a little first party self myself.

Maybe that's so that I can understand.

Hotels do this, right?

They own some properties and then they vend out a lot of the rest to franchisees.

Maybe it becomes a little like that, you know?

But so I think it'll be a mixed model, but I think the dominant thing is going to be, I want to sell and commercialize

as much of my tech as possible.

And that's best done to marketplaces like us who are willing buyers.

And we've got tens of millions of riders who, to your point, are already used to a certain thing and trust a certain thing.

We'll be right back after the break.

And if you're enjoying the show so far, be sure to give Prof Shi Markets a follow wherever you hit your podcasts.

Support for this show comes from Nike.

No matter the team, no matter the ranking, every season starts with the same goal, win it all.

And Nike knows that reaching for that goal starts long before the final whistle.

It starts with the battles at practice, the losses that keep you up at night, and everything in between.

Nike has the best gear to get you on the court, field, or track and pushing through the hardest moments.

So whether you're the champ or you're looking to knock them off the pedestal, Nike is there to help you with winning no matter where you play.

Visit Nike.com for more information and be sure to follow Nike on Instagram, TikTok, and other social platforms for more great basketball moments.

We're back with Property Markets.

So I think of you as the number two that needs to be

in the way you continue to grab market share is through focus or just owning certain, I don't know,

you become known as the company that has better service or is better to your drivers or is especially strong in rural areas versus urban or vice versa.

When you look at the different points of differentiation or growth, it could be autonomous, it could be food delivery, it could be a messenger service, it could be a luxury offering, it could be partnering with new types of transportation, vertical takeoff and landing, which I'll come back to.

What growth channel are you most excited about and think, okay, if I was going to double down on something and try and, I mean, to be blunt, I've gotten to know you and I like you and I'm rooting for you.

But

I don't immediately feel a point of differentiation from you guys.

I don't immediately go,

when I think of Lyft, quite frankly, your brand association is you're the number two.

That's not the brand association you want.

If you were going to overinvest in an area and say, in five years, I want Lyft to be known as the guys who are, or the right-hand company that is really good at X, what is that?

I want to be known for great service.

I really do.

And I'm talking about exceptional service.

I'm talking about every single time you order a Lyft, you know what you're going to get.

It's going to be fantastic every single time.

And if you have a problem, we're always going to make it right.

I'll give you a tiny example of how we do it today.

Today, if you use this for a scheduled ride to the airport and we're more than 10 minutes late, we pay you 100 bucks, up to 100 bucks, even to take the competition i don't care and no questions asked and guess what guess what our our payout rate is 0.001 you know what i mean it's like we've gotten that really really good our black offering our luxury offering it's relatively small now it's not been an area of investment but it's doubled year on year just in the last year as we've started to focus on it so if i have to say number one let me ask answer the question also a different way i think it's not just about what we're better at what we're unique at, but also how our customers think about us, how they perceive us.

I want our customers to say, you know what?

And I'm talking about our riders now.

I'm not doing this just the default.

I'm making my own decision.

I'm making my own decision.

I want to support a company that treats its drivers better.

I want to support a company where I know I'm going to get great service.

I want to support a company that has values like mine.

Totally agree with you because you can hear the number of words I'm having to use to answer your question that we continue to have work to do to refine that.

that value prop.

And,

you know, in my two and a half years, the first focus has been getting the basics right.

And now, and now here's finally the answer to your question, an enormous focus on brand is going to be one of our big pushes.

It has to be.

It has to be.

There's so many products out there in the world where people are making the decision based on their heart, based on what they think and love and fall in love with.

And of course, rationally, I've had a great service, it picked me up super fast, but they also got to fall in love with this.

And so that's my big thing over the next couple of years is how do you get love going?

I love your focus on customer obsession and on service.

And I think this is probably a good moment to look at kind of your career path, because I know that you were an early executive at Microsoft and then you were an early executive at Amazon too.

In other words, you worked very closely with two of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, and that is Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

And Bezos is sort of the king of customer obsession

and of just dialing in on service and how important that is.

So my question, what did you learn from those two about entrepreneurship, about business, or even just about life in general?

What I really learned at Microsoft, and some of this really was, I mean, I didn't work for Bill, of course, I worked for, you know, somebody who somebody is somebody, but I saw him in action is just the focus of being a fierce competitor, a fierce competitor.

Oh my God, was he fierce?

And it's so interesting because in the package software world, So much of the, you have this crazy network effect, right?

Like once people start to use Excel, once it gets over 50 or 60% in your company, it's going to go to 90%.

And he knew that he was like we got to get i mean it's not his words but this is the vibe it's like you got to get to you know you got to get to a critical mass and then and then you move on to the next thing i remember someone asking this question you know how much time do you spend thinking about excel and he's like ah not so much because they've kind of already won the thing so like so the sort of frankly winner take all mentality he was super aggressive and i and i learned a bunch from that i had a million pictures up in my office of literally ceos of competing companies and i would you know throw darts at him stuff like that from jeff customer obsession and you know and it sounds trite now because people have said it so many times but i mean he really was a a deep believer that, you know, everything is one click away from everything else on the internet.

And so if you don't just fight every single day, wake up every morning terrified that your customer is going to abandon you, you know, you're losing.

And I've really, you know, I brought that to Lyft.

We talk about our values a lot.

Customer obsession is number one by far.

And then I want to say something else, if you don't mind.

So I then went on and did a bunch of other things, including running a nonprofit for many years, for about 12 years that I founded myself of Getting Kids Reading called World Reader.

I bring that up because from there, I really learned a sense of purpose.

And in that case, it was getting kids to read.

Now it's serving and connecting at Lyft.

One of those principles

that I really respect that you mentioned that you do is that you drive.

You are a Lyft driver and you do it regularly.

And I'm pretty sure Waffle House has a similar system where I think they say that the CEO has to be a line cook one day of the year.

And I think there are probably some other companies that do this as well.

But But in other words,

you know what it's like to be

to be a driver.

Tell us why that's important to you

and tell us what that does in terms of customer service and how that benefits the company.

So, I mean, I have to say first, almost selfishly, I just love it.

I love it.

I do it every six weeks or so, and it's just super, super fun.

I literally go, I don't tell my comms team.

I don't tell anyone else.

They all go bananas when this happens, but I'm like, look, I'm just going to get out there and drive for two, three, four hours

in the Bay Area, which is where I live.

And it's so great.

So first, here are the things.

First of all, you learn what it's like to be a driver, right?

You learn the stress you're under.

You learn the stress you're under.

You're simultaneously trying to figure out what the person in the backseat wants, where you're going to go,

whether you're going to take another ride afterwards.

And you have all these kind of interesting tools, which tell you where the demand is.

And you can sort of draw a circle and say, I only want to drive within this area because I got to get home by five o'clock to see my wife or whatever it is.

So

it's sort of more complicated than people realize to juggle all this stuff.

And so so you get a real sense of that.

And so inevitably, you know, I come home just on the driver's side with a whole bunch of ideas for the driver team about ways we can make this information a little easier to understand, you know, make this a little bit bigger or change this, whatever it is.

Then from the driver's side, it's great.

Excuse me, from the rider side, it's great.

It's great.

Like I always ask, you know, what did how come you chose this today?

How come you chose Lyft?

I don't say us.

And, you know, sometimes people are very precise.

Sometimes people are not.

By the way, sometimes people don't want to talk.

You can kind of tell that like the first 10 or 15 seconds.

I think you might have drove Scott.

Yeah, that was Scott.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Shoot, shoot, shoot.

I think I drove you too.

Well, but I'll tell you such a funny story about this.

I have a billion.

A lot of people get in, and you can tell, like, their vibe is not like, I now want to have a 15-minute conversation.

But if I ask, how's your day going?

Oh, my God.

It's like I'm the bartender.

I'm like frigging shaking drinks up at the front of the car, like talking about their recent divorce.

There's a woman I picked up at 11 o'clock in the morning, and she had just spent the night at a guy's house.

And I said, what's going on?

She said, well, he broke up with me a year ago, but then my boyfriend broke up with me last night.

So I'm going over to her.

Anyway, we ended up having a conversation about making wise choices, which was super fun.

Then another conversation with a guy that wanted career advice when he found out who I was.

So we spent another 15 minutes in the car after the thing was over.

My favorite ones are ones where I really learned something about what the rider wants.

So there's a woman named Ann, and I picked her up in Sausalito a couple of months ago.

Actually, it was last year at this point, time flies.

And she was so stressed out because she said, every morning I wake up.

and the prices bounce around between San Francisco and Sausalito and San Francisco

a ton.

And if it's less less than 20 bucks, I'll take a Lyft.

If it's more than 40 bucks, I'll stay home.

It's 30 bucks.

It's kind of a crapshoot.

But today, it's somebody's birthday in my office.

We had donuts.

So anyway, literally, so we have this whole conversation.

So at the end, I'm like, well, I'm the CEO of Lyft.

So she goes bananas and I'll have Rick Steve in a car, which is, which is super fun.

And then we start to develop this product called Price Lock.

And it really was for her.

It really was for her.

I wanted to lock the price in.

So now for $2.99, I'm going to always be closing.

$2.99, you can lock in the price for a certain route.

It stops all the bouncing around.

It's a great product and people love it.

I was actually just on the phone with her a couple of weeks ago.

She actually, you know, we're talking about some other stuff because now she's, you know, I use her to kind of ping her from time to time.

And so that's kind of what happens.

So the,

you know, the short answer is not only do I learn a lot, but I, and I get conviction around certain things.

Conviction, like we have to solve this problem.

We got to deal with it.

But I also, and it gives me, frankly, some sort of moral authority, you might say, beyond just I'm the CEO.

So, you know, that's so it's that's helpful.

But it also just reminds me every single day what an important part of people's lives we are.

So David, as you were a driver, if you've ever had a passenger say one of the following things,

just drive, please, or you're

or you're going the wrong way, or

just do what the fucking app says, boss.

It's not that hard.

Then, then you may have driven me.

You may have driven me.

By the way, I think I probably have the lowest.

I'm not one of those people that's really nice.

You're probably banned from the app.

That's why you use Lyft.

Yeah, I don't think you actually are allowed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maybe that's it.

Anyways, making friends wherever I go.

I can tell.

David,

I'm just sort of curious to get your 30,000-foot view on where do you think

generally transportation, when you think about

electric or rail or a super app,

what trends do you see in transportation?

And you and I have had some really interesting conversations

about trying to get people out of their house and get them connected.

But more broadly, even beyond kind of ride-hailing, do you see any big, big trends in transportation?

The rite of passage of the 16-year-old of getting his own or her own drive, their own driver's license is kind of done.

So strange, isn't it?

Where did you grow up?

It was everything when I was growing up.

It was everything.

I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland.

I'm not proud to say this, but I failed my first driver test.

Me too.

Oh, Ed, what a mistake for Ed to let me know that.

Oh, my God.

Oh, you're going to regret that.

Me and the CEO of Lyft.

I'm in good company.

Oh, my God.

I'm literally the GRU that has leverageable information against Ed Elson now.

I'm sorry, go ahead, David.

I got to tell the story because I felt so misled.

And it's a total trick.

It was a total trick.

Like it's one of those closed courses and you finish, you parallel park, which was like, that's the thing.

I was like, you got to get the parallel park.

And I said, parallel park.

Then you pull up and the instructor is like, that's great.

Now just go over there by the wall and we're all done.

And what you don't see is the stop sign that's right there.

And you don't act, you don't.

do a full stop because you're just so anyway i blew through it uh bummer but anyway past the second time long story so back to the thing i think uh freedom is what that was all about, right?

I can do my own thing.

I can make my own choices.

And now you have different ways to have freedom.

And mostly, frankly, you know, us and the other guys.

You jump in the car and whatever.

So that's a big, big shift.

Then the car ownership.

What's your first car, right?

I still remember my first car.

It was a Honda Accord.

My mom actually gave it to me.

It was used.

It was her boyfriends, you know, all this sort of stuff.

I drove it in senior year in college.

You know, it was kind of my thing, chick magnet.

I don't want to brag, but whatever.

Anyway, that's kind of gone too.

I mean, of course, people will eventually buy their first car, but it'll be later in their life.

So these are sort of, you know, very foundational sorts of things.

Let me flip to the other side for a second.

As you get closer to your end of life, we're all getting older, right?

It's happening.

And demographically, you know, just also just the laws of physics.

We just, I'm going to promote a second.

We just launched a product called Lift Silver a couple of months ago.

It's all about getting older people out and engaged because that's how you live your best life is when you're out and engaged and you're at your kids' soccer game or you're at your doctor's appointment that you didn't miss because you don't want to drive yourself because you're worried about driving, whatever it is.

Anyway, it's been a massive hit, massive, massive hit, taken off much faster than I hoped.

And I was hoping I had big hopes.

Literally, people hugged me because of this product.

So I think if you look at both ends of people's lives, transportation is going to play a new role, largely because other people are doing the driving and you don't have to.

You can text.

You can do whatever the frigg you want to.

You know, you can enjoy your life while this is happening.

So what does that mean?

That means car, and then autonomous, of course.

So as autonomous happens, it's not just about somebody else driving the car or the car driving itself.

It's about, you know, lounge mode.

You're going to be reclining, you're going to be going to sleep.

You're going to be in your camper, you know, at night, and then it's going to, you wake up the next morning and there you are at Yellowstone and it's driven you, all this sort of stuff.

So I think, and then when you think even bigger, you mentioned things like vertical takeoff and landing.

Like that is going to happen.

You can't, I'm in New York City right now.

Already I've had a conversation about some guy actually works for us.

He's an amazing guy, but he was frustrated about how long it took him to get to

a vacation house in the Hamptons, just like everybody does.

They're frustrated by that.

And inevitably, it talks helicopters and drones and all these sorts of things.

So I think maybe a very long way of saying the transportation, I think for some period of time was super novel, right?

Model T, oh my God, it's not a horse, amazing.

And then it was kind of everywhere.

And then there's the highway system, right?

Then it's big open road and Route 66 and interstates and all this sort of stuff.

And then, you know, trains were cool and they were kind of not cool in the United States.

And then planes were cool and then they're kind of annoying.

And like all that stuff is true.

And I think there's another big thing.

And I think it's when it becomes kind of cool and fun again because Autonomous drives you there because you don't have to actually do a lot of the work and you can live your best life.

And it's going to get in my, you know, I will bring it back to that.

I want as many people off their friggin couch and not watching, you know, Netflix or getting food delivery as much as I like that and they're great partners of ours.

But man, I want them out in the world, out in the world.

That's how we live our best lives.

Just from an organizational perspective, like

how are you supposed to maintain strong service when you're managing a company of thousands of employees?

Like, I mean, just for context, I'm reading this book, Unreasonable Hospitality right now, which talks about all this stuff in terms of the restaurant industry.

And, you know, it's hard to do that at a restaurant where you're managing like 20, 30, 40 people.

And I can just assume that as you scale, it becomes increasingly difficult not only to manage, but also just to have any contact with the customer experience.

Like it just, you become so detached.

when you're managing this large of an organization.

So just give us some of your philosophy, your management philosophies on how how you maintain service as you scale and as you build out a company of literally thousands of people.

I love every single thing about this question.

First of all, I read Unreasonable Hospitality about a year ago,

and it changed my life because I started to think about this very, very directly.

Let me give you a little bit of data.

So we have 3,000 people who are employees at Lyft, but we have 1.5 million people who drive on the platform.

They are independent contractors.

And it's not just a legal distinction.

What it is is an acknowledgement of what you're saying.

It is very, very distributed, right?

And people drive for all sorts of reasons, all sorts of reasons.

Okay.

So I actually put this question to two super interesting people over the last six months.

One was Thomas Keller, who runs the French Laundry, as you know.

One was Eric Rupart, who runs Le Bernadette in New York City.

And both of those, and I asked the same question about, how would you create the level of culture around service, not just for the 30, 40, 50 people who work for your restaurant, but for one and a half million people who don't even work for your rest, how would you do that?

And both of them are so interesting.

I mean, they get thousands of questions.

They're mostly like, yeah, yeah, whatever, whatever.

Both of them, and I don't think I'm speaking out of school here to say, like, they stopped in their tracks.

They're like, that is a mind-blowing question.

That is a mind-blowing question.

Like, let me help you think about that.

And so both of them gave me some ideas, but I can tell you that that is what I'm hell-bent to solve that problem, hell-bent to solve that problem.

And I hope 10 years from now, when people look back and they say, you know, what did this guy do?

Oh my God, he somehow figured out a crack.

He, they, the team, figured out how to crack the code on getting one and a half million drivers to level up their service to a level of consistency and excellence that you might typically see

in a high-end restaurant.

Let me say one last thing.

From a million miles away, you think driving,

you have a certain sense of what driving is.

And it may be sort of a transactional sense.

People do it when they can't get another job or when they need extra money, whatever.

People drive for all kinds of reasons, but here's what's true.

Drivers really like driving.

Most of them, some of them don't, but most of them really like it.

And they actually have a lot of pride.

So what we try to do is we try to say, okay, drivers, it's not just about how much money are we paying you.

It's not just about, it's how can we help you move through your life.

And so we have this accomplishment letter thing.

You can literally, as a driver, come in and push a button.

It says Scott started driving.

It's AI driven.

Scott started driving 18 months ago.

He's a super grouchy driver.

You should never have.

No, that's not at all.

But like he's one of our top 5% drivers.

You know, he always shows up on time.

Here are three comments that are sort of representative of his driving skills.

And we have stories.

And then, you know, I would hire

Scott for any service-oriented job you're looking for.

So that could be a baggage handler.

It could be a front receptionist at a hotel.

We have amazing stories.

There's a guy who did this and literally he couldn't get a job.

Then he attached his reference letter and now he's working at IKEA in exactly this way.

So

such a long way of saying, but I hope you're getting the point.

If we invest in our drivers and we help them understand that they're not just in the driving industry, they're in the service industry.

And we help support them, not just by paying them in a certain way, but actually by supporting their life dreams.

And we do a bunch of other things with them to upskill and so forth and so on.

I think we have a shot.

And then we're very clear on what our values are and what our expectations are and take our incentive systems and align them.

We have a driver loyalty program that is now starting to reward reward drivers for exhibiting better service and a new feedback mechanism that allows riders to help drivers see how they can improve their service.

Then you can start to create a sort of a flywheel ecosystem that I think really does level up.

I just learned from your answer that Thomas Keller, one of the greatest chefs of all time, is advising

Lyft on how to run the business, which I just love.

And yet.

We're not hearing any of the advice.

We can't get a nugget.

We can't get just a little bit.

Did you see what I just did there?

I just completely jumped over that.

100%.

We can't hear anything.

Totally, totally.

100%.

All I can tell you is he was very interested.

And I do have an excellent selfie of the two of us standing together.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Well, maybe you can send us the selfie because that in and of itself is fascinating.

Happen to.

He might be surprised to hear that he's advising us, by the way.

I think it was a little bit more of a one-and-done type of conversation.

But anyway, I'll send you the selfie, and who knows?

Maybe, you know, we'll see.

We'll be right back.

As a founder, you're moving fast towards product market fit, your next round, or your first big enterprise deal.

But with AI accelerating how quickly startups build and ship, security expectations are also coming in faster.

And those expectations are higher than ever.

Getting security and compliance right can unlock growth or stall it if you wait too long.

Vanta is a trust management platform that helps businesses automate security and compliance across more than 35 frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more.

With deep integrations and automated workflows built for fast-moving teams, Vanta gets you audit ready fast and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring as your models, infrastructure, and customers evolve.

That's why fast-growing startups like Langchang, Ryder, and Cursor have all trusted Vanta to build a scalable compliance foundation from the start.

Go to Vanta.com/slash Vox to save $1,000 today through the Vanta for Startups program and join over 10,000 ambitious companies already scaling with Vanta.

That's vanta.com/slash box to save $1,000 for a limited time.

We're back with Property Markets.

One of the things that we have been talking a lot about on this podcast in relation to what has been happening in politics,

we have been somewhat surprised at the lack of pushback from the business leader community against some of the policies that we've seen.

You know, we could talk about immigration policies, but more so what we're seeing with tariffs and the ways that that is affecting our economy and the ways that it is going to affect our economy.

And we have been surprised by how many public company CEOs

are kind of shrugging or,

you know, capitulating, whatever it is, sucking up to the president.

I'd just like to get your perspective on that point.

How do you feel?

about your role as a public company CEO?

as someone who runs just a very large public company.

Have you been surprised by this too?

And do you have any thoughts on this topic?

I have been surprised.

I do have thoughts.

I think the fear of retaliation is real.

And I think that stops a lot of people from saying anything.

I think there's a general view of let's not be the tallest poppy is sometimes the term people say,

so that I don't get targeted, frankly.

I think that's a big part of it.

I will also say I've been been disappointed.

I think there are executives who had the opportunity to speak up and chose not to.

And I think they probably could have.

And I think that the world would be a little better as a result.

Now, I also have to say, I've spoken to people in the current administration, and there are some very, very competent people there.

Competent, that sounds like a backhand of competent, very, very passionate people who are actually really trying to do, you know, quote, the right thing, unquote, trying to make business easier to get done, trying to reduce stuff that probably was, you know, made sense at a certain time and no longer does.

So I actually think there's some genuine, I'm talking about a slightly different level maybe from what you're talking about, but I think there's some genuine desire within the administration to do the thing that sort of everyone kind of wants, which is like, let's get rid of stuff that doesn't make sense and let's sort of be kind of a raging centrist.

I think Scott used to say this sometimes.

I'm talking about from kind of a regulation perspective and whatever.

So anyway, that's a little bit of a side point, but I just wanted to make sure that folks heard that.

I did a little video a couple of weeks ago where I talked about values and the importance of leading with purpose and some of the values that we demonstrate as a rideshare business.

We have a product called Women Plus Connect that allows women to sort of preferentially choose each other as rider-driver.

And it makes them feel safe.

It makes them feel secure.

It drives our business.

It's a very popular feature.

It's the type of thing that I wanted to speak very clearly about and say this is something that we'll continue to be committed to and are continuing to actually invest in.

I could sort of go on and on.

But so we talk a lot about how our values show up in the way we do business and that those values strengthen our business.

It's one of the reasons why we are gaining share on the other guys is because people respond to it.

We're targeting communities that maybe other folks are overlooking.

So I think if I wanted to sum it up, I might say my surprise comes both from a little bit of a values perspective, but also I think there's a way to sort of, you might say, thread the needle, like really kind of say, I'm going to stand up for my values and it's going to drive my business forward.

And if you don't like it, challenge me because I'm okay with that.

I think I am on the right side of this one.

You have a very impressive background.

I don't know many people who started at Microsoft, went to Amazon, and then spent 12 years trying to help encourage kids to read and then went back to be the CEO of a public company.

We're the same age.

You're obviously economically secure.

You've checked a lot of boxes.

What's left for you?

What does success look like for you in five or 10 years?

If you think these are the box or boxes left for me to check, what are those things?

Look, I first want to acknowledge, I have been super, super lucky and I've made some good choices along the way.

Of course, both those things are true.

I was the 37th employee at Amazon.

You don't get to, you know, not that many people get to say that, actually, I think just one.

Okay.

So

I don't know that I have a super clear view of what's next i can tell you i'm absolutely loving my job i literally jump out of bed even on saturdays i'm like my wife is like david you know i'm like i wish it were monday my wife's like settle down david just just settle down so so so but but now let's zoom out every saturday morning i do something i should do two things saturday morning you might find both of these interesting uh the second thing i do is i write a letter to our board of directors every single week an email every single week and it's always structured exactly the same way the good the bad that's it then there's some some data that's consistent from week to week and maybe a few pictures that tell the story.

But the good and the bad, I find it very grounding.

I think it kind of helps me think of what we accomplished over this week and what we're kind of up to.

And it helps keep the board very involved.

And so the board meetings tend to be much more productive as a result.

That's a total side comment, but it's just part of how I set my Saturday morning.

The first thing I do is more important, which is I write in a physical journal for about a half an hour about typically four things.

All right, how's my work going?

How's my relationship with my family?

How's my i have two daughters?

I have a wife.

I have brothers and so forth.

How's my relationship with my friends?

Am I reaching out to them?

Have I talked to somebody in this last week?

Do I have plans to talk to somebody this next week?

Whatever it is.

And then how's my health?

And by health, I mean, not just sort of the basics, like do I have a cold or not or whatever it is, but like, you know, have I gone to the gym?

Have I kind of stayed active for the week?

So I don't know.

And on all those,

I don't sort of give myself a five-star rating or whatever, but I kind of just reflect on each of those things for a little bit.

And I suspect that at age, I'm about to turn 60 years old in a couple of days.

You know, then I'll be 70, then I'll be 80.

I have a goal of living to 100, hopefully healthily.

So I hope, number one, I'm alive and on that path.

Number two, I hope I'm still thinking about those four things and that I'm making progress on all four of those and still loving all four.

So that's going to be the, that'll be the framework.

I don't know the specifics.

Done with questions, Scott.

I'll wrap this up.

Yeah, I am.

Okay.

Scott was taking a moment to reflect on that.

Scott was reflecting on his health.

He was thinking.

I could see.

I was just thinking,

how can you be, how can you go to Princeton and fail your first driver's test?

That's what I was thinking.

Well, you know what?

I'm just reading David's bio.

David is also a target.

So that's two for two.

Princeton, Harvard, Amazon, Microsoft.

Yeah.

Jesus.

Just before we close here, David, any advice that you would give to young people starting their careers?

I mean, a lot of people look up to you.

You're kind of

reached the heights in business in a lot of ways.

What advice would you give to a young person who's just starting out right now?

I mean, the first thing I would say is don't stress about the future so much.

Gosh, there are all sorts of reasons to worry about the world right now.

I think we're going to be okay.

And I think, particularly when you're in your 20s, you're getting so much incoming of all the stuff going on and you have so much pressure to sort of like, what is my thing going to be?

What's my career or whatever?

And I'm really like, gosh, your 20s is your time to explore.

So the first thing I would say is reduce the stress because I don't think it's going to help you.

And second of all, take your 20s to just explore.

Don't, don't stress about like, what is my career?

I, gosh, I could, in retrospect, I can tell you what a beautiful career I've had.

And I've done all these, but no, it was just all like I did a thing and I was good at that and another thing.

I was good good at that.

I phone call.

I just took the phone call.

I did a thing.

So like, anyway, number one, like, don't, don't worry so much about a master plan when you're a kid.

Just, you know, explore.

The second thing I think, and this is, I mean, the whole follow your passion thing is so trite.

And, you know, people have all sorts of things about that, which I get.

I've heard you talk about this, Scott.

But

I don't talk about quite that way.

What I do say, though, is don't follow the money.

Don't follow the money.

And it's such a mistake I see people make is they think, oh my God, I'm going to take this job because I'm going to make more money effectively.

And it's like such a dumbass thing to do.

First of all, there's never enough.

There's literally never never enough quick side thing.

My wife wrote a whole book on this topic.

It's called We Need to Talk, a memoir about wealth.

It's been the impact wealth has had on our family.

It's a very personal story.

It's a memoir.

I'm a small supporting character.

You know, other people are big.

But the point is that one of the things she talks about is there is never enough.

So don't be doing that because that's a dumb goal.

You're setting yourself up for failure.

On the other hand, do do the things that you're good at.

You do do the things that you're good at.

The things that bring you joy, of course, to also what you're good at.

Because if you're good at something, you will do better.

And if you do better, you will get compensated.

And if you are compensated, that'll make you not exactly happy, but it'll give you more options to do other things.

And so, you know, I think probably every word on this topic has been said a million times before, but that's just kind of my philosophy.

I'm a little bit of a, don't overplan it, don't overthink it.

Use a little bit of exploration time in your 20s so you don't get, you know, on that too early.

But man, oh man, if there's one thing, don't follow the money because it's a loser.

You'll never get there.

David Rischer has served as CEO of Lyft since 2023 and as a member of the board since 2021.

Prior to Lyft, David co-founded World Reader, a non-profit organization that has helped 21 million people read, served as a senior vice president of U.S.

Retail and Amazon and as a general manager at Microsoft.

He holds a BA in comparative literature.

Gosh, I can't speak today from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

David, thank you very much for joining us.

This was great.

And go tigers.

Go tigers.

There you go.

That was a lot of fun, you guys.

Thank you, Ed.

Thank you, Scott.

Yeah, that was fun.

Thank you for doing that, David.

Scott, what'd you think of that?

So a quantitative observation and a qualitative.

The quantitative one is, I think he represents the company really well.

I had no idea they had that level of market share.

I thought,

quite frankly, I thought, and this speaks to probably he has a problem with his comms department.

I thought Lyft was dying a slow death.

And I did not think they were grabbing market share.

And given that the market is growing, I just didn't know that.

In the U.S., we should clarify.

The U.S.

market share.

It's still a big deal, but Uber is still taking over the rest of the world.

I would not have thought that Lyft was gaining share against Uber in any large market.

So, and I look at their price to sales.

It's one.

Uber's four.

Uber's more diversified, has more scale.

I think they still lack real differentiation.

I think they've got to make a big bet on something as opposed to just being right now.

They're just known as the number two.

And I don't think you solve that problem.

And then my other observation is the reason I've gotten to know David accidentally because he shares a concern about young men, and we've gotten to know each other a little bit.

And it's the reason why I don't get to know these guys is you like them.

This guy is really likable.

They're just starting.

We can't have CEOs on the podcast anymore.

We're going to just start, we're going to become sycophants.

Well, I've gotten to know this guy.

He took 12 years off, I think, to...

to work on a non-profit trying to encourage kids to read.

That's like, I'm pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg will never do that.

But he's a, he's very, I mean,

that guy's impossible not to like, in my view.

And so I think he's in the right seat.

I think they are struggling.

They've got to make a big bet and be more than just the number two when you hear their brand name.

What do you think?

Yeah, I think it's really interesting what you say about the price sales multiple there.

And that is, I mean, I agree.

I really enjoyed that conversation.

I really like him.

But the question as a CEO is how can you increase those multiples?

I mean, just as you said there, you didn't know that they had as large of a market share as they do in America.

And whose fault is that?

Well, that's comms.

That's PR's fault.

But it's also kind of his fault as the CEO by not communicating that message enough.

And so I think that I would like to see more.

more from him in communicating, actually,

we are taking over the market in a lot of ways.

And I also think that this was an opportunity.

You asked him, you know, what are your big bold bets?

And he said customer service, which, you know, fair enough.

And I really appreciate his obsession with that.

I do think that is important.

But I also think that these podcasts are the moment to make that giant pitch.

And sure, maybe Uber is going to start getting worried about it and management will start, you know, looking at this podcast and say, okay, Lyft is getting into this but you also need to make the pitch to wall street and say this is the future you know we're getting into robo-taxis and it's going to be massive yeah he's the anti-musk musk like basically strings together like bullshit and fairy dust and the market believes it and and he's he's quite frankly kind of honest and reserved to a fault he's kind of reeks of integrity and he doesn't want to get out over his skis whereas musk is like oh yeah i'm putting i'm putting people on uranus

Well, I'm high on ketamine.

I'm going to enjoy it.

That seems to be the problem, right?

I mean, the problem isn't really the underlying business.

They're actually doing a credible job there.

The problem is selling to Wall Street, to investors.

That's why the stock's down.

He's the CEO of a bygone era, and that is he's under-promising and over-delivering.

And that used to be what CEOs acted like up until about 15 years ago.

And now CEOs over-promise, promise, hoping that their stock will go up and they can use cheap capital to pull the future forward.

And he just, he kind of reeks of integrity.

I don't know.

I'm rooting for the guy.

I may even download the Lyft app.

Who knows?

I just might get fucking crazy.

I might go crazy tonight.

I'm switching to Lyft.

I'm a fan of David.

I'm going to switch to Lyft as soon as we get off this podcast.

Maybe that's just because, as you say, I like the guy and

I'm becoming a victim of

the likability of these people.

Good.

We need to stop having CEOs on the pod.

There you go.

No more.

No mas.

This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer.

Mia Silvero is our research lead.

Isabella Kinsel and Dan Schlan is our research associate.

Drew Burroughs is our technical director and Catherine Dylan is our executive producer.

Thank you for listening to Profit Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

If you liked what you heard, give us a follow and join us for a fresh take on markets on Monday.

You have me

in kind

reunion

as the world turns

and the love flies

in love.