Lyft’s CEO Says, ‘We’re the Good Uber’

Three Years AGO, Lyft was floundering. The perpetual also-ran to Uber was in danger of being run off the road entirely. The founders were in charge, and in March 2023, they hired former Microsoft and Amazon executive David Risher to turn things around. The new CEO has expanded its service in other countries, made deals with Waymo and Nvidia, lowered ride cancellations, and paid drivers more. Just this week, Lyft announced that customers in New York would also see taxis among their options. The company now reports a profit—but it’s still deep in second place in ride-sharing, and its stock has been down this year. I recently spoke to Risher on Lyft’s prospects, his jaundiced view of Uber, and his plans to manage fleets of autonomous cars owned by tech companies or civilians.

STEVEN LEVY: Where are you on your turnaround mission?

DAVID RISHER: When I came in, we were losing share—Lyft was 26 or 27 percent compared to the other guy. We were losing money, $300 million a year. Things were not looking good. I went to the Jeff Bezos school, so when I came in, my whole focus was customer obsession. We spent quarter after quarter getting our cost position right, so that we could lower prices. We raised driver rates, because if drivers aren’t getting paid enough, they tend to be very frustrated and don’t provide great service, and drop off the platform. We started to innovate again. So today, we’re profitable. We have some of the highest driver satisfaction rates we’ve ever had, and our riders are coming back. And our share is now up to about 31 points.

Yet your stock is down.

Our analysts and investors love the fact we’re growing quarter by quarter, but they also see uncertainty in the industry.

Thirty-one percent is still a distant second. I saw a headline the other day, “Is OpenAI On Its Way to Becoming Lyft?” The story wasn’t even about ride-sharing! What will it take to never see that headline again?

That might be a false premise. We do a billion rides a year in North America. The other guys maybe do two. [Uber doesn’t break out numbers geographically but reports around 14 billion rides a year globally.] That’s 3 billion rides between the two of us. But people take 160 billion rides in their private cars every year. So there’s a gigantic market which you can grow into.

The reason we have been gaining share over the last couple years is our service is just better. On average we will pick you up faster than those guys will. We have reduced driver cancellations. The next phase is what we call “Save Money, Check Lyft,” which is based on a very basic premise that if you’re a rider and you’re only checking the other guy, you’re leaving money on the table. If people checked every single time, we would have a greater than 50 percent share. I promise you.

Yesterday my son was on a stuck train, and he needed a ride to the station a few stops down. Uber was $70 and Lyft was $130.

We try to beat them more than we lose, but we have different algorithms, different data. We religiously, obsessively check to make sure that is true.

I often hear from drivers—for both Uber and Lyft—that the companies take too big of a cut. Is that complaint valid?

The short answer is no. Certainly in the early days of this industry, there were massive effective driver subsidies, and there are still drivers who remember that or have friends who remember those days. We will never, ever, ever, ever take more than 30 percent after insurance is taken out.