Lyft Founder: The Uber War, the COVID Collapse, and the Robotaxi Threat | John Zimmer

Like, I'm gonna fucking wake up in a world and see Ubers drive by and know that I, like, put down my arms and didn't fight. But 80% of the business went away overnight.

When you have 5 months left to live, like, what is the number one thing?

It makes things really fucking clear, I guess, because you're in survival mode. Probably can't talk about as much because of NDAs, but—

Alright everyone, I am so excited to have John Zimmer here. Needs no introduction. But co-founder of Lyft, generational company, and took it from its foundation to IPO. Now he's the co-founder of YesAnd, and one of the things I admire most about John after doing extensive research is that you built Lyft in a values-first way in a market that usually rewards the opposite. And I think that's something that a lot of companies can learn today. So, It's great to have you here.

Thank you. It's good to be here.

So, first off, I've been banned from Lyft for a couple years.

Uh-oh.

Do you have any sway in getting me unbanned?

What did you do?

I can't talk about that here.

Okay. It depends what you did, then I can probably connect you to the right person.

All right. We'll chat about that.

But yeah, kind of curious.

Let's start in the beginning of your career. You started in hospitality, and this has been a big theme of your life, service first. But then you went into Wall Street. You worked at Lehman Brothers before the financial crisis. I'm curious what Wall Street taught you that you brought forward building a company that was involved in service.

Well, I hated the culture at Lehman. And I mean, there were good things, but there were a lot of things I didn't like. And so it taught me a lot about how I wanted to build the company differently. So I went to Lehman Brothers in 2000. I graduated school in 2006, was there in 2006, and I left 3 months before they went bankrupt in 2008. And I said, how could you leave a sure thing like Lehman to do a silly carpool startup? But there was less of a focus on doing excellent work and a lot of like focus on things like FaceTime and, you know, OEO, like just making yourself look good in front of the managing director instead of actually doing the most, the best work and excellence around the work. And so, anyway, I wanted to build a company and culture, which I'm proud that we did, that where people could bring both the same person that they are at home as close as possible. I think there should be professionalism in the workplace, but I think like, I wanna see the person for who they are. At work. And I learned as I got to know people at Lehman, like, they were like really interesting, fun people, and they like behaved extremely differently in the office. And I just wanted to kind of—

Authenticity.

Yeah, authenticity.

Did that inform how you hired, like you hired for that, or you believe that is something that could be taught?

A bit of both. I think like that what we learned at Lyft, not just in the culture of the company itself, but also with the driver community and rider community is the power of suggestion is, is very high and strong. And so by suggesting whether they're like company values or norms, I do think people are good people. I do think people innately want to take care of each other. And so when you, when you create an environment where people can authentically do that and comfortably do that, then I think Sure, there are bad actors, so it's not perfect, but I think people want to be in that environment. In order for people to do their best work, I think they have to be comfortable. And so there's like an ROI component of it too. It's not just like to be nice and part of— it doesn't mean that, you know, we say yes to everything and let team members, employees do whatever they want, but I think authenticity matters. So we definitely hired for it and built an environment that allowed for it.

Love that. In the early days of building your first company, you know, you were taking no salary, sleeping on a couch, having microwavable meals. This is like the classic founder story. And I'm just curious to hear from your perspective, do you— did that actually matter later on that you had to go through that? Or do you think a lot of this early founder kind of suffering is a bit over-romanticized?

I mean, it's not a like require— it's not a necessary thing to be successful, but I think it sometimes can be correlated in the fact that we were putting every ounce of our energy and resources into solving the most important problem at the company. And by sleeping, I mean, we had what we called the apart-fest, which was an apartment, and I would sleep on a couch like this. Logan, my co-founder, he got a real bed, he had the bedroom. But then my desk was like right next to the bed, I had the best commute. And then in the morning we would like rip off the blanket and like throw it in the closet, and like when we hired a couple people and like, you know, tried to make it feel less weird.

Minimal decision fatigue.

Yeah, so I don't know, I think it's not necessary, But I think, you know, character traits of doing what it— like believing so deeply in the mission and the company that you're willing to do what it takes, being extremely persistent, particularly in those early years, is super, super important.

Yeah. And, you know, from that you built a working business with Zimride, and you asked yourself, how would this look differently if we rebuilt it for the mobile era? And you decided to kill it for Lyft, which at the time was an experiment that had traction, but I'm sure killing something that was a full business was hard. What gave you the conviction to kill the thing that was working, and did you ever kind of look back and doubt that decision?

We didn't doubt it. It was clearly the right decision. It was extremely hard to make that decision because we had spent, at that time, 5 years building the first company, Zimride, and it becomes just like the next company, just so important, you pour so much into it, and then you're like, I'm going to take a risk on this new idea and just give up on all the last 5 years of work was very, very hard. What ultimately— in fact, I had to get like my— I had appendicitis, which I think was in like— I was highly stressed when we killed it, so it's potentially related. But what eventually gave us the confidence to do it was just that customers, riders were pulling on— like, we had to create a waitlist for Lyft within the first week. And Zimride, there was never that type of pull. And so just listening to the customer, it was very obvious this was the right thing.

Nice. There was a time where, you know, you were up against Uber. They had 10x more capital than you. They were paying people not to be drivers on Lyft. And sometimes when you have competition like that, your first intuition might be to copy what they're doing. And I'm curious, was there a moment where you felt like copying Uber's strategy would have helped you in the short term, but you decided not to do it anyways?

I think we had to learn, and it was a lot more of different capital. They had raised $3 billion from the Saudi government, and we had 5 months of cash left. And everyone said, you are royally fucked, and like, you might as well return the capital to your investors at this point.

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Again, I always go back to the mission. So our mission was to like improve people's lives with the world's best transportation. So if in order to do that, we should copy part of a strategy, do it. If it's tied for me to the mission and you think you'll get to a better place. But given that we had such little capital compared to theirs, we couldn't copy their strategy, and we had to think like we were guerrilla fighters. And so we went to the markets where we had the lowest market share, and we spent as much money as we could, because it, you know, let's say we had 10% market share in a market, and they had 90%, if we subsidized something a dollar or gave a dollar off, they would have to pay $9. And so we would start making it more expensive. So if we had 5% and they had 95%, obviously you can do the math. And so we had to think differently. But certainly there were things that they ripped from us and vice versa.

Yeah. And—

In fact, the whole idea of Lyft, they ripped from us and Bricks.

We can get into that. Follow-up question, why go into the markets where you have lowest share versus trying to dominate the ones where you have highest share?

It was just too— we couldn't afford to do it. Look, we wanted to be in those markets, but we were trying— they were trying to kill us with cash. And we were trying to—

You couldn't fight that battle.

We were trying to make them stop. And so we said, okay, You really want to play this game?

Make them spend more.

Then you have to spend 9x, 10x, 20x. And so we'll raise $1 billion, go raise $20 at some point, like put down your weapons, like let's like fight a different battle.

Yeah. So a lot of people know about the story of Travis trying to acquire Lyft and an investor actually telling you to shut the company down. I'm curious to know, the 48-hour period between you receiving those options and deciding, "No, I'm going to go all the way." Like, what were the conversations that you had that made you say, "Hey, we're going to take this all the way." So, those are two different moments.

So, the first moment of, "You should shut the company down," was actually that kind of capital moment I talked about where they raised $3 billion and we have 5 months of cash left and it looks pretty dire. In that case, I'm really grateful to Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, that they said, look, like, this almost happened to one of our companies, and then we turned it around and, you know, went public and became a billion-dollar company, you know. And so they had seen— working with investors that have seen with their own, you know, their own companies things almost go to the end before being turned around was very helpful. Inspired us. But also again, just like to keep harping on it, we believe so much in our mission. The words were actually even different than what I just said when we started, it was reconnecting people and communities with the world's best transportation. We were just so mission-oriented that like we just had not— and Uber took a very like kind of played a dark foil for us and we're like, we don't want to live in a world, like I'm not going to fucking wake up in a world and see Ubers drive by and know that I, like, put down my arms and didn't fight to have competition that would then compete for drivers, pay drivers better, compete for riders, give riders better service. And so we were just like missionaries. We were like, we're just— I don't know how we're going to do it, but we're going to keep going. And that also, like, brought the team closer together and had the team, you know, work extra hard. And kind of— it was just— it was like the best sports team you've ever been on, like everyone fighting towards something that we all believed in. The other time, probably can't talk about as much because of NDAs. I'm glad we remained independent.

So there's a lot of— there's a belief in startups that you have to be cutthroat to win, that nice guys finish last. We even have an investor who famously quotes that humility is for losers. And you charted your own path. Lyft did things a very different way, values first, and something that I know you kinda learned from Howard Schultz. Was there a moment where you felt that doing things in this kind of like right way was a disadvantage, and you just had to decide whether to stick with those values or not?

I definitely felt that way, and I do think there are patterns. There are patterns of entrepreneurs who are cutthroat and aggressive and do extremely well. And so I think, like, it was scary to say no, like, treat people well and then you'll do well because they'll want to work for you, they'll want to, like, buy your product. So I think there's two paths. I don't know, like, I don't think Uber was— is a bigger company than Lyft because they were more cutthroat than us. I think they started earlier and they raised more capital earlier, and so like, I just think there are two paths, and this is the path like, I like to build a company and a product where you treat people well. It doesn't mean you're not, like, you do have to be cutthroat about certain business decisions. We did have to lay off a lot of people, and that was extremely hard, and so it's not about just like always being nice and always saying yes, So I think it's a balance of like, but I could like, I had someone after I fired them give me a hug, which was a little weird, but like, that wasn't the goal, but like, treat someone with respect. And I've had a lot of good things happen to Lyft or me because of that. And so I think it was an advantage for us. I think we survived because of it.

That's a very long-term mindset in a way.

But you can, I mean, you will need to be, you know, sharp and cutthroat in business. I mean, we were like aggressively fighting Uber. And so it's, I think it's more nuanced than maybe like the good guy, bad guy thing.

Sure, yeah. And on that, you know, Lyft famously invested in brand and trust and community and safety. As kind of core tenets to, you know, what differentiated the company. What made you confident that that was the vector to differentiate in, or was it more just, this is the kind of company I wanted to build?

A little bit of both. I mean, it was like what felt right, what I wanted to build. I mean, coming from a hospitality background, it's all about service, it's all about like, who are you serving? So we always felt like we were serving our drivers, our riders, and our employees. And so, To me, you know, that just makes sense. And again, we had this foil of a company that was treating their drivers like shit, and, you know, that helped us in those early years. I think they've turned around that, and that's good. That's why competition is good. They were forced to, like, that's not gonna be a winning strategy.

Think differently.

Yeah.

Brand is becoming more and more important today in the AI era as like, what you can differentiate and kind of is going to zero. Were there any non-obvious things that you did with the Lyft brand?

We put a pink mustache on the cars. That was pretty—

That one, yes.

Pretty non-obvious.

Yes.

But no, we did other things. We created a ritual in the beginning, early days. The premise was like, you're gonna get into a car with a stranger in their Honda Civic. That was not aspirational, that was not cool, that was scary, right? Like your parents said never take a ride with strangers. And so the non-obvious thing was, okay, we're gonna like not make this look like a Honda Civic, we're gonna have people smile instead of be scared, and so we did something absurd, which was the pink mustache. It was just ridiculous. And—

You had to make something more ridiculous than what was already kind of ridiculous.

Yeah, and it changed, like people would smile and point at, little kids would run and like tell their parents like, look at that., and then they would have a conversation, and we never paired the pink mustache with the logo because we wanted people to, like, be forced to talk about what it was, what they were seeing. It seems really smart now, but I mean, we were just like, let's try this. Who knows? It was just a meeting. It was kind of a random idea, but with the intention of, like, let's make a Lyft, not a Civic, Accord, you know, all these different vehicles. We also in the early days suggested that you sit in the front and that you fist bump your driver. Again, we were trying— like our tagline, and this was like the first couple of years, was like, "Your friend with a car." This is not like, "Get into a taxi, a stranger's taxi." This was like when you were in college and one of your friends had a car, we wanted to— and then we obviously did criminal background checks, driving record checks, and in the early days, literally myself and Logan met every driver, and then that couldn't scale, and so we had to adjust that. But, um, so those were some of the things we did on brand. We had really fun content we were creating. I remember when, you know, some of the marketing leaders we were working with or interviewing would talk about, uh, we need to do ads and commercials, and we're like, why don't we make really cool content? And so we We got celebrities to be undercover Lyft drivers, which was super fun. We had Shaquille O'Neal driving in the worst possible disguise, but somehow people were still surprised. Anyway, so we just had fun and did things that would get attention and be not— What is interesting about what you're saying with where we are with AI now, I do think brand, like you said, is becoming more and more important. But also to do things that haven't been done before. Take more risks? And take more risk, because everyone else can do things that have been done before by using AI to give them that idea. But if you do something that's unexpected and risky, oftentimes that can pay off.

And when Lyft had gotten to the point of mass adoption, were there any continued risks like that that you continued to take, or you didn't really need to? At that stage?

Oh, no, we took risks. I mean, because we're still— by being the underdog, I think the onus was on us to take risks and to punch up a bit. And so we did some political things that were controversial and got a lot of attention, but we always asked ourselves when we took an action, 'Is this authentic?' 'Cause I think consumers can see through stunts, particularly now, 'cause other companies have done this a lot.

And people copy.

Yeah, but I think like if there's something authentically that you, because you are that company, can do, and that you, because you are that person, believe, that those are risks that we took.

And it seems like behavior normalization, was like really the key battle. Were there any specific uphill battles in normalizing this behavior in The Strangers Car, even after trying some of these stunts?

Honestly, it became like a cultural moment. And so it kind of like just took a life of its own. Just suddenly. Because it was absurd with both the pink— I mean, there was a Conan O'Brien recorded like a 9 or 10 minute piece that's like his most viewed or second most viewed video on YouTube where him, Kevin Hart, Conan O'Brien, Kevin Hart, and Ice Cube got in a Lyft. And we had no— we didn't like— it didn't come through us, it was the early days. It was like incredible. It's a really funny video still if you want to see it on YouTube. But I think it just hit a cultural vein that it like became We didn't have to, like, work hard to get people to use the product or, like, we just— the hardest hurdle was the government relations and, like, creating new laws.

Yeah, that's a good segue to my next question. A lot of people talk about Uber being Lyft's most existential risk. I'm curious if there are any kind of unspoken internal risks outside of Uber and outside the government that you view as some of your biggest challenges while running the company?

I mean, those early years, it was like capital, government relations, competition from Uber. And then, yeah, you can— like, your company culture could be both like the accelerant or the risk. I think for us, it was mostly the accelerant. I think COVID was a super hard moment. So that became a pretty big existential risk, both— literally to the company. People didn't, for some reason— this is a joke— for some reason didn't want to ride in an enclosed environment with other people, especially when they didn't understand what COVID was. So that 80% of our business went away. That's why you needed masks and cars. Yeah, but 80% of the business went away overnight. So we had just been like, oh my God, we, we've kind of survived. We raised enough capital, we brought the company public, uh, we're on a path to profitability, uh, we're no longer like fighting for survival, where you need to build a, like, profitable, successful business, and then COVID. And Uber had Eats, and Eats does very well. And so that was a pretty rough moment. And then it has cultural problems too, where you, like, start not working together in the same environment, which I didn't like.

Yeah, it was against kind of the mission, connecting people through rides. What was your strategic response? If Uber had Uber Eats, what was kind of Lyft's response to dealing with COVID We explored delivery.

Ultimately, we had to cut our costs. That was the main strategic response, is like, you know, a tough pill to swallow, but when you lose 80% of the business, theoretically you gotta cut, to have the same level of profitability, you got to cut, you know, 80% of the costs. And so, but I think ultimately that made us leaner and like better for it at the end of the day, because then we came out of COVID Pressure makes diamonds. And yeah, so we, you know, had to make the best, best of that moment.

Were there any significant internal disagreements on strategy and vision, either with your co-founder or the team, that was kind of a fork in the road?

I mean, like, Logan, my co-founder, and I, we definitely disagreed, but we disagreed in a very productive way. And he remains, like, my best friend. We were very kind of different personalities too, which I think was helpful, and had kind of different areas of focus. Trying to give you like a specific disagreement. He hated when I sing, when I would sing when I worked.

You sing?

No, not really.

You don't sing?

Just like while I was working. He got really pissed at me. We had a whole idea to build out. It was very tough because competing with Uber who had the eats platform and always had more capital, there was constant, you know, interest and desire to change the game a bit. And it was hard to do, hard to do that. I think internally and with Logan, it wasn't as hard.

It seems like a result of the culture that you built.

Yeah.

So you've talked about your mental health journey building Lyft. Specifically, there was a time in 2015 where you've talked about being depressed and not necessarily making the best decisions and— I think not a lot of founders talk about this part of the job. And I'm curious, what do you wish someone told you at that time as you were kind of going through this? And what inevitably snapped you out of that funk?

I mean, I think just normalizing it would be helpful, and that like talking to other kind of founders that had gone through that, and I think is the most helpful thing. You know, I tied my identity to Lyft and to Lyft succeeding, and when I thought it wasn't going to succeed, I felt pretty shitty about myself. Like, and so take care of yourself, get good sleep, eat well, and do exercise. Seriously, the basics are so important. And I think Logan, you know, was a great partner. My wife Well, it was incredible. And so I would credit, you know, her and Logan from snapping me out of it and therapy. But Logan, I remember early on, was like, you say you're way happier when you like do exercise, so don't fucking come to the office until you do exercise. And that was just like very helpful. It's like so obvious, but like, I don't want to— I wanted to just like never take my foot off the gas of work? And I think the obvious answer is like, well, you're not going to do great work if you're not taking care of yourself. So pretty basic.

What, uh, something that we ask every guest who comes to the— on this podcast is, what is the greatest hardship you experience on your journey, and what did it teach you about resilience?

I mean, the Yeah, there's two of the ones we talked about. One is the personal side, is like the personal mental health, and the other is the, like, cash crunch that I mentioned where we were about 5 months left and Uber raises $3 billion. What that teaches me about resilience is that— is back to this mission thing I keep talking about— is that when you have a group of talented people that care deeply about what they're working on, you can accomplish almost anything. And literally, like, so many people wrote us off, so many smart people, and like the odds weren't that they were right.

Because of that 5 months?

Yeah. Uber was like $3 billion, was the most money ever raised by a private company. And we are the tiny— we had less market share than we have now. We probably have, you know, a third of the market now in the US. We probably had Single digits, so it's like network effects was like the most common phrase in Silicon Valley. Biggest player already has network effects, they have all the cash, you are royally fucked. But we, because, and I couldn't have done it myself, I couldn't, like Logan and I couldn't have done it myself, is 'cause the team was just like inspired, and we figured it out.

When you have 5 months left to live, how do you choose, like, what is the number one thing?

It makes things really fucking clear, I guess, 'cause you're in survival mode. So I had to go raise capital. Logan and, you know, the product team had to build a better product, and him and the data science team had to plot out this, you know, game of risk that I was talking about, where we're gonna attack in these markets. And I mean, it has a way of making things pretty clear.

More capital, better product.

Yeah, and like a guerrilla strategy.

Well, you guys made it, so it worked.

Yeah.

In 2016, you made predictions about the future of autonomous vehicles that were on the way to that future. We haven't quite made it yet.

Yeah, they were a little aggressive.

What assumption behind those predictions were wrong, and How has that like diff in what you predicted to what actually happened changed the way you think about what's going to happen in the next 5 to 10 years? Does it?

I think what was wrong is that I was super aggressive in the timeline saying that autonomous vehicles would be— would happen sooner than they are happening. But now, I think it's becoming very clear to anyone here in San Francisco as you walk outside and see, you know, 3 Waymos, looking at each other, and then a Zoox ride by, like, this, this is coming. And, and so the, like, outcome of those predictions, I think, still, still remains the same, is that we can get rid of car ownership. Car ownership can be some— like, driving a car, you can go to, like, an amusement park and drive a car in, like, 20 years. And, uh, redesigning cities, what ultimately made me want to build Lyft is that we can redesign cities around people and not cars. Our cities are designed for cars, and that's stupid. Inanimate objects. And if you've been to a city designed before the car, in Europe or somewhere else, it's way better. And we get that moment again if we take advantage of it as a society and as, you know, city planners or city leaders. You can get rid of on-street parking, you can get rid of some roads and make them totally walkable or bikeable. And so I'm still incredibly bullish on that happening, turn parking lots into parks, like, but, but I was too aggressive on saying it would happen in a few years.

What do you think the strategy of Lyft, Uber, companies like that, that are not like— I'm not saying AI not AI native, but it doesn't have that business model right now. How would they adapt?

Well, I mean, there's two main things you can do. One is, and something we always thought about, is like, how do you get access to autonomous vehicle technology? And the good news is with AI, like, the cost of training and developing autonomous vehicles is coming down, and there are more companies than the ones, you know, than the ones that are physically present here in San Francisco that are developing this technology, because it is such a big opportunity. And so, as long as the vehicles and technology are available outside of just two companies, then the networks do have quite a bit of power in that they have— we can monetize Lyft can monetize an autonomous vehicle better than Waymo or anyone else. Lyft and Uber can monetize one of these assets way better because of the scale of the network and the data. So like the downtime, if you took a Waymo, put it on our platform, put it on Waymo's platform, I would guarantee you that we would have less downtime. Just because of the scale and the data. The other part of it is, part of the reason we would have less, better utilization is because of the drivers, which is maybe counterintuitive, but the simplest way of understanding this is how many Waymos should be purchased by Waymo? How many vehicles should be purchased by Waymo for the 9 AM rush, the 12 PM lull, or whatever the lull is, 11, and the 5 PM rush. Do you buy to the 5 PM rush? Do you buy to the Saturday rush that's like 10x, 30x any other time? Do you buy to, and so whatever number of assets you buy, if you buy to the peak of that demand curve, then you're gonna have really shitty utilization, it's gonna be very expensive for the customer. If you buy underneath that, you won't have— if you're like on the Waymo system, there are times where you maybe can't get a ride. And so I think like the ultimate is a hybrid network where you can go to one place and get both. And will that be Lyft bringing on other AVs, which is starting to happen? Will these get TBD. But it's certainly a risk, and it's certainly a phenomenal experience.

Do drivers go anxious about that?

Like, have they come up saying like— Yeah, I mean, 90% of drivers on Lyft and Uber are doing this part-time, and there's like an annual turnover rate that that's material. And so while I was there, we never needed less drivers. If there becomes a time in the future where you need less drivers, you just stop onboarding, and I think it would, you know, resolve itself. I also think like the cost of these vehicles has to come down quite substantially to fill all of the hours, all of the demand peaks. And so I do think they'll need drivers for a very long time. And then post-actual drivers, I think having service providers that go along with autonomous vehicle for an elderly person or for a larger form vehicle, a 10-person vehicle that there's a bartender on board, like, there'll be jobs. But TBD exactly how that rolls out.

We talked earlier about Lyft being born from Zimride because of your question, would this company look differently if built for mobile. Do you think that's a worthy parallel question people should be asking themselves with AI? Or where do you think the mobile AI kind of analogy breaks?

Yeah, for us it was like, what experiences would this unlock? So it's like, yes, it's the mobile device, and ours happened to be an app on a mobile device. But I think like thinking a little more broadly than just like appending AI to whatever idea someone has. I think like what experiences or what things are possible now, or what things can and should be rebuilt because this is possible. Or, which is more into what I'm doing now, is like, okay, let's fast forward, you know, 10, 20 years where we're kind of post this AI boom. Like, what else matters? And like, what's outside of the software that really matters in a world where there's, you know, we can have almost anything we want, or software becomes a lot cheaper, or engineering becomes, you know, accessible to anyone. That's— we're kind of dealing with, in my new thing, like consumer businesses that are outside the AI world.

So what matters in a post-AI world, and how does that relate to YesAnd?

I think We have a, like our mission statement, which some people will think is kind of foo-foo or kind of whatever, but for YesAnd is make life the purpose of business. And my belief is that actually it's going that way anyway, that like if you can build anything, like why build it? Well, you build it because it like makes people's lives better. And so I think many companies that is true. But I think when you make that the purpose, the very clear purpose is to like make people's lives better.

To live.

That's I think where it goes.

Are you allowed to share a little bit more about the company?

It's like a mix. If you took one part Y Combinator, one part Virgin Group, and maybe something called a search fund, if you're familiar with, it's kind of like that.

Okay. Painting an image in my mind.

Yeah.

What are you bringing from your days leading Lyft into this new venture? And what are you intentionally changing about the way you ran the company?

I think bringing the, like, very strong mission orientation, like a high bar of excellence for the team's work, for the teammates that join the team. Those two things matter a lot to me, and I think always will. I think my role changes. I'm kind of in this, you know, we're launching multiple companies of which I will be the chairman, and we will hire dedicated CEOs, so I'm kind of changing my role quite a bit. And of course, like, the world has changed, you know, whether it's the continue, like, for consumer businesses, it's kind of like we have three big frames that have changed. One is the internet. And the other is social media, social media influencers. You don't need to like run ads on TV anymore. And then the third is AI, and that's more about how you kind of operate the business.

You know, after this podcast, we'll have a digital version of you that other people can learn from. If you have a mission-driven founder, what is one thing you would want them to learn from you?

Well, I'd say like be authentic and deeply committed to the mission, and then I would say like hire amazing people. I had this like made-up parable that I would tell managers that if a— and I would tell them it was made up, but if a genie granted you one wish for a manager, they could be amazing at one thing, but it would make them horrible at everything else, what would it be? And it would just be hire amazing talent. And so just to emphasize the importance of that.

And what was— were there any— filters that you had in finding such people? Because a lot of people can show up and act authentic. I'm curious, were there any questions or non-authentic—?

Not just like, yeah, authentic people, but like super talented people. People that whatever the job you were setting out to do, they would, you know, there's people talk about the 10x engineer, you know, there's that in most jobs, whether it's 2x or 3x. And so getting those people, again, if you were horrible at everything else, is you'd still be a fantastic manager because your team would crush it, and that would be amazing, as long as you could retain them, you weren't an asshole.

And I'm sure there were talent wars at the time between Lyft and Uber. How did you win people over?

Mission and, you know, be part of— people like being part of the underdog or rooting for the underdog in sports, and so you just lean into that. And they'll be like, oh, you wanna go take the easy path? And like, are you like interested in a challenge? And do you want to like change this category? Or do you wanna like give, you know, rich kids rides in black cars? Like, and so, you could get people pretty fired up to be at the underdog.

Can you tell me about the journey of deciding to leave Lyft and your— since you seem like a very intentional person, the decision-making process on who would take over?

Yeah, I mean, Logan raised his hand and said, I want to have multiple chapters in my career, and if you want to lead it solo, you know, go for it. And I was like, alright, let me think about this. 24 hours later, I, I first was like, maybe. And then 24 hours, then 20. No, no, like, in the moment I was like, I don't know, maybe. And then 24 hours later, I was like, no, I, I don't want to do it. And like, thank God you raised your hand because like it gave me the permission I needed to myself, which I shouldn't have needed, but I did, uh, to be like, no, I also want multiple chapters. And we were just burnt out. Yeah. And I think we were not making as good decisions and just being honest about like that we weren't enjoying it as much anymore. I mean, it was, it felt like I was doing leading IR and HR, you know, for a 4,000-person company versus like building, you know, which I really enjoyed doing in the early stages. And so he just helped me see that it's also not what I wanted to do. And, uh, and then David Risher, who we hired, has done an excellent job, and just admitting that, like, he was the right person for that chapter, and that made sense. And so, because I think you also, you know, we looked at other founders who had, like, still run their company, and you run it like, I'm gonna run this thing forever, and so there's that archetype, and I think we were just honestly like, that wasn't us.

And the years that followed, were there any, kind of learnings that you kind of came afterwards, where you had to reflect on your journey at Lyft and maybe you wish you did things differently?

Um, yeah, I mean, I think, I think we, we were so used to surviving that when we had survived, we were still kind of huddled in like almost like a war stance, always in war mode. Yeah, and I think, I think ultimately we needed you know, a leader that didn't have all that baggage, I guess.

John, thank you so much. Yeah, this is great.

Yeah. Good to meet everyone.

Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode and want personalized advice from John, head to the link in the comments or description to ask his digital mind on Delphi.