John Zimmer's carpooling startup Zimride wasn't working, so a hackathon created Zimride Instant instead. The team abandoned the original business to focus on the new product, launched it as Lyft in under three weeks, and grew from one market to 67 markets with over 10 million rides.
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I think I was subconsciously telling myself, you know, doing two things really well, especially when, you know, it's a startup, is not a good idea. When we were looking at the data behind Zimride and what users were saying, they were saying that the product wasn't sticky enough. They were using it just a few times a year. For breaks from their school schedule. And so we realized we have to do something that occurs way more frequently. We gotta make this like brushing your teeth, something that you do twice a day. And so we had this hackathon where we said, "Let's come up with different ideas on how to make a more frequent and a mobile-based ride service." So at first it just started as, "Hey, we have this new idea," and it seemed almost like a feature. Actually, we first called it Zimride Instant. Once it got out and we saw the reception, and how consumers just started using it every day. And how when we worked so hard on marketing efforts with Zimride to get a few rides to happen on university, hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands of rides were happening. Then it was like, oh man, this is big. We had the entire engineering team, which at the time was probably about 10 to 15 people, stop working on Zimride. And go over to Lyft, and then we had Zimride as a platform that we would continue to sell to universities and companies. But then we realized, hey, this is distracting us. We have to continue to fix things. We are pulling engineers off. And we got some real hard decisions to make. Are we going to continue to operate both businesses? Are we going to pick one? And I struggled with that for over a month. I had a headache for a month. I went to multiple doctors trying to figure out what was wrong. I thought, I thought there was something separate wrong because I had this headache, and I think what it was, you know, this subconscious and conscious stress about making that big decision. How could you cut, you know, what you've been working on for 5 years to go do something that was yet to be proven? Eventually we had to say, hey, look, what we care about is building the next form of transportation that is more efficient, affordable, and social. And we just found a faster path to that. And so let's be honest with ourselves, let's make the hard call, and let's move on, but continue that vision that we're really excited about. For the most part in the boardroom, most people were open to hearing this idea. There was one board member that was really concerned, are people really going to want to use this service? Like a low-cost peer-to-peer ride service, is this something that people are going to like? And Logan and I, our eyes lit up and we said, absolutely. We have no question. The solution is so incredible. It's going to empower so many people. Everyone is going to want to use this. The thing that we need to figure out is these regulatory hurdles. What are the right ways to get through them? You know, a lot of amazing innovations have faced adversity, have faced legal challenge, have faced regulatory challenge. And maybe that means it's an even bigger idea. After that board meeting, we said, let's launch this. And we asked an engineer, Sebastian, how long will this take? And he said, it'll take about 3 months. And we said, how about 3 weeks? And he did it in under 3 weeks. We had it in the App Store. and the whole brand came together. Lyft was created, the mustache, the logo, everything in a matter of 3 weeks with a team of about 5 people. I think there was some relief that, okay, we'd made a decisive decision to move on, but it felt, you know, like it's been feeling for the last, you know, 7 or so years is that we're not done, and we haven't done, you know, even today with Lyft, I feel like we've done, you know, page 1 of 100 of what we're trying to create. We were in one, one market in January 2013. We're now in 67 across the country. We've done millions and millions, over 10 million rides. People really love the product, they love the brand, they love the experience, and so there's more we're going to do with it, but we'll be doing Lyft. Lyft is our path to the promised land, and we'll be doing it for a really long time.
