LYFT Co-Founder John Zimmer: Ask Me Anything with Aaron Samuels | AT Main Stage Talks

Please welcome to the stage co-founder and president of Lyft, John Zimmer, and our moderator, co-founder and chief operating officer of Blavity, Aaron Samuels. Alright, alright, alright, how's everybody doing? We have to follow Charlamagne, but that's fantastic because I'm sitting here with one of the co-founders of Lyft. How many of y'all know about Lyft? Yeah, they gave me a write-up, you know, backstage to talk about Lyft, but I'm like, I feel like people Most people understand Lyft, know what it is. What people might not know is that Lyft is one of the leaders in the $1.2 trillion transportation industry. And I'm super excited to be sitting here with John. Now, one of the things that people might not know about you is that after graduating Cornell, you— where you studied hospitality, hotel administration, one of your key focuses was learning a little bit more about about what makes cities work and understanding all of the different problems that exist in cities. And what you and your co-founder realized is that one of the ways that we could solve that or attempt to solve those problems was by looking at all of the unused seats that were in cars. About— only about 4% of cars are actually being used at any given point in time. A lot of unused seats. So you decided to take that and say, hey, can we use this as a way to make cities better and improve cities? So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about your journey co-founding Lyft.

Yeah. Thank you for having me. Yeah. So as you mentioned, I studied hospitality. I went to hotel school. When I was in high school, actually before college, I was working in hotels. I was a phone operator. I fell in love with the idea of service, trying to make people's days better, one-on-one human interaction. And then when I was in the hotel school, I started thinking, what would be non-obvious places to bring hospitality? The most obvious places were the hotels and restaurants. And then I took a city planning class, and I realized the city itself is the most important hospitality experience. And yet we don't think about it that way. We just kind of accept the city in many ways, you know, in the way it was built decades ago. And I think that framing it as a hospitality opportunity opens up a lot of door as to how you could redesign it around people and not cars. Because when you look at most major US cities, they were designed for cars. And that sucks. You know, you don't design products, you don't design hotels, you don't design things for inanimate objects. You design places for people. And so then I realized, you know, when you look into cars and car infrastructure, The average American spends more money on their car than they do on food. That's crazy to me. The average car— Americans spend about $9,000 every year owning and operating a car. That's like, you don't think about it. You know, maybe you pay, if you're fortunate to have a car, you pay a couple hundred dollars for a lease. But then there's fuel and insurance and maintenance and all these, and parking. And it, for the average American, adds up to that really high dollar amount.

And incredibly wasteful for the environment as well.

Yeah, and so the idea for Lyft and our personal passion is, what if you could create transportation as a service? Just the way you subscribe to entertainment or music, you know, could you do that for transportation? And we're in the really early days of that, but pretty soon you'll be able to subscribe and get access to Lyfts, to Lyft bikes and scooters, to autonomous vehicles. And never have to deal with parking ever again. So we're working on—

that's incredible, that's incredible. So let me ask you, do you own a car?

I do, and I have two young daughters. One is almost 4 and one is about 5 months. And my wife said we need to have a car because we have car seats, and Lyft has not yet solved that and made it easy for parents. So we have more work to do.

More work to do.

But with the car, I do drive for Lyft on occasion. So I have a tradition every year, at least once a year, so every New Year's I drive for Lyft. Again, if you're in hospitality, you have to do the work that you're asking other people to do. So it's a small thing that I do it only once a year, or at least once a year. But it's important to me to be out there on days when other drivers are sacrificing time they could be spending with family to be helping out the community, taking safe rides.

And I imagine that's important as a founder of a company to understand what all of the different employees are doing.

Absolutely.

So, question: I heard a rumor that sometimes when you drive Lyft, you do it in costume. Is this true?

Not that I remember.

That was just a promotional—

Yeah, no, back in the early days, Before Lyft, we started a company called Zimride. My co-founder was inspired when he traveled to Zimbabwe. He saw people sharing rides out of necessity. It happens in many— Zimbabwe? Nice. That was actually the inspiration for the company we started that turned into Lyft. When we were promoting, Zimride was a carpooling service. It was people coming back from college, driving 3 hours, selling the seats in their car another friend. And, uh, when I would like go up to people on a college campus and say, hey, do you want a carpool? Like, no one really wanted to talk to me.

Uh, fair.

So I put on a frog costume and that changed everything.

Changed everything. That's where it all began.

Yeah.

Fantastic. And now can you tell us a little bit more about the process of scaling the organization? So not just the, you know, original idea, but how did you get from that idea to where Lyft is today with all of the different services and products, cars, bikes, et cetera?

Yeah. So scaling the actual product or kind of the operation?

Exactly. The product and the organization.

Yeah. Really learning— as people say, building the plane as we're flying it. That was literally the case. I graduated from school, worked for 2 years, and then started working on this. And interestingly, me and my co-founder, we worked together on this first company, Zimride, for 5 years. We got to learn how to work with each other, And it was a slow pace, it was more of a slow business. And then we launched Lyft 5 years in, and this was 2012, and it had instant product-market fit. We had to create a waitlist for passengers. And we got, you know, within a few weeks we got cease and desist from various government agencies. And it just, you know, took on this incredible speed and life of its own. And, you know, we got great advisors, hired a great team. I mean, it was really about just having the the best possible team around us. And it was tough. I mean, one of the hard moments was about 5 years ago. We woke up, and Logan and I were incredibly passionate about the mission. That's what drives us. Our mission is to improve people's lives with the world's best transportation. And we entered this space where we were the first to really scale peer-to-peer transportation. But Uber had existed, and they were doing on-demand limos. And they hadn't done what we were doing. And so they start 6 months or 6 to 12 months later, they get into the industry, then they raise $3 billion. At that moment when they raised $3 billion, we had 5 months left of money.

Oh, felt that.

It was really scary. Yeah. You know, and I think important to note, like, it hasn't been always easy. And, but what, what What I've really learned from that experience is that a small group of people that is incredibly passionate, has the right set of values, focused— We were told there's no way you will survive 30-to-1 capital odds with this crazy aggressive competitor. And we now have at least double, if not triple, the amount of market share that we had back then versus them. So it taught me the value of building the right type of culture and being focused on a mission.

I think that's fantastic. So pivoting a little bit and talking about culture, talking about scaling organizations to really affect the way that cities can work and thinking about hospitality through the lens of cities and urban planning. One of the reasons that we are here this year, that we are here in Oakland, is because of the value that the AfroTech community and the Blavity community places specifically on the Oakland community. And my understanding is that Lyft has a similar value for the Oakland community. My understanding is that you've made a $1 million commitment this year to the city of Oakland across multiple different programs. Yes, you can clap it up for that. Yeah, $1 million across multiple things including free rides for people that are transportation insecure, a bike library and bike sharing programs to to enable better transportation and looking at other ways of increasing access to transit, specifically in the city of Oakland. So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about Lyft's commitment specifically to Oakland, where we are right now, and what you're thinking about for the future.

Yeah, so I think it's really important— like, we consider this home. Obviously our office is in San Francisco. I live in the East Bay. And I think, you know, the culture and the opportunity that is represented in Oakland is something that in meeting various people, you know, one of the people, Scraper Bikes, if you know Scraper Bikes, Champ over there who leads that organization, it's a fantastic organization, and we're scaling the size of our bike share here, and I said, "Look, if we want to prove some things about how transportation can increase economic mobility, we should do it first here in Oakland." So that's the commitment we made earlier this year. I'm really excited about that. You know, at the root of this is that transportation and car ownership has divided those that have access and those that don't. And as we think about inequality in society, we believe that we have a responsibility. When you're part of ushering a new form of transportation, you have a responsibility to do better than past generations.

[Speaker:JOHN ZIMMERMAN] Absolutely.

[Speaker:JONATHAN FOSS] And past generations have not done well. With transportation. I mean, there's all these expressions that you live over the tracks. You know, there's $9,000 a year of car ownership. That is transportation dividing people. That is the cost of transportation dividing opportunity or access to that opportunity. And so I don't get up out of bed to just build a business. We want to have an impact. that starts at home.

That's fantastic. That's fantastic. Let's clap it up for that. So one of the great things about AfroTech is to create opportunities to ask directly CEOs, co-founders, leaders of organizations questions specifically that are relevant to us and relevant to our community. So at this point, we are going to open it up to the crowd. To see what questions that y'all have for John. Go ahead.

Greetings.

Okay. And please say your name and where you're from.

My name is Jim Gibbs. I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Meter Feeder. Cities are losing billions of dollars trying to price a curb for shared vehicles. We actually made a way for traditional and autonomous vehicles to pay for parking with no human interaction so that cities cities can start making money, and I can stop getting parking tickets. So my question is, I know that you're— you want to make sure that people have the ability to get to work in autonomous vehicles in future cities and stuff like that. What I'm interested in is, how do we sort of navigate the Lyft landscape in order to maybe form a partnership?

Great question.

So just to make sure I understand, the question is how do we form a partnership? Is that the question?

Exactly, exactly. Or more broadly—

Look for someone with a Lyft shirt on. There's quite a few up here.

But to make it more broadly, so there's a lot of founders here, many of whom are existing in the transportation economy. Thinking about more broadly, how do people who are creating companies in this space think about partnerships with organizations?

Yeah, I mean, like, our approach has been a partnership-centric approach. We don't believe we can and should do everything ourselves. I mean, you mentioned autonomous. If you look at the way that we've approached autonomous vehicles, we have two strategies. One, we're building our own self-driving system. And two, we're talking to partners that are developing self-driving technology. And if it's safe, we'll put it on our platform for our customers. It doesn't have to come from us. So curb access, which I think you're focused on, is incredibly important. And I think there will be a role for a company like yours and government to play in pricing curb access or pricing the streets. And that's something that we're definitely going to work on or be part of. I'd say look for someone in a Lyft shirt and make a pitch.

You heard it.

Yeah, the name of the company is called Meter Feeder, by the way.

So, uh, thank you.

We're gonna flip it over to the other microphone. You go ahead and say it. Say your name, where you're from.

Hi, my name is Jerome Lamar. I'm from the Bronx, New York.

Okay.

I have a question from social media for you, John. The question is, what role do you see diversity playing in the development of your product? Yeah, thank you. Um, it is critical to me that we have people that are designing transportation for the future that come from a variety of different backgrounds, uh, different ways of thinking, uh, different upbringings. Um, and so it is As a person who loves hospitality, and in my mind hospitality is connecting, serving other people, we cannot serve other people if we don't represent those people. So the long-term goal of diversity within Lyft is to have our team reflect the people we serve, both drivers and passengers. We have a long way to go. We are far from that. And we'd be the first to admit that. But to me, it is a competitive advantage. It is not a nice to have. It is not a— thing you do for PR. It is a business strategy as much as it is the right values.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Pam. I'm from San Jose, Costa Rica. Okay. My question is, are you thinking about expanding to Latin America?

Awesome. Yeah, let's talk about Latin America and also just more broadly, how do you think about Lyft in a global context?

Yeah, so we are currently just, as you may know, we're just in the US and Canada. But if, you know, our mission is improve people's lives with the world's best transportation. So we do have global aspirations. You know, as an entrepreneur, something that we were, I'd say, forced to do by our limited constraints, as I talked about the capital advantage that our competitor had, we had to focus. We had to make tough decisions. We had to say no to going everywhere at once. But since that, we have opened up Canada as our first international market, and we do have interest in going to places like Latin America.

Very cool. Interested.

Hi, I'm Cheryl from Southern California. My question is more around AB5 in California. How does that impact the growth of Lyft? Lyft, and then as well as a rider like I am, I use it religiously. How does that impact me as well as a consumer of Lyft?

Yep, great question. So for those that don't know, AB 5 is a law that was signed a few months ago around driver— what classifies a driver as an independent contractor versus an employee. And if you zoom out on the issue, to me what the issue represents is historically employees have received all the benefits or have all the protections, whether it's discrimination protection, whether it's wage protection, whether it's healthcare benefits. Those all are aligned with employment law. Independent contractors, while people get flexibility to go to multiple different jobs, they don't have all those protections. And so when I zoom out, just like when we created a new form of transportation, I see this as an opportunity to create improved protections for the workforce. 4 or 5 years ago, I asked our legal department, "Hey, can we provide benefits to drivers on the platform that are independent contractors?" And they said, "Legally, if you do that, you will make all drivers employees." Now, that might sound good or okay, 91% of Lyft drivers drive less than 20 hours a week. Actually, 76% drive less than 10 hours a week. So the far, far majority are using the platform very different than an employee-employer relationship, and they don't want a boss. They don't want to be told what shifts they can and can't come in for. So our goal— we don't like the current writing of AB 5. Our goal is to say, hey, what are we trying to accomplish? We're trying to protect workers. We're not trying to dictate that they have to become employees with Shifts. And so we are working both with labor, you know, having conversations with labor unions as well as with the legislature, and running a ballot initiative to try and find that right common ground. I think part of your question was, what does it mean for a customer or rider? There are things that would be done, in my opinion, that would not only make the job untenable for a driver because they'd be required to work certain hours, it would make it likely more expensive for a passenger.

Thank you. Thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is Zara Wright. I am currently a junior at Washington University in St. Louis.

Okay, shouts for WashU.

And so as an aspiring entrepreneur, I was just curious. You said after you graduated from Cornell, you worked for 2 years, and I was just wondering, how did you know when to make that leap? Was it financial stability? Was it that you found your coworker after you had your idea? What was it that made you take the dive into startup culture?

Yeah, it's a great question. I was fortunate that I, I had a job for those 2 years where They had a bonus at the end of each year and I didn't touch it. It went right into my bank account. And I didn't, I hadn't saved up any money prior to that. And so I just, I put that in my bank account, didn't touch it, and then left. And didn't take a salary for 5 years. At least 5 years. I felt like at that point, the risk of not leaving was greater than the risk of— or sorry, the risk— I think you know what I'm trying to say. Anyway, I felt like I had to take that jump at that point. But I was fortunate to be in that position, and I understand that. I was also extremely— I didn't like where I was working. I was working at Lehman Brothers in Manhattan. It was from 2006 to 2008.

And so it was time to go.

Oh yeah, well, when I said I was leaving, they said, how could you leave a sure thing like Lehman for a silly carpool startup? And Lehman is now gone, was bankrupt actually 3 months later. So I think, you know, when you see something that other people don't see, when you feel like you put yourself in a position to, you know, have the basics or have You know, now you can be a Lyft driver. And that's one of the things that makes me, you know, happy about the fact that it is with, you know, the flexibility of work is that we do have a lot of people using this type of platform or other platforms to follow things they are most passionate about. But for me, it was about— I'd saved some money and I was extremely passionate about the mission. I think a lot of times people ask about, you know, a business, and when I'm, you know, interested in maybe mentoring, or if I was to ever do investments in companies, I would always be looking for how committed is this person to the mission. Because it is not— I can guarantee you there will be moments where the walls will close in on a startup and you'll feel like it's all over. And if you are not committed to the mission, then it will be very, very hard to succeed. So I think that to me is the measurement of when it's when it's time.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm Alex Harding from Sierra Leone, West Africa.

Okay, woo!

I'm currently an information security engineer at LinkedIn, and my question for you is around your most dependable demographic for for your company, and that being people that are visually impaired. They can't really drive, so they have no option but to use carpool. And being— the current status is everybody pays the same price, and those people that are visually impaired are mostly unemployed. I think the ratio is about 80 to 20%. That are unemployed. I was wondering if you're doing anything with regards to help them be able to afford Lyft to move around.

It's a great question. It's a fantastic question.

Yeah, so one thing is— step one is making sure our product is usable by those that have those types of impairments. So for example, you know, we've We've made it so that a screen reader can basically inform someone who is visually impaired what, where, you know, how to order a ride and things like that. So that's step one, and I feel like the team has done a good job with that. We do have partnerships with organizations and nonprofits that do serve those communities, and I believe we are providing free ride credits to those organizations. One thing that we just recently announced is ride credits for those that need access to jobs, access to groceries. And as I mentioned, I do believe there's also a program in place with nonprofits for those that are visually impaired. There's always more work to be done. And actually, like I said, or like you said, in Oakland, that, you know, we put $1 million aside to be, you know, testing and actually I think doing research on when we do provide We provide rides or transportation to those that didn't previously have access. What type of impact does that have on their lives and their own ability to have economic mobility? Because there could be a lot better ways that we're helping society. Oftentimes in society, we, you know, we solve things with, let's, you know, let's provide someone with a lot of resources when maybe they want to pick themselves up, you know, by themselves. But if they couldn't get from point A to point B, they couldn't get started. So those are some of the ways we think about it and some of the programs that we're doing.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Well, hello. My name is Brian Diadone. I am a PM in applied data science at Xbox. Work on the user shelf for the Xbox system. I'm curious, how have you leveraged experimentation for product growth, given that you've covered a large ground once covered by Uber. So I'm curious, how has experimentation powered your product growth, if it has? I'm curious.

Oh yeah, it's— thank you for the question. It's the basis of how our product team works. Our head of product will get furious with a PM or an engineer if they're doing something without testing to know kind of what was our baseline, what was a holdout, a group held out so that they didn't get the specific test done on them, and then what is, you know, what is the improvement that we see or not from that change. So it is, I'd say, the basis of how our product team works. It's experimentation.

That what drives everything, is what you're saying?

Yeah, we got to try a lot of things to improve and make transportation more efficient. One important thing with experimentation is, you know, when you go to the driver's side of that equation, you know, you gotta be very careful. You can't be experimenting with people's livelihoods. And so that's some balance that I think, you know, maybe a few years ago we probably didn't have done as well as we should have. But now the team is careful, or more careful, around the fact that these— this does impact people's lives in a very meaningful way. And I think in technology, yes, experimentation is critical because if If we are trying to build technology that does help society, we're going to have to keep learning how to make it better. But in our business, we also have to be careful given that people's livelihoods are depending on how much money they make on a week-to-week basis.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Go ahead.

Hi, I am Angela from the congested city of Los Angeles. Thank you for being here. My question is related to values. You speak very— clearly about your values of service and trying to bridge the gap between the have and the have-nots. Can you speak a little bit to tangible ways that we can stay in alignment with our values?

Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. One of the things that I feel most— we feel most lucky about is that I do believe that building our business is directly tied to our values. I feel like for some businesses, they have to go outside and look for nice things to do. That is often a bad sign. You know, transportation, bringing down the cost of transportation, creating— and, you know, last year we had nearly 2 million drivers drive on the platform. That is creating work opportunities for those drivers. And we can and should make it better for those drivers. We can and should make it more affordable for our passengers. But I would argue that we don't need to go searching for things outside of our business. If we are doing a better job for our drivers and riders, we are living up to those values. So that's something that I think we as Lyft are fortunate in that position. But of course that doesn't mean we shouldn't do things like we're doing in Oakland. You know, the Jobs Access Program. There are other— we can take our superpower of transportation and bring it more quickly to those that don't have access, rather than just waiting for us to kind of continue to improve upon the business. So I'd say those two categories: use our superpower for good of transportation, and build a large business that lowers the cost, makes transportation more accessible and affordable for more people, and provides good job opportunities for drivers.

And the last question.

My name is Corwin. I currently live in Dallas. And along the same lines of affordability and bringing the cost down, my commute to work happens to be quite long. And so I drive, I own a car. But I found myself this week kind of in between cars, right, waiting to get a new one. The old one broke down, et cetera. But I found that when I had to take a ridesharing service to work, I mean, that can be a $30 or $40 one-way cost. So are there any things as our country continues to sprawl, are there any steps that you guys are taking to try to lower that long-haul commute cost for riders?

Yeah, great question. And I agree, we haven't fully solved the commute yet. It's too expensive. And so some of the things that we're doing, we've worked really hard on shared rides. So you can think of there's— and transit. So we've incorporated transit into our service. We've launched a membership program. I talked about subscription, but we launched a program called Lyft Pink recently. And right now it's centered on ridesharing. You get 3 free bike rides or scooter rides. But you could imagine that it could include your Clipper card type thing, which is the New York version MetroCard. Basically your transit card. You could have all your transportation in one thing. You could get better discounts on transit when your car is in the shop or something like that. And then shared rides, I think, becomes more like transit. You know, oftentimes— and public transportation is great when it works, when it's near your house. But I also, you know, think the promise of public transportation isn't always realized when, you know, you have to run a 40-person bus in order to provide service to a place where there's only 2 people that need that service. In that case, you should have a shared ride available. So the 2 big areas, or few areas, are transit, shared rides, and then for the shorter commutes, we're obviously working on bikes and scooters as well.

Thank you. And on behalf of Blavity and the AfroTech team, we really want to thank you for joining us here today.

Thanks for having me. Thank you.