Max Brun led pricing strategy at Lyft, focusing on how to pay drivers competitively, reduce multi-homing, and use surge pricing to balance supply and demand. He shares what he learned about marketplace intelligence and benchmarking against competitors.
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You know, so going back to your time at Lyft, you know, what were you working on there? Maybe what were some of the challenges with it as a marketplace at the time?
So at Lyft, I was focused on, I'm also focused on the same thing at Shipt. At Lyft, I was primarily focused on 2 areas. One was pricing, and this was pricing on the supply side, meaning how do you, what do you pay for a ride? The drivers, right? The, the gig side of the business, how do you pay that? And, you know, if you think about it, if you, you could argue that really pricing is really the, the main reason why people come and work for, uh, an on-demand marketplace like Lyft or Shipt, uh, because, you know, what they get paid as a result of that, the economic opportunity is the reason why they actually come and work for you. So incredibly important role. I worked as part of the pricing team. I dealt with what we call as competitive prices, meaning how are we paying versus our competitors? How do you benchmark that? How do you make sure that in the rideshare world, we are generally in the on-demand world, you call it as multi-homing. How do you, you know, how do you prevent multi-homing? How do you increase loyalty with your own business, for example, through pricing? Again, as I said, arguably pricing is the last lever that you can pull. Right? If you pay more money, more people will come and work for you. I think that anybody can, you know, associate with that. So, so that, and then the other team that I also worked with was called Marketplace Intelligence, which was a lot of analytics and business intelligence, really looking at numbers and enabling the leadership in the, at the company to look at numbers so that they can run the business intelligently. So those 2 things, I think the unique use cases Some of the unique use cases there were Lyft and Uber really are one of their— they were one of their kind. Now there are more marketplaces like that. But at the time, especially things like surge pricing, which were such a unique concept, it was a little— it depends on who you ask whether that is a good or a bad, whether it is for good or for evil, depending on if you ask the rider or if you ask the driver. But the concept of surge pricing to bring what we used to call equilibrium back to the marketplace, right? You know, in your Economics 101 sense, those problems, working on those problems, balancing out supply and demand, using pricing as a sort of the pivot point of balancing supply and demand, you know, using that to figure out how to mitigate undersupply or supply shortages. How— what do you do when there is an excess demand but you don't have enough supply? How do you kind of balance that out? using those kind of, uh, techniques, using those kind of mechanisms. Lyft and Uber were really the first ones to kind of pioneer those, and I got to work on some of those problems. That was incredibly exciting.
