Lyft's John Zimmer At The HIBT Summit

Next up in our series of episodes from the How I Built This Summit: John Zimmer, co-founder of Lyft. John sat down with Guy Raz in front of a live audience in San Francisco last month to talk about Lyft's visions for the future of transportation – and their fierce competition with Uber. Coming up next month: three more episodes from the Summit – so keep checking your podcast feed every Thursday. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Guy Raz?

  Hey, everyone. It's Guy here. So today, we have another bonus episode from the How I Built This Summit in San Francisco that happened back in October. It's from my live interview with John Zimmer, the co-founder of Lyft. And my original conversation with John ran back in February of last year. And if you haven't heard it, you may want to check it out. Because in it, John tells the story of how he launched his first ridesharing service in college, and how he and his co-founder Logan Green went on to build one of the biggest ride-hailing apps in the world. And I say "one of the biggest," of course, because, well, there's Uber. And it's no secret that those two companies, they have been in a fierce competition pretty much since they launched.

• 0:49Guy Raz?

  It's a rivalry that's up there with, you know, Coke and Pepsi, or McDonald's and Burger King. And that competition, and how it's affected Lyft, is one of the things I wanted to ask John about when we sat down to talk at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

• 1:11Guy Raz?

  How you doing?

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Good.

• 1:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah? Did you guys hear his episode? One of our earlier episodes. Really amazing story. Just out of curiosity, on a given day, and you might not be able to say the exact numbers, but roughly, on a given day, how many people use Lyft?

• 1:28Speaker 01

  So every month, we do over 50 million rides.

• 1:31Guy Raz?

  Wow. It's amazing. I mean, this thing... Let's just start with this idea, because when you started this idea, when you came up with this idea for Lyft, did you guys think of this as a simple idea?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, in a sense, when Lyft started, we had a tagline that was "your friend with a car." It was that simple. There are 250 million vehicles in the United States, I believe, and they're used... Each car is used 4% of the time. 96% of the time, it's parked. So the simple idea was, you know, that time where you had a friend with a car that got you where you needed to go? What if we could utilize these cars more? We could... Offer new job opportunities for those that needed it and flexibility. If you think about a single parent who can't work a nine to five, having the the timing flexibility was was large. And so that was the simple idea. Let's create your friend with a car at a community level. And that's how it began.

• 2:26Guy Raz?

  Was it? I mean, how much of it was driven by this sense of we want to kind of recreate our relationship with automobiles? This sort of idealistic notion and and how much of it was we want to completely disrupt an industry?

• 2:41Speaker 01

  I never thought about disrupting an industry. We knew that was possible. We were aware of, you know, in the early days in San Francisco, when we started, I sat down with the general managers of the three major taxi companies. Because I wanted to understand their perspective and I wanted to make sure that the work we were doing had a net positive benefit on society. So I think disruption was something that became part of the equation, but wasn't the reason why we began.

• 3:10Guy Raz?

  All right, let's talk about the competition. Pretty soon after your after your launch, Uber kind of stepped into your territory with with. At that time, Uber was a premium black car service. And once Lyft got traction, Uber launched Uber X pretty pretty soon after. And want to talk more about that because in some ways, the story of Lyft, certainly the early story of Lyft is partly about your competition with Uber. Back when that happened, because they were bigger than you and still are a little bit today. How how worried were you about that competition?

• 3:43Speaker 01

  We were quite worried. We started knowing what we were entering into. So we knew we were the underdogs from day one. We we did that, you know, with our eyes open. We knew what we were taking on, whether it was Uber, the taxi industry, a small company with, you know, six years ago. Maybe even five years ago, we were about 30 people.

• 4:04Guy Raz?

  How many people are you now?

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Almost 5,000.

• 4:08Guy Raz?

  Five years ago, you had 30 people. You have 5,000 today.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So yeah, we knew what we were getting into and definitely that was concerning at times.

• 4:18Guy Raz?

  But I mean, this became almost like a blood sport for some time, right? This competition between Uber and Lyft, and it was really, I mean, Uber wanted to crush you guys.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:26Guy Raz?

  How did you, how did you deal with that? Like, how did you deal with that just from a, you know, a stress level?

• 4:32Speaker 01

  It was very hard. I have amazing co-founder Logan Green, who's a, who, we didn't know each other before we started working together. There's a lot of stories of friends who start things together. We started something together and became friends. I have a great wife who is very supportive, but it was, it was very difficult. We woke up one day, it was about four or five years ago, and Uber has raised $3 billion. And we had $100 million left in the bank, which is a lot of money, but only a few more months left. And now you have this crazy competitor who wants to kill you.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  That, that was definitely, definitely tough, but I think we, we stayed focused on our values. We stayed focused on our, our vision and our mission and, and just put our heads down and executed and tried our best not to get distracted.

• 5:24Guy Raz?

  A lot of people here are building, are building ideas that will inevitably attract copycats, inevitably attract competitors, even brutal competitors. What, what have you learned about your competition with Uber that might help someone figure out how to deal with, you know, with their own competitors?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you think back five, five years ago, everyone said we were dead.

• 5:48Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  I mean, if you look at the odds, $3 billion, a, a strong competitor, network effects as part of the business. But, but values do matter. Treating people well does matter. And having a mission that you focus on and care about more deeply than someone else in the end, really matters. So I would just say, focus on, on what you can control and there are, there are good forces at play.

• 6:14Guy Raz?

  And how did the dynamic between you and Logan work? Like, how did you, when, it sounds like what you're saying is, he was kind of the steady, you know, calm force and you were sort of a little bit freaking out? You were like the freak out person?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  I think in simplistic terms, that's reasonable.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  He's, I'm more emotional, he's more logical. But I think it's fair to say there were moments where we both freaked out.

• 6:41Guy Raz?

  Did you ever think that, I mean, you said people thought we were gonna, we were gonna be crushed, we were gonna be finished. Did a part of you ever worry that that might happen?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:50Guy Raz?

  How, I mean, really, like, you thought, you have sleepless nights, like, this, we might not be around?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 6:56Guy Raz?

  Were vultures circling around?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  It felt like it. You know, and you go to work every day, and you wanna rally the troops, and you talk to, whether it's reporters or investors, and one of the big things people were saying was that, like, Uber is so aggressive, you guys are nice. And it was like, what, like, sorry? We're, we're trying to treat people well, and we are aggressively pursuing our mission. But, you know, we entered, as I said, we knew what we were getting ourselves into, and we took it on.

• 7:28Guy Raz?

  Uber is a, a good product. Lyft is a good product. And they, they do things really well, you guys do things really well. I'm curious how that competition has actually made Lyft better.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great point. The, the competition has absolutely created more urgency, more focus, more prioritization. You know, we started tipping for drivers, we started rental cars that are completely flexible on a weekly basis for drivers. We started this idea of treating drivers well, which is shocking that it's an idea and not obvious. And, and so I think, in this case, competition has been a good thing.

• 8:08Guy Raz?

  All right, so this is, this is a tricky question, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you this anyway, which is, when Uber ran into so many problems, we know what those were, many, of course, of their own making, culminating in the resignation of, of the founder, was there some, I don't know, some schadenfreude on your part? Did you guys kind of feel like...

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Feel like what?

• 8:34Guy Raz?

  Did you, I mean, did you sort of feel like, well, you know?

• 8:38Speaker 01

  I mean, I can't say I was disappointed. But, but we were very careful about how we, how we behaved because it was a really critical moment, you know, all eyes were on the industry, were on us, and there were a lot of people that were hurt by what happened, both internally at our competitor, externally. And so we told our team, this is not a time to gloat, and we mean that, and we meant that, you know, why would we celebrate someone else's pain? And if our goal is to improve people's lives with the world's best transportation and to serve our drivers and passengers, this doesn't affect us doing that.

• 9:15Guy Raz?

  So here's, here's what's interesting about your, I mean, not only is this a complex and regulated, highly regulated industry, but the, the technology is changing so fast, right? Like, in 10 years, we might not even, even be driving cars at all, maybe 20 years, right? So how do you, I mean, how do you think about your business model and how it might, how it might evolve over time?

• 9:39Speaker 01

  So there will be a portfolio of options that we offer you to say, a subscription. We want to offer you transportation as a service. Instead of spending $9,000 a year to own and operate your vehicle, we want to sell you, maybe it's $500 a month, a subscription plan, similar to how you buy minutes, you'll buy 1,000 miles. And you'll get access to our bikes and scooters, you'll get access to transit through the partnerships we have with local governments, you'll get access to rides. That is what we're doing. As technology changes, as we add bikes and scooters, it becomes part of that. As we look to autonomous vehicles, it's not the be all, end all, it's part of providing that transportation to our customer.

• 10:18Guy Raz?

  In an earlier interview, I asked Jen Hyman about her business, Rent the Runway, and she described how it was fully formed right at the beginning, when she was in business school, that she had this vision for a closet in the cloud, but that she just introduced a part of that company at the beginning, the, the high-end ball gown rental company. But ultimately, she knew that she wanted to create a company where you could buy, you could get all your clothes. What you're talking about now, where you're paying a monthly subscription fee and you have access to all these things and driverless cars, like, were you thinking about that, you know, seven, eight years ago? Or is Lyft what Lyft is today, was that the vision?

• 10:59Speaker 01

  I think somewhere in between. But when we started, again, the vision is like at the city level. If you look outside and walk around, you see cars, you see pavement, and you see parking spots. That sucks.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  And another thing you see is people staring down at their phone or driving alone in their car. And we don't like that. And so we're trying to solve what we think is a big part of the design problem. And so we did have that vision to eventually get into other forms of transportation. I remember thinking in college of some type of automated service that would just be way more efficient and allow you to have less infrastructure. But there are parts of it that are definitely new as well.

• 11:45Guy Raz?

  So I want to go back to the theme of scaling because it's 2018 now. And really, four years ago, you were a fraction of what you are today. I mean, you were a tiny company comparatively. April 24th, 2014, on that one single day, you launched in 24 cities simultaneously. A huge, insane launch. How did you manage that growth and that scale?

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been a constant balance, I think, for us about picking our areas of focus. We've chosen to be careful about international launches. We've chosen not to go into food delivery. But we did think having coverage in the United States for every American is a critical factor. If we want to replace car ownership as the best way for you to get around, if we want to be, you know, have transit, Lyft, bikes and scooters all in one app, having coverage first in the United States for a car that was as convenient as a car parked in your driveway, coverage was important.

• 12:49Guy Raz?

  If you hear the podcast, you talk a lot about how your commitment to the environment and your interest in the environment really motivated this idea initially. But as with any new technology, there are unintended consequences. And even with Lyft, there are, even with Uber, there are. You've seen studies that have shown that in some cities, there's an increase in traffic. Some people say you go to airports, there's an increase in traffic because of ride-sharing drivers. Is that something that you think about? Do you ever think, "That's not what we intended to do"?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Our goal is to get rid of traffic. So when there are cases that we are adding to it, that is not good, and that's something that we do think a lot about.

• 13:35Guy Raz?

  Is there a solution to it?

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Congestion pricing is the best solution. Getting more investment in public transportation is another solution. And those two things can be directly tied together. So we may be an unlikely... People might not expect it, but I think we'll become more vocal about our advocacy for both of those things.

• 13:56Guy Raz?

  You could imagine a future where to drive into a city at a certain time, you have to pay... Like in London, you have to pay a fee to go into the city?

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. In order for there to be equity, you need to have a free option for those that can't afford it. We have that in the East Bay called the carpool lane. And we now have products like our shared ride service that can make it easier for people to connect and get into that carpool lane, or just the casual carpooling lines that exist and have existed for many years that actually work quite well. So I do think ultimately, if we, as a society, want to get rid of traffic, we need to all create a new system.

• 14:32Guy Raz?

  Right. I want to shift in our final moments, because I know a lot of people think that when they launch a business... They really think of the what, you know, what is it that I'm trying to create? We've talked about this before and I've heard you talk about the why. The why, that the why of what you're launching is much more important than the what. So, what do you mean by that?

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's some revisionist history that I now like to say the why in Lyft is because the why behind our work is way more important than the what. The why, that has always been true, that the why has been important. The reason is like, in today's society, we can, there's so many things we can make. Technology is incredible. We can have these computers in our hand that everyone can have, but why? Why are we doing this? So I think there's too much focus on the next, you know, often in technology, you have the, the next phone release. And I think there needs to be a much, much more push from all angles on people thinking about why are we doing this? And if we all were to agree on like principles of what's important, principles around, you

• 15:37Speaker 01

  know, for us, equity, sustainability, economic mobility, then, then our what would be better informed.

• 15:43Guy Raz?

  John, and I love this question, I love asking people at your, at your point in your career, this question. If you were sitting in this audience 10 years ago, watching somebody like you up here, what would you, what do you wish you would have known that would have been helpful to you as you were growing and creating your business?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Well, first, five years ago, I very much could have been in the audience.

• 16:03Guy Raz?

  Five years ago?

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you can accomplish a lot in a short amount of time and, you know, the thing that's been cemented in our minds is just having a core set of values and a mission that drives you is, is the thing that matters most.

• 16:21Guy Raz?

  And so, is that how you thought of it even 10 years ago?

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think in our society, you know, in the United States, for the most part, we're extremely fortunate that there are a lot of job opportunities. And if you do have a choice, not everyone does, but if you have a choice and you can do something you're passionate about with the majority of your time, or you can do something you don't like doing, like, you know, again, if you're lucky and fortunate to have the choice, then you should do what you're passionate about.

• 16:51Guy Raz?

  So, do you think people are gonna be driving cars in 20 years? Just curious.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Uh, in major urban environments, I do not think so. I think maybe we'll go to amusement parks to do that.

• 17:01Guy Raz?

  Wow, in 20 years?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:03Guy Raz?

  Incredible. John Zimmer, founder of Lyft. John, thank you so much.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 17:09Guy Raz?

  John Zimmer joined me live onstage at the How I Built This Summit, which happened last month at the Air Buehner Center for the Arts in San Francisco. And over the next month, we're going to be posting three more bonus interviews from the summit. Next Thursday, it's my conversation with Joe Gebbia of Airbnb. Oh, and if you want to hear more from summit speakers, check out a new video with Cheryl Conti, CEO of DoBigThings.Today. Cheryl talks about overcoming the imposter syndrome and other anxieties that come with starting a business. You can find that video on the How I Built This Facebook page. And thanks for listening to today's bonus episode. It was produced by Rachel Faulkner with music composed by Rameen Arablouei.

• 17:53Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to a bonus episode of How I Built This from NPR.

• 18:06Speaker 02

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• 18:08Speaker 03

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• 18:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:11Speaker 03

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• 18:13Speaker 04

  Well, sure, let's say it is.

• 18:15Speaker 02

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