BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher

Barry speaks with Lyft CEO David Risher about his career path from Microsoft and Amazon to leading the ride-sharing platform. They discuss Lyft's financial turnaround, cost-cutting measures, and strategies for expanding market share. Plus customer-centric features, the mechanics of ride data, and the decade-long transition toward autonomous vehicle networks. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.

• 2:06Speaker 04

  This week on the podcast, man, was this a fascinating conversation. David Risher is CEO of Lyft since, I don't know, past three years. He's been on the board for the past five years. What a fascinating discussion about a company that is probably an app on your phone, and you may not be aware of all the different things they do, from bike share to autonomous vehicles, to fleet management and everything in between. I thought this was absolutely fascinating, and I think you will also. With no further ado, my conversation with Lyft's CEO, David Risher.

• 2:44Speaker 05

  Thank you, Barry. I am happy to be here.

• 2:46Speaker 04

  I'm thrilled to have you. Before we start talking about your technology background, I gotta roll a little further back. Bachelor's in Comparative Literature from Princeton? That doesn't sound like the sort of career plan for someone who's going to work his way through technology companies. What was the original idea?

• 3:06Speaker 05

  So this goes way back. And the funny thing is, even to high school, my mother bought an Apple II computer a million years ago to help her run a small business that she was running. And I sort of got into technology that way. I will admit, part of it, I think, is I had terrible handwriting. And so when I used the computer to, you know, to print out stuff, you know, for my high school, you know, English teacher, she could finally read what I was, what I was writing. It probably gave me a better grade as a result. But so I sort of got into computers a little bit as a kid. Ended up at Princeton writing my thesis on a computer again. And this is a million years ago, when that wasn't normal. And so I found myself just interested in technology. And after, you know, going to a consulting firm for a couple of years to learn about the business world and going to business school,

• 3:51Speaker 05

  I found myself as an intern at Microsoft, you know, again, back in 1990 it was, and sort of the rest is history.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  So Harvard Business School, we know what that typically leads to. I'm curious, how did the humanities background help shape the way you think about business, about leadership, about working with people? What was the upside of humanities for you?

• 4:15Speaker 05

  You know what? I really appreciate the question, and I actually think it's more relevant now than ever. Look, the humanities is all about, you know, curiosity and understanding, and maybe even empathy, right? If you, if you read a book, you have to understand, you're exposed to different people's perspectives, right? It's almost like you're crawling inside someone else's brain, particularly if you're reading fiction. And so to a certain extent, I think it's, you know, nothing could prepare you better. Now, you have to have an analytical brain. You might also have to be good with numbers in business. But the humanities world, I sort of think of it as this kind of magic, you know, vaccination against irrelevance, because that curiosity is always going to matter. And it certainly helped me through my whole, for my whole career.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  I love that answer. So you intern at Microsoft, you end up beginning your career there, where you helped to launch their first database product, Access. Tell us about that.

• 5:05Speaker 05

  Sure. So Microsoft was, you know, famously ahead in, or at least getting ahead, let's say, with the launch of Windows in Word processing, in spreadsheets, of course. And again, this is sort of ancient business history, but it's, it's sort of a fascinating tale of a technology shift completely reshuffling the deck away from old companies like WordPerfect and Lotus 123. We didn't even know who those companies are anymore because Microsoft took over that space. And it's really because Windows shifted the platform. We might come back to that idea, you know, when we talk about autonomous cars. But they didn't have a database. And that was sort of the third big product that a lot of companies wanted. I helped develop it. I was the first product manager on it. And really, all that meant is my job was to go around

• 5:47Speaker 05

  and watch other people use competing products at the time, Paradox, D-Base, again, products that don't even exist anymore, and try to pay attention to what they were doing with these products. How were they using them? Where were they stumbling? And that was my first role. And in a sense, it has been, you know, one of the most important jobs I ever had because it's what sort of taught me about understanding what customers want.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  Interesting. And then you founded Microsoft Investor and launched that product?

• 6:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  That is so far afield from databases. What, what led to that transition?

• 6:18Speaker 05

  Okay, so you're making me realize that there's a theme in my life I hadn't really thought of before, which is platform shifts. So when I joined Microsoft, Windows was the product, right? This was the thing that was going to run, you know, software. And of course, it's become incredibly successful. But then, you know, 1995, 1996, 1997 comes around. The internet is here. And Microsoft, like any tech company at the time, had to figure out its, its internet strategy. And it decided that there were a couple of key products that needed to be available on the world wide web. Again, actually, I think the information superhighway, literally was the way people talked about it. This is crazy.

• 6:53Speaker 04

  So cliched.

• 6:54Speaker 05

  So cliched, but there it was. No one even knew how to talk about the thing. So anyway, and I had been, you know, a little bit interested in personal finance. You know, a couple of sort of threads came together. Microsoft tried to buy a company called Intuit, still very successful, was unsuccessful, blocked because of the Justice Department. And so we decided we need personal finance. And I said, you know what? Why don't we develop this product? A personal finance product for the internet, not as packaged software.

• 7:18Speaker 04

  Huh, really, really interesting. And then staying with the theme of platform shifts, employee number 37 at Amazon? That is just an absolutely bonkers number.

• 7:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:32Speaker 04

  Senior VP of US Retail. When you joined the firm, revenue was $15 million. You helped ramp that up to $4 billion. So

• 7:42Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 7:43Speaker 04

  Obvious question. When you joined Amazon, did you have any idea what the behemoth it would become? Or was it still, hey, we're hanging on our fingernails, and maybe this will work out? Or anywhere in between?

• 7:56Speaker 05

  It was sort of both at the same time, you know? And it was almost always going to be one or the other, right? So I remember, I'll tell you a little of the story of how I got there. So my phone rang one day at Microsoft, and it's this guy Jeff. And he's doing a reference check of a woman who used to work, actually, at Microsoft in the personal finance group. So it all kind of connects. And, and so we get to talking, and one thing leads to another. And he's very precise about the way he's asking questions. Remember, the company had maybe 10 people at this point. It was very, very small, very, very small. But he had a big vision, you know? He was going to be Earth's biggest bookstore.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  Wait, hold on, let me just stop you. When you say this guy Jeff?

• 8:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:37Speaker 04

  This isn't just some guy in HR, Jeff Bezos is calling you to do a background check on a potential hire.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  That's exactly it. That's exactly.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  So, so go on, Jeff.

• 8:47Speaker 05

  So Jeff called me and literally at the time, he was just this guy Jeff.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Hey, David, some guy named Jeff on the phone.

• 8:53Speaker 05

  Pretty much.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  Background check for an employee. So, so what was that conversation like?

• 8:59Speaker 05

  Well, so he had, you know, to take you back then, but in a sense, it's still the Jeff you know today. He had a plan and it was a 25 question plan for the phone call, right? And, and to this day, the question I remember the most clearly was, it's very clear you're a fan of this, this person. Give me an example of a job that she wouldn't be a good fit for. And it was such a clever question because inevitably in background checks, you're trying to say nice things about the person.

• 9:27Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 9:27Speaker 05

  But this is an invitation to say, well, you know, maybe, you know, a very detail oriented job might not be the best fit. Or, or maybe something that, you know, manages a lot of people because she has nothing, something like this that would give people a little sense or give him some sense of where an area to probe more is. Anyway, at the end of that conversation, literally 45 minutes into it, he says, you know, you sound like a good guy. I said, oh, you sound like a good guy as well. And so a couple of days later, he and Mackenzie, his wife at the time, and Jen, my wife currently still, and I went out to dinner, got to know each other and over the course of the next year, got to know each other a little bit better. And then I ended up applying for this, this job to, to help, to help Amazon grow beyond just books. That was really the job.

• 10:06Speaker 04

  And how'd that work out?

• 10:08Speaker 05

  It worked out pretty well.

• 10:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:09Speaker 05

  It worked out pretty, but you know what? It wasn't obvious at the time. So, you know, he, during the interview, I remember he said, look, if we play our cards right, and as you say, it was a 15.6 million dollar store at the time. So tiny, tiny little thing. He said, if we play our cards right, maybe by the year 2000, this is in 1996, we might be a billion dollar company. Maybe, maybe, but a lot has to go right in order for that to happen. Obviously we got there and then we got, you know, far beyond, but there were all kinds of people who frankly, were sort of rooting for our failure. You know, competitors, you know, Barnes and Noble at the time, a bunch of Wall Street analysts who thought this was just a, you know, some sort of crazy Ponzi scheme or whatever it was.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  No one's gonna buy anything on the internet. What are you guys doing? This is a dumb idea.

• 10:49Speaker 05

  Totally, totally. Well, and not only that, but also the costs are going to be huge. You're going to have to build out these distribution centers and warehouses sometime, you know, this, this cost event. The internet is unproven technology, all sorts of things.

• 11:01Speaker 04

  No one's giving you a credit card over the internet.

• 11:03Speaker 05

  Correct, correct. Who's even gonna trust you?

• 11:05Speaker 04

  I remember getting from my college roommate, which was decades before Amazon formed, an Amazon gift certificate. And the first time you go through the experience of buying something, it's like, oh, this makes perfect sense. I don't have to, I don't have to go to the store. I don't have to waste time. This is great. I mean, there's certain stores are fun to browse, but like the mundane sort of stuff, he was just decades ahead of everybody else.

• 11:35Speaker 05

  In that way, and in realizing that it's really the customer experience and customer obsession that's going to drive your continued growth. Because all those things are true and as he would say famously, you're always one click away from competition. So that's the downside, right? Is how do you continue to compete in a world where theoretically someone else could start, having someone else could start and someone else could start. And you don't have any geographic advantage over them.

• 11:59Speaker 04

  And they kind of owned that space for the longest time. Really, it was only the pandemic where people were out of things that had forced everybody, all right, now I have a Target account. Now I have a Walmart account. Now anybody else who could deliver. And what's been surprising is how they've just powered right through.

• 12:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:17Speaker 04

  Hasn't really slowed them down very much.

• 12:19Speaker 05

  That's right. That's right.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  So, so you go from Amazon, you kind of tap out a couple of years later. You teach at the University of Washington's Business School. You were elected Professor of the Year in 2004. And then you spend 13 years running World Reader, a nonprofit dedicated to helping children learn to read in underserved communities. This is yet another pivot.

• 12:45Speaker 05

  Platform shift, right?

• 12:47Speaker 04

  What, was it just like, all right, I have my Microsoft stock came in, Amazon recovered from the dot com implosion. That's doing fine. I could just do something for fun. What was the, what was the shift thinking behind the shift?

• 13:00Speaker 05

  You know, uh, no, it wasn't that actually. It was sort of a different thing. So you asked me, you know, a couple of questions ago, what my career idea was as, as a kid. Honestly, if I had had to guess, I might've said, you know, I'll be, maybe I'll be an English professor someday or something like that. Like I'd wanted to teach and I loved reading. And so this was a way for me to bring together a couple of different things in my life. Obviously books and literacy, because that was sort of the passion and focus, but also technology. The thesis of the company was kids are going to read using tech. And that's how it's gotten to be, you know, millions and millions of kids later are all reading on the platform. It started out with Kindle, a product I know something about because of my Amazon days. And brought, you know, sort of technology and reading together. So that was really the, the focus.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  And then what ultimately ended up bringing you back into the corporate sector after, you know, a long time in academia and nonprofits?

• 13:51Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, um, uh, so here it was, you know, one day my phone rings and a guy named Sean Agarwal is on the other end of the line. Sean and I had worked together many years before back at Amazon. He was my kind of finance partner. He had subsequently become an investor and then the board chair of Lyft. And he and John and Logan, the co-founders of Lyft, really were looking to do something quite unusual at the board level, which was bring someone in who is a real customer advocate. So boards, you know, for, for those of you who haven't gotten a chance to be exposed to a board, you know, they typically are, are made up by, you know, kind of finance people,

• 14:29Speaker 05

  business strategists, you know, maybe, you know, maybe people who've built companies before, but often by the time you get to sort of the board level of a company, you're pretty far away from the customer. And John and Logan, again, to their credit said, you know what? We need some more customer advocacy right from the top. We need some more support frankly, for, for that kind of vibe, as well as someone who'd helped scale a company like Amazon. You know, I also learned a lot about competing at Microsoft and even at World Reader, you know, World Reader nonprofits, people sort of look at them and think they're not very much, but it's very, very difficult to actually scale a nonprofit because the funding is always tight and so forth. So I think they were looking for someone with a combination of scaling experience, but also real customer advocacy. And so I, I joined the board as a result.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  And then eventually, a couple of years later, you get offered the role of CEO. What was that like? How, how did that come about? Frequently, board members, or I should say infrequently, board members become CEOs. That doesn't happen a lot. Yeah.

• 15:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, uh, so, so funnily enough, and this one, I'll sort of slow the story down again, or this time, because it actually was Sean Agarwal again. So same board chair, he calls me up. It happened to be on Valentine's Day of all day, so I remember the day in 2023. And, and then the backstory here is John and Logan, again, the co-founders of Lyft, this is what they had been doing for 15 years, non-stop. It was literally their first job out of college, founding this whole new company, you know, withstanding the onslaught of an incredibly competitive environment, an incredibly operationally complex environment, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for year after year. So at the end of the prior year, they said to the board, you know what? It's time for us to move on. We've sort of done what we need to do. Uh, and frankly, the company is going through a bit of a tough time financially and operationally.

• 16:08Speaker 05

  And I think they realized that they were sort of getting to the end of what they could really, where they could really help. So the board did what it does, you know, boards do this, they form a special committee, they start to recruit, look around. I wasn't on the committee. I was sort of watching from, uh, you know, from, from aside. But, um, but as I say, then my phone rings one day and it's Sean on the phone with John and Logan. And they basically say, you know what? We've been thinking, and as we've been looking at external people, frankly, we think we might have the right person to at least apply for the job. Let's be clear, apply for the job, sitting right here, um, uh, you know, on the board. And I said, what are you talking about? They said, we're talking about you, David. I said, absolutely not.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  Really? Your first reaction was, hey, thanks, but no thanks.

• 16:47Speaker 05

  Zero percent chance, zero percent chance.

• 16:49Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 16:50Speaker 05

  I literally said, you should hang up the phone right now because you've got better things to do. There's just no way. But you know what? As the day wore on, I found myself saying, you know what? This is a really interesting opportunity. How many people, you know, get this opportunity to run a, and I never run a public company before. I mean, my God, but at the same time, I had learned some things at Microsoft. I'd learned some things at Amazon. I learned some things at World Reader. I learned some things in, in various different ways in my life. And I had a lot of passion for the company, having been on the board and also a real understanding that as a board member, you really only have so much power and influence. It's, it's fairly limited, but as a CEO, it's a different thing. So anyway, one thing led to another. I applied and, uh, went through kind of a harrowing experience, but ended up getting the job.

• 17:29Speaker 04

  Really, really fascinating. So we mentioned earlier, you joined the board in 2021, you're named CEO in 2023. When you, you joined the company, they were still reeling from the pandemic and all the, um, factors that that drove. The company was losing, not only losing money, but also losing market share to their big competitor, Uber. What did you find when you looked under the hood? What, what surprises were awaiting you as CEO?

• 18:00Speaker 05

  So the first maybe meta observation, and you're teeing it up is, gosh, you, you're on the board of a company for a couple of years. You kind of think you know the company. You don't really know the company. I mean, if any board members are out there, you think you do, and you probably have a pretty good sense of certain things, but you get in there and everything is 10 times, you know, bigger, worse, better, all the things than you realize. Okay. What did I see? I saw a company that had some real innovative spirit at its core. Remember Lyft was actually the one that really revolutionized rideshare. So the other guys, they came up with a sort of black car concept and, you know, black car on an app. But it was really Lyft that said, you know what? It can be anyone with a Prius. You know what I mean? Anyone can pick it up. So this company had innovated from the early days, but honestly, its innovative spirit had maybe gotten a little of the best of it.

• 18:45Speaker 05

  Tried a few too many things, spread a little too thin, losing share in its core businesses, you say. Not priced well, you know, not paying competitively. So a number of different, um, just basic issues. So what, what did we do the first, um, you know, frankly, couple of weeks? Well, first thing is lower prices. We were just priced too high.

• 19:02Speaker 04

  Really?

• 19:03Speaker 05

  Yeah. Can't operate in a.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  Did you do a big onset of announcements around that? Cause I don't, 2023 is still kind of a blur to me.

• 19:09Speaker 05

  So we didn't, and here's why. Uh, in order to, to withstand a, a price drop, because it's a very competitive business and you're doing a lot of volume. So if you, if you, if you drop your price, you, you got to make sure you can pay for it. We had to do some other things as well. So for example, we had to, uh, reduce our costs significantly. So we laid off about, uh, about a third of the company. And yeah, 26% actually of the, of the company. And I think about $330 million of savings. That was a very, very significant shock to the company. By the way, we also had to raise driver pay. So we had a lot to pay for.

• 19:43Speaker 04

  We always use simultaneously lowering prices for Lyft and yet bumping up prices for drivers.

• 19:49Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 19:50Speaker 04

  That sounds like that's going to cause a big problem for profits.

• 19:53Speaker 05

  So that's exactly right. So in order to pay for it, you have to figure out how to pay for it. And frankly, our cost structure was just sort of out of control. We were doing too many things. We had too many people. And by the way, those people were all working remotely, which makes it quite difficult to really kind of change the culture to a customer obsessed culture, which was my other big thing. So, and by the way, we were also overpaying in stock-based compensation, which was bugging investors. So in the first couple of months, you know, it wasn't really the time to be bragging. It was the time, frankly, to be saying, okay, we've got some things to fix and let's really focus on, on that. So, so, so first, you know, call it, you know, 30, 60, 90 days, it's fixing some, some basics, but also reorienting the company back towards its, its customer obsessed roots. And I'm, I'm still very, I guess I'd say proud of this.

• 20:38Speaker 05

  The second, the first meeting I had of the day was literally, you know, getting my computer or my laptop. Second meeting, 10 o'clock in the morning, Monday morning, I said, let's start talking about a product that's now called Women Plus Connect, trying to get women drivers and women riders.

• 20:50Speaker 04

  Such a great idea, especially given the mayhem across the street from you.

• 20:55Speaker 05

  I appreciate you saying that. And it's, uh, it really matters. And so, and this is something the company.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  And I'm sorry to interrupt.

• 21:01Speaker 05

  Please.

• 21:02Speaker 04

  It's very visible on the app, like that choice.

• 21:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:06Speaker 04

  Which shows some thoughtfulness and, oh, there's this problem. How about we have send a woman driver for you and you don't have to worry about what you're hearing about elsewhere.

• 21:15Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  It just makes so much sense.

• 21:17Speaker 05

  So I really appreciate you saying that. It was an easy decision from that sense. All you have to do is talk to 10 women and say, well, you know, what do you think? And they say, well, gosh, particularly late at night, maybe in a new city, maybe after a long day, it's just not my jam to be talking to a dude. Sorry dudes, you know, like that. But, um, but, but, but sometimes the easiest ideas are also the most complicated. There are all sorts of potential legal issues, all sorts of operational issues. There are even to a certain extent, cultural issues of like, is this going to be okay? But I was like, you know what? I think it's going to be okay. I think it's going to be okay. So, so that was an early decision we made. It came out, that was in, in April of 2023. We launched that later that year. And it was really exciting for the company to say, you know what? We can do big things again and we can, we can start to innovate again on, on behalf of customers.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  Huh. Kind of fascinating. Coming up, we continue our conversation with David Risher, CEO of Lyft, discussing the future of rideshare technology. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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  I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest this week is David Risher. He is the CEO of Lyft, one of North America's largest and fastest growing ridesharing network. So over the next year or so, you return Lyft to profitability. On the most recent reported quarter, first quarter 2026, over 28 million active riders, nearly $5 billion in gross bookings, 1.7 billion in revenues, just about 133 million in EBITDA profits. So the combination of, of restructuring the company, attracting, uh, higher paying, more

• 25:11Speaker 04

  drivers and discounting prices for, uh, riders puts you on the right foot. How do you build on that? What's the next step to maintain that momentum?

• 25:22Speaker 05

  Well, so, so in some sense, nothing changes and in some sense, everything changes. Okay. So what doesn't change? Customer obsession is still driving profitable growth. That's just going to be a theme I just go with forever. Yeah. I, you know, maybe I've drank a lot of the Jeff Bezos Kool-Aid, but it seems to be working out pretty well. So, so, so one other financial metric that has been interesting to watch is when I joined, we were losing about $300 million, consuming about $300 million in cash over 12 months. We're now generating about $1.1 billion in cash over the, over 12 months. Okay. So what that allows us to do is invest in the future. What does that look like? Certainly it looks like international expansion. So that's been one thing we've been at for about the last year, uh, which is, you know, Lyft was, was sort of, I almost say caught a little bit in sort of a, in sort of a US-centric

• 26:07Speaker 05

  view of the world. And, and it just doesn't make sense. Once you have a product that scales really well and is sort of a fixed cost-based type of thing, you really want it to be around as much of the world as possible so that you can run as much volume through that platform as possible. So we bought a company called FreeNow last year. It's a European taxi aggregator.

• 26:26Speaker 04

  FreeNow?

• 26:27Speaker 05

  FreeNow. Yeah, yeah. It is Europe's biggest taxi aggregator, which means that if you want a taxi and you're in a place like Barcelona or London, or pick your, your favorite city, they operate in nine countries, the FreeNow app is going to be your best way to get it. That gives us a great platform for expansion, even when it comes to autonomous vehicles. We'll come back to that, I'm sure, you know, in a couple of seconds. So that's one direction of expansion. You think of that as out overseas. Another dimension is up, up market. You just kind of referred to this. So Lyft, again, it's sort of started, its tradition was as kind of a relatively inexpensive, very available rideshare option, but it wasn't as strong in kind of the black, you know, kind of luxury segment. We bought a company called TBR last year. TBR is a high-end chauffeur company.

• 27:11Speaker 05

  We also have a very, very good Lyft black product. In fact, if you're listening to this, I promise, if you haven't tried it, give it a try. I think you'll like it. It's actually our highest rated product, you know, a nice black car comes and pick you up, picks you up. So that's another area of expansion for us because that gives us frankly more margin to play with, but it also allows us to, to talk to a segment that we haven't talked to very much. And then of course, autonomous vehicles. So these are all nice uses of cash. Once you're generating cash, you can start to either acquire companies or you can invest in things that then grow, you know, build sort of the next chapter of growth.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  So I appreciate you mentioning the various tiers. There's this tendency to think of the consumer, especially the American consumer, as one thing, but we both know that's not true. You get to crunch a whole lot of data. What are you seeing in terms of income, geography, various times a day? Like what do the metrics tell you about the different flavors of consumers using Lyft?

• 28:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. This is such an interesting, you know, issue and it's not something I really appreciated. You know, we're going to do about a billion rides this year. And so to your point, with a billion rides, you kind of get a sense of how people are spending their time during the day. So I'll tell you two things that are growing quite quickly. One is, um, party time. And it might be funny to start there, but party time. So I should say what that means. What that means is, uh, Thursday night, really Friday night and Saturday night, call it nine to midnight. And it is really interesting. I think this, um, not just post-COVID, but I think frankly, a little bit of app fatigue is driving people to say, you know what? Let's actually get out and spend our lives out in the real world instead of spending all of our lives on apps. So I think that's actually, I'm quite comforted by that.

• 28:52Speaker 05

  And it's actually a big part of our sort of overall purpose is to serve and connect people. A lot of passion about that. At the same time, commute as well. And I do think this is a certain post-COVID thing where people were sort of thinking, maybe we'll just be in our houses the rest of our life, working remotely. It turns out a lot of companies and a lot of people are saying, I want to get back to work. And I think these things are somewhat connected and sorry for sounding a little bit like a social psychologist a little bit, but I mean, gosh, I'm at my wife at Microsoft. You know, a lot of people have really significant life events that happen at work that are not just work, right? And so I think there's a little bit. So anyway, when I look at things like commute hours and I look, and then travel continues to be really strong as well. I think, and this is, look, I'm, you know, a million years old now. When I was a kid, the idea of, you know, getting on a plane and going overseas was, I mean, I might as well say, you'll go to the moon.

• 29:36Speaker 05

  Now, you know, 20 and 30 year olds are like, yeah, I'll sort of take a trip overseas or I'll go to, you know, whatever, Nashville for the weekend or something. So anyway, I think these are pretty big, you know, real societal shifts as people want to kind of be out in the real world.

• 29:48Speaker 04

  I'm kind of fascinated by the idea of party time because there's always pre-drive apps is there's was always the question, all right, I've had to, I guess I'm driving tonight, so I gotta stop here. But if you're out on party night and you know, you're taking a car home, you're not afraid about having a second or third drink, you can kind of relax a little bit. Getting pulled over is not a problem if you're in somebody else's Lyft.

• 30:16Speaker 05

  That's exactly right. It's so again, if you zoom out, so you know, Wall Street looks at companies like ours quarter by quarter and it's sort of drives you crazy. But if you zoom way, way out, you know, let's look at that from a different dimension now. Average car right now, 50,000 bucks a year. Okay, average monthly payment, 800 bucks. Insurance will cost you another couple hundred bucks. Gas might cost you another 100 bucks or so, at least now. And then service will cost a little bit more than that. Okay, so that's Plan A. And by the way, if you take on all that responsibility, there's no texting and there's no drinking.

• 30:50Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 30:51Speaker 05

  Now, Plan B, pay 20 bucks, get in a Lyft, someone else does the driving, text your heart to contend, drink as much as you want, if that's your, if that's your jam. And it's, you know, 20 bucks, not, you know, 800 bucks times your plus, plus, plus, plus, plus. So just, just looking out, again, you're sort of asking about kind of segments and sort of the, maybe a little bit, the role of technology in society. I think, I still think we're actually at the, at the beginning stages of a lot of these changes. And we, and sometimes, again, people have been around for a while, don't even realize how much the world has changed in that way.

• 31:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, fascinating data point I saw, it was actually a couple of years ago, the number of kids under 19 that haven't gotten a driver's license is kind of like, when I was growing up, you couldn't wait to get your driver's license because that meant freedom. There wasn't an internet, there were three channels, plus some people started getting cable. Like, it was a very different world back then.

• 31:42Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 31:43Speaker 04

  And now it's like, yeah, maybe I'll get a license, maybe I won't. How do you think about marketing to that demographic?

• 31:48Speaker 05

  Well, so one of the things I learned from Jeff again, who is, as you can imagine, quite an influential boss for me, is, you know, build your businesses on things that don't tend to change, not things that are, that are sort of ephemeral. So what are some things that don't, that aren't going to change? Okay, again, people are going to want to get out either to the doctor or to, you know, go to a bar. So that's, that's, that's a good bet. People are also going to want to save money. And so a lot of our focus right now, and you're going to see start a lot of marketing around this, is save money, check Lyft. Now, I want to be super clear here. It's not, if I look at the competitor, that we always have a better price. Of course, we try to, but we don't always, you know, sometimes, you know, all sorts of things happen. But over time, if you check both

• 32:32Speaker 05

  apps, you're going to save some money. And certainly compared to buying a car of your own and dealing with all the maintenance, you're going to save some money. So it's not the only thing I want to say, but I actually think it's an important thing to say, particularly in a world of sort of some economic instability is, this is a good way for you to save some money. And frankly, I'm proud of our cost position. I'm proud of our ability to offer a great price every single day, you know, billion times a year.

• 32:52Speaker 04

  So, so let's talk about you versus your competitor.

• 32:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:55Speaker 04

  Lyft has always been framed as sort of the underdog to Uber. Is this kind of a Coke and Pepsi story? What, what are the advantages of, of being number two? Remember the old, was it Avis? We're number true two, we have to try harder?

• 33:10Speaker 05

  Absolutely. So I like being number two. And it's maybe a funny thing to say, but I do think it means you try harder. You wake up every single morning and you say, I got one job, which is to frankly, you know, do a great job for my riders and my drivers, such that maybe over time I can, you know, I can, I can overtake the, the other guys. You know, I guess the way to think about that is, I think the right number of rideshare companies in most markets is probably two. You know, it's, it's, it's a capital intensive business, not because you own the cars, but because you own a lot of server capacity and, you know, it's quite complicated to figure out, you know, pick up and drop off locations and customer service. People leave their phones in the car about 8,000 times a week, you know, it's just all sorts of, right?

• 33:54Speaker 04

  Especially Friday party night, right?

• 33:56Speaker 05

  There you go. It all kind of comes together. There is something, there is something to that. And by the way, we have really cool innovation coming out there. We'll, we'll bring your phone back to you automatically, but that's a separate story. But anyway, so, so in a funny way, it's, it's, it's not a bad thing to be in, in sort of a two-player position, because you really only have one competitor. And frankly, if you spend too much of your time thinking about that one competitor, you're probably losing the, the script, because guess what? There are a lot of drives, rides that people aren't even taking on rideshare at all. Okay. So, you know, back to this question, you know, we're a customer obsessed company. And, you know, this is going to be the thing, this is why we're growing, you know, mid-single, mid-double digits, you know, 15 to 20% year on year. It's why we've become profitable. It's why we're spinning off cash. And I think that is a good place to be, particularly when I look at the other guys who I tend to think

• 34:40Speaker 05

  of frankly, as a more, I'll call them sort of financially and maybe, maybe technologically driven, maybe, I don't know exactly how they describe themselves, but, but I don't get the, the customer obsessed vibe.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  Huh. So, so that's kind of interesting. Let's talk about an example where there's no customer obsessed vibe. So I use Lyft, I use Uber. It feels like on Uber, the way it measures time is sort of an alternative reality. Hey, we'll find a driver in three minutes, it takes nine minutes. Hey, the car will be here, but in, in 11 minutes, it's there in 23 minutes. Like, they, the, the app is very full of BS. It consistently lies. I'm curious, is this just a logistical issue that everybody has to deal with? Or, and we know a lot about the history and culture of your biggest competitor, is this a culture

• 35:35Speaker 04

  problem that, you know, their history has a lot of bad behavior, a lot of, let's just call it questionable legality. I wouldn't go so far as to say fraud, but they did a lot of bad things. Does that show up in how the app behaves? Or is this just, no, Google Maps is tough to work with, this is a logistical challenge?

• 35:57Speaker 05

  No, it is, it is a logistical challenge, but, but I think you're, look, I'm not going to characterize, you, you did a marvelous job characterizing me.

• 36:07Speaker 04

  Skirting liability for slander.

• 36:10Speaker 05

  Fantastic. Exactly. So Barry's got a whole second, hold on, well, you were a lawyer, right?

• 36:15Speaker 04

  Yes, that's correct.

• 36:16Speaker 05

  Oh, there we go.

• 36:16Speaker 04

  But I, but I'm recovered.

• 36:17Speaker 05

  I understand, recovered lawyer, but you did just hear a lawyer very carefully parse his words. Okay. Listen, I won't comment on that. What I will say is, we are very focused. For example, you're talking about reliability. Oh my goodness, you talk to my team and they will, they will, they roll their eyes, maybe would be one way to say, but the number of times I talk about reliability internally is, is high, because I am obsessed by saying, if we're going to make a promise, we're going to meet the promise. And starting in a couple of weeks, we're actually starting to do some more work to actually surface that promise even a little bit more visibly. We do it today for airport pickups. If we're more than 10 minutes late for an airport pickups, we pay you up to 100 bucks, no questions asked.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  Really?

• 36:53Speaker 05

  Yep. And we rarely have to do that. Our reliability rate is above 99% for scheduled airport pickups. Yeah. So we're very, very focused on that. You know, I will say, look, at, at business school, there's a very famous class, which has a weird technical name, but it's basically about incentives and behavior.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  What's the name of the class?

• 37:12Speaker 05

  It's called, like, I was in business a long time ago. I think it's called CCMO is the, is the, and I don't even remember what it stands for anymore. It's probably called something different today. But, but it really is about how incentives drive behavior, you know, financial incentives and other incentives and incentive alignment and so forth and so on. There is an incentive in the, the sort of the, the on-demand app world, not always to be truthful, because if you, if you overpromise something, and then you kind of hook a person in, you know, what are they going to do if they cancel or whatever? It's just going to take them more time. So, and that is an evil and pernicious problem that is kind of baked into the, the model. And we just reject it wholeheartedly. Doesn't

• 37:57Speaker 05

  mean we never make a mistake, but if, if, if your car shows up later than we estimated, it's not, it's because we made a mistake. And, and, and we are trying over and over and over and over again, to eliminate those, their defects, right? And then start to guarantee it over time.

• 38:10Speaker 04

  So you are crunching a lot of numbers, you're seeing a lot of data in real time. I'm kind of fascinated by the concept of what at Lyft HQ, the dashboard looks like, what sort of data you're, you're watching constantly. What's the most surprising set of numbers or, or charts that come across that?

• 38:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is a great question. I mean, yeah, so the answer first is just, you know, validate the premise is absolutely, you know, enormous amount of real time data, you know, two to three million rides every single day, and now worldwide. So we're very active. And in fact, we have whole cool maps that are show, you know, simulations and such of, of behavior, particularly around storms and all sorts of crazy times. Anyway, back to your question. Look, there are a couple of metrics that I think might surprise you that we pay as much attention to as we do. And I'll give you a very specific one because it kind of helps tell the story. When I joined, about 15% of the time, drivers would cancel on you. Now, this is infuriating.

• 39:06Speaker 04

  Really?

• 39:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 39:07Speaker 04

  That, that high? I mean, every now and then on your competitor, I'll see a cancellation, but typically, it's rush hour, someone's stuck on the other side of the city, they're not going to make it. So rather than, and get that ding, they just cancel and find someone by then.

• 39:21Speaker 05

  So, so today's world, it is less than four and a half percent on our app. So we've brought it down by a factor of three.

• 39:29Speaker 04

  One in 20.

• 39:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. And it was less. And so, oh, no, yeah, no, that's, it's actually about that.

• 39:34Speaker 04

  Just slightly less.

• 39:35Speaker 05

  Around that, yeah. So, so how have we done that? Well, it's not just they're on the other side. It's maybe we didn't give them enough information right up front, right? So for example, how much they're going to make, or what neighborhood are they going to drop you off at? Maybe, and by not enough information, maybe we gave it to them, but the font was a little bit too small for them to see it, right? Or maybe it wasn't on the screen, you know, quite long enough. Or maybe we gave you a ride that we didn't know was very, very unlikely for you to want for, because of your, you know, past history, whatever it is. So now we spend a lot of energy and we've just been grinding away at this year after year after year, because it's so infuriating to riders. That's an example of a, of a

• 40:18Speaker 05

  sort of specific metric that we're looking at, you know, by the day.

• 40:21Speaker 04

  Huh, really, really interesting. Two kind of related questions to the growth of Lyft. Your last quarter's earnings call, you said, or maybe it was a previous one, 27% of North American rides are linked to a corporate partnership, Chase, DoorDash, United, Hilton, et cetera. What is that strategy? Is that about customer acquisition, margin? Like, what goes into those sort of big partnerships?

• 40:48Speaker 05

  Sure. So, you know, as you say, we have, we have tens of millions of people who use our service every, every quarter. It's about 50 million a year. And, and again, this is back to sort of the, the Amazon philosophy. You've got to compete for those customers, right? You've got to compete because, you know, they have alternatives. And in fact, there's, you know, another company out there that, that, that some people know. Okay. So one of the ways you compete is you say, gosh, it's not just about the ride, it's about the relationship. And maybe it's a relationship you already have with another company. So you mentioned United Airlines. United Airlines has now been a partner of ours for about the last six months. It's been a wonderful partnership already because United Airlines Mileage Plus program is incredibly well built out. People are very, very loyal to

• 41:30Speaker 05

  it. What can you do on Lyft? You can now earn miles so that you can take a vacation, you know?

• 41:36Speaker 04

  Same with Hilton Honors?

• 41:37Speaker 05

  And same with Hilton Honors, exactly. There, we've been a partner for many, many years. The big innovation on the Mileage Plus side is you can actually spend your miles on Lyft as well, which almost feels like free rides, right? It's just like, you know, you, you get, you know, 200 miles for 500 miles, whatever, for taking an airline trip, and you spend, you know, a small segment of those on a, on a Lyft ride. So, so these partnerships, you, you sort of asked what their, their, sort of the, the, the method behind it is, it's about customer acquisition for sure, but it's also about customer retention, you know, because if you're in the United ecosystem, or on the DoorDash side, or Hilton, or Alaska Airlines, or Bilt, primarily here in New York City, and other cities where they're active, and you want to either earn or burn miles or, or points, we're a great place to do that.

• 42:19Speaker 04

  Really, really kind of interesting. I read an article from Reuters, smaller US markets in college towns have been meaningful growth drivers. Curious, what, why are those markets underpenetrated? What did you guys figure out there?

• 42:35Speaker 05

  So part of it there has been just a little bit of, you know, you might say neglect from the rideshare business for a while. And we realized about 18 months ago, that a large part of the TAM, just to, just to frame this again-

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Total addressable market.

• 42:50Speaker 05

  Total addressable market, exactly. About 160 billion rides a year that people take in their private cars across the United States, 160 billion. And remember, we do a billion, the other guys might do three or four, maybe two or three billion, so four billion out of 160 billion. Okay, so there's a lot of addressable market left for us to go to. And we've been in places like New York, and San Francisco, and Chicago for over a decade right now. But some of these smaller towns, you know, the Indianapolis's of the world, the St. Louis's of the world, as well as college towns, where basically, you know, nobody has a car compared to the population, you know, they just look like good opportunities for us. They're complicated from a marketplace management perspective, because anytime you go to a newer geography, you've got to first make sure you've got enough drivers, because otherwise it takes too long to get picked up. And you've

• 43:33Speaker 05

  got to make sure you've got enough riders, because then driver, if not, then riders, drivers won't make enough money. So it's, it's quite complex to invest-

• 43:39Speaker 04

  There's a chicken and egg problem now.

• 43:40Speaker 05

  There's a chicken and egg problem over and over again, which again, is why, back to the, an earlier part of the conversation, it's really quite hard at this point to come into the market fresh. You know, you're not going to find a lot of folks who want to come into a, a well served market. But anyway, so we just started to focus on it. And, and our data scientists and, and our marketers really kind of went to town, and it's been a, a big source of growth.

• 44:01Speaker 04

  Really, really interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation with David Risher, CEO of Lyft, discussing the future of transportation technology. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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• 47:01Speaker 04

  I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special fascinating guest is David Risher. He is the CEO of Lyft, and we have been discussing the future of transportation technology. We, we have to talk about AI, we have to talk about autonomous vehicles, but before we do, I, I have to ask you two really interesting questions. One is, how do you solve the problem of even sober people leaving their phones in the car when they get out, and suddenly it's a big penalty, somebody has to come either drop off the phone or whatever? How, how do you, as a customer-obsessed company, how do you solve that problem?

• 47:47Speaker 05

  I so love this question, because it is an experience every single one of us has had, and it is both infuriating and incredibly stressful. Because all of a sudden, you realize, oh my God, my entire life is driving in the wrong direction, and I don't even know how to contact the company at this point. Okay.

• 48:02Speaker 04

  Because the number is on your phone.

• 48:04Speaker 05

  And the phone is in the car, and you're like, I want to hold my phone to call the phone, but I can't do that. It's very, very stressful. So here's what we've done. We actually are working, we're doing a huge amount of work on this, just to be really customer-centered. The first thing is automatic detection. So if the phone starts to travel away with the driver after, you know, you've been dropped off-

• 48:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, that immediately automatically alerts the driver, there's probably a phone in your backseat. It requires a little bit of work on the rider's side. We're still trying to figure out how to get riders to opt into this, because they have to share a little bit more information, but we're still working on that. But regardless of whether it happens automatically or manually, the second thing is, we've got a whole web portal, so you don't actually have to use your phone, you can, and you don't have to log in. But really, the big innovation is this. We used to have, it's called sort of out of band. So the whole, like, return the phone thing, it becomes almost a separate process. And frankly, in the past, it's almost felt like a bit of a negotiation between the driver, and nobody liked it. The drivers didn't like it, because it felt like it was sort of an annoyance. The riders didn't like it, because they're like, oh my God, I sort of feel like I'm being held hostage here. A terrible thing. Now, it's a whole automated

• 49:08Speaker 05

  process, and basically what we realized is, we should just treat it like any other ride. So it's basically the phone is getting a ride back. So what you get to say as a rider is, yes, please bring my phone back. I know exactly how much it's going to cost. It's going to cost just the exact same amount as if I'd taken a ride to that exact place where the phone is. And the driver gets it in their queue, just like they would get any other ride request, and it gets returned to you. Typically, I was just looking at this data, and it changes every single week. But we're now getting to the point where a, a large percentage of our phones are being, or riders' phones are being delivered back within an hour, which is the absolute gold standard.

• 49:41Speaker 04

  So let's use technology and, and cut that on the app, opt in to avoid leaving your phone in the car via Bluetooth, not on each ride, but just once on the app. And then when the person, when the ride is over, you've arrived, and the person gets out, if the phone doesn't leave the car, right there and then, the driver should lower the window and say, hey, you left your car, your phone in the backseat. If that technology, and that doesn't seem like you're changing or creating new technology-

• 50:14Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 50:15Speaker 04

  You're just applying existing technology. Why take an hour? Why not take 30 seconds?

• 50:19Speaker 05

  Hundred percent. So, and, and this is now where you realize that all technology problems are ultimately human problems. Because in order for that to happen, a person has to have opted in, they've got to click a, a button. Most people are either skeptical of that, or they're not paying attention. So now that's our trick, is to try to figure out a way to really encourage people to do that. As you say, you only have to do it once, but that's going to be the next big, next big focus.

• 50:40Speaker 04

  So let's stay with that theme before we really move too far away from people and towards technology. You drive for Lyft every six weeks or so, which seems kind of bonkers. What, what have you learned, sitting in that seat, that you can't learn from the executive suite or the boardroom?

• 50:59Speaker 05

  So much, so much. And, and I know, you know, we're all busy people, you know, here I am, busy, senior executive, CEO of company, my God, you know what? I got time. I can't jump in the car. So and here's why. So I learned stuff about being a driver and I learned something about being a rider every single time. So I'll give you an example of each very quickly. On the driver's side, I learned how important a feature is that we've developed over years and refined called stay within area. And that's because and there are actually two features next to each other. One stay within area, one's arrive on time. Let me actually focus on arrive on time. What that means is I've got a kid to pick up at the end of the day, or I've got a date with my wife tonight, or I've got a doctor's appointment at three o'clock in the afternoon. And so I need to figure out a way to organize my life such that my last

• 51:44Speaker 05

  ride is going to put me, you know, right where I need to be by a certain time. That, you know, if I look at the gig economy, one of the real gifts of the gig economy is it allows you to integrate your work into your life in new ways. Again, I don't have to call my boss and tell him I'm going to be late today. I don't have to do anything like that. But sometimes I do have other things in my life. Maybe it's another job. Maybe it's an obligation with my, you know, with my parents or whatever it might be. So anyway, that's a feature. It worked pretty well. When I started, it works very well now. And in part, it's because I give a lot of feedback to the team on how to how to make that better and how important it is to to get that exactly right. And then on the rider's side, I mean, every time I take a, you know, a rider in the car, of course, I asked them why they chose us versus the other guys. Sometimes it's because they say,

• 52:27Speaker 05

  oh, Chase Sapphire Reserve. I'm a Chase Sapphire Reserve cardholder, and you guys have a relationship with them. That's great. That gives me a little bit of data of how important that is.

• 52:35Speaker 04

  That's a points relationship also?

• 52:36Speaker 05

  Points relationship, and you get all sorts. You get $10 every single month to use as Lyft credit. And look, I can look at the data, just like anyone else, and realize the number of people who are using that. But there's just no substitute by hearing somebody, you know, go off about how they much, how much they love that card, and how important that that partnership is to them, as a generic example. And then a specific example involved a woman that I gave a ride to, this is now about almost two years ago, but it's still really, you know, kind of resonates with me, where she would wake up every single morning, and depending on what the price was of getting from her home to her job, because the prices would bounce around a lot, she would either take a Lyft, or maybe take the other guys, or drive herself, or stay home. And it was a source

• 53:19Speaker 05

  of stress and concern to her every single day. She would literally wake up an hour, you know, before she had to leave, just to sort of check prices. And it just made me realize how much surge pricing is is customer hostile.

• 53:30Speaker 04

  Nobody likes it.

• 53:31Speaker 05

  Nobody likes it.

• 53:32Speaker 04

  It starts to drizzle a little bit, and suddenly it's a $30 surcharge. And I know people are infuriated by it.

• 53:39Speaker 05

  And they and they should be. And here's the problem. This is the difference between, you know, if you're an economist, you love this, right? It's all supply, demand balancing in real time. It's just unbelievable, like a, like a, like a perfect science experiment. And if you're a real person, it just, it just bugs the crap out of you. So it really drove home to me how frustrating this was. And it was literally a Friday morning where this woman had donuts, and she was bringing them in to see a coworker for his birthday. And she's like, I can't work from home today. I'm so glad that Lyft was, you know, was reasonably priced. So that's what's led us to both take about $50 million a year out of surge pricing. We've really tried to get rid of it as much as we can, can't completely eliminate it, and also introduce a product called Price Lock that allows you to lock in a price on a route.

• 54:19Speaker 04

  So what, tell us a little bit about Price Lock. What does that do?

• 54:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 54:22Speaker 04

  So I'm not familiar with that aspect of the app.

• 54:25Speaker 05

  Yep. Yep. So what it's, it's really meant for people who commute the same route every day, and they don't want the route to go from 20 to 30 to 40 bucks. Because as you say, it rains. And by the way, to be very clear, like, there are good reasons for surge pricing, right? It's a very good way for us to encourage drivers to drive when there's more demand than there's supply. But because it's very frustrating for riders, we want to give people a way to kind of opt out of it. So for a given route, you know, from point A to point B, if you want to lock in a price, we basically say, here's the average price over the course of a month. If you want to lock in, I think it costs $4.99 a month per route, that's all it takes. And it's been super popular for people who just want to get that out of their lives.

• 54:59Speaker 04

  Huh. Really, really, really kind of interesting. So let's talk a little bit about autonomous driving. I was in San Francisco last month. Waymos are everywhere.

• 55:10Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 55:11Speaker 04

  Tell us a little bit about what Lyft wants to do with autonomous vehicles. Are these just shiny objects? Or are these the future?

• 55:19Speaker 05

  They're the future. They're the future. It will take a long time for this future to come. It will be very unevenly distributed, but they are the future. And the basic reason why is they are a reliable product, and they're a safe product, you know?

• 55:33Speaker 04

  Safer than human drivers, substantially, right?

• 55:35Speaker 05

  And it's because they not only know the policies, but they follow the policies. You know, they tend to follow the rules. And they don't get distracted, you know. So not to say some crazy thing won't happen one time out of a million, but 99.999% of the time, they'll do the thing that you expect a car to do, which is, you know, keep its rider safe. So, so, okay, so that's, that is, is coming. So now, you know, as a, as a business person, you know, you have a, you have a choice to make, right? You can either embrace this, or you can sort of not. And the thing is, in a sense, it's a choice, but in another sense, it's not, because you've seen Kodak, whatever, Polaroid.

• 56:11Speaker 04

  Who, by the way, Kodak invented the digital camera.

• 56:14Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 56:14Speaker 04

  But didn't want to cannibalize their own film business. And how did that work out?

• 56:18Speaker 05

  Not exactly, not so well. And then you look, on the other hand, at maybe a company like Netflix that invented the DVD by mail business to sort of, you know, you know, sort of set Blockbuster aside, but did such a good job surfing from that to, you know, streaming, and now to original content, right? They're a great company in so, so many ways, but they were, they were relentless, fearless about cannibalizing their own business to sort of, you know, get to the next thing. So that's the shift that we're right in the early, early, early days of. It will be another platform shift. But we're in a very fortunate position, and here's why. You know, we have millions of riders. We have millions of billions, billions of data points about pickup and drop off location,

• 57:02Speaker 05

  and pricing, and so forth and so on. And we have a whole subsidiary called Flex Drive that does fleet management, which I can come back to in a couple of seconds. But these are going to be some of the building blocks of the self-driving, or I really should say hybrid network of the future. Because that's the last thing I'll say, just as sort of intro, self-driving cars are going to come little by little by little by little. Human drivers are going to be around for a long, long, long time. There is not enough self-driving cars in any given market to satisfy peak demand on, you know, Friday afternoon at 5 o'clock rush hour, or what have you.

• 57:32Speaker 04

  So this is not a three, four, five year transition. This is a 10 to 20 year transition? Is that about right?

• 57:38Speaker 05

  Think about it as a decade transition. Yeah. And even, again, the word transition, I think, is maybe, you know, not quite right, because the economics of an expensive car don't really lend themselves to having a whole bunch of them sitting around at 2:00 in the morning, empty. You really, I think, want a hybrid network for a long, long time, for human reasons, too, right? You might want someone to help you with your luggage, or maybe even someone to ask you how your day was. But the economics of it make it such that it's much more likely this will be a hybrid network for at least a decade or more.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  So, so that kind of raises an interesting question. What exactly is Lyft? We know it's a ride hailing company. It's also a transportation market clearing mechanism. It's a consumer brand, and it's also a logistics platform. Like, where is the future growth coming from?

• 58:27Speaker 05

  I mean, you know, a little of the above, right? So as you say, I mean, the thing people know Lyft the most for are, you know, human driven cars, you know, picking you up and dropping you off. And as we were just saying, that will become a mix of human driven and, you know, frankly, robot driven cars. What you may not know is Lyft also runs the BikeSure system here in New York City, where we're.

• 58:47Speaker 04

  City bikes are run by Lyft? I did not know that.

• 58:50Speaker 05

  That's exactly right. So we run City Bike, we run the program in San Francisco, we run the program in Chicago, we run the program in Boston, we run Portland, Oregon. And then we also supply the technology and the bikes in London, in Barcelona, in Madrid, you know, many, many countries around the world. This may seem like sort of a small thing, but if you've been to a city like New York or, or London, you'll know that cities are very, very aware that they want sort of multimodal transportation. So that's going to be, you know, a big part of our future as well. And then, look, you know, someday, who knows, maybe Bodes, maybe Vertical Takeoff Airlines, you know, who knows. But I will tell you that our real focus right now, and we will always be, is, and this, this is our sort of purpose, is serving and connecting. I want people

• 59:33Speaker 05

  to be out and about and connect with each other in any possible way we can. That's really what I want.

• 59:37Speaker 04

  So you mentioned London.

• 59:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:39Speaker 04

  What are the plans for Baidu RoboTaxis in Robo, in London? This is going to be a pilot program that could potentially scale up dramatically, like the Waymos in San Francisco?

• 59:53Speaker 05

  That's right. So again, let's think about the self-driving car world for a couple of minutes. The technology is being developed worldwide. It's being developed in the United States. Waymo, of course, is the leader, really the worldwide leader. Zooks, which is owned by Amazon, is much, much smaller, but, you know, trying very hard to come up behind Waymo. And then there'll be, you know, many others, including maybe Nvidia and companies that aren't even really in the space now, but will want to sell their technology to different OEMs, to different, you know, car manufacturers. There's also technology coming out of China. Baidu is sort of the Google, you think of it as kind of the alphabet of China. And there are many, many others. There's a company called WeRide. There's a company called Pony. There's a company called Momenta. There's a company called Geely.

• 1:00:37Speaker 05

  I was just in China a couple of weeks ago, looking at the incredible just growth of technology there, both of hardware and software type technology. Okay, so that's all background. It's going to be deployed worldwide. And in the United States, Chinese technology is not super welcome for obvious reasons. But Europe is taking maybe a little bit of a more sort of economical approach, where they're kind of looking at different technology providers and saying, let's experiment. So in London, we're partners with Baidu. Baidu has a very, very highly regarded self-driving platform. And we're just in the early days of rolling it out there. It's called an RT six car. This is sort of behind the scenes stuff. And it literally is just rolling off boats right now, and it'll be commercialized next year.

• 1:01:19Speaker 04

  So I'm looking at the current crop of autonomous vehicles, which are essentially converted traditional cars.

• 1:01:29Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  But you really, do you need that front driver seat? Can you change up the internal layout? Like, what are autonomous vehicles going to look like? Not in 2060, but in a couple of years.

• 1:01:41Speaker 05

  Yeah. So again, it's such an interesting time to be in this industry. And it's exactly, you know, as you're saying, like, do you really need a steering wheel? Do you really need, you know, accelerator and brakes? You know, Zooks, as I say, they're an Amazon subsidiary. They would say you absolutely don't. And they have a purpose-built vehicle that doesn't have either one of those things. Now, for regulatory reasons, for human acceptance reasons and so forth, for manufacturing reasons, that's going to be slower to roll out because you can't rely on, you know, the big OEMs to produce a car like that. That's its own vehicle. So I think what you're going to see over the next three to five years is an enormous amount of new innovation in the in the car space. It won't just be, you know, there won't be a driver. It'll be, you know, you'll have seats that face each other.

• 1:02:25Speaker 05

  You know, you'll have seats that completely recline because you've got more space in there. You'll have different luggage configurations. You'll have, you know, some of them will feel more like, you know, party buses. Some of them may be, you know, corporate shuttles that just don't have drivers. A lot of new stuff is going to come in the next couple of years, step by step. Because again, you know, hardware is hard. It takes a long time to build it out. But, you know, you look five years out, and I think you're going to see a lot of cars that look pretty different from what you see today.

• 1:02:47Speaker 04

  I'm unfamiliar with Zooks and Amazon's relationship with them. But if I recall correctly, Amazon was an early investor, took a big chunk of Rivian.

• 1:02:56Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:02:57Speaker 04

  And all of the electric Amazon delivery vehicles you see are essentially the Rivian platform repurposed for commercial use.

• 1:03:06Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:03:07Speaker 04

  Zooks plus Rivian, is that the direction Amazon is going? And do you guys, does Lyft, who CEO has a relationship with Jeff, have a relationship with Amazon?

• 1:03:20Speaker 05

  We do have a relationship with Amazon. Of course, we're huge consumers of AWS, which is Andy, current CEO's, you know, kind of pride and joy. And for sure, we'll end up using, you know, we'll end up. Look, everyone is going to end up partnering with everyone. That's the interesting space we're in right now is if you're in the, if you're in the business of developing a self-driving car, it's billions of dollars of R and D, billions of dollars. And so you want as many customers as possible. And then if you're in our business, in the business of moving people around and connecting people, you want to have multiple suppliers of that technology. So you're not beholden to anyone. Some of that is just being, you know, a smart, you know, business person. But some of it also is, you know, technology goes through its own, you know, fits and starts.

• 1:04:04Speaker 05

  Look at what happens with the airline business when all of a sudden, you know, Boeing has a problem with one of its units. You know, they stop manufacturing those for a time or they're grounded. So I don't want to overdramatize. But, you know, anytime new technology comes out, you're going to find, you know, some of that happens as well. So all of us are kind of in multiple, you know, let's say maybe polyamorous relationships might be one way to.

• 1:04:24Speaker 04

  Well, don't you have to be? You can't lock into platform dependency too early. Otherwise, you end up owning Betamax, and what good is that? And I know half our audience has no idea what the hell that is.

• 1:04:36Speaker 05

  There we go, an old school reference.

• 1:04:37Speaker 04

  Right. But, but I mean, when you, when you commit one way. So, so, so let's talk a little more about the autonomous ride hailing. What are the big concerns? Is it safety? Is it regulation? Is it winning the consumers' trust? What are the economics of managing a fleet like that?

• 1:04:56Speaker 05

  Again, so many interesting questions here. Let's start with the customer side of things, right? So the first order of business has to be building customer trust and adoption for this new technology. Because, you know, it's a car that drives itself, which is magical, but also can be a bit intimidating or, you know, even scary for people who haven't seen the technology. Lyft obviously has a lot of value to add right there because it's a brand that already people trust. They understand. You'll be able to opt in or opt out of getting it. I was just in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago where we're having an experiment, a small deployment with a company called May Mobility, which is also in the self-driving car space. They're Toyota Siennas. They pull up to you. And all of a sudden, you get in, it's kind of a whole different type of experience from what you've probably experienced in the past.

• 1:05:39Speaker 05

  But because it's got Lyft behind it, right on the door, already people sort of say, okay, great, I kind of understand this company and know something about it. Okay, that's great. So then you kind of have to work yourself down the stack. There's all sorts of technology problems that you have to solve as you integrate, you know, their platform and us. And then someone's got to manage these cars. And this is worth talking about for a couple of seconds. In traditional ride share, the driver is responsible for their own car, right? They put gas in it, or they charge it up if it's electric. They keep it clean, hopefully they keep it maintained and so forth. But in the self-driving space, at least for the next three to five years, most of the car ownership are going to be professional fleet owners. You know, they're going to buy 20, 50, 100, 500, and are going to kind of manage these as a fleet.

• 1:06:23Speaker 05

  And that means that they've got to be, again, charged and maintained and cleaned. But they have to be done at kind of at a professional level. That's the sort of stage we're in. We've had a subsidiary for many years called Flex Drive. We actually own about 10,000 cars on the Lyft platform for drivers who don't want to drive their own car. And we are responsible for maintenance and keeping them cleaned and so forth and so on. So we actually bring a lot to that as well. And I think that's one of the reasons why we like the economic profile of self-driving cars. They don't have insurance as high, for example, as personally driven cars. But also, we like the economics of our fleet management subsidiary and think we can service these at an industry-leading rate and therefore hopefully make more money on the asset than anybody else.

• 1:07:04Speaker 04

  Is there still going to be a future for people who, today you would think of owner drivers, who just want to own autonomous vehicles and lease them out or send them out into the Lyft network? Like, I'm crunching the numbers in my head as we're speaking. And I'm like, oh, that could be a 10, 12% return on investment. Not bad when bond yields are 4%, 3.5%.

• 1:07:27Speaker 05

  100%. I mean, there will be a time where, you know, if you fast forward, you know, five years or whatever, maybe more, many people, individual owners, have cars that can drive themselves. And then there's a question to your point of, you know, can you put that on the network? The answer is absolutely. You'll be able to put it on the Lyft network, and it'll come back, again, cleaned and charged because of the fleet management side of things.

• 1:07:46Speaker 04

  That, that sounds really, really interesting. You know, it's funny because when the ride apps first came out, there was a little bit of a lag before people got comfortable. What do you mean I'm getting into a stranger's car?

• 1:08:01Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:08:01Speaker 04

  I imagine we're going to go through the same thing. What do you mean I'm getting into a car with no driver?

• 1:08:06Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:08:07Speaker 04

  It feels like the transitions are happening faster and faster. Same sort of question. This isn't a 10, 20-year thing. This is a couple of years before people are, forget people under 30 who adapt so rapidly. The, the middle part of that age bell curve, the 30 to 60, they're going to adapt to this pretty quickly over the next couple of years. How, how do you think about the different segments of consumer when it comes to autonomous driving?

• 1:08:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, I think as you're suggesting, you know, younger people do tend to take up new technology, you know, pretty quickly. But in this case, I do believe that many people, after they've had a couple of rides and realize that it feels very safe and reliable, I think they'll flip from skeptic to kind of fans, you know, pretty quickly. Now, I will say policymakers, you know, they have their own, you know, issues. So, and some of that can be very local. So you may find some cities that just say, we just don't want them on our streets for a period of time. You may find, conversely, other cities that say, bring them because we want to feel like a city of the future. So I think there are going to be some policy issues. There are also some infrastructure issues. Remember that, you know, AVs also tend to be EVs. EVs require charging. Charging requires infrastructure.

• 1:09:17Speaker 05

  And not every city is going to have the amount of electrical power. I mean, this is kind of a side issue. But if you listen to, you know, Jensen, for example, at Nvidia, talk about what could end up holding the United States back from its next big leap, a lot of it comes down to power infrastructure in this country, right? So anyway, so there are many different kind of bits and pieces, all the way from consumer adoption to physical infrastructure to policy and so forth. But I think, again, over the next three to five years, I think you're going to see a real shift, mostly because consumers are going to try them and like them. And then they're going to be saying, hey, you know, faster, please.

• 1:09:49Speaker 04

  So here's the crazy thing about AVs that I'm, I'm still kind of shocked about, that relies on visual, on LiDAR, on radar, and all these other technologies. But there isn't a whole lot of infrastructure built into the roadway grid. Wouldn't be that difficult to create a series of RF devices that specifically geared for autonomous vehicles that, like every now and then, if you're letting the car drive yourself and there's a, an exit or a merge or, like, it's not great with those sort of things today. Because there's no real infrastructure. It's.

• 1:10:31Speaker 04

  Relying on a technology not built for autonomous driving. Is there any sort of motion towards, hey, let's everybody that's doing autonomous come up with a set of standards and have the government implement this into the highway system?

• 1:10:47Speaker 05

  I mean, the short answer is no today and long term for sure. And the reason no today frankly is again, you know, anytime you see these platform shifts, you always have competition for sort of who gets to sort of own the platform, right? And individual companies all have a huge incentive to say, you know, I want to do it my way because if my way becomes the standard, then everyone else kind of follows along me and I get to sort of set the standard. Over time though, you tend to see that those things, that doesn't become a long-term competitive advantage typically, particularly for this sort of infrastructure. And so I would fully expect over time, just in the same way that you can start to see charging networks kind of harmonize, that you'll see some sort of, you know, kind of federal level, but it's, we're years before that.

• 1:11:30Speaker 04

  Right. We did see that sort of standardization take place in a lot of other technologies. And suddenly you're not competing on a standard, you're competing on highest quality, lowest price, et cetera.

• 1:11:42Speaker 05

  That's exactly right.

• 1:11:43Speaker 04

  But you would think that if the cars literally knew exactly where the road was, it would be even that much safer.

• 1:11:50Speaker 05

  You would think, but I would say right now that the technology is evolving so quickly at the car level and really the safety is very, very, very impressive. And of course, look, I know, you know, tomorrow morning, you're going to open up, you know, a newspaper or an app and you're going to read about some strange thing that happened, you know, in some strange part of the, of the world with a self-driving car. And I'm going to tell you that that is going to happen and that's, you know, one in a million as opposed to, you know, one in, you know, hundreds, which happen every single day with human drivers.

• 1:12:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, those are the clickbait headlines, not the statistically significant practice. All right. So last question before I get to my favorite questions I ask all my guests. When it comes to transportation technology, what are we not discussing as a society, as a government, as consumers, that we really should be? What is kind of getting overlooked in this rush to new technology? It could even be something that you guys are focused on, but a lot of people don't realize is, oh no, this is really significant and the public hasn't quite grok this yet.

• 1:12:54Speaker 05

  Yeah. You know, I'm going to come back to the basic role that technology plays in people's lives to help them live their absolute best lives. I'll tell you something that I have a lot of passion about personally, and that is as people live longer lives, one of the things that is very predictive of their quality of life is how much time they're spending with other people out.

• 1:13:15Speaker 04

  Socializing.

• 1:13:16Speaker 05

  Socializing, exactly. Very, very highly predictive of, of a healthy, long life. And as we as a country are getting older, which we are demographically, that is going to be an enormous shift where you have so many more people in their 60s, 70s, even 80s who want to live healthy, vibrant lives. And so one of the things I'm really quite proud of with Lyft is, you know, Lyft Silver is a particular product line that we've developed over the last year. It's really focused on, you know, helping older folks get out, the app's a little easier to use, the car's a little easier to get into, the driver's a little bit more experienced. I think that sort of the intersection between societal trend and the type of work we do in transportation is really quite deep and, you know, maybe just as important ultimately

• 1:13:58Speaker 05

  is, you know, all of our conversation around medicine and so forth and so on is keeping people out and about. And I notice you're an Oura ring where, where I am as well. It's a, or maybe you're not, I don't know.

• 1:14:08Speaker 04

  No, I am. My, my wife wanted to get, so we got a pair.

• 1:14:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:14:11Speaker 04

  And she got bored being told she's stressed all the time and stopped wearing it. So now I'm wearing it. So we both, we each have one and I'm the only one who still wears.

• 1:14:19Speaker 05

  How funny. Okay. Actually, my wife and I did the same. She said, I get a little tired of seeing, you know, they're just telling me, exactly, I'm stressed or I'm not sleeping well. But at least for me, it's a sort of nice nudge to get good sleep and frankly, to kind of keep an active life. And so, so I see this space, the transportation piece is somewhat similar. Like I want technology that kind of helps me live my best life and I think transportation plays a big role there.

• 1:14:39Speaker 04

  All right. So let's jump to our speed round, our favorite questions, starting with, tell us about your mentors who helped shape your career.

• 1:14:47Speaker 05

  Oh gosh. I love this question because I think it's so important for us to remember that we all stand on other people's shoulders. I'll list, I'll list a few. Of course I worked for Jeff Bezos a lot. I've mentioned him, but I want other people. First big boss, a guy named Todd Nielsen. Todd really taught me the power of a great story and also the importance of really listening and watching closely customers. So he taught me two big things there. And then a guy named Peter Spiro. He was the board chair at World Reader for many years. He and I sort of knew each other back in the Microsoft days, but was the board chair for, for the nonprofit I ran. So focused on the team, so focused on the team. You're only as good as your team. Really learned a ton about management and leadership from Peter.

• 1:15:29Speaker 04

  Huh. Really interesting. Let's look about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading currently?

• 1:15:34Speaker 05

  Oh man. I just finished a book called Good People. So I tend to read some fiction and some nonfiction. So I'm currently reading a book called Apple in China, all about Apple's entrance into China and ultimately the importance that China has and frankly, the power that China now has over, over Apple. And then Good People is a fictional book about an Afghan, a family from Afghanistan that moves the United States and is either a model family or, or terrible people. And it's very, very hard to know which, and it's sort of, the book sort of flips back and forth. Remember when I said that books kind of teach empathy and sort of different perspectives? This one does a, a good job of that.

• 1:16:14Speaker 04

  Really interesting. What about streaming? You listen to any podcasts or Netflix, Amazon, whatever? What, what keeps you entertained?

• 1:16:22Speaker 05

  I do, I am a podcast guy. I have to say though, I'm kind of traditional when it comes to podcasts. I listen to the daily from the New York Times pretty regularly. And I think most of it is because I have so many things in my life that are sort of, there's, there's so much content that comes at you that's sort of superficial. And at least with the daily, I feel like I get to go a little deeper on a subject. You know, it tends to be a kind of a half an hour, you know, deep dive on a particular thing. And I do feel particularly, I also read the New York Times. I know it's sort of traditional in that way. So if I've read an article and then I kind of hear a podcast on the same topic, I do feel like I've actually gotten maybe a little bit smarter about something, you know, beyond the surface.

• 1:16:59Speaker 04

  Let me just push back ever so slightly on how the daily has evolved. Cause when it first came out and I was a regular listener, I don't want anybody telling me about the story that's in the paper that I can read. They used to kind of do the background, hey, how did you start investigating this? What led to this? Tell us some interesting stuff that didn't make it into the article. It was really inside baseball and that stuff is kind of fascinating. Now, whenever I check it out, it's the person, I don't want to say reading the story, but it, it, it feels like they've left a lot of that, you know, behind the scenes stuff back three years ago. It's still, it's become one of the biggest podcasts in the world. It's giant.

• 1:17:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's interesting.

• 1:17:47Speaker 04

  Anything else? Anything else you listen to or watch?

• 1:17:50Speaker 05

  I mean, you know, I'll, mindless TV I love, but I'm, I can embarrass myself by telling you all that, that sort of stuff. Yeah. We'll stick with the daily on this one.

• 1:17:58Speaker 04

  We are in the golden age of mindless TV and it's not, you know, if you're watching The Crown or Landmin or Three Body Problem, there's so many fascinating shows out there. It's not, it's not like garbage time like it was when I was a kid.

• 1:18:14Speaker 05

  You are right about that. And I will say that my wife and I became obsessed with the pit, as many people are. It is funny and it almost makes you feel like, you know, I'm halfway to being an ER doc myself. By the way, you are not, so don't think that that's true. But what is hilarious is my wife's tolerance for some of the gory stuff is a little lower than mine. So she watches the pit with her hand kind of half in front of her face the whole time.

• 1:18:35Speaker 04

  My wife, we watched the first couple of episodes. She's like, this is just too much. It's like you want to relax and it's very.

• 1:18:42Speaker 05

  It just kind of tends to.

• 1:18:43Speaker 04

  But it's a great cast and it's a great set of stories.

• 1:18:45Speaker 05

  For sure.

• 1:18:46Speaker 04

  Final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in either technology or business?

• 1:18:56Speaker 05

  So my advice here tends to be, it's always sort of the same. And here's how, there's so much temptation when you're picking your job early on to pick something that, that sort of seems like it's going to be good on your resume, or maybe it's going to make you a lot of money, whatever it is. This, this is sort of the temptation because it's so sort of in the air, maybe now more than ever because of, of social media. And oh man, the people that I see succeed are really the ones that say, yes, I have an economic reality. I have to sort of do better than that. But once the economic, you know, reality has been met, it is all about pick something you think you're really going to love and are going to be good at, are going to be good at. And I, and I say that like, you have to be a bit introspective of this.

• 1:19:40Speaker 05

  You know, maybe you love, you know, selling. Okay. Great. So take a sales job. Maybe you love listening to customers. Great. Take maybe a marketing job, maybe, but, but in, I'm, I'm trying to make this sound maybe a little bit more interesting than follow your passions because that's so trite. But there is something to it that really kind of being introspective about what you think you're going to just jump out of bed every morning and, and love doing, tends to be a much more powerful predictor of long-term success than people who try to optimize for that short-term sort of get rich quick type of thing, and then find themselves later realizing, shoot, this, this isn't really my thing. It's somebody else's thing.

• 1:20:11Speaker 04

  Huh. Really, really good answer. And our final question, what do you know about the world of consumer-facing technology and apps that would have been useful to know 25, 30 years ago when you were first getting started?

• 1:20:25Speaker 05

  Wow. Okay, that's also a really interesting question. You know, I think I've probably gone through a similar arc to other people where I, you know, in the 90s, maybe even early 2000s, was sort of a universal techno-optimist. I probably was in the camp that said, "Technology is such a powerful force for the good." And you see me try to harness it with World Reader specifically, of course, trying to take technology and get people reading. In that case, it did work. We've gotten over 22 million people reading, so that's awesome. But, oh, man, it is hard not to see some of the just terrible costs we've paid as a society. And so I think maybe more of a mindset than a particular thing of just, just be really aware that technology is so powerful.

• 1:21:10Speaker 05

  And man, oh, man, with great power comes that great responsibility. And I'm just a big believer that, you know, our best leaders now, and I'm not necessarily putting myself in the category, but are being really thoughtful about, you know, the good of technology, but also really trying to avoid some of the problems.

• 1:21:24Speaker 04

  Good, good answer, David. Thank you for being so generous with your time. This has been absolutely fascinating. We have been speaking with David Risher. He is the CEO of Lyft, one of North America's largest ride-sharing networks. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of the 639 we've done over the past 12 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Bloomberg, wherever you find your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss, fine and thank the crack team that helps me put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is my video and podcast producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer.

• 1:22:08Speaker 04

  I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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