State of Play in the Rideshare Wars — ft. David Risher, CEO of Lyft

David Risher, CEO of Lyft, joins the show to explain how the company is differentiating and gaining ground on Uber. He shares how Lyft is keeping customers loyal, why he gets behind the wheel himself, and what he sees as the future of transportation and autonomous vehicles. Subscribe to the Prof G Markets newsletter Order "The Algebra of Wealth" out now Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram Follow Scott on InstagramFollow Ed on Instagram and X Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it it wasn't.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 0:30Scott Galloway?

  Today's number 6600. That's how many Americans applied for UK citizenship last year. A record high. Ed, did you hear about that tragic auto accident where Meghan Markle was disfigured and burnt alive?

• 0:42Ed Elson?

  I didn't.

• 0:43Scott Galloway?

  Well, we can we can wish, can't we?

• 0:48Speaker 04

  Listen to me. Markets are bigger than us. What you have here is a structural change in the world distribution. Cash is trash.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Stocks look pretty attractive. Something's going to break.

• 0:56Speaker 04

  Forget about it.

• 0:58Scott Galloway?

  What did the Americans say when he was watching the British porno?

• 1:00Ed Elson?

  What?

• 1:01Scott Galloway?

  The British are coming. The British are coming.

• 1:03Ed Elson?

  I heard that one.

• 1:04Scott Galloway?

  You heard that one?

• 1:05Ed Elson?

  I've heard that one.

• 1:06Scott Galloway?

  You know what? You and I have really never shared. I don't know how you feel about Harry and Meghan. How do you feel about them?

• 1:11Ed Elson?

  I hate them. I'm a huge, yeah, I really do not like Meghan Markle.

• 1:16Scott Galloway?

  I love the story of a 40 year old divorcee saving a prince from the horrors of Buckingham Palace. Do you remember when we were at the Soho House in Austin for South by Southwest? Where your very generous boss decided to take the whole property media team? Just saying. And we saw Meghan and Harry. They were eating next to us. Were you at that?

• 1:35Ed Elson?

  That was the one dinner I did not make. The entire team sat next to them and I was, I think I was busy in my hotel room, anxiously prepping to do my first live podcast. So I didn't see them, but the rest of the team did.

• 1:48Scott Galloway?

  OK, so let me just tell you. After seeing them, I hundred percent get it. She is so scorching hot.

• 1:54Ed Elson?

  We all knew that.

• 1:56Scott Galloway?

  I feel bad now making fun of them because I just totally get it. I hundred percent get it.

• 2:01Ed Elson?

  A few years ago, when you wrote, you wrote a post about Harry and Meghan. And you had one line that I think was my favorite line that you've written before. And you were talking about how, you know, Meghan's terrible for all these reasons. And then you're like, but we have to give her credit for doing something that we all strive to do. And that is convince our spouse that their family is terrible.

• 2:27Ed Elson?

  But I've never, I've never heard someone put it that way. It's very true. It's, it's like, it's a, it's a favorite.

• 2:34Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 2:34Ed Elson?

  Your family's awful.

• 2:35Scott Galloway?

  Let me give you a little, little inside tip, little pro tip.

• 2:38Ed Elson?

  By the way, just, just to be clear, I love my girlfriend's family. I'm, I'm, I'm totally kidding. If anyone's listening, I love them.

• 2:45Scott Galloway?

  You're still working it. I, I get it. I get it. You're still trying. Anyways, let me give you a little tip because I get the sense you're barreling towards, towards marriage and kids and all that good stuff. Is that once, the key to having a great relationship, I have the best relationship with my in-laws. There's only two things you gotta remember. One, don't communicate with them. Right? That is when it all comes off the rails is when you start talking to them and all of a sudden you're, you're sort of like, you're interested to ask your father-in-law why he likes Trump. Okay. Just don't, don't talk to them and hope they, hope they speak really poor English. Actually, my in-laws speak pretty good English, but it's not their first language. And my father-in-law doesn't, he doesn't hear great. It just works out so well.

• 3:30Scott Galloway?

  And just buy the dad a Mercedes every three years. Boom.

• 3:33Ed Elson?

  That's not that great advice. That's not that actionable for me right now. Aside from buying the Mercedes, but what else, what else can I do?

• 3:40Scott Galloway?

  I think that's the key. I remember, although I knew I liked her, I knew I liked my, current partner's mother when I picked her up. And I was going to basically taking her to New York with me. And I heard her over saying to her husband, he didn't even bring a goose.

• 3:59Scott Galloway?

  Like I'm taking their daughter, I should have brought a goose or something.

• 4:03Scott Galloway?

  I thought that was funny. Like, your mom said I should have brought a goose for you in exchange for you. You're worth a goose. Anyways, Ed, what's going on?

• 4:12Ed Elson?

  Didn't understand that one as much as I usually do. But I rarely do, so.

• 4:16Scott Galloway?

  The British are coming. Anyways, all right, get on to the headline. Oh, wait, we don't have headlines today? What's going on?

• 4:23Ed Elson?

  No, we don't have headlines today. We've just got a conversation. We're speaking with David Richer, who is the CEO of Lyft.

• 4:30Scott Galloway?

  What an amazing company. They're just dominating, right? Oh, wait, never mind. Never mind. Sorry about that. Sorry about that, Ed.

• 4:36Ed Elson?

  Careful.

• 4:37Scott Galloway?

  He's actually a really nice guy. He texts me.

• 4:39Ed Elson?

  I know.

• 4:39Scott Galloway?

  That's the problem, Ed. Just as someone who's clearly strategically absconding my identity, pretty soon I'm gonna walk into my house and you're gonna be there with your socks off hitting my kids. Like, you are definitely usurping my identity right now. Don't get to know these people because you like them.

• 4:56Ed Elson?

  Right.

• 4:57Scott Galloway?

  And you stop speaking openly and honestly about them. And I've gotten to know David a little bit, and I like him. He's a very nice guy, very thoughtful.

• 5:03Ed Elson?

  Shall we bring him in?

• 5:04Scott Galloway?

  Let's bring him in.

• 5:04Ed Elson?

  Okay, let's do it. David, thank you for joining us on the program. Super good to be here.

• 5:13Ed Elson?

  We're going to start with, I mean, we have, I have a lot of questions. Okay, lay them on me. We're gonna start with just Lyft and the ride-sharing market specifically. And then we'll get into some broader topics about you and about your career. We were just talking off mic earlier. You wrote a senior thesis that was somehow more boring than mine, which we can maybe talk about later. But for now, let's start with Lyft. You are the CEO. You became CEO back in 2023. And at the time, Lyft had about 26% market share in the US. The rest was Uber.

• 5:55Ed Elson?

  Today.

• 5:57Ed Elson?

  Lyft's market share is larger. It's around 30%, a little higher. But the rest is still Uber. And Uber's at this gigantic $200 billion market cap. Lyft is at $7 billion. So I know, I'm sure you get this question all the time, but it's sort of the question that we all have to ask. And that is, how are you competing with Uber?

• 6:21Speaker 05

  The other guys, they do their thing. But I'm actually much more interested in the 160 billion rides that people take every year in their car, in their own private car, just in North America. That's my biggest competition is actually inertia, you know, and the couch and your own car. Like, that's the competition. And so, I mean, it's great that we picked up share. I'll tell you about that in a second. But what has really driven our growth, and it's been very significant growth. You're talking about 13%, well, 15%, 17%, 19%, 15%, 14% now on sort of $16 billion of booking, 800 million rides a year, 1.5 million drivers on the platform. These are big numbers. How do you grow such big numbers? You don't just compete against your competitor. In fact, if you focus on that, you lose. What you do is you focus on your riders and your drivers. That's how you win.

• 7:06Speaker 05

  And that's why we're now, you know, making money, printing cash. Our service letters are better than ever, you know, and on and on and on. And in a way, that's the answer to how you compete with the other guys, too. You just do better. You just do better. And that's why we've picked up share.

• 7:17Ed Elson?

  Is this a question you get all the time? I'm assuming it is.

• 7:21Speaker 05

  I mean, it is and it isn't. So people talk a lot about the competition. The funny thing is that I actually think it's part of the problem of the rideshare industry, or maybe has been for a while, is I think it got people stuck in this sort of zero-sum mode. You know, they win, you lose, you win, they lose. And I think it sort of ignored the much bigger question, which is, this is a good product. This is a product that's part of people's lives, at least from our perspective, 2 million times a day, 800 million times a year. So for me, the bigger question is, why haven't we all grown more? And I think the answer is a lack of innovation. And I think part of the lack of innovation is because there's been that whole competitive dynamic and so focused on each other instead of focusing on customers. So that's the big shift for me.

• 8:00Scott Galloway?

  So what is that tangible differentiation? Why do you think you're able to grab share? If you're on a very basic level, is it a cost advantage? Because is it a culture advantage?

• 8:14Scott Galloway?

  You know, Coke and Pepsi, what, why is Pepsi different here?

• 8:18Speaker 05

  Our purpose is to serve and connect. That's what we do every single day. We wake up, we've got 3,000 employees, we've got 1.5 million drivers, and the idea is how can I serve riders and drivers better than they've ever been served before? And how can we connect them to the people and places they love? So that's where, that's where we start. Okay, so how does that manifest itself competitively? So get drivers for a second. Drivers right now have a 29-point preference for driving on our platform versus on the other guys. 29 points. That's internal data that we do every quarter. We can share the data with you. It's been, and it's been a remarkable sort of divergence over the last year in particular. So that's a form of competition, right? We're competing for the same driver

• 9:00Speaker 05

  base. How are we winning? Well, we have a 70% earnings guarantee. We have an AI assistant that helps people plan their, their drives. We have an accomplishment letter. So you, so you, you compete at sort of the street level, and you say, how can we grab more preference from drivers? And when drivers drive more for you, it allows the marketplace to work better, you know, yada, yada. Okay, how do you compete for riders? We give better service. Now, people don't necessarily know that right now, and I grant you that. I grant you that. Right now, yes, we have a small price advantage, but frankly, that's tiny, and we compete frankly on, on price, sort of by matching, like we, you know, that's not really sort of a competition area as much for us. We really want to compete on service. I'll tell you something. Today, we will pick you up about 30 seconds faster

• 9:43Speaker 05

  than our competition does on average, which is very significant considering we're a third their size. I will tell you their driver cancellation rate, and it's a lot of data, but here we go. When I started, it was about 14%. So 14% of the time, a driver will cancel on you. Now it's down to 4.9%. So we just over and over and over and over again, provide better service. And the reason that that, or the way that shows up, and the reason therefore it allows us to kind of clawback share. Is because it increases new rider activation for sure, but frequency. And that's a huge part of it. A huge part. A lot of people know about rideshare, but people only take it two or three times a month. But if we can do better service, they come back to us, they ride more. And so that's why we've been growing so much.

• 10:20Scott Galloway?

  Fortunately or unfortunately for you, Uber's become a verb or synonymous with ride hailing. And so you have to, you know, you're Avis, you need to try harder. But you're finding that consumers, are they more loyal? Is it that that what sounds like a better offering? Or, and by the way, I think focusing on the drivers is actually a very smart thing to do.

• 10:45Scott Galloway?

  But do you see in consumer survey data that, that your riders are more loyal? And willing to pay a price premium? Or how does that manifest in terms of consumer feedback?

• 10:58Speaker 05

  So the short answer is they are more loyal and they're getting more loyal every day. So our frequency has never been higher, both our new riders and our frequency has never been higher. I mean, I'm going to take a little bit of a side and I'll come back. I drive for Lyft about every six weeks. And one of the things that I hear, I hear a couple of, because I, and I always ask, I ask, why did you choose Lyft today? And typically the responses come in a couple of categories. Some are functional, you know, you were faster than the other guys, your lower ETA, your price was lower. Sure. Then there's what I might call partner driven. You know, I'm a Chase Sapphire Reserve holder, says a rider, and therefore because I get points, I use you guys. You know, these, these sorts of things. And we have a lot of partner, DoorDash is a huge partner of ours, a huge, huge partner of ours. And that becomes a big, significant growth driver.

• 11:41Speaker 05

  So those are, those are sort of semi-functional, kind of maybe, maybe functional adjacent. Then you get stuff like, I like your values more. I just think you're a better company. I can feel it. I can feel the way your drivers talk about you versus the other guy. And you get a whole bunch of other things. The way it shows up most consistently on the financials is growth. And again, taking share, as Ed mentioned, when I started, I were 26%, then 27%, then 28%, then 29%, then 30%. We're touching 31%. It's not what motivates me every morning. It's a trailing indicator, but it shows that, you know, step by step, by step, by step. And then there'll be some step changes, which maybe we'll talk about another time. But things like Lyft Silver and some other things that really expand the market. So it's tricky. Look, it's a, it's a duopoly. I mean, let's use the word, right? And there are two people who are fighting it out every single day.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  And we, we, we fight super, super hard and it's great for frankly, the whole industry. You know, grows the whole TAM because you've got two people who are fighting for every single thing. And then little by little, you pick up share. And so, you know, start 26, then you go to 30, then maybe you go to 35, maybe you go to 40, and maybe the market goes, you know, and doubles and doubles again as, as new things happen.

• 12:41Ed Elson?

  I think one of the big topics also right now in ride sharing, one is delivery, and that's been a big investment from Uber. And you mentioned that you, you have this partnership with DoorDash, which I would like to hear more about. And the second is autonomous driving. And, you know, you've obviously got Waymo, which is expanding. You've got Tesla rolling out their robotaxi. I know that Uber is also working on a lot of autonomous vehicle projects. They're partnering with Waymo. Talk a bit about what you're doing in terms of delivery, and also, after that, in terms of autonomous driving. Do you see,

• 13:21Ed Elson?

  it seems as though that's where ride sharing is headed at this point, that that's, that's how these companies will expand. I'm wondering if, if you view that the same way over at Lyft?

• 13:33Speaker 05

  We decided a while ago, so as you mentioned, I've been in the job now about two and a half years, a little less. And, you know, my big focus right from the beginning is customer obsession is what's going to drive profitable growth. As you mentioned, when I started, we were losing money. Now we're making money. So the thesis is sort of being proven out. One of the sort of, let's say, corollaries to that is focus really helps. And so we're really focused on ride sharing and doing great ride sharing experience. And thus, for that reason, we've decided that partnership is a better strategy than trying to incorporate food delivery ourselves. We partnered with the best in breed. DoorDash actually dominates the other guys in food delivery, certainly in the United States and in actually much of the world. And it's a great partnership. And it's one of those partnerships, it's quite, it's early, it's only been about six months. But gosh, man,

• 14:15Speaker 05

  you look at the number of, I mean, we blew away. So Tony, who's the CEO of DoorDash, and I were on sort of a daily email the first couple of days. We lost the partnership, and we each had our own internal goals of how many people would link their accounts over the first, you know, day, week, month. And, I mean, we blew them away. We, we basically, what we thought was going to be a six month project turned out to be like a three week thing of activation, and, you know, literally over a million riders linking their accounts just in the first couple, at least because they got. Points and rewards on both platforms by doing so. So long way of saying, I think partnering with the best to breed is great. And if your riders can literally order DoorDash as they're coming home at night and get a bonus from it so that by the time it's home, they've got an extra perk, they've maybe got a discount on their ride and their food's been delivered. It's great from a rider perspective and does everything you want it to do.

• 15:00Ed Elson?

  I think that's a good lead in to the AV question because I think one of my big questions about AVs is how is the business going to work? And so far, it has been largely a partnership setup. There are questions over how viable that is, especially when it comes to Uber, where there are questions over, does Uber lose some leverage if the only way that they're getting into autonomous vehicles is through forming these partnerships where they're reliant on other companies to build those vehicles for them? There was a time when they were maybe going to build those autonomous robot taxis themselves and they decided, no, we're going to take the partnership route, which is what you've done as well. You've decided we're going to partner with DoorDash instead.

• 15:45Ed Elson?

  So I guess I'm interested in why does the partnership route make the most sense? And how will that play out in the robot taxi business in the long term? Is that the Lyft strategy?

• 15:58Speaker 05

  The networks that create hybrids between human driven and machine driven, robot driven vehicles, they're going to win. And the reason they're going to win is because from a customer perspective, of course, AVs are novel right now, but eventually they just become commonplace. They're just another way to get around. They have certain advantages, they have certain disadvantages. They don't pick up your luggage for you, but they don't listen to you while you're talking on the phone. Okay. So you're going to want them as part of your network. Absolutely you are. But you can't only have robot taxis. You can't. They're just not enough. They're not enough at the end of the Taylor Swift concert. They're not enough at five o'clock at night or nine o'clock in the morning. They're not enough when it starts to pour down raining and everybody wants to take rides. They're not enough because in rural areas, it's going to take years and years and years.

• 16:42Speaker 05

  Even the most aggressive estimates, now I'm going to set Tesla aside for a second because they're very hard to model, but the most aggressive estimates, which is a funny understatement, hard to model. Anyway, so like, but it's maybe 30,000 cars by 2030, something like that in total in the US that are robot taxis. Okay, again, we have 1.5 million drivers on the platform, between them as a car and the other guys have, call it a similar number, maybe bigger. So you're going to want some sort of hybrid because most customers aren't going to want to have five different apps depending on what city they're in or whether it's raining or not or whatever. Okay. So now the question becomes, well, do you want to sort of fully integrate or do you want to partner? And I'm going to get like, so Scott's a professor. I'm going to get a professorial for a second. Apologize in advance, but like, think of the

• 17:26Speaker 05

  whole value chain here. Like, you've got the OEMs, the people who make the cars. Okay. Then you've got the tech providers, the AV tech providers, right? That might be a Mobile Eye or it might be a Waymo. Then you've got the whole financing thing. Somebody's got to buy these things and own these things. They're expensive assets. Then you've got what we call fleet management. Someone's got to keep them clean. Someone's got to keep them maintained. Someone's got to keep them ready to go on the road. Then you've got all the, what we call marketplace. So the supply, demand matching stuff. And they have pricing and ETA, customer service, all these other things. So each one of these is its own thing. And you could try to do all those things. Sure, you could. You know, that would be, that would be an unusual strategy because most people are ungraded everything from, you know, making cars and tech to customer service and marketplace and all the rest. You can do it though, if you tried, but it's very, very expensive.

• 18:10Speaker 05

  Or you can say, well, let me specialize. So what we specialize is in the marketplace stuff and the demand management. We've got three million people every day who open up our app. And then we have this whole thing called Flex Drive, which is a fleet management system that runs about 15,000 cars on it right now. It's garages, it's maintenance, it's all kinds of stuff. It's charging, it's tire pressure, it's all the stuff to keep all that. That's an asset we have. So we believe that our assets, all of our customers, all of our customer service, all of our demand management, all of our pricing, all of our ETA estimation, gate codes for millions of planned communities, pick up and drop off, all these things that take years and years to build, plus fleet management. That's what we bring to the table. The last thing I'll say is, and you kind of mentioned this before, of course, if there were only one supplier of AV tech, that'd be awkward for us because

• 18:54Speaker 05

  then we'd be beholden to somebody who's got tech, which is, which is pretty cool. It's safe and novel and all sorts of cool things. But that's not the case. That's not the case. There's so many, you just, you can't even throw a stone without, you know, of course, there's Mobile Eye, of course, there's Tesla, of course, there's Waymo, of course, there's Zooks, of course, there's, and then you get to the Chinese guys, of course, there's Pony AI, and there's We Ride, and there's Baidu, and there's BYD. And then you get to the people you haven't even heard of yet. Maybe Nvidia gets into the space, maybe. You know, OpenAI gets in this space. And then there are guys in the garage who are just thinking about it today. You haven't even thought about it, you know, how they're going to solve it. So I think the chance of there being, let's call it, supply concentration is very, very low. I think the chance of demand aggregation mattering a lot and fleet management and pricing always being important. Plus a hybrid network of millions of drivers is very high. And that's why I think we win.

• 19:38Speaker 05

  And I, and I think we've become the best way for people to commercialize these very expensive assets. Put them on our network and just go, go, go.

• 19:45Scott Galloway?

  So you have about 24 million, my understanding is, active users on your platform. Yeah, which is a lot of people.

• 19:53Scott Galloway?

  And consumers are lazier, I find they are, and that is they're used to your app, they're used to your interface. And so they're just inclined to, you know, get their, get their rides to Lyft. Do you think, what's your gut telling you? Do the Waymos and the, and the Teslas and potentially Nvidia's and the other people that come in? Do you think they sit back and say, okay, we want to be the operating system and the technology? And partner with the people who already have already acquired these people and are used to a certain user interface? The Lifts and the Ubers of the world? Or do you see them going vertical? Are you, and what is Tesla's? To the extent you've had conversations with them or, or not? What does your gut tell you? Are these companies going to be suppliers? Or are they going to go vertical and then compete against you?

• 20:38Speaker 05

  I think you right now are sitting in the boardroom of Waymo and asking yourself that question. And, and I think the answer right now, and I'm not betraying conferences. I think you can just see this as you look at what the different companies are doing. Is people right now are going for optionality. Right? It's very, again, we can come back to Tesla because it's a bit of a special case. It's more of a future possibility rather than a present day thing. But if you look at the present day, and let's just look at Waymo, who's, you know, obviously very, very advanced in this, in this space. They are simultaneously promoting Waymo One, which is their own product. As well as partnering with others who can provide the demand for them. And then they're effectively the supplier. And it's possible that that is stable. I mean, in other words, that you can do both, right?

• 21:23Speaker 05

  Many companies have done this. They have the first party apps and then they let third parties on the platform, right? That's, that's a way that, that companies work sometimes.

• 21:31Speaker 05

  I happen to believe, of course, I'm partisan, but I also think that there's some data to back this up, that the dominant strategy will be the partnership strategy, because I think it's more capital efficient. It's very expensive to run, to build and run a rideshare system. It's very, very expensive. Again, you have to think, go down a path for two seconds, three million people a day opening your app. Every single time they open an app, they're seeing, you know, five different, then they put in a destination, they're seeing a whole bunch of different prices. Every one of those prices has to be calculated in real time. Every one of those ETAs has to be calculated in real time. Those routes have to get vented out to a bunch of different drivers. And then depending on various dynamics, you know, whatever, you got to click, the supply is not constant. Drivers are coming on and off the platform. You say, well, maybe EVs aren't, but they need to be because guess what?

• 22:16Speaker 05

  Sometimes you're going to have a lot of demand, sometimes not so much. It's a math, the math problem is huge, the compute is huge. And then there's all the customer service and all these things. The point is, building and maintaining that and getting it better every single day for every single airport and every single small town and now over in Europe as well, it's expensive. So I think if you're, sorry for the long answer, but I think if you're, the rational player says, I will mostly focus on building something that is unique and super high quality and super safe, and I'm going to try to sell to as much of people, many people as possible. Maybe I'll experiment with a little first party stuff myself. Maybe that's so that I can understand, hotels do this, right? They, they own some properties and then they vend out a lot of the rest to franchisees. Maybe it becomes a little like that, you know? But so I think it'll be a mixed model, but I think the dominant thing is going to be,

• 22:59Speaker 05

  I want to sell and commercialize as many as possible, as much of my tech as possible. And that's best done to marketplaces like us who are willing, you know, buyers. And, and we've got, you know, tens of millions of riders who, to your point, are already used to a certain thing and trust a certain thing.

• 23:16Ed Elson?

  We'll be right back after the break. And if you're enjoying the show so far, be sure to give Prof you Market a follow wherever you get your podcasts.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 24:07Ed Elson?

  We're back with Profiteam Markets.

• 24:09Scott Galloway?

  So I think of you as the number two that needs to be in the way you continue to grab market share is through focus or just owning certain, I don't know. You become known as the company that has better service or is better to your drivers or is especially strong in rural areas versus urban or vice versa. When you look at the different points of differentiation or growth, it could be autonomous, it could be food delivery, it could be a messenger service, it could be a luxury offering, it could be partnering with new types of transportation, vertical takeoff and landing, which I'll come back to. What growth channel are you most excited about and think, okay, if I was going to

• 24:49Scott Galloway?

  double down on something in trying, I mean, to be blunt, I've gotten to know you and I like you and I'm rooting for you. But I don't immediately feel a point of differentiation from you guys. I don't immediately go, when I say, when I think of Lyft, quite frankly, your brand association is you're the number two. That's not the brand association you want. If you were going to over invest in an area and say, in five years, I want Lyft to be known as the guys who are the right handling company that is really good at X. What is that?

• 25:22Speaker 05

  I want to be known for great service. I really do. And I'm talking about exceptional service. I'm talking about every single time you order a Lyft, you know what you're going to get. It's going to be fantastic every single time. And if you have a problem, we're always going to make it right. I'll give you a tiny example of how we do it today. Today, if you use this for scheduled drive to the airport and we're more than 10 minutes late, we pay you a hundred bucks, up to a hundred bucks, even to take the competition. I don't care. And no questions asked. And guess what? Guess what? Our payout rate is 0.001%. You know what I mean? It's like we've gotten that really, really good. Our black offering, our luxury offering, it's relatively small now. It's not been an area of investment, but it's doubled year on year, just in the last year as we've started to focus on. So if I have to say number one, let me ask, answer the question also a different way. I think it's not just about what we're better at, what we need to get, but also how our

• 26:07Speaker 05

  customers think about us, how they perceive us. I want our customers to say, you know what, and I'm talking about our writers now, I'm not doing this just the default. I'm making my own decision. I'm making my own decision. I want to support a company that treats its drivers better. I want to support a company where I know I'm going to get great service. I want to support a company that has values like mine. Totally agree with you because you can hear the number of words I'm having to use to answer your question, that we continue to have work to do to refine that, that value prop. And, and you know, in my two and a half years, the first focus has been in getting the basics right. And now, and now here's finally the answer to your question, an enormous focus on brand is going to be one of our big pushes. It has to be, it has to be. There's so many products out there in the world where people are making the decision based on their heart, based on what they think and, and love and fall in love with.

• 26:50Speaker 05

  And of course, rationally, I've had a great service to pick me up super fast, but they also got to fall in love with us. And so that's, that's my big thing over the next couple of years is how do you get, you know, love going?

• 26:59Ed Elson?

  I love your focus on customer obsession and on service. And I think this is probably a good moment to look at kind of your career path, because I know that you were an early executive at Microsoft and then you were an early executive at Amazon too. In other words, you worked very closely with two of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, and that is Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

• 27:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:26Ed Elson?

  And Bezos is sort of the king of customer obsession and of just dialing in on service and how important that is. So my question, what did you learn from those two about entrepreneurship, about business, or even just about life in general?

• 27:44Speaker 05

  What I really learned at Microsoft, and, and some of this really was, I mean, I haven't worked for Bill, of course, I worked for, you know, somebody who's somebody, somebody but, but I saw him in action is just the focus of being a fierce competitor, a fierce competitor. Oh my God, was he fierce. And it's so interesting because so that in the packaged software world. So much of the, you have this crazy network effect, right? Like, once people start to use Excel, once it gets over fifty or sixty percent in your company, it's going to go to ninety percent. And he knew that. He was like, we gotta, I mean, this is not his words, but this is the vibes. Like, you gotta get to, you know, you gotta get to a critical mass. And then, and then you move on to the next thing. I remember someone asking this question, you know, how much time you spent thinking about Excel? And he's like, ah, not so much, because they've kind of already won the thing. So like, so the sort of frankly winner take all mentality, he was super aggressive. And I, and I learned a bunch from that.

• 28:28Speaker 05

  I had a million pictures up in my office, literally CEOs of competing companies. And I would, you know, throw darts at them, stuff like that. From Jeff, customer obsession. And, you know, and it sounds trite now because people have said it so many times. But, I mean, he really was a deep believer that, you know, everything is one click away from everything else on the internet. And so if you don't just fight every single day, wake up every morning terrified that your customer is going to abandon you, um, you know, you're losing. And, and I've really, you know, I brought that to lift. We talk about our values a lot. Customer obsession is, is number one by far. And then I want to say something else, if you don't mind. So I then, I went on and did a bunch of other things, including running a nonprofit for many years, for about twelve years, that I founded myself, getting kids reading, called World Reader. I bring that up because from there, I really learned a sense of purpose. And in that case, it was getting kids to read.

• 29:13Speaker 05

  Now it's serving and connecting at Lyft.

• 29:15Ed Elson?

  One of those principles that I really respect, that you mentioned that you do, is that you drive. You are a Lyft driver and you do it regularly. And I'm, I'm pretty sure Waffle House has a similar system where I think they, they say that the CEO has to be a line cook one day of the year. And I think there are probably some other companies that do this as well. But in other words, you know what it's like to be, uh, to be a driver. Tell us why that's important to you. And tell us what that does in terms of customer service and how that benefits the company.

• 29:55Speaker 05

  So I mean, I have to say first, almost selfishly, I just love it. I love it. I do it every six weeks or so, and it's just super, super fun. I literally go, I don't tell my comms team, I don't tell anyone else. They all go bananas when this happens. But I'm like, look, I'm just gonna get out there and drive for two, three, four hours, you know, in the Bay Area, which is, you know, where I live. And, and it's so great. So first, here are the things. First of all, you learn what it's like to be a driver, right? You learn the stress you're under. You learn the stress you're under. You're simultaneously trying to figure out what the person in the backseat wants, where you're gonna go, you know, whether you're gonna take another ride afterwards. You know, and you have all these kind of interesting tools which tell you where the demand is. And, you know, you can sort of draw a circle and say, I'm gonna drive within this area because I gotta get home by, you know, five o'clock to see my wife, or whatever it is. So it's, it's, it's sort of more complicated than people realize to juggle all this stuff.

• 30:40Speaker 05

  And so you get a real sense of that. And so inevitably, you know, I come home just on the driver's side with a whole bunch of ideas for the driver team about ways we can make this information a little easier to, to understand, you know, make this a little bit bigger, or change this, whatever it is. Then from the driver's side, it's great. Excuse me, from the rider's side, it's great. It's great. Like, I always ask, you know, what, how come you chose this today? How come you chose Lyft? I don't say us. And, you know, sometimes people are very precise, sometimes people are not. By the way, sometimes people don't wanna talk. You can kind of tell that, like, the first 10 or 15 seconds. I think you might have drove Scott. Yeah, that was Scott. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Shoot, shoot, shoot. I think I drove you too. Well, but I'll tell you such a funny story about this. A lot of people get in, and you can tell, like, their vibe is not like, I now wanna have a 15-minute conversation. But if I ask,

• 31:23Speaker 05

  how's your day going? Oh, my God. It's like I'm the bartender. I'm like friggin' shaking drinks up at the front of the car, like, talking about their recent divorce. There's a woman I picked up at 11 o'clock in the morning, and she had just spent the night at a guy's house. And I said, what's going on? She said, well, he broke up with me a year ago, but then my, my boyfriend broke up with me last night, so I went over and I was how, anyway, we ended up having a conversation about making wise choices, which was super fun. Then, another conversation with a guy that wanted career advice when he found out who I was. We spent another 15 minutes in the car after the thing was over. My favorite ones are ones where I really learned something about what the rider wants. So there's a woman named Anne, and I picked her up in Sausalito a couple of months ago. Actually, it was last year at this point. Time flies. And she was so stressed out because she said, every morning I wake up, and the prices bounce around between

• 32:05Speaker 05

  San Francisco and Sausalito and San Francisco, a ton. And if it's less than 20 bucks, I'll take, you know, a Lyft. If it's more than 40 bucks, I'll, I'll stay home. If it's 30 bucks, it's kind of a crapshoot. But today, it's somebody's birthday in my office. She had donuts. So anyway, literally, so we have this whole conversation. So at the end, I'm like, well, I'm the CEO of Lyft. So she goes bananas and all over the car, which is, which is super fun. And then we start to develop this product called Price Lock. And it really was for her. It really was for her. I wanted to lock the price in. So now for $299, I'm going to always be closing. $299, you can lock in the price for a certain route. It stops all the bouncing around. It's a great product and people love it. I was actually just on the phone with her a couple of weeks ago. She actually, you know, we were talking about some other stuff because now she's, you know, I use her to kind of ping her from time to time. And so that's kind of what happened. So the, you know, the, the short

• 32:50Speaker 05

  answer is not only do I learn a lot, but I, and I get conviction around certain things. Conviction, like we have to solve this problem. We got to deal with it. But I also, and it gives me frankly, some sort of moral authority, you might say, beyond just I'm the CEO. So, you know, that's, so it's, that's helpful. But it also just reminds me every single day, what an important part of people's lives we are.

• 33:08Scott Galloway?

  So David, as you are a driver, if you've ever had a passenger say one of the following things, just drive, please, or you're, or you're going the wrong way, or just do what the fucking app says, boss. It's not that hard. Then, then you may have driven me. You may have driven me. By the way, I think I probably have the lowest. I'm not one of those people that's really nice.

• 33:30Ed Elson?

  You're probably banned from the app. That's why you use Lyft.

• 33:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't think you actually are allowed.

• 33:34Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe that's it. Anyways, making friends wherever I go.

• 33:39Speaker 05

  I could tell.

• 33:40Scott Galloway?

  David, I'm just sort of curious to get your 30,000 foot view on where do you think

• 33:47Scott Galloway?

  generally, transportation, when you think about, you know, electric or rail or a super app, like what trends do you see in transportation? And you and I have had some really interesting conversations about trying to get people out of their house and get them connected. But more broadly, even beyond kind of ride hailing, do you see any big, big trends in transportation?

• 34:11Speaker 05

  The rite of passage of the 16 year old of getting his own or her own drive, their own driver's license is kind of done.

• 34:17Scott Galloway?

  So strange, isn't it? Where did you grow up?

• 34:19Ed Elson?

  It was everything when I was growing up.

• 34:21Speaker 05

  It was everything. I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. I'm not proud to say this, but I failed my first driver test.

• 34:25Ed Elson?

  Me too.

• 34:25Scott Galloway?

  Oh, Ed, what a mistake for Ed to let me know that. Oh, my God. Oh, you're gonna regret that.

• 34:32Ed Elson?

  Me and the CEO of Lyft, I'm in good company.

• 34:35Scott Galloway?

  Oh, my God, I'm literally the GRU that has the leverageable information against that else now. I'm sorry, go ahead, David.

• 34:42Speaker 05

  And I gotta tell the story, because I felt so misled. It was, and it's a total trick. It was a total trick. It's one of those closed courses and you finish, you parallel park, which was like, that's the thing. I was like, you gotta get the parallel park. And I said, you parallel park, then you pull up and the instructor's like, that's great. Now just go over there by the wall and you know, we're all done. And what you don't see is the stop sign that's right there. And you don't, you don't do a full stop because you're just so, anyway, I blew through it. Bummer. But anyway, pass the second time. So back to the thing. I think freedom is what that was all about, right? I can do my own thing. I can make my own choices. And now you have different ways to have freedom and mostly, frankly, you know, us and the other guys. You jump in the car and whatever. So that's a, that's a big, big shift. Then the car ownership. What's your first car, right? I still remember

• 35:25Speaker 05

  my first car was a Honda Accord. My mom actually gave it to me. It was used, it was her boyfriend's, you know, all this sort of stuff. I drove it senior year in college, you know, it was kind of my thing, chick magnet. I don't want to brag, but whatever. Anyway, that's kind of gone too. I mean, of course, people will eventually buy their first car, but it'll be later in their life. So these, these are sort of, you know, very foundational sorts of things. Let me flip to the other side for a second. As you get closer to your inner life, we're all getting older, right? It's happening. And, and demographically, you know, just also just laws of, of physics. We just, I'm gonna promote a second. We just launched a product called Lyft Silver a couple of months ago. It's all about getting older people out and, and engaged, because that's how you live your best life is when you're out engaged and you're at your kid's soccer game, or you're at your doctor's appointment that you didn't miss because you don't want to drive yourself because you're worried

• 36:08Speaker 05

  about driving, whatever it is. Anyway, it's been a massive hit, massive, massive hit, taken off much faster than I hoped. And I was hoping, I had big hopes, the people hugged me because of this product. So I think if you look at the both ends of people's lives, transportation is going to play a new role, largely because other people are doing the driving and you don't have to. You can text, you can do whatever the frig you want to. You know, you can enjoy your life while this is happening. So what does that mean? That means, and then autonomous, of course. So as autonomous happens, it's not just about somebody else driving the car or the car driving itself. It's about, you know, lounge mode. You're gonna be reclining, you're gonna be going to sleep, you're gonna be in your camper, you know, at night, and then it's gonna, you wake up the next morning and there you are Yellowstone, it's driven you, all this sort of stuff. So, so I think, and then when you think even bigger, you mentioned things like vertical takeoff and

• 36:51Speaker 05

  landing, like that is gonna happen. You can't, I'm in New York City right now, already I've had a conversation about some. Guy actually works for us, is an amazing guy, but he was frustrated about how long it took him to get to his, um, to a vacation house in the Hamptons, just like everybody does. They're frustrated by that and inevitably it talks helicopters and drones and all these sorts of things. So I think maybe a very long way of saying, the transportation, I think, for some period of time was super novel, right? Model T, oh my God, it's not a horse. Amazing. And then it was kind of everywhere. And then there's the highway system, right? Then it's big open road and Route 66 and interstates, all this sort of stuff. And then, you know, trains were cool and they were kind of not cool in the United States. And then planes were cool and then they're kind of annoying. And like, all that stuff is, is true. And I think there's another big thing. And I think it's when it becomes kind of cool and fun again, because autonomous drives you there, because you don't have to actually

• 37:35Speaker 05

  do a lot of the work and you can live your best life. And it's going to get in my, you know, I will bring it back to that. I want as many people off their frigging couch and, and not watching, you know, Netflix or getting food delivered, as much as I like that and they're great partners of ours. But man, I want them out in the world, out in the world. That's how we live our best lives.

• 37:50Ed Elson?

  Just from an organizational perspective, like, how are you supposed to maintain strong service when you're managing a company of thousands of employees? Like, I mean, just for context, I'm reading this book, Unreasonable Hospitality, right now, which talks about all this stuff in terms of the restaurant industry. Um, and, you know, it's, it's hard to do that at a restaurant where you're managing like 20, 30, 40 people. Um, and I can just assume that as you scale, it becomes increasingly difficult, not only to, to manage, but also just to have any, any contact with the customer experience. Like it just, you become so detached

• 38:33Ed Elson?

  when you're managing this large of an organization. So just give us some of your, your philosophy, your management philosophies on how you maintain service as you scale and, and as you build out a company of literally thousands of people.

• 38:48Speaker 05

  I love every single thing about this question. First of all, I read Unreasonable Hospitality about a year ago. It actually, and it changed my life because I started to think about this very, very directly. Let me, let me give you a, a little bit of data. So we have 3,000 people who are employees at Lyft, but we have 1.5 million people who drive on the platform. They are independent contractors. And it's not just a legal distinction. What it is, is an acknowledgement of what you're saying. It is very, very distributed, right? And they're, and people drive for all sorts of reasons, all sorts of reasons. Okay. So I actually put this question to two super interesting people over the last six months. One was Thomas Keller, who runs the French Laundry, as you know. One was Eric Ripart, who runs Le Bernadette in New York City.

• 39:30Speaker 05

  And both of those, and I asked the same question about, how would you create the level of culture around service, not just for the 30, 40, 50 people who work for your restaurant, but for one and a half million people who don't even work for, how would you do that? And both of them are so interesting. I mean, they get thousands of questions and mostly like, yeah, yeah, whatever, whatever. Both of them, and I don't think I'm speaking to school here to say like, they stopped in their tracks. They're like, that is a mind blowing question. That's a mind blowing question. Like, let me help you think about that. And so both of them gave me some ideas. But I can tell you that that is what I'm, I'm hell bent to solve that problem. Hell bent to solve that problem. And I hope 10 years from now, when people look back and they say, you know, what did this guy do? Oh my God, he somehow figured out a crack, he, they, the team figured out how to crack the code on getting one and a half million drivers to level up their service to a level of consistency and excellence that you might typically see in a, in a, in a high end restaurant.

• 40:13Speaker 05

  Let me say one last thing. From a million miles away, you think driving, you might, you have a certain sense of what driving is. And it may be sort of a transactional sense of people do it when they can't get another job, or when they need extra money, whatever. People drive for all kinds of reasons, but here's what's true. Drivers really like driving, most of them, some of them don't, but most of them really like it. And they actually have a lot of pride. So what we try to do is we try to say, okay, drivers, it's not just about how much money are we paying you? It's not just about, it's how can we help you move through your life? And so we have this accomplishment letter thing. You can literally as a driver come in and push a button. It says Scott started driving, it's AI driven, Scott started driving 18 months ago. He's a super grouchy driver. You should never have, no, that's not at all. But like, he's, he's one of our top 5% drivers. You know, he always shows up on time. Here are three comments. They're sort of representative of his driving skills.

• 40:58Speaker 05

  And we have stories and then, you know, I would hire Scott for any service oriented job you're looking for. So that could be baggage handler, it could be a front receptionist at a hotel. We have amazing stories. There's a guy who did this and literally he couldn't get a job, then he attached his reference letter and now he's working at IKEA in exactly this way. So such a long way of saying, but I hope you're getting the point. If we invest in our drivers and we help them understand that they're not just in the driving industry, they're in the service industry and we help support them, not just by paying them in a certain way, but actually by supporting their life dreams. And we do a bunch of other things with them to upscale and so forth and so on. I think we have a shot. And then we're very clear on what our values are and what our expectations are and take our incentive systems and align them. We have a driver loyalty program that is now starting to reward

• 41:41Speaker 05

  drivers for exhibiting better service and a new feedback mechanism that allows riders to help drivers see how they can improve their service. Then you can start to create a sort of a flywheel ecosystem that I think really does level up.

• 41:52Ed Elson?

  I just learned from the answer that Thomas Keller, one of the greatest chefs of all time, is advising Lyft on how to run the business, which I just love. And yet, we're not hearing any of the advice. We can't get a nugget? We can't get just a little bit?

• 42:10Speaker 05

  Did you see what I just did there? I just completely jumped over that. 100%.

• 42:14Ed Elson?

  We can't hear anything.

• 42:15Speaker 05

  Totally, totally. 100%. All I can tell you is he was very interested. And I do have an excellent selfie of the two of us standing together.

• 42:21Ed Elson?

  Oh, wow. Okay. Well, maybe you can send us the selfie because that in and of itself is fascinating.

• 42:29Speaker 05

  Happy to. He might be surprised to hear that he's advising us, by the way. I think it was a little bit more of a one and done type of conversation. But anyway, I'll show you the selfie and who knows, maybe, you know, we'll see.

• 42:40Ed Elson?

  We'll be right back.

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• 43:24Ed Elson?

  We're back with Profitec Markets. One of the things that we have been talking a lot about on this podcast in relation to what has been happening in politics, we have been somewhat surprised at the lack of pushback from the business leader community against some of the policies that we've seen. We could talk about immigration policies, but more so what we're seeing with tariffs and the ways that that is affecting our economy and the ways that it is going to affect our economy.

• 43:58Ed Elson?

  And we have been surprised by how many public company CEOs are kind of struggling or capitulating, whatever it is, sucking up to the president. I'd just like to get your perspective on that point. How do you feel about your role as a public company CEO? As someone who runs just a very large public company, have you been surprised by this too? And do you have any thoughts on this topic?

• 44:35Speaker 05

  I have been surprised. I do have thoughts. I think the fear of retaliation is real, and I think that stops a lot of people from saying anything. I think there's a general view of let's not be the tallest poppy is sometimes the term people say, so that I don't get targeted, frankly. I think that's a big part of it. I will also say I've been disappointed. I think there are executives who had the opportunity to speak up and chose not to, and I think they probably could have, and I think that the world would be a little better as a result. Now, I also have to say, I've spoken to people in the current administration, and there are some very, very competent people there. Competent, that sounds like a back end compliment, very, very passionate people who are actually really trying to do, quote, "the right thing," unquote, trying to make business easier to

• 45:18Speaker 05

  get done, trying to reduce stuff that probably was, you know, made sense at a certain time and it no longer does. So I actually think there's some genuine, I'm talking about a slightly different level maybe from what you're talking about, but I think there's some genuine desire within the administration to do the thing that everyone kind of wants, which is like, let's get rid of stuff that doesn't make sense and let's sort of be, you know, kind of a raging centrist. I think Scott, you say this sometimes, I'm talking about from kind of a regulation perspective and whatever. So anyway, that's a little bit of a side point, but I just want to make sure that folks heard that. I wrote, I did a little video a couple of weeks ago where I talked about values and the importance of leading with purpose and some of the values that we demonstrate as a rideshare business. We have a product called Women Plus Connect that allows women to preferentially choose each other's rider driver and it makes them feel safe. It makes

• 46:01Speaker 05

  them feel secure. It drives our business a very popular feature. It's the type of thing that I wanted to speak very clearly about and say this is something that we'll continue to be committed to and are continue to actually invest in. I could sort of go on and on, but so we talk a lot about how our values show up in the way we do business and that those values strengthen our business. It's one of the reasons why we are gaining share on the other guys is because people respond to it. We're targeting communities that maybe other folks are overlooking. So I think if I wanted to sum it up, I might say my surprise comes both from a little bit of a values perspective, but also I think there's a way to sort of, you know, you might say thread the needle, like really kind of say, I'm going to stand up for my values and it's going to drive my business forward. And if you don't like it, challenge me because I'm okay with that. I think I am on the right side of this one.

• 46:43Scott Galloway?

  You have a very impressive background. I'm one of the many people who started at Microsoft, went to Amazon, and then spent 12 years trying to help encourage kids to read and then went back to be the CEO of a public company. We're the same age. You're obviously economically secure. You've checked a lot of boxes. What's left for you? Like if, what does success look like for you in five or 10 years? If you think these are the box or boxes left for me to check, what are those things?

• 47:07Speaker 05

  I look, I first want to acknowledge I have been super, super lucky and I've, and I've made some good choices along the way. Of course, both those, those things are true. I was the 37th employee at Amazon. Like that's a, that's, you know, you don't, you don't get to, you know, not that many people get to say that, actually, I think just one. Okay. So, so I don't know that I have a super clear view of what's next. I can tell you I'm absolutely loving my job. I literally jump out of bed even on Saturdays. I find my wife is like, David, you know, I'm like, I wish it were Monday. My wife's like, settle down, David, just, just settle down. So, so, so, but, but now let's zoom out. Every Saturday morning I do something. I should do two things Saturday morning and you might find both these interesting. The second thing I do is I write a letter to our board of directors every single week, an email every single week, and it's always structured exactly the same way, the good,

• 47:52Speaker 05

  the bad, that's it. Then there's some data that's consistent from week to week and maybe a few pictures to tell the story, but the good and the bad. I find it very grounding. I think it kind of helps me think of what we accomplished over this week and what we're kind of up to and it helps keep the board very involved. And so the board being intended to be much more productive as a result. That's a total side comment, but it's just part of how I send my Saturday morning. The first thing I do is more important, which is I write in a physical journal for about a half an hour about typically four things. All right. How's my work going? How's my relationship with my family? How's my, I have two daughters, I have a wife, I have brothers and so on. How's my relationship with my friends? Right? Am I reaching out to them? Have I talked to somebody in this last week? Do I have plans to talk to somebody this next week, whatever it is? And then how's my health? And by health, I mean, you know, not just sort of the basics, like do I have a cold or not or whatever,

• 48:35Speaker 05

  but like, you know, if I got to the gym, if I kind of stayed active for. So I don't know. And on all those, I don't want to give myself a five star rating or whatever, but I kind of just reflect on each of those things for a little bit. And I suspect that at age, I'm about to turn 60 years old in a couple of days, you know, then I'll be 70, then I'll be 80. I have a goal of living to 100, hopefully healthily. So I hope number one, I'm alive and on that path. Number two, I hope I'm still thinking about those four things and that I'm making progress on all four of those and still loving all four. So that's going to be the, that'll be the framework. I don't know the specifics.

• 49:04Ed Elson?

  Done with questions, Scott? I'll wrap this up. Yeah, I am. Okay.

• 49:08Speaker 05

  Scott was taking a moment to reflect on that.

• 49:11Ed Elson?

  Scott was reflecting on his health.

• 49:12Speaker 05

  He was thinking. I can see.

• 49:14Scott Galloway?

  I was just thinking, how can you, how can you be, how can you go to Princeton and fill your first driver's test? That's what I was thinking.

• 49:22Ed Elson?

  Well, you know what? I'm just reading David's bio. David is also a tiger. So that's two for two.

• 49:28Scott Galloway?

  Princeton, Harvard, Amazon, Microsoft. Yeah. Jesus.

• 49:33Ed Elson?

  Just before we close here, David, any advice that you would give to young people starting their careers? I mean, a lot of people look up to you. You're kind of. Reached the heights in business in a lot of ways. What advice would you give to a young person who's just starting out right now?

• 49:51Speaker 05

  I mean, the first thing I would say is don't stress about the future so much. Gosh, there are all sorts of reasons to worry about the world right now. I think we're going to be okay. And I think particularly when you're in your twenties, you're getting so much incoming of all the stuff going on. And you have so much pressure to sort of like, what is my thing going to be? What's my career or whatever? And I'm really like, gosh, your twenties is your time to explore. So the first thing I would say is reduce the stress because I don't think it's going to help you. And second of all, take your twenties to just explore. Don't, don't stress about like, what is my career? I, gosh, I could, in retrospect, I can tell you what a beautiful career I've had and I've done all these. No, it was just all like, I did a thing and I was good at that. And then another thing, I was good at that. Phone call, I just took the phone call, I did a thing. So like, anyway, number one, like, don't worry so much about a master plan when you're a kid. Just, you know, explore.

• 50:34Speaker 05

  The second thing I think, and this is, I mean, the whole follow your passion thing is so trite. And, you know, people have all sorts of things about that, which I get. I've heard you talk about this, Scott. But I don't, and I don't, so I don't talk about it quite that way. What I do say, though, is don't follow the money. Don't follow the money. And it's such a mistake I see people make is they think, oh, my God, I'm going to take this job because I'm going to make more money effectively. And it's like such a dumbass thing to do. First of all, there's never enough, there's literally never enough. Quick side thing, my wife wrote a whole book on this topic. It's called, We Need to Talk, a memoir about wealth. It's been the impact of wealth is that in our family. It's a very personal story, it's a memoir. I'm a small supporting character, you know, other people are big in the point is that one of the things she talks about is there is never enough. So don't be doing that because that's a dumb goal. You're setting yourself up for failure. On the other hand, do do the things that you're good at.

• 51:16Speaker 05

  You do do the things that you're good at, the things that bring you joy, of course, but also what you're good at. Because if you're good at something, you will do better. And if you do better, you will get compensated. And if you are compensated, that'll make you not exactly happy, but it'll give you more options to do other things. And so, you know, I think probably every word on this topic has been said a million times before, but that's just kind of my philosophy. I'm a little bit of a, don't overplan it, don't overthink it. Use a little bit of expiration time in your twenties so you don't get, you know, on that too early. But man, oh, man, if there's one thing, don't, don't follow the money because it's, it's a loser. You'll never, you'll never get there.

• 51:46Ed Elson?

  David Richa has served as CEO of Lyft since 2023 and as a member of the board since 2021. Prior to Lyft, David co-founded World Reader, a nonprofit organization that has helped 21 million people read. Served as a senior vice president of US retail at Amazon and as a general manager at Microsoft. He holds a BA in comparative literature. Gosh, I can't speak today from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. David, thank you very much for joining us. This was great and go Tigers.

• 52:17Speaker 05

  Go Tigers. There you go. That was a lot of fun, you guys. Thank you, Ed. Thank you, Scott.

• 52:21Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, that was fun. Thank you for doing that, David.

• 52:32Ed Elson?

  Scott, what did you think of that?

• 52:34Scott Galloway?

  So a quantitative observation and a qualitative. The quantitative one is I think he represents the company really well. I had no idea they had that level of market share. I thought, quite frankly, I thought, and this speaks to probably has a problem with his comms department. I thought Lyft was dying a slow death. And I did not think they were grabbing market share. And given that the market is growing, I just didn't know that.

• 52:55Ed Elson?

  In the US, we should clarify, the US market share is still a big deal. But Uber is still taking over the rest of the world.

• 53:03Scott Galloway?

  I would not have thought that Lyft was gaining share against Uber in any large market.

• 53:10Scott Galloway?

  So, and I look at their price to sales. It's one, Uber's four, Uber's more diversified, has more scale. I think they still lack real differentiation. I think they've got to make a big bet on something as opposed to just being, right now, they're just known as the number two. And I don't think you solve that problem. And then my other observation is the reason I've gotten to know David accidentally because he shares a concern about young men. And we've gotten to know each other a little bit. And it's the reason why I don't get to know these guys is you like them. This guy is really likeable. They're just starting.

• 53:40Ed Elson?

  We can't have CEOs on the podcast anymore. We're going to just start, we're going to become sycophants.

• 53:45Scott Galloway?

  Well, I've gotten to know this guy. He took 12 years off, I think, to, to work on a nonprofit, trying to encourage kids to read. It's like, I'm pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg will never do that. But he's a, he's very, I mean, That guy's impossible not to like, in my view. And so I think he's in the right seat. I think they are struggling. They've got to make a big bet and be more than just the number two when you hear their, hear their brand name. What do you think?

• 54:12Ed Elson?

  Yeah, I think it's really interesting what you say about the price of sales multiple there. And that is, I mean, I agree. I really enjoyed that conversation. I really like him. But the question as a CEO is how can you increase those multiples? I mean, just as you said there, you didn't know that they had as large of a market share as they do in America. And whose fault is that? Well, that's, that's comms, that's PR's fault. But it's also kind of his fault as the CEO by not communicating that message enough. And so I think that I would like to see more, more from him in communicating, actually, we are, we are taking over the market in a lot of ways.

• 54:56Ed Elson?

  And I also think that this was an opportunity. You asked him, you know, what, what are your big bold bets? And he said customer service, which, you know, fair enough. And I really appreciate his obsession with that. I do think that's, that is important. But I also think that these podcasts are the moment to make that giant pitch. And sure, maybe Uber's going to start getting worried about it and management will start, you know, looking at this podcast and say, okay, Lyft is getting into this. But you also need to make the pitch to Wall Street and say, this is the future. You know, we're getting into robotaxis and it's going to be massive.

• 55:34Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, he's the anti Musk. Musk like basically strings together like bullshit and fairy dust and the market believes it. And, and he's, he's quite frankly, kind of honest and reserved to a fault. He's kind of reeks of integrity and doesn't want to get out of his skis, whereas. Musk is like, oh yeah, I'm putting, I'm putting people on Uranus. While I'm high on ketamine, I'm going to enjoy it.

• 55:58Ed Elson?

  That seems to be, that seems to be the problem, right? I mean, the, the problem isn't really the underlying business. They'd say they're actually doing a credible job there. The problem is selling to Wall Street, to investors. That's why the stock's down.

• 56:13Scott Galloway?

  He's the CEO of a bygone era and that is he's under promising and over delivering. And that used to be what CEOs acted like up until about 15 years ago. And now CEOs over promise, hoping that their stock will go up and they can use cheap capital to pull the future forward. And he just, he kind of reeks of integrity. I don't know. I'm, I'm rooting for the guy.

• 56:36Scott Galloway?

  I may even download the Lyft app. Who knows? I'm, I just might get fucking crazy. I might go crazy tonight.

• 56:41Ed Elson?

  I'm, I'm switching to Lyft. I, I, I'm a fan of David. I'm going to switch to Lyft as soon as we get off this podcast. Maybe that's just because, as you say, I, I like the guy. I'm, I'm, I'm becoming a victim of this, of the likability of these people.

• 56:56Scott Galloway?

  Good.

• 56:57Ed Elson?

  We need to stop having CEOs on the pod.

• 56:58Scott Galloway?

  There you go. No more, no Moss.

• 57:06Ed Elson?

  This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Mia Salvario is our research lead. Isabella Kinsel and Dan Shlon as our, our research associate. Drew Burrows is our technical director and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow and join us for a fresh take on markets on Monday.