Lyft

“We created a company to do that, and MasterCard came and bought it. This was in 2013. And then all of our customers, and we had good customers, actually, back then Stripe and Lyft were a customer, and we did a lot of payouts to Lyft for Stripe. Ticketmaster wa…”

“We've not participated historically in the aggregation apps where some, you know, somebody will come to us and pitch and say, hey, you know, give us APIs that give us real-time info on Every car, every Uber car in the network what the price of that ride is, wh…”

“This is why, you know, like Lyft is smaller than Uber because we were better at this part of this, the thing, and people don't really know that's what it takes.”

“I wouldn't do anything different. And it's easy to say now, but I got a lot of shit for that for a long time. But it was basically, I would sit across the table from the guys, and I just didn't It was just clear that we were very culturally different, and you …”

“I just interviewed the president of Uber. What is his single biggest fear? It's actually the disaggregation of UI or the removal of UI where you say, I want a car, and ChatGPT automatically routes you to Lyft, Uber or another provider based on price.”

“In general, even now, like applications like Uber or Lyft, that completely not adapted for elderly adults.”

“So, and you know, in order to Dave and Catch, I ended up having to go on the board. Like, I took over that board seat to kind of help them through that.”

“And the deal on Lyft was two 10.”

“We had this thing where we would, against Lyft, we would we would recruit the drivers on Lyft to bring them over to Uber, so that it was hard for Lyft to build supply. And we would aggressively do it, and we had a program for it internally, which we called sho…”

“The way you call projects, it has to be appropriate for, like, a ten-year-old basketball team. So it went from shoplift to the national, sorry, the North American Championship Series. We call it the NACS. And we had a whole very heavy-duty initiative called th…”

“That's why I didn't buy Lyft.”

“In the end, the market is a weighing machine, not a popularity machine. No one remembers who went first, Google or Yahoo, Lyft or Uber”

“They, in San Francisco, it got to 25% market share really quickly with very few cars. You know, Surpassing Lyft and being a formidable competitor to Uber.”

“I think the foundation model companies look a little bit like that. And I think in the apps layer, you're just going to have people that want to Consume the code they generate through a rich IDE and those that want to be closer to the metal, and that's probabl…”

“I was like, we should buy Lyft. He's like, we should crush Lyft.”

“There are something like 50,000 Lyft drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area and Waymo overtook them in market share.”

“How could we Create multiple consumer businesses that are tuned to the modern world of social media, internet, and AI, but that have self-fulfilling, very positive outcomes. So simply, you know, we're creating a platform to help more and more people build thos…”

“We did something at IPO. We recreated a system for drivers to get equity.”

“Yeah, there were, I think it was when I was leaving, like, three percent of the U.S. Workforce had, had earned on Lyft”

“This year, in January, they were reportedly doing more in gross bookings than Lyft in San Francisco.”

“The actual regulator of taxis is Uber or Lyft because they have real-time tracking. They have star ratings on both sides. Or your you know, some, you know, the FCC or something like who issued licenses. Well, the actual regulator of speech or what have you sai…”

“We lost I think we made, we lost like 20 cents on the dollar, and Lyft we made like a three X.”

“And I lived it in the Uber lift situation, but we're going to have that type of capital battle in every category under the sun.”

“And there are Ubers and Lyfts out there, and it's very inconvenient because it's to the discretion of the driver whether they're going to take you or not.”

“Uber and Lyft are more like 20, 25%.”

“If we think about it, Chewy.com is in the world of Amazon. They're doing amazing. Rover is in the world of Airbnb. So if those guys can do it, then yeah, Spot On has a space in Uber and Lyft's world as well.”

“Lyft headquarters carries us, they buy about 3000 dollars of cup or cup a month”

“Like the first 10 Lyft drivers were TaskRabbits because John at the time didn't know how to do background checks and like we wrote background checks. For TaskRabbits, right?”

“And they had this big hole in their unit economics, which is paying the drivers. And so suddenly there was like a strong market pull for self-driving technology, whereas before I had been seen as just kind of a cool sci-fi thing.”

“So for Stripe in that first camp, this was back in 2017 that we started our foray into enterprise, and it was the Shopify's, the Lyft's, Squarespace's were all growing up, bringing in adult CFO's, contemplating IPOs, and so they had a bunch of demands.”

“It turned out that, well, A, there's some people who would prefer to deliver Food or a package over delivering people. They didn't want to have to have social interactions. And then there's other people with perfectly fine cars, but they're not perfectly fine …”

“What happened was Lyft was, you know, Zimride, and I had passed on Zimride”

“Travis Basically for six months was like, you know, telling the taxi commission, the city, government, like, you know, hey, these guys are illegal, like, well, you know, why are you allowing it, et cetera, instead of launching it, you know, as well which was l…”

“Andreessen, having lost the Uber deal, ended up doing the Lyft deal, and we had, you know, Travis and Emil, you know, they were close to acquiring it acquiring Lyft which, you know but they wanted too much ownership so that luckily didn't work out”

“Ann funded Lyft at five and a half million post money.”

“Twitter was a little over 300 X and gets all the credit for Lyft, that was like about two, 205 X what else? Applied. Applied is probably encroaching on a hundred X in the first check. Twitch got close, but not quite there. It got to 94 X.”

“Waymo launched in SF in August, 20, 23 in kind of an open market way. Uber and Lyft were 66 and 34% market share at the time. And in 15 months in November of 2024, Waymo is now a 22% market share of rides in SF, which is the same as Lyft and Uber is now down t…”

“Now Waymo has 22% market share of all taxi journeys in San Francisco, which exceeds the human driver company, or sorry, the human driver company Lyft was the headline.”

“Guys, lift, lift is fucked.”

“And so the growth marketing team turns off every single paid channel and installs and signups barely move. They go down by like maybe five, 10%. I don't remember what it was and what did go down. It was all Low quality. So every marketing dollar that was being…”

“We overestimated how much better we could make the ride sharing product. I think we started to hit, like when you look at ride sharing four or five years ago versus today, how much has the product changed? Not that much. So if you don't believe, well, sorry, i…”

“If I look at some of our competitors like Lyft in the US, I don't think that being a number two is sustainable. But it is a very profitable business if you're able to run a very lean operation.”

“I think that the, their only way out of this is to optimize their costs. I just generally don't see how they're going to be an independent company five years from now with the current cost structure.”

“This is why Uber is beating Lyft is, oh, and the wait time is lower.”

“These organizations that worked with us, one of them was Lyft for early days, for example. They, you know, came upon this need. They wanted to pay out drivers, and so they built the product with us.”

“Reliably every time he'd come in, he would close the blinds of the windows. They're like, crap, what are we doing? Like, it's not because there was glare, like they were orthogonal to the screen. And then one time I was like, why are you doing that? He's like,…”

“On the driver's side, when you go into a small town, you have, if drivers drive anytime that they want, like with Uber and some of these other platforms if it's a Monday afternoon and you have a hundred cars on the road like drivers get bus street and they chu…”

“How involved is the intermediary defines how managed the marketplace is. So something like Craigslist is super hands-off, unmanaged, and something like Lyft starts to be more into the semi-managed, where the platform significantly shapes the transaction in thi…”

“In our case at Lyft early on, we were, you know, we had a wait list on the demand side because we just couldn't you know, onboard enough supply. And so we had this idea of like having a pop-up instead of saying like no drivers available, it would be like, Hey,…”

“What will predict you deciding to book a ride for Lyft and for Uber, it was ETAs. So we knew that if we had if the closest driver was at least three minutes away from you or closer, then we had hit a ceiling. You were more than like X percent likely to, you kn…”

“I think one real interesting direction that they took pretty early on to differentiate themselves was in my mind, Perhaps very naively a mistake. They decided to give complete control to the user where as a user, you had a whole bunch of filters. You could dec…”

“And when we looked at the market, we realized that 50% of the job seekers and welfare recipients don't in the U S don't have a car.”

“And I think in, in three months we'd built, you know, rental company from the ground up and within eight months, I think we were like the fourth largest rental fleet in the U S.”

“Pretty early on at Lyft, this was 2014, 2015, maybe Uber was basically like 30 exercise. They had 30 times more revenue, more people, more liquidity, like everything you can think of, right?”

“We would pay our best drivers 35 dollars per mentor session. And mentor session was essentially replacing his onboarding flow. So it was basically another driver looking at your vehicle to check all your documents, take photos of your driver's license and all …”

“This allowed us to match most of Uber's footprint with like, you know, a 10th or a 20th of the resources that you know, I, incredible speed, I guess.”

“Those guys were outperforming our very best, like, trained salespeople, because it's not like, hey, it's Ben from Lyft, like, hop on the road, please.”

“If you had had the idea for ride sharing before the iPhone four S had a GPS chip, you could have been right about the future, but you wouldn't have been able to build a system that embodied your idea about the future. Riders and drivers wouldn't have been able…”

“Each and every city we went to, we would send, we would wait for Lyft to launch. And then we would basically say to the city, we'd send them a letter saying, there's this really cool thing called ride sharing. This company called Lyft is doing it. We think it'…”

“And what a lot of people don't know about Lyft is when we started launching UberX, we let Lyft go first, and we had a policy that said, hey, if Lyft launches in a city, we are going to wait 30 days to see if the law enforcement comes after them, and then we're…”