Lyft

“Product isn't the type of company that needs to raise a ton of money. It's also one which is not doesn't have like direct competitors in the sense of like an Uber and Lyft situation where raising is actually like kind of mandatory and you sort of have to build…”

“When we launched a Lyft, when we sort of were bringing it out of private beta, we had this press event at the office, which is in Soma, and it had these doors, these big, huge, like garage style doors. And so we opened them up and we actually drove a car into …”

“So much of that story was stuff that I had experienced pretty regularly while I was at Lyft battling against Uber. So one part of me was like, oof, I remember that. God, that was hard. Another part of me was happy that to see that all of the things were out in…”

“I think there were really legitimate complaints about the structure of driver P. That were coming up and that were behind, I think some of the complaints and some of the big stories in the press and some of the big kind of legal action that was taken. Paying f…”

“I think the big learning, at least in that business, was you have to think about operational requirements and operational control as a first order requirement.”

“I don't think you're going to have any meaningful influence on the world without changing some pattern of behavior. And if you're changing a pattern of behavior, there's somebody who's invested in that pattern of behavior, and that's going to create some confl…”

“In terms of, you know, volume, I would say that we're up there with Uber globally and definitely larger than Lyft. I don't remember how many drivers are in the US, but it's definitely, we definitely have more drivers in the region than all of the, all of Ameri…”

“So the ideas behind Stripe Connect came from working with companies like Lyft and Shopify in the very early days. They were using Stripe for pay-ins, but we realized, oh, these companies are operating in these multi-sided marketplaces, and there's a ton of hea…”

“The way that the team was organized before I got there was that actually, you know, physically the design team sat separately. They sat in a room that was just like beautifully designed. Separated from engineering and product and all the other functions by a l…”

“Literally and figuratively, we broke down the wall and, you know, brought the teams physically together so that they would work together. And then, you know, we had an org chart where it's like, okay, these designers are working on driver. These designers are …”

“It only works because they, there are modest scale economies. If there weren't any, then If they did all this stuff, they'd still have equivalency.”

“You asked me earlier, or in the material you sent me about Uber and Lyft, I'd say that, you know, they probably have network effects involved, but not network economies.”

“You know, you could have had the idea for ride sharing before the iPhone four S, but it wouldn't have mattered because the riders and the drivers wouldn't have been able to locate each other well enough. If you'd waited too long after the iPhone four S it woul…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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,…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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,…”