The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 24 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Helmer: Uber and Lyft lack true network economies
“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.”
Frederick: Driver complaints about Lyft's unpaid pickup times were legitimate
“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…”
Nickels: Travis Kalanick closed Uber blinds fearing Lyft drone surveillance
“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,…”
Peer mentoring let Lyft match Uber's footprint with a fraction of resources
“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.”
Lyft peer driver recruiters outperformed the company's trained professional sales team
“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.”
Aluwi: Gojek's volume rivals Uber globally and exceeds Lyft
“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…”
Super Pumped accurately portrayed Uber's aggressive tactics against Lyft
“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…”
Lyft rider booking conversions plateaued when driver ETAs reached three minutes
“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…”
Sidecar's granular user filtering fragmented supply and drastically hurt service levels
“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…”
Lyft built the fourth-largest US car rental fleet in just eight months
“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.”
Maples: Ridesharing would have failed before iPhone 4S's GPS locator chip
“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…”
Helmer: A war of attrition only works with underlying scale economies
“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.”
Katie Dill restructured Lyft's design team by embedding designers with engineers
“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 …”
Frederick: Operational control must be a first-order requirement in marketplace algorithms
“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.”
Frederick: Meaningful disruption inevitably generates public controversy and conflict
“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…”
Hoover: Product Hunt might not have needed venture capital if personally funded
“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…”
Uber had 30 times Lyft's revenue and headcount around 2014
“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?”
Half of US job seekers and welfare recipients do not own cars
“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.”
Prompting stranded riders to become drivers failed to generate significant Lyft supply
“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,…”
Lyft paid top drivers $35 per session to onboard and inspect applicants
“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 …”
Katie Dill: Lyft's design team was originally isolated behind a locked door
“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…”
Stripe Connect originated from early marketplace integrations with Lyft and Shopify
“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…”
Platform involvement defines the spectrum of managed versus unmanaged marketplaces
“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…”
Lyft launched by driving a pink mustache car into their SoMa office
“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 …”