Lyft’s bold plan to overtake Uber in the race for rideshare’s future

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

DAVID RISHER: There’s almost this gravitational pull for all sorts of reasons for products and services to get worse. You have to fight against that, you got to fight really hard. If you don’t, you can wake up one morning and realize, where did everybody go? Why is it that there are 160 billion rides a year in private cars, but rideshare is only doing maybe 3 billion between us and our competitor? What’s up with that? And the answer is because the service just isn’t good enough, and so we want to make it better.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s David Risher, CEO of rideshare service Lyft. David’s been making a series of aggressive moves to reposition Lyft against what he calls ‘the other guys,’ which of course means Uber. Since taking the reins two years ago, David’s been pushing Lyft to move faster, and in just the past few weeks, has rolled out new programs and Lyft’s biggest international acquisition ever.

The rideshare industry is grappling with how to integrate self-driving cars, keep its human drivers from protesting, and address customer concerns about pricing and trust. David’s strategy includes attacking what he’s publicly called enshittification, plus lessons he’s learned from Jeff Bezos and more. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with David Risher, CEO of Lyft. David, thanks for joining us.

RISHER: It’s great to be here.

Copy LinkHow Lyft’s CEO operates in uncertainty

SAFIAN: So there is so much going on in Lyft’s world right now. You sparked some attention with some comments about what you call falcon mode. Lyft announced a big acquisition in Europe, also that you would add taxis to the platform. Lots of ground to cover.

I want to start though with this moment in time. You’ve been CEO of Lyft for two years now. Lyft stock perked up smartly after you arrived, after being in the doldrums. Although it’s given back much of that ground. It’s been a chaotic time for every business. AI is suddenly everywhere, a new administration resetting rules, it’s hard to catch your breath. Do you have a philosophy about how to operate when uncertainty is so high?

RISHER: Well, that’s a great question, and the answer is yes. And that’s to focus on the things that don’t change. So there’s so much noise as you say, and it gets so easy, tempting almost because it gets us all riled up and our endorphins starts to skyrocket. But here’s what’s not going to change: People are still going to want to get out of their houses and go see friends and go to concerts and got to the airport and go to work. I mean, either they’ll want to or they’ll have to. They do it on Lyft platform already about 2 million times a day every single day. And we’ve been growing double digits now for 16 quarters in a row, so it’s pretty good.

But if you look deep inside humans, we’re social beings. So that’s not going to change. People are going to want great service, so they’re going to want to be picked up on time. So we pick you up about a minute faster than we did a year ago. So that’s really important. People want to get a good price, drivers are going to want to get paid. So that sort of philosophy is really focus on the things that don’t change, and that’s how you build a great business.

Copy Link“The service just isn’t good enough”

SAFIAN: You recently released your second annual letter to shareholders, and in it you used a somewhat off-color word: enshittification. Can you tell us where the idea to use that word came from and what it means to you? I mean, CEOs don’t typically use expletives publicly.

RISHER: We keep that to the boardroom. I mean, so two different things. The term itself, it was actually coined by Cory Doctorow, futurist author, and one of the things he noticed several years ago is that so many things that start out great, and he was specifically thinking about products and services, you might think of maybe a Facebook or something, you might even think of rideshare, let’s use rideshare. Things that start out as magical. You push a button, and a couple minutes later, someone comes up and gets out of the car for you, and it’s this crazy experience, and at the end, you don’t have to pay. It just all happens magically on the app. There’s this sort of a magic to things at the beginning.

And then over time for all sorts of reasons, quarterly profits, maybe getting a little defocused, focusing too much on your competitor, trying to not miss the next big thing, you get a little distracted as a company, and so your products tend to get worse. And you can see this, you can see it actually happening right now, even with AI, which is so new, but already like, oh, my God, it’s showing up in all sorts of stupid places and trying to give me suggestions I don’t really want and whatever. That’s a particularly rapid form of enshittification. I think there’ll be a couple of bumps along the way.

But the point is that there’s almost this gravitational pull for all sorts of reasons for products and services to get worse. And guess what? You have to fight against that, you got to fight really hard. And if you’re in a business like ours, which is a service business, if you don’t, you can wake up one morning and realize: Where did everybody go, what happened to everyone? Why is it that there are 160 billion rides a year in private cars, but rideshare is only doing maybe 3 billion between us and our competitor? What’s up with that? And the answer is because the service just isn’t good enough, and so we want to make it better.

SAFIAN: Is some of this that as a business “grows,” I’m using quote marks here, you add more services, more things to it, and it just gets messy. I mean, I know your competitor who you won’t mention, but I will, Uber, they’re trying to make their service into an app for everything. Is that what is enshittifying the industry, trying to do too much?

RISHER: I mean, that’s definitely part of it. It’s hard to be great at everything, it is. Instead of being creative and coming up with ways to grow in a way that’s really customer-obsessed, they get uncreative, and they start to just copy other people’s ideas and add new junk. There’s this idea of additive bias that I talk about in the letter as well, which is typically faced by some problem; we’re not growing fast enough, we’re not doing something fast enough. The first thing is, what else can we do? So you add a thing, you add a thing, you add a thing.

Even today, I’ll give you a very small example of something that happened today. There’s some language in our product that I don’t find particularly descriptive, and it’s quite prominent. If you open up our app, there’s a little dropdown that says ‘change rider.’ It’s right up at the top, a relatively new addition. Now what it’s meant to say is ‘get a Lyft for a friend’ because this happens quite often. You have the app, the other person doesn’t or maybe their credit card is out of date or something like this.

SAFIAN: I do this for my mom all the time.

RISHER: Ah, well, there we go. Okay, so you know exactly, and we can talk about Silver too because maybe you need to be on the Silver program. We’ll talk about that in a second. But for some reason, I’m not 100% sure why, we decided that ‘change rider’ was the right way to say it. If you’re like me, you think, well, change rider sounds a little mysterious, but ‘get a Lyft for a friend’ sounds very specific. So I’ve suggested that language or something similar.

The team came back with, “Well, why don’t we put a tool tip on it so when you hover over it or something like that, you can see it.” Or not hover over, but it’ll pop up. And I’m like, “No, no, we’re not going to do that. Now we’re solving a problem by creating another thing. Now we’re [using] new language and other stuff and whatever.” It’s like, “No, no, no, get the thing right.”

So I think, again, it’s so tempting to just add new stuff and whatever as opposed to be really, really obsessed with what it is your customer wants, and just try over and over again to give it to them in a way that also helps you build a business.

Copy LinkIntroducing Lyft Silver

SAFIAN: And the new Silver service, which you mentioned, which you guys rolled out today, that’s not an addition that is enshittifying because I can’t believe I’m using this word over and over again, but—

RISHER: It’s the way of the world. It starts out crazy, and then it becomes normal like so many things. So it’s interesting you say that. So I think Lyft Silver is actually a really good… So that’s why I’m wearing this crazy silver shirt by the way, as we just launched it today. And the premise here is that there are, every single day, literally people have these tough conversations with their parents; “Mom, dad,” I had one myself a couple of years ago with my mom, and it didn’t go well, “it’s time to turn over the car keys.” Why didn’t it go well? It didn’t go well because she sees that as taking away her independence. She’s like, “I’m a perfectly good driver.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s not about you. It’s the other people, safety, all this stuff.”

So Lyft Silver basically says, let’s get rid of all the clutter, let’s actually simplify. So it’s actually a very active simplification of the app, and then let’s build some other services around it.

So we found that if you’re older, and there are, to be clear, 60 million older adults in the United States, it’s going to 70 million over the next couple of years. It’s a big growing market. If you’re older, you’re worried that you’re going to do something that you’re not going to know what to do next. And so we’re making customer support one click away, literally push the button and the phone goes straight to customer support. So it’s a whole service. You get nicer cars, all sorts of things, and it’s really for folks, I suspect, like your mother who you want to get out in the world.

Now, is it enshittification? I think it’s the opposite. I think it’s a very specifically designed product for a very specific demographic that’s growing and has very clearly identified needs. And funnily enough, it actually, if anything, is a simplification rather than additive.

Copy LinkDavid Risher on the importance of ‘falcon mode’

SAFIAN: This letter you wrote also includes this phrase ‘falcon mode,’ which has also sparked a bunch of interest. So I wanted to ask you to explain what is falcon mode?

RISHER: So falcons fly thousands of feet in the air. But of course, they can’t stay up there always because they got to eat. So falcons have adapted to become extremely perceptive at seeing very small things on the ground and then being able to dive down very, very quickly, grab the mouse or whatever it is, and then go back up to cruising altitude.

I use that kind of figurative language to help my team actually understand my job, which is to try to stay up at the high level. I mean, a CEO doesn’t hopefully need to be in the details every single day, but I have never found a successful CEO, and I’ve worked for some very successful CEOs, I’m very lucky in that way, who doesn’t also judiciously decide when to come down and to go really, really deep into the things, to get to the point where you’re literally saying, “You know what, I think this language on the screen isn’t quite doing the job,” as an example.

Copy LinkLessons from using Lyft’s service as a driver

SAFIAN: How much of that is about you identifying something that’s strategic that you could have seen at 30,000 feet that maybe others are missing versus pointing to your team that this is the way you want them to act?

RISHER: I think if you never do it yourself, if all you’re doing is telling your team, “Go look at this, go look at this, go look at this, go look at this,” I think the chance of you having good intuition on that, where to actually go deep, is low. But then on the other hand, hopefully they see you doing it, and they become comfortable themselves.

And again, I want to make a distinction, you haven’t mentioned the word micromanagement, but that’s a word that sometimes people say, “Well, doesn’t that sound like micromanagement?” And for me, the distinction I make is I try, again, sometimes unsuccessfully to be clear, but I try not to use it as a way to propose answers. Of course, sometimes I do. I’m a human being, I have ideas, but I try more to use it as a way to understand a problem space better.

A story I tell in the letter is you can understand the issue of surge pricing at a generic level. People don’t like prices that are unpredictable, and that gives you a certain amount of insight. But when I drove and I picked up a woman named Anne, and she said, “Sometimes the price is 20, sometimes it’s 30, sometimes it’s 40. When it’s 20, I take a Lyft. When it’s 40, I drive myself, but I’m really annoyed. I get up at 6:00 in the morning, just check the price every single morning.” You have these conversations, and you get so much more empathy and understanding for the contours of that problem and why it matters so much at individual level.

And then you can go back to your team and say, “You know what, guys, I know we’ve been talking about trying to get rid of surge pricing or at least some of it for a while. Let me give you some examples that I’ve picked up by going deep that maybe help us understand both why this is a big problem for people and maybe understand, as I say, the contours of this space a little bit better as a result.”

SAFIAN: And so this is why you get on the road and you drive a Lyft every six weeks for a day, so you’re close to the experience of both sides of your marketplace, the driver and the rider.

RISHER: It’s exactly it. And it’s so interesting. I actually took my first drive, I think it was a week before I joined even. So it’s been a little bit over two years now. And at first what I really thought it was going to be is really understanding the driver app and the driver experience. And I learned a lot, but what it’s really taught me is how the rider experiences the ride. And it’s so different to look at the data versus talk to the riders and ask them, “Why did you choose Lyft today versus the other guys? What are some of the perceptions you have?”

And sometimes people talk about a credit card deal we have with Chase Sapphire Reserve, and sometimes people will talk about a bad experience they had on the other guys. Sometimes they’ll talk about how they think they like our values better or they like Women+ Connect, which is a service we have. So you get a sense of both sides of the marketplace, and it’s quite efficient. I mean, it’s only two or three hours, and gosh, you can learn a lot in two or three hours if you really, really focus on them.

Copy LinkCompeting with Uber

SAFIAN: I mean, Lyft, you mentioned the other guys. I mean, you have more riders than ever, you have more drivers than ever, but you’re still far behind Uber, which has 75% of the market or something. I mean, we’ve heard a lot about the streaming wars in TV, and there’s arguably a ridesharing war going on. Do you have to beat Uber to become like Netflix in streaming, or is it just about staying competitive? You don’t have to be Netflix. If you can be BritBox, and that’s you, and that’s okay.

RISHER: So a couple of things I think about that, every year just in the U.S., so we’re not even talking about overseas, just in the U.S., people take about 160 billion rides in their own car, 160 billion. So every single one of those rides, they’re getting behind the wheel, their stress level is probably going up a little bit, hopefully they’re not texting, but they’re certainly tempted to text every time they come to a stoplight, they’re road rage sometimes, frustrated. At the very least, they’re not able to do very much else with their life, and then they got to park, and then they got to pay for parking, and all these different things.

So there are a lot of times where, you know what, it’s actually kind of nice to have someone else pick you up. You can do the texting, you can sit back, you can make a phone call if you want to, you can put on your makeup if you’re a woman, whatever it is, guy too, whoever. So the point is it’s a better experience, and we want to do it so reliably and at such a high service level that we move from, call it, 800 million rides a year, which is about what we do, to a billion to 2 billion to 3 billion to 4 billion.

So do I have to compete with someone else to do that? Not really. Now, we have to compete with private cars, and to a certain extent, with people staying at home on their couch. I mean, those are things I have to compete with, but I don’t really need to dominate the other guy.

Now, having said that, there is another guy in the marketplace. Our share when I joined was about 26% share. Now it’s about 31% share. So we’ve made nice progress there, and that’s hard. I mean, every single point of share you get over a bigger competitor is quite hard.

I’ll give you two stats that I’m very proud of. One is we pick you up about 30 seconds faster than they do. Second is for our drivers, we have a 23 point advantage, 23 point advantage in preference of dual-appers, people who use both apps. Who would you prefer to drive for?

So I consider those to be very good leading early indicators that we’re doing some things well. The share thing is a little bit of a trailing indicator. It’s just an interesting little thing to look at. Leading indicator is more to people like you more, you get better service. And over time, that tends to grow a business quite nicely.

SAFIAN: I just love how David avoids naming the other guys, how he makes a strong case that the industry opportunity is much bigger than any competitor. And then he delivers some savage data on how he’s gaining ground.

So what other creative steps is he taking to gain ground, and how are self-driving cars impacting his approach and strategy? We’ll talk about that after the break. Stay with us.

[THEME MUSIC]

Before the break, Lyft CEO, David Risher, talked about what’s needed to drive growth for the ridesharing industry. Now we talk about the future of self-driving cars, the lessons he learned from Jeff Bezos, and more. Let’s get back to it.

Can I ask you about the other end of the spectrum, self-driving cars, Waymo, and the like?

RISHER: Sure, of course.

Copy LinkHow Lyft is approaching autonomous vehicles

SAFIAN: I mean, I know you’ve got partnerships for self-driving rides with Mobileye and May Mobility. Now I saw that Uber, the other guys, recently announced a deal with May Mobility too, which doesn’t that kind of bug you?

RISHER: I mean, I guess if I let it bug me, I’d probably be an unhappy person. I’m pretty happy person, because the thing is, we’re so early. Okay, self-driving cars, they’re definitely happening, let’s be clear. And if you’re here in San Francisco, you know that because you see them every day. If you’re in most of the country, you’ve maybe read about it, but let me assure you that they are happening.

SAFIAN: But then how do you think about differentiating what Lyft might have to offer relative to autonomous vehicles and AVs? I mean, you must have to stay up to date yourself about what’s going on in this adjacent business or adjacent market and technology to yours. I mean, I saw that Aurora is doing autonomous trucking. Are things like that a signal of certain things for you?

RISHER: I mean, it’s interesting you bring up Aurora. I just had coffee with the CEO last week to try to understand his world a little better and vice versa.

Yeah, I mean, one of the, I’ll just call it a feature of the technology space is it doesn’t stop. And so you have to have a very high tolerance for change, you have to be quite clear-eyed about your long-term strategy. So our strategy with autonomous is to bring multiple vendors onto our platform so that riders can have that experience and be the best way for them, the manufacturers and the OEMs and so forth, to monetize that asset, to get paid back for all the R&D. I mean, that is our vision and that’s the process we’re on, whether it’s with Mobileye or May or any number of other organizations.

And you have to understand how it could be the best thing in the world that happened to us because all of a sudden we have a lot of new supply and a cool new set of toys for our riders to play with. Or it could be quite disruptive. And I don’t mean in a good way because all of a sudden maybe they’re partners that you weren’t really considering competitors, but maybe they turned out to be competitors too.

SAFIAN: Yeah. I mean, personal self-driving cars would radically change the way we get around. Do you have a theory about, ‘Will I still own a car or will I still need a ride service because my car is my ride service?’

RISHER: My theory is that in the fullness of time, self-driving will be to cars as radios are to cars. You could buy a car without a radio, but it would be a very strange thing, which it’s to say it is absolutely the default. Yes, you can still buy a manual transmission car. I happen to have one myself. They’re fun to drive, but it’s a niche at this point. So that is my theory.

Now, whether that’s seven years from now or 15 years from now or 20 years from now, who knows? So our job has to make sure that the network that we have of connecting riders and drivers today, cars and riders tomorrow, is resilient to that kind of change. And we’re doing a lot even today to plant the seeds for that.

If you’re on a Lyft, this is a tiny thing, but let’s be clear, for some people it matters a lot, you can get points on Alaska Airlines or you have certain benefits on DoorDash. You can start to see these ecosystem benefits that accrue when you’re on the platform. And that doesn’t really matter whether you’re being driven by a driver or a self-driving car. Again, self-driving cars, it’s very small right now in terms of absolute numbers, very, very small. But we have to plan for it to be big, and we have to build a business that’s resilient to that, and hopefully expansive as a result.

SAFIAN: And the drivers of the future who will be providing services on your platform, are you thinking that those are physical drivers in the car or that when I’m not using my car, I can have it be operating as a Lyft and picking people up without me being in it?

RISHER: I think it’ll be both, I really do. There will not be enough self-driving cars in even the next five years, five to seven years, whatever, for it to be enough to manage all the demand. Remember, we’re talking about billions of rides a year. When the concert lets out, when the Giants finish, when whatever it is, you just say when it’s raining and no one wants to drive themselves, and everyone’s got to get somewhere, and of all that.

And by the way, humans are very good at certain things, they’re very good at helping you with your luggage. They’re probably going to be better at helping your mom than a robot will anytime soon.

And then also in the rural areas where there’s just not enough density to make sense for a lot of self-driving cars too, because they’re expensive assets. So anyway, humans are absolutely in this equation for a long, long time.

So today, if you’re a driver, you’re effectively trading two things for money. You’re trading your time, and you’re trading your car’s use. So today you put yourself in the driver’s seat, and you go drive somewhere around.

Tomorrow, it is quite possible that you could buy a car and put it on the network, but not have it take your time. Now, you’ll still have to clean it, you’ll still have to maintain it, you’ll still have to do some things. Nothing comes for free. But I think that’s also a very reasonable scenario.

But again, now we’re talking years out, but it’s why we partner with companies like Mobileye. Mobileye is in the business of putting tech not just in one or two models, but in hundreds of models of car. So someday over the next five to 10 years, maybe you buying your own car might want to, as you say, put it on the Lyft network in the evening.

Copy LinkInsights from an “unusual career”

SAFIAN: I mean, I know you spent more than a dozen years running a nonprofit, Worldreader, before taking on this CEO role. And you worked previously at Microsoft and at Amazon, but that was 20-some years ago. Working in the for-profit world now that you’re back, has it changed compared to then? Is working in nonprofits that open your eyes to new ways to approach strategy and leadership calmness? I don’t know. Or how much are you tapping into those Microsoft/Amazon days? How does that mix come together?

RISHER: I mean, I do think about this a little bit because I have had this unusual career. So I was at Microsoft in the ’90s. Microsoft in ’90s was animated by a competitive, almost animal spirit. And I think that reflected Bill Gates at the time. He’s quite a competitive person famously so, and he recognized the market dynamics of packaged software that basically there’s no number two. You get to be Excel and then everybody else, you get be Word and then everybody else. So that’s kind of, sort of how that market tends to go. So I learned a lot through that.

At Amazon, which it was crazy, I was the 37th employee at Amazon, so very, very early there when it was a tiny just online bookstore. But my job was to build the music store and the toy store and the video store, run the whole front end of the company. There, I really learned from Jeff, who I worked for directly for many years, the value of customer obsession. And now it’s a little bit of a trite phrase, but at the time, it really is quite revolutionary the idea that you’re going to organize all of your decision making around your customer because if you don’t, everything’s just one click away on the internet. He saw that early on. So you can lose your customers in a second if you don’t continue with that.

And then Worldreader, which is a nonprofit, I started to get kids reading using digital technology by the way because obviously I’ve been in the tech world for a long time. We got to 20 million, still around, I mean, I’m a member of the board, to actually 22 million kids reading on the platform, originally Kindles, now on cell phones. We did all these crazy partnerships with publishers all over the world. Really, really interesting work. But I think what I probably most learned from it is this notion that if you lead with a sense of purpose, the sky is the limit.

Copy LinkThe purpose of Lyft now

SAFIAN: When you mentioned purpose, I’m curious because early on when I would talk to the founders of both Uber and Lyft, their purposes and their founding motivations were quite different. Uber’s was about like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be great if I could be treated like one of those rich bankers and get picked up by a nice black car and not have to pull out my wallet?” And for Logan Green and John Zimmer, it was more like, “Oh, we can take more cars off the road, and we can improve the way cities work and improve the environment.” Very different ways to come to two businesses that end up being remarkably similar. When you think about the purpose of Lyft now, where does it sit in that historical context? Is there a new purpose that you’ve brought to it?

RISHER: So our purpose is to serve and connect. I think the through-line is John and Logan started with, and still, they’re still a member of our board, and I think part of the reason they reached out to me, interested in my applying for this job is because they saw some of the same values around improving, making things better. They had a particular vision around the role of cars and cities and stuff. As you expect, some has played out, what you expect, some not so much. But the fundamental motivating thing was: Can we make things better for the world, can we make things better? And I would say the other guys had a different motivation, as you just pointed out.

The way that I would position Lyft to make things better is that we know, the research is unequivocal, that the happiest, most satisfied, most engaged people are the ones that are interacting with other people and places. As technology takes on more and more of our lives, as I mentioned before, and screen time grabs you more and more, so many forces. You mentioned Netflix before, the streaming wars, what a great company, but its job is to get you in the home and alone. That’s not their purpose, but that’s a side effect.

We’re the physical corrective of that. Our business only works if you get out and connect with the world, and that’s what we’re here to do. So if we can do that and we can provide millions of people a way to make a living through driving on the platform and so forth, I think we’ve done some real good work in the world.

Copy LinkWhy some drivers prefer Lyft

SAFIAN: The drivers who prefer Lyft, I mean, is that about compensation, is that about longer-term benefits? I mean, I know we’ve seen some driver protests recently in Alexandria, Virginia, against Uber and Lyft about how to make rideshare driving a more sustainable career or business.

RISHER: We just treat drivers better. I mean, we just do, flat out. And I’ll give you two very specific examples. About a year ago, a little over a year ago, we instituted something called a 70% earnings guarantee. Drivers understand that we can’t really guarantee them a certain amount of demand, but what we can guarantee is we’ll treat you fairly. On a weekly basis, you’ll always make at least 70% of what riders pay you after insurance, which we take out on the top.

And to be clear, the average they make is 86%. How is that in dollars? But these are rougher averages. But you can actually find a whole white paper we wrote on our website. About $30 an hour that a driver’s engaged gross, that means before expenses, about $20 an hour net, that means after gas and depreciation and repairs and cleaning and all these things.

Now, those are not bad numbers. It’s significantly higher than national minimum wage obviously. It’s quite good. That’s number one.

Number two, we just launched, a couple of months ago, something called a driver accomplishment letter. So drivers sometimes they drive as a side hustle. Maybe they aspire to open a restaurant or maybe they want to be a front desk clerk at a hotel one day, and this is good service training, any number of things. So what we did, this is actually literally, I brought mine, it’s kind of cool, we created this thing called a driver accomplishment letter. And it literally is an AI-generated letter that any driver that’s driven more than I think it’s 150 rides can get. And it literally says, I’ll read you part of mine, I’ve got an average rating of five stars out of five. That’s nice. 15 complimented David’s friendliness, 14, how David went above and beyond, 13, the cleanliness of the car, 13, good driving, yada-yada-ya. Riders appreciate his engaging and professional demeanor.

SAFIAN: So this becomes like a reference for other kinds of work?

RISHER: That’s it, exactly right. And people are using it that way. Drivers have asked for 300,000 of these so far, and so it helps them in their next thing. I think that’s one of the reasons why we get such a high approval rating.

Copy LinkWhat David Risher is focusing on

SAFIAN: And when you think about your competitive priorities right now in 2025, how do you weigh or play off technology, branding, pricing? How do you weight those things? What’s most important as you’re trying to focus and avoid the insidiousness? I’m not going to use that word again that we used in the beginning.

RISHER: I understand. Yeah. Look, on the competitive side, again, my bigger focus is on how do we get more people who are not even taking rideshare to take it. That’s my biggest focus. But if we’re just talking about the specific competitive dynamic, I want to compete on service, and I want to out-innovate the other guy. I want driving and riding on the platform just to be flat out better than the alternative, flat out better.

And then to your point about branding, we have to talk more about it, we do. This is a company that’s been we’re early brand-forward company. We have a very distinctive look, we have distinctive values. It comes across.

SAFIAN: Oh, I remember the mustache, yes.

RISHER: So the mustache is, it’s awesome and epic, and we occasionally use it. In fact, I think — oh, yeah. I don’t know if we can get that in the camera, but hold on, I can use my hands. Check it out. I got one right here.

SAFIAN: There you go.

RISHER: Lyft stache.

SAFIAN: There you go.

RISHER: On our Lyfts is a small version of the ones we used to have in the car, but what we found is people still believe in Lyft. And so part of the way to get back into that game is by turning up the volume a bit. And so you’ll be seeing that. That’s expensive, that takes time, people’s mindsets take a while to shift, but over time, you can expect us to make investments there too.

SAFIAN: I mean, I sometimes asks this question and say, if your company went away tomorrow, what would the world lose? If Lyft disappeared, I could still get a taxi or use another ridesharing app, right? I’m curious how much you think about that what really makes Lyft special?

RISHER: Yeah, I love that question. So I do think you’d lose a force for good in the world. I mean, it’s 2 million people every single day are taking this app, and they’re all going places that they really typically need to get to, and typically are choosing us for a very active reason. Maybe they don’t have a taxi or public transportation isn’t as strong, or their private car, they don’t own one. Or if they do, they don’t like to use it, or maybe their husband or wife is using it. So it’s quite integral to a lot of people’s lives.

So as I say, I think we’re quite embedded in a lot of people’s lives. So I think from that perspective, it’d be quite problematic. And where I started, I think I really do believe we’re a force for positive change in the world, and I want to continue to be seen that way.

SAFIAN: Well, David, thanks. This was great.

RISHER: Thanks for all the great questions.

SAFIAN: Listening to David, I hark back to his focus on falcon mode, sticking to that high altitude overriding strategy while also diving down into the details with precision. It’s so critical to effective leadership, especially in times of disruption and change.

I’m also struck by David’s calm and upbeat demeanor. He’s not going to let himself get bent out of shape because Uber is bigger than Lyft. It’s a reality, but it doesn’t define his strategy. He’s focused on creating his own trajectory, something former DuPont CEO, Ellen Kullman, emphasized in a conversation we had at a difficult moment for her business. Ellen, who now leads 3D printing firm, Carbon, also memorably told me, “Don’t play the hand you’ve been dealt, play the hand you want.” That’s just what David is doing with Lyft.

I’m Bob Safian, thanks for listening.