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Benjamin Lauzier

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2024-09-29
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2024-09-29
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  1. “Have advice if you know anyone in the space, if you're interested in learning more about this, if you have advice, if you have learnings, if you know anything about this, I would love to hear it. If you have hot takes at Marketplace, if you disagree with it and you have what I've said, I'd love to also hear it.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Oh, and just the company that we're building, anyone that you know or if you yourself have chronic or complex conditions and you feel like you need help managing your health and navigating your care.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “We've had both founders and PMs and sort of like heads of product, but it's my strong recommendation it's people that have product market fit. I can provide conversation. If you don't have product market fit, wait a little bit before enrolling in this course, focus on your core business before worrying about the Markus Dynamics aspect.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, you can find me two things that are perhaps helpful for people out there. One is I have a reforge course. If you're curious about Marketplace, if you want to dig deeper into Marketplace growth, I have a course on reforge. We're about to do our fifth or sixth cohort, I think, now been going really well. We've been working with tons of really, really cool marketplaces going much deeper into some of the topics that we just talked about. So if you're interested in marketplaces, I would say check this out.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Question. I did not see any live events, unfortunately. Perhaps the highlight for me was I'm a big man biker. But in the biking realm, I love the men BMX event where all three men on the podium were French. So this was like a kind of a great moment for France.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I don't have anything particularly philosophical, unfortunately. I lived in Daho for a few years. I lived now in the French Alps. So I have a frame with John Meers quote, The Mounts are calling and I must go. I feel like this is my sort of grounding place. Like the Mountains are my happy place. And so I don't share that work often. I don't like peace out in middle meetings like the mountains are calling on us go. But it's been sort of like a grounding, you know, sort of a mode, I guess for me.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Like, I've been using Chrome for like 12 years, or I don't know how many years it feels like such high friction to change my entire life in eight seconds. It was done. It felt like home. I was like, wow, this is way faster than I expected.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Maybe a little bit behind the curve on this one, but I've been loving the Arc browser. I don't know if you use it. Oh, I love ARC.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I haven't seen anything lately that's been like mind blowing, but I'll share an old new one. I've rewatched The Last of Us recently, and it's an old favorite. I just love the TV show. I like the game and play the game years ago and love the TV”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “If I'm pronouncing this right, but it's the science sort of channel. If you're even remotely curious about how your body works, how your immune system works, it's an amazing book that's really, really fun to read, super entertaining and just great sort of biology and fun book, I promise.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Give you books in different directions. One is misbehaving the makings of behavioral economics. I'm really interested in behavioral economics. I love this intersection between economics and human psychology. Like it's a great analogy for product, so that's a great introduction to this field. The second book that I recommend a lot is range, why journalists triumph in a specialized world by David Epstein. I've always felt curious about a lot of things, but it's made me feel like I'm decent at many things, but I'm good at nothing. I'm very good at nothing. And so even my career, I'd see like all those PMs where like machine learning gurus, leading conferences on weekends that are contributing to AI think tanks, I just felt like a journalist, you know, so if you feel this way, this is a good book to make you feel a little bit better about yourself and your post-syndrome, at least it did for me. And last one, nothing to do with business, but immune by Philip Detmer. This is the creator of the YouTube channel Kurzkaz.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Ignoring the Markbust dynamics. I'm fooling my own advice and I'm just sluring one side of the markplace. The health advocates were jumpstarting this side for now and were only focusing on what I think is going to be the hardest side for us and is going to be demand. Like how do we find those people? How do we create the right value proposition for them? So that's what we're focused on.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Appointments for you. We help you prepare your appointment. We make sense of a diagnosis, test results, we spend hours researching solutions and potential treatments and just more generally we do everything we can to help you better advocate for themselves basically. And yeah, launched in the US an early version of this a few weeks ago and the engine has been like really, really mind blowing so far. We're helping cancer patients, people with a lot of those niche chronic conditions and literally harassing the doctor's office like, hey, we still haven't received that referral. All the things that you just get tired of doing when you're dealing with so many appointments and when you're having to manage a condition like this. And our mental model is what would we do if this user was our partner or our parent, right? You'd likely like spend all night come make the research.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “My mind, the problem is obviously not about the practitioners, right? It's systemic. It's just growing financial pressure from private equity firms. It's just countless other factors. But you see the physicians being overwhelmed, overworked, burning out, and you see that pressure just only increasing, I think. So I basically spent the next six months just talking to hundreds of patients and doctors and experts. And what we built is basically a platform to help people fight for the health. And so we want to close the gap between like patients and the healthcare system. There's this critical layer of the system that's missing, I think. People are navigating life-threatening or debilitating conditions largely with Google. And at some point, you just get tired of fetting for yourself, right? So we connect people with complex conditions typically with their own health advocate. So it's essentially like their own health assistant. They're available 24-7 to help you navigate your care. So we find”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Consensus on this particular treatment that the doctors don't seem to know about, right? And yeah, throughout this whole process, it felt like no one really had her back. No one within the medical system was fighting for her, the way that your family doctor might have fought for you 20 years ago, knowing everything about you and being like, Lenny, like, you know, let's talk about this. I know your uncle had this, right? Like there's this sort of like a sense of advocacy that came from your family doctor that just doesn't exist today. It's not uncommon for doctors to have thousands of patients that they see like just a few minutes each year. So digging into this, we just realized that we're this not a nice led case. You have nearly half of Americans have at least like one chronic condition or half to deal with like some sort of like complex health issue largely on their own. You see a lot of like those large online communities revolving around like chronic conditions or chronic pain and trying to make sense of it and advocate for themselves. I think I want to be clear.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Navigate the healthcare system in the US. So we'd wait three months for an appointment for a neurologist. Then they'd see her for maybe eight minutes, average appointment time in the US is between like 10 and 12 minutes. They'd dump a bunch of jargon to say like, hey, Tesla looked normal. Like, sorry, like you should just go see this other specialist instead. We'd wait another three months, see another specialist, and with a lot of anxiety, a lot of pain, as you can imagine, like all those things. You have another eight minute slot with someone. And they're like, oh, why didn't the neurologist do this test? Like, I can help you like this. You know, this makes no sense. And so you just like, it ends up between like incredibly isolating. Like the whole time, you know, we just felt completely alone. It was just like us and Google, you know, we felt we kept getting conflicting advice from doctors. And I was spending all my time researching specialists, what solutions to consider, you know, spent all my nights reading through research papers to understand, hey, what is the academic?”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, I have to say, like, entrepreneurship has been a very humbling journey. I think the zero to one is way harder than anything else have done so far. And I feel like when you're used to building and scaling products within companies, you kind of take for granted. At least I did. You take for granted that the problem space has already been validated, right? You have like some burn equity. Even if you launch a new vertical, like, you know, there's like an existing user base. There's a validation of the broader problem space. I think going to truly zero is like felt at least to me like super overwhelming and lonely but also super exciting right with tons of condensed learnings it's been like a really really interesting journey so uh what brought me there is my wife started to have some health issues about three years ago now it's partially why we decided to move to france last year just for a couple of years and she's had this undiagnosed condition and chronic pain and we saw just like how much of a nightmare it was to to manage you know like her care”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Telling more about the story of the business, the trajectory of the business, why it matters for their future equity. I think anything along those lines, I think, can help cultivate this greater ownership mindset, I think, for people. And then I think another big piece again is, at least to me, this is a big recipe to successful product teams is to like develop teams that revolve around this concept of ownership and accountability. Teams are clearly owning a huge, you know, or doesn't have to be huge, like a slice of the business, like not feature teams, shipping maybe guests, but teams that have clear accountability with consequences, but also like clear ownership and leeway to do their best and to thrive.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “It's a great question. I haven't fully cracked that and I think it's a really hard question. I'll give some sort of small pointers that have helped at least some of the companies that I talk to. But the one is equity. I think there's like a desire from a lot of the founders that I talk to to give equity to employees. But because it's not in the culture yet, I think employees also have an underappreciation for equity. Like, well, yeah, it's nice. I don't know what's going to happen. work for the CO anyways. There's less of like this sense of, again, like ownership that you can have, you know, like in the US. And so I think leaning into that and investing in education around equity, it's the case also in the US. I'm convinced 80% of people just don't fully understand their equity. But I think leaning into that, especially in Europe to help understand how people understand the value of their equity, help them by, you know,”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Maybe, yeah, maybe that's a little bit. And I think also it's this culture of like business, so very business centric sort of culture you have. And again, it makes sense, right? Like the markets, you have less venture capital, you have less liquidity in the financial markets as well. And so when you raise funding, you need to have a strong businesses. Like the business gaze is at the center of your hypothesis. Whereas I think oftentimes in the US, you have, again, it's a little bit stereotypical, but it's a very tech or product.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, I think so. It's not just about firing, I think, to be clear. I just think it's like culturally the market seems like a lot less liquid and dynamic.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Then, as a founder, you become perhaps a little bit cagey about your vision. You want to be more hands on because you made about higher, something like someone perfect, then you'll kind of make your work. But it means like you'll be more hands-on in the work of PMs, daily and perhaps you'll think like, oh, maybe I don't need product managers who want on my vision. I'll hire project managers or something like that. So it's perhaps slightly more conducive to those types of dynamics.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Not quite sure it's a good question. My take, and I think this is, I'm sure, very naive and reductive. And I know this is like one of my core principles. I'm sure I also have a tunnel vision on this a little bit. But to me, one of the biggest differences that I see is really around this concept of ownership and accountability. Whereas in the US, and again, I saw it, I'm sure you saw it here. Maybe you see a lot of companies, not everywhere, but a lot of companies will hire you, give you a big chunk of the business and it's up to you to prove yourself out, right? Like you have six months, you have a year, it's up to you to show impact. I think the French employment model is less conducive to this type of dynamic because employment is much more rigid. So you have much less of this higher now and prove yourself out. It's much more of like prove yourself beforehand. And if you've made about a higher.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I'm a big Android guy, and a lot of the features like Jim and I and all this is only available in the US. And now that I'm in France, I see the difference a little bit.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “That's been kind of interesting in terms of the dynamic, but it's also been really interesting to just see how vibrant the SARP culture is here in France. You have like a truly exciting innovation happening, especially in AI. You have a lot of French companies at the forefront of this with like Mistral AI and hugging face and things like that. And also how it's been exciting to see how the government is leaning into that as kind of a catalyst for this innovation. I think the French government has dedicated something like $2.5 billion in funding to support French AI excellence by 2030. So they're running a lot of internal government incubators to try to disrupt some of the government functions from the inside. And they're hiring top talents to do that. I've met some of the people working on this. It's just really fascinating. It makes me super excited about what a federal startup task would be inventing the DMB would look like. So it's been really...”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Differs from the stereotype of the CS degree, Stanford dropout that you have instead of Silicon Valley. And I think because of a few of those things that I just mentioned, less liquid job markets, but also less liquid financial markets. The last thing that I've observed that's kind of interesting is that's also around ownership, I guess, is like equity is much less meaningful in France. So of the product leaders that I talk to, most of them consider their equity to be virtually worthless. None of them know of anyone who's made a down payment on a house thanks to their sort of equity. So it seems as like a nice bonus, but it's not the token of ownership and the promise of future wealth that it can be in the US when you join a startup for exec roles. I think it's often sub 10% of their total compensation. Whereas in the US, it's very often like more than 50% of your competition will be equity.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Who tend to wait a little bit longer before hiring, especially in product. The art of product is a little bit less of a thing. You have a lot of amazing PMs in France, but the recognition of the craft is a little bit different outside of the people who practice it. And you have a lot of really interesting outsourcing also. You see startups and companies of all sizes actually relying on great product studios like Mudza to build end-to-end products from the ground up, right? So something that's been sort of really, really interesting. Another slide that I see is this dominance of business over tech in France. There isn't as much of a cult of technology and software engineering in France as there is in the US. And so the French Ivy League schools are business schools like, as you say, and the most highly valuable skill that you get is soft skills around management and business.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Doesn't always happen, but oftentimes I think that's the case. And if things don't work out, well, there's this expectation that you'll be managed out. This is just there are countless memes on LinkedIn about the 10 year of CPOs at tech companies to illustrate that. I think in France, the market is much less liquid. So it's incredibly difficult to change jobs and it's very expensive to fire someone in France. So it seems to lead to two effects beyond the obvious job security. One is I think PMs tend to have less autonomy and ownership and a little bit more like micromanagement. And they're also less business owners than they can be in the US and see sort of founders and managers struggling to let go of control a little bit more again because you understandable in a way you don't have like as much sort of a control as you do in the US. And so it is to a lot of like really fascinating sort of effects you have.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “It's been really fascinating. I think so, my entire career has been in the US, and I'm just starting to understand, to talk about that European and the French market in particular, Slovak looks like. And my read so far is that product management has really exploded, I think, in Europe.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Think it indicates a very different vision now, a very different direction for the business. And yeah, that's my take, I guess.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Get the donuts during COVID, and a huge part of it also was leaning heavily in shirt rides. And so this was, again, how do you reinvent public transportation? It's like every car is a dynamic bus. And now there's no bus line. The bus line is always running, right? It's always like by your house. So a lot of our investment, I think, in thinking went in like that direction. And the last thing that people wanted with COVID was to be in a car with like five strangers. But what people wanted is like we delivered to the house, right? And so that's sort of, I know that the business had a huge blow during COVID, whereas I think Uber was able to like rebound much more quickly because of how diversified the business was. And so it's funny now because I think Lyft actually keeled shared rides, which was just so core to their identity. They were like the first ones to launch this. And so, yeah, the new CO, I think killed the shared rides, which I'm really sad about. But yeah, so.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Like goods and parcels and things like that. And I think that crushed them during COVID, essentially. I think Uber had, I think at some point their slogan was moving in bits and atoms or something like that. But I think it implies this notion of being a logistics platform for assets in the world, right? For transporting people, for transporting things, for transporting. And I think they built, they invested a lot in trucks and food delivery and all those really exotic things that Lyft had never any intention to invest in, not even because of the lack of resources, but because this was like in part like a distraction from our vision. We wanted to change how people move around in cities. We want to reinvent public transportation, but we did not want to, you know, be a DoorDash confederate and help you.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Yeah, I think it all went south when I left the company. I'm just kidding. No, I, and again, I have to I have to call the fact that I haven't been close to lift and their business and strategy for many years at this point. So take this with a grain of salt. This is my very naive perspective. But I think to me, perhaps the biggest blow to Lyft's business was somewhat inherent like the vision. Lyft's vision was always anchored around transportation and people transportation. The founders were deeply passionate about moving people. They were passionate about transforming the way people, you know, move around in a city. They wanted to just change how cities are designed, how roads are designed. And so that meant investing in dynamic shuttles and things like that. And there's a lot of experimentations that went to that. But it also meant that Lyft never invested in things like food delivery.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “And who would pay them 20 bucks per person that they converted to activation? And so something incredibly scalable for us. Another way for us to reward and recognize our best drivers. And he also provided a really interesting way for us to smooth out the supply and demand. The problem with the marketplace like Lyft is that you have like this big spikes, right? Like everyone wants to drive on a Tuesday at 2 p.m. but everyone wants rides on a Saturday at 2 a.m. right. And so how can you manufacture demand during those low utilization times? This was a great way to do that. Now you could wait on the road and like still make money while just sitting in your car while waiting for the next ride. So this was another sort of iteration of this model that was like really cool.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “The next step in that journey was basically we're growing like crazy, but now we had what cracked like the activation phase, but now we had a whole bunch of people dropping off in the fun before activation. So they didn't enter their SSN or they didn't enter the right info for us to run all those checks and the previous steps of the onboarding flow. And so we built a team of hundreds of account executives and their job was to just like pick up the phone and like call those drivers. And so we had the same aha moment like could we get some of our best drivers to do that for us and empower them to like, you know, to be a part of this. And so we did this and we launched another role. We call them recruiters. And so as a recruiter, as a driver, you could just like, if this was quiet, you know, on the road, you could just like hop on your phone and you would have like a mini sales dashboard where you could like claim leads. And this was like a driver who had dropped off in the funnel and you had like a tool you phone number. You could like.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Onboarded by those mentors. And even for those mentors, for those laptop drivers, it was an incredible recognition lever. For them, if you were like a 4.9 driver, you had enough rides, you knew you had a chance to make it into being a mentor. And this provided additional earnings opportunity for you if you did two mentor sessions in an hour, you could make $70 an hour. You could take a break from driving if you're tired and just do some of those. It felt like getting promoted at a job, right? And so it actually had a huge impact on the retention of our very best drivers, which was kind of unexpected. So a lot of like really, really interesting benefits. And we actually lean into this and build like a couple of really fascinating variations of this, you know, for a while. But this allowed us to match most of Uber's footprint with a 10th or a 20th of the resources that incredible speed, I guess.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “This created tremendous leverage and social proof for those new drivers who were on the fence about taking changes into the car. It's actually quite funny because we had the brightest minds in the company, like writing the best marketing emails and copy like, hey, drive on, you know, hop on the car and drive this Saturday. And you had all those drivers, all those mentors don't listen to those lift guys. Like, here's what you should do. Go on Tuesday at 2 p.m. text me. I'll tell you where the good spot is. And this is how you're going to get right. This is how you're going to get rich and make a lot of money, right? And this reconditioned lever was just so much more powerful than anything we could be telling you, right? And so very, very sort of like efficient activation lever for the new drivers. For us, also very, you know, like incredibly scalable, right? We could fly a small team to rigorously vet and onboard maybe like 10, 20 top drivers. And then they'd fly to a different market. And we would let the rest of our drivers”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Had the pink mustaches at the time, we had like this very strong brand identity. I think a lot of that has been lost now. But we also had this amazing community of drivers who were fierce advocates for the brand. And so what we did is leveraging this community and building essentially a self-onboarding supply engine where we would pay our best drivers $35 per mentor session. And mentor session was essentially replacing this 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 that stuff and take you on a short ride along. And the benefits of this were absolutely mind-blowing and kind of unexpected for us on all sides. First, the mentors were our very best drivers. And they were eventualists for the brand, right? So what they did was they would share like personal tips on when and where to drive, right? Oftentimes they shared the contact info.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “You had to do a visual inspection of your car, a quick test drive, some light training, and we would check your documents. We would check that like you are the person with a driver's license and all those things. And Uber at the time would launch a team on the ground. They would go and open an office and they would have DMD style group onboarding sessions and car inspections. And we did this as well in our first three to four rickets. But you can imagine the overhead and the lead time. You had to go and you had to find an office space, sign a lease, hire employees, like huge, huge lead time. And we thought about it at the time, a huge competitive differentiator for us was our brand. As a passenger or as a driver, why would you use a platform with lower liquidity? As a driver, you had lower earnings guaranteed. As a passenger, you had like longer wait times. Why would you use a service like that? You do because of the brand, right? Because of its values. Its high makes you feel.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “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? They were growing like crazy. And we had a bit of this existential moment, as you can imagine, where we were wondering how we're supposed to compete with that, right? And we had to be super clever. Everything that you did at the company had to be 10 times more efficient, like per person than the competition just to survive. Like that was, that was the bar, just not to die. And put a lot of pressure on us, but we basically found kind of a clever way of onboarding driver at a fraction of the cost and resources. So let me give you a little bit of context on how the onboarding flow worked. So at the time, the last step to get onboarded as a driver was after you back on check and your driving record check came back.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Exactly. Yeah. It's the Markless version of maybe like your black car fleet owner has their fleet of vehicle and they have like people. So this was like the marketplace version of doing that.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Yeah, yeah, it had a tremendous impact. Like I mentioned, I think we scaled this sort of exponentially to become, I think, again, like the fourth largest rental fleet in the US because it was so effective for us, both because Those drivers were incredibly loyal to us. We had a whole bunch of other incentives that we could do. We could offer to pay for the car, but only if you don't drive for the competition for Uber, for Uber, and only if you drive at least like 30 hours a week. So this, again, provided us with much greater retention, much higher engagement was a real incentive for us, but also for those drivers.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “It was a bit of both. We actually launched vehicles that drivers could rent from Lyft and to drive on the platform and also to drive for their personal needs, essentially.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Like the quality of the cars on the platform. So we talked about that. That's a great example in the markets where we thought the vehicles of quality was too low. We knew we could onboard like more rental vehicles that were more recent to raise the average sort of like age of a vehicle platform. So it gave us more control by in a much more surgical way, I guess.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Supply gap. This was a huge pool of people that we couldn't tap into because they didn't have a car. And so by renting cars, we could essentially manufacture our own supply, right? We could dial this up and down. We could be very surgical about like how many vehicles do we bring in, which markets do we bring this in, at what price, right? We could even offer to pay for the car if they drove 30 hours a week and completely transform the lives of those people, right? Now we allow them to have true mobility. They can go buy groceries. They can go take the kids on vacation. So a huge win-win for everybody with something like this. And I think in three months, we had built rental company from the ground up. And within 18 months, I think we were like the fourth largest rental fleet in the US. But all this sort of stemmed from this gap that we saw from like, okay, like it's not about controlling the drivers in general. It's about like, okay, we want to be surgical. We want to control.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Correct, yes, yes. Yeah, so this is a little bit of context. I was leading the driver side of Product at Lyft and General Motors had invested half a billion dollars in our last round of funding. And this was Christmas Eve. I always remember I got a call from Lyft CEO and General Motors CTO. And we decided to build a rental company, essentially. And the reason for it was really fascinating. GM had all those vehicles that were coming off of lease and that they were forced to sell at auctions. They didn't really know what to do with. And from our perspective, we have this massive supply gap. We've talked about this before, but we have this huge supply crunch. We're growing super fast and couldn't hire drivers fast enough, could onboard drivers fast enough. And when we looked at the market, we realized that 50% of the job seekers and welfare recipients in the US don't have a car, right? So that was like that was our.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Vetting quality early on with a ton of different checks, but also maintaining that quality. So throughout with the right Kochi tools, with education and things like that.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “There's a talent marketplace called Tuptal. And they are specialized in this. They have a really high bar for quality. They claim to only have some of the top 1%, top 3%, I believe, of talent out there. And they have a really amazing set of checks and processes. sort of funny story from them, but apparently they advertise something like maybe like a 3% sort of pass rate for their talent. So they only onboard like 3% of the people who apply. And allegedly their actual pass rate is even lower than that. But they thought that if the actually advertised the actual number, it would sound fake. And so the actually saved 3% because like 1% would sound like too ridiculous and it would discredit. So they're one company that does a tremendous amount of work for.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “And then take a step back and see where the gaps are and invest more in hands-on tactics just to close those gaps more specifically. So lots of like coaching tools that Lyft Uber did it like most sort of marketplaces like provide some sort of coaching. You have like a review system perhaps. You have like stars for your sellers, for sellers who fall below the threshold, then like coach them, provide them the right tools, the right guidance. What is the standard that you have on your marketplace and help them meet that bar? And for people who fall in for the gaps that you have, then that's when you invest in sort of more hands-on tools. And there's a great, this is one of the things that we did at Lyft also with the rental company that we spent up. I'm happy to tell you more about that if that's interesting.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Thing at Lyft when trying to make driver earnings less volatile, you had to fight a lot of that perception and a lot of that peak end effect. So my call out here is any attempt at control can be really tricky and backfire in ways that are unpredictable. You also touched on sort of employment classification. In the US, when you talk about controlling supply, like all the lawyers are like, no, no, no, that's not something that we do because if you control your supply, then there can be legally classified as employees and be entitled to a whole bunch of benefits. So my take on this in general is I'm a huge believer and it really depends on the type of company, I should say, obviously. But my take is I'm a huge believer in market forces and empowerment. So provide guardrails for what a good experience is in your marketplace. Set a clear bar for quality and provide the right coaching and tools for supply to be successful.”

    2024-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source