YouSaid · the spoken record

David Risher

lines on the record: 82
first: 2026-07-08
most recent: 2026-07-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Wow. Okay. That's also a really interesting question. You know, I think I've probably gone through a similar arc to other people where I, you know, in the 90s, maybe even early 2000s, was sort of a universal techno-optimist. I probably was in the camp that said technology is such a powerful force for the good. And you see me try to harness it with World Reader specifically, of course, trying to take technology and get people reading. In that case, it did work. We've gotten over 22 million people reading. So that's awesome. But, oh, man, it is hard not to see some of the just terrible costs we've paid as a society. And so I think maybe more of a mindset than a particular thing of just be really aware that technology is so powerful. And man, oh man, with great power comes that great responsibility. And I'm just a big believer that, you know, our best leaders now, and I'm not necessarily putting myself in the category.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is something to it that really kind of being introspective about what you think you're going to just jump out of bed every morning and love doing tends to be a much more powerful predictor of long-term success than people who try to optimize for that short-term sort of get-rich quick type of thing and then find themselves later realizing, shoot, this isn't really my thing. It's somebody else's thing.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stories So, my advice here tends to be, it's always sort of the same. And here's how it comes. There's so much temptation when you're picking your job early on to pick something that sort of seems like it's going to be good on your resume or maybe is going to make you a lot of money, whatever it is. This is sort of the temptation because it's so sort of in the air, maybe now more than ever because of social media. Oh, man, the people that I see succeed are really the ones that say, yes, I have an economic reality. I have to sort of do better than that. But once the economic reality has been met, it is all about pick something you think you're really going to love and are going to be good at. They're going to be good at. And I say that like you have to be a bit introspective of this. You know, maybe you love, you know, selling. Okay, great. So take a sales job. Maybe you love listening to customers. Great. Take maybe a marketing job. Maybe, but, and I'm trying to make this sound maybe a little bit more interesting than follow your passions because that's so trite.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not, you know, You are right about that. And I will say that my wife and I became obsessed with the pit, as many people are. It almost makes you feel like, you know, halfway to being an ER doc myself. By the way, you are not. So don't think that that's true. But what is hilarious is my wife's tolerance for some of the gory stuff is a little lower than mine. So she watches the pit with her hand kind of half in front of her face the whole time.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you know, mindless TV I love, but I'm not going to embarrass myself by telling me all that sort of stuff. Yeah, we'll stick with the daily on this one.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am a podcast guy. I have to say, though, I'm kind of traditional when it comes to podcasts. I listen to the Daily from the New York Times pretty regularly. And I think most of it is because I have so many things in my life that are sort of so much content that comes at you that's sort of superficial. And it leaves with the daily, I feel like I get to go a little deeper on a subject. You know, it tends to be a kind of a half an hour deep dive on a particular thing. And I do feel particularly, I also read the New York Times, I know it's sort of traditional in that way. So if I've read an article and then I kind of hear a podcast on the same topic, I do feel like I've actually gotten maybe a little bit smarter about something beyond the surface.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, I just finished a book called Good People. So I tend to read some fiction and some nonfiction. So I'm currently reading a book called Apple in China all about Apple's entrance into China and ultimately the importance that China has and frankly the power that China now has over Apple. And then good people is a fictional book about an Afghan, a family from Afghanistan that moves to the United States and is either a model family or terrible people. And it's very, very hard to know which. And it's sort of the book sort of flips back and forth. Remember when I said that books kind of teach empathy in sort of different perspectives? This one does a good job of that.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, I love this question because I think it's so important for us to remember that we all stand on other people's shoulders. I'll list a few. Of course, I work for Jeff Bezos a lot. I've mentioned him, but I want other people. First big boss, a guy named Todd Nielsen. Todd really taught me the power of a great story and also the importance of really listening and watching closely customers. So he taught me two big things there. And then a guy named Peter Spiro. He was the board chair at World Reader for many years. He and I sort of knew each other back in the Microsoft days, but was the board chair for the nonprofit I ran, so focused on the team, so focused on the team. You're only as good as your team. Really learned a ton about management and leadership from Peter.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, actually, my wife and I did the same. She said, I got a little tired of seeing, you know, that it's telling me exactly I'm stressed or I'm not sleeping well. But at least for me, it's a sort of nice nudge to get good sleep and frankly to kind of keep an active life. And so I see this space, the transformation piece is somewhat similar. Like I want technology that kind of helps me live my best life. And I think transportation plays a big role there.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that sort of the intersection between Societal trend and the type of work we do in transportation is really quite deep, and you know, maybe just as important ultimately as all of our conversation around medicine and so forth and so on is keeping people out and about. And I know it's here in Aurora Ring where I am as well. Or maybe you're not. I don't know. No, I am. My wife”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. You know, I'm going to come back to the basic role that technology plays in people's lives to help them live their absolute best lives. I'll tell you something that I have a lot of passion about personally, and that is as people live longer lives, one of the things that is very predictive of their quality of life is how much time they're spending with other people out socializing exactly. Very, very highly predictive of a healthy long life. And as we as a country are getting older, which we are demographically, that is going to be an enormous shift where you have so many more people in their 60s, 70s, even 80s who want to live healthy, vibrant lives. And so one of the things I'm really quite proud of with Lyft is, you know, Lyft silver is a particular product line that we've developed over the last year. It's really focused on helping older folks get out. The apps a little easier to use. The cars are a little easier to get into. The driver is a little bit more experienced.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You would think, but I would say right now the technology is evolving so quickly at the car level and really the safety is very, very, very impressive. And of course, look, I know, you know, tomorrow morning you're going to open up a newspaper or an app and you're going to read about some strange thing that happened in some strange part of the world where the self-driving car. And I'm going to tell you that that is going to happen. And that's one in a million as opposed to one in hundreds, which happen every single day with human drivers.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the short answer is no today and long term for sure. And the reason no today, frankly, is, again, anytime you see these platform shifts, you always have competition for sort of who gets to sort of own the platform, right? And individual companies all have a huge incentive to say, you know, I want to do it my way because if my way becomes the standard, then everyone else kind of follows along me. And I get to sort of set the standard. Over time, though, you tend to see that those things, that doesn't become a long-term competitive advantage typically, particularly for this sort of infrastructure. And so I would fully expect over time, just in the same way that you can start to see charging networks kind of harmonize.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Comes down to power infrastructure in this country, right? So, anyway, so there are many different kind of bits and pieces all the way from consumer adoption to physical infrastructure to policy and so forth. But I think, again, over the next three to five years, I think you're going to see a real shift, mostly because consumers are going to try them and like them and then they're going to be saying, hey, faster, please.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, I think as you're suggesting, younger people do tend to take up new technology pretty quickly. But in this case, I do believe that many people after they've had a couple of rides and realize that it feels very safe and reliable, I think they'll flip from skeptic to kind of fans, you know, pretty quickly. Now, I will say policymakers, you know, they have their own issues. And some of that can be very local. So you may find some cities that just say, we just don't want them on our streets for a period of time. You may find, conversely, other cities that say, bring them because we want to feel like a city of the future. So I think there are going to be some policy issues. There are also some infrastructure issues. Remember that, you know, ABs also tend to be Eeves. EVs require charging. Charging requires infrastructure. And not every city is going to have the amount of electrical power. I mean, this is kind of a side issue, but if you listen to Jensen, for example, at NVIDIA talk about what could end up holding the United States back from its next big leap, a lot of”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. I mean, there will be a time where, you know, if you fast forward five years or whatever, maybe more, many people, individual owners, have cars that can drive themselves. And then there's a question to your point of, you know, can you put that on the network? The answer is absolutely. You'll be able to put it on the Lyft network and it'll come back again cleaned and charged because of the fleet management side of things.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one of the reasons why we like the economic profile of self driving cars. They don't have insurance as high, for example, as personally driven cars. But also we like the economics of our fleet management subsidiary and think we can service these at an industry leading rate and therefore hopefully make more money on the asset than anybody else.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to solve as you integrate their platform and us. And then someone's got to manage these cars. And this is worth talking about for a couple seconds. In traditional rideshare, the driver is responsible for their own car, right? They put gas in it or they charge up if it's electric. They keep it clean, hopefully they keep it maintained and so forth. But in the self-driving space, at least for the next three to five years, most of the car ownership are going to be professional fleet owners. You know, they're going to buy 20, 50, 100, 500, and are going to kind of manage these as a fleet. And that means that they've got to be, again, charged and maintained and cleaned, but they have to be done kind of at a professional level. That's the sort of stage we're in. We've had a subsidiary for many years called FlexDrive. We actually own about 10,000 cars on the Lyft platform for drivers who don't want to drive their own car. And we are responsible for maintenance and keeping them clean and so forth and so on. So we actually bring a lot to that as well.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, so many interesting questions here. Let's start with the customer side of things, right? So the first order of business has to be building customer trust and adoption for this new technology. Because, you know, it's a car that drives itself, which is magical, but also can be a bit intimidating or, you know, even scary for people who haven't seen the technology. Lyft obviously has a lot of value to add right there because it's a brand that already people trust. They understand. You'll be able to opt in or opt out of getting it. I was just in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago where we're having experiment, a small deployment with a company called May Mobility, which is also in the self-driving car space. They're Toyota Sienas. They pull up to you. And all of a sudden you get in is kind of a whole different type of experience from what you've probably experienced in the past. But because it's got lift behind it, right on the door, already people sort of say, okay, great. I kind of understand this company and know something about it. Okay, that's great. So then you kind of have to work yourself down the stack. There's all sorts of technology problems that you”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With Amazon. We do have a relationship with Amazon. Of course, we're huge consumers of AWS, which is Andy, so current CEOs, kind of pride and joy. And for sure, we'll end up using, you know, we'll end up, look, everyone is going to end up partnering with everyone. That's the interesting space we're in right now. If you're in the business of developing a self-driving car, it's billions of dollars of R&D. billions of dollars and so you want as many customers as possible and then if you're in our business in the business of moving people around and connecting people you want to have multiple suppliers of that technology so you're not beholden to”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of new stuff is going to come in the next couple of years step by step because, again, hardware is hard, it takes a long time to build it out, but you look five years out and I think you're going to see a lot of cars that look pretty different from what you see today.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So again, it's such an interesting time to be in this industry, and it's exactly, you know, as you're saying, like, do you really need a steering wheel? Do you really need accelerator and brakes? You know, Zux, as I say, they're an Amazon subsidiary. They would say you absolutely don't. And they have a purpose-built vehicle that doesn't have either one of those things. Now, for regulatory reasons, for human acceptance reasons and so forth, for manufacturing reasons, that's going to be slower to roll out because you can't rely on the big OEMs to produce a car like that. It's its own vehicle. So I think what you're going to see over the next three to five years is an enormous amount of new innovation in the car space. It won't just be, you know, there won't be a driver. It'll be, you know, you'll have seats that face each other. You'll have seats that completely recline because you've got more space in there. You'll have different luggage configurations. You'll have, you know, some of them will feel more like party buses. Some of them may be, you know, corporate shuttles that just don't have drivers.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's going to be deployed worldwide. And in the United States, Chinese technology is not super welcome for obvious reasons. But Europe is taking maybe a little bit of a more sort of ecumical approach where they're kind of looking at different technology providers and saying, let's experiment. So in London, we're partners with Baidu. Baidu has a very, very highly regarded self-driving platform. And we're just in the early days of rolling it out there. It's called an RT6 car. This is sort of behind the scenes stuff. And it literally is just rolling off boats right now and it'll be commercialized next year.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So, again, let's think about the self driving car world for a couple of minutes. The technology is being developed worldwide. It's being developed in the United States, Waymo, of course, is the leader, really the worldwide leader. Zux, which is owned by Amazon, is much, much smaller, but trying very hard to come up behind Waymo. And then there'll be many others, including maybe NVIDIA and companies that aren't even really in the space now, but will want to sell their technology to different OEMs, to different car manufacturers. There's also technology coming out of China. Baidu is sort of the Google, you think of it as kind of the alphabet of China. And there are many, many others. There's a company called WeRide. There's a company called Pony. There's a company called Momenta. There's a company called Gili. I was just in China a couple of weeks ago looking at the incredible just growth of technology there, both hardware and software type technology. Okay, so that's all background.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did not know that that's exactly right. So we run City Bike, we run the program in San Francisco, we run the program in Chicago, we run the program in Boston, we run the program in Portland, Oregon. And then we also supply the technology and the bikes in London, in Barcelona, in Madrid, many, many countries around the world. This may seem like sort of a small thing, but if you've been to a city like New York or London, you'll know that cities are very, very aware that they want sort of multimodal transportation. So that's going to be a big part of our future as well. And then look, someday, who knows, maybe bodes, maybe vertical takeoff airlines, you know, who knows. But I will tell you that our real focus right now, and we will always be, is this our sort of purpose, is serving and connecting. I want people to be out and about and connect with each other in any possible way we can. That's really what I want.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. I mean, you know, a little all the above, right? So, as you say, I mean, the thing people know lift the most for are human-driven cars, you know, picking you up and dropping off. And as we were just saying, that will become a mix of human-driven and, you know, frankly, robot driven cars. What you may not know is Lyft also runs the bike show system here in New York City where we're...”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That about right? Think about it as a decade transition. Yeah. And even, again, the word transition, I think, is maybe not quite right because the economics of an expensive car don't really lend themselves to having a whole bunch of them sitting around at two in the morning empty. You really, I think, want a hybrid network for a long, long time, for human reasons too, right? You might want someone to help you with your luggage or maybe even someone to ask you how your day was. But the economics of it make it such that it's much more likely this will be a hybrid network for at least a decade or more.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, not so well. And then you look on the other hand at maybe a company like Netflix that invented the DVD by mail business.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's because they not only know the policies, but they follow the policies. They tend to follow the rules, and they don't get distracted. So not to say some crazy thing won't happen one time out of a million, but 99.99% of the time they'll do the thing that you expect a car to do, which is, you know, keep its riders safe. So, okay, so that is coming. So now, you know, as a business person, You know, you have a choice to make, right? You can either embrace this or you can sort of not. And the thing is, in a sense, it's a choice, but in another sense, it's not because you've seen Kodak and whatever Polaroid.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're the future. They're the future. It will take a long time for this future to come. It will be very unevenly distributed, but they are the future. And the basic reason why is they are a reliable product and they're a safe product.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, yep. So it's really meant for people who commute the same route every day and they don't want the route to go from 20 to 30 to 40 bucks. Because as you say, and by the way, to be very clear, like there are good reasons for surge pricing, right? It's a very good way for us to encourage drivers to drive when there's more demand in their supply. But because it's very frustrating for riders, we want to give people a way to kind of opt out of it. So for a given route, you know, from point A to point B, if you want to lock in a price, we basically say here's the average price over the course of a month. If you want to lock in, I think it costs $4.99 a month per route. That's all it takes. And it's been super popular for people who just want to get that out of their lives.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody likes And they should be. And here's the problem. This is the difference between, you know, if you're an economist, you love this, right? It's all supply-demand balancing in real time. It's just unbelievable, like a perfect science experiment. And if you're a real person, it just bugs the crap out of you. It really drove home to me how frustrating this was. And it was literally a Friday morning when this woman had donuts and she was bringing them in to see a co-worker for his birthday. And she's like, I can't work from home today. I'm so glad that Lyft was reasonably priced. So that's what's led us to both take about $50 million a year out of surge pricing. We've really tried to get rid of as much as we can. Can't completely eliminate it, and also introduce a product called price lock that allows you to lock in a price on a route.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Points relationship, and you get all sorts of, you get $10 every single month to use as Lyft Credit. And look, I can look at the data just like anyone else and realize the number of people who are using that. But there's just no substitute by hearing somebody go off about how much they love that card and how important that partnership is to them as a generic example. And then a specific example involved a woman that I gave a ride to, this is now about almost two years ago, but it's still really kind of resonates with me, where she would wake up every single morning. And depending on what the price was of getting from her home to her job because the prices would bounce around a lot, she would either take a lift or maybe take the other guys or drive herself or stay home. And it was a source of stress and concern to her every single day. She would literally wake up an hour before she had to leave just to sort of check prices. And it just made me realize how much surge pricing is customer hostile.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your work into your life in new ways. Again, I don't have to call my boss and tell him I'm going to be late today. I don't have to do anything like that. But sometimes I do have other things in my life. Maybe it's another job. Maybe it's an obligation with my parents or whatever it might be. So anyway, that's a feature. It worked pretty well when I started. It works very well now. And in part, it's because I give a lot of feedback to the team on how to make that better and how important it is to get that exactly right. And then on the writer side, I mean, every time I take a rider in the car, of course, I ask them why they chose us versus the other guys. Sometimes it's because they say, oh, Chase Sapphire Reserve. I'm a Chase Sapphire Reserve, a card holder, and you guys have a relationship with them. That's great. That gives me a little bit of data of how important that is.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So much, so much, and I know, you know, we're all busy people. Here I am busy, senior executive, CEO of company. My God, you know what? I got time. I got time. I can't jump in the car. So, and here's why. So I learned stuff about being a driver and I learned something about being a rider every single time. So I'll give you an example of each very quickly. On the driver side, I learned how important a feature is that we've developed over years and refined called stay within area. And that's because, and there are actually two features next to each other. One stay within area, one's arrive on time. Let me actually focus on arrive on time. What that means is I've got a kid to pick up at the end of the day, or I've got a date with my wife tonight, or I've got a doctor's one at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. And so I need to figure out a way to organize my life such that my last ride is going to put me right where I need to be by a certain time. That, you know, if I look at the gig economy, one of the real gifts of the gig economy is it allows you to integrate.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're from the back seat That's right 100%. And this is now where you realize that all technology problems are ultimately human problems. Because in order for that to happen, a person has to have opted in. They've got to click a button. Most people are either skeptical of that or they're not paying attention. So now that's our trick is to try to figure out a way to really encourage people to do that. As you say, you only have to do it once, but that's going to be the next big focus”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Typically, I was just looking at this data and it changes every single week, but we're now getting to the point where a large percentage of our phones, our riders' phones, are being delivered back within an hour, which is the absolute gold standard.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the phone is in the car, and you're like, I want to hold my phone to call the phone, but I can't do that. It's very, very stressful. So here's what we've done. We actually are working, we're doing a huge amount of work on this just to be really customer set. The first thing is automatic detection. So if the phone starts to travel away with a driver after, you know, you've been dropped off. Yeah, that immediately automatically alerts the driver. There's probably a phone in your back seat. It requires a little bit of work on the rider's side. We're still trying to figure out how to get riders to opt into this because they have to share a little bit more information. But we're still working on that. But regardless of whether it happens automatically or manually, the second thing is we've got a whole web portal, so you don't actually have to use your phone. And you don't have to log in. But really, the big innovation is this. We used to have, it's called sort of out of band. So the whole like return the phone thing, it becomes almost a separate process. And frankly, in the past, it's almost felt like a bit of a negotiation.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I so love this question because it is an experience every single one of us has had, and it is both infuriating and incredibly stressful. Because all of a sudden you realize, oh my God, my entire life is driving in the wrong direction. And I don't even know how to contact the company at this point. Okay.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the chicken and egg problem over and over again, which again is why back to an earlier part of the conversation, it's really quite hard at this point to come into the market fresh. You're not going to find a lot of folks who want to come into a well-served market. But anyway, so we just started to focus on our data scientists and our marketers really kind of went to town. And it's been a big source of growth.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Total, this more market exactly about $160 billion rides a year that people take in their private cars across the United States, 160 billion. And remember, we do a billion. The other guys might do three or four, maybe $2 or $3 billion. So $4 billion out of $160 billion. Okay, so there's a lot of adjustable market left for us to go to. And we've been in places like New York and San Francisco and Chicago for over a decade right now. But some of these smaller towns, you know, the Indianapolises of the world, the St. Louis is the world, as well as college towns where basically nobody has a car compared to the population. They just looked like good opportunities for us. They're complicated from a marketplace management perspective because anytime you go to a newer geography, you've got to first make sure you've got enough drivers because otherwise it takes too long to get picked up. And you've got to make sure you've got enough riders because then if not, then drivers won't make enough money. So it's quite complex to invest. There's a chicken and an egg.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So part of it there has been just a little bit of, you know, you might say neglect from the rideshare business for a while. And we realized about 18 months ago that a large part of the TAM, just to frame this again.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And same with Hilton Honors, exactly right there. We've been a partner for many, many years. The big innovation on the mileage plus side is you can actually spend your miles on lift as well, which almost feels like free rides, right? It's just like, you know, you get 200 miles for 500 miles, whatever, for taking an airline trip and you spend a small segment of those on a lift ride. So these partnerships, you sort of asked what their sort of the method behind it is. It's about customer acquisition for sure, but it's also about customer retention. Because if you're in the United ecosystem or on the DoorDash side or Hilton or Alaska Airlines or built primarily here in New York City and other cities where they're active, and you want to either earn or burn miles or points, we're a great place to do that.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So, you know, as you say, we have tens of millions of people who use our service every quarter. It's about 50 million a year. And again, this is back to sort of the Amazon philosophy. You've got to compete for those customers, right? You got to compete because they have alternatives. And in fact, there's another company out there that some people know. Okay. So one of the ways you compete is you say, gosh, it's not just about the ride, it's about the relationship. And maybe it's a relationship you already have with another company. So you mentioned United Airlines. United Airlines has now been a partner of ours for about the last six months. It's been a wonderful partnership already because United Airlines Mileage Plus program is incredibly well built out. People are very, very loyal to it. What can you do on Lyft? You can now earn miles so that you can take a vacation”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or maybe we gave you a ride that we didn't know was very, very unlikely for you to want because of your past history or whatever it is. So now we spend a lot of energy and we've just been grinding away this year after year after year because it's so infuriating to riders. That's an example of a sort of specific metric that we're looking at by the day.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a great question. I mean, yeah, so the answer first is just validate the premise is absolutely an enormous amount of real-time data, you know, two to three million rides every single day. And now worldwide. So we're very active. And in fact, we have whole cool maps that show simulations and such of behavior, particularly around storms and all sorts of crazy times. Anyway, back to your question. Look, there are a couple of metrics that I think might surprise you that we pay as much attention to as we do. And I'll give you a very specific one because it kind of helps tell the story. When I joined, about 15% of the time, drivers would cancel on you. Now this is infuriating. Really?”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is an incentive in the sort of the on-demand app world not always to be truthful because if you overpromise something and then you kind of hook a person in, you know, what are they going to do if they cancel or whatever? It's just going to take them more time. And that is an evil and pernicious problem that is kind of baked into the model. And we just reject it wholeheartedly. Doesn't mean we never make a mistake, but if your car shows up later, then we estimate it's not, it's because we made a mistake. And we are trying over and over and over and over again to eliminate those are defects, right? And then start to guarantee it over time.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in business a long time ago. I think it's called CCMO. And I don't even remember what it stands for anymore. It's probably called something different today. But it really is about how incentives drive behavior. Financial incentives and other incentives and incentive alignment and so forth and so on”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep. And we rarely have to do that. Our reliability rate is above 99% for scheduling airport pickups. Yeah. So we're very, very focused on that. I will say, look, at business school, there's a very famous class, which has a weird technical name, but it's basically about incentives and behavior.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I understand. Recovered lawyer, but you did just hear a lawyer very carefully parse his words. Okay. Listen, I won't comment on that. What I will say is we are very focused. For example, you're talking about reliability. Oh my goodness. You talked to my team and they will roll their eyes maybe would be one way to say it. But the number of times I talk about reliability internally is high because I am obsessed by saying if we're going to make a promise, we're going to meet the promise. And starting in a couple weeks, we're actually starting to do some more work to actually surface that promise even a little bit more visibly. We do it today for airport pickups. If we're more than 10 minutes late for an airport pickups, we pay you up to $100. No questions asked.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source