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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“No, it is. It is a logistical challenge. But I think you're, look, I'm not going to characterize you. You did a marvelous job characterizing them.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There you go. It all kind of comes together. There is something to that. And by the way, we have really cool innovation coming out there. We'll bring your phone back to you automatically, but that's a separate story. But anyway, so in a funny way, it's not a bad thing to be in sort of a two-player position because you really only have one competitor. And frankly, if you spend too much of your time thinking about that one competitor, you're probably losing the script because guess what? There are a lot of rides that people aren't even taking on Rideshare at all. Okay. So, you know, back to this question. We're a customer obsessed company. And this is going to be the thing. This is why we're growing mid double digits, 15 to 20% year on year. It's why we've become profitable. It's why we're spending off cash. And I think that is a good place to be, particularly when I look at the other guys who I tend to think of, frankly, as a more, I'll call them sort of financially and maybe technologically driven maybe. I don't know exactly how they describe themselves, but I don't get the customer obsessed vibe.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So I like being number two, and it's maybe a funny thing to say, but I do think it means you try harder. You wake up every single morning and you say, I got one job, which is to frankly, you know, do a great job for my riders and my drivers, such that maybe over time I can overtake the other guys. I guess the way to think about that is I think the right number of rideshare companies in most markets is probably two. You know, it's a capital-intensive business, not because you own the cars, but because you own a lot of server capacity. And it's quite complicated to figure out, you know, pick up and drop off locations and customer service. People leave their phones in the car about 8,000 times a week. It's just all sorts of, right?”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, at the beginning stages of a lot of these changes. And sometimes, again, people have been around for a while don't even realize how much the world has changed in that way.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's exactly right. It's so again if you zoom out. So, you know, Wall Street looks at companies like ours quarter by quarter and it sort of drives you crazy. But if you zoom way, way out, you know, let's look at that from a different dimension now. Average car right now, 50,000 bucks a year. Okay, average monthly payment, 800 bucks. Insurance will cost you another couple hundred bucks. Gas might cost you another 100 bucks or so at least now. And then service will cost you a little bit more that. Okay, so that's plan A. And by the way, if you take on all that responsibility, there's no texting and there's no drinking. That's right. Now, plan B, pay 20 bucks, getting a lift. Someone else does the driving. Text your heart to content. Drink as much as you want, if that's your jam. And it's 20 bucks, not 800 bucks times, plus plus, plus, plus, plus. So just looking out, again, you're sort of asking about kind of segments and sort of maybe a little bit the role of technology in society. I think I still think we're.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of companies and a lot of people are saying, I want to get back to work. And I think these things are somewhat connected. Sorry for sounding a little bit like social psychologist a little bit. I mean, gosh, my wife at Microsoft, you know, a lot of people have really significant life events that happen at work that are not just work, right? And so I think there's a little bit. So anyway, when I look at things like commute hours, and then travel continues to be really strong as well. I think, and this is, look, I'm a million years old now. When I was a kid, the idea of getting on a plane and going overseas was, I mean, you might as well say, go to the moon. Now, you know, 20 and 30 year olds are like, yeah, I'll sort of take a trip overseas or I'll go to, you know, whatever Nashville for the weekend or something. So anyway, I think these are pretty big real societal shifts is people want to kind of be out in the real world.”
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 such an interesting issue. And it's not something I really appreciated. We're going to do about a billion rides this year. And so to your point, with a billion rides, you kind of get a sense of how people are spending their time during the day. So I'll tell you two things that are growing quite quickly. One is party time. And it might be funny to start there, but party time. So I should say what that means. What that means is Thursday night, a really Friday night and Saturday night, call it nine and midnight. And it is really interesting. I think this not just post-COVID, but I think, frankly, a little bit of app fatigue is driving people to say, you know what, let's actually get out and spend our lives out in the real world instead of spending all of our lives on apps. So I think that's actually, I'm quite comforted by that. And it's actually a big part of our sort of overall purpose is to serve and connect people. A lot of passion about that. At the same time, commute as well. And I do think this is a certain post-COVID thing where people are sort of thinking maybe we'll just be in our houses the rest of our life working remotely. It turns out”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's another area of expansion for us because that gives us, frankly, more margin to play with, but it also allows us to talk to a segment that we haven't talked to very much. And then, of course, autonomous vehicles. So these are all nice uses of cash. Once you're generating cash, you can start to either acquire companies or you can invest in things that then grow, you know, build sort of the next chapter of growth.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much of the world as possible so that you can run as much volume through that platform as possible. So we bought a company called Free Now last year. It's a European taxi aggregator. Yeah, yeah. It is Europe's biggest taxi aggregator, which means that if you want a taxi and you're in a place like Barcelona or London or pick your favorite city, they operate in nine countries. The free nap is going to be your best way to get it. That gives us a great platform for expansion, even when it comes to autonomous vehicles. We'll come back to that, I'm sure, you know, in a couple seconds. So that's one direction of expansion. You think of that as out overseas. Another dimension is up, up market. You just kind of refer to this. So lift, again, it sort of started its tradition was as kind of a relatively inexpensive, very available rideshare option, but it wasn't as strong in kind of the black, you know, kind of luxury segment. We bought a company called TBR last year. TBR is a high-end chauffeur company. We also have a very, very good Lyft Black product. In fact, if you're listening to this, I promise if you haven't tried it, give it a try. I think you'll like it. It's actually our highest rated product. A nice black car comes and pick you up.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so in some sense, nothing changes, in some sense, everything changes. Okay, so what doesn't change? Custom obsession is still driving profitable growth. That's just going to be a theme I just go with forever. Maybe I've drank a lot of the Jeff Bezos Kool-Aid, but it seems to be working pretty well. So one other financial metric that has been interesting to watch is when I joined, we were losing about $300 million, consuming about $300 million in cash over 12 months. We're now generating about $1.1 billion in cash over 12 months. Okay, so what that allows us to do is invest in the future. What does that look like? Certainly it looks like international expansion. So that's been one thing we've been at for about the last year, which is Lyft was sort of, I almost say caught a little bit in sort of a US centric view of the world. And it just doesn't make sense once you have a product that scales really well and is sort of a fixed cost-based type of thing, you really want it to be around as”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly So, I really appreciate you saying that. It was an easy decision from that sense. All you have to do is talk to 10 women and say, you know, what do you think? And they say, well, gosh, particularly late at night, maybe in a new city, maybe after a long day. It's just not my jam to be talking to a dude. Sorry, dudes. You know, like that. But sometimes the easiest ideas are also the most complicated. There are all sorts of potential legal issues. There are all sorts of operational issues. They're even to a certain extent cultural issues of like, is this going to be okay? But I was like, you know what? I think it's going to be okay. I think it's going to be okay. So that was an early decision we made. It came out. That was in April of 2023. We launched that later that year. And it was really exciting for the company to say, you know what, we can do big things again and we can start to innovate again on behalf of customers.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's exactly right. So, in order to pay for it, you have to figure out how to pay for it. And frankly, our cost structure was just sort of out of control. We were doing too many things. We had too many people. And by the way, those people were all working remotely, which makes it quite difficult to really kind of change the culture to a customer-obsessed culture, which was my other big thing. And by the way, we were also overpaying in stock-based compensation, which was bugging investors. So in the first couple of months, you know, it wasn't really the time to be bragging. It was the time, frankly, to be saying, okay, we've got some things to fix. And let's really focus on that. So first, you know, call it, you know, 30, 60, 90 days, it's fixing some basics. But also reorienting the company back towards its customer obsessed roots. And I'm still very, I guess I'd say proud of this. The first meeting I had of the day was literally getting my computer or my laptop. Second meeting, 10 o'clock in the morning, Monday morning, I said, let's start talking about a product that's now called women.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we didn't. And here's why. In order to withstand a price drop, because it's a very competitive business and you're doing a lot of volume. So if you drop your price, you've got to make sure you can pay for it. We had to do some other things as well. So for example, we had to reduce our cost significantly. So we laid off about a third of the company. And yeah, 26% actually of the company. Now I think about it, $330 million of savings, that was a very, very significant shock to the company. By the way, we also had to raise driver pay. So we had a lot to pay for.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just basic issues. So, what do we do the first, you know, frankly, a couple of weeks? Well, first thing is lower prices. We were just priced too high. That'd be a good one. Really? Yeah. Can't operate in a Did you do a big in a set of”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the first maybe meta observation, and you're teeing it up is, gosh, you're on the board of a company for a couple years. You kind of think you know the company. You don't really know the company. I mean, if any board members are out there, you think you do. And you probably have a pretty good sense of certain things, but you get in there and everything is 10 times bigger, worse, better, all the things. Then you realize, okay, what did I see? I saw a company that had some real innovative spirit at its core. Remember, Lyft was actually the one that really revolutionized Rideshare. So the other guys, they came up with a sort of black car concept and, you know, black car on an app. But it was really Lyft that said, you know what? It can be anyone with a Prius. You know what I mean? Anyone can pick up. So this company had innovated from the early days. But honestly, it's innovated spirit had maybe gotten a little of the best of it, tried few too many things, spread a little too thin, losing share in its core business, as you say, not priced well, not paying competitively. So a number of different.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zero percent chance. Zero percent chance. Wow. I literally said, you should hang up the phone right now because you got better things to do. There's just no way. But you know what? As the day wore on, I found myself saying, you know what? This is a really interesting opportunity. How many people, you know, get this opportunity to run a car? And I never run a public company before. I mean, my God. But at the same time, I had learned some things at Microsoft. I'd learned some things at Amazon. I learned some things at World Reader. I learned some things in various different ways of my life. And I had a lot of passion for the company having been on the board and also a real understanding that as a board member, you really only have so much power and influence. It's fairly limited. But as a CEO, it's a different thing. So anyway, one thing led to another. I applied and went through kind of a harrowing experience, but ended up getting the job.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wasn't on the committee. I was sort of watching from aside. But as they say, then my phone rings one day and it shone on the phone with John and Logan. And they basically say, you know what? We've been thinking, and as we've been looking at external people, frankly, we think we might have the right person to at least apply for the job. Let's be clear. Apply for the job sitting right here, you know, on the board. And I said, what are you talking about? They said, we're talking about you, David.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's unusual. Yeah. Yeah. So funnily enough, and this one I'll sort of slow the story down again this time because it actually was Sean Agrawal again. So same board chair. He calls me up. It happened to be on Valentine's Day of All Day, so I remember the day in 2023. And then the back story here is John and Logan, again, the co-founders of Lyft, this is what they had been doing for 15 years, nonstop. It was literally their first job out of college, founding this whole new company, withstanding the onslaught of an incredibly competitive environment, an incredibly operationally complex environment 24 hours a day, seven days a week for year after year. So at the end of the prior year, they said to the board, you know what? It's time for us to move on. We've sort of done what we need to do. And frankly, the company was going through a bit of a tough time financially and operationally. And I think they realized that they were sort of getting to the end of what they could really, where they could really help. So the board did what it does. Boards do this. They form a special committee. They start to recruit, look around.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Helped scale a company like Amazon. I also learned a lot about competing at Microsoft. And even at World Reader, World Reader nonprofits, people sort of look at them and think they're not very much, but it's very, very difficult to actually scale a nonprofit because the funding is always tightened and so forth. So I think they were looking for someone with a combination of scaling experience, but also real customer advocacy. And so I joined the board as a result.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So here it was. One day my phone rings and a guy named Sean Agrawal is on the other end of the line. Sean and I had worked together many years before back at Amazon. He was my kind of finance partner. He had subsequently become an investor and then the board chair of Lyft. And he and John and Logan, the co-founders of Lyft, really were looking to do something quite unusual at the board level, which was bring someone in who is a real customer advocate. So boards, you know, for those of you who haven't gotten a chance to be exposed to a board, they typically are made up by finance people, business strategists, maybe people who've built companies before, but often by the time you get to sort of the board level of a company, you're pretty far away from the customer. And John and Logan, again, to their credit, said, you know what, we need some more customer advocacy right from the top. We need some more support, frankly, for that kind of vibe, as well as someone.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, no, it wasn't that actually. It was sort of a different thing. So you asked me a couple questions ago what my career idea was as a kid. Honestly, if I had had to guess, I might have said, you know, maybe I'll be an English professor someday or something like that. Like I'd wanted to teach and I loved reading. And so this was a way for me to bring together a couple of different things in my life. Obviously books and literacy because that was sort of the passion and focus, but also technology. The thesis of the company was kids are going to read using tech and that's how it's gotten to be millions and millions of kids later are all reading on the platform. It started out with Kindle, a product I know something about because of my Amazon days and brought technology and reading together. So that was really the focus.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that way, and in realizing that it's really the customer experience and customer obsession that's going to drive your continued growth. Because all those things are true. And as he would say, famously, you're always one click away from competition. So that's the downside, right? Is how do you continue to compete in a world where theoretically someone else could start and someone else could start and someone else can start and you don't have any geographic advantage over them?”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally, totally. Well, and not only that, but also the costs are going to be huge. You're going to have to build out these distribution centers and warehouses sometime. You know, this cost event, the internet is unproven technology, all sorts of things.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It worked out pretty well. It worked up pretty well. But you know what? It wasn't obvious at the time. So, you know, he during the interview, I remember, he said, look, if we play our cards right, and as you say, it was a $15.6 million store at the time, so tiny, tiny little thing. He said, if we play our cards right, maybe by the year 2000, this is in 1996, we might be a billion dollar company. Maybe, maybe, but a lot has to go right in order for that to happen. Obviously, we got there and then we got, you know, far beyond. But there were all kinds of people who, frankly, were sort of rooting for our failure, you know, competitors, you know, Barnes& Noble at the time, a bunch of Wall Street analysts who thought this was just some sort of crazy Ponzi scheme.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But this is an invitation to say, well, you know, maybe, you know, a very detail-oriented job might not be the best fit, or maybe something that, you know, manages a lot of people because she has not something like this that would give people a little sense or give him some sense of where an area to probe more is. Anyway, at the end of that conversation, literally 45 minutes into it, he says, you know, you sound like a good guy. I said, oh, you sound like a good guy as well. And so a couple of days later, he and Mackenzie, his wife at the time, and Jen, my wife currently still, and I went out to dinner, got to know each other. And over the course of the next year, got to know each other a little bit better, and then I ended up applying for this job to help Amazon grow beyond just books. That was really the job.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so he had to take you back then, but in a sense, it's still the Jeff you know today. He had a plan and it was a 25 question plan for the phone call, right? And to this day, the question I remember. And it was such a clever question because inevitably in background checks, you're trying to say nice things about the person.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was sort of both at the same time. And it was almost always going to be one or the other, right? So I remember, I'll tell you a little of the story of how I got there. So my phone ring one day at Microsoft. And it's this guy, Jeff. And he's doing a reference check of a woman who used to work actually at Microsoft in the personal finance group. So it all kind of connects. And so we get to talking. And one thing leads to another. And he's very precise about the way he's asking questions. Remember, the company had maybe 10 people at this point. It was very, very small. Very, very small. But he had a big vision. You know, he was going to be Earth's biggest bookstore. Wait, hold on.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So cliche, but there it was. No one even knew how to talk about the thing. So, anyway, and I had been a little bit interested in personal finance. You know, a couple of sort of threads came together. Microsoft tried to buy a company called Intuit, still very successful, was unsuccessful, blocked because of the Justice Department. And so we decided we need personal finance. And I said, you know what? Why don't we develop this product, a personal finance product for the internet, not as packaged software?”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so you're making me realize that there's a theme in my life I hadn't really thought of before, which is platform shifts. When I joined Microsoft, Windows was the product, right? This was the thing that was going to run software. And of course, it became incredibly successful. But then 1995, 1996, 1997 comes around. The internet is here, and Microsoft, like any tech company at the time, had to figure out its internet strategy. And it decided that there were a couple of key products that needed to be available on the World Wide Web. Again, actually, I think the information super highway literally was the way people talked about it. It's crazy.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So Microsoft was famously ahead in, or at least getting ahead, let's say, with the launch of Windows in Word processing, in spreadsheets, of course. And again, this is sort of ancient business history, but it's sort of a fascinating tale of a technology shift completely reshuffling the deck away from old companies like WordPerfect and Lotus 123. We don't even know who those companies are anymore because Microsoft took over that space. And it's really because Windows shifted the platform. We might come back to that idea when we talk about autonomous cars. They didn't have a database. And that was sort of the third big product that a lot of companies wanted. I helped develop it. I was the first product manager on it. And really all that meant is my job was to go around and watch other people use competing products at the time, Paradox, DBase, again, products that don't even exist anymore, and try to pay attention to what they were doing with these products. How were they using them? Where were they stumbling? And that was my first role. And in a sense, it has been.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what? I really appreciate the question. And I actually think it's more relevant now than ever. Look, the humanities is all about curiosity and understanding and maybe even empathy, right? If you read a book, you have to understand you're exposed to different people's perspectives, right? It's almost like you're crawling inside someone else's brain, particularly if you're reading fiction. And so to a certain extent, I think nothing could prepare you better. Now, you have to have an analytical brain. You might also have to be good with numbers in business. But the humanities world, I sort of think of it as this kind of magic vaccination against irrelevance because that curiosity is always going to matter. And it certainly helped me through my whole career.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this goes way back. And the funny thing is, even to high school, my mother bought an Apple II computer a million years ago to help her run a small business that she was running. And I sort of got into technology that way. I will admit part of it, I think, is I had terrible handwriting. And so when I use the computer to, you know, to print out stuff for my high school English teacher, she could finally read what I was writing. It probably gave me a better grade as a result. But so I sort of got into computers a little bit as a kid, ended up at Princeton writing my thesis on a computer again. And this is a million years ago when that wasn't normal. And so I found myself just interested in technology. And after, you know, going to a consulting firm for a couple years to learn about the business world and going to business school, I found myself as an intern at Microsoft, you know, again, back in 1990 it was. And sort of the rest is history.”
2026-07-08 · Masters in Business · BONUS: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source