Today, I’m talking with David Risher, who is the CEO of Lyft. I’ll just say from the jump: I think you’ll like this one, since David is refreshingly direct and doesn’t pull a lot of punches.
He has been on the board of Lyft for years, but he only stepped in as CEO just a couple of years ago to help turn it around. He’s done pretty well with that so far, but he’s pretty straightforward about how the company wasn’t doing well, and he had to make real changes to fix it. That also means he has a clear thesis about what kind of company Lyft really is — a service company that operates in the real, physical world, as opposed to a tech platform, which is very much how its big competitor Uber sees itself.
Uber comes up a lot in this conversation, actually — the competition between the two is just as fierce as ever, and you’ll hear David make a lot of references to “the other guys” throughout this episode. But it’s not just competition for riders and drivers that Lyft has to deal with. It’s the future of transportation itself, and new AI tools that might take apps like Lyft out of the equation entirely.
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David and I talked a lot about autonomous vehicles and how they’ll impact riders and especially drivers. I always ask my rideshare drivers what I should ask the CEOs of the platforms when I do these interviews, and the only thing they ever ask is simple: when are you going to pay us more? So I asked David straight up: can Lyft pay drivers more money, especially when the promise of autonomy is to replace the drivers entirely?
You’ll hear David point out that it’ll be a long time before Lyft or anyone else gets to the point where self-driving cars are the default. So for now, Lyft is still a service company with humans doing the work. But the transition to a world of robotaxis is going to upend that system over time, and David has a lot of ideas about how it might play out.
Then there’s the other kind of problem with AI, what I’ve been calling the DoorDash problem. In a world of AI agents going out and booking cars and ordering sandwiches for you, apps like Lyft and DoorDash might just turn into commodities, not companies anyone interacts with directly.
Lyft, in particular, is the exact kind of service that seems really susceptible to this problem, given how many people will just flip between Lyft and Uber based on which one’s cheaper on any given day. So I really wanted to dig into that with David, to see what he thought a service platform like Lyft could do to retain loyal customers — customers they can sell subscriptions and other services to — when users might not be opening apps at all in the future.
There’s a lot going on in this one, but I also have to point out that David is one of the only Amazon or ex-Amazon people to give an original answer to the standard Decoder question about decision making. Like I said, he’s pretty direct.
Okay: Lyft CEO David Risher. Here we go.
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