Lyft CEO Looks to Get Faster, More Partners

There was something interesting you said, which is you’ve made improvement in both rider retention and new riders and you’ve made some progress in Canada. But actually that I wanted more specifics on what you did to achieve that. Yeah. So I break it down like this. First of all, good to be here. Second of all, I break it down like this. First, you got to get the basics right. We call it rideshare perfection. That’s all about pricing, right, Paying drivers, right, picking you up fast. Our ETA is that’s what we call how fast we pick you up our faster they’ve been in four years. So those are the basics. Once you do that, then you can build on top of that. Then you can do things like innovations around how fast can we pick you up for the airport, for example, One of my favorite example. I think last time you and I talked, we had just rolled out this on time pickup promise and now less than 1.5% of people are being picked up so late that we have to give them the 100 bucks. So after the basics, then you innovate and then you partner with other people. We’ve got great partnerships with Chase, with Delta and others. You put all these things together and it’s a great combination. It’s worked really well. Oh, let’s go in on the B2B partnerships, David, because I know that you are mobility first, but you look at Uber and Instacare yesterday. What other partnerships do you have in mind? So I probably won’t be able to speculate on new partnerships, but I but I can tell you this, you know, I spent in my prior career a lot of time in Africa and now you’re asking where is this going. But the answer is in a lot of countries in Africa, there’s this great expression. If you want to go fast, you go alone, but if you want to go far, you go, you go together. So you know as I say Delta, Amazon is a partner. We pick up some of their folks at distribution centers, LinkedIn as a partner. We actually they they overran their parking lot when people came back to work. And so we help people get back to work. Delta Sky Miles, of course you can get sky Miles, but also we help move their flight crews around, particularly in early morning hours. These are partnerships that they chase with sapphire. They’re really deep partnerships. And when you really go deep with someone you know, it’s almost like a relationship. You can find all sorts of amazing things to do. Those are the groups of people you’re moving. And as you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about how people move from A to BI. Want to go back to Robo Taxi? Tesla will show us a Robo Taxi in August. Your competitor Uber has this relationship with Waymo. I don’t think you have a formal relationship, but if Tesla comes to market, you must be thinking about that long term, yes, But. So first, robo taxis or let’s just say autonomous vehicles are going to happen. There’s no question here in San Francisco. We know they’re happening. You see him on the street. But we have to think about it this way. For someone’s got to make the tech, then someone’s got to build the car, then someone’s got to own the car and someone’s got to run the network, right. These are four different pieces of business that people have to do. We run the network and it’s a very expensive, very expansive network that we run every single day, 2 million rides a day. Now if we need to incorporate and of course we will autonomous vehicles into that, that’s great. That’s fantastic. It’ll increase, you know, supply and increase the number of different ways. But I don’t really look at an initiative like theirs and think it worries me. I think that’s really interesting. It’s going to maybe help expand the market and I would say for them, gosh, that’s a lot to take on at once. And so you know, we’ll see, we’ll see how that goes. David, innovation was what you’re just talking about. Would you ever reconsider innovation in taking more than just people but food but groceries? You know, our real focus is on moving people around and in specific getting them out of their house. And this is where I get a little philosophical. If you read any of the sort of articles about kind of the health of our nation, we talk a lot about sort of political divide, but there’s also just a tremendous amount of loneliness and people staying at home too much and being disconnected with from their friends and their family and so forth. So I’d say that really is going to be our focus, Doesn’t mean that we, of course, we also get people out on bikes. You know, we’re just talking. We’ve got a great bike system in New York, among other places. So that’s important as well. But I really think getting people out and about is really our focus and then we can partner for other things to the extent that is important to to customers. David, our Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, Mandeep Singh and I were going through our numbers and trying to see if it proved you’d taken market share from Uber. Derek Hosh Rashahi is coming up next after we’ve gone off on the next program with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. What’s your message for Dara in terms of whether he should be looking over his shoulder and the progress you’re making? You know, it’s so funny. People love of course to talk about this sort of head to head thing. I think our competition is, is people staying at home. That’s our competition. I want more people out. I want them connecting with other folks. I think it’s just a much more interesting way to run a business than just sort of always focus on your competitor. You know, look they they’ll go through their ups and downs and their quarters. So will we. He’s got a lot on his mind. It’s fine. Ask him about all the different things he’s got on his mind and we’re just going to focus on our, on our, on our riders and drivers. On your mind, Gen. Z women, corporate travellers. Who’s getting in your cars? Who’s riding your bikes, David. Well, so a lot of women are. I’m glad you brought that up. Of course we have women plus connect, which I’m so, so proud of. One of the great quotes I heard from a friend recently is when he said he was actually talking to his girlfriend and he said, why do you like this woman plus connect rider, driver connection on Lyft. And she said, look, I can finally take a nap in rideshare. I can finally take a nap, which I think is so profound. We’ve had something like 20,000 new women join the platform on the driver’s side just since we’ve started the program. So super important, I’ll tell you another thing that’s really interesting, right? We’re seeing, of course commute is happening, but also party time, people really are getting out. It’s after nine or after 5:00 and it’s it’s going great.