Last week, Lyft suddenly announced that its co-founders, President Logan Green and CEO John Zimmer, would be retiring from the ride-hailing business after 11 years. David Risher, a former executive at Microsoft and Amazon who has served on Lyft’s board since 2021, will take over later this month.
Lyft’s C-suite shuffle was sudden, but not surprising. For starters, tech companies in their teens and tweens seem to be entering an era of founder flops. Twitch’s Emmett Shear, Instacart’s Apoorva Mehta, Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann, and Peloton’s John Foley all recently parted ways. But Lyft in particular is struggling. It has not become a profit. It is losing market share to Uber. Last fall, it laid off 13 percent of its staff. The share price is down nearly 90 percent since going public in 2019.
And yet Green and Zimmer’s exits say something about how the vibes in the tech industry have changed since the early 2010s, when young dudes raised mountains of cash to disrupt, well, everything.
In the beginning, Lyft’s main offering was… vibes. Travis Kalanick’s Uber was a cutthroat, modeled after upmarket black car services and founded because Kalanick and his crew aspired to be “ballers.” Lyft, on the other hand, recruited anyone with a driver’s license, a vehicle, and a willingness to stick a pink fuzzy mustache on their car and greet strangers with a fist, welcoming passengers into their front seats. It was Lyft that piloted the peer-to-peer model of ride-hailing, the idea that anyone can become a taxi driver if they download the right app.
Zimmer loved to talk about the service’s city-building potential. A degree in urban planning at Cornell University, he often said, had opened his eyes to the destructive effects of the automobile on urban life: the traffic, the smog, the excess parking that took up space that would become parks, playgrounds or homes. could be. Lyft and similar services, the theory went, could help many people escape the tyranny of car ownership by letting them occasionally use other people’s vehicles instead. When Lyft acquired America’s largest bikeshare operator in 2018, it presented that transaction as another way to help cities.
It was a heartwarming story that got a credibility boost from Uber’s public implosion in 2017. But it didn’t quite work out. The Lyft ride-sharing concept was first found to fuel the growth of the gig economy, which has some serious shortcomings. We are still learning about the complicated effects of disconnecting service work from benefits such as health care and sick pay.
Meanwhile, ride-hailing seems to have actually increased traffic in cities. And that deadly car ownership thing? Just a few months ago, Lyft rolled out services to help car owners book parking spaces and vehicle maintenance. How Lyft fits into anyone’s urban planning syllabus is less clear than Zimmer had hoped.
When I spoke with Risher, Lyft’s new CEO, last week, it was clear that the vibe-based strategy has given way to the reality of turning a failing business around. Gone were some of the glossier marketing concepts; in it were the brass tacks. “I feel a real energy when I say, ‘Let’s really focus on our rideshare business,'” Risher told me. “Let’s pick people up on time. Let’s give them a good rate so they don’t defect to Uber. Let’s drop them off where they tell them to go.”
When I asked Risher to name a distraction that didn’t belong in the new model, he highlighted Shared Rides (formerly known as Lyft Line), the service that offers users cheaper fares in exchange for sharing a car with a few other travelers. The shared option disappeared at the start of the pandemic, but has returned in a handful of US cities.
