Lyft CEO: We Do Ride-Sharing, but ‘Not for High Rollers’
Logan Green, the cofounder and CEO of Lyft, is a gentle, soft-spoken, idealistic man. He doesn’t do a lot of on-camera interviews. So it was a treat to interview him at the SXSW festival in Austin last week.
Lyft, like its headline-grabbing rival Uber, is a ride-sharing service. These two companies seem to do the same thing: They let you summon a car and driver with a tap in an app, with all the billing handled behind the scenes, so you don’t have to fumble for cash or card at the end of the ride.
Uber began life employing only professional chauffeurs — black-car drivers. But Lyft started out employing ordinary folks in their own family cars, an idea that Uber soon imitated with its UberX service.
Ride-sharing is a profoundly disruptive business, as you can see if you read about the lawsuits, protests, tire slashings, and other resistance from people who prefer the status quo: taxis. But once you try one of these new car services, you won’t go back. You’ll probably save money, you’ll meet interesting people, and it’s more convenient.
The big differences
As my conversation progressed with Green, it became clear that Green himself doesn’t see Uber and Lyft as similarly as the public does. “Our goal was never to create a better taxi,” Green says. “Our goal was to completely change transportation. Change traffic. And make it possible to get anywhere you want to go without owning a car.”
To that end, Lyft recently launched Lyft Line, a service that matches you up with other passengers going in your direction. You each pay a much lower fare, and the world is spared the congestion and pollution of a second car going to the same destination.
From the sound of it, I didn’t imagine that Lyft Line would work. This is, after all, America — land of the pointless SUV, land where the best-selling car is a pickup truck. What red-blooded American would sign up to share a ride with a total stranger?
But Green told me that already, in San Francisco, one-third of all Lyft rides are Lyft Line rides. It’s catching on, at least there. (Uber also has a version of this: UberPool.)
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The next step in Lyft’s evolution is Driver Destination. That’s where you, a Lyft customer, have somewhere you need to drive yourself. You flip your app into Driver mode, enter your destination, and get matched with somebody else taking a trip along that route. You make some money for a drive you were going to take anyway (to work, for example), and your passenger pays very little.
All these initiatives are additional steps toward Green’s dream: to make it less expensive to take Lyft cars all the time than to own a car.
Dirty ride-share tricks
But where Lyft, like its CEO, comes across as gentle and optimistic, its rival Uber has earned a reputation for cutthroat, even dirty tactics. Uber has tried to poach Lyft drivers; has called Lyft rides and then canceled them, just to mess Lyft up; has revealed that it can track the whereabouts of individual customers.
The aggressive behavior is paying off, at least from a business perspective. Uber has received far more venture capital than Lyft ($5 billion to $850 million) and is in many more cities (269 around the world, versus 65 U.S cities for Lyft).
The pink car mustaches and fist-bumps that once distinguished the Lyft experience are mostly gone now, but the Lyft philosophy — that people are nice, that everyone can win when we collaborate — lives on. As the company continues to make transportation greener, friendlier, and less expensive, Green expects that Lyft’s differences from Uber will become clearer and clearer.
