WIRED13%
Lyft’s CEO Says, ‘We’re the Good Uber’ 64%
By Steven Levy0%
7/17/2026, 3:00:00 PM
Keywords: Business, Tech Culture, Backchannel Nl, Uber, Lyft, Autonomous Vehicles, Ride Sharing, Transportation
BS Summary: This article contains 40 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Availability Heuristic, with Optimism Bias as the most egregious example at 14.1% saturation with 128 hits. Analysis detected 1,927 faulty-reasoning hits from 908 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 59.2% and a BS Rank of 64% (7,368 of 20,445 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 64.00% of the article peer group.
STEVEN LEVY: Where are you on your turnaround mission?
DAVID RISHER: When I came in, we were losing share—Lyft was 26 or 27 percent compared to the other guy.
We were losing money, $300 million a year.
Things were not looking good.
I went to the Jeff Bezos school, so when I came in, my whole focus was customer obsession.
We spent quarter after quarter getting our cost position right, so that we could lower prices.
We raised driver rates, because if drivers aren't getting paid enough, they tend to be very frustrated and don’t provide great service, and drop off the platform.
We started to innovate again.
So today, we’re profitable.
We have some of the highest driver satisfaction rates we've ever had, and our riders are coming back.
And our share is now up to about 31 points.
Yet your stock is down.
Our analysts and investors love the fact we’re growing quarter by quarter, but they also see uncertainty in the industry.
Thirty-one percent is still a distant second.
I saw a headline the other day, “Is OpenAI On Its Way to Becoming Lyft?”
The story wasn’t even about ride-sharing!
What will it take to never see that headline again?
That might be a false premise.
We do a billion rides a year in North America.
The other guys maybe do two.
[Uber doesn’t break out numbers geographically but reports around 14 billion rides a year globally.]
That’s 3 billion rides between the two of us.
But people take 160 billion rides in their private cars every year.
So there’s a gigantic market which you can grow into.
The reason we have been gaining share over the last couple years is our service is just better.
On average we will pick you up faster than those guys will.
We have reduced driver cancellations.
The next phase is what we call “Save Money, Check Lyft,” which is based on a very basic premise that if you're a rider and you're only checking the other guy, you're leaving money on the table.
If people checked every single time, we would have a greater than 50 percent share.
I promise you.
Yesterday my son was on a stuck train, and he needed a ride to the station a few stops down.
Uber was $70 and Lyft was $130.
We try to beat them more than we lose, but we have different algorithms, different data.
We religiously, obsessively check to make sure that is true.
I often hear from drivers—for both Uber and Lyft—that the companies take too big of a cut.
Is that complaint valid?
The short answer is no.
Certainly in the early days of this industry, there were massive effective driver subsidies, and there are still drivers who remember that or have friends who remember those days.
We will never, ever, ever, ever take more than 30 percent after insurance is taken out.
Who bears the burden for the fuel price increases?
Drivers are responsible for fueling up, so ultimately, of course, they're paying the bill.
But we're trying our best to help.
There’s a way to not have to worry about pleasing drivers–replacing them with autonomous vehicles.
You have a deal with Waymo in Nashville where you service their cars.
We’re partnering with multiple companies, but our Waymo partnership is perhaps the most significant.
No matter how a Waymo is ordered, we will do the fleet management.
So our job is to make sure that cars are available as close to 24/7 as possible.
Cars sitting there stranded, not charged, not clean, whatever, aren’t making money.
That's bad.
It’s one way where we're going to help the partner, in this case Waymo, make money on its assets.
The second piece is supply sharing—a fleet of autonomous vehicles will be available both to the Waymo app and the Lyft app later this year.
So essentially Waymo is acting like a Lyft driver?
Yes, they're a supplier, just like a driver would be exactly.
In a decade, buying a car without self-driving technology will be like buying a car with manual transmission—you could do it, but you probably won’t.
Today, if you want to drive on the Lyft platform, you have to do two things: you've got to put your car to use, and you've got to put your time to use.
Ten years from now, in a world where a lot of people have cars that can drive themselves, you just have to put your car to use, and when it comes back, you're going to want it cleaned and maintained.
That's where fleet management comes in.
I’m guessing that your dream is that Lyft will be the number one of the two companies.
Sure, because our service is better.
I also think—and you can quote me on this, although it's a little bit of an obnoxious thing for me to say—I think we're the good Uber.
You’re saying Uber is still evil?
Yeah.
[Pauses.]
No, that's too strong.
Both companies have obviously done quite well in very different ways.
When I talk to people at the other company, they do admire that we are walking the walk; we are customer obsessed.
That's the big change that's turned our economics around, and we're not going to back off of that.
Those advantages will compound over time.
This is an edition of Steven Levy’s Backchannel newsletter.
Read previous newsletters here.
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