Customer-Obsessed Innovation

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to HBR On Leadership, case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts—hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. I’m HBR executive editor Alison Beard filling in for Hannah Bates.

This month, we’re highlighting some of the best conversations from the 2025 HBR Leadership Summit held in April. In today’s episode, we hear from David Risher, the CEO of Lyft.

Since taking the wheel in 2023, figuratively and literally, Risher has led the company through a bold transformation—focusing on customer obsession, technological innovation, and a renewed commitment to drivers and riders alike. Lyft recently reached record bookings and a 31% increase in annual revenue and its first full year of profitability.

In this conversation with me, Risher shares how his own experience behind the wheel as a Lyft driver informs product innovation. And why listening deeply—whether to a single passenger or a room of drivers—can lead to breakthrough ideas. He also opens up about navigating layoffs, launching inclusive features, and preparing for an autonomous future while keeping human dignity front and center.

If you care about service, leadership, or what it takes to revive a brand in a hyper-competitive space, this episode is for you. Here it is.

ALISON BEARD: I want to hear how Lyft evaluates and anticipates what customers want and need. Is it analytic surveys, focus groups, all of the above?

DAVID RISHER: It’s kind of all of the above, but in maybe a different order. So I would actually say analytics are the least important, and I’m going to tell you why in a second. The most important, for sure, is lived experience. So we’re really lucky. Lyft gives two million rides a day, obviously a huge volume, 800 million rides a year.

And every one of us– we have 3,000 people who work for us. Every one of us can be a rider or a driver. And I actually am a huge, huge believer in lived experiences, one of the best ways to– because then you’re literally putting yourself in the driver’s seat or in the passenger seat. You don’t even have to imagine it.

We also do round tables pretty often with drivers in particular where we’ll bring groups of drivers together. I’ve done them in New York. I’ve done them in DC, in Boston, in Seattle, here in San Francisco because people’s interests vary a little bit in different parts of the country, so for sure.

Social media is also really important. Of course, you have to filter things out a little bit, but there is a lot of wisdom out there if you can see through the noise and through some of the frustration and extreme stuff that you get. I get email every day and texts all the time from friends and from random people who find my email address online. And so it’s all that.

And then analytics is– the reason I say it’s the least important is because it’s so tempting, I think, to sit at your desk and look at the numbers. And while you can use that to size opportunities and maybe prioritize, but you very rarely get the real insight that leads to the breakthrough just by looking at the analytics.

ALISON BEARD: I know that you’ve done some Lyft-driving yourself, so is that standard process for all managers so you can better understand the situation on the ground?

DAVID RISHER: Yeah, I’d like to say that it is. This sounds maybe a little braggy, but I think I’ve driven more than– I think this is true– than just about anyone else at the company. So we have 1.5 million drivers on the platform. They’re all independent contractors. But in terms of Lyft employees, I might be the first. I’m not sure.

I drive about every six weeks, and I never tell people when I’m going to do it. I don’t tell the social media team or anything like that. I do post about it afterwards just with the pictures and experiences I’ve had, and you can see that on LinkedIn. But I take it really seriously, really seriously.

And I listen very carefully. I ask, tell me why you chose Lyft today, and also very interested in other things going on in people’s lives. I’ve had these great conversations with people who, for example– I’ll give you an example. So I picked a woman– I live in San Francisco. I picked a woman up– this was last year– in Sausalito.

And I said, why did you choose Lyft? And she said, well, look, every day I wake up in the morning at, like, 6 or 7 o’clock in the morning. And I said, why? And she said, well, to check the pricing because sometimes it’s $20. Sometimes it’s $30. Sometimes it’s $40.

And it kind of drives me crazy because when it’s $40, that’s too expensive for me, but when it’s $20, I’ll take it. $30, maybe I’ll check the competition. But today is a colleague’s birthday, and so I really wanted to be there. So I was so glad that it was inexpensive.

So just that conversation really got me understanding how frustrating what’s called surge pricing is to people. And I can tell you all about this, but we have a feature called Price Lock that really tries to get rid of it. And it was really developed or it was catalyzed because of that conversation I had with her.

ALISON BEARD: So when you get these new ideas for features or services, how do you make a decision about which will be worthwhile and value-creating to pursue? And then how quickly can you move to execution?

DAVID RISHER: So two very different questions. The answer to the second is it’s never quickly enough, so this is a source of constant– it turns out, as a CEO, you can have all sorts of ideas about how fast things can go, and then just brutal reality gets in your way. I’ll come back to that in a second.

The prioritization is– so we have a pretty rigorous process because, again, of course, there are always more ideas than you can possibly do. And so broadly, broadly speaking, we’re always– OK, Lyft’s business model, very simply, is the more people we have taking rides, the better we do. It’s kind of that simple.

If our fixed costs are more or less fixed, which they are, then the incremental contribution of every ride– it might be $1, or it might be $2, might be $3, whatever it is– is a certain number. And the more of those we can drive across the platform, the more money we make. We’re now profitable, as you said in your introduction. We spun off about $760 million in cash over the last 12 months. That was up from negative $300 million the year before.

So once you really understand the basics of the business model, everything else is just execution. And so that helps you understand then how you evaluate new ideas is, can it– is the product market fit– is the potential for product market fit so good that it could potentially drive hundreds of thousands or millions of more rides on the platform?

Now, the economics of them might be different. So for example, with Price Lock, it’s actually a subscription product. You pay $2.99 a month, and then you lock in a price, a cheap price so it doesn’t bounce around. And then we have to do a lot of math to try to figure out whether we can make money on that or not. So you then have to figure out whether you can do it profitably.

But the first question is, is it compelling? Is it interesting? Can it touch either, I’ll say– let’s call it millions of people. Or is it something that maybe a smaller group of people care about, but they care about it so much that the impact is outsized? And I think those are two different cases, but they both come up. And I’ll give you just very quickly an example of the latter.

This actually came out of another– I mentioned this idea of driver roundtables. We were talking to about 12 different people. This is in New York City. And we were talking about things that they like about the platform and things they don’t, and one of the women said almost offhand– she said, you know, I have a tough time taking breaks to go to the bathroom.

And I said, why? And she said, well, some bathrooms– they feel unsafe, or they’re dirty, or whatever. And then she said, the thing that struck with me– that stuck with me the most. She said, and I can’t just pull out a bottle and pee in it. It’s like, OK, that’s a good point.

And so we developed as a result of that and some other things we’re doing something called a restroom finder now that allows drivers to indicate where there are safe restrooms and easy-to-access restrooms and maybe what the restroom code is. So anyway, so it might only affect a– it affects all drivers at some point, but it probably only affects a small number of drivers in a deep way. But for those drivers, it’s really important.

ALISON BEARD: I love that example because it illustrates how you have customers that are riders, but then your drivers are also your customers. So you have to be equally obsessed with their experience.

DAVID RISHER: That’s right.

ALISON BEARD: So talk about that execution piece. And sorry for jamming two questions together, but when you decide that that’s a great thing to implement, the restroom finder, how do you ensure that your teams can get it out there quickly enough that it makes an impact?

DAVID RISHER: Yeah, so it’s such a– it’s a simple question, and there are multitudes within it because of course you have an annual plan that you’ve done. You have certain themes you really want to work through over the course of the year. So as an example, one of the themes we’ve been working on for quite a long time is, how can we increase driver earnings? How can we increase driver earnings?

As you say, there are two customers in every car. The rider has a certain price that they’re willing to pay. The driver has a certain price that they’re willing to accept. And we have to figure out how to make those lines cross millions of times every single day.

Drivers get very frustrated if they feel that they’re not getting rides that meet a certain threshold for them. In some cases, there’s work we can do at the user interface level to help a driver see how much they’re going to make. This is something we’ve done a lot of work on to make it very clear every time they accept a ride how much money they can expect to make on that on a per-hour basis so it’s easy for them to compare.

But we’ve also put in minimum standards. So we used to have no minimum. Now we have a 70% earnings guarantee. That means that at the end of every week a rider will always get– excuse me, a driver will always get at least 70% of what riders pay after insurance and some other fees are taken out. And that’s been a game-changer, very expensive– it costs us millions of dollars to do– very technically complex.

And so it took us months and months of work to do. This was last year. But because it fit in a thematic piece that we’d already put out for ourselves over the year, how can we increase driver earnings, we had space for it. So it was a lot of work, but it was kind of straightforward.

The trickier ones are ideas that come along the way that you hadn’t necessarily anticipated, or you realize, we’re kind of missing the boat here, or whatever it is. And then, frankly, it’s a lot of my job as CEO– you think of it as an allocation question. Like, how do I reallocate resources periodically in a way that focuses on a combination of what we thought was important at the beginning of the year and what we think is important now without being so disruptive? I know that’s of a generic answer, but it’s the way it goes.

ALISON BEARD: No, I think that’s useful. So I’m on the same note, when you discover that there are problems, how do you fix them? I hear you have something called Falcon Mode.

DAVID RISHER: I do. [CHUCKLES] I do. I do. Yeah, I do. So Falcon Mode refers to the idea that– so Falcons are unbelievable animals. And I’m not a falconer, by the way. I don’t know that much about them.

But what I do know is that they can fly at very, very high altitude for a very long period of time. But then they get hungry, and so they’ve got to dive. And they got to dive 2,000 feet or whatever it is and then pick a fish out of the ocean or whatever it is they actually eat. As I say, I’m not really a falconer.

So as a metaphor, I use it sometimes to help people understand, there are going to be times where even I at the level that I operate need to go deep, and I need to go deep fast. I need to understand some problem at some level of detail so that I’m assured myself that I’m making good calls on whether or not to put energy over here or energy over here or what have you.

Now, the problem, of course, is that generally people who work for you don’t like this very much. [CHUCKLES] And there’s this word, “micromanagement,” that comes up from time to time. I don’t think I’m that person, but maybe some people have a different opinion. But my point is I’m not trying to solve necessarily the problem. That’s generally not my job. But I do believe that sometimes you have to go very deep to understand the problem and to hang out in that problem space for a while and really get it.

So let’s go back to driver earnings for a second. It’s very easy to detect that drivers want to be paid more like anyone who’s doing a job. That’s not complicated. The question becomes then, how do you do it in an economic way? But I think what becomes more interesting is, well, hold on. What else are drivers telling us about their goals and their life besides the obvious, besides the loud thing, which is earnings?

And one of the things that we know is that– so the vast majority of people who drive on the Lyft platform do it part time. They’ll do it 20 hours a week or less. Often it’s supplemental income. Sometimes it’s a bridge. They’ve just lost their job, and they need to earn quick money, whatever it is.

But it’s always– most of the time– let’s call this 85% of the time– it’s part of a bigger plan. Call it 15% of the time a person might want to be a professional driver. 85% it’s a bigger plan. So how can we support them? How can we– how can we support them in a way that’s going to be economically good for us?

So we put together this thing called the driver accomplishment letter, which allows the driver to push a button and get a readout of their accomplishments, an AI-generated readout so they can use that, for example, as a reference letter for another service-oriented job.

That’s an example– sorry for going on at some length with this, but that’s an example of moving beyond the transactional and the obvious stuff and trying to understand deeply enough, what do drivers really care about? Not just making more money but setting themselves up for maybe longer-term financial success in a way that if you don’t do those social media readings or focus-groupy-type things– you might not get to. But once you get there, you realize, oh, yeah, this really matters too.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So in your recent shareholder letter, you recently wrote about a different kind of problem. You have a term for it that I’ll let you share yourself. But it’s basically the slow degradation of a product, of a service that happens over such a long period of time that you’re not really aware of it, until the problem is so bad that it’s more difficult to fix. So how do you protect against that?

DAVID RISHER: Yeah, so I think you’re referring to enshittification. I appreciate your– [CHUCKLES] I understand. I wrote this letter myself, but of course I have other people who look at it. And I got a lot of– some pushback on the term.

But I said, look, this is it’s first of all, it’s not mine. It’s Cory Doctorow’s term. You might know him. He’s an author and a thinker. And one of the things that he recognized some period of time ago is that ideas and businesses, let’s say– they start often with a high-quality, high-bar mode but then over time tend to get worse. And you can see this even within rideshare.

Rideshare, for those of you who’ve been paying attention for, let’s say, the last decade– you might remember when you first got in the car it was kind of a magical experience. The driver treated you super well, and maybe it was a very nice car. And it kind of felt amazing. I push a button, and three minutes later, someone pulls up. They take me where I want to go. I don’t have to pay at the end. It seems like magic, all this stuff.

Well, rideshare, like many other things– but I’ll use the industry I know the best. I would say, looking at it objectively, it’s gotten worse over time, not better. And we’re in the service industry. That’s crazy. So one of the, let’s say, responsibilities I feel, as a leader in this industry, is to push against that and to say, let’s not just let that be the way. Let’s not let quarterly earnings or what I call additive bias– again, not my term. But there’s always a general mode of, just add more and more stuff to a thing, and make it better, which sometimes is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Anyway, let’s actively fight against some of this. And again– I should zoom out– my basic premise in the last two years has been– customer obsession is what’s going to drive profitable growth. Customer obsession will drive profitable growth. And it’s worked right. We used to be not profitable. Now we’re profitable, full stop. And we used to be not growing so much, and now we’re growing a lot.

So anyway, so I think all the questions you’re asking get at the same fundamental premise, which is, can you really be a customer-obsessed organization and grow as a result profitably? And we’re trying to demonstrate the answer is yes.

ALISON BEARD: So on that note, Shazab is asking, how do you ensure that your 1.5 million driver contractors, who are gig workers– they’re not employed by Lyft– live and embrace your customer experience obsession?

DAVID RISHER: Ah, this is a very cool question. This is a very cool question. And I’m going to answer the question, but I’m going to give you– I’m going to tell you you’re in good company for asking this question. So first of all, let me say this– service, of course, doesn’t just mean, what happens when you’re in the car.

It means, for example, after I open up the app, what’s the estimate I’m going to get? How fast am I going to get picked up? Let’s start with that. So right now we pick you up about a minute faster, on average, than we did a year ago. That’s about 40 faster than our biggest competitor, which is actually quite an accomplishment.

So before I get to the answer, I will just note that “service” means a whole lot of different things. It can mean, for example, does your driver cancel on you, which is quite irritating? And you might– interestingly enough, it’s actually hard to detect in the data how irritating it is because people tend to get rematched, and a car eventually picks them up.

But people find it very frustrating. They don’t like the idea of– and you’ve probably seen this yourself. It says, oh, we’re finding a new ride. It’s not a great experience. So anyway, that service experience starts from the second you pick up the app.

But now to the center of your question, now you get in the car. The car pulls up, and you get in the car. And I find this a very, very interesting question of how can– we do all kinds of things today. Let’s just start with level set.

So we have what’s called a driver education center, a coaching center. I’m a driver myself, as I said. I just got a prompt yesterday to go in and review some videos and stuff. In a week– actually, we haven’t said this publicly yet, but I’ll say it now because why not– we’re actually starting a new driver podcast, which I think will be very cool because drivers, of course, spend time in the car.

And it’s actually not– it’s produced by Lyft, but it’s actually drivers talking to– its two drivers, a man and a woman, talking to each other about how to deliver great service and how that connects to great tips. So that’s cool. And then we also have various incentive programs and bonuses and so forth and so on if you do certain things and don’t do certain things. So there’s a whole, as you can imagine, machine behind it.

But I still think the question is even more interesting because– and I’ve asked this very same question. I happen to have had the very lucky experience of getting to talk to Thomas Keller a couple months ago, who runs The French Laundry and then just completely coincidentally to Eric Ripert, who runs Le Bernardin in New York, so two three-star Michelin restaurants.

And I asked both of them exactly the question you’re asking me. I said, how can we, as a company, coach, cajole, encourage, whatever it is but create a service culture, a service ethic among the 1.5 million drivers that drive on our platform that’s at the same level, same consistency, maybe not five-star, three-star level but a consistent level, that you do in your restaurants?

And both of them– it was so interesting. You know the difference in a question you ask, and the person is– they give you a rote answer and like, whatever. But this was the opposite. In both cases, they leaned into this and spent another five or 10 minutes saying, that’s a mind-blowing, mind-blowing idea. Like, how can you get at that level the type of service that we get?

So that was a very, very long way of not answering a question. I don’t actually know yet. I can tell you some of the things we’re working on, and some of them I’ve already mentioned. But I think it’s one of the things that’s going to, I hope, set us apart and make us an industry leader in this group, in this area.

ALISON BEARD: I’m sure that driver experience, customer experience is going to play a big role in your answer to the next question. But it is a really good one, and it’s certainly one on everyone’s mind. Two people are asking it. Jordan asks, how does Lyft differentiate itself from its biggest competitor to encourage consumers to switch?

And an anonymous viewer asks, how did you position your company to compete so well against a robust, name-recognized competitor? And kudos to our very polite audience for not mentioning the name of the competitor. But that’s the question for you. How are you battling this dominant force in your industry?

DAVID RISHER: Sure. So again, it is a good question, and it’s quite hard. It’s quite hard, particularly when some of our drivers drive on both platforms. The car is the same. So it’s quite an interesting problem.

I’ll go back to the same thesis. So you mentioned also that I was on the board of Lyft for a couple of years before joining the CEO. And it’s quite interesting and, of course, a separate issue of the perception you have of as a company– of a company as a board member versus inside. I will say, as a board member, I believed the company was customer-obsessed, and I was asked to be on the board to push that idea at the board level because boards often think about finance and strategy, not so much customers.

But I came to believe over the course of the two years I was on the board before joining as CEO that customers– and then when I joined the company as CEO, I realized, no. Not that we were not but that, gosh, we were a bunch of different things. We were many– we were trying to do too many things all at the same time and maybe not– not maybe not. I’m sorry– definitively not really obsessing over our customers. We were pricing too high. We were paying too little. Our reliability wasn’t so great, on and on and on.

And so the answer to your question– again, it comes to the same. Our purpose is to serve and connect. Let me start with those two words, “serve” and “connect.” And I want to serve riders and drivers better than they’ve ever been served before, and I want to connect them with the people and places they love. That’s big, big picture, what I want to do.

And that’s what we’re doing. So I’ll give you some evidence that we’re beginning to make some inroads against those other guys. When I joined– let’s look at two statistics. When I joined, our share was about a 26, maybe 27, now, most recent, about a 30, 31. That might not seem like a big change, but it’s a big change.

In Canada, we’ve gone from being irrelevant to having our ride volume double and double again. That’s been 100% a street fight against the other guys because we weren’t really there, and then we entered seriously about a year ago. And now we’ve been–

And again, so some of it comes from differentiated service, things like Price Lock, Women+ Connect, a product I started, actually, on the first day I was here that lets women drivers and riders choose each other, a product that’s coming out next week. I’ll give you an early preview. It’s called Lyft Silver, which allows old people to have a simplified version of the app, and you can invite them to be part of the app and even pay for their ride if you’re maybe a son or daughter, caregiver.

So some of it’s product differentiation. Some of it’s partnerships. We have partnerships with a company called Bilt, for example, or a company called, well, Chase Sapphire Reserve. Many people probably have their credit card or– in the audience. So some of it’s that. We have these sorts of partnerships that give us exclusive or preferential access to certain customer sets in return for certain things.

Some of it’s brand, an area, actually, we haven’t actually invested that much in recently, but you’ll see more of that later this year and next year. So again, maybe a little bit of an “all of the above” thing, but the through line through all this is we want to level up the service that you get by far, by far and really redefine it.

And here’s where I’ll end. On the driver’s side– and this is probably the area where we’ve made the most progress– because of things like earnings guarantee, because of– and this earnings commitment and a set of tools around that and various other things we’ve done, we now have a 20-point advantage, 20-point advantage over the other guys when drivers are asked the question, which company would you prefer to drive from, 20 points. So step by step by step, by treating them well, by obsessing over drivers and riders, that’s how we’re getting there.

ALISON BEARD: So you’ve been a change agent in the company. When you took over as CEO, you wanted to execute a turnaround that included layoffs at the start. How did you make the very difficult decisions in that scenario and then communicate them to the workforce?

DAVID RISHER: Yeah, so it was very difficult but in a weird way kind of straightforward. And this is what I mean. So my first day was April 17, 2023, and I had actually been coming in for the prior– call it two months, on Thursdays and Fridays. So that my first full-time day.

And within the first, say, six weeks, we had announced a couple of very significant things. The first, as you mentioned, was quite a significant layoff. It was 26% of the workforce. Now, that’s devastating. That’s devastating.

But– or and, I guess I should say– the framing that I gave was, this is the only way, only way that I know how to pay for the things that we are going to do for our customers, for our riders and drivers, which is to say, lower prices to be competitive and raise pay to be competitive.

And I was– and of course it was devastating, of course, for the company and particularly because the company had gone through layoffs in the past. But I will say– and I don’t think this is just people telling me what they thought I wanted to hear– even some people who left the company, who were asked to leave the company or told to leave the company, said, I hate it, but I get it. But I get it.

If we want this company to survive, you got to make these types of choices, and it’s the type of choice that maybe we needed to have made in the past that we didn’t make with such clarity of purpose, which was so that we could provide better service to riders and drivers.

The second thing, just to walk down that path for a couple more steps, I said is– and remember, you have to put yourself back in 2023. We’re all coming back to work three days a week. Now, this was an interesting decision because at the time it was not obvious that that was maybe the right thing to do. And in fact, the company had in the past said, we’re going to be remote first, as many companies did. Now, obviously, a lot of companies since have also done the same.

But I bring this up because I thought of it as a very important cultural moment for us as well, to say, if our purpose is to serve and connect and we’re about getting people out of the house and dealing– all these sorts of things, we can’t just do it remotely, and we’re not going to come up with our best ideas. And we’re not going to– it’s very hard for that– again, you can look at the data screens. But to get that real feel of what drivers and riders really will respond to without the whiteboard sessions and all the rest, so that was a very important second thing.

And then the third thing that we announced– it was all right in these first couple of weeks– was a new product called Women+ Connect. This– I mentioned this before briefly– allows women riders and drivers to choose each other. And this was something I actually started on the first day. It was actually 10 o’clock in the morning the first day I was here.

And the reason I thought it was so important is because it was an idea that had been kind of floating around for a while, and people had always come up with a way to say no to it. Ah, it’s complicated, or there’s legal issues, or this or that, all sorts of things. And I’m like, yeah, but on the other hand, 25%– excuse me, 50% of our riders are women, roughly, and 25% of our drivers are women. And they’re telling us guys, when we listen, that they’re not always comfortable, particularly late at night or particularly in a new city. They’re not always comfortable. So what are we doing here?

So anyway, we pushed through some of those objections and talked about the risks and characterized them in certain ways and did the technical work. And I think it was six months later, in August, they came out with a– came out with the product. And it’s been very popular. It’s actually one of our most popular products, particularly for drivers. Once they turn it on, they never turn it off

I go into detail on this because I wanted to say from the beginning, it’s not just about cost-cutting. It’s cost-cutting for a reason– we can do better for riders and drivers as a result. And we’re going to grow too. We’re going to innovate. We’re not going to let this stall us, and we’re going to do it together.

ALISON BEARD: That’s good advice for anyone who’s trying to lead a change effort in any-size organization or team. So Martin asked, would you consider onboarding autonomous drivers, i.e., cars without driver, and Wendy asks, how does Lyft view the Waymo disruption, continuing to innovate toward that future trend, while balancing your current business model and offering and assuring support to your current drivers?

[00:28:23.75] DAVID RISHER: Yeah, so great questions.  So the answer to the first is yes, we will absolutely welcome autonomous vehicles onto our platform. In fact, we’ve already announced an agreement with a company called– with a company called May Mobility that operates or will operate in Atlanta later this year, actually this summer. They operate Toyota Siennas in self-driving mode.

And we’ve announced an agreement with Mobileye, which is a technology company that produces autonomous technology that will be installed in a to-be-named OEM, to-be-named car that will also be on our platform. And I think, if I zoom out for just one click, autonomous vehicles, self-driving vehicles are absolutely going to happen. In some places, it’ll happen fast. Here in San Francisco, they’re happening quite quickly. In other places, it’ll be slower. But it’s going to happen.

So then the question is, well, how do you really embrace it? How do you bring them onto your platform in a way that hopefully expands the market, which– we’ve actually seen some evidence of that, which is great– is respectful and acknowledges the fact that you’ve got millions of people driving on the platform too? So how do you work with them through this transition period?

And then how do you make sure that you’re not accidentally being disrupted out of business? Waymo is a very interesting company. Perhaps at some point they’ll be a partner of ours. Right now you might see them as a competitor, a small-scale competitor. But still, they’re doing stuff that competes directly with us in some of our markets.

So it’s no exaggeration to say it’s probably the thing that I’m thinking about the most and our board is the most engaged with, but I’m quite optimistic that under 99 scenarios out of 100 it turns out to be actually quite accretive for the industry because it gets– remember, people take 160 billion rides a year in their own private cars. Rideshare is only three billion between us and the other guys.

So there’s so much opportunity for other people driving you and that experience being part of people’s lives that I tend to be much more focused on how to take advantage of that market share expansion than I am about fighting a particular battle with a particular competitor or something like that.

ALISON BEARD: OK. This is another anonymous viewer asking. He’s clearly done his research. He says, from your wiki page, an impressive career advancement, Microsoft, Amazon, and now Lyft. It’s clear that your bosses have loved you. What characteristics do you think set you apart from others?

DAVID RISHER: Wow. That’s like a– it’s like an Oprah Winfrey-style question.

ALISON BEARD: I know. I love it when they get personal. I do love it when they get personal.

DAVID RISHER: Honestly, it’s maybe easier for me to turn the question around just a little bit and say what I learned at those places. What I learned from working at Microsoft– and I didn’t work directly for Bill Gates, of course, but I did have enough interaction with him to get a sense of who he was and what his values and focus was. He was a very competitive person, and so I learned how to compete hard. I really did. And that was very important learning.

And then I also learned a lot about taking technology, from a guy named Todd Nelson, actually, my boss for a long time at Microsoft, taking technology which can feel a little obscure, particularly back in the ’90s, and making it personal and trying to understand it at a personal level, not just at a technology level.

I think I did work directly for Jeff Bezos for quite a long time at Amazon, and customer obsession really did come from him. He understood early on the internet everyone’s a click away from everyone else, and so if you don’t– there’s no such thing as an undifferentiated competition. You have to differentiate in order to compete. Otherwise, people go to something else that’s better, so anyway, that real focus on customer obsession.

And then I ran Worldreader for a long time, the nonprofit I founded, and there I was my own boss. I was my– well, my board was boss. But really what I learned there is this idea of leading with purpose and that you can get people– you have so few tools in the nonprofit world. You have small salaries. You don’t have stock. But you do have purpose, and if you lead with purpose, gosh, people are willing to do amazing things. So maybe those are some things I’ve learned over the years.

ALISON BEARD: I really like that you turned a question asking about why you’re so amazing to talk about why your bosses were so amazing and what they taught you. And so I think maybe what characteristic is most salient for you is that you’re a learner. You’re curious, and you’re picking up lessons from other people. OK, this last question– and it’s just a one-word answer– what’s your Lyft driver rating?

DAVID RISHER: 5. [CHUCKLES]

ALISON BEARD: I’m not surprised. All right, David, I’m sorry that we’re out of time. It’s really been a pleasure talking with you today. Thank you so much.

DAVID RISHER: Alison, I’ve had a ton of fun. Thanks for the great questions from you and from the whole audience. It was great.

ALISON BEARD: That was Lyft CEO David Risher in conversation with me at the 2025 HBR Leadership Summit.

We’ll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about leadership from Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, be sure to leave us a review.

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This episode was produced by Dave Di Ulio, Elie Honein, Curt Nickisch, and me. Music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Julia Butler, Scott LaPierre, Simona Sparane, Maureen Hoch, Amy Poftak, Alex Kephart, Rob Eckhardt, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.