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How I Built This with Guy Raz

Lyft's John Zimmer At The HIBT Summit

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.831.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2018

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Next up in our series of episodes from the How I Built This Summit: John Zimmer, co-founder of Lyft. John sat down with Guy Raz in front of a live audience in San Francisco last month to talk about Lyft's visions for the future of transportation – and their fierce competition with Uber. Coming up next month: three more episodes from the Summit – so keep checking your podcast feed every Thursday.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.

0:07.0

Download the app today.

0:09.0

New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.

0:13.0

As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.

0:17.0

So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.

0:24.0

Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.

0:31.0

Hey everyone, it's Guy here.

0:34.0

So today we have another bonus episode from the How I Built This Summit in San Francisco that happened back in October.

0:41.0

It's from my live interview with John Zimmer, the co-founder of Lyft, and my original conversation with John ran back in February of last year.

0:49.0

And if you haven't heard it, you may want to check it out.

0:53.0

Because in it, John tells the story of how he launched his first ride sharing service in college, and how he and his co-founder Logan Green went on to build one of the biggest ride hailing apps in the world.

1:04.0

And I say one of the biggest, of course, because, well, there's Uber, and it's no secret that those two companies have been in a fierce competition pretty much since they launched.

1:16.0

It's a rivalry that's up there with, you know, Coke and Pepsi or McDonald's and Burger King.

1:22.0

And that competition and how it's affected Lyft is one of the things I wanted to ask John about when we sat down to talk at Year of a Boy in a Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

1:32.0

How you doing? Good. Yeah. Did you guys hear his episode?

1:42.0

One of our earlier episodes. Really amazing story. Just like Curiosity, on a given day, and you might not be able to say the exact numbers, but roughly on a given day, how many people use Lyft?

1:55.0

So every month we do over 50 million rides. Wow. It's amazing. I mean, this thing, let's just start with this idea, because when you started this idea, when you came up with this idea for Lyft, did you guys think of this as a simple idea?

2:10.0

Yeah. Yeah. In a sense, when Lyft started, we had a tagline that was your friend with a car. It was that simple.

2:16.0

There are 250 million vehicles in the United States, believe, and each car is used 4% of the time. 96% of the time it's parked.

2:27.0

So the simple idea was, you know, you know, that time where you had a friend with a car that got you where you needed to go. What if we could utilize these cars more? We could offer new job opportunities for those that needed it and flexibility.

2:40.0

If you think about a single parent who can't work a 9-5, having the timing flexibility was large. And so that was the simple idea. Let's create your friend with a car at a community level. And that's how it began.

2:53.0

Yeah. What was it? I mean, how much of it was driven by this sense of, we want to kind of recreate our relationship with automobiles, the sort of idealistic notion, and how much of it was, we want to completely disrupt an industry.

...

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