Lyft CEO David Risher on record bookings, Waymo partnership in Nashville, and AV rollout strategy

Google's most intelligent model yet. state-of-the-art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. Up next, we have David Richer. He's the CEO of Lyft, and we're going to ask him about the Ferrari Luche.

Ferrari Luche, yes or no. Is it the ideal lift mobile? Yes. You like the Johnny Drive, the Johnny IV inspired interior? You're down?

I am down. I mean, I look, I like innovation. I like cool new stuff. So, why not give it a try? I've not been in one, though, to be clear. Yeah, I don't think anyone has. I mean, they did a they did a PR uh you know uh a day. They didn't show the exterior of the car, but they did let some journalists come and twist the knobs and

hear the click pl I'm with you. I like that there's some fresh ideas in there, and I hope the other manufacturers

Yeah.

Uh adapt as well.

What's the freshest idea you have for 2026 for Lyft? What's happening? What's happening in your world?

Oh, dude, a lot. Well, so we just announced earnings, which is always kind of an interesting time.

So, record bookings, which is great, and accelerating. Record profits, which is nice as a business.

Over a billion dollars in cash generated, which again is nice as a business. And the only reason I start there is because to me it says like this is customer obsession driving profitable growth, right? Like I took this job maybe almost three years ago now. Actually, fun fact, I was sort of convinced to do it on Valentine's Day three years ago. So, it's coming up right on that magic moment. My wife and I had such a romantic evening talking about Lyft that night. But anyway, so the point is like

that's amazing.

It was it was it was a thing of beauty. But anyway, so um yeah, and so here we are super well positioned for 2026. Why? Because international expansion, that's a fresh thing. That's a big deal for us.

Uh autonomous vehicles, self-driving vehicles, that's a super super um big deal for us. So we've got a couple of big what we call uh growth vectors in the business. Yeah. What's the biggest uh what what's the market internationally that's still ripe for ride sharing to come?

Yeah. So, it's really interesting. You know, Europe uh is is an established ride share market of course, but there's still a huge huge taxi market in Europe. And it's really interesting like if you look at the total mobility like outside of people driving their own cars in Europe, still a ton of people every day pick up the phone and super old school, you know, call the phone number and get a taxi to their house and stuff like that. So that's actually a big transition thing that's happening that we're really uh kind of helping power is the kind of moving from offline to online. And then just like all over the world, I mean self-driving cars are going to be a big deal for all of us. And you know, I look yeah, you know, 3, five, 10 years, you know, it'll be 5% and then 10% and then 20% and then 50%. Then that's going to be huge. Um Oh, and bikes are always big in Europe, too. Even bigger than the US.

Uh how are your how are your conversations uh like with other public company CEOs? Right now we're in this period of insane volatility. Do and and it seems like no matter what uh management team says on an earnings call, you're going to have uh you know uh some some massive volatility, but um yeah, what what are those conversations like? I'm curious. Do you guys have a little group chat where you're like, I'm going in. I'm going in.

I'm going in. I'm going. Wish me luck. What's going to happen here soon?

Uh you know what? We don't actually have those conversations that much. just because they're kind of boring, you know? I mean, it's sort of like everyone has the same level of frustration, of course, where it's sort of like, oh my god, you know, everything seems so volatile and it's so weird. I was actually just thinking about this yesterday. I mean what happens right now I don't know if you guys know this but what happens is you come out with earnings and then like for example again we had so record um uh you know bookings record rides record profits you know good go good go good go good go good go good go good go good go good go good go good go good go good go good go good go good go good go good go good go good go good good okay so for like the first 30 seconds headlines say you know whatever lift beats on profits or you know lift you know highest rides ever something like this and then there's some market reaction now the market reaction might have something to do with some totally different thing you know some weird or cruel thing that some bot remember happens after hours so some bot picks up some weird cruel thing that doesn't fit in the model and then all of a sudden you know starts selling shares and then you know the sentiment turns and this is all after hours stuff super thinly traded. Okay. So then the headlines get rewritten in real time by other bots who are not reacting to the news of the earnings. They're reacting to the reaction of the news and that tends to

and then they're creating so they they see the stock price move and then they're creating a written narrative of why it's happening that then gets turned into a a an article that then other people are reading. 100% and remember a lot of people don't read much beyond the first paragraph and so they'll just see this headline which used to say you know lift beats on profit or lift beats on whatever and now you know lift shares down you know 10% or whatever it is and so it's such an interesting thing anyway it's a little bit of a meta point but like right now as a society it's like we're almost we're almost reacting to the reaction more than to the thing itself which is which is a little bit mind-bending.

Yeah that's uh yeah that's super fascinating. We're reacting. We're we're we're letting the bots react and then deciding how we feel based on based on that.

That's that's exactly right. And the funny thing is the the bots are reacting for their own algorithmic reasons that might not particularly be well plugged into any reality. Anyway, you can go on this for hours, but it's a little like at the sort of super like species level, we're kind of liking we're kind of like letting the machines take over a little bit. We're not forming our own opinions. we're letting them tell us what our opinion should be and then reinforcing that which is a little bit a little counter but anyway like of course some version of this going on for a long time it's just sort of exaggerated now I remember this is something I I worked for as you guys know Jeff Bezos for a long time and you know Amazon for example back in the 2000s was you know $6 stock or something like this and people would ask him like how do you stay um you know sort of uh sort of focused he's like the good news is like I know the data and this is how I feel too like I was in a meeting yesterday about our self-driving car initiative. It's amazing. And I was in another meeting yesterday about our Super Bowl performance. It was amazing. We were up 13% year-on-year. We picked people up faster and we took we were down 20% in surge pricing. In other words, our prices were were 20% better than they would have been if we'd had our search pricing algorithm from last year, which is great because it means that we're able to do this at a lower cost to to customers. So, like I see the data and I see how well positioned we are right now. So, my last thought on this is this is now my my new favorite CEO tool. Back to your point. You know what these are?

Noise cancelling headphones.

Yeah, noise cancelling.

That's great. Can you unpack a little bit more of the Whimo partnership? Talk about how that's progressing um and just broad roll out your plans where you how how fast do you see that becoming meaningful and growing?

For sure. So, I'm going to zoom out one click and you just to sort of remind everyone. So, I'm super bullish on

uh AV's autonomous vehicles entering the ride share space. And the reason I'm so bullish is because they're they're um market expanding. You know, when when and we see this in market aftermarket when AVs come in, people take more rides overall because it's cool. It's a it's a cool new product. It's kind of fun. It's sort of futuristic. It's reliable. So, so it expands beyond the current, you know, population of people who take rides here today. And then the cost over time will become lower. you know, for example, insurance costs are lower. That'll be pretty obvious. So, it's nice when the market expands and when your cost of doing business goes lower.

Okay. So, then you ask about Whimo. Whimo, of course, is the leader here in the United States. No question. And we have a very um specific partnership with them announced in Nashville.

Um that was literally one of the meetings I was in yesterday where we're talking about all these different ways where we're integrating across the two platforms. Everything from fleet management to demand generation. And you know if we get a ride are we going to are we going to you know ask Whimo to take it or is a human driver going to give it like all these different you know sort of details that you have to work out when when you're doing a deep partnership which we expect to go live um later this year.

The expectation of that partnership certainly that we have and I believe that Whimo has as well is that this will scale you know beyond just Nashville but Nashville is very much our focus right now.

I'll tell you one last thing. um uh Teara who's the CEO of Whimo was just on a a show yesterday and she was asked about this partnership too and she was it was nice to see her also being very enthusiastic about it and saying you know the thing that I think should be obvious to many people which is even if Whimo wants to go it alone in some markets like they're doing here in San Francisco it's really helpful for them to have a demandgen fleet management partner like us in a place like Nashville and hopefully elsewhere as well because it allows them to really focus on what they want to do well which is you know create the world's safest driver that's the they call it and not have to worry about all the other details of riding of a ride share network. So anyway, it's, you know, stay tuned. We've actually, you know, broken ground on the big depot. I mean, we're doing all this sort of work. And in the next couple of months, we'll start to roll uh rides out in um in in Nashville.

What is uh talk about I'm I'm super curious to actually understand like what does the depot look like? Like what is what is the process? What are all the things that goes into it? What are what are the jobs? That kind of thing.

Yeah. So, first thing is it's big. you know, it t it takes some space uh because you you have to think I mean you're talking about hundreds is something that has to be able to clean, maintain, charge, um uh you know, tune up all all these different things, repair in some cases, you know, couples, hundreds of cars, hundreds of hundreds of cars. And you know, like at at 2 o'clock in the morning, you know, these cars are not necessarily going to be out on the road. So you got to have a place for you know hundreds of cars to sort of go through uh this cycle when the when the demand is low. Um there'll be real jobs there and actually we're hope and we have a we have something called flex drive there which is our own fleet management subsidiary and that kind of is the basis of this thing that we're kind of building it around let's say and so some of the folks working at flex drive you know we'll transition into doing this AB stuff. We'll also frankly end up hiring some drivers in the community who kind of want extra money and know a lot about cars and so forth. But yeah, I mean, think of it as sort of a a big very kind of modern uh you know, kind of um let's say char there are also some pit stops around the around the town that just do charging, but think of it as sort of charging and maintenance, but done for kind of you know, 2026 and beyond instead of

Yeah. So, so yeah, that was going to be my next question is is uh do you have uh for a city like Nashville, you have one major depot, you have some charging stations. Would you ever break out the depot? Basically having like multiple spaces for storage or is like one for a Nashvilleized city is like one facility going to be enough uh to to to kind of likely operate.

I think you know one big central and then a couple of satellites is probably right. It's it's sort of tricky to site these things because if you put them too far outside of town the good news is it's cheap but the bad news is they've got what we call deadhead miles. So just miles going back and forth with probably no rider in them. So you know so you have to find a place that's kind of the right you know ours is kind of near the airport all this sort of stuff.

Uh and then and then you want a couple and it's got to have a lot of power too literally electricity like we work with a utility to figure out what's the place that can support a fairly big power load and then so anyway that becomes your central thing and then you have a couple of satellites around that. How do you think about the the the scaling and roll out of self-driving vehicles just broadly in America? I think a lot of people lean back on what the AI systems can do, incidents per mile, and there's a lot of smooth curves there, but we in a lot of AI world, we're running into the real world. Is there enough energy for this data center? Is there enough are there enough chips for this uh new model or this new new training run? at a certain point. Um, how are you feeling about the ability of the OEM market, the car production, supply chain, uh, even things like regulation, like how how do you see all that playing together? What's the most important thing to focus on?

I mean, you're you're you're literally laying it out. Like, think of this whole thing. You've got, first of all, you got to have great tech that works at scale

without a driver in it that can go, you know, for a long time with with no instance. So that's a very very important thing. Then you have to have an OEM, right? And that OEM has to be willing to make an investment, right? Because it's not just like cool, let's just take the same lines and just, you know, throw some AV stuff on at the end. It's like you want to design production lines that build that A and think about what you know, you can see this with Whimo, right? Like Whimo literally is receiving and I'm talking about the Jaguar platform that they used mostly so far. You know, they're literally like receiving these kind of half-built cars and then kind of disassembling them and reassembling them. It's very complex. So you you want to be able to build that in a very costefficient way. So OEMs have to have to be willing to make a big investment there. Then you've got to have the regulations line up and that's a city by city, state-by-state thing, right? So we just signed an agreement, this is outside the US, we just signed an agreement with Hamburg, Germany. That'll be the first city in Germany and one of the first in Europe to say, "Yeah, we welcome ABS onto our um uh roads. Here's the kind of framework we have to use." Anyway, so that's got to line up. Then someone's got to buy these things and finance these things. So there's got to be financing. By the way, these things might last 3 or 400,000 mi, but unlike a normal used car, they'll have zero value at the end, right? Zero value. No one's going to buy a used AV that's been on the road for 400,000 mi and uses old tech. So, okay, that's a whole financing model that people have to figure out. Then there's got to be all the stuff that we were just talking about, all the fleet management stuff, and that's physical world stuff, right? That's like who's going to charge these things, who's going to reboot them when they need rebooting, who's going to clean them when someone, you know, throws up in the car, all these things. And then, uh, who's going to maintain them? And then you have to have all the demand, you know, management and so forth that we've we're pretty good at. So I think your analogy is a good one, which is that and it's why you see so many tiny pilots which are all kind of handbuilt and and artisally done. But when you think about scale, it really is going to be years and years and years until all of these things line up in market after market after market. Um yeah, I don't know if that exact track do you track the EV AV roll out in China like what what's the timeline for manufacturers to just be you know a BYD that can just plug into a a platform a Chinese equivalent platform like Lyft and just like start earning uh autonomously.

I mean I will say this is an area where it's just flat out China is ahead. Flat out China is ahead. I mean this maybe slightly different from the question you're asking but when I talk to AV so if you're if you're in the business of of producing AV technology uh you know it could be a mobile eye it could be a a wave it could be you know any number of people who are producing this technology independent of the OEM when you talk to them their biggest frustration I'm actually going to quote one of them right now is saying we talked to quote western manufacturers and and it really doesn't matter whether you're talking about VW or Stalantis or board or whatever just western manufacturers and and then you talk to Chinese manufacturers and and in China they're talking 1 to two years and then that same conversation with a western manufacturer is a 5-year conversation. You know it's a it's a 2032 conversation instead of like a 2027 2028 conversation. So the short answer is, you know, there's good AV tech from a lot of places, but frankly, the OEMs are in very very different positions in terms of their ability to to to spin up quickly and and um uh yeah, and get and get a platform out that actually works.

Well, makes sense.

Congratulations on all the progress. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

And fantastic shirt, by the way.

We love the shirt.

Coming in strong.

Well, thank you, gentlemen. It means a lot coming from two fashionable guys.

Yeah. In the plain white shirt. I'm really taking a risk today.

I mean, you're bold. It's part It's It's on brand for you. You're You're bold.

Yes. In a world of uh you know, plain black t-shirts of tech, the white collar shirt white collar shirt does kind of stand out. So, thank you.

I appreciate it. Hey, congrats to you guys on all your progress and your Super Bowl ad. That was amazing.

Thank you. That was a lot of fun. It was a good time.

Slightly smaller ad than yours, but we're working our way up.

We're getting there.

No, dude. You got to start, you know, step by step by step by step. I will tell you, I did zoom in on all the logos. I was looking for the lift logo. It must have been hidden. I don't think I saw it. But any it was

somebody's getting fired.

Tyler is looking into it right now. We're going to send you evidence if it's in there. If we But we might have made a mistake. It's possible. There were a few that were behind certain letters and so they got

And that was it. I looked very closely. Pretty sure it was hidden. It's no problem at all. I'm not holding it against.

We'll figure it out.

No, we take we're taking

Good thing the Super Bowl happens every year.

Yeah.

There we go. 61. It's just around the corner.

There you go. Great to see you, David.

Have a great rest of your day. We'll