Two years after stepping down as president of Lyft, the company’s cofounder John Zimmer is looking back on the rideshare wars from the comforts of his new perch—in the south of Spain.
Who can blame him? Uber vs. Lyft had to be one of the most intense start-up fights in recent memory, a David vs. Goliath tale pitting Uber (which raised $3.5 billion dollars from the Saudis in 2016) against Lyft, the pink mustache company. At one point, Uber was actually paying drivers not to work for Lyft. Even one of Lyft’s own board members had his doubts about the company’s future, advising Zimmer to return to investors whatever cash they had left on-hand and close up shop.
Zimmer and his cofounder Logan Green doubled down instead, raising more money and riding a moment of anti-Uber backlash to within an inch of category dominance—until COVID-19 hit. Uber recovered faster from the pandemic (in parts thanks to UberEats). And in June of 2023, Zimmer and Green stepped down from day-to-day operations at Lyft. David Risher, who’d helped build Amazon into an e-commerce titan, was named as the company’s CEO. Green now serves as the board’s non-executive chairman, while Zimmer is the vice chair. (Elsewhere, Uber founder Travis Kalanick was forced to resign in 2017 in the wake of a series of privacy scandals and sexual harassment claims at the company.)
It’s been a wild ride since Zimmer and Green launched Lyft in 2012 out of their Palo Alto apartment, a place they famously dubbed the “apartfice,” because it served as both their home and office. Now Zimmer is getting back to his early DIY roots, plotting his next move from a small office in his wife’s hometown in Sevilla, Spain.
In his first big interview since stepping down, Zimmer talks about betting on himself, PTSD from the rideshare wars, and that entrepreneurial bug.
MICKEY RAPKIN: We tend to romanticize the early days of a start-up. You and your Lyft cofounder were in the Bay Area, working out of what you called “the apartfice”—the apartment-slash-office. What do you remember most about that early time? Were you hopeful? Fearful?
JOHN ZIMMER: It’s the best commute I’ve ever had. (laughing) It wasn’t easy, but it felt very community oriented. It felt like a project you had to work on in college. We tried to maintain that for quite some time—that feeling of being outside a dorm, working on something you’re passionate about.
ERIC RYAN: I still try to re-create that that feeling, which is harder as the company scales up. But there’s definitely moments where the energy is electric.
RAPKIN: Ride sharing became a part of our lives so quickly that I think we sometimes forget how weird it was to get into a stranger’s car. What was the investor reaction?
ZIMMER: Your parents said, “Never take a ride with a stranger and never get candy from a stranger.” We did both. Because the early Lyft drivers had pink Starburst. What you’re talking about is just this massive behavior change of getting in the backseat of someone’s Honda Accord. That’s really weird. And so, instead of it being a Honda Accord, could it be a Lyft? And how could we make it a Lyft? And that was the pink mustache, which also was absurd, because in some ways we should have been hiding from the authorities. But instead we strapped a giant pink mustache on the front.
The Rideshare Wars
RAPKIN: We learn a lot from the hard moments. In 2015, Lyft was running out of cash. I think you had four months of runway left. One of your investors said you should just return the cash to the investors and close.
ZIMMER: That’s real.
RAPKIN: How did you bet on yourself? Was it pride or did you, or did you really have an answer of how you were going to fix this?
ZIMMER: We had to raise more cash. That was kind of the only answer because Uber was trying to kill us with cash. They raised $3 billion dollars, which at the time I believe was the most money raised privately.
RAPKIN: They were paying drivers not to drive for Lyft.
ZIMMER: Yeah, we had four or five months left. As a first time entrepreneur, I’m looking up to the board as these established titans of industry, but they were wrong. And yeah, we bet on ourselves to raise more money—and did.
RYAN: [As a board member], I’d much prefer to advise and roll up my sleeves and help than sit on an audit committee.
ZIMMER: I don’t know that we ever had an easy year. I mean between COVID, going public, the competition with Uber, the regulatory fights we went through…
RYAN: Any time, when any of my start-ups are going really well, I almost get more nervous. It’s not realistic that you’ll keep a winning streak. When things are hard—as they often are—it’s almost easier. Because you know what the problem is, and you can put all your energy into solving that problem versus waiting for the next problem to emerge.
ZIMMER: I think we might have this addition to solving. It’s masochistic in a way. Maybe you can relate. I’m more comfortable in that hard situation. In the world, I’ve historically been an optimist. But I think life experiences have taught me to see both sides of that. Because things can change quickly. I worked at Lehman Brothers in real estate finance. I wanted to do the two-year analyst program and get the hell out. I actually told a friend, “If I don’t leave after two years, punch me in the face.” I see people get addicted to that salary and lifestyle. People said, “How could you leave a sure thing like Lehman to do a silly carpool start-up?” Three months later Lehman was gone.
RAPKIN: Wow.
ZIMMER: That relates to that quote, “You gotta have eyes behind your head if you’re an entrepreneur.” Now, you can overdo that, which I’ve done at times. Worrying all the time can get you stuck.
RYAN: I always tell people, “The day-to-day mechanics of a start-up are not hard. It’s the mental game that is the hardest part of it all.”
ZIMMER: I can relate.
Prioritizing Mental Health
RAPKIN: John, you’ve been open about your past struggle with depression. Was there something that was stopping you from getting help when you needed it? Do you think it was a stigma? Or was it thinking to yourself, You’re the boss, you shouldn’t need help.
ZIMMER: It was probably a bit of stigma. And also just prioritizing everything else over me. Which is not a formula for success. I was open with my cofounder, who was wonderful, and my wife being supportive and encouraging me. Surround yourself with great people. It’s kind of a corny cliché, but in this situation that was most helpful.
RAPKIN: I want to talk about the next chapter. When you and your cofounder stepped down, did it feel like a door opening?
ZIMMER: I think the real relief came after a few months of seeing David [Risher] settle into the role. It’s like, All right, this is the right person. Then my shoulders dropped. Then I had to learn how to get out of “fight or flight.” I had really trained my body—in a bad way—to be in “fight or flight.”
RYAN: You were in one of arguably the toughest start-up fights with another company. It’s understandable why you ended up in that place of “fight or flight.”
ZIMMER: I don’t want to misuse PTSD, but that’s what some of the therapists have said. This kind of PTSD fight or flight thing, that probably becomes a learned behavior too. And so I found it helpful, although I’d say it’s a long process. I’m sure I’ll be working through it for a while, but I found it helpful to physically change my location. So, by physically going to my wife’s hometown in Spain, it allowed me to kind of reset a bit.
The Next Big Thing
RYAN: Sitting where you are—after selling Method—I found I had this real fear, Was I a one-hit wonder? Did I just get lucky with my first venture or am I actually good? I was kind of terrified. But I also had this itch. I learned so much on my first start-up, mostly through making dumb mistakes, and I wanted to apply all that learning.
ZIMMER: The bar just feels like it raised for myself on what I’m going to work on. I also feel this huge sense of excitement as I’m getting into it. I invited a couple of people to Sevilla and they actually said yes.
RYAN: (laughing) It’s not hard to get people to go there.
ZIMMER: (smiling) Yeah, it was really challenging. But they made the sacrifice. We’re in this really tiny, little $200-a-month Spanish old office building, which is just a table. There’s something romantic about the early days that is real. And I’m excited to kind of exercise that part of my identity.
The Robotaxi Plan
RAPKIN: We should say, you are still on board at Lyft, and the company is preparing to deploy robotaxis this year. In five years, will every Lyft be a robot-driven car? Where do you see that going?
ZIMMER: My predictions have been slower than they’ve happened. But I think we’re moving towards the majority of rides happening [that way]. What’s really neat about the Lyft platform is, I think it’s going to be a hybrid for a long time. I think the market’s gonna grow massively because with autonomous vehicles, the cost of a ride comes down. But do you buy enough autonomous vehicles for 9 am rush hour? Or noon when you know everyone’s eating lunch and not moving? How do you manage the peaks? It’s like having a phone network where you can’t make a call all the time. That doesn’t work. So, having both human drivers on the Lyft platform— I think we’ll increasingly still need, potentially more and more, because instead of people owning a vehicle, they’ll subscribe to a Lyft plan. Just like you do for minutes on Verizon or T-Mobile, you’ll get miles on Lyft.
RYAN: What’s it like to be a board member of a company you founded? And for you personally not to be in the day-to-day operations?
ZIMMER: It feels good. We have a great team, we have a great leader. We have a great healthy board. We have different perspectives. It’s very different. I’m both aware of not wanting to be that board member that was hard for me. But also wanting to provide a perspective that is not from someone who’s doing the day-to-day. I always found that valuable.
RYAN: I always say it’s almost like having grandchildren now. I love being on the boards of companies I founded, but then not having to worry about the day-to-day problems. And really being able to coach, cheer on, empower the team and have that pride of ownership, but not—to your point—the daily firefights and stress.
RAPKIN: As an entrepreneur, what’s getting you out of bed these days?
ZIMMER: My children, my dog. I mean, the problems that kind of most interest—or worry me—are how much time more and more people are spending on screens and not with each other. We’re not eating real foods, we’re eating more processed foods. And then the challenges to the environment. Community and connection is getting me out of bed in the morning, and what can I do to kind of increase that as well as human health and planet health.
RAPKIN: Does that serve as the hint for what your next business is?
ZIMMER: Yeah, I mean, those are the categories. I’m thinking a lot about mission. The next thing I want to do is multiple ideas, but if you can create a mission where you don’t have to have a kind of social impact strategy, where it’s so obvious that the bigger this business gets— the market cap, the sales of this business—the better things are. That to me is awesome. We’re not going to measure social impact. It’s so obvious and it’s so core and essential to what we’re doing that it’s not separate. It’s like the whole thing. But there’s a big scaled opportunity because this other belief I have, especially after seeing what we did, is: Good intentions accomplish nothing. Scale does matter.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. If you enjoyed this piece about how the cofounder of Lyft is recovering from the rideshare wars, click here for more episodes of Cereal Entrepreneur.
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