Lyft (Lyft) CEO David Risher, with the help of new product promotion and refocusing on customer service, said his company is beginning to close the gap with Uber, which continues to dominate the ride-sharing market. “We’re starting to do some assaults on others,” Risher said at the Harvard Business Review Leadership Summit yesterday (April 29).
Risher admits that adopting such a dominant competitor, especially those that many Lyft drivers also work for, is not an easy task. But he believes that the recent feature promotion has begun to be different. These include tools to connect female drivers and riders, option for riders to opt out of price, and an upcoming simplified app interface designed for older users.
“With all this, we want to upgrade our services,” Risher said.
He said when Risher became CEO in 2023, Lyft had about 26% to 27% of the ride-hailing market. Since then, this number has climbed to about 30% to 31%. (The rest is Uber.) Outside the U.S., Lyft has expanded to markets like Canada, which Risher described as “100% street fight with other people because we’re not really, and then we got in seriously about a year ago.”
The rise of autonomous driving has also introduced new competitors in the form of Waymo. Lyft has been pursuing its own autonomous driving strategy, recently partnering with autonomous vehicle company Mobileye Global and may begin deploying driverless cars in the next few years.
Risher said the broader opportunity lies in leveraging the wide market for private car travel. “I tend to focus more on how to leverage market share expansion than on specific battles with specific competitors,” he added.
