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It's been holding its first over investor day this week, with the company projecting growth bookings to grow about fifteen percent and a compound annual rate over the next three years. Investors liking that clarity a stick in a little bit more in the LIFT CEO David Rusher, who's here in New York City. It was a big event. It was lots of musical performances, and then the serious matter of numbers of margin. What gets you that fifteen percent compound increase?
What gets you an improvement in margin and profitability too.
So I don't think you're going to be surprised about this, but the answer is customer obsession is what gets us there, right. I mean, we're a scale business. We're a scale business. We do two million rides a day to day. We're going to get to twenty five billion dollars in bookings over the next couple of years. That just means doing more of customers, like picking them up faster, pricing better, and then innovating like with women plus connect and some
of the other things we've talked about before. It's really the basics, but you do them really well. Over and over again, and you can grow an incredibly big and profitable business.
I can see that helping bookings. How does it do the profitability? Do you have to start to charge people a little bit more to be able to get that margin?
No?
No, in fact, that's not a lot on the plan, and standward, it's in the plan are things like lift media. So this is such an interesting thing. Think about all the different ways brands want to talk to you today. A lot of them are online, right, They're through Google, maybe Meta whatever it is. Well, we actually have people in cars going to grocery stores. And is that interesting that maybe you know Cres versus Collgate. Maybe you don't care too much, but maybe there's an advertiser who'd like
to talk to you. Is you're about to walk into Kroger, for example. So that's part of the way that we can kind of work with margins. We can also work with modes and some other things. A lot of good ideas.
There, David, good morning, is ed. I'd like to look past the numbers a little bit. I understand the seven hundred and nine million rides you did in twenty twenty three, and you make this argument that your target market or total addressable market is based on the total miles driven in personal cars. But what I don't see is how you're going to go after that addressable market convincing people not to use their own vehicles but take you instead.
Right, Well, you know I don't have to do a lot of that. To be honest, it's one hundred and sixty billion trips that people take a year. Let's just look at the daily commute. Every single year, people commute to and from works work fifty five billion times, fifty five soul crushing billion times. So you don't have to take much of that to make a real difference in
our seven hundred to eight hundred million rides. We've got a new product that we're just in the process of developing, for example, that will allow you to lock in your price, so every single day, instead of a pobace that bounces around, you get a consistent price. And that's something we know people stress about. Literally, people wake up early in the morning just to check a couple of different apps to figure out what the least expensive way to get to
work is. So if we can take that off the table, that might increase us by call it a ride a week. But we ride a week, times fifty two weeks a year, times millions of people. It adds up pretty fast.
David. When I said you were coming on the show, the majority of questions from the audience were about robotaxi. You and I've discussed this in the past, but Lift has a complicated history with robotaxi. I think at the core of their question is will you survive in a world where you know, Zeukes has a really big runway, Waimo appears to have a really big runway.
Yeah, yeah, so we will survive. Let's just take that off the table right now, because I think the way to think about it is this. You know, it's one thing to create a robotaxi, and both of those companies are doing really incredible work. I'm super super impressed with
the technology and how it's coming together. But it's a very different thing to two million times a day, pick people up, drop them off, do it in weird weather, do it at airports, and so on and so on, and so I think it's a much more likely scenario that one displaces the other, that actually we work together, right, that we end up welcoming them to our network. Because if you're a ROBOTAXI company, and I know you've taken for example, the Zoukes ROBOTAXI. Gosh, you need a lot
of volume to really drive the numbers. Otherwise, you know, I mean you make ten ten cars, you know, ten million dollars a car, it doesn't make any sense. So you've got to have someone like us as a partner who can really incorporate them into our network. And I think that's the most likely scenario that you know, a bunch of different companies. I think they're going to work on.
No soul crushing commute for Ed when he's in that zoos about heading around that, David, I'm interested in you can work together with robotaxis, but you're not going to work together with Uber And I'm interested is to Ultimately they're really focusing on this advertising focus too. Is there room enough of both of you? How are you going to compete for that?
I don't think we have to compete for them because I think this. You know, one of the things I learned from Jeff Bezos is work on things that are durable. If you're going to build a big business, work on something that's durable. Okay, I can predict in five years ten years, one hundred years, there are going to be companies like the ones we work with today, Chase, You, NBC, Universal, Delta with their skymiles program, Kroger, Ihop. These are five
companies that we're working with today. Every single one of those companies or their siblings or their brethren are going to want to talk to customers in new ways. And we've got two million rides every single day. So no, I don't think that this is one of the zero some things. I think actually this is a whole new category of mobile advertising. I think we're going to get their first. I think we're going to do it better. But if other people want to follow us, and more power to them.
Of course works Famaz and you work for Microsoft. Do you learn a lot from those businesses? And both of those are plowing forward and artificial intelligence, I'm sure you are too. How much can you use my data as a lift user to dictate what ads I'm seeing? Make it more specific for me without wading me out?
So great question. I mean I would actually turn it around a little bit and say, of course, artificial intelligence is going to revolutionize a lot of different businesses. I would start actually with our drivers. Look at all the different ways drivers interact with on our platform. Right now, by the way, forty one percent of our drivers don't speak English as their first language at home. So imaginal
world where artificial intelligence can help with simultings translation. Every single one of our drivers wants to earn more our platform. Imaginar world where drivers can use an intelligent assistant to help them figure out how to spend their time so they can earn even more on the platform. And then you get to the targeting side, and our goal is going to be to make the targeting so seamless. You think of it as a benefit, like, oh wow, this is fantastic. I'm literally getting a coupon off of my
fe what's your favorite toothpiste? Out of curiosity.
I'm using some weird one made in India that doesn't have fluor ride in it. I'm like going into that big rabbit hole on.
You're one of those people, Okay, fair enough, Well you know what, I use a product called David Toothpaste. I don't know if they're on the line now, Sorry, I've got a personalized it's not personalized, it's just pure coincidence. But there also I think they have a different formulation than Florid. I don't know. I'm not so focused on that, but it's a very nice tube I can tell you that.
So imagine I'm going to CVS and I get five dollars off my David's Tuesdays instead of the big, long, ridiculous thing that you get after you check out there. I think it's a better experience.
David on the AI note, I got a very specific question from an audience member on X how is lift leveraging AI? Is it truly a buzzword for them or are they really making use of it in a meaningful way? And you gave the example or a couple of examples there from the driver's perspective, what about the rider's perspective? And what about your internal use?
Sure? So all three? Right? So internal is really about productivity and quality? Right? We use AI to check our code. We use AI to come up with different ideas, sometimes as kind of idea starters. Anyway, a lot of interesting things there. For drivers. I just mentioned a great way I think to sort of maximize earnings as an example, and I think for riders, imagine a world. Here's a scenario that I bet has never happened to anyone listening. You ever leave your iPhone in the car, and how
how fun is that experience is? You know two minutes later when you realize you don't have it, well, you know, AI is pretty good at detecting patterns and understanding the gosh the car is moving one way. You know, you've just gotten out of the car. What's going on here? Maybe you can reroot the driver back to drop the phone off for you. So I think, look, you can overhype AI. You know, maybe it's not going to cure cancer tomorrow. Probably isn't, to be honest, but I do
think that every single day. If we're customer obsessed and that's going to be our focus, customer obsessed AI, we can use it in really innovative ways.
Let's see it. David Richard, thank you so much. We appreciate you coming into a well head quolt.
It is always a pleasure.
You'll good to see