Okay. So we are here today, at NFX HQ in San Francisco. I'm Pete Flint. I'm here with my partner and friend James Currier, and we're talking about the Lyft IPO. Which is going out on NASDAQ in just a few days. Right. And so James, 2019 is a pretty exciting year for network effects. 70% of value and technology is created by companies have a network effect, their core. So this year in 2019, it's a big year for network effect IPOs.
Bunch of companies starting with Lyft and Uber and Flint Pinterest and Slack on the B2B side Airbnb and Postmates, maybe Robin Hood this year. All of these companies have at their cores network effects that determine how the companies move, how they grow, how they compete, and understanding those network effects is critical to understanding what they're gonna be in the future.
And their examples are good for startup founders to understand, you know, how to emulate the they've had, but also to understand the environment that you're going to be operating in over the next 10 years as these companies go public, and the the network effects that they have and the reinforcement they're gonna be trying to do and where you can play around that.
For people who are investing in these IPOs, you know, they're trying to get a sense of of what the future hold for these companies and understanding the the engines of these businesses is gonna be critical to taking their best guess at what happens next for these companies. So this is fascinating company in a fascinating year. You know, I think, both of us have kinda known the company since its origins. And, after many, many years, they are finally going public.
And I think there's a whole bunch of interesting things going here. One is kind of obviously, you know, where it affects, venture fund that focuses on network effect businesses. And this is at its Morgan, network effect business. It's a transportation marketplace. And so it's fascinating to dive Flint, not just the evolution, but also some of the data and kind of the published data. Around the company. But where they've gotten, where they've come from. And where they're going.
Yeah. You know, the $20,000,000,000 question for Lyft is around competition. It's fascinating the competition, with Uber. This is a you know, it's turned into a duopoly, pretty much in the US. Right. Given that it's not a duopoly in China, for instance. Yeah. Or another part of the world. The network effects, within the business, how defensible is this? Because if it's not defensible, then it becomes, a pretty low margin business.
What's interest thing about this particular network effect that we noticed years ago was that we call it asymptoting, right, where, you can get a driver to come pick you up, but 4 minutes, and that's great. But if they pick up a 3 minutes, that's not necessarily even that helpful, because you still gotta get your bag, your jacket, or your umbrella, or you gotta hug the friend goodbye, or go to the bathroom, whatever it is. You need that 3 minutes to do something before you get in.
So, it's really asymptotes. You you you could get, you know, 10 1000 Flint drivers, and it's not gonna be that much better than where they are now with a 1000. So this is like when, when you open the app, it says your car is 3 minutes away. Yeah. And then you say book it and at rise in 10 minutes. They're just playing with a sort of that 3 minute rule in your mind that that's the sort of threshold of of availability.
Beyond that, it doesn't matter kind of if it's 10 minutes, then you're just switching to the other app. That's right. So the app has to tell you, well, I mean, that's that's a very interesting detail of the product, which which, you know, sort of shows that that's the threshold at which the services get any better.
And if if they don't do that, you might switch over to the other app, which which gets into another interesting challenge with this business, which is what we call multi tenanting, right? We've talked about this before where if I'm a writer and I can choose between the two apps and I can toggle between them in a second, which I can, then I can do what's called Pete tenanting. I can live in 2 different apps. And of course, the drivers can do the same on the other side.
So, you know, by the math of it, this is a pretty vulnerable type of a network effect compared to many of the others that we work with. So this sort of traditional analogy that's often used is telecommunication network effect. So you think of Verizon or AT and T, it's sort of like they're substitutes for each other. Yeah. But there's just that much competition.
So other entrants that have tried to compete against Uber And Lyft have kind of been knocked out because they haven't achieved the sufficient scale and density in their particular markets. Right. Right. So Juno was, I think, the best example, right, in New York. Yeah. You know, if they come in, they raise 50,000,000 bucks They get all the drivers. They had no problem getting supply side of the marketplace, but they had a tough time getting the the riders.
And, and they didn't have enough money with 50,000,000 to actually buy enough traffic so that the drivers would then be, we happy enough, and they ended up selling for 200,000,000, which was really an aqua hire, in that case, which is too bad, because you can see having you know, 3 logos on each, a driver.
You could see, a Flint and an Uber and a Juno, let's say, but it never happened because because of this, what you say is this threshold network effect where You just gotta get both sides of the marketplace in order to get it down to 3 or 4 minutes. So it's interesting looking at the the s one that and, and of course, we don't know kind of Uber's number. While it say sort of asymptoting network effect, they've continued being able to kind of increase their take, within the marketplace.
So they've increase their ability to, to grow revenue per active rider. And at the same time, there's this sort of you know, this aggressive focus on market share gains. So so Uber's been, you know, the number one for several years, but Lyft is fighting back. And growing their market share. It remains to be seen how long term profitable this is gonna be. Right. And because there's discounts, there's as price competition, clearly demand side is simulated by pricing.
I I think the fear is from when investor bespoke if these guys are gonna just battle, kind of, forever. Yeah. Like the airlines. What would be the what would be the airline analogy? Prices are basically commoditized. And so if you look at, the the travel industry is like that the OTA is make a buck or 2, per airline ticket, but in reality, they're very successful businesses because they make a ton of money on hotels. Hotels haven't been commoditized.
So there's still margin there to be gotten, but the airlines, because they're essentially selling the exact same thing, have been able to be commoditized. And so they're really making their money off their frequent flyer Flint. Right? They've they've gone to loyalty programs in order to try to find some margin away from the other airlines. Yeah. As Beller send you Uber's launched a, a reward program, a loyalty program Yeah. To kind of avoid this sort of, multi tenanting. Multi tenanting.
And certainly the kind of packaging and pricing they're putting in is to kind of get people to be loyal to one company versus the other. Yeah. And 2 years ago, Lyft in the United States only had 25% market share, but now they're up to 39%. Why do you think that is? There was clearly a sort of case of Uber, being the early aggressive scale player that's coming in and kind of how executing, frankly, Flint, our spending and, and basically taking market share.
But Lyft has been sort of raising capital and, and fighting back. There's sort of a public narrative that is to delete Uber a moment which helped Flint, which I think was a sort of a modest tailwind for them. I think it's just the company just figured out what they were doing Right. And execute didn't raise money to kind of get to sufficient scale, made them a viable substitute to to Uber.
Yeah. And, and it does feel as if, you know, a consumer product, as you know, they were unable to get the demand side. They're unable to get the unable to get the consumer, enough on, on their platform to actually make it viable.
So this is really a consumer product, and the consumers have emotions about their products, whether it's Hertz or Abel or Coke or Pepsi, And people have these emotions around Flint and the Lyft brand and what it means or what it doesn't Morgan, and it makes a difference. So I've talked to Lyft drivers and they say, I don't do Uber anymore. And I'm like, why?
And I said, well, because the Uber passengers are jerks, and I don't enjoy driving Uber passengers around, and I thought, that 2 companies with the exact same product, the exact same cars, because of their branding, or the pink color, the black color, the names, or I don't know how it happened over the last 8 years, but because of of subtle differences in their branding and their approach have ended up picking different personality drivers and
different personality passengers, so that now Lyft is at 39% market share. It's fascinating to see that slight differences can can make that sort of impact in the long term. I think one of the, one of the core questions going forward is how much the companies look more like each other versus different from each other. And I think you, you know, there was a time early on that Flint was kind of the differentiator company and, and with pig moustaches and fist pumps, all the rest of it.
And Uber was the sleeker mysterious, yuppy kind of black car service. Uber's trying to lighten it up. Flint is getting a little more solid. Yeah. Less Flint bumping. I think you'll probably see the company look more try to look more different, in the future in terms of their branding. I think the the brand differentiation will expand beyond the product differentiation. And they'll try and, focus on differences between the company as a position to target different segments of the population.
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, you've seen now decide to go into the to the scooter business with their own brand. So now the Lyft brand means scooters in some places and rides. Which will be an interesting difference because Uber invested in one of the scooter companies and is keeping that brand separate right now, at least. And so that's gonna start to, to shift the 2, brand meanings to people as well.
Maybe, you know, I think both of them have realized that you've gotta own the app that consumers go to when they want transportation, not just when they want a ride sharing type of transportation. And I think there's a race to own that consumer habit to open up their app instead of somebody else's app. Yeah. And I think take a long term view, that's one of the key strategic focuses for the company is to own the demand side, to be that kind of single Pete, to own transportation.
And that obviously creates sort of a bunch of optionality into autonomous. Yeah. You know, whether it's scooters or multimodal and then autonomous. If you start to control the entry point for transportation, decision making, then that opens up a whole wealth of opportunity into autonomous. It's not gonna be owned by BMW or Mercedes or Tesla. It's gonna be owned by, a a little square on your phone. Right. Right.
Just owning those pixels on the phone might do it, and could be car rentals, could be car leasing, could be public transportation. You know, there's so many different modalities that people do use. It could all be in one app and it's not clear why it shouldn't be. But hasn't happened Pete, and and and we'll see if it does or not.
Yeah. Looking at tech companies are going public, one of the key things that you'd expect to see is is how much the company grows in existing market versus grows in adjacent Morgan. So classic examples, Amazon, moving into kind of multiple categories, multiple geographies, and then multiple industries, you know, with AWS and others. And that's, you know, we know we know that story. Facebook, obviously, with Instagram, and WhatsApp, Google, and YouTube, and others.
On the one hand, Lyft has been taking a kind of stab at Uber for Uber Eats and, being international, but clearly there's there's gonna be series of escrows for this company, grow in their existing markets, and then what's next? Right. And the obvious one is autonomous. Yeah. You know, that's an enormous market, but it it may be 10 years out. Yeah. And it was interesting. I was taking a tour of the Flint, autonomous area down in Palo Alto the other day.
They've got 450 people down there working on autonomous. People in 13 different disciplines and you've got the same thing over at Uber, but they, instead of being in the Bay Area, are in Pittsburgh, Toronto and Ottawa, mostly. And I think they have over a thousand people. Both of the, the companies spending a lot and losing a 100% of what they spend on their autonomous efforts.
And, you know, there's probably another 10 giant autonomous efforts over Google and elsewhere, with the same sorts of very diversified teams and everyone just burning through cash to try to be one of the ones that gets there first. And, it'll be interesting to see how much both these companies start, you know, continue to invest in that you know, once their public and these numbers start to come out and and be scrutinized by by, the investors.
Yeah. And I think how much they use external investments to, to subsidize that because it's, at this point, it's almost an open checkbook, but it's gonna be sustainable. I didn't know if it really mat, you know, in some ways it doesn't matter, you know, for the next several years, if Lyft becomes that kind of like that bun on your screen, then whether that's their own autonomous technology or 3rd party autonomous technology that they integrate as part of the open platform. Maybe that's okay.
Maybe that's okay. But they're all doing it. They're all spending like crazy and put a huge amounts of effort in in that direction. And given that there's, you know, 10 or 11 such efforts, I'd I'd be interested to know what the strategy is on that. I'm I'm looking forward to hearing a lot of the discussion once the company goes public.
You know, we you mentioned Uber Pete, and and one of the things we've seen with this asymptote network effect, which isn't particularly strong, isn't particularly defensible. Is it does feel like Lyft and Uber do need to explore other features and functionality that have better network effects. Right? So, for instance, commute, if if your your higher density in terms of where you get picked up in the morning can make a difference.
So someone to come Six Blocks over, that's an extra 8 minutes if they're stop lights or stop signs. So having someone really close to you for a commute, could be very valuable, and that is not an asymptote 2 sided network effect. It's actually a direct network effect with with people who are commuting, and then you're gonna have to drop you off somewhere.
And so, I think Uber's very smart to go after that, and I'm wondering if Lyft is gonna get into that that area as Beller, simply because it is a much more defensible network effect. And this thing we're talking about right now would be the little button on the phone that would be for all of your transportation modalities.
That's kind of a two sided platform network effect, right, where you create the platform of the button, and then, and then the, the public transit, and the, the rental car companies, and the leasing, everybody else sort of on top of your platform, that too is a much more defensible network effect that, more so than the SASSEM Toni one that they have today.
Of course, the data that's being collected out of that creates tons of improved product experiences, monetization opportunities, partnership opportunities to strengthen that, that platform. But it's unclear how it will change a competitive dynamics, dynamics, but will certainly increase the overall defensibility of those 2 companies, because there there seems to be this sort of copycat mentality between the 2. They're innovating and then replicating between the 2.
So it'll be interesting to see how the psychology of the competition plays out. Right. Cause they do have to watch each other. Well, I think the The dynamics around the wide sharing business is the demand side is clear. You know, there is ridiculous demand for low cost high quality, high availability transportation. The real question is the supply side. That's where the innovation opportunity and long term margin potential is.
And probably from a long term profitability perspective is innovation on the supply side that is to drive for the success of these companies and whether that is branding, whether that's product features, whether that's financing, whether that's autonomous, probably all those, the areas will will be enormously beneficial to to be successful.
And there's a lot of talk about the the demand side experienced, but the supply side will probably be the defining characteristic of coup wins ultimately in the US. In these marketplaces. Yeah, or whoever can aggregate, a diverse set of supply options.
Either by providing it themselves by owning the cars or having drivers who own their own cars or having scooters or, you know, There's gonna be so many different transportation options that they could aggregate or whether it's a commuting network or what. Right. So innovation, I think, is is certainly required on the supply side, but it's also a case of enabling an ecosystem perhaps to develop, different options that can then plug into a demand side aggregator.
Yeah. Lyft is approaching the autonomous strategy in in really 2 pillars. 1 is an open platform, and 1 is a owned and operated and proprietary technology, and it's not clear yet, how Uber's trash is, but it's probably going to be somewhat similar. You have to own the underlying technology for fear of disintermediation by someone else, but you have to maintain a wide number of options to work with as as many low cost, suppliers as as possible.
And it, you know, I think there will be, it's an interesting question about how the data kind of assert, who owns the data around these, around these services? Because that's going to be a key asset in, early autonomous companies taking a, an advantageous lead by aggregating data and building and data network effect essentially around this around this, you know, the new form of autonomous, driving.
You know, another thing that the people don't don't talk nearly enough about typically with with these sorts of discussions about, you know, 2 competing public companies is just the character and the culture of the different companies. I mean, this is something that we've experienced, you know, living here and knowing a lot of the executives of each of the, of each of the companies and their experiences of working in the different different companies.
And I remember, I don't know, 15 years ago, one of the mutual funds pulled me aside and said, you know, Hey, what's this, what's the competition, Yahoo and Google gonna be And I said, please, just look at their cultures. Google's gonna crush Yahoo! And and that did end up happening, but it was kinda or just by knowing the personalities and the and the culture of these companies, you see the same thing with Flint and Uber, very distinct cultures.
There's different types of people work at the place feels very different when you go to their offices. You know, Flint is, you know, much more, collaborative, much more, lighthearted, there's there's a tremendous amount of energy and buzz there, and you have the same energy and buzz over to Uber, but it feels very different. It feels much more you know, driven, much more serious, much more heads down.
See, and it is interesting looking at the the parallels between other industries and other companies which have gone sort of public in the same sort of vintage So Well, Pete, you, you had one with truly Zillow. Exactly. So there's a ton of parallels. So, sir. You were the CEO and took truly a public, and then Zillow was your main competitor in the The products ended up being very similar over time. How did that play out?
It's it's kind of analogous in the sense that truly started on, one segment of the market, which was more home buyers, instead of solely for home Beller, and then over the subsequent 8 years, the sort of product experience morphed. Consumers really couldn't see that much differentiated underlying the products, you know, it's more the brand experiences. So we moved to a marketing battle, not a product at all.
And, and Zillow went public a year Morgan, and Zillow went out in 2011, truly went out in 2012. You know, both companies are Pete, and they obviously, you know, ended up merging, but how the individual leaders think about competition. And clearly, you, you've seen Uber being you know, beaten to the IPO start line by Lyft, which is clearly in a sort of aggressive move to to fight back and own some of their space, because they were an early innovator, in, in the categories.
So they're getting out in front telling their story rather than being compared to to Uber, they're telling their own story and getting ahead of it, which I think is a strashy box did it over Dropbox. That's the other parallel that's slightly different. Mhmm. Similar products, different segments of the market, but box was was definitely the kind of less well known company and smaller company and got out ahead. And I think that was exactly the right thing to do.
I think it's absolutely the smart thing to do for Lyft, to, to get out ahead of it and tell their story and build their brand. And that, you know, for us going public, that was a key a key component of it to to go public was to build our brand and and increase awareness and obviously have a balance sheet and liquidity to to be more active.
The challenge of it going public particularly when you've got this this very visible comp out there is how much the company thinks about sort of competition and, and executing a way, which is, tracking to the tricks of the other public company versus borrowing their own strategy. And it and it appears itself in very subtle, non obvious ways, by the metrics you choose share with Wall Street. So you, you, you've led a bunch of metrics, and then you publish them.
And once you start publishing them, you use very hard to stop publishing those metrics. And, you know, that we often see in kind of, in private companies where, the execution is a display of the, the metrics, which is, you know, generally a huge mistake to make. And it's unclear longer term what lips call metrics are gonna be or Uber's call metrics are gonna be in terms of what drives their ultimate business.
So, they're gonna to resist the temptation, not to just try and optimize Beller term metrics, driven by Wall Street, which may decide of the longer term goal of the business and what drives perfect. Right. Of course, Wall Street's gonna want them to both report the same types of numbers so that they can compare apples to apples and make it easier and Yeah. That may not be in the best interest of either of the company.
And that's particularly hard for the number 2 because they're gonna have inferior metrics in some ways. And an Uber being second will be able to tell a story based on what Lyft has sold. How they think about differentiation from a brand perspective, from a product perspective and a psychology perspective. I, you know, I, I think it's fabulous that these, both these teams was, I didn't know about Uber only Flint.
The founders have, a super majority Pete, that's controversial opinion, but I think it's a great thing. As the number 2, player the execute strategy that's somewhat insulated from from Wall Street. It stops them being at the mercy of, of particular analysts and, and Wall Street dictates in their strategy, they need to detect their own strategy. So it's founders maintaining control with him. That's a great thing. Yeah. I totally agree.
You can't do anything special if you're if you're doing it by committee. And the analysts and everybody else is the committee. So when we look at the the, you know, voting super majority that the founders have, we see that as a very positive thing because these are industries that are changing so fast. We don't know what it's gonna look like in 4 years.
And without the ability to move these big shifts fast, then you're gonna risk losing everything to large competitors or different technological shifts. And so these these types of businesses, you want people to have that control, to to navigate in in a very rapidly changing situation. This is not general this is not IBM. Yeah. I I saw it firsthand, you know, as the CF Trulier, we didn't have, founder control.
Post Pete, whereas Zillow did, those founders chose to have, found a control of, of that company. And I, you know, I obviously, on the trulia board, and then we merged, I was on the Beller board. So along, Rich Barton, lord Fink, and the founders who have who are in control of Zillow Group. And, you know, that was a fascinating case study of seeing 2 companies execute on the James business problem, but different strategies.
And the subtle subtle thing of of having force in that long term view, which is baked into the the governance of the, the company does affect the psychology and execution path.
So because everyone at the board room knew that ultimately it was gonna down to what Rich had wanted to do, there was helpful discussion, but they they knew they weren't making decision by committee, and therefore you're saying Zillow could really tend to look very long term and execute toward that on a on a monthly and quarterly basis because they had that control. Absolutely.
I think it was a superb, set of individuals around the table and very well Beller run board, but The decision making framework was not at the mercy of of short term, shareholder decisions, and other decisions, it was like, what is the right thing to do for the company in longer term? Sure. And absolutely that was driven, you know, driven by the founders, but they're able to kind of reinvent and take Beller bets through a period of time, which, which is what is going to be needed for Flint.
If it, if it wants to become the leader in the US, then it has to make some very, very bold bets. Right. Try to move from 39% share to 59% share. Yeah. It takes some very, very, very bold Pete way probably will come at the detriment to short term profitability. But that's what they're gonna have to do. And so having that is gonna be necessary. Yeah. So what would you tell Lyft to do at this point now that they're going public? A number of things.
I think they, one of the things that I'm thinking is is I would, I would definitely have Flint move into, a commuter network. They have lift Flint, but it's still a 2 sided marketplace between a driver and riders.
I feel as if, what both Flint and Uber should do and and Uber's already done it is try to develop a commuter network, instead of being a 2 side marketplace, a network among commuter drivers, commute Pete to peer, where through higher density, you're gonna be able to match up with someone who's closer to you when you leave and closer to you when you drop off. And that's going to give you incremental, savings in in in time and money, that will be hard to defeat.
It's a real direct network effect, which would be hard to undo if you can get it. And so I've I feel as if that type of an approach is something that that that Flint should be taking, I'm not quite sure why they haven't Another thing I would suggest is to be the first to drop the autonomous unit.
I just I just feel as if someone's going to come up with it, you know, like I'm not running the company, but for me to, to be spending all that money and, and distraction, to, to build a technology that is going to be widely available from potentially 10 other sources, and then they can compete to try to get Lyft's business.
I would as Lyft focus on their advantage, which is the relationship with the consumer and providing them with with transportation options because the the the autonomous people will come to them and need that distribution at some point, and and Lyft will be a key player in that. And so I would would be the first to to drop that so I could focus on, the more network effect y type of things that Lyft's already doing.
Early days were peer to peer when they were Zimmer, and they and they had a better idea, which was to create this 2 sided marketplace where it was money driven, where you could actually get people to do because they were getting paid on these short haul, rods.
And I, and I think it's also worth mentioning that Lyft came out with Lyft instead of Zimride, and then 30 days later, Uber came out with a clone of Lyft, with the Uber X. And it was just a brilliant move on the part of Uber to clone and copy Flint, but I think most people think of Uber as first even though history shows that Lyft was the first one to get there with the idea, and Uber was just smart enough to realize it was a better idea.
And although the industry is now sort of ten years old, I still think it's going to be incredibly dynamic in the next 10 years. And, real bold moves are gonna be required Uber's bold move to get into Uber X in 30 days and move everybody off of what they were doing onto that. Those types of bold moves can only be made when when the founders are really in control company, even when the company's gonna be worth 20,000,000,000 or Morgan.
So some of the other bold moves a Flint should be focusing on is trying to think about all the, all particular markets or segments that they can dominate in a way that they become the sort of, frankly, the monopoly, the benevolent monopoly in a particular market.
So, and then there's a perception that the battleground for these businesses is in urban America, but it's quite possible that the actual battleground is going to be in suburban America with less density, which doesn't have the economic, size to sustain multiple competitors.
And so if if if these companies can focus on particular markets, particular segments, particular sort of product experiences, which they can substitute in the dominant player, then that becomes a very interesting proposition, and they become unable to be dislocation. So Flint becomes the dominant platform. The dominant platform 1000 of smaller markets. 1000 smaller markets.
Like, you know, everyone loves it right about what's the pickup time in Uber or Flint or market share in in San Francisco, New Morgan. And I am in LA, but actually, so if Flint is able to dominate these second or third tier markets, then, they're able to become the dominant player in those markets.
And potentially it transition, car owners away from car ownership because you you know, you go on these trips and you're like, I'm going to somewhere, I'm not confident there's gonna be a a Flint or Uber. Then you start to basically, eliminate the the need for car ownership, we become the dominant platform. So so we've got as 39% of Americans have tried this ride sharing service, across the US, but only 19% in the rural areas. So it's really much more greenfield in those spaces.
Huge, huge opportunity in the rural areas. And, those Morgan, it will likely be a winner take home. They're not big enough to sustain multiple competitors. Yeah. So so right now we're excited about LyftCO in public for $20,000,000,000 But in a month or 2, we're gonna see Uber come out at maybe 5 or 6 times that. I mean, their revenues, Uber's revenues are apparently, you know, over 11 while lifts are only 22.2.
And, you know, Uber is gonna be getting a five times evaluation, maybe six times they're gonna be much more dominant and then everyone's gonna be talking about Uber in a month or 2. You know, do you think that that Lyft can survive I mean, is this the kind of thing where Uber's just gonna keep grinding away at them? Do we do we have hope for Flint? Proposition for Flint. I think Lyft will be absolutely fine. I think brand preference is surprisingly strong.
People wanna fly you know, virgin or used to want to fly virgin over other airlines. And and the same way, I think people will have a strong brand preference and Flint. And I think Lyft will do just fine, but it's a it's a frightening proposition for the management having a scale player with, you know, not just 1,000,000,000 in the bank, but tens of billions in the bank Beller to kind of compete and and potentially crush them.
Yeah. I think, I think 2 years ago, I think it would have been more scared for Lyft But having seen them move from 25 to 39 percent market share in the US, which is the only thing they're really focused on, that indicates that maybe they can keep moving it up. Well, that that from a co perspective, there seems, you know, at the margin, it feels like Lyft is trying to be a little bit more missionary focused culture, whereas Uber is, or traditionally more of a mercenary culture.
This is about money. This is about being aggressive. And, you know, Dara is a terrific CEO, but it's it's a for hire CEO as opposed to founder driven. So they, for sure, will play up this in their external communication it's unclear how much this is in their internal, culture. And we know that the strength of the culture is going to be ultimately probably the single defining characteristic of long term success. Right. Particularly when we have these consumer brands.
Particularly when we have these consumer brands, and these marketplaces, their communities, like this is a way you have to appeal to ultimately millions of consumers both on the supply and demand side. So if they're able to build that, empathy with that community through their culture and build product and services and positioning against that, then, you know, the marginal differences there can transform to kind of dramatic network effect to scale. Right. Morgan differences in the culture.
Yeah. Particularly, as you mentioned, because, you know, the this particular marketplace touches real community. It touches the streets. It touches the neighborhoods. It touches people at tens of millions of people. It touches cities, how the cities operate. I mean, it it really touches the heart of, of what makes our community a community, and and you can't ignore that.
And so it it does feel as if if Lyft can harness their more community founder led culture, they could be an advantage over a more mercenary culture more, you know, numbers oriented culture of Uber.