Lyft CEO on Strong Growth & Autonomous Vehicles, How Dario Amodei Stirred Up Silicon Valley

0:13Welcome everyone to the Informations TI TV. My name is Stephanie Palazzolo and it's Friday, August 7th. Today on the show, Lyft reported strong Q2 demand, but its guidance for the rest of the year is raising questions. We'll talk to the company's CEO for more on what's ahead. We'll then take a look behind the curtain at how Wall Street and Silicon Valley view Anthropics CEO Dario Amadei ahead of the company's IPO. We'll unpack our latest profile with my co-author Corey Weinberg. And to close out the show, we'll examine how ByteDance is planning the future of its AI models, plus a special edition of the Editor's Cut, where we take a closer look at SoftBank's financing strategy and the stalled Warner Brothers Paramount merger.

0:56It's going to be a great show, so let's get right on into it. Lyft reported strong demand in its second quarter. Gross bookings rose 23 % as its European taxi business and a record share of rides through partnerships lifted the average value of each trip. Joining me now to discuss the quarter and Lyft's long-term strategy is Lyft CEO David Risher. David, welcome to TITV. It's great to have you on. Thank you, Stephanie. So David, you know, Lyft delivered another really strong quarter, but your guidance calls for gross bookings growth to moderate from the pace we've seen recently. Tell me kind of what's driving that outlook.

1:33Yeah. So I think the big picture is, so it was a record quarter, as you say. We had record bookings, we had record rides, we had over 30.5 million active riders. And when I look back a couple years, it's really sort of a night and day difference. We are growing kind of like a weed, both at the top and the bottom line. Our top line, which we call bookings, that's the amount that riders pay for us. It's never, never been higher. And I think that's a direct result of our customer obsession driving our growth strategy. And then our profits have never been higher as well. In terms of the outlook, it's actually really strong.

2:05I mean, you know, we're on track to do a billion rides this year. So at our scale, you know, even small differences look kind of magnified. But I'm actually really happy with our growth both in the U.S. and overseas. Yeah. You know, one billion rides is nothing to scoff at for sure. I mean, I think one topic that you touched on yesterday during earnings was autonomous vehicles. It does seem that the ride-hailing industry broadly has come to agree that AVs are a really big part of the future. You know, you guys obviously have partnerships. Uber has partners. How do you see Lyft kind of standing out in this area moving forward?

2:39Yeah. So I think you're actually seeing two very different strategies play out, but maybe some common ground in this. AVs are going to be great for rideshare. And the reason is because it's a new product on an existing platform that riders really like. And we can see that when they're being tested in places like Atlanta, where we're testing with a company called Maymobility. We're just about to kind of unveil the next version of the next kind of step in our work with Waymo and Nashville. And we can see a lot of demand out there. And you can understand why. It's a cool product. It feels very reliable.

3:10You know, you're in your own kind of quiet space and so forth and so on. So all of that is really good. Now, it's also going to be a big change for the industry, right? We're going to have to bring new hardware onto the platform. There are policy considerations. There are even real estate considerations. So let me give you an example of what that looks like. In Nashville, where, as I say, we're partnered with Waymo in a very, very deep way, we're doing two pieces for them. On the one hand, we're providing what are called fleet operations. So this is all the back of the house stuff, the stuff you never see, the maintenance, the cleaning, the charging.

3:43But it's a big deal for AVs, right? These are all EVs. They're quite complex pieces of equipment. We have an 80 ,000 square foot depot that we're in the process of opening up for them right there. And that's a real service that we can add in this space. And then on the demand side, later this year, riders will have the opportunity to be matched of the Waymo right on the Lyft platform. And this is kind of technical, but we call it supply sharing. And what it really means is it's not just a special sequestered group of Waymos that's only available for Lyft. We and Waymo are gonna be sharing that supply dynamically across both of our apps.

4:19So really innovative, really proud of the teams for working out this arrangement. And we think it combined with our, you know, one and a half million drivers is the best way to kind of enter this whole new space. And you just talked a bit about fleet management. Talk to me a little bit about, you know, why is that such an attractive business? And is it more than kind of just another logistic service? Yeah, it is because it's a very specialized piece. So in order to keep cars, again, maybe let's zoom out because we've got a little bit of space here to do this. In today's rideshare world, it's really the driver that's responsible for keeping that car maintained and up and running and available, you know, as often as need be.

5:02In the autonomous vehicle space, at least in the near term, it'll be companies like us, like Lyft, that's responsible for doing that because there's just not enough expertise in the world to do this kind of in a distributed way. Now, we're really lucky there. We've been doing fleet management for almost a decade now. We have a subsidiary called FlexDrive. We set it up years ago to help drivers with car kind of leasing and maintenance and so forth if they don't want to use their primary car. And it's something we've got about 15 ,000 cars on that part of the platform already. So it's something we're quite accomplished at.

5:35But in the AV space, as I say, it turns out to be even more important because this is new ground. No one knows how to do this at scale. But if the cars aren't available to drive, then no one's making money. So that's the reason it matters. And that's the reason why we think we've got real competitive advantage there. You know, hate to bring up a competitor, but you knew it was coming. Talk to me about how Uber's maybe AV strategy differs from yours and how you're planning to differentiate there. Yeah, maybe I'll focus more on our strategy than on theirs. We've decided to work very, very closely and deeply with the people we believe are the world's leaders in AV.

6:13They're certainly the most developed. This would be Waymo in the United States, Baidu, which is a Chinese company, and we're working with them in London. And I would say if I look at that strategy, it's very consistent with, again, kind of how we've maybe differentiated from other folks. We're very, very deep partners. We're good at partnering. And I say that with pride, but I also say that with evidence. When I started a couple years ago, about 20 % of our rides, I'm talking about rides now, were tagged to a partner. That might be a Chase with the Sapphire Reserve Partnership or DoorDash, which is a more recent partnership, United Airlines.

6:48These are all partnerships that we have on the demand side that have grown like crazy, like crazy. We just entered Canada with DoorDash. Link rides are up about 40 % there. United Airlines, just looking at this, people have accumulated over half a billion miles with our United Airlines partnership where you can get miles by taking lifts. So anyway, we pride ourselves at being very good at partnerships because they're the types of partnerships where both companies succeed. Both companies succeed, and that's why they tend to be successful over the long term. Again, I sort of look at the other guys, and I see a different kind of vibe with them and maybe different DNA around partnerships.

7:24But we feel very, very strongly that the best way to sort of enter this market is in deep partnership with a small number of true leaders and create something that is, frankly, new and where the whole is greater than some of the parts. And you did just mention, you know, Waymo obviously operating in Nashville. That started earlier this year through FlexDrive. What are you learning so far and kind of what milestones are you looking out for before this, you know, becomes a meaningful contributor to Lyft's business? Sure. Well, I'll tell you some of the things that we're holding ourselves accountable for.

7:57Certainly availability of cars. And again, you can't overstate this. Just imagine, for example, when you go to an airport, you know, the difference between a profitable airline and a not profitable airline is, are the planes being turned around quickly and in the air? If they're just sitting around or kind of in maintenance mode or whatever, again, no one's making money on it. So very similar with cars. We have to keep the asset utilized. And then on top of that, aside from just basic availability, let's say, you've got to have strong demand and you have to match that demand in a very, very efficient way to the right car at the right place and so forth.

8:29Now, this is something we've had years and years of experience doing, but this is a new thing because this is what we're calling a hybrid network. Drivers plus robot-driven cars on the same platform working 24-7. So we're really holding ourselves to sort of a high bar in terms of service quality, making sure that riders are always getting the best possible experience. On the driver side, equally important, making sure our drivers are feeling fully utilized themselves, right? We don't want to sort of have this come at the expense of them. So it'll be that sort of, you know, can we create this new hybrid marketplace in a way that really succeeds for us, of course, but also succeeds for riders, drivers, and for Waymo.

9:04I mean, were there any surprising challenges that have come up through this process? Like anything, you know, maybe obstacles you ran into that you really weren't expecting? I mean, this is kind of like uncharted territory. Yeah. You know, we're so early. It's probably a little too early to talk about big surprises. I can tell you maybe just to kind of, again, maybe go a little bit behind the scenes. even where you choose to put the depot, again, this is technical stuff, but choose to put the depot. If you put it too far outside of town, the real estate is cheap, but then you have all these deadhead miles, right?

9:34You've got to go back and forth before you have any customers. If you put it on the wrong side of railroad tracks, then you might find yourself in a position where you can't move your car for 15 minutes. If you don't have enough parking for the cars, well, that sounds easy, right? But you have to have parking for potentially hundreds of cars because they might at some point all be there, either napping or in maintenance mode. And so you have to be very careful about looking forward two, three, four years and deciding how much space you're going to need. So we're very much at that sort of logistically.

10:00Even, I'll tell you one last thing, the cleaning of the car. People say, oh, cleaning of a car is not a big deal. People know how to do that. Well, these cars have sensors on them. Those sensors have to be cleaned in a very particular way. I mean, literally, you know, wiped in a very particular way to make sure that they don't get streaks and so forth because that can degrade the operations of the car. So this sounds very technical and it's very early, but it's that kind of thing that we're really laser focused on to make sure we create a great, great experience for our partner, but also for our riders.

10:27Yeah, it sounds like a very technical process. I mean, separately, there is this kind of weird tension, right, between AVs and the business that Lyft has obviously run for many years. You know, one of the things that you really emphasize is supporting drivers. But there is this tension between maybe that philosophy and also a future where, you know, we're going to be taking rides that involve many fewer, you know, human drivers. So how do you kind of jive those two things together? Yeah, yeah. I think it's a great question and really important. And I'll maybe philosophize for just a second and say I actually think it really is important for businesses to take these kinds of transitions quite seriously.

11:04Okay, so what do we do? The first thing we're doing is we're supporting our drivers in the way that we always do, right? We have what we call an earnings cap that sort of caps or a fee cap, excuse me, that caps lifts fee. It does some very basic things to make sure the drivers feel, we hope, treated fairly. And to brag for a second, we have about a 30 point advantage, preference advantage versus drivers who drive for the other guys. So when we ask drivers who drive for both, who do you prefer? Over 50 % say us, and then some 20-some percent say them. So that's a good place to start. Okay, then what can you do during a transition like this?

11:37A couple of different things. First, you can make sure that drivers really do feel supported and understand this is not either or. There will be plenty of people who don't want to take an autonomous vehicle. Maybe they want help with their luggage. Maybe they want a nice conversation at the end of the day. Maybe they are worried they're not going to get to the airport fast enough and want to be able to say to the driver, can you kind of step on a little bit? Because you can't say that to a computer. So that's one thing. The second thing is we're actually hiring drivers. So I've mentioned this depot.

12:02This depot is quite technical. The majority of the people we have hired to work in this depot have been former Lyft drivers. And that's not an accident. That's something we're doing very, very deliberately. We're putting our thumb on the scale for former Lyft drivers. And then third is we're trying to grow the market, right? So this is not a thing where we sort of say it's zero sum. Every robot takes, you know, a human drive away. No, no, it's the opposite. Remember, we give a billion rides, which is wonderful. But people do, in the U.S., 160 billion rides in their private car. So there's a huge amount of opportunity in the future for riders, excuse me, for drivers and for AVs.

12:37And we're very focused on expanding that pie so it doesn't feel zero-sum. And so obviously we've talked a bit about, you know, Waymo in Nashville. You also did mention bringing kind of Baidu's Apollo Go robo-taxis to Europe through Freenow. obviously that's a pretty notable decision at a time where policymakers are increasingly looking closely into Chinese tech. How do you think about those geopolitical risks? Yeah. Again, super perceptive question. And it's different country by country, right? Different countries have different tolerances for Chinese technology on the street. If you look at London, London has a fair amount of Chinese technology on the street already.

13:14In fact, the London cab, which we all know and love and kind of is iconic, is actually made by Gigli, a Chinese company. So So to a certain extent, London and England have already gotten comfortable with Chinese OEMs, car manufacturers, having their cars on the road. So what's the role we can play? The role we can play is making sure that we are doing our level best to take care of all the data privacy and security issues. And these are quite serious. I mean, we, for example, we anonymize all the data before we send it to anything outside of the UK. And that's a whole sort of technical thing. There are a bunch of policy commitments we've made to make sure that we're effectively taking responsibility for, you know, for these cars.

13:58So, you know, I think it's a really interesting example of a kind of a joint operation where the Chinese company, Baidu, which is kind of the alphabet of China, has a very, very good technical product that does a very good job, you know, driving itself. But we take a lot of the responsibility for kind of the more customer and kind of government facing side of things. and hopefully, you know, again, the whole will be great in the sum of the parts. Very early days, we just started mapping out roads with that, it's called the Baidu R2-6. It's a great product. People love, the riders love the product.

14:28It's actually, I've written it myself. It's a great product. Hopefully policymakers will continue to think it's additive to their, you know, kind of to the London transportation system and that's certainly what we've seen so far. And I guess, you know, last question, just talk to me a little bit more about international expansion. You know, you guys closed the FreeNow acquisition in July. That's Lyft's first major step outside of North America. You know, why is this the right time for international expansion? Where do you see that business sitting in your overall business breakdown, you know, five years from now?

14:59Sure. Yeah. So we closed it almost exactly a year ago. It was last July. And we've really spent the last year becoming a much more global company. So FeeNow does about a billion dollars in bookings, which is relatively small compared to, let's say, lifts$20 billion, but still a very significant presence in countries like Greece, in countries like Ireland, in Spain, and across about nine different countries in Europe. It's what's given us access to the earlier point, to the London streets, to help kind of commercialize AVs there. But day by day, what we're doing is we're bringing the technology and the expertise we've developed in the United States at a very, very big scale, and really bringing that to Europe to try to kind of level up the rider experience and the driver experience as well.

15:41If I think, you know, two, three, five years out, you know, look, the two markets are roughly the same size, but Lyft kind of traditionally grew up as a domestic company, a U.S. company only. We've more recently gotten started in Canada and are doing quite well there. So I would certainly hope that Europe will actually grow, frankly, very, very fast, even maybe compared to the U.S., because there's so much opportunity there. You know, the TAM is equally big, but we're so much more kind of underpenetrated. So stay tuned. We'll see. It's still early days there just a year in. But I'll finish up by saying I was actually lucky enough to be in Barcelona a couple of weeks ago in Spain, testing out our new integration, which allows you to open up the Lyft app in beta mode and call a free now taxi cab.

16:23And I did it four times and it worked perfectly every time. So starting in 2027, you'll be able to kind of roam across the U.S. and Europe with your Lyft app and be able to get a ride anywhere you want, hopefully to be a great experience. Exciting stuff. Well, looking forward to hopefully having you on after the next earnings. Again, thank you so much for joining us, David. And that was David Risher, CEO of Lyft here on TITV. Religious leader or CEO, that was the question my colleague Corey Weinberg and I were trying to answer in our latest profile on Anthropic CEO, Dario Amade. Here to discuss that story, as well as another piece we published yesterday on Canvas slowing growth, is our senior reporter covering Anthropic, Corey Weinberg.

17:03Corey, welcome to the show. Hey, Steph. so you know taking a step back for a second let's talk a little bit about why did we even want to do this profile in the first place and you know what made dario such an interesting person for for us to really dig into yeah i mean i think that dario has been profiled you know several times before but never during a moment like this where he is essentially on top of the business world on top of the tech world. Anthropic passed OpenAI in sales earlier this year. It totally dominates the most lucrative market in AI coding tools. And Dario Amadei has taken a really unusual ascent to the top.

17:51And he is really a figure that I think Silicon Valley doesn't fully understand. We've seen a lot of CEOs described as, you know, sort of in sort of religious terms that he inspires devotees to his leadership and just generally is someone who retains a lot of loyalty among employees. But never someone like this who's retained a ton of loyalty largely by making hard choices and difficult trade-offs about what business decisions to make versus how to stand by its principles and sort of be under the microscope on things like that. And I'm curious for you, I mean, obviously I think there were a lot of really surprising pieces to come out of the profile, but what was the most surprising thing that you learned coming out of this reporting process?

18:46Yeah, there was some really fun details to learn around who actually is in Dario's immediate circle. That was actually one question that I was sort of tackling in the reporting to kind of help guide me around, who is this guy? You know, we've read his essays. We've seen him more recently on TV around, you know, sort of controversies when Anthropic is fighting with the Pentagon or the U.S. government is putting export controls onto Anthropic. But who is this guy actually listening to? Who is in his circle? And sort of a distinct impression I was getting initially when I was talking to a lot of investors in Anthropic is they didn't really think he had that wide of a circle, which was surprising to me.

19:34Because when I've profiled CEOs before, investors are usually sort of quick to say, oh, he's listened. He's gotten really close to XYZ business luminary in the past. He has taken on this person as a mentor. I got none of that with Dario, which was really surprising to me, especially for a first-time CEO like Dario is. People said he listens to his co-founders a lot, one of whom is his sister, who he's very close to. And he also talks to his wife. He considers his wife a close counselor. Her name is Camilla Clark. She is very often at his side at industry events. She was there at Sun Valley. The two of them took a trip down to Miami together to meet with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

20:30and Camilla has really no public profile whatsoever. She is very much low profile, but she was sort of a very important person to Daria, especially during such a chaotic time for him. And so that was kind of one new aspect of the profile that I found sort of important to bring to readers. Yeah, I know you were like really deep in the trenches trying to find anything about her. And it was super funny just like seeing the comments on the story or people talking about it on social media. I saw several people that were like, Dario's married? Like I had no idea. So she's very much under the radar. Totally, totally.

21:14I mean, I think from my end too, I think one thing that surprised me that I was trying to figure out is I feel like in the last couple months, there's been this debate of like, how much is what Dario says kind of like marketing hype? like, oh, did he say all those crazy things about Mythos because he just wants to hype up the model and it's actually this super insanely smart marketing strategy thing. But it was interesting because I really feel like coming out of this, I just really believe that he's just very genuine and these are things that he truly believes. I mean, talking to some of his colleagues, even from his earliest days at OpenAI, where he very much did not know he was going to be in the limelight, Like, they were saying things like, you know, he works on this air-gapped computer from his home.

21:56He's, like, printing out these memos of things that are, like, you know, not really people—not really something people would consider to be kind of top-secret information. He is telling his colleagues he's afraid to go to China because he's afraid of getting kidnapped. Like, he was just hyper-paranoid even in the earliest days whenever a lot of people were saying, like, you know, GBT-1, GBT-2. They were like, all right, this is cool, but, like, it can barely stream together a sentence. and even then Dario's like no this is like so scary and we need to like lock this down so that just I think really helped to clear up some of that stuff for me I think.

22:29Yeah I agree I mean I think like as reporters we have to be somewhat conspiracy brained just pursuing leads for stories like you know what a bigger conspiracy than like this guy doesn't actually believe what he says and he's just saying it to hype it up and and and all of that But I think you have to be real about what the reporting shows, which is this guy has been consistent in a lot of these traits around really believing deeply that this technology can be very dangerous, being, you know, sort of almost somewhat paranoid, you could argue, about state actors like China trying to get their hands on the technology.

23:10You saw that from his earliest days in OpenAI. That was what, as we reported, all of his colleagues were sort of pointing to as a key trait of his. So that was definitely incredibly striking. Totally. And I think another topic that we tried to touch on in the piece is this idea that as Anthropics has gotten bigger, it's had to deal with balancing these kind of core principles with making money and beating out competitors. And in some cases, it's had to really compromise. For instance, it took money from investors in the Middle East after previously saying that it wouldn't. And then obviously, as you wrote, it maybe updated or rolled back some aspects of its responsible scaling policies earlier this year.

23:49I mean, how do you kind of jive those compromises with Dario's seemingly, you know, like ultra principled nature? Yeah, I think they have this very, you know, sort of difficult balancing act where they've stated that their commercial goals, their desire to be on top of the AI race is essentially a way for them to race to the frontier to be able to ensure that they have developed all the proper safety protocols. and tactics to avoid catastrophe, whether it be cybersecurity, bioweapons, anything bad that can happen with really powerful AI. But I think the critique that I hear that most resonates strongly with me rather relates to this approach and with Dario, especially as they have to make these constant trade-offs, is anthropic success has perhaps only intensified the quote-unquote race dynamics within AI that can make things a lot more dangerous.

24:59They explicitly went out to start Anthropic five years ago because they didn't trust Sam Altman and a lot of the OpenAI crew to be the ones to be responsible stewards of this powerful technology. And I think in some ways, anthropic success on top of open AI success has only intensified the race, I would say. You now have a very intense effort within China to develop this technology as well. Obviously, all the big AI and tech companies from Meta to Alphabet too. And so I don't know. I think like to me, like the question that I'm still trying to wrestle with is, was Anthropics founding itself sort of an original sin of the AI race?