Lyft’s Stock Turnaround, Snowflake’s AI Agent Strategy, Building EV Charging Networks | Nov 13, 2025

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Thursday, November 13th. We have got a great show lined up for you today. First up, Lyft shares are actually outperforming Uber shares this year. Our financial analysis columnist joins us on the show to talk about the factors behind Lyft's turnaround. We've also got a great conversation about AI agents lined up for you with a Snowflake executive. And we're talking about the state of electric vehicles charging infrastructure with the CEO of Loop Global. And finally, we'll finish things off with a funding update from a startup on this year's TI50, our list of the 50 most promising startups.

0:53It is a big show, and so let's get right on into things. Uber's market cap is nearly 20 times more than that of Lyft's, but a little-known stat that may interest you, Lyft shares are up almost 80 % this year compared to Uber's 50 % jump. Both companies are clearly doing well. But today, my colleague Anita Ramaswamy published a column breaking down how exactly Lyft has turned itself around over the past few years and what it could mean for the future of the company. It's a great column. And so I want to bring on Anita to talk all about it. Anita, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here.

1:28Hi, Kosh. Great to be here. So let's talk about Lyft. Why are Lyft shares doing so well this year? Yeah, so this is a little bit surprising to investors, a caution to the market more broadly, because Uber is a lot bigger. It's always been seen as sort of the number one competitor in this space. And many investors have a thesis that it's sort of a winner-takes-all space. And Lyft really broke out of that narrative this year for a couple of reasons. They got a new CEO in 2023, David Risher, and he came from Amazon and he's been implementing all sorts of changes at Lyft. And the biggest result that he's delivered so far, in my opinion, is that he was able to turn the company into a company that is free cash flow positive.

2:06So he's cut costs. He has actually used some of the excess cash Lyft had on its balance sheet to do some acquisitions. So they bought a luxury chauffeuring service this year. They bought a European taxi app, which kind of marks their biggest international expansion and their first initiative outside of North America in a while and ever. So that's, you know, one other reason. And he's also cleaned up the cap table. There was a big controversy around the dual class share structure that Lyft's founders had. And he managed to work with an activist investor and resolve that issue as well. So he actually worked with activist investors.

2:43A lot of CEOs, sometimes they get scared of activist investors. They say, look, let me do my thing over here. It's funny. It was like a couple of weeks of an activist campaign, one of the shortest activist campaigns that I've ever seen. And it resulted in Lyft upping its share buyback program, making that bigger and also resolving this cap table issue. But it was just sort of funny to see that it was less than a month long. David Risher, he's an interesting guy. He does a lot of podcasts. I have to say, I don't know how many of them you've listened to, but he's really down the circuit.

3:14So let's talk about how Lyft compares to Uber's business. These are two companies that at one point were rivals. Now Uber is obviously much bigger. But how does the way that Lyft has been running their business contrast or compare with that of Uber's? I would say the biggest difference, Akash, was in the past Uber was international, Lyft wasn't. So that's one thing that has started to change. But the biggest difference today is actually the Uber Eats division. Lyft has focused singularly on ride hailing, David Risher has been crystal clear that that is the only market that he's focused on right now and doesn't have plans to expand into anything like food delivery or grocery delivery in the same way that Uber has.

3:53So while Uber is a lot bigger, it's got eight times the revenue, generates nine times the cash. It's also grown a bit faster in the last couple of quarters because Uber Eats has been growing really nicely. The advantage with Lyft is that David Risher and the team there are focused only on ride hailing, and that's where they've done growth initiatives and new features as well. Now, what about the threats that face the ride hailing sector at large? The elephant in the room is autonomous vehicles. It's been a big week for Waymo announcing their cars will be on highways. Has Lyft talked at all about the ways in which it's approaching that paradigm shift and the ways in which it can actually latch onto that trend?

4:34Yeah, this is a big risk looming over both Uber and Lyft in different ways. And the way that Uber had addressed it is they started doing all these partnership deals with different AV firms. So they did deals with Waymo in Austin, Atlanta, and Phoenix. They have partnerships with a bunch of other, you know, different AV players that are on different parts of that autonomous robotaxi stack. Lyft was less successful in making those partnerships early on. But in the last couple of months or so, they have started to turn that around. And one of the key reasons is they are doing a deal with Waymo in Nashville to bring robotaxis to the Lyft network there in 2026.

5:08And what's unique about Lyft's approach is that they actually own a fleet management company called FlexDrive, something that they bought in 2020 to help service, clean, and maintain their fleet of cars. And they are going to be applying that subsidiary and its capabilities to autonomous vehicles. So it's really important to caution AVs to make sure that your taxis are being used all the time. It's important in regular ride hailing too. And in order to boost that utilization and make sure the cars are being turned around quickly, cleaned quickly, getting back on the roads quickly, that fleet management service, FlexDrive, is going to be really crucial for Lyft, in my opinion.

5:43And so your view actually is that Lyft is approaching the autonomous vehicles challenge a little bit better than Uber, if I'm understanding correctly. Yeah, that's right. I mean, Uber has been tremendously successful, but I think it is a true differentiator that Lyft owns this part of the stack. If you think about all the different components that go into robo-taxis, and if you assume, if you're an investor who believes that these are really the future and they're going to gain mass market popularity, I mean, we just saw yesterday that Waymo expanded in the SF Bay area. There's a lot of early points of validation to the business model and that there is real demand.

6:16So, you know, at that point, Uber is positioned right now as a platform that can just bring demand to those already existing AVs. if the AV companies like Waymo can get demand on their own, then it's not clear to me where Uber is doing something unique and differentiated. Lyft has built that capability out in-house. Uber can always acquire a company that does fleet management. They can always do some M &A and find some other way into the stack. But at least for right now, Lyft is building this capability and has been working on it since 2020 from the ground up. And I think that's going to be an advantage for them when it comes to making deals with other sorts of AV firms besides just Waymo or deals in other cities.

6:53Now, you talked about M &A, you talked about acquisitions. We rewind the clock. At the end of last year, you made a prediction that Amazon was going to buy Lyft and it hasn't happened yet. We're not saying it couldn't happen, but where do you stand on that? Are you re-upping that prediction that you made last year? What is your prediction for Lyft going forward? Not quite, Akash. I guess sometimes the crystal ball doesn't work perfectly, but the rationale there, I think still holds up and makes sense insofar as both Lyft and Uber have a lot of demand and heavy ridership, millions of riders on each of the platforms.

7:28And I think when it comes to the autonomous vehicle race, we are still very early. So Waymo looks like the winner right now, but we all remember what happened with GM's cruise. We all remember so many of these different companies that were not able to move forward. And I think that the field of players is going to shift really rapidly. So I think it's possible that Lyft is either acquired or an acquirer of more of these startups as the technology develops. Great. Well, Anita, it was a great column. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it. And I should say, David Risher, if you're watching this, I know you're on the podcast circuit.

8:01Come on our show because clearly we're watching your company very closely. But in the meantime, thank you, Anita, for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thanks. Okay. We talked yesterday about the proliferation of AI agents at enterprise software companies. Snowflake is one company that sits at the center of that trend. This month, the company launched Snowflake Intelligence, which houses another group of agents aimed at businesses. Joining me now is Jeff Holland, head of Cortex AI agents at Snowflake, to tell us more about his vision for the offering. Jeff, welcome to TITV. It's great to have you here.

8:38Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's an honor. So let's talk about Snowflake Intelligence. What is it? Yeah, so Snowflake Intelligence is our effort to help it so that every organization can more easily get everybody on the same page. We're often finding across many companies, like data is everywhere. There's so much data scattered across Slack conversations and documents and you name it, but actually having the ability to gain insights, understand what's happening of how are we trending towards our revenue? What is my sales pipeline looking like? Can be really difficult. Often you're stuck by looking at something like digging through static or stale dashboards or you're calling your analyst team and you're helping for them to do manual analysis, we want to empower every individual in an organization, whether you're the CEO or you just joined a week ago, to have instant access to all of the data across your organization to make better, informed, more intelligent decisions.

9:30And this is all powered by agents behind the scenes connected to your data through Snowflake. And how are you pricing it? Yeah, so Snowflake has actually been known for a while of a very generous pricing model, which is we are pure consumption-based, which means we do not recognize revenue unless our customers recognize value. We actually took the same approach, which is quite differentiated in Snowflake Intelligence, which means you could roll out something like Snowflake Intelligence to your entire organization. You only pay when those agents are actually working. So if nobody's asking a question, there's no cost for you in Snowflake.

10:02You're just paying for those tokens, those LLM calls that are happening only when customers are actually finding value. I'm curious, did you build this all in-house or did it come from any of the technology that you've acquired recently? So it's a combination of a few things. Snowflake has a few key partnerships in terms of underlying large language models themselves. So Snowflake securely can run things like OpenAI GPT-5 or Anthropics Cloud 4.5. Those acts as the underlying models. In terms of the ability to accurately find and retrieve the right data to give to the user, There's actually a few acquisitions that have happened.

10:39Neva was a few years ago at this point. That has some of the core search technologies. True Era was a little bit more recent. That's around quality of some of these agentic pieces. And then a lot of the additional layers on top, how do we make it so agents are really, really good at understanding the complex, massive data sets? I mean, think of Snowflake. These are global 2 ,000 companies. These are huge organizations. So we have built a lot of things in-house over the last year, year and a half to make it so that these agents are really effective, even when looking at massive data sets. You talked about using models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

11:11We've talked a lot on this show about how expensive it is to use some of these models, not just at those two companies, but models at large are pricey. Are these agents profitable for you right now? I mean, we don't disclose anything in terms of like our underlying margins for these pieces. I would say that we've got really good agreements with each of these providers in terms of making sure that we can get good economics on our side. And then we do everything we can. Like our goal, truthfully, I'm on the product side, is we want to reduce as much friction as possible for our underlying users.

11:41So we're not out here trying to nickel and dime people. We truly are. Like there's a real cost, to your point, of these large language models. These things do require some real beefy heavy GPU compute. But we're really happy with the agreements that we have with these providers, with the cloud infrastructure that we're running behind the scenes. We're trying to push as many of those benefits to our customers as we can, which is part of why I mentioned a bit ago, too. So we're actually offering this as a consumption-based offering, not requiring you have some like fixed per seat costs, which is usually the norm with some of these AI agent technologies.

12:12I want to zoom out a little bit and look at the enterprise software sector at large. We had our enterprise software reporter on just yesterday, Aaron Holmes. He wrote a story about how all these agent offerings at enterprise software companies are really starting to converge and they're starting to step on each other's toes in a way that we actually haven't seen in quite a few years. As you think about that, how do you think about how Snowflake Intelligence differentiates itself from the dozens of other enterprise software companies that seem to be offering something very similar to the language that you just used?

12:46Yeah, and the thing that I always often like to talk when I'm talking to organizations about this is our goal at Snowflake, we're not trying to build an agent that can do everything. And of course, there's so much excitement, real understandable excitement around agents right now. To your point, so many technology providers right now are creating their own agent offerings. Our position is saying, hey, look, this isn't going to be the agent that does everything for you. What we want to make really easy and really effective are specifically agents that can look into and understand your data. Like data is the blood of Snowflake.

13:16That's our core. That's the thing that we are really, really good at. So the way that I see things moving forward is that you will see these combination of agents in an organization. but we're moving towards more of this world where those agents are gonna act more as an ensemble and orchestra together, where when you're accomplishing a task, maybe part of your task is you need to go open up a job rec using your job portal. Well, a Snowflake agent's probably not gonna be the best one at doing things like opening a job rec. Maybe your workday agent is gonna be the right one for that. But any time in that process where the job to be done is, well, I need to understand what's happening, right?

13:51What does my employee turnover look like? What does my revenue look like? What does my sales pipeline look like? Well, that's where you're going to want to use the Snowflake agent. That's where we're saying, hey, we are really, really good at this. So there is a bit of overlap. You see all these agents coming together. I see them working together more in concert over time. And our aim is to add the most value we can, especially on that data understanding, data insight piece. Let me ask you, Snowflake hosted its Build conference, I think it was last week, earlier this month. As you think about the conversations that happened at that conference this year, how How did those conversations on the ground differ than what you saw last year with customers?

14:27I think the biggest difference to me that's very exciting is this is becoming very real. Like Agents was buzzed about in 2024. Maybe there were some early adopters. Now we're seeing this rolled out in large ways. I was able to get joined on stage with companies like Fanatics or Podium, and they talked through how they're rolling out dozens of agents in their organizations. Fanatics was awesome. They're like, look, our goal is to provide the most optimized personalized span experience that we can. We have all of this data in Snowflake to help us understand so much about our fans and what they're doing.

14:57Are they seeing ROI from that investment in agents? Absolutely. Real profitability. I mean, the fanatics didn't disclose profitability numbers before them. But in terms of, is this adding real value? Are our employees more productive? They shared an instance where they have an executive who want to understand, look, should we be doing this marketing campaign? and how can we understand better our different fan bases, things that previously would have taken days, if not weeks to understand. They're like, well, let me open up Snowflake. And literally within 45 seconds, they got deep analysis. So that type of value, it can be sometimes hard to quantify, right?

15:32Like how do you quantify the three weeks of time that would have been spent? But seeing that value and seeing this actually happen in production, to me is where we're happening now. Like that's what gets me excited about the last Build Conference is we're going beyond the hype to finding what are the areas of real value that people can find. Great. Well, Jeff, I want to thank you for coming on the show. We really appreciate it and hope to have you back again soon. Yeah, anytime. It's been great. Have a great one. Okay. September was a record month for EV sales with 2.1 million vehicles sold worldwide.

16:03That is according to research firm Rowe Motion. A big factor, U.S. buyers racing to take advantage of expiring tax credits. So in an era where electric vehicles are no longer a niche experiment, but rather a mainstream reality, the question is, who is building the charging infrastructure to keep up? Joining me now is Olga Shevarinkova, CEO of Loop Global, one of the largest EV charging networks in the U.S. Olga, welcome to TITV. It's great to have you here. Hi, thank you for having me. So let's talk about Loop. Tell me about the charging infrastructure product that you have and who your customers are.

16:40yeah so we have two main products one is a we call l2 a slow charger and the main client or the main customer for that is multi-family or office building so you charge your car in eight hours while you're sleeping at home or while you're working in the office that's our primarily uh product and multi-family would be the most um uh the locations where we sold the product the most. Our second product is our GC product, the fast product, which allows you to charge your car in 45 minutes. And the main customer for that product will be a retail location, like a grocery store or a shopping center where people don't spend as much time as they spend at home in the office, but they want to charge their car.

17:22So those will be two primarily products and two primarily segments we're targeting. And with those two segments, which segment is giving you the most revenue right now? This is a very interesting question. If we're thinking about the hardware sales, because we sell our product, then the fast charging product is picking up very fast, because it's much more expensive. So you sell less of them, but you get higher revenue. But if you're talking about reoccurring ongoing revenue, which is a software subscription and revenue share, then of course, it's our historical L2 product, because we've just deployed so much of it.

17:58So between the two right now, hardware is still generating the most revenue for you? Yes. Today, yes. And how much revenue is the company generating now? So we are not a public company, so we don't disclose our financials. But I can ask. I can ask. We've deployed nearly 8 ,000 ports over the life of our existence. The recent Axios article recently estimated that we're number four in the United States of America. The first three companies are public, which will be Blinked and a ChargePoint and Tesla. So anybody who is interested can infer by looking at their financials. Once we go public, then there won't be a secret.

18:39Are you going public soon? No. No. Today's markets are open for that. Well, you know, I want to talk a little bit more broadly about how the electric vehicle story has changed over the past few years. I wonder how your business has been impacted by the current regulatory environment with the U.S. around electric vehicles. We've talked a little bit about the credits. How are you dealing with that on the ground? Yeah, so there were two primarily things which the current administration has done is slashing the federal incentives and slashing the actual tax credit to a driver. We were not affected by federal incentives because we were never targeting that market.

19:23That federal incentive primarily incentivized the rollout of infrastructure alongside highways. That has never been our market, so that really did nothing to us. The incentive, which, as you very correctly pointed out in your introduction, is about to expire, will probably have some indirect effect on EV adoption and on us as well. But what I can say is that the market has been, the growth hasn't been as fast as people were accustomed already for a couple of years. The market's been growing, but it's been growing probably in a high single digits, low double digit percent year over year. And everybody expected that the market will like double every year.

20:04So a lot of people were disappointed. But primarily driver for that wasn't the incentive for administration change. It's simply a high interest rate environment. which usually slows down spending on the layout of projects. And it has all kinds of connotations to the economy. So I'm quite optimistic that now when we're entering the era where the Fed stuck cut, the interest rates will see the market picking up faster. What effect the tax credit will have on EV sales is unclear yet. I think everybody's trying to understand that. What I see though from research, and I've been in this market for over a decade now, what I see from research is that the main driver for people to buy an EV is not the regulatory incentive, is not the affinity for sustainability, anything like that.

20:56It's simply a consumer preference. The EVs are better cars to drive. And that's very different from 10 years ago. 10 years ago was a very different audience. Today, we're entering into mass market where people just love driving EVs. EVs are fun. There are new models coming out. And once you've tried one, you never go back. So there is a fundamental driver as a consumer preference, the fundamental driver. So what I'm hearing from you is that when you think of the biggest bottleneck right now to EV adoption, from what you see, it's not consumer preferences. It's the macro trends that are actually preventing people from from buying it is is that what what you're seeing on the ground i i'd say the main hurdles to ev adoption are um still oems haven't introduced the mass market model which would be at par at cost with um you know like a toyota corolla or whatever like the mass market vehicle so a lot of people who buy evs today are people with higher incomes we're living in a big still rich country so it's a lot of people still they drive the pricing pricing is is still the biggest hurdle pricing and it's not that they are they price um if you take a a mercedes vehicle they price the mercedes electric and mercedes gas are priced similarly but you don't have that in again in the toyota corollary as a mass market vehicle segment just yeah though i know that a lot of oems are working on introducing it once that happens it unlocks tons of sales from my perspective, that's one hurdle.

22:29The second hurdle, you still have that range anxiety. And that's what me and the company like Loop are working on, where people are like, okay, I buy an EV and I can get from place A to B. What if I get stuck? And all of those things. But we see, I live in California. California is leading EV adoption in the US. We see that in California, that factor is going away because there is so much charging available, especially if you live in large urban centers like Los Angeles or San Francisco, San Diego. So that is alleviated. And that's where we see EV adoption is picking up much faster because people know they see it with their own eyes at every grocery store and every hotel they go into.

23:05Let me ask you this. We saw the news this week that Waymo is charging ahead with their own ambitions. They're putting their cars on highways now. A lot of people are talking about autonomous vehicles this week. How does the advent of autonomous vehicles and the boom that people are forecasting there, how is that going to affect the EV sector and your business? Very positively. Pretty much every, to my knowledge, every autonomous car, be it Waymo, any of their competitors, is electric because it is much easier to operate remotely, right, to start and go and it has all this electronics built in.

23:41So those cars drive, like, at average, just a normal commuter drives 11 ,000 miles a year. The New York taxi driver drives like 60 ,000 miles thousand miles a year way more car will drive like 120 thousand miles a year right so if you drive that much guess what you need you need charging and you need a lot of it so that's a very positive development from my perspective for EV sectors are you are you talking to these autonomous vehicle companies right now doing any partnerships with them um that's not where we are focusing today uh at flu uh because our focus again is multi-family and retail but that's something we will start doing once they really widespread.

24:25Right. Let me ask you one question before you go. You've been in this sector for more than a decade, in the sustainability sector for even longer than that. I wonder if you reflect on where you started when you were starting out, and there were all these forecasts coming out probably about EV adoption and how quickly it would take for everybody to have one. Here we are now in 2025, and we know that it's growing, but it's not everyone. I mean, you know it's it's it's still it's still uh still work to be done when you reflect on where you expected things to go 15 years ago how do you think about that did it live up to your expectations is it faster or slower than you thought you know when we think about 15 years ago it's definitely faster i don't think anybody 15 i don't think i could have imagined that i would be driving an electric vehicle 15 years ago really so nobody was saying then nobody was i mean i No, no.

25:20Everybody was talking about solar and wind. When you talk about the scenarios, it's solar and the wind and then batteries showed up and then EVs were like this toy. And I remember in my career, we had this intern who was tasked with EV charging and everybody thought it was just some toy project. Nobody cared. But then it kind of popped up. So I think if you compare it 15 years ago, we definitely, with autonomous, with EVs, with all those like mobility infrastructure 2.0, we were much further ahead. If you compare it to five years ago because then everybody's expectations shot up. If you compare it to five years ago, I think a lot of people, as I mentioned earlier in this conversation, feel disappointed because they thought, okay, by 2025, everybody's going to drive EV or whatever, 40 % of people.