Bonus: The Future of Ride-Hailing with Lyft CEO David Risher

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.

**Barry Ritholtz** (0:17)
This week on the podcast, man, was this a fascinating conversation. David Risher is CEO of Lyft since the past three years. He's been on the board for the past five years. What a fascinating discussion about a company that is probably an app on your phone, and you may not be aware of all the different things they do from bike share to autonomous vehicles to fleet management and everything in between.
I thought this was absolutely fascinating, and I think you will also with no further ado, my conversation with Lyft's CEO, David Risher.

**David Risher** (0:55)
Thank you Barry. I am happy to be here.

**Barry Ritholtz** (0:57)
I am thrilled to have you.
Before we start talking about your technology background, I gotta roll a little further back. Bachelors in Comparative Literature from Princeton, that doesn't sound like the sort of career plan for someone who's gonna work his way through technology companies. What was the original idea?

**David Risher** (1:16)
So this goes way back, and the funny thing is even to high school, my mother bought an Apple II computer a million years ago to help her run a small business that she was running. And I sort of got into technology that way. I will admit part of it, I think, is I had terrible handwriting. And so when I used the computer to print out stuff for my high school English teacher, she could finally read what I was writing. Probably gave me a better grade as a result. But so I sort of got into computers a little bit as a kid.
Ended up at Princeton writing my thesis on a computer again, and this is a million years ago when that wasn't normal. And so I found myself just interested in technology. And after going to a consulting firm for a couple of years to learn about the business world and going to business school, I found myself as an intern at Microsoft, again, back in 1990 it was, and sort of the rest is history.

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:09)
So Harvard Business School, we know what that typically leads to. I'm curious, how did the humanities background help shape the way you think about business, about leadership, about working with people?
What was the upside of humanities for you?

**David Risher** (2:26)
You know what, I really appreciate the question, and I actually think it's more relevant now than ever. Look, the humanities is all about curiosity and understanding and maybe even empathy.
If you read a book, you have to understand, you're exposed to different people's perspectives. It's almost like you're crawling inside someone else's brain, particularly if you're reading fiction. And so to a certain extent, I think nothing could prepare you better. Now, you have to have an analytical brain, and you might also have to be good with numbers in business. But the humanities world, I sort of think of it as this kind of magic vaccination against irrelevance, because that curiosity is always going to matter. And it certainly helped me through my whole career.

**Barry Ritholtz** (3:04)
I love that answer. So you intern at Microsoft, you end up beginning your career there, where you helped to launch their first database product, Access. Tell us about that.

**David Risher** (3:16)
Sure. So Microsoft was famously ahead in, or at least getting ahead, let's say, with the launch of Windows in word processing, in spreadsheets, of course. And again, this is sort of an ancient business history, but it's sort of a fascinating tale of a technology shift, completely reshuffling the deck, away from old companies like Word Perfect and Lotus 123 We didn't even know who those companies are anymore because Microsoft took over that space. And it's really because Windows shifted the platform. We might come back to that idea when we talk about autonomous cars. But they didn't have a database, and that was sort of the third big product that a lot of companies wanted.
I helped develop it. I was the first product manager on it. And really all that meant is my job was to go around and watch other people use competing products at the time, Paradox, Dbase, again, products that don't even exist anymore, and try to pay attention to what they were doing with these products. How were they using them? Where were they stumbling? And that was my first role. And in a sense, it has been one of the most important jobs I've ever had because it's what sort of taught me about understanding what customers want.

**Barry Ritholtz** (4:17)
Interesting. And then you founded Microsoft Investor and launched that product.