Lyft: John Zimmer

**Guy Raz** (0:00)
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**Guy Raz** (0:39)
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**John Zimmer** (2:02)
One of the kind of funny things we had to figure out was how to quickly market to the college campus. And so one of our early purchases was a frog and beaver costume that we put on. I went to Cornell. I was actually going to Cornell on a recruiting trip for Lehman.
And I was standing on the quad in this ridiculous costume, handing out cards about this carpooling service.

**Guy Raz** (2:28)
Is this a frog costume or the beaver costume?

**John Zimmer** (2:31)
I was the beaver. And at that next day at the Lehman recruiting event, a girl came up to me and said, did I see you in a beaver costume yesterday?

**Guy Raz** (2:49)
From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how John Zimmer made private cars work like taxis, and in the process, helped build a service now worth billions.
So, do you actually remember the days of walking onto the sidewalk, sticking out your hand, inhaling a taxi? I mean, it feels like ancient history, right? But still, even though this world of instant car rides is just a few years old, we're so used to it that, if you're like me, you start to get really antsy and anxious when the Uber or Lyft app says you have to wait for three minutes for your ride. And just think about how quickly ride sharing apps like Uber and Lyft have totally transformed transportation in many cities around the world. How, in most places, they've become indispensable, which has also meant that the competition between the two companies has been really fierce since 2012, when both of them launched a service that turned private cars into public taxis. But the amazing thing is, even though Lyft is just a fraction the size of Uber, it is still valued at more than $5 billion. And one of the guys behind it, John Zimmer, he never thought that ride sharing would be his life's work. He actually studied hotel management at Cornell, but his interests really started to change during his senior year.

**John Zimmer** (4:32)
I took a course that was really, really important to me called Green Cities, and I had this amazing professor. His first lecture is The History of the World in 30 Minutes, kind of like the book Guns, Germs, and Steel.
And he ended the lecture saying that we're at a really important time in world history, where population density is rising rapidly in our cities as more and more people move there, and resources and infrastructures that were built decades ago are becoming more and more strained.
And he kind of challenged us at the end of the class and said, if you don't make this class the most important thing you do this semester, then I don't want to teach you, because if we don't fix these problems, we're going to have major economic, environmental and social problems. And that kind of set me on a path which eventually led to Lyft. But being that I grew up in the East Coast and in Connecticut and New York, I did feel like I had to have a finance experience. And so after graduating, I went and worked at Lehman Brothers in 2006