Lyft CEO on the time Bill Gates told him he was making ‘the stupidest decision I’ve ever heard anyone made’

It was 1996, and Risher had a successful profession in Microsoft during the peak Windows. In fact, Risher indicated that he and his wife had died on their thirtieth marriage, after they met “on the first day” in Microsoft. He said it was a very training time for him and his professional life in a very competitive company.

But he was in conversations with a man named Jeff Bezos, who was running a new start -up company called Amazon. When Risher decided to leave the technology giant to join the online retail dealer, Gates himself sent an email and invited him to his office.

He says, “Wait for one second. You mean to tell me that you are leaving this company to some small small internet library that no one has ever heard … this decision should be the most stupid that you have ever heard. ”

While Riccher admitted that this step was not “completely rational”, he said he was attracted to this opportunity. He had first communicated with Bezos a year ago, when the amazon founder was conducting a reference examination. What Riccher eventually convinced to take a leap is the intense Bezos concentration on the customer. “It was very obsessed with customers,” Recyccher said, noting that “everyone clicks away from someone else, so you have to create a great experience for customers.” (In fact, the Bizos management style for Amazon confirmed that they should deal with them every day from the “first day” mentality.)

Bezos also put an ambitious vision in a convincing way: to develop business worth $ 15.6 million to a billion dollars by 2000. Richar, a thirsty reader, was fascinated by the opportunity to build something new in the “crazy intersection of technology and culture”. Join Amazon as a 37 employee, who is charged with helping to build “everything store” by adding music, video and play categories. The company reached its billion -dollar goal in 1999. This step has pushed so well that the message “Thank you” from Bezos to Risher, on February 2002, is still on Amazon to this day.

One of a great return

Now, as the CEO of Lyft, Risher applies the same founding principle of customer obsession with engineering, which he hopes to be “one of the great stories of the world’s return.” He said when he took the job in 2023, the company was “lost its way” a little, as it was losing its share in the market, and it was not profitable. (LYFT has decreased by almost 20 % over the past five years, but it has increased by 60 % of the year.) The Risher strategy has been to return to the basics: understanding what customers already want.

To achieve this, it works famous for “Undercover” as Lyft driver in NAPA Valley and San Francisco to learn the driver and driver’s experience. The conversation with one of the passengers struggled directly led to the creation of the “locking” feature in Lyft. And insists on the display of drivers as customers as well, which led to a 70 % profit-drivers always receive at least 70 % of what the Dragon pays, a step that gave Left a 19-point advantage in the driver’s preferences over competitors.

This focus on improving the service is part of the Battle of Risher against what he calls “ENSHITTIONATION”, and the borrowing of the phrase from Cory Doctorow, which was named after the “Word of the Year” by both the Australian dictionary and the American Delivery Association for how to summarize widespread frustration with the technical sector, even with modern life. Risher described it as an attractive clouds that makes services worse over time due to profit and investor pressures. By destroying the problems of a piece, its team has significantly improved the user experience, which reduced the rate of the driver’s cancellation from “very annoying” by 15 % to less than 5 %.

From receiving a blatant warning from Techaan Titan to earning a permanent thanks from another, the unconventional Risher profession was defined by facing ambitious challenges. Now, it is betting that the same first customer philosophy that transformed a small online library into a global empire that can push the next chapter of growth in Lyft.

For this story, luck The artificial intelligence is used to help with a preliminary draft. Check an editor of the accuracy of the information before publishing.

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