In Episode 14, we connect with Emily Castor, Director of Community Relations at Lyft, to discuss how community fuels growth at this transportation marketplace.

For more information about Lyft: https://www.lyft.com/

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Transcript:

Kevin:            Hi. Welcome to the Crowd, a podcast by Near Me. We’re talking about peer-to-peer marketplaces. We’re talking about the collaborative economy and we’re talking about thought leadership. We’re talking about all these things, any and all of them with some of the best minds in the field. And of course, I’m your host, Kevin Cohen.

 

                        Today, we’re going to talk to Emily Castor of Lyft. What is Lyft? Lyft is a ride sharing company based out of San Francisco. So the next time you need to talk a cab, maybe try Lyft. Anyway, let’s jump in to the interview. I am super excited about today’s interview. I’ll be joined by Emily Castor. Emily is the director of Community Relations at Lyft. Emily, welcome to the show.

 

Emily:            Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

 

Kevin:            We really appreciate it. Before we jump in to our discussion on Lyft, let’s do some rapid fire questions. What book do you recommend most often to your coworkers or friends?

 

Emily:            Well, I’ll tell you one of my favorite books is actually something that had nothing to do with Lyft or even technology at all. And that’s the book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I don’t know if you’ve ever encountered it but I ran into it when I was working on Capitol Hill. And it’s all about our food system and different kinds of farming in the US. And at that time, I was working on agriculture policy on Capitol Hill. And it was so fascinating just to hear this sort of almost anthropological approach to exploring our food system from industrial farms all the way to small family organic farms and just to understand the way that we eat a little bit better. It’s an interesting approach applied to almost anything not just agriculture. It’s a great book.

 

Kevin:            It is a great book. I’ve actually read it. It’s very cool. When you’re online, where do you spend most of your time on a personal basis? Obviously at work, you’re probably doing a lot of email. But where do you like to poke around online on a personal basis?

 

Emily:            Well, I will say Twitter continues to be an awesome source of all kinds of miscellaneous nuggets of knowledge. So I love to spend some time on Twitter just to get exposed to other people’s ideas and people I respect. And then I definitely have a habit of using the New York Times Now app which not only has the best articles from the New York Times every day and kind of synthesizes them into a little summary for you in the morning and in the evening but it also has some great highlights from around the web. And so I start my day that way every day.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. Who are some of your favorite people to follow online?

 

Emily:            Since I’ve been becoming even more of the sharing economy nerd lately, I really had been enjoying following Arun Sundararajan who’s a professor from NYU who’s really distinguished himself in his thought leadership in the sharing economy. He’s a great guy to follow. And then I like following David Spinks who’s very well known in the world of online community. He convenes a great group around the CMX media events and their online blog. And so I follow him and other people who talk a lot about online community like Kate Kendall.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. We’re definitely going to go deep into that stuff in just a sec. Besides Lyft, what peer-to-peer marketplaces do you use on a daily, weekly or monthly basis?

 

Emily:            Well, that’s an easy question for me because the way that I got into working at Lyft was by being basically a peer-to-peer power user myself. And for me, the gateway drug was Getaround. I used to rent my car out through Getaround to other people that live near me in San Francisco. And that just opened my eyes to this entire field about three years ago. So I continue to use Getaround sometimes as a renter. Actually, my car was in the shop recently and I used Getaround. Actually, I took a Lyft to my Getaround and a Lyft home after I dropped it off. So it was a beautiful peer-to-peer transportation experience. And then I’ve also used Airbnb quite a lot. It’s the way I prefer to travel when I go places so I don’t have to stay in sort of a homogenous hotel experience. And then TaskRabbit is great for getting things done when I need to lift heavy furniture, other things like that.

 

Kevin:            Awesome. So you’ve been at Lyft a couple of years but let’s go back in time. What did you do before you got to Lyft?

 

Emily:            I had a circuitous route through politics and finance. So when I joined Lyft, I had most recently been working as a municipal financial consultant. I basically was structuring big financing deals for state and local governments to help them issue bonds to cover their large infrastructure projects which sounds like a far cry from pink mustaches and online community. And before that, I’ve been working on political campaigns and I started out on Capitol Hill in DC when I was 22. So I’ve gone quite a distance from those early parts of my career. But in many ways, each of those things that I did related to transportation because I had transportation policy in my portfolio when I worked for a congresswoman. And I saw how much public funding was going to create these large new infrastructure projects to expand our freeways or build new ones and to try to fund public transit. And when I worked in municipal finance, again I saw how much taxpayer money went towards the expansion of infrastructure and yet I realized that funds were insufficient and space was insufficient to really meet the growing needs of mobility in our cities. And so things like Lyft that allow us to make more efficient use of the infrastructure we already have were so greatly needed.

 

Kevin:            It’s almost like iterative innovation. So an existing infrastructure provides a service but it’s not perfect and there’s already pent up demand. So it seems like the services doing really well in the collaborative economy are ones that are kind of runoffs of existing systems that innovate and provide a better user experience. Sometimes, it provides some savings over traditional means. Is that a reasonable analysis of it?

 

Emily:            Yeah. I think that when we look at the companies that have succeeded over the last three years in the sharing economy, the ones that have skyrocketed in their mainstream use have been those that are really biting off a part of the economy where people are already spending a lot of their personal income. So there’s a strong economic imperative for people who – they need to spend money on transportation to get around. They need to spend money on housing or towards accommodations when they travel. And then there’s also real money to be made in those categories on the provider side. Whereas, if you rent out a very small value item to another person, it’s very much less likely to be worth your time and especially if you’re concerned about someone messing up your lawnmower or something like that. It just seems to have a little bit more friction that’s inhibited some of those kinds of good sharing marketplaces from really succeeding. Whereas, travel and transportation and space, people can make a great deal of income through those categories. And so it makes that worth their while to be a provider and it provides a compelling economic opportunity and incentive for passengers as well.

 

Kevin:            Definitely. So you’ve been at Lyft for a couple of years. What was it like when you joined?

 

Emily:            Well, I joined on the first day that Lyft launched. So what it was like was one car on the map and then maybe five cars on the map. And it was so small that we knew every driver. I mean I literally knew all of their names and they would come in to the office to go to the bathroom or get a cup of coffee. And we had hangouts and it was very personal. And that was special. It was a really memorable, meaningful kind of a process to be a part of seeing something be born. And as a company, internally, we were very small as well. So the company had previously been Zimride as you may know with a long distance car pooling platform for road trips between major cities so that people could sell extra seats in their cars kind of on an advanced booking basis.

 

                        So we already had about 25 people working at the company when I joined. But Lyft was like a startup within a startup. We took about five people that were already working there and then I was hired and one other person was hired. And the seven of us became like the Lyft team and we would have separate scrums and work with the founders directly very intensively to try to get this thing off the ground. And so it was a very exciting experience to see that just from day one. And then to see its tremendous growth over the last few years has frankly been surreal. I mean we have about 400 employees at Lyft now. See, it’s already almost difficult for me to keep track because I don’t even know everyone anymore. So that itself has just been a very fascinating learning experience and one that’s given me the opportunity to refine my role over time and specialize.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. So as the Director of Community Relations, what do you do at Lyft? Paint that picture for us.

 

Emily:            So I became Director of Community Relations about a year ago. Prior to that, I had been working primarily on our core community operations which at that time included everything from moderating your online groups, managing community managers that were putting on events to our entire email marketing apparatus and our whole social media program. So it’s a very large scope really focused on operations. And then about a year ago, I switched over into more of a government relations capacity. So what I do now is manage a team of digital and field organizers really like community organizers who work to mobilize our drivers and passengers to get involved in the policy battles that we have around the country because we so frequently our called upon to work with government to create brand new legal frameworks for our business. Since it’s so new, there really isn’t already a framework in the law for how peer-to-peer marketplaces for transportation or other types of services like Airbnb should be governed. And state and local governments are grappling with that right now very rapidly. So my team makes sure that drivers and passengers find out about what’s going on and are given the opportunity to participate and go to the meetings and contact their elected officials. And then I personally also do quite a bit of outreach to academics and transportation experts and others focused on the sharing economy more broadly who are interested in being part of a coalition in support of ride sharing.

 

Kevin:            So can you give us an example of some of these local campaigns that you’ve dealt with in terms of working with local municipalities or governments to get into different markets? Can you share one of those with us?

 

Emily:            Sure. So I think a good example is Austin, Texas. Austin when you think about it culturally is an awesome alignment for Lyft because it’s a place where there’s really a strong community and an ethic, a desire to support local business that people who want to rely on their neighbors and who value technology. So it seemed like a natural fit but there were some regulatory barriers. And in fact, about a year before we ended up launching in Austin, we had been preemptively given a cease and desist order by their Department of Transportation without ever having set foot in the city. So we had some formidable barriers to deal with but the goodwill was there. We knew that they wanted to work towards a solution and so we’re able to work with city leaders over the course of that next year to get first a task force created that laid the ground work for a policy process to create sort of enabling legislation for our industry there. And during that process, we launched in the city. And within a matter of months, the city was able to agree on a reasonable set of rules that protected their important public safety objectives without putting in place unnecessary barriers that would block people from participating.

 

Kevin:            So you got to reach back and utilize some of your experience from your public service days.

 

Emily:            Absolutely. And our community participation was key throughout that. So we had a strong local community of drivers and passengers. In fact, many people were really mobilized around the idea of reducing drunk driving because there just weren’t very many good options for getting home safely at night. And as many people know, Austin is renowned for its amazing entertainment and nightlife and music festivals. And so they needed more options for people to get home safely. There had been some really tragic incidents with drunk driving fatalities. And so the community kind of rose up and said, “Look, we need these kinds of new mobility options.” And they worked and took it in their own hands to propel the issue at city hall.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. So what are some of the challenges that you guys faced in the last year as well?

 

Emily:            Oh gosh. Where do I start? It was quite a busy year. I mean I feel like I was in the trenches from start to finish. It was a fascinating time to be a part of it especially on the policy side because during our first year and a half of existence from June 2012 until this time last year in January 2014 we had only really been in California and a small number of other markets. And so we’ve gone through a regulatory process in California but we hadn’t had time yet in these other places to really have rules develop for our industry. So over the last year, that all has happened. It’s all happened in a mad flurry of activity creating new rules and having regulatory processes and state legislation and city ordinances and gubernatorial vetoes. So it’s been a challenge of bandwidth at some level just to keep up with so many things happening at once and to grow our team quickly enough and maintain the institutional knowledge that we need to address those issues as they arise and be everywhere at once. And I think there certainly have been just other scaling issues as well as a company for us to figure out how to structure ourselves for a company of 400 people in 65 cities. And so we’ve gone through many reorganizations and iterations on our operational model to the point where we’ve gotten much, much more refined and efficient about the way that we bring drivers into our community and the way that we communicate with them and how we find new passengers. So that’s all a process of maturing as a company that’s been both difficult and wonderful and it’s fascinating to watch.

 

Kevin:            Right. Well, I’m sure how you do your campaigns and how you roll out your different programs is a little different today. Obviously, the company has gone through many rounds of funding. And so having some resources to roll out these programs is probably a new thing because when you got there a couple of years ago you probably were more boot strapped I would assume.

 

Emily:            We were definitely thriftier then. I mean we were a funded company when Lyft started. We had been funded with our Series A before Lyft launched but we were tiny and we were so thrifty because we had this business that had become self sustaining with Zimride but it really was not going to be our final resting place. We wanted to try out this newer, riskier model of Lyft but it was very unknown whether it would succeed. And so we had to be very wise in the way that we spent every penny. And I remember arguing with vendors over $100 versus $250 a month for software subscriptions and just kind of pinching every single penny.

 

Kevin:            Definitely. So what are some of your big objectives for 2015?

 

Emily:            In 2015, I think we’re going to have an opportunity especially with our government relations efforts to be much more proactive. As I mentioned, the last year, it was really like playing whack-a-mole. I mean it was such a flurry of activity that we had to be very reactive and often couldn’t predict what was going to happen next. This year, we’ve already launched in almost every major American city. So we have a footprint. We know where we are and we understand these cities much better than we did before we had been there. So now, we have an opportunity to look at the landscape and identify the places where we can make strategic progress with a stronger understanding of the dynamics in those locations to make an opportunity for ride sharing to achieve its true potential because Lyft is only at the very beginning of what we hope will be a much more transformative change in transportation. And our founders have really described that since day one but recently it started to come to fruition through some changes in our product.

 

                        Now, the first phase of Lyft was really just getting drivers on the road, people who had some extra time and giving them the opportunity to receive ride requests from people nearby and to build up availability, to basically make ride sharing reliable which it had never been before in the history of car pooling. It just wouldn’t have been possible for people to be matched with someone who is three minutes away from them at anytime around the clock in any place in a metropolitan area. And through the last two and a half years, we’ve been able to achieve that by getting drivers on the road. But now, what we want to do is use that footprint, use that infrastructure to make it more and more efficient to really turn Lyft into car pooling.

 

                        So Lyft Line is one product that we launched a few months ago to start doing that where we actually match up multiple passenger groups that we can identify are going the same way. And that means hey, you’re requesting a ride right now. You wait a few seconds and we see that there’s another person requesting a ride just a couple of blocks away and they’re going somewhere that’s close to where you’re going. So the driver can stop and pick each of you up and then you ride together and then drop each of you off. And you pay less and the driver earns more. And it’s more efficient for the environment. So, we’re doing that. And we’re also allowing people to give rides if they’re driving somewhere for their own purposes as well through our driver destination feature. So that’s something that I think we’ll double down on in the coming year and really evolve the nature of car pooling and hopefully we’ll get some support of legislation to expand our ability to do that.

 

Kevin:            So how many markets is Lyft Line in right now?

 

Emily:            Lyft Line is in three markets. We’re in California. We’re in Los Angeles and San Francisco in California and then also in New York in New York City.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. So you talked about launching a new market. When you go into a new market as a community manager, what does the prelaunch look like? What kind of campaigns do you run? Can you share a little bit of that with us?

 

Emily:            I can tell you kind of how that’s evolved. In the early days, we had a launch team. And the launchers when we were scoping out a new market would go and they would actually live in the city for a couple of months before launch, sometimes you know, three or four months. It took a long time then for us to really figure out how to identify potential drivers, to plan the big launch party and to train all of those drivers because it used to be the case that we had to actually physically bring every driver into our office and have an interview with them in person. And more recently, we were actually able to bring all of that process into the app and then into the hands of some of our best current drivers through what we call our mentor program.

 

                        So right now, the way that we bring new drivers onto the platform is to take existing drivers who have shown that they perform very well in our platform and have a very good record of being a driver and then we invite them to be mentors. And they can receive mentoring requests from new prospective drivers who’ve reached the final stage of the process and they’ll actually go into a ride along with that prospective driver. And they’ll take the photos and they’ll do a walk through the vehicle and take photos of their documents. And so they’re having that in-person community interaction which in many ways is really superior to what we were doing before. We didn’t have the opportunity to actually take a ride with them when we were doing it ourselves and that was much more difficult for us to get a lot of drivers through the process. Mentoring allows us to get many drivers through the process much more quickly.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. Well, Emily, we really appreciate you joining us today on this call. Quick question, if people want to learn more about Lyft, where can they go to learn more about you as a company, how to become a driver?

 

Emily:            You can just go to lyft.com. That’s L-Y-F-T dot com. And if you want to be a driver, just go to lyft.com/drivers and you can apply right there.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. And also, your app is available in the IOS app marketplace as well as the Google Play marketplaces, correct?

 

Emily:            Absolutely, it’s a free app.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. Emily, thanks for your time today. We really appreciate it.

 

Emily:            Thank you so much. Have a great day.

 

Kevin:            So that’s it for today’s show everybody. I’d like to thank Emily from Lyft for joining us here today. They’re doing great stuff so check them out. If you want to learn more about Emily or Lyft, we got all of their information in the show notes at near-me.com. Click on the blog and then go to the podcast listed. Also, if you really liked today’s show, we’d really appreciate it if you could go to iTunes and leave us a five-star review. It really helps us out. Anyway, thanks for your time today. Make it a great day.