Benjamin Lauzier: belief

Transcript context

…And it's also just a differentiator, because GM and you guys were close, and so you had this lever that say Uber didn't have. Amazing. Another area that I know you spent time on that I think is really interesting, and I think it'd be helpful to people to hear is the mentorship program, and the ambassador program that you had at Lyft, and how that helped you scale much more quickly than other folks were able to. Can you share that story? Pretty early on at Lyft, this was 2014, 2015 maybe, Uber was basically 30X our size. They had 30 times more revenue, more people, more liquidity, everything you can think of. They were growing like crazy, and we had a bit of this existential moment, as you can imagine, where we were wondering how we're supposed to compete with that. And we had to be super clever, everything that you did at the company had to be 10 times more efficient per person than the competition just to survive. That was the bar, just not to die, and put a lot of pressure on us but we basically found a clever way of onboarding drivers at a fraction of the cost and resources. So, let me give you a little bit of context on how the onboarding flow worked. So, at the time, the last step to get onboarded as a driver was after you background check and your driving record check came back, you had to do a visual inspection of your car, a quick test drive, some light training, and we would check your documents. We would check that you are the person with a driver's license and all those things. And Uber at the time would launch a team on the ground, they would go and open an office and they would have DMV-style group onboarding sessions and car inspections. And we did this as well in our first three to four markets, but you can imagine the overhead and the lead time. You had to go and you had to find office space, sign the lease, hire employees, you had huge, huge lead time. And we thought about it, and at the time a huge competitive differentiator for us was our brand. As a passenger or as a driver, why would you use a platform with lower liquidity? As a driver, you had lower earnings guaranteed. As a passenger, you had longer wait times. Why would you use a service like that? You do because of the brand, because of its values, it's how it makes you feel. And so, we had the pink mustaches at the time, we had this very strong brand identity. I think a lot of that has been lost now, but we also had this amazing community of drivers who were fierce advocates for the brand. And so, what we did is leveraging this community and building essentially a soft onboarding supply engine where we would pay our best drivers $35 per mentor session, and a mentor session was essentially replacing this onboarding flow. So, it was basically another driver looking at your vehicle to check all your documents, take photos of your driver's license and all that stuff, and take you on a short ride along. And the benefits of this were absolutely mind-blowing and kind of unexpected for us on all sides. First, the mentors were our very best drivers, and they were evangelists for the brand. So, what they did was they would share personal tips on when and where to drive. Oftentimes they shared their contact info. And this created tremendous leverage and social proof for those new drivers who were on the fence about taking strangers into their car. and where to drive. Oftentimes they shared their contact info. And this created tremendous leverage and social proof for those new drivers who were on the fence about taking strangers into their car. It's actually quite funny because we had the brightest minds in the company writing the best marketing emails and copy, like, "Hey, hop on the car and drive this Saturday." And you had all those drivers and all those mentors like, "No, no, don't listen to those Lyft guys. Here's what you should do. Go on Tuesday at 2:00 PM, text me, I'll tell you where the good spot is, and this is how you're going to get rides. This is how you're going to get rich and make a lot of money." And this recognition lever was just so much more powerful than anything we could be telling you. And so, very, very efficient activation lever for the new drivers. For us, also incredibly scalable. We could fly a small team to rigorously vet and onboard maybe like 10, 20 top drivers, and then they'd fly to a different market, and we would let the rest of our drivers be onboarded by those mentors. And even for those mentors, for those top drivers, it was an incredible recognition lever. For them, if you were a 4.9 driver, you had enough rides, you had a chance to make it into being a mentor, and this provided additional earnings opportunity for you. If you did two mentor sessions in an hour, you could make 70 bucks an hour. You could take a break from driving if you're tired, and just do some of those. It felt like getting promoted at a job. And so, it actually had a huge impact on the retention of our very best drivers, which was unexpected. So, a lot of really, really interesting benefits, and we actually lean into this and built a couple of really fascinating variations of this for a while, but this allowed us to match most of Uber's footprint with a 10th or a 20th of the resources at incredible speed, I guess.…

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