Posted by Alumni from Wired
April 8, 2023
Last week, Lyft suddenly announced that its cofounders, president Logan Green and CEO John Zimmer, would step away from the ride-hailing company after 11 years. David Risher, a former executive at Microsoft and Amazon who has been on Lyft's board since 2021, will take the helm later this month. Lyft's C-suite shuffle was sudden, but hardly surprising. For one thing, tech companies in their teens and tweens seem to be entering a founder flop era. Twitch's Emmett Shear, Instacart's Apoorva Mehta, Pinterest's Ben Silbermann, and Peloton's John Foley all recently bid adieu. But Lyft in particular is struggling. It hasn't turned a profit. It's losing market share to Uber. It laid off 13 percent of its staff last fall. Its stock price is down nearly 90 percent since it went public in 2019. And yet the exits of Green and Zimmer say something about how tech industry vibes have shifted since the early 2010's, when young-ish dudes were raising mountains of cash to disrupt, well, everything.... learn more