Brutal take from former Lyft COO: Lyft won't have many interested buyers
Q: You went to Lyft after Tesla. They're struggling now. So is Lyft valuable to a company like GM as a brand if they want to turn those into robotaxis?
A: Here's the tough part for Lyft. The economics really don't point to that answer. It costs Lyft and Uber more than $1,000 to acquire a driver. And it costs Lyft and Uber less than $5 to acquire a consumer. If I’m starting a robotaxi business, I've got no driver costs.
But I can go recruit my own consumer base for less than $5 each. And when you add 600,000 roughly monthly riders on Lyft and multiply that by $5, you wouldn't have to pay very much for a company to acquire those users yourself instead of paying $2 to $3 billion to acquire Lyft. So the economics don't work.
These networks are worth a lot less to people who have robotaxis. The more important near-term issue is supply constraints. They don't need to generate much demand to fill up their rides. Over time, they'll be able to attract consumers to their own platform. That's tough news for Lyft.
Q: Is anybody a good acquirer?
A: Uber has combined these different businesses of food delivery, rideshare, and package delivery. They've got a means to fill a driver's entire day. And all those businesses provide a really low cost consumer acquisition for each other.
What could be interesting is a combination of DoorDash and Lyft because they would lower each other's driver acquisition costs and consumer acquisition costs. But DoorDash hasn't shown an appetite to take on the mess that is Lyft.
