Lyft co-founders, CEO Logan Green and president John Zimmer, will step down from their positions in mid-April, the company said Wednesday. They will serve as chairman and vice chairman of Lyft’s board, respectively.
David Risher, former retail manager at Amazon, is taking over as CEO at Lyft. Lyft’s current chairman, Sean Aggarwal, will step down from his position but will remain on the board.
Green and Zimmer founded Lyft in 2012. At the time, the company was mainly distinguished from Uber by the presence of pink mustaches on Lyft vehicles. At the time, Zimmer told AapkaDost that Lyft had originally thought of doing the service only for women, “as a kind of security service and a very specific clientele.”
Lyft ditched the mustache in 2016 and went public three years later. When it debuted, Lyft raised more than $2 billion in an afternoon after pricing its shares at $72 each. Today Lyft closed at $9.60 a share; however, the stock price surged nearly 6% after hours following news of Risher taking over as CEO.
Risher joined Amazon in 1997 as the company’s first VP of product and store development. He rose through the ranks alongside Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos, and served as SVP of marketing and merchandising before leaving Amazon in 2002. everything store” with sales of more than $4 billion, according to a statement from Lyft.
Today, Risher is the CEO and co-founder of Worldreader, a non-profit organization that aims to get children interested in reading. Perhaps it’s this community-oriented spirit that ties in well with Lyft’s original founding goals as a company. According to a post on LinkedIn, he will step down as CEO and remain as chairman of the board.
Risher, who joined Lyft’s board of directors in 2021, will assume full leadership responsibilities for the company’s operations on April 17, according to the company.
Lyft said there would be no change to the company’s previously announced revenue, contribution margin and adjusted EBITDA outlook for the first quarter of 2023. When Lyft in February shared its fourth quarter and full year 2022 revenue, the company cut its revenue expectations for the first quarter of 2023 to $975 million, down about $200 million. Analysts had expected the company to promise $1.09 billion in revenue. That guidance caused the shares to fall 25% in after-hours trading to $12.13, and they’ve continued to fall in the intervening weeks.