Lyft has announced that board member David Risher will become the company’s CEO on April 17. As part of the transition, Lyft’s co-founders Logan Green (CEO) and John Zimmer (President) will step down from their roles but will remain at the company in non-executive roles as chair and vice chair of the Lyft board. They will step down from their positions on April 17 and June 30 respectively.
Commenting on his appointment as CEO, Risher said:
“When the search committee asked me to consider this role, at first I was gobsmacked, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the competitive spirit I learned at Microsoft, the customer obsession I learned at Amazon, and the do-more-with-less lessons I learned leading Worldreader are exactly what Lyft needs right now. I am honored to step into the CEO role at such an important moment in the company’s history, and am prepared to take this business to new levels of success.”
As alluded to in the comments above, Risher has a fair bit of experience. He was the 37th employee of Amazon and served as the company’s first head of product and head of US retail then moved on to become a general manager at Microsoft. After he left Microsoft he went on to start a reading non-profit called Worldreader.
Lyft’s current board chair, Sean Aggarwal, said that David Risher knows Lyft’s strengths and weaknesses and should therefore be able to set out a future for the company so that it can capitalize on “significant opportunities” and achieve long-term profitable growth.