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Lyft (LYFT) CEO David Risher has never said this publicly, but he used to throw away newspapers as a paperboy way back when.
It’s not something the avid reader is proud of, though he learned a lesson or two from it.
“My first real newspaper delivery job was the Washington Post. But the one I had before that was a very small local paper called The Advertiser. It was totally advertising-supported. And I got into so much trouble as a kid because I literally, for a period of time … I would do some of the route and then I would just throw the rest of the papers away. I’m like, nobody really wants this,” Risher said in a new episode of the Power Players with Brian Sozzi podcast (video above; listen in below).
“There’s a guy on Bradley Lane … He owned a store called Strosniders Hardware. They were one of the biggest advertisers in The Advertiser. When he stopped getting his paper, all hell broke loose. And I got in big trouble,” he added.
“My father, who kind of was a strict guy, basically garnished my wages for a year to give them back to Mr. Strosnider to pay him for the ads that people weren’t seeing for the course of the year,” Risher said.
Risher is still in the delivery game — just in a different form.
The bike-riding CEO has executed one of the more underappreciated turnarounds in corporate America. He spent 10 years at Microsoft (MSFT) helping build the company’s retail and marketing muscle in the early days, then jumped to Amazon (AMZN) in 1997 as one of its earliest senior executives.
He stepped away from the corporate world entirely in 2002 and spent the better part of two decades building a charity. Risher co-founded Worldreader, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing digital books to children in the developing world.
Then Lyft, where Risher had been a board member since 2021, came calling in early 2023. The board was in crisis mode, the stock had collapsed from its IPO price of $72 to single digits, and the company was losing hundreds of millions of dollars.
Since then, he slashed costs with a ruthlessness that surprised even his critics, rebuilt driver relationships that had deteriorated under prior leadership, launched a price war that started winning back riders, and got Lyft to its first-ever period of consistent profitability.
Today, Lyft stock is trading around $15, well off its IPO price but much improved over its lows. Uber (UBER) is seen as the ride-hailing leader. But Lyft is still here and still getting after it with a more fundamentally sound balance sheet.
