Woody Hartman, Lime COO on Micromobility and Scaling Lyft

Michael Koenig: Hello and welcome to Between Two COOs, where phenomenal chief operating officers come to share their knowledge, advice, and at the very end, a crazy story. I'm your host, Michael Koenig, and today our guest is Woody Hartman, chief operating officer at Lime, the micromobility company whose Lime green e-scooters have become ubiquitous across 250 cities and 30 countries. Prior to joining Lime, Woody spent 6 years at Lyft as VP of Operations, guiding the company from $100,000 in annual revenue to over $3 billion. He's also served as President and Head of Product at TeamSnap and held strategy roles at Disney, Fox Interactive, and McKinsey Company. In 2019, Woody summited Mount Everest, which aside from being incredibly cool, has now earned him one of the most prestigious awards known to humankind, and of course I'm talking about the official Between Two COOs Badass Award. Welcome, Woody. Happy to have you here.

Woody Hartman: Thanks, Michael. It's great to be here.

Michael Koenig: Woody, you've had quite the career. How'd you end up in the COO seat? Give us the tour.

Woody Hartman: Well, I think like most people's careers, it's a winding road and probably not the one they originally planned for themselves. But, you know, I would say I was on a path doing a bunch of strategy work in a variety of industries that centered around actually something I was really passionate about, which is creating joy for people. I dabbled in video games, I dabbled at Disney theme parks. I love creating joy. And it was somewhat by accident that one of the co-founders of Lyft reached out to me in the very early days of that company. And he had a real passion for Disney, which was the employer I was at at the time. And he had found me and basically said, "Hey, as crazy as this sounds, I'm trying to build a transportation company that is about more than getting from A to B. That's about the experience in between, and I think someone who has a passion for creating joy and has come from a place like Disney could help me do that. Can you come on board with this quirky pink mustache taxi company, my words, not his, to as employees sort of 34 to see if we can start to build that together? And I said, well, that does sound crazy. I don't know if I believe you, but after many more conversations, I realized he was extremely sincere and that it might actually be possible. So I joined as the general manager for Lyft in Los Angeles, which was just their second and started a 6-year run with the company that led me to be the VP of Operations for the last 4 years and really positioned me as an operator in the tech industry and, and showed me that mobility can be about a lot more than getting A to B. I think it's no accident that after a hiatus in community sports at TeamSnap, I came back to mobility for a product that I think creates a lot of joy. I have never seen someone in a bad mood on on an electric scooter. I think it's inherently a fun experience and it's part of what brings me joy every day in this job.

Michael Koenig: Now, it's really interesting to have a founder come across someone who doesn't necessarily come from the background that that specific company operates in, and yet they put you in charge of not just a new expansive city, this was a pivotal test to see whether ridesharing would work outside of San Francisco. Tell us about that. That, that seems like a very gutsy decision, whereas I would think, oh, pull someone from

Woody Hartman: Yeah, well, I'm very lucky they took a chance on me. But I think as someone who was then very quickly in the position to, make the same sorts of decisions about who to hire and how to grow this company. What I learned is, especially at an earlier stage company and an early stage industry, there's actually usually very little, experienced talent to draw on. So you have to figure out, what are your analogs? Where, what's important to you from a skill, behavior, mindset standpoint, not maybe take the shortcut of, well, who's done this kind of work before? Um, because at that time there was no one really doing any— had, who had any meaningful experience in the type of rideshare that Lyft was doing. Lyft was, uh, out there with Sidecar at the time as the only two companies that were actually pioneering peer-to-peer rideshare. Uber had built their business for a few years on the licensed black car drivers, and that mindset of working with fleets and licensed operators, chauffeur culture and mindset was very different from what Lyft was setting out to build. And that's why I think it made a lot of sense for If you want to build something different, you got to get different people. And I appreciate that mindset. And that was a mindset that I think we followed substantially for much of Lyft's history. We rarely ever recruited people from Uber because we really wanted culture to be our differentiator. And it's hard to do that if you're just recruiting the same people.

Michael Koenig: That's interesting. And I wonder if you can maybe take us behind the scenes. Lyft, as it continued to expand, more or less developed a playbook. When you enter a new city, you do X, Y, and

Woody Hartman: Yeah, I mean, when I joined, I joined, I think, one week before launch. So, uh, I was just a sponge at— in the beginning, of course. My job was to absorb and listen and learn as much as I could from the two launchers who were there, uh, to bring, you know, whatever institutional knowledge we had at that point to Los Angeles in this new market. Um, but also just to be a smart generalist, uh, to not be afraid to make real-world observations about what's probably gonna work and what isn't, look at what limited data we have and draw conclusions and try stuff, right? I mean, we were a tiny company at that stage. And so the risk of getting something wrong is very low and the risk of not trying enough things is very high. And so I would say the, the real MO in the very early days was try as much as you can and see what sticks. So we tried different ways of onboarding drivers. We tried different ways of marketing to customers. We tried different geographic areas to support in the city. We tried different ways to talk to the city and negotiate with the city. I mean, it was just nonstop experimentation. But absolutely, through that sort of million flowers bloom, you figure out which ones bloom the brightest, and very quickly you start picking those and replanting them and doing your years and years of cultivation. And that was kind of how we started to build a playbook. And one of my first versions of that was after getting LA up and running in those first 6, 8 weeks, sort of feel like, okay, I'm starting to see the playbook here to operate. Create a market, and the launchers were off trying to launch Seattle and Chicago as the next Lyft cities. And it was going very slowly. It was taking more than 2 months. Those cities weren't launched. They weren't recruiting enough drivers. And I felt like I'd learned a lot, uh, through trial and error in LA. So I grabbed one of my junior team members. We drove down to San Diego and I said, hey, I'm going to go launch this and I'm going to do it in 4 weeks. Uh, and by the way, I'm going to do it without needing to hire anyone locally on the ground, which was our, biggest bottleneck from a launch playbook standpoint. And sure enough, it worked. And that was really the springboard for me to go from being maybe just a long-term general manager for LA. The COO at that time, Travis Van Der

Michael Koenig: And so now you're in San Francisco and you're directing the launch team. You've done San Diego, you had that success, and then correct me if I'm wrong, but shortly thereafter, over the next year and a half or so, you launched into like 65, 70 other markets. I mean, that is incredibly fast. Can you tell us about that experience?

Woody Hartman: Yeah, it was really fast and really fun. Uh, it was certainly a land grab. Um, and, uh, the focus of our innovation at that stage was speed. So what started as kind of a 2-month launch playbook, I got it down to 4 to 6 weeks with San Diego. Uh, and then, you know, it was once a month, then it was 2 a month, then it was sort of 1 a week. Uh, and then, you know, the fun capstone for us, which was a bit of a PR stunt, but also grounded in the reality of, um, it was, we called it 24 launches in 24 hours. What really happened was we had about a 3-week lead time on 24 markets that all launched at the same time. Um, so we were able to launch whatever that is, you know, 8 markets a week basically was kind of the peak runway run rate we got to in that style. And then really after that point, we stopped even doing dedicated city launches and we changed the playbook again. We were able to do it fully remotely. We didn't need to be, you didn't need to send people into cities.

Michael Koenig: That's really interesting. First off, I mean, I would have lost probably all of my hair doing that and not slept at all. I think definitely for those 24 hours at least. In terms of the success that carried over, certainly there are always bumps and bruises along the way. And I mean, I think a lot of us followed the rideshare— you know, we can call it a war, we can call it the competition. Can you tell us about some of those challenges and how that sort of shaped you and also how you approached them?

Woody Hartman: Yeah, I mean, there were many challenges in ridesharing, but I will say with, you know, some of the perspective post my ridesharing career, I would say we also had a lot of advantages that other industries don't have, including micromobility. So it's the compare contrast of actually some of the things that allowed ridesharing to scale so quickly are not necessarily transferable. And even something that looks perhaps as similar as micromobility. But we can get to that in a minute. I mean, in terms of some of the challenges in rideshare specifically, you know, the, by far the biggest was driver onboarding, right? It was a supply game was the biggest challenge was the product thankfully mostly sold itself. The value proposition was pretty easy to understand. While no one wanted to use the term taxi in those days, and truly even internally, we kind of didn't allow ourselves to consider ourselves a taxi company, because we did have much bigger aspirations than that. That initial taxi use case was an established business model. You know, people, consumers had an understanding of what use cases were relevant. They're like, oh, I'll take it to the airport, or I'll take it when I'm drinking and things. So there, there was already a base of demand that didn't need too much work to generate. The, the challenge was developing the supply to serve it, uh, and especially because we unlocked so much more demand than it ever existed previously, given the convenience of you know, app-based hailing and all the rest, um, we needed a lot of supply. Uh, and this is the real innovation was both where is that supply? How do you communicate with them? How do you get people engaged in an industry that would have never considered being a taxi driver, but suddenly you're trying to convince them to, to drive strangers around in their personal vehicle. That was a real marketing challenge, a real funnel challenge, a real operations challenge, because then you also need to do lots of steps to validate, is their vehicle safe? Are they a safe driver? Are they safe, uh, et cetera, et cetera. So that's where I think most of the innovation lie in the first couple of years of the industry. And it was a lot of fun to, to figure that out one step after another.

Michael Koenig: So in 2017, you become the VP of Global Operations for Lyft, and now you've gone from launching in LA to launching internationally. At what point did you start to really evolve your skillset and Let me just back up here. When you're in the early startup phase, a lot of the time you have generalists, and as you grow and grow further, you realize, oh, we need specialists to really guide us, have that sort of institutional knowledge or just prior experience in legal or whatever it may be. You grew with the company significantly and not just in a, in a minor way, I mean, as a leader, how did you personally keep up with the developments of the company and the needs of the company?

Woody Hartman: Well, yeah, I consider myself extremely lucky to have sort of stayed with the company for that incredible run because the company did change so much in, in so many ways, maybe not in a few others. I mean, fortunately we were founder-led the whole time, which meant kind of the cornerstone of our cultural values and approaches were the same, but obviously the details of how work got done and the tactics to be successful and everything else evolved dramatically. I would say, you know, lots of people asked me at Lyft and since, you know, how was I successful where other people weren't? And the number one answer I always share with them is adaptability. You have to be adaptable in order to be successful over an extended period of time at a rapidly growing company. And I say growing broadly, or sorry, a rapidly changing company, which is even broader than growing because, you know, uh, obviously There's many versions of change. A startup that is in hypergrowth is one of those and a particularly exciting one. But yeah, you have to be adaptable. And I would say the key to adaptability is, is humility. You have to be willing to say, oh, I don't think I know how to succeed in this, or I don't know how to make that decision. Can someone help me? Or does anyone have any advice for this? Or just say, hey everyone, I got that wrong. Sorry, I've learned from that mistake now. But I think too many people end up with this. Sort of imposter syndrome that makes them actually less vulnerable and less authentic and causes them to pretend like they know what the answers are at this stage and pretend like they know who to hire and all the rest. And I'd say something that I tried to channel, not always perfectly, was just consistently saying, okay, this is what I'm going to bring to the table. In many cases, after my first year or two, it was like, I have the institutional knowledge. I know how to get this done or how the system works. Or what drivers are thinking, but I have never managed a team this big before, or I have never run a budget process this large before. And being humble about that means you can surround yourself with people with those experiences and really get the most out of them.

Michael Koenig: Early on, you were at McKinsey. How much of those skills that you learned factored into your ability to adapt and your ability to do, you know, some of those things like manage a enormous budget and a P&L of $2 billion. I mean, let's, let's actually put some numbers here. This is massive. You're talking about managing— you had 1,000 people within your org. You managed the P&L for this. You went, as I mentioned in the intro, from $100,000 in annual revenue to $3 billion. I mean, this is a significant period of growth. So we're not just talking about, oh, we went to raise our Series B of $50 million. How do some of those prior experiences factor into your success in being adaptable?

Woody Hartman: Yeah, I do think McKinsey was incredible training at being comfortable uncomfortable. McKinsey, especially, you know, as a 22-year-old fresh out of undergrad, you don't know anything. You don't— I mean, you certainly don't know how to build a free cash flow model with any level of sophistication in the real world. But even more importantly, perhaps, apps, you don't even know what work culture looks like and feels like. Like, you know, how long should you work? And when's— what's an appropriate way to craft a late-night email or any of those things? So, you know, being thrown into that environment, uh, like so many other business analysts at McKinsey or other consulting firms, you just have to get comfortable being an imposter. You literally are an imposter. You're an outsider in McKinsey, and then McKinsey's thrust you into an outsider at some other company. And so you just have to kind of get comfortable with that discomfort. And I think that's very healthy, because once you are, then again, you can— that's when your mind can open up and you can learn. You can be helpful without necessarily being a know-it-all. So, yes, I found probably more the sort of emotional and behavioral lessons from McKinsey were far more important even than any specific skills.

Michael Koenig: You talked about company culture. You also referenced this when you were speaking to Lyft. Tell us about how you have gone about crafting just great company cultures. I mean, I'm very familiar with TeamSnap. Some of our folks might not be, but, uh, TeamSnap, uh, Boulder, Colorado-based company, and just has a remarkable culture. You came from Lyft, then TeamSnap, and now at Lime. Tell us a bit about that.

Woody Hartman: Yeah, I, as someone who really considers it my calling in life to create joy and good experiences for other people. What I learned as I became a manager and then a very large manager at Lyft was that not only can your product and experience deliver joy and great experiences, but actually the culture you create at a company as a manager does that just as much and in many ways in an even more direct and tangible way. So it's no accident that I've sought to put myself in environments in which I thought I could be that sort of inspiring, uplifting manager, and where I could hopefully amplify a culture that was already strong and creating a great experience for people and just be a part of that and build on it. And so yes, it was the number one thing that drew me to Lyft in the beginning was the culture that the founders embodied and extolled and wanted to create in this business, both with the employees, but then through the drivers and ultimately in the passengers and the The most common buzzword at Lyft in the first 3 years was community. And I was so excited to be a part of building that community. Similarly, TeamSnap, actually, so TeamSnap is a company that provides software for sports organizations and individual coaches themselves to organize amateur sports. And I had a personal connection to this dimension of community because while I'd been at Lyft in San Francisco, I actually created, LGBT Ultimate Frisbee league that started as a small little startup of just a few friends tossing a disc in the park to something that was hundreds of people big and, uh, and one of the largest, uh, LGBT sporting organizations in a city full of them, many of which with many decades long history. And so I personally had seen the impact of creating that community on a community I cared a lot about. And so it was natural for me when I thought about what my next purpose was going to be after leaving Lyft and after climbing Everest and taking a year off. I wanted to do something that would invest in community and culture again, and TeamSnap felt like a great bridge to that. And Lime as well. I mentioned already that I think the service brings joy. And I think Wayne, our CEO, and the culture he's built is one of the strongest cultures I've ever seen, led with more humility and empathy and, and just genuine compassion, uh, than I've perhaps ever seen. Uh, and that's been really fun to be a part of.

Michael Koenig: I love that you created Ultimate Frisbee League and then came to dominate other leagues. I mean, Woody, come on. Was it, was that as competitive as Lyft?

Woody Hartman: No, and it was never the intent, right? And I think that was maybe the key to the success was, um, You know, people can sense authenticity from a million miles away. And, you know, if they felt like they were joining a sports league just because, you know, I had some personal ambition to make it important, that would not be a great experience. They wouldn't tell their friends about it. It would not go viral in the way that any organization needs to in order to really grow organically. But that wasn't at all what I was trying to do. I, like many founders, was tapping into a very personal motivation of mine. I had lived in San Francisco as a gay man for, I don't know, at that point, 9, 10 years, and never really felt like there was the community based in the same values and behaviors that I really wanted. Close, I had approximations, or maybe pieces of it here and there, but never really the full picture of what I wanted. And I was like, well, shoot, what if I just create that around a sport that's really easy and welcoming to newcomers? And sure enough, lots of other people gravitated to that vibe as well.

Michael Koenig: That's phenomenal. Let's talk about coaching. As a leader, eventually you shift into having to coach and having that opportunity to coach, and you become someone who from, you know, your early career relied on mentors and, and received coaching, and then you kind of hit this, this curve, this inflection point where you yourself become the coach. I mean, going from, let's say, a podcast listener to now a guest on podcasts. Can you tell us about that personal development? What surprised you? And then let's actually dive into the coaching. How do you approach it? So much of it is— so much of building a team is also helping other people develop and achieve success?

Woody Hartman: I agree with the premise of the question, which is that coaching is an incredibly important part of my job and, uh, and just an incredibly valuable and rewarding thing to do. I also agree that it is quite jarring to be viewed as a coach maybe when, when you're first making that transition, because you probably don't view yourself as one yet. So I remember And it was maybe year 2, 3, 4 at Lyft where people started asking me those questions for advice. And I always kind of raised an eyebrow. Really? Why are you asking me? Come on now. But I think like many things in life, the first step is sort of assuming the mantle that is given to you of saying, OK, if people want this from me or expect it from me, then I should deliver on it in the best way that I can while probably being still humble about where my limitations are. But OK. You think I have valuable perspective to you, let me see what I can share. I also take to heart something I learned in business school, as dangerous as that sentence is to say out loud, that one of the lessons I took away was I took a coaching class and then got a chance to be a coachee and then a coacher. And one of the biggest things they said was that, you know, great coaches rarely give advice. They often just guide the, the coachee to their own answers. And so that's something I've really tried to practice as people increasingly seek advice from me, to hopefully more often reframe that with just interesting questions that help them self-reflect. Because at the end of the day, my experiences are still limited to the narrow set of, uh, you know, experiences that I've had in my life. And in many cases, it may be a false parallel to assume that whatever worked for me will work for someone else in a very different context. So I try to instead use my perspective to ask the right questions, uh, that get people to their own answers.

Michael Koenig: And it takes a little bit longer to arrive at the outcome, but at the end of the day, it's more efficient. It's that concept of teach someone to fish instead of catch the fish for them. What are some of those questions that you ask? How do you go about guiding someone to that answer?

Woody Hartman: It's difficult to answer in the abstract, but I would say most people are ultimately asking some version of the question, you know, "How can I achieve the level of success you've achieved?" And I think the first question I ask back to them is, "Are you sure you want to achieve exactly what I've achieved?" Defining what you want to achieve is the first step in being successful. And so, that's often some of where the richest self-reflection occurs is, "Are you aiming to be a VP of Global Operations at a rideshare company?" If that's very specifically what you want to achieve, maybe I can be helpful, but even then, And my path to it is not open to anyone else. Lyft will never be a 34-person company again. So I'm not sure I can give you that direct path. But if you are interested in building culture, if you're interested in scaling a startup, if you're interested in developing a bench of incredible leaders that can be your successor, whatever those personal goals are. Then I think it's easier to perhaps give the right advice or at least help them start to focus on the right things that are going to contribute to that outcome.

Michael Koenig: You just mentioned successor, and this ties back into Lyft. The IPO happens. You've been there, as you said, from 34 people to thousands to billions of dollars in revenue, now an IPO, and then you stepped away. Tell us about that decision. Tell us about the preparation that went into it and what drove it?

Woody Hartman: It was a decision a few years in the making, and perhaps slightly off topic, I will take a moment to say that, you know, I think in this era of great resignation and all of the disruption and unpredictability and uncertainty in our world over the last few years with the pandemic, I think this culture of having— of actually being responsible for the successful transition is something that's certainly faded in a lot of the company cultures. And I know it's not just the ones I've been a part of, but many of the people I speak to say, whatever happened to making multi-month transition plans and actually shepherding that and grooming the right people to step up and replace you versus just a peace out, I'm done, you figure it out. I took that responsibility at Lyft extremely seriously because I felt like to the extent that I'd invested so much of my time and energy in a company and I wanted there to be a long-standing legacy from that. I felt like that, like, even in a selfish way, that legacy would only be protected if my successor or the plan for my departure was smooth and effective. So yes, it was years in the making. I ultimately recommended an individual on my team step up into my role, which he was able to do, although I also recommended a pretty pretty significant set of reorganizations. And that was part of why I stepped away was what I realized, and this, I saw this happen many other places at Lyft through my tenure there. And then it seemed in the end so obvious to be true for me was that there are also times when you need to step away in order to enable an organization to take that next step on its own. And in my case, I felt like I was a crutch for a certain organizational model at the company that was no longer serving the company very well. And there wasn't wasn't a great next step for me. And instead of sticking around and kind of like forcing the organization to hold on to me at this access point of maybe an outdated organizational model, I went to the CEO and said, hey, I think you need to reorg this company in a pretty meaningful way. And I think me stepping back is the first step in being able to do that. So yeah, those are some of the thoughts that, uh, and actions that took place to I think what made ultimately a successful but certainly not without its challenges transition at Lyft.

Michael Koenig: You talked about your CEO at Lime, and so let's bring the conversation over. How have you and Wayne divided up responsibilities and how do you complement each other's abilities?

Woody Hartman: It's actually really fun working for Wayne, not the least of which because he was previously the COO and it's the first time I've worked for a former COO. And I'll admit, and maybe, maybe many other operators out there can empathize, you know, it's not very common for CEOs to be former operators. They often come from finance or they are a founder themselves and haven't actually had sort of executive-level positions previously. Often they come from product. That's been my experience in tech. So, so it's really fun and validating in a way to work for someone who's experienced operations firsthand, but it's also made it it at least presented a risk that Wayne and I overlap too much in terms of the way we think or the, the skills that we bring to the table. And I really have Wayne to credit for this. He has been extremely self-aware of that and has leaned into the non-operating parts of the job and, and frankly his skillset. So that means he's been much more focused on things like corporate development, much more focused on, um, business development as well, finance, fundraising. More of those external-facing parts of the job, as well as of course focusing much more on the other non-operational functional responsibilities at the company, be it product and engineering and, and others. So, uh, I think that's been at least the starting point for a really healthy, uh, division of labor. But I will say when I need to go to him and explain like, oh, come on, man, operationally this is gonna be super challenging. Do we really have to implement this new approach or whatever, it's great to have someone on that side of the table who can empathize and say, "Yeah, I completely see what you're talking about. Let's see if we can make that a bit easier." I love that.

Michael Koenig: So now we're talking about Lime shifting from Lyft. The growth and distribution strategy has notably changed for Lime. In the early days, it was pretty common to read news stories where companies in the e-scooter micromobility world would descend on a city, drop scooters all over the place, and sometimes it was likened to Uber's aggressive sort of growth at all costs, ask for forgiveness not permission approach. But this has evolved over time now. How have you seen it evolve and impact the stability of the company but also its growth?

Woody Hartman: Yeah, that is a, I think, a relatively fair characterization. You know, a lot of micromobility was born out of people from the rideshare industry. And this is— I alluded to this earlier— this is one of the interesting, you know, juxtapositions between ridesharing and micromobility. Ridesharing was able to ask forgiveness because it was an asset-light model in which, uh, it was pretty hard for a city to actually regulate or, or in any way penalize the rideshare companies early on, right? People were driving their own cars. There wasn't any licensing being done centrally. Those cars weren't well marked. And so it was effective. One can debate whether, you know, it had other values or perhaps had value challenges, but it was effective to take an ask forgiveness approach in ridesharing in a way that in an asset-heavy model like micromobility, where suddenly you've got millions of dollars of assets that you've put on the streets and the city can pretty easily hire a truck to go around and pick those up, put them in an impound lot, and suddenly you've lost millions of dollars. The city has a lot more leverage in micromobility, and I think the companies all learned that the hard way after sort of 12 months of trying to take a rideshare approach. The outcome I think is overall great though, is by giving the city more leverage, it's forced micromobility to evolve to a position that ridesharing took much longer to get to, which is to say, look, this isn't about us versus them. This is about a partnership. And at the end of the day, transportation serves communities in the same way that cities want to serve communities. So how do we do that in partnership together? What's it going to take? And I think that's why when you look at, for example, the way Lime operates in many cities across the US, we, uh, we have something called equity zones, which are often, uh, areas of a city in which it may not be particularly profitable for us to serve them on our— in our own right, but where the city said, look, if you want to serve all really profitable areas, you need to make sure that 25% of your vehicles are in these low-income areas to make sure that people of all types and all communities here in the city have access to this, you know, great form of transportation. And I think that's great. I think that it's made micromobility mature faster, and I think it's provided a better service that serves our mission earlier than we would have evolved to on our own.

Michael Koenig: So we've been talking a lot about micromobility. Tell us about how you've seen that grow and what about it inspires you.

Woody Hartman: Yeah, I mean, I think we'll start with the big picture, which is mobility overall, I think, has clearly been ripe for disruption. And we're seeing that from many angles. Ridesharing was certainly one of the largest angles on that. But even the definition of ridesharing, of course, has expanded dramatically, right? It was an initially just a disruption of sort of a classic licensed taxi driver. Then it added carpooling. Um, there's been significant experimentation with larger passenger vehicles and many other things. Um, so that's been fun. And then yes, has certainly moved down into these light vehicles as well, which is sort of synonymous, I'd say, with micromobility. Uh, the two form factors that are most prevalent and really matter in micromobility at the moment are bikes and scooters. But we and many other companies continue to experiment with lots of other form factors because the, the basic hypothesis or the basic theory of the case is that regardless of where you get energy, energy is expensive and valuable. And it takes a lot of energy to move a 200-pound person in a multi-ton vehicle. Almost all of that energy is moving the vehicle, very little of it is moving the person. And so we as a society are going to be much more efficient if we can transition more of those trips to, you know, moving a 200-pound person on a 60-pound vehicle. That's pretty transformative, even whether we're powering that with gas or of course electricity. And, you know, today maybe that's a gas-powered electrical generation, or in the future hopefully almost entirely clean sources. So that is kind of the landscape of mobility, and I think it's exciting to take any angle of our of our core life, right? I mean, what are the basic things that humans do? We eat, we drink, we take shelter, and we go places. That sums up a lot of what human existence is, and to be disrupting one of those in such a significant way, I think, is a massive opportunity for technology, for business, uh, and I'm excited to see where it continues to go from here. I do think micromobility is on the bleeding edge of that for many of the reasons that I described, and is certainly not limited to bikes bikes and scooters, and I'm excited to see kind of what the next frontier means.

Michael Koenig: And to that energy consumption that you just referred, I mean, obviously we're talking about, uh, the impact on the planet that it has. And another aspect that is talked less about in terms of mobility and the conversion from combustion to electricity is also right-sizing vehicles, even if it is an electric car, having a giant Rivian compared to something much smaller, it's still a significant impact on the Earth in terms of raw materials, in terms of supply chain, all of that. Now, you have all right-sized to the extreme from a Rivian. Tell us about how that plays into the form factors that you described. What— where does this fit in next for, you know, say I want to go somewhere with my kid, I can't really jump on a Lime scooter. How are you all thinking about this?

Woody Hartman: Yeah, I think there's, you know, needs to be a portfolio of options for, for people, right, depending on both the use case of that specific trip and who's going. But I think we have very much in the US especially, but really around the world, apply to one-size-fits-all approach where We have this one big, heavy, gas-guzzling vehicle that 90% of the time is just a solo traveling to and from in their standard, relatively short commute, right? Maybe it's 5 miles, maybe it's 10, maybe it's 20, but it's not much more than that. And yet we have vehicles with 300 miles range, with seating for 5 to 8, that are thousands of pounds for the odd chance that that twice a year we need to go to Home Depot and pick up a bunch of lumber and drive the whole, my kid and all their kids for the birthday party, right? It just doesn't make sense that we would be using that for all of our use cases when it's actually relevant for only a tiny fraction of those. And I think that's the unlock that not only micromobility is trying to serve, but I would say transportation as a service is trying to serve, is to get us out of this clunky ownership model in which, um, yeah, if you're going to only be able to afford one car, you're going to buy the most versatile car possible. But if you have transportation as a service, you're going to rent whatever is necessary for that trip and not have to rely on, uh, sort of— and have something— let me put it differently— you'll have exactly what you need for every trip, uh, which is great. You can have the truck when you need it, and you can have the 12-passenger van when you need it, and you can have the single scooter when you need need it. Um, and I think transportation as a service is really exciting, uh, for that reason.

Michael Koenig: 2022 was meant to be a blockbuster year of private companies going public after some of the most active years of venture capital investment that we've seen in a long time. The macroeconomic climate has obviously shifted and changed a lot of those plans, and now some of those companies that going to go public or just trying to survive. How has that changed the strategy at Lime?

Woody Hartman: We are very lucky to have come into sort of this change in the macro environment in a really strong position. We raised over $500 million in 2021. So we came in with a really strong cash balance in the beginning of the year, and we are holding on to most of that. So, you know, some timing is, is everything. And we certainly feel very fortunate to have had that time coming. But I also think we've made some really important strategic choices coming into this year, which are now bearing out in a really favorable way. So, you know, our theme this year was growth through focus, where we saw many other competitors still expanding dramatically into, you know, frankly, often relatively small long-tail cities all around the world. We took a different approach at the beginning of this year, and we decided to double down in the largest, most valuable markets in the world. And I think what we've learned this year is that was the right strategy. That has— those markets have proven to be far more profitable than even an aggregation of thousands of smaller ones. And of course, much more sustainable from really every dimension in the business. So we are, you know, looking at, you know, a few years, a few days before the end of the year now, we're looking at a year that is is almost certainly going to be EBITDA positive, which is groundbreaking. It is the first time any micromobility will have delivered that. But frankly, the first time any mobility company, even Uber and Lyft, haven't had a full EBITDA positive year yet. So I don't think anyone would have guessed that a micromobility company would get there first, but we're really proud that we've done that through, I think, strong operations and some really smart strategic decisions. And fortunately, we also have the cash balance to back us up and make sure we can weather this storm as long as it lasts. Our theme next year is Path to Sustainability, which is an intentional double entendre on both environmental sustainability and financial sustainability, but we are laser-focused on building a full free cash flow positive company, and I'm confident we're going to get there.

Michael Koenig: And as you mentioned, you're the first micromobility company to reach that cash flow positive, whereas some of the other rivals are really struggling. Bird recently laid off 20% of its workforce, and Spin just laid off 10% of its workforce and just exited 10 markets. I mean, you all are really thriving, so let's kind of put this in perspective. It's not that, you know, there are a bunch of companies here that are doing really well. This is very, very different. How do you view that in terms of your competitive position? You talked about bringing people joy and the experience around that, and I'm kind of bringing this whole thing full circle. Tell us about how you all approach that.

Woody Hartman: Yeah, it's a great question. One clarification in your question, we believe we'll be EBITDA positive this year, not free cash flow positive. That is still a little ways out, but because we spend a lot on CapEx, obviously, and that's a big sort of below the EBITDA line for us. But still, yes, the premise of your question is spot on, which is I think we are drawing a big divide between our performance and many of our competitors. And yeah, I think there's no one thing that adds up to that. I think we have— it's a handful of 2 big strategic bets I think have paid off, one of which has been many years ago we brought our own hardware development in-house instead of relying on sort of commodity hardware products that nearly all of our competitors use from the same 2 to 3 companies in China. And I think that has helped us start to really differentiate the customer experience in an important way. We see consistently when we swap our fleet from our older vehicles to these, that we call them our Gen 4 vehicles, we consistently see utilization and market share pop almost immediately. People immediately, even just from a curb appeal standpoint, say, oh, that Lime vehicle looks better, it looks safer, it looks more durable, it looks faster, I'm gonna ride that one when it's sitting next to 2 or 3 other options. So that's been a great bet that's really paid off. We also made a bet a couple years ago that that cities were an extremely important customer of ours, perhaps the most important customer, given they gatekeep our right to operate in cities. And our partnership with cities over the last few years has put us in a position to consistently win nearly all of the top-tier RFPs that we apply for. So that means that's, you know, probably the biggest factor in our significant global scale at this point. We, you know, we're the, uh, one of, you know, the largest player in Europe, and we're the largest player in the U.S., uh, and that's not easy to do in, in, in both of those areas. And now we're also the largest player in Australia, New

Michael Koenig: Yeah, and let's just stick another number here. In 2021, y'all had completed over 250 million trips. So just to give this some perspective in terms of how many people are actually riding these scooters and how frequently they're going about it, some of the criticism that has been levied against the micro mobility e-scooters has been congestion. A lot of the time, the congestion on the roads with actual cars is is ignored, and instead we're paying attention to congestion on sidewalks with pedestrians, with bikes, things of that nature, and just seeing scooters all over the place. How do you all think about that? How do you approach it? And really, what's next in terms of, you know, having even more scooters in cities and doubling down even more?

Woody Hartman: Yeah, I think I like the way you certainly point out something we like to point out, which is, you know, it's easy to focus on the new thing and say like, oh man, you know, look at these scooters, they're in the way. When you then look at that same cityscape and say, well, 95% of the real estate is allocated to cars, and you're saying that scooters are like overcrowding this 5%, maybe we should reallocate some of how we're using our land and valuable, you know, street space in cities. So we certainly are on board with that and thrilled to see the ambitious steps that many cities are making. I mean, cities like Paris and Seattle and many others are actively converting huge amounts of street parking or in some cases actually traffic lanes into protected bike lanes and things like that, that not only reduce the congestion but more importantly increase safety, right? I mean, the biggest reason that people ride a scooter or a bike on the sidewalk versus on a city street is because they're afraid of the cars. And rightfully so, cars are really dangerous. They kill a lot of people every year. And we forget that when we focus on kind of, oh, the nuisance of this new thing. Also, I think it's worth just acknowledging that, you know, this is still a very new thing. And, uh, think about, you know, we're about 5 years, 6 years into the micromobility industry. Imagine what the automobile industry looked like 5, 6 years in. What would that be? Maybe the '20s or '30s. Have you seen those pictures? It's hilarious, right? There are no lanes, there are no parking spaces, there's cars and horses, you know, running into each other and driving every which way and parking, you know, right in front of the building and blocking everyone's entrance. I mean, it was the same free-for-all, and it's only over decades that we've built traffic laws and trained people on them and painted all of our infrastructure accordingly and gotten everyone to abide by these rules of the road to make it really orderly. And we need to do the same thing if we want, you know, bikes and scooters and other forms of mobility to be, you know, orderly and constructive and, and sort of, and all the rest. And we see many cities taking those steps. We hope it goes faster, but, um, and as a company, we're of course invested in that. In many cases, we do have to work with the cities themselves because they do own the public rights of way. And, you know, if we want to install a parking area, right, then we have to work with them to say, where would you Do you— can we put a bike rack there or some other piece of infrastructure? Can we paint something on the sidewalk to say this is where people should park their scooters so that it's not in the way of the main pedestrian path or something? But we are having a lot of success with that. And I think we are seeing that, you know, it's— the momentum is certainly in the direction that, you know, if we fast forward 5 years from now, most cities will have designated parking corrals on every block. For bikes and scooters that are a shared asset for people to use in the city. And, and I think that'll be great. I think a lot of the little pain points people feel today of like, oh man, there's a tipped over scooter that's blocking part of the sidewalk. Those things are pretty easily solved in this scheme of great human challenges.

Michael Koenig: Well, Woody, it's time for my favorite question. We've all had those moments where we've come across something new and we've just thought, Holy smokes, I never thought I'd see that. Is there one that you can share with us?

Woody Hartman: There are plenty. Um, I'll draw back in my history to Lyft to share an example that comes first to mind. We, uh, were— it was probably year 2, 2 and a half of my time at the company, and we had at this point now launched all the major cities pretty much across the US. Except New York. And because New York, we knew, was incredibly important, but was also deeply regulated, right? This was where the taxi lobby was most powerful. Uh, and, and we were really struggling to figure out how we could bring ridesharing as we defined it, which meant people, unlicensed drivers driving their personal vehicles. How could we bring that business model to life in New York City? But we knew we needed to find a way. You just can't be a credible mobility company in the US if you've never touch New York. So we're figuring this out after months and months of strategizing and working through alternatives. We've worked with the city and we think we've identified a plan to launch. We've brought on hundreds of drivers, which was significantly more than our typical launch. Uh, we even had a press release on the Tuesday with all the drivers, or sorry, a press conference with all the drivers and the press to sort of announce we were launching that Friday. And it was in the, ride home back to the hotel with our co-founders that one of the co-founders got a call saying, "Hey, the mayor just called and he's going to throw you in jail if you proceed with the launch on Friday." And so, he hangs up the phone and shares this with us. And being like a good scrappy co-founder, his first reaction was like, "Maybe I should go to jail. This will be great press. We are fighting for the community. This is unlawful. They can't at the last minute change their mind." All these drivers are like ready to go. Why would we deny them the opportunity to get started on their jobs and these sorts of things? And we, you know, talked him off that ledge. But basically what it turned into was, Woody, can you figure out how to operate a fully licensed, basically an entirely new business, a fully licensed, uh, sort of this, you know, transportation model in New York. Within a week or two. That means new systems, new regulatory environment. You need to go get all those drivers through their, you know, onerous processes in the, you know, New York Transportation Authority and everything else. Uh, you know, go figure it out was the answer, was the ask. And we did. I flew every member of my team to New York regardless of what they were working on. Um, and basically 24/7 for what ended up being 15 days. We figured it out and we launched 15 days later with a completely different business model that we continue to operate to this day, only in New York City.

Michael Koenig: Wow. That is wild. That's definitely a never thought I'd see that moment. There is one other thing that I would love to ask, and that is about Everest. You left Lyft, you took some time off, and you weren't like, hey, I'm going to go chill on a beach. It was more along the lines of, why don't I climb the highest peak in the world and do something insanely dangerous? And you've commented about that experience in articles of seeing people who didn't make it quite literally and lost their lives. Can you tell us about that decision? And I know I said this was It was my last question before, but I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about this.

Woody Hartman: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I, I don't know if your listeners would feel the same way, but my 6 years at Lyft were really defining for me as not just a professional, but as a person. Uh, it became a big part of my identity to have helped scale this company that I think changed our world in some ways. And as I thought about leaving, I really worried that I would have an identity crisis. Who am I? What am I doing? What's the purpose of this next chapter if I let go of this last cornerstone of it? And so, I made a list of many potential things that I could plug in to give meaning to the next chapter of my life, and that was the one that ended up working out. And I'm incredibly glad I did. I think it is probably a cliché to say that it's rarely the easy and comfortable things that give your life meaning, and that was the philosophy I took. Lyft was neither easy nor comfortable but gave my life incredible meaning, and so did Everest. And yes, I felt personally endangered at many times. It was horribly uncomfortable at times and exhausting and also really forced me to confront mortality of myself and others, but But through that, I developed a stronger sense of self and what my purpose on this planet is, and I'm incredibly thankful for that.

Michael Koenig: You get to the peak, what do you do?

Woody Hartman: You go down. And I know that's like, uh, sounds absurd, but that's actually 100% what I was thinking about and probably what everyone thinks about when they're getting to the top is, um, Holy crap, now I have to get down. It's— I think it is a complete misunderstanding of mountaineering to think that the summit is the reason people do it. The summit is often— there's a brief appreciation for having achieved your goal, but the summit is where you are the most exhausted, the most dehydrated, the coldest, the windiest, all the things. And so it's not like you're up there just taking deep breaths and oming your way through a celestial experience. You're often in survival mode and very much, okay, I need to eat one bar and get 300 calories in. I need to drink half a liter and I need to take a picture and head down. And mountaineering is a sport for neurotic people who are extremely disciplined because you have to micromanage those things at every step to be successful. And so that was— yes, I took some pictures, I high-fived my Sherpa and gave him a big hug, and then we turned right around and went down. And it is a truism that, you know, 80 to 90% of all mountaineering accidents, including deaths, happen on the descent. So if anything, the scariest, hardest part begins at the point you reach the summit.

Michael Koenig: Thanks for sharing that. And Woody, thanks for joining us. Really appreciate your time and I know we went over our planned time session, so thanks so much.

Woody Hartman: It was really my pleasure. Thanks for having me.