8.18.15 - The Case For Carpooling Inside Lyft And Ubers Quest To Squeeze More People In The Backseat
"Lyft has dreamed of carpooling “from day one,” Green said, though it hasn’t always been a good idea. A few months after Lyft launched in 2012, when the company was still figuring out how to deal with basic problems like slow driver onboarding, Green was already scheming on how to get passengers to share rides. That couldn’t happen until people started putting their destination into the app before booking a ride, so Green had the team build a beta version that required it. It was a flop: half the beta testers abandoned it for the old version. “This was one of the worst product mistakes, resource-investment mistakes we made,” Green said. The project was shelved, but only after the company had sunk several months of work. Eventually, in early 2014, Lyft quietly acquired real-time transit app Rover and its founders, Lev Popov and David Dryjanski, and set them to work building Lyft Line as a skunkworks project within the company."