UBER VS. LYFT: EXACT SAME TECH—ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CULTURES
I can’t recall ever speaking to my Uber drivers.
I pressed the button, they showed up, and off we went; transaction complete. Then one day, I switched to Lyft. Suddenly, I was chatting with my drivers. Sometimes, we talked about mundane topics, but not always. One driver told me how he stopped driving at night after an intoxicated man became verbally then physically abusive. The driver punched his attacker in self-defense, then drove the man to the hospital and called the police. Another driver told me how driving part-time allows her to go back to school and pursue a teaching degree. Another driver told me how she supplements her freelance work as a graphic designer with Lyft rides and how on several occasions those conversations with her passengers actually led to graphic design gigs.
Here’s perhaps the more interesting thing I’ve commonly heard: although many people drive for both Uber and Lyft, they never expect to have a conversation with their Uber fares. These are virtually identical services and virtually identical platforms, yet Uber somehow fosters transactions while Lyft creates experiences.
Same basic technology—two starkly different cultures.
Same Service, Different Companies. How?
Uber has a four-year head start on Lyft—a tremendous advantage in any field but one that’s especially important in tech. Uber remains the market leader, but Lyft has gained momentum, one year tripling its number of rides from the previous. There are plenty of reasons why Uber is losing ground to Lyft, but I link many of them to the company’s problematic culture.
Culture, after all, is the context for our relationships, both transactional and authentic. The culture of any organization, big or small, takes its lead from the top. The good and bad of that culture permeate every level of the company, but it also extends out into the world where brand meets customer. There are plenty examples of Uber’s culture problems, including reports of blatant sexual harassment, blackmailing journalists who wrote unfavorable press, and threats of physical violence against employees. But the most relevant example is Travis Kalanick himself who stepped down from his post as CEO of the company he co-founded.
The incident that sparked that was when a video surfaced of Kalanick in an ugly exchange with an Uber driver. After a public backlash, Kalanick apologized. That was the right thing to do, but Kalanick missed the larger point. An Uber driver—the only living, breathing connection between a technology platform and its customer—was telling Kalanick something about authenticity, or rather the absence of it, at Uber. What the driver was saying was that Uber needed to be a better partner.
That is where the rubber meets the road. Either you subscribe to a transactional worldview that says every engagement is an opportunity for maximizing your return on investments, or you take a more holistic view toward building authentic relationships that create value for all stakeholders over time.
The Culture Is the Code
Both companies allow passengers to tip, but only Lyft makes it easy for riders to do so. Sure, we’re only talking about a few bucks, but the difference is huge in terms of the human experience. By making the tipping process opaque, Uber marginalizes people, and as a result, it reduces every encounter to a transaction—one which the driver can expect to be overlooked.
In contrast, Lyft makes tipping accessible and transparent, opening up the opportunity for a more authentic experience. These decisions are driven by culture, but they’re enforced by computer code. While the interplay between culture and code has obvious implications for rideshare drivers and their passengers, it also permeates the rest of our society.
Have you ever unfriended someone on Facebook for political reasons? Sure, the political climate is ugly these days, but isn’t unfriending someone you disagree with just as transactional as the culture at Uber? And it’s not just politics. Professionally, we reduce ourselves to the narrow box of a LinkedIn profile and demand others to do the same. One of the great paradoxes of the digital revolution is that the more we connect, the more transactional we become. Our social and professional networks are huge . . . but they’re also shallow. Avatars, not people, populate them. Yet all the while, we crave authenticity--not just from our leaders, but also from our friends, our spouses, and even the brands we choose to give our business to.
Tech Enables Transactions; Service Enables Connections
Sure, service can be transactional. I never had a complaint about the service rendered by my Uber drivers. But those transactions never amounted to anything more than a charge on my credit card. Whatever relationship I had with Uber wasn’t authentic, and it certainly wasn’t built to last.
But Lyft—that’s a different story, and one every tech CEO can learn from.