Scott Weiss

05.23.13 // It’s Time for Lyft off!

When I first met Logan Green and John Zimmer nearly a year ago, I was struck by the authenticity of Lyft’s founding. Originally called Zimride, everyone assumed the company was named after John but it’s actually a much better story: When Logan was traveling in Africa — Zimbabwe, to be exact — he noticed that despite the lack of infrastructure, people were able to get around efficiently thanks to a vibrant ridesharing movement. Every car, van and bus was full and people would literally stand on the side of the road waving money instead of sticking out their thumbs.

At nearly the same time, John was sitting in a college course exploring the history of transportation: canals, trains, and then roads and planes. He wondered to himself, what would be the next big innovation in transportation? He thought, “I’ll bet it’s about using information to fill seats — especially all those empty seats in cars.”

I’m acutely aware of John and Logan’s observations when I’m sitting alone in my 7-passenger minivan on the 101 inching along while others are zooming past me in the High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane. These are times when I really wish I had a few extra people in the car! But it’s just not that simple — I don’t want to go way out of my way and I want to feel comfortable picking up someone new.

With this unique vision in mind, John and Logan went about launching Zimride and Lyft. The information technology problem was essentially solved with the proliferation of GPS-enabled smartphones. If they could get a critical mass of people on the same network with information about when and where people wanted to go, it would be relatively easy to pair up drivers and riders that were headed in the same direction. But how to get it started? And what about safety?

The first incarnation, Zimride, launched in 2007, tackling these issues by targeting college students headed home on holiday. Logan and John’s big insight was that by using Facebook profile information via Facebook Connect, both the drivers and the riders could find out about each other to develop enough trust to get into a car together. As a driver, you’d post the where and when details of your trip and then passengers would apply for a ride with a predetermined chip-in. Over the years they have showed steady and solid growth and built a real community of people making friends and sharing rides.

Last June, they launched Lyft in San Francisco, a made-for-mobile, ridesharing app that was geared towards ridesharing within a city as opposed to between cities. Since its launch, Lyft has absolutely exploded and is now doing over 30,000 rides per week! Now active in four major cities and expanding at a blazing pace to meet demand, the key for Lyft has been the community. Lyft has a very different offering and experience than anything else in this space. To be specific:

- Lyft is all about taking cars off the road via ridesharing. This is NOT merely a cool new use of technology to efficiently onboard and route more cars, cabs, towncars and limos. Lyft wants to use technology to get everyone who currently owns a car to join a trusted information network to share rides.

- As such, the Lyft drivers are regular folks with underutilized cars. They are college students, engineers, entrepreneurs and retirees. As the founders like to say, a Lyft driver is “your friend with a car.”

- As demonstrated by Airbnb, the person-to-person sharing economy is all about earning trust and establishing a good reputation. If I am going to rent my spare bedroom or get into the car with someone I don’t know, I have to find a way break the trust barrier. Lyft requires all drivers and riders to connect through Facebook. They have intentionally limited the potential market to people who have established social network identities as a way to improve trust and safety. The drivers and passengers also rate each other after each ride to further build their reputations.

- Lyft screens their drivers with interviews and full background and DMV checks. They are looking for real people with great driving records and a knack for hospitality.

- You also get to ride up front in a Lyft. As the car pulls up with its unique pink mustache on the front (as John says, “it always brings a smile!”), you jump in the front seat and do a ceremonial fistbump with the driver. You are offered a phone charger and the chance to play DJ for the ride. Many of the drivers I’ve ridden with even offer something unique and fun like Capri Suns or snacks for the road.

Lyft is a real community — with both the drivers and riders being inherently social — making real friendships and saving money.

I am pleased to announce Andreessen Horowitz’s partnership with Logan and John. We will be leading Lyft’s Series C financing round of $60 million to propel the Lyft movement globally. I am honored to be joining the board of directors and excited to help the founders realize their dream of filling all of those empty seats!

04.30.13 // How would you start a PayPal or rebuild Visa today?

Ben Milne has a special relationship with transaction fees.

An entrepreneur with a design and manufacturing business in Iowa, Ben found himself obsessed with one simple notion: transaction fees were eating into his profit margins. If you consider money as data, there had to be a better way with so much money sloshing around in the system when the marginal cost of actually transferring the money is practically zero. So why did it cost him $55,000 a year to access it? Why then did he have to wait seven days to get paid?

This is the frustration out of which Dwolla was born. Ben set out to redesign a much better, and radically cheaper, payment network.

But how in the world would he scale a new, two-sided payment network today?

The PayPal and Visa stories are well documented. Visa’s story is famous. A genius by the name of Dee Hock pioneered a brilliant strategy that empowered a loose association of affiliates to distribute the card all over the world, almost entirely manually. And while eBay was distracted building and scaling their marketplace, PayPal snuck in to become the defacto standard for eBay transactions between individuals. eBay bought a competitor and tried to unseat PayPal but the network effects were just too strong and they ended up having to buy PayPal for $1.5B.

So how would Ben do it then? This is the beauty of his approach at Dwolla. Ben began designing a system based on the impending ubiquity of the Internet; something consumers, banks, businesses, and developers had immediate access to on their phones and computers. This would give Dwolla the ability to bypass the traditional systems, hardware, and distribution costs associated with the card networks birthed in the 60s and 70s.

Dwolla moves money for only 25 cents and can do so instantly (versus two to seven days it takes other processors). Signing up is free and there are no other costs. Not counting the hardware, gateways, and hidden fees, businesses and consumers were paying three to eight percent per swipe, adding up to over $48B in 2009. Ever walk into a bar, buy a drink and been told, “there’s a $10 minimum to use a card?” Yeah, that’s why.

What’s astounding? In addition to payments only costing 25 cents, transactions under $10 are free — this opens up a huge opportunity for Dwolla to be the defacto standard for micropayments. This “flat fee or free” pricing model strategy is such a compelling value proposition that large players, like the state of Iowa, are signing up for Dwolla in droves.

What about checks? Small business owners and consumers know the pain points associated with manually processing checks all too well and all the problems with the slow, antiquated Automatic Clearing House (ACH) network. How much does it cost to do a wire? $50? $10? That depends on where you bank. But either way, ouch.

These slow-moving, expensive, fraud proliferating systems aren’t just the United States’ burden. In many countries around the world, the luxury of ATMs, having cash on hand, or retaining the value of money as it moves from one person to the next, just isn’t possible. In many developing areas, networks charge up to 30 percent of a transaction because of the way you paid for a particular good or service.

The world needs a better way to transfer value, the same way it needed a better way to transfer information before the Internet went mainstream.

Now here are the other wonderful parts: Dwolla has created straightforward APIs, simple user experiences, social integration, and one of the United States’ most sophisticated and advanced banking software, called FiSync. And whenever Dwolla signs up a new customer, those users now send out their payments via Dwolla. The payee is then highly motivated to activate and bank-enable their Dwolla account to claim their cash. It’s natural convenience.

I am pleased to announce Andreessen Horowitz has led a $16.5 million investment in Dwolla to help Ben and his team realize their vision of fixing the worldwide payment network. Here’s why we believe this is such an amazing opportunity:

Founder/market fit: Ben is one of the most determined and scrappy entrepreneurs we’ve met and has a deep knowledge of the entire payment network.
Ridiculous market size: Dwolla’s FiSync is taking on ACH and FedWire, a combined $730+ trillion market with real-time transactions, new revenue streams and incentives for key players in the payment process.
A snowball of traction: Its annual processing run rate has moved from the hundreds of millions to billions and its business development pipeline is chock full of opportunities.
The simple strategy of “natural convenience.” Especially as it pertains to ACH and payout needs, Dwolla offers an easy-to-use platform for payers and a free, low-cost platform for payees.
Radical innovations in anti-fraud and risk management technologies: For example, Dwolla removes much of the sensitive financial information, which is often exposed when someone uses a paper check or plastic card, from its transactions. This reduces liability for merchants and developers, and mitigates the threat of identity fraud for its consumers. Genius.
One of a kind technology: Underneath Dwolla’s beautiful front facing experience belies a complicated, intricate series of systems, technologies, and considerations that we’ve never seen before.
Our customer references came back over-the-top positive on responsiveness, customer/ developer friendly, and intuitive/ easy to navigate user interface.

Ben and his team are introducing an entirely new way to think, access, and use money. I am excited to be joining Dwolla’s board of directors and look forward to helping Ben build the next multi-billion dollar payment company!