Earnings
Lyft earnings: A COVID-19 referendum on ride-hailing

Source Code: Your daily look at what matters in tech.
To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. If you continue browsing. you accept our use of cookies. You can review our privacy policy to find out more about the cookies we use.
The big number: While the number of rides on Lyft's platform plummeted 75% in April compared to last year, the average revenue the company collected from each rider grew to $45.06, up 19% from the same time last year. Despite the pain from coronavirus, investors liked what they saw, driving the stock up more than 15% in after-hours trading. But will the tolerance for spending more on rides last in a down economy and socially distant society?
People are talking: "Rides last week were still down more than 70% year-on-year," Lyft CEO Logan Green told investors on Wednesday's earnings call. "Even as shelter-in-place orders and travel restrictions are modified or lifted, we anticipate that continued social distancing, altered consumer behavior and expected corporate cost-cutting will be significant headwinds for Lyft."
Opportunities: To survive the pandemic, Lyft and gig companies like it must navigate an escalating labor war while encouraging consumer demand for cheap on-demand services. Green told investors his company will be able to withstand plummeting ridership because of a strong balance sheet and an "inherently resilient" financial model, in which about two-thirds of costs are variable. If and when people return to ride-hailing, executives said the company will be positioned to capture laid-off workers seeking new income — although a lot is riding on whether Lyft, Uber, Instacart, DoorDash and Postmates can convince California voters to back their $90 million ballot effort to circumvent state law AB 5, which would require gig companies to compensate workers as employees.
Threats: One existential issue is what happens if courts or California voters push back on Lyft and similar companies' plans to codify low-cost, benefit-light gig work as a permanent part of the economy. Another question for the business is how deep the cuts will go in the meantime, and what will be left afterward. Just this week, Lyft slashed 17% of its workforce, furloughed nearly 300 additional employees and announced 10% to 30% pay cuts. "Every other expense line is being scrutinized," Green said, which the company expects will trim about $300 million off projected 2020 spending.
The power struggle: Watch how many drivers get back on the road in the coming weeks. As it stands, Lyft has paused onboarding of new drivers and started a wait list for applicants, executives said Wednesday. But if ridership recovers and Lyft sees anywhere near the demand for new work that gig economy peers like Instacart have seen, the company could win more political leverage in a perilous moment for unemployment. Lyft and its allies already got one tacit endorsement from on high, when lawmakers and President Trump allowed gig workers to be written into an emergency federal relief package, even though the companies hadn't paid into unemployment insurance funds and incited backlash for offering workers few protections from the virus.
Lauren Hepler ( @lahepler) is a former reporter for Protocol covering how people live and work in Silicon Valley. She previously covered development, energy, and tech for The New York Times, The Guardian, the LA Times, the Silicon Valley Business Journal, and others. Lauren can be reached at lhepler@protocol.com (just ask for Signal), and you can share information with her anonymously via Protocol's SecureDrop. She grew up in Ohio and lives in Oakland.
It's an app for all your social apps. And part of an entirely new way to think about chat.
Beeper is an app for all your messaging apps, including the hard-to-access ones.
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
Eric Migicovsky likes to tinker. And the former CEO of Pebble — he's now a partner at Y Combinator — knows a thing or two about messaging. "You remember on the Pebble," he asked me, "how we had this microphone, and on Android you could reply to all kinds of messages?" Migicovsky liked that feature, and he especially liked that it didn't care which app you used. Android-using Pebble wearers could speak their replies to texts, Messenger chats, almost any notification that popped up.
That kind of universal, non-siloed approach to messaging appealed to Migicovsky, and it didn't really exist anywhere else. "Remember Trillian from back in the day?" he asked, somewhat wistfully. "Or Adium?" They were the gold-standard of universal messaging apps; users could log in to their AIM, MSN, GChat and Yahoo accounts, and chat with everyone in one place.
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
From biometric monitoring to unregulated contact tracing, the crisis opened up new privacy vulnerabilities that regulators did little to address.
Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, says the COVID-19 pandemic has become a "cash grab" for surveillance tech companies.
As the coronavirus began its inexorable spread across the United States last spring, Adam Schwartz, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, worried the virus would bring with it another scourge: mass surveillance.
"A lot of really bad ideas were being advanced here in the U.S. and a lot of really bad ideas were being actually implemented in foreign countries," Schwartz said.
2020's blurring of professional and personal boundaries exacerbated disparities, humanized leaders and put personal values front and center.
In 2020, the personal and the professional became inextricable at work.
Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
For those of us lucky enough to keep our jobs and privileged enough to be able to work from home, our whole selves were bared at work this year. Our homes and faces were blown up for virtual inspection. Our children's demands and crises filled our working hours, and our working mothers became schoolteachers and housewives, whether they wanted to or not. Our illnesses became vital public information, and our tragedies shared. Our work lives ate into our social lives until there was no boundary between them.
In 2020, the personal and the professional became inextricable at work. Remote work might be the most sexy 2020 trend, but for the CEOs and leaders I spoke with, the de-professionalization of work could be the most important effect on a personal level. It's the one that has caused the most harm to women in the workplace and destroyed work-life balance for basically everyone. It's also what has contributed to the majority of work-from-home Americans being more satisfied with their work lives than they were before, mostly because they feel more connected to their families, they're able to set their own schedules and they're more comfortable at home, according to a Morning Consult poll. While we can't know exactly how many and who will be going back to the office just yet, as long as there is some kind of flexible work schedule, people's personal lives will be part of their work lives and vice versa.
Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
The pandemic wasn't kind to the company. But the way it's working with the major COVID-19 vaccine makers is a model for what comes next.
Christian Klein became SAP's sole CEO in April.
Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
Christian Klein took over as SAP's sole CEO in April. It wasn't an ideal time to take the helm of an organization that sells expensive enterprise software.
As the spread of COVID-19 forced corporations everywhere to cut costs, one of the first places they looked was IT budgets. Specifically, companies around the world trimmed spending on back-end products, such as those offered by SAP, many of which still run via on-premise data centers.
Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
The second stimulus package will expand the FTC's authority to penalize companies promoting fake information and faulty products.
The FTC will finally have the authority to immediately fine scammers touting fake COVID-19 treatments and lies about pandemic government benefits.
Emily Birnbaum ( @birnbaum_e) is a tech policy reporter with Protocol. Her coverage focuses on the U.S. government's attempts to regulate one of the most powerful industries in the world, with a focus on antitrust, privacy and politics. Previously, she worked as a tech policy reporter with The Hill after spending several months as a breaking news reporter. She is a Bethesda, Maryland native and proud Kenyon College alumna.
The FTC will finally have the authority to fine scammers touting fake COVID-19 treatments and lies about pandemic government benefits, thanks to new language in the economic stimulus package set to pass on Monday.
COVID-related scams proliferating online have overwhelmed government agencies and cost Americans more than $145 million since the beginning of the pandemic — and the FTC has been almost powerless to stop them, thanks to limitations on the agency's authority.
Emily Birnbaum ( @birnbaum_e) is a tech policy reporter with Protocol. Her coverage focuses on the U.S. government's attempts to regulate one of the most powerful industries in the world, with a focus on antitrust, privacy and politics. Previously, she worked as a tech policy reporter with The Hill after spending several months as a breaking news reporter. She is a Bethesda, Maryland native and proud Kenyon College alumna.