JOHN ZIMMER

The solution to transportation inefficiencies lies at the intersection of collaborative consumption and the social graph: Shifting transportation from ownership to access.

There's a massive opportunity as more and more millennials and others in cities switch over from car ownership to transportation as a service. They are picking Lyft, and we want to stay focused on that big opportunity.

When you request a Lyft, 90% of the time, there is someone else going within a half mile of your destination. We've seen this on our platform, so now we're matching up these rides for a discount.

Transportation is going to transition from ownership to transportation as a service. What is the best model to address the largest part of that market? We believe it's peer-to-peer.

Lyft is the fastest-growing on-demand transportation service in the United States. It's as easy as opening the Lyft app, clicking a button, and a driver arrives within minutes.

I believe that whenever an overall view or theme is applied to an entire industry, bad decisions will be made.

Driverless pods could have people who want to watch the same movie. Or there could be Tinder pods.

Lyft Line came out of the vision that we've had from the beginning, which is how do we get the most affordable ride to everyone? Eighty percent of seats at all times on the road are empty. In Los Angeles, average car occupancy is 1.1, and if it were 1.3, there would be no traffic.

I came from a hospitality background and saw that 80 percent of seats in cars weren't occupied most of the time.

The independence once represented by the car has been replaced by cell phones and social networks, which are now at the forefront of people's expression of freedom and access. Once a symbol of 'coming of age,' many drivers are waiting longer to get their licenses.

Lyft treats people better than competition. So whether that's drivers or passengers, that goes into the car experience. That's why more and more people are choosing Lyft.

The times in my life I've felt the most alive is when I'm having a connection with people. We need to hack cities in a way to bring back that community culture.

Car ownership as we know it will change. The promise of car ownership of the past, the freedom of open roads... the reality has been more of a burden.

The main difference to me with Lyft is the sense of community and social experience. The pink mustache, fist bump and strict screening have fostered a strong sense of community with many stories of new friends, discovered jobs, and even some Lyft hugs after a tough break up.

Through social, location, and mobile technologies (SoLoMo) we now have the ability to leverage our virtual communities into the physical world, to bring our online experiences offline.

Autonomous vehicles, because they'll be able to operate at a lower cost, will be able to pull more consumers into the Lyft network. And as you have more people switching from using their own car, they'll be taking more rides that still require a person behind the wheel.

The next wave of the social graph is empowering services like Airbnb and Lyft that give people the chance to have that physical interaction. People are more open to that because of Airbnb. Airbnb took couch surfing and took an additional step.

When I left my job at Lehman Brothers to start a company, my best friend's mother said, 'How could you leave a sure thing like Lehman to do a silly carpool startup?' That was three months before Lehman went bankrupt.

My vision for the future of social transportation is one that places more value on information and community over a physical product. Move over, multi-billion-dollar high-speed rail infrastructure and welcome, social information-based solutions.

We see Lyft as not just an app, but a movement of people coming together in cities and having conversations about things that matter. You're around some of the most interesting people in the world, and you don't talk to them. More and more people are craving in-person interactions.

When we first created the Lyft community, we wanted to make cities feel smaller and more connected by bringing people together through transportation. In 20 months since we launched, we've seen drivers and passengers redefine the true meaning of community through Lyft in countless ways.

We stay true to our values, and that's very people-centric, and taking care of our drivers, and drivers taking care of our passengers, and what we're seeing now is a driver preference and a passenger preference for Lyft.

By rebuilding transportation so that you're not owning this thing that just sits there all the time, you get to rebuild cities in the process. If we do this right as a country, we have a chance to re-create our cities with the people, rather than cars, at the center. Our cities today have been built for the car. They've been built for car ownership. Imagine walking around in the city where you don't see any parking lots and you don't need that many roads.

Eight out of 10 drivers prefer driving for Lyft. We'll keep delivering our message. We'll keep talking about how we want to push forward the future of transportation in a people-centric way, and the narrative has already changed dramatically in the past year, and will continue to change as we continue to tell our story.

Our community of drivers has 30 percent women in a driving industry that's typically 1 percent. We better understand each other because we better reflect our community than maybe other tech companies or other companies in general. It's something we're very happy with and proud of.