Who built the seven towers of Thebes?
The books are filled with the names of kings.
Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished…
Where did the masons go?
–Bertolt Brecht
“Box! Box! I need another box.” Shel shouted from across the office.
By now my small team of TaskRabbits was moving and operating like a professional kitchen at rush hour.
October 2013
I was standing on the street outside the office wrapped in my black Lyft hoodie having my daily chat with Ramiro, our UPS driver. Ramiro was strong, sinewy, and wore shorts even in cold weather. His brown UPS truck would roll in every day precisely between 4:20 and 4:40 pm. And the TaskRabbits and I were always ready with our industrial dollies to help him load.
Every day the UPS truck brimmed with more and more stacks of our Lyft driver kits. Only a few short months ago, all it took was one dolly for the entire day’s load. Ramiro never quite understood our business, but I suspect he got a kick out of whatever weird thing we were building here.
498 driver kits in one day
With one boot resting on the wheel of his industrial dolly and his tattooed arm casually draped across the top, he spat knowledge like only a guy who’d managed the same route for 18 years could.
“Yeah, so it works like this: I pick up any next-day air packages now, it’s (checks watch) 4:48pm. I meet up with another driver who transports them to the Oakland airport. Those packages need to be at the airport by 6pm to be sorted and loaded onto a plane. That plane flies to a regional gateway where they’re sorted and routed again. Standard gets there by noon tomorrow.” He animated the whole explanation with his hands.
This was truly fascinating. I visualized the entire journey in my head. Who was the airport guy? Now there’s the linchpin.
“So what happens to a package if you’re running late and miss the airport guy?” I asked.
I’d set a goal for my small team to build and fulfill 500 driver kits in a single day. I really just wanted to demonstrate that we could do it. It was an exhilarating goal worth pursuing. Like a guy taking a motorcycle out to the desert to set a land speed record. And I was never lenient with my self-imposed goals.
“Package sits around until tomorrow and catches the next flight,” he replied, taking his boot off the dolly.
Shel burst through the front doors of the building with a few more stacks of freshly packed driver kits with TaskRabbits Jamie and Emily not far behind.
I quietly exhaled as Ramiro examined the additional stacks and looked back at his truck. Then at me.
“How many we got today, boss?” he said, glancing at his watch.
I counted as the team jammed the last few kits into the big brown truck.
“Looks like 512.”
With that Ramiro shut the overhead door on his truck and sped off. I stood around to savor the moment. Watching the UPS truck whip around the corner towards its next stop.
498 driver kits in one day
Correction: 512 driver kits in one day
At this point, I’d assigned each TaskRabbit to their own packing table. The unofficial initiation was that they had to assemble the table themselves when the ULine order arrived. Each of them was responsible for managing their own assembly line. They’d remove items from original third-party packaging, and then repackage them inside a newly assembled Lyft driver kit. It wasn’t yet the ideal setup, but Shel and I were constantly looking for ways to make the build process more efficient.
Shel poked their head into my office as the others packed their belongings to go home.
I was at my laptop, attaching a photo to an email that I was drafting. It was a photo of the original 498 driver kits we’d built earlier that day. All neatly stacked in the middle of the office like a giant pallet of driver kits.
That was shortly before I asked Shel if we could get a few more built.
It was days like this that drove me to hit the all@ Lyft email alias to message the entire company whenever we hit a big milestone. My team was the final leg of driver onboarding, and I wanted the rest of the company to know what we were doing. I’d seen a few others at the company use it to share their milestones. Who else was going to advocate for us?
Shel launched in, “Jamie didn’t have her lunch today.”
“Oh, that sucks.” I responded as I typed.
Shel was now standing in front of my desk. Leaning in.
They added, “She was busy building driver kits and forgot to eat. She was cool about it but mentioned it to me on her way out. She didn’t know if she was allowed to stop working to eat. I thought you should know.”
“I thought the rabbits had lunch time.” I said.
I hadn’t really thought about it beyond that.
“Did you have lunch today, Alex?” Shel asked.
I sat back in my chair. My mind reviewed the highlights of the day. Taking a stroll around the corner to Blue Bottle and grabbing myself a New Orleans iced coffee. It was so potent that it made the hairs on my arm stand. The cute barista with tattoos and a silver septum piercing had made mine.
My stomach growled. And suddenly, I felt tired.
“No. Haven’t eaten all day.”
After the Drive Team moved into the new Lyft HQ across the bay in San Francisco, we hadn’t had any catered lunches at the office in Oakland, since technically, I was the only Lyft employee here. I’d maintained a regular Costco order so the Oakland office was always stocked with snacks and drinks, which also meant that my diet consisted of protein bars, mixed nuts, and other Kirkland snacks throughout the day to keep me going. I’d even concocted a cocktail one day when I felt a cold coming on: a can of San Pellegrino blood orange mixed with a packet of Emergen-C. I’d convinced myself, and a few of my Drive Team comrades, that this was good for you.
The conversation with Shel had left me feeling a little raw that day. I reached for a protein bar that was on my desk and tore into it.
I hit SEND on the email.
Gravity
My usual end-of-day routine was listening to a podcast or some random playlist. I’d recently given up Pandora as my go-to music player and gotten myself a Spotify subscription. One of my favorite playlists was created by Nate Rodriguez and other members of Lyft’s early support team titled “Songs That Don’t Suck.” People would just add to it when they ran across a song that they determined did not suck. A cultural artifact of the ride-share wars.
I’d often pace around the office talking to myself out loud to get the ideas out. Part daily retro, part ideation session. It would usually take me a few hours to come down from the long days of running a startup logistics operation.
At this point in my life, I was crashing on my brother’s couch at his apartment in San Jose. I had no girlfriend and most of the fun after work stuff was happening in San Francisco. I really had nowhere else to go. Sometimes I’d grab food and just come back to the office.
Tonight I looked around the office. A part of me just wanted to keep working. What a fucking mess.
Then there was a KNOCK on the door.
Enter Isaiah Steinfeld. He always stood out with his Yankees ball cap in the land of Giants.
That night, we had plans to watch Alfonso Cuarón’s movie, Gravity, on IMAX at a theatre in Emeryville. Isaiah and I quickly became homies not long after he landed on the Drive Team in August of 2013, and we bonded over our love of movies and the movie business.
Isaiah is the kind of guy that gets you excited about working in tech. Equal parts salesman and operator. Whenever we hung out I walked away feeling inspired to run through walls. I think he enjoys the game more than most people.
”Dude.” he started as we slapped hands.
He took in the space around him. It was the first time he’d been back in the office since relocating to San Francisco.
I felt a little self-conscious. Like someone demoing their project to a friend for the first time.
”It’s small but mighty.” I said.
He whipped around with a smile on his face.
”Dude, this is sick. Give me the Cribs tour.”
Ah. There he goes.
I relaxed a bit and showed him around the office and explained all of the startup feng shui that went into the design of the office. I explained the UPS visit and everything.
He admired a stack of driver kits that had been pre-built and were awaiting shipment. I mentioned how I’d sometimes stay late to prep and strategize for the next day.
I explained our operational processes. How they started and how they had evolved. The strain of scale. A few patterns I’d noticed. My TaskRabbit manpower hack. Shel being the nucleus that kept the operation humming.
He told me he envied the autonomy and space I had here to run. I understood his perspective. I told him about how I missed celebrating the wins with the rest of the team. The after-work drinks. The spontaneous nerf gun battles. Catered lunches. The hot coworkers.
Isaiah and I shared a Lyft to the theatre and forgot about the Lyft grind for a few hours. Our minds were blown by the scale that IMAX technology brought to Cuarón’s story.
We left the theatre on a high and chatted while we fired up our respective Lyft apps.
”You realize you’re building a startup within a startup, right?” he said.
”It’s like startup Inception.”
I laughed. ”No. I didn’t.”
We glanced at our phones and waited for our respective Lyft rides to arrive.
”Did they hook you up with a good equity package?” he asked.
I thought for a second. Just staring at the little car icon moving on my app. I only knew conceptually how equity worked. When I signed my employment agreement I was just happy to be gainfully employed and have benefits. I assumed that equity would be granted on my start date.
I looked over at him, not sure how to respond. So I said the first thing that came out of my mouth:
”How much did you get?”
With that Isaiah probably knew the answer to his original question. He’d apparently negotiated a solid equity package but wouldn’t divulge a number. He probably exaggerated. But he’d done something I hadn’t.
My starting Lyft salary was $35,000, about $17 an hour for someone who worked the standard 40-hour week.
I wasn’t standard.
”You should really ask Steve for some equity.” he said, sounding more like a big brother.
His ride arrived and he drove off. I looked down at my Lyft app. My ride was taking forever to arrive.
That night as I sat on my brother’s couch I pulled up the copy of my employment contract. I pored over every line.
Shipping Lead.
$35,000.
PTO. Health insurance. Transit reimbursement.
No language about equity.
I closed the document.
Fuck me.
CUT TO BLACK
🎧 Cue “A hard day’s night” – The Beatles
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Rebel Without a Crew: A Lyft Story – Chapter 4
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