Remember the Pink Mustache?

 After a bad quarter, a lower stock price and more than a decade at the helm of their company, the co-founders of Lyft are stepping aside. (The Hill)

In the tiny, rarified community of those who have started successful tech companies, this is not an unusual development. The founders of such ventures, however competent, rarely remain in charge for as long as they would have in the pre-Internet era.

Similar to the job insecurity known by everyone else in the modern world, founders are considered expendable by the venture capitalists and corporate strategists. Conventional business wisdom has it that other, more experienced types of executives are better suited to build and manage a company once it scales to a certain size.

There’s something a bit sad about that, though of course the founders have by then accumulated great wealth as a consolation prize for losing control of their dream.

As for this particular dream, I remember interviewing Lyft co-founder John Zimmer and meeting some of his earliest drivers soon after the company launched in 2012 with its distinctive pink mustache on the grills of its cars. I already knew Zimmer from his earlier ride-sharing venture, Zimride, and considered him one of the most idealistic startup founders I had interviewed during the crazy years of Web 2.0.

Zimmer told me he hoped Lyft would be a partial solution to the climate crisis.

“If we can help fill the 85 percent of unoccupied seats in private cars, it will mean fewer cars on the road and a lot lower harmful emissions,” he explained to me at the time.

Since those days, the company has enjoyed a lot of disruptive growth and endured a lot of controversy, especially about whether its drivers are contractors or employees. It has ballooned to around a billion dollars a year in revenue and 20 million customers a month (including me, on occasion). The giant pink mustaches from its original iteration are long gone but those empty seats in many of the vehicles on our highways persist.

So no matter who is in charge, from an environmental perspective, Lyft still has its purpose and Zimmer’s vision still has its relevance. That’s worth bearing in mind.

• Lyft founders step down as president, CEO (The Hill)

• Lyft Ride-Sharing Cars Are The Ones Sporting Pink Mustaches — by David Weir in 2012 (7x7)

• Lyft’s New Boss Quickly Loses His Signing Bonus — Relief over founders’ exit gives way to worries about new CEO and Lyft’s dwindling share (WSJ)

OTHER NEWS:

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• Can a Machine Know That We Know What It Knows? (NYT)

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• Mexico migrants: Deadly fire at Juárez migrant centre kills at least 39 (BBC)

• As McCarthy laments ‘no progress,’ here’s where U.S. debt ceiling talks stand (CNBC)

• Donald Trump Has a Fresh Legal Headache, and It May Be His Worst Yet (Slate)

• Trump Allies Beg Him Not To Sh-tpost His Way Into More Legal Trouble (Rolling Stone)

• Trump’s tribute to rioters convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at a weekend Texas campaign rally alarmed GOP senators. "There is no way you’re going to convince the American people that Jan. 6 was anything less than a horrible day," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is backing Trump in his 2024 presidential bid, said. Fox News host Brian Kilmeade denounced Trump's theatrics as "absolutely awful." [HuffPost]

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• Afghans resettled in US fear being sent back as pathway to legal status stalls in Congress (Guardian)

• An Afghan girls' education activist has been arrested, the U.N. says (NPR)

• ‘Being truthful is essential’: scientist who stumbled upon Wuhan Covid data speaks out (Guardian)

• The Catch-22 for Working Parents (Atlantic)

• Efforts to ban books nearly doubled in 2022 over the previous year, according to a recent report published by the American Library Association. The organization logged 1,269 attempts to ban books and other resources in libraries and schools. (NYT)

• Huge Amounts of Water on The Moon May Have Just Been Located (ScienceAlert)

• There have been 89 school shootings – defined as any incident in which a gun is discharged on school property – in the US in 2023, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database. We look at the history of major school shootings in the US. (Reuters)

• Financial Advisor Recommends Fraud (The Onion)