Lyft seems like the kind of company that would be more successful run extremely lean than trying to focus on growth. There simply isn’t that many major metro areas after all.
I'm starting to think that many companies seem to define "growth" in terms of headcount, rather than revenue or marketshare, and that they overhire based on a perception of needing to grow the company whether they need the people or not.
I think it's not so much companies as executives. If we divide people up by skill/topic and reward managers for being in charge of many people, then they've got a strong incentive to focus on the growth of things that make them look important.
I mean, if you can grow success without headcount, that's the dream, but sometimes growth means "investing in many different parallel opportunities" so you hire more people to do more in parallel.
They never expanded globally like Uber did though so there is potential there, but with any marketplace, you need a lot of money to expand into a market initially because you need both riders and drivers and incentivizing use when you're new is expensive.
