It’s Lyft With a Y, and a Why

Lyft Inc. filed the prospectus for its initial public offering on Friday, and it reads like the standard prospectus for an initial public offering of a certain kind of modern technology company. The foundational text of this genre is probably Facebook Inc.’s IPO, when Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to shareholders that began “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.”

Lyft, too, focuses on mission rather than business. The first page of Lyft’s prospectus is a big pink slide saying “Our mission: Improve people’s lives with the world’s best transportation.” Is there a letter from the founders? Oh boy is there a letter from the founders. Its headline is “Our Life’s Work,” and it begins “It’s time to redesign our cities around people, not cars,” a counterintuitive slogan for a company that, uh, sells car rides. “The Y in Lyft” is a section header: “The why in what Lyft is doing is most important to us, as well as the cities and communities we serve, and it will always be our company’s North Star.” That sort of thing.