Lyft Co-Founder John Zimmer Will Step Down as President — A Look at His Net Worth

When Lyft co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer started their rideshare company, they were on a mission to prove people wrong. “Logan and I were told we were crazy to think people would share a ride in another person’s car.” Now, more than a decade later, Lyft is dominating the rideshare space. So, how much has Zimmer made from it all?

Zimmer has been serving as Lyft’s president since March 2013, and after spending 10 years in the role, he has decided to step down. On March 27, 2023, Lyft announced both Green and Zimmer would be leaving their full-time roles to pursue non-executive roles as chair and vice chair of the board. Find out who will be taking over Zimmer’s role and the fortune he has made from Lyft down below.

Although Zimmer’s net worth hasn’t been confirmed, some sources estimate him to be worth around $800 million. And it’s certainly possible considering his business partner, Logan Green, has a net worth of $750 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth.

Zimmer co-founded Lyft with Green in 2012, but the concept for the rideshare company was really born out of Zimmer and Green’s earlier collaboration, Zimride. Zimride was a ridesharing platform available on various college campuses in the early 2000s.

A Cornell University grad, Zimmer started thinking about creating a rideshare business when he was commuting from Upstate New York to his job as a real estate finance analyst for Lehman Brothers in New York City.

“All around me were these empty seats,” Zimmer told Forbes in 2011.

Zimmer then saw a Facebook post from Green on a mutual friend’s social media page. At the time, the two didn’t know each other and lived on opposite ends of the country. Green’s post said he launched a carpooling network called “Zimride.”

"I reached out to our mutual friend, and I said, 'How well do you know Logan, and why the hell did he call his company Zimride?'” Zimmer told Business Insider’s podcast “Success! How I Did It” in 2017.

The first Zimride service was launched at Cornell University in 2007, and a second location at the University of California Santa Barbara was started a few months later. Zimmer quit his job at Lehman Brothers and moved out to Silicon Valley to work full-time with Green on their new carpooling business.

“Our actual mission is to improve people's lives with the world's best transportation and, in doing so, to change our cities so that they are designed around people instead of cars,” Zimmer said in the 2017 “Success! How I Did It” podcast.

For the first three years the company was in business, Zimmer didn’t take a salary, Insider reports. Zimride eventually became Lyft in 2012.

In March 2022, Lyft pledged to help out the people of Ukraine by enabling riders to round up their fares so the difference could be donated to emergency relief efforts in the war-torn country. Lyft pledged to match rider donations up to $500,000.

Donations from the fundraising campaign went directly to response efforts, including transportation, housing, food, clothing, counseling, and more for Ukrainian refugees in Romania, Moldova, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, the company said in a statement.

“We stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine as they live through an unjustified invasion of their country. Lyft has teams working around the clock to support our employees in the region and their families by providing financial resources and helping to ensure their safety,” per the company statement.

In February 2022, the company announced that it would offer financial support for its employees in Ukraine after Russia's unprovoked invasion of the country. Lyft opened an office in Kyiv, Ukraine, in April 2021, and the office employed about 60 people.

Green, who serves as Lyft's CEO and Zimmer, Lyft's president, will step down from their roles by mid-2023. Green will transition to his non-executive role on April 17 and Zimmer will join him on June 30.

The two are being succeeded by David Risher, a company press release states. Risher, who co-founded Worldreader, was the 37th employee of Amazon, and helped it grow from an online bookstore to a one that produces over $4 billion sales.

Risher has been a part of the Lyft board of directors since July 2021.