Lyft Co-Founder John Zimmer Has a Net Worth Over $800 Million

Lyft company president John Zimmer has built a net worth of about $800 million from the rideshare company he helped found in 2012.

Last week, Zimmer and Lyft pledged to help out the people of Ukraine by enabling riders to round up their fares so the difference can be donated to emergency relief efforts in the war-torn country. Lyft will match rider donations up to $500,000.

Donations from the fundraising campaign will go 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,” the company said in a statement.

In February, 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.

Zimmer co-founded Lyft with Logan Green in 2012, but the concept for the ride-share 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 ride-share 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.