Marketplace Labs was founded to develop strategic, long-run science capabilities to achieve Lyft's ambitious growth objectives over the long term, and to be competitive against other tech giants in the transportation space.
[Confluence page (Lyft-only)]
Head of Marketplace Labs:
Garrett van Ryzin
Mission Statement
Marketplace Labs' mission is to firmly establish Lyft as the global scientific and research leader in building and operating transportation marketplaces at scale, from rideshare to AVs to city-scale multimodal systems. Marketplace Labs accomplishes this objective by partnering with internal and external collaborators to bring the latest scientific knowledge to bear on Lyft's core technical and business challenges.
Roles
Marketplace Labs serves three major roles:
Acceleration
Accelerating the work of other Lyft research science and product groups by:
- Providing additional expertise, advice and collaboration on difficult science problems;
- Serving as a swing resource to incubate new ideas and perform exploratory applied research to better understand and solve strategic problems and vet potential solutions;
- Helping to coordinate and align the efforts of research science related to marketplace issues that cut across the company.
Incubation
Conducting our own research and thought leadership on strategic long-term challenges facing Lyft, collaborating closely with existing marketplace science and product groups and (where appropriate) outside academic experts.
Outreach
Serving as a home for visiting scientists from academia and generally helping to facilitate interaction between Lyft scientists and the academic research community. The aim of this interaction is to help inject new skills and knowledge into Lyft research science, strengthen the Lyft brand throughout the scientific world, and share the great science work we do with external scientific colleagues, including participating in published research.