What if you bought Lyft in 2020?
US Tech · Apps. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0.3× · S&P 500 same money: $2,092
$1,000 in Lyft at the start of 2020 would be worth about $333 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Lyft grew out of a carpooling start-up and launched its ride-hailing app in 2012, branding itself the friendly alternative to Uber with pink moustaches on car grilles. It was, for most of its history, a firm number two in a market where scale matters enormously, operating almost entirely in the US and Canada while Uber spread worldwide and added food delivery. Lyft beat its rival to the stock market in March 2019, pricing at 72 dollars, and the shares fell sharply within weeks.
The pandemic hit Lyft harder than Uber because it had no delivery business to fall back on. Losses persisted, the founders stepped aside as chief executives in 2023, and new boss David Risher concentrated on cutting costs and matching Uber's prices. A typo in a 2024 earnings release briefly sent the shares soaring before being corrected. In 2025 Lyft expanded into Europe by buying taxi app FreeNow. The business stabilised, but a 2020 buyer still lost roughly two thirds.
The lesson: In winner-takes-most markets the runner-up can be a poor investment even when the market grows; Lyft lacked the scale that made Uber profitable.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | $45.00 | $333 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2020, turning $1,000 into $333. The S&P 500 from that same year: $2,092.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Lyft is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
Play Sixty-40More in US Tech
- What if you bought Apple?
- What if you bought Microsoft?
- What if you bought Amazon?
- What if you bought Nvidia?
- What if you bought Google / Alphabet?
- What if you bought Facebook / Meta?