Ann Miura-Ko Talks About Her Early Investment In Lyft

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Ann Miura-Ko sits down with NBC Bay Area’s Scott McGrew for “Sand Hill Road” podcast to talk about Lyft‘s upcoming IPO

SAN JOSE, CA – (March 21, 2019) – In this week’s episode of NBC Bay Area’s podcast Sand Hill Road, business and tech reporter Scott McGrew speaks to Ann Miura-Ko, a founding partner at Floodgate, about Lyft’s upcoming IPO and why she doesn’t see Uber as a threat to Lyft.

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Dubbed “the most powerful woman in startups” early in her career, Miura-Ko invested in Lyft when it was worth $5 million. The company is projected to be valued between $20 billion and $25 billion after it goes public in a few days. Miura-Ko tells McGrew what she saw early on in the company that others didn’t see. “The only company that we knew of was Zip Car,” Miura-Ko said about transportation companies at the time. “It was a huge space, it was a place where if something interesting happened it would have massive ripple effects, and so that’s what we wanted to get involved with.”

On Lyft going public before Uber, Miura-Ko tells McGrew why she doesn’t see it as a race, “When you have a competitor that’s being super aggressive and wants to take over the entire market, you respond by thinking about culture and thinking about how you are going to service the drivers and what’s the experience that you want to deliver. It isn’t a competitive reaction but it’s about who you are.”

Miura-Ko also addresses the gender gap among venture capitalists and says that although she has seen an increase of women partners at venture capital firms, initiatives dedicated to founder-driven diversity are still necessary to promote change. “You just see a whole different set of priorities becoming important not only to the venture capital firms, but to the founders,” said Miura-Ko about the initiative Founders for Change. “When it’s important to the founders I know that we’re going to see increasing change back in the venture capital world.”

Sand Hill Road is a podcast hosted by NBC Bay Area / KNTV business and tech reporter Scott McGrew, featuring interviews from the heart of Silicon Valley with the venture capitalists, start-ups, and innovators behind the trending technologies of tomorrow.

To listen to past episodes featuring interviews with Tim Draper, Elad Gil, Randy Komisar and Maynard Webb among others, subscribe to Sand Hill Road on iTunes and wherever podcasts are available.

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Owned by NBCUniversal, NBC Bay Area / KNTV is the Bay Area’s investigative station located in the heart of Silicon Valley. The station is committed to providing continuous, in-depth journalism with unique personalities. Along with broadcasting NBC’s award-winning daytime, prime-time and late night programming, NBC Bay Area produces more than 32 hours of news programming each week. The station can be seen locally on Comcast 3 and 703 and over-the-air on 11. COZI TV, the station’s digital network, offers a full schedule of America’s most beloved and iconic television series, hit movies and original programming. COZI TV can be seen locally on Comcast 186 and over-the-air on 11.3.

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