Prior to becoming the CEO of Lyft, David Risher didn’t post much on social media.
That began to change just before his first day on the job, when Risher decided to sign up on the ride-sharing platform as a driver.
“I had no plan,” he says. “I just wanted to get in the car and see what it feels like to drive for Lyft and hear the rider’s story, but also experience it from a driver’s perspective.” At the end of that first outing, Risher revealed to the passenger who he was, and requested a selfie. He posted it on his personal LinkedIn account. “I drove for a couple more hours—and I didn’t tell anyone at Lyft I was doing this.”
Since then, Risher has made a regular habit of getting behind the wheel and sharing the stories (and selfies) he gathers from the road on his personal LinkedIn and X accounts, which have since added about 25,000 followers.
“Part of a CEO’s job is to be an external spokesperson for the company. The thing that I get the most consistent positive feedback on is my social media posts, particularly around driving, or pulling back the curtain on what it’s really like to run a company,” Risher says.
“People trust individuals more than they trust institutions . . . so I think it is important for Lyft. I kind of just want people to know CEOs are just people.”
As the personal brand of CEOs becomes increasingly tied to the brand of the companies they lead—their voice, their interests, their faces—more and more top bosses are taking pages out of the books of influencers.
Like Risher, many tech CEOs in particular have jumped on the branding bandwagon. Spotify cofounder and CEO Daniel Ek makes Instagram Reels sharing his company’s quarterly earnings; he also announced his forthcoming move to executive chair this way. As he transitioned from the COO of Shopify to CEO of Opendoor, Kaz Nejatian began posting about new hires, product changes, internal memos, and other plans on his personal X account, including that he, too, is looking to innovate around the real estate company’s earnings calls to make them more social for his retail shareholders.
But is the expectation to whip out a phone and lead a TikTok Live changing the way these leaders function, and is it too much for a role that’s already all-consuming?
