Edward Quince's Wisdom Bites: The one with the falcon and the donut

(Expanded from May 5, 2025)

In May, we wandered briefly away from charts and into something far more revealing: a CEO driving his own product.

Lyft CEO David Risher introduced two concepts worth their weight in free cash flow: Falcon Mode and Enshittification.

The Donut Dilemma

While driving for Lyft, Risher picked up a rider named Anne. Her commute decision depended entirely on price. At $20, she’d go in. At $40, she’d stay home. That day the fare was $30—barely tolerable.

She paid it only because she had donuts in the backseat for her team.

A spreadsheet would log this as a successful transaction. Reality logs it as resentment.

Fighting Gravity

This is enshittification in action—the slow degradation of a product in the blind pursuit of profit. Cory Doctorow’s framework is simple: first platforms serve users, then they exploit them, and eventually they extract everything they can from everyone involved.

It’s not malicious. It’s gravitational.

The cause is additive bias—solving problems by adding layers instead of removing friction. Metrics improve while experience decays.

The Financial Takeaway

Falcon Mode is the antidote: operate at altitude, but retain the ability to swoop.

Dashboards tell you what happened. They rarely tell you why.

For investors, beware of businesses that grow by extracting rather than creating value. If the model depends on customer irritation and employee exhaustion, it is not compounding—it is consuming.

Quality is felt before it is measured. If you wouldn’t ride the product, don’t own the stock.