Could not agree more on Lyft. In a winner-take-all market where an all-out land grab is critical to the long-term success of the marketplace, moving quickly and being the first to reach that golden scale of monopolistic ownership of supply and demand is absolutely key.
Not a perfect comparison given Lyft was founded 2 years after Uber and therefore was already at a disadvantage, but had they grown faster, they might have been able to overtake Uber's position.
In any case, the outcome of the Uber / Didi battle in China should be a great data point for this question.
I don't think Lyft has failed by any means, it's a 4 billion dollar company and growing. Also, it seems they're quite quick to innovate. IIRC, they were first to come up with the carpool system that Uber then rapidly appropriated into UberPOOL. It's just hard to overtake a company executing as brilliantly as Uber.
Not a perfect comparison given Lyft was founded 2 years after Uber and therefore was already at a disadvantage, but had they grown faster, they might have been able to overtake Uber's position.
In any case, the outcome of the Uber / Didi battle in China should be a great data point for this question.