Lyft Going Public: The Dual-Class Share Dilemma

By Stacey Vanek Smith,

Paddy Hirsch

Published March 21, 2019 at 3:46 PM CDT

Traditionally, taking a company public involved a trade-off: on the one hand, selling shares in your company could mean bringing in a ton of money; on the other hand, you had to give up some of your power to shareholders. And then tech CEOs started using a trick to make sure they could raise money and keep a lot of the power for themselves: dual-class stock.

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Economy & Business

Stacey Vanek Smith

Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.

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Paddy Hirsch