Logan Green, CEO of the ridesharing company Lyft, will be a keynote speaker at SXSW Interactive 2015. Credit: Contributed by SXSW Inc.
The chief executive Lyft, a ridesharing company that along with Uber is part of a wave of companies using freelance labor, will be a keynote speaker at South by Southwest Interactive.
Logan Green, who co-founded the San Francisco-based company, is the fifth and final keynote speaker to be named for the festival. He joins Astro Teller of Google X Lab, entrepreneur and Saudi Arabian Princess Reema Bint Bandar Al-Saud, MoMA curator Paola Antonelli and SiriusXM inventor Martine Rothblatt as a keynote. The festival told attendees of a meetup Monday night. Green will be the keynote on Monday, March 16 at the festival. The presentation will be live streamed for free on the SXSW site.
Green's company, which gives users a way to hail a ride in pink mustache-adorned vehicles, has had a tempestuous relationship with Austin. Much of last year was spent an effort to get ridesharing services legal in Austin even as the city explored the possibility and issued fines and impounded cars in the interim. By late fall, the city gave initial approval to companies like Lyft and Uber to operate legally. In 2007, Green co-founded a company called Zimride for carpooling that would eventually become Lyft.
