Yahoo Finance Live’s Rachelle Akuffo discusses Lyft’s exec shakeup.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: Well, don't overlook Lyft. We're going to chat with the ridesharing company's incoming CEO in the next hour and Howard Schultz in the hot seat. Starbucks former CEO facing a grilling over how it handled labor unions. Joining us with a sample of what's to come, Yahoo Finance's Rachelle Akuffo. Hi, Rachelle.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: Hello, always good to be in the early show. Now, we're watching those changes at Lyft. David Risher taking over as president and CEO starting April 17. Current CEO and co-founder Logan Green, he will now chair the Lyft board. President and co-founder John Zimmer, he will move to vice chair, so a bit of movement there. To give you some background, Risher does have some Wall Street cred. He was a former GM at Microsoft, senior vice president of US retail at Amazon when it was scaling from the late '90s into the behemoth it is today, and then most recently, the founder and CEO of Digital Book Platform Worldreader.

Now, I'll be asking him how he plans to apply all that experience to Lyft because Risher still wants to focus on the ridesharing business, but not really competing with Uber's growing ecosystem of delivery services, which has really been the growth route there for Uber. Now, Lyft's past two quarterly reports disappointed the street, so Brian Sozzi and I will dig into the potential turnaround and how Lyft plans to compete from here, if they're really just focusing on the ridesharing.

BRAD SMITH: And so we're also set to chat the controversy around Starbucks and how they handled unions. Tell us more about that and what's being tracked there.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: Now, this is going to be a tough one because former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz will face off with Senator Bernie Sanders. Now he's chairing the Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, also known as HELP, today. That's actually starting in just a minute or two. Expect a grilling hotter than your morning roast, as the hearing is titled "No Company is Above the Law," mythbusting Starbucks claims that it has not violated federal labor law with impunity.

So lawmakers are going to drill down on Starbucks's store closures and some of these firings tied to these growing unionization efforts. About 3% or 300 US stores voted to join the union Starbucks Workers United. And Sanders reportedly turned down having other representatives from Starbucks in place of Schultz, telling NPR Tuesday, I hope that by the end of the hearing, what Mr. Schultz will say is that he's prepared to sit down with the union and negotiate a contract. But up till now, both sides have been accusing the others of undermining the process. It's going to be a tough one. Bernie Sanders will be coming for Howard Schultz today.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, definitely.

BRAD SMITH: Absolutely. Rachelle Akuffo, we're going to be tuning in to you at 11:00 AM. Thanks so much for joining us here.