Compare / DoorDash vs Pinterest
DOORDASH
Four Stanford students ran a website called PaloAltoDelivery.com where they personally answered phone calls an…
Ben Silbermann built a virtual pinboard for collecting pretty pictures and accidentally created one of the mos…
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
DoorDash
BUSINESS MODEL
DoorDash
DoorDash operates a three-sided marketplace connecting restaurants, delivery drivers (Dashers), and consumers. Revenue comes from three streams: commissions charged to restaurants (typically 15-30% of the order value), delivery fees and service fees charged to consumers, and DashPass subscription revenue ($9.99/month for free delivery and reduced fees).
The DashPass subscription is the retention engine. Over 18 million subscribers pay monthly whether they order or not, creating predictable recurring revenue.
Subscribers order more frequently (about 4x more than non-subscribers), increasing order volume.
Advertising is the emerging high-margin business. Restaurants pay for promoted listings and sponsored placements in the app.
This is essentially a search advertising business built on top of a logistics network. Ad revenue has grown to over $1 billion annually — and it's nearly pure profit because it costs almost nothing to display an ad.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
DoorDash
Tony Xu grew up watching his mother work multiple restaurant jobs after the family immigrated from Nanjing, China to Illinois. She washed dishes, waited tables, and cooked — sometimes all in the same week at different restaurants.
That experience gave Xu an unusual understanding of how brutally hard the restaurant business is.
At Stanford in 2012, Xu and classmates Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore were in a startup class looking for a business idea. They interviewed over 200 small business owners and kept hearing the same problem: restaurants wanted to offer delivery but couldn't afford to hire drivers.
Domino's and Pizza Hut had fleets. Your local Thai place didn't.
Their solution was comically low-tech. They built a one-page website called PaloAltoDelivery.com, listed menus from local restaurants (without asking permission), and put their personal phone numbers on the site.
When orders came in, they drove the food themselves. The first order was pad thai from a restaurant in Palo Alto.
Within months, they were drowning in orders and realized this was a massive business. They incorporated as DoorDash in January 2013 and got into Y Combinator that summer.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
DoorDash
DoorDash won the US market through obsessive focus on suburban and mid-market restaurants — the segments Uber Eats and Grubhub ignored. While competitors fought over Manhattan and San Francisco, DoorDash was onboarding every Chinese restaurant and pizza shop in Tucson and Des Moines.
By the time competitors noticed, DoorDash had locked up the majority of US restaurants.
The "last-mile logistics" expansion is the long game. DoorDash now delivers groceries (partnerships with Albertsons, Rite Aid), convenience items (DashMart dark stores), alcohol, pet supplies, and retail products.
The thesis is that once you have a network of drivers and a consumer habit of ordering through an app, you can deliver anything — not just food.
The Wolt acquisition for $8.1 billion in 2022 was the international play. Instead of grinding through country-by-country expansion, DoorDash bought the leading delivery platform in 23 countries across Europe and Asia.
Wolt brought strong unit economics and a beloved brand, especially in the Nordics.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
DoorDash
Profitability has been the constant question. DoorDash lost money every year through its IPO and beyond, finally posting its first full year of profit in 2024.
The food delivery business has razor-thin margins — restaurants want lower commissions, drivers want higher pay, and consumers want lower prices. Squeezing profit from that three-way tension is incredibly hard.
Regulatory risk is real and growing. Cities and states have capped delivery commissions (New York City caps at 15% for delivery, 5% for marketing).
Worker classification lawsuits keep coming — are Dashers employees or independent contractors? California's Prop 22 temporarily settled this for California, but the debate rages everywhere else.
Each new regulation shaves margin.
Uber Eats is the forever competitor. Uber's massive ride-sharing network gives them built-in driver supply and brand recognition.
They're willing to lose money on Eats to keep their broader ecosystem sticky. DoorDash and Uber Eats together control about 90% of US delivery, and neither can afford to cede ground.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
DoorDash
DoorDash Marketplace — the core food delivery platform connecting consumers to 390,000+ restaurant partners across the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Germany. DashPass — a subscription program offering $0 delivery fees and reduced service fees for $9.99/month.
The loyalty engine of the entire business. DoorDash Drive — a white-label delivery service that lets any business (not just restaurants) use DoorDash's driver network to fulfill their own orders.
Basically DoorDash as a logistics API. DoorDash for Business — a corporate platform for team meals, employee benefits, and office food programs.
Wolt — the European food delivery platform DoorDash acquired for $8.1 billion in 2022, now the company's international expansion vehicle.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
DoorDash
Sequoia Capital has been the most consequential investor, leading multiple rounds and backing Tony Xu from Y Combinator onward. Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and SoftBank Vision Fund participated in growth rounds.
Y Combinator was the starting point (Summer 2013 batch). The December 2020 IPO raised $3.4 billion at a $39 billion valuation, making it one of the biggest tech IPOs of that year.
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.