Compare / Lyft vs Pinterest
LYFT
Lyft did everything Uber did but nicer, friendlier, and with a pink mustache on the dashboard — and still ende…
Ben Silbermann built a virtual pinboard for collecting pretty pictures and accidentally created one of the mos…
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Lyft
BUSINESS MODEL
Lyft
Lyft takes a commission on every ride — typically 20-25% of the fare. The driver gets the rest plus tips.
Revenue also comes from service fees charged to riders, subscription products (Lyft Pink at $9.99/month for discounted rides), and bike and scooter rentals in select cities.
The economics are straightforward but brutal. Each ride has a driver who needs to be paid enough to show up, a rider who needs a low enough price to choose Lyft over alternatives, and Lyft's cut has to cover platform costs, insurance, customer support, and hopefully generate profit.
The margins are thin — gross margins hover around 45%, and after operating costs, the company has been unprofitable for most of its existence.
Advertising is an emerging revenue stream. Lyft Media places ads on in-car tablets, the Lyft app, and bike-share stations.
It's small but growing and high-margin compared to the ride business.
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
Lyft
Logan Green was obsessed with transportation. Growing up in Los Angeles — the car capital of America — he spent his college years studying why American cities were so car-dependent and how ride-sharing could fix it.
In 2007, at age 23, he started Zimride (named after Zimbabwe, where he'd seen communal minibus sharing), a long-distance carpooling platform for college campuses.
John Zimmer was a hospitality management student at Cornell who joined Zimride early on. The two realized that while Zimride worked for planned trips, there was no good solution for on-demand rides within a city.
Uber had launched UberCab in 2010 as a black car service, but it was expensive — a luxury product.
In 2012, Green and Zimmer pivoted Zimride into Lyft, launching a peer-to-peer ride-sharing service in San Francisco. The differentiator was branding: Lyft was friendly, casual, approachable.
Riders sat in the front seat. Cars had giant pink fuzzy mustaches (later replaced by a glowing dashboard amp).
Drivers fist-bumped passengers. It felt like getting a ride from a friend, not hailing a cab.
They eventually sold the original Zimride carpooling platform to Enterprise Rent-A-Car and went all in on Lyft.
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
Lyft
Lyft's original growth strategy was being the anti-Uber. When Uber was mired in scandals — the Susan Fowler sexual harassment revelations, the "God View" privacy scandal, Travis Kalanick's combative leadership — Lyft positioned itself as the ethical alternative.
The #DeleteUber movement in 2017 sent a wave of riders to Lyft.
Market focus was another differentiator. While Uber expanded to 70+ countries, Lyft stayed focused on the US and Canada.
The theory was that winning one market deeply was better than spreading thin globally. This kept costs lower but also capped the growth ceiling.
Bike and scooter integration was the multimodal play. Lyft acquired Motivate (the largest bike-share operator in the US, running Citi Bike and others) in 2018 for $250 million, adding an entire transportation layer that Uber didn't have.
In dense urban areas, bikes often beat cars for short trips.
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
Lyft
Uber is the problem that never goes away. Uber has 72% of the US ride-share market to Lyft's 28%.
Uber has global scale that generates massive data advantages, cross-selling opportunities (Uber Eats), and brand recognition. Every dollar Lyft spends on marketing, Uber can match and triple.
The market share gap has been stable for years, and closing it seems nearly impossible.
Profitability has been elusive. Lyft went public in March 2019 and lost money every quarter for nearly six years.
The company has cut staff aggressively — laying off 13% of employees in late 2022 and another 26% in April 2023. Only in the second quarter of 2024 did Lyft post its first profitable quarter as a public company.
Autonomous vehicles are both an opportunity and a threat. If self-driving technology works, it eliminates the biggest cost in ride-sharing: the human driver.
But Lyft sold its autonomous vehicle division (Level 5) to Toyota's Woven Planet in 2021 for $550 million. Now they partner with AV companies instead of building their own technology.
If Uber or Waymo crack autonomous rides first, Lyft could become irrelevant.
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
Lyft
Lyft Rideshare — the core ride-hailing platform matching riders with drivers in 600+ cities across the US and Canada. Lyft Pink — a subscription program ($9.99/month) offering 5% off rides, priority airport pickups, free roadside assistance, and discounted bike/scooter rides.
Lyft Bikes & Scooters — micromobility options in select cities including the iconic Citi Bike system in New York City (operated by Lyft since 2018). Lyft Autonomous — partnerships with autonomous vehicle companies including Motional and May Mobility to offer self-driving rides in select markets.
Lyft Media — an advertising platform placing ads across Lyft's digital and physical touchpoints including in-app, in-car tablets, and bike-share stations.
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
Lyft
Andreessen Horowitz led the Series A and was an early champion. Founders Fund invested early.
Fidelity, Alphabet (Google's parent), and Alibaba participated in later rounds — notably, Alphabet invested $1 billion in Lyft while simultaneously developing Waymo, a potential competitor. The March 2019 IPO raised $2.3 billion at a $24 billion valuation — Lyft beat Uber to the public markets by six weeks.
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.