How Lyft's cofounders, Logan Green and John Zimmer, went from organizing carpools on college campuses to running a ride-hailing company worth $29 billion

"He built the first car-sharing program at UC Santa Barbara, before Zipcar was there," Zimmer told Pando. "He built it from scratch. He got the attention of the local transit board and they elected him to the transit board. He was the youngest member and he was the only person who rode the bus on the transit board."

"I was driving from Upstate New York to New York City and all around me were these empty seats," he told Forbes.

Zimmer was also inspired by one of his college classes called "Green Cities," when his professor ended his first lecture by saying: "Our population density in our cities is rising rapidly. For the first time in history, today more people live in cities than not. The infrastructures that exist in our cities were built decades before these two patterns were true, and if we don’t do something about it, we’re going to have major economic, environmental, and social challenges going forward."

Within a week of their Facebook introduction, Green flew to New York City to meet with Zimmer.

While Zimmer worked on Wall Street as a real estate finance analyst during the day, the two developed Zimride.

"I completed a two-year program [at Lehman Brothers] and I decided that I was going to leave," Zimmer told TechCrunch. "I packed my bags, I used Zimride, and I drove across the country."

In its first year, the startup got $250,000 in seed money from Facebook and expanded to a company with six employees, with more than 30 college campuses, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and Cigna Corp. as clients.

Green and Zimmer started their car-sharing business on college campuses for a simple reason.

"The college space, we felt, is perfect for the kind of critical density we need with a level of trust," Zimmer told The New York Times in 2009.

On an episode of Business Insider's podcast, "Success! How I Did It" in 2017, Zimmer told Business Insider's US editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell that Zimride it was more of a "side project."

"... it felt like a school project where there was a lot of interest, passion, and we had a big vision, but we didn't know what it was going to be, and so we just wanted to see it work," he said, adding, "We were mostly focused on college campuses and making the majority carpool to get home for spring break."

That year, Green and Zimmer reevaluated their long-term mission.

"The bigger vision, which we've always had, was providing a full alternative to car ownership," Zimmer told Business Insider. "Our actual mission is to improve people's lives with the world's best transportation and, in doing so, to change our cities so that they are designed around people instead of cars. And we were just scratching the surface."

Zimmer said the pair said to themselves, "Well, what if we could increase the frequency of use? Use a smartphone?" Within three weeks, two engineers had built the Lyft app.

"At the time, Uber existed, but they were just doing this for black cars and limos, and to us that was uninteresting," Zimmer told Business Insider.

In the first half of 2013, Lyft raised $75 million in funding.

In the fourth quarter of 2018, Lyft generated $670 million in revenue, Business Insider's Graham Rapier and Yutong Yuan previously reported.

Uber brought in $3 billion over the same period. But while Uber's explosive growth from 2016 and 2017 seems to be slowing down, Lyft seems to be picking up steam, Rapier and Yuan reported.

Lyft is the first ride-hailing company to launch on a US public market, beating its biggest competitor, Uber.

"In our opinion while Lyft has clearly benefited from some of the negative PR issues that Uber faced in 2017/early 2018, going forward the battle for market share will be a bit more balanced," Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note to clients earlier in the week.

Green, the CEO, owns an estimated $700 million stake in the company and president Zimmer a slightly smaller $510 million stake.

Still, Lyft's IPO will likely create some new millionaires. San Francisco is expecting to see an explosion in millionaire residents by the end of 2019 as many other tech start-ups are expected to go public.

Companies like Uber, Slack, Postmates, Pinterest, and Airbnb are expected to follow in Lyft's footsteps.