The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 48 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Levine: Bessemer Would Have Missed Pinterest Without Partner Sarah Tavel
“Had we not had, at least on a gender basis, A diverse duo of people looking at the investment. I think we would have missed it, too.”
Facebook cutting Pinterest off its newsfeed shifted growth from exponential to linear
“I remember early on at Pinterest, there was a time when Facebook acquired Instagram. We were both growing exponentially. Pinterest and Instagram were growing exponentially at the time. They acquired Instagram, and then they shut Pinterest off the newsfeed. So …”
Shah: Platform maturity made consumer startups capital inefficient post-2016
“And so my intuition was a platform maturity of the iPhones, of the app store on iOS, of Facebook, of Google, of Snap and Pinterest kind of hit a ceiling where I felt the cost of acquiring these customers in the LTV, according to it, would make the businesses v…”
West Coast tech hubs in NYC risk stifling local giants
“All the big companies from the West Coast have set up product offices here over the past five years, and I think that that might on one hand prevent the emergence of a standalone New York A monster, but it also brings more talent here, and so you've seen what …”
Maples: Sitting on 22 boards distracted him from recognizing Pinterest's potential
“When you're on 22 boards, it's blowing up all the time. There's always something totally screwed up. You're not as awake to the possibility of what Pinterest could be when you get pitched by Pinterest, right?”
Frankel: Founder Collective passed on Pinterest due to portfolio conflict
“The first thing that comes to mind is like Pinterest. The founders came to us and we had a conflict. We had a very strong associate in Zach Klein, who was the chairman of supply. We, we'd invested in supply. We couldn't make the investment.”
Pinterest and Facebook possess the tech industry's best growth tracking infrastructure
“I think Pinterest has one of the best, like, systems of growth. A list of all the current growth experiments, you automatically run reports on it, etc. I think the only other company that really has that system is Facebook”
Winters: Pinterest signed up over half the US via Google preview walls
“When people came in from Google, we would let you see a preview of the content, and then we would ask you to sign up to see more of it... As we did that, that was really successful. And we ended up signing up, you know, like over half of the U S up to Pinteres…”
Pinterest signed up over half the US population via Google SEO
“So as we did that, that was really successful, and we ended up signing up, you know, like over half of the US up to Pinterest with, you know, a pretty high retention rate.”
Levine: Bessemer's Pinterest Memo Assigned 25-30% Chance of Total Failure
“And the chance of it being a big zero for a company at that stage is at least 25 or 30%, which means that the chance of it working is also not going to be huge.”
Levine: Pinterest's $1M Seed Stock Buyback Was Its Best Capital Use
“The company actually bought back some of the stock from those very early investors. It wasn't a large amount, but it might've been another million dollars. And so it was probably the best use of capital the company ever could have come up with, given what that…”
Levine: Pinterest Generated $40M Revenue in Its First Year of Monetization
“I think in the first year they tried to monetize, I think they made forty million dollars of revenue. That was extraordinary. I'd never seen anything like that before, to go from zero to forty million of revenue. Now, there are many other companies that have d…”
Lavingia: Post-PMF company employees become cogs optimizing and scaling
“Starting a company is just fundamentally different from working at a company. Even as hot as Pinterest was, like, I just felt like very quickly, sort of post-product market fit You kind of become a cog in the machine. You kind of figured it out, and now you're…”
Snap and Pinterest broke Google and Facebook's acquisition duopoly
“I think Snap and Pinterest have kind of broken through that duopoly, and therefore there's some heterogeneous ways to acquire customers, but not as many as you'd hope.”
Motschwiller: Series A rounds for top consumer decacorns occurred pre-2012
“You look at the series A Funding times of the consumer decacorns that are out there, the Ubers, the Lyfts, the Airbnbs, the Snaps, the Pinterest, the Spotifys, those series A's were all done pre-二零 12.”
Hartz names Airbnb, Pinterest, and Bitcoin as his top investment drivers
“Airbnb, Pinterest Bitcoin.”
Snapchat and Pinterest ad channels cannot scale like Meta or Google
“Snapchat, Pinterest, those work, but those are hard to scale. Like you don't get large scale, similar to Facebook and Google.”
Jordan: Startups must separate experimental marketing budgets from core spend
“I love the companies that have a, they segregate an experimental budget from their core, core acquisition budget, just to, because if you bundle them together, it, It's a barrier against experimentation. If you're constantly optimizing Google and Facebook, but…”
Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are the premier tech growth talent pools
“In general, I think people at Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, a few other companies maybe, like, really do know growth. They know how to run these successive experiments. So all those companies, I think, have, like, really great growth culture where people have…”
Casey Winters: Product growth connects users to existing core value
“Growth is about connecting people to the value that's already been created by the business, you know, either through product or services or whatever. So growth is not about building totally new features, totally new products. It's about once we have those and …”
Winters: Intuition-based growth experiments failed at every new job he took
“Every growth experiment I've recommended when I've joined a company, I'm fundamentally using more of my gut from previous experience. Every time that has not worked.”
Casey Winters: Facebook Open Graph changes temporarily killed Pinterest's viral user acquisition
“When Facebook changed the way the open graph worked, all of a sudden we stopped getting any new users.”
Levine: E-Commerce Transactions Are Not Required for Pinterest to Monetize
“I thought that would be necessary to monetize. It turns out that it's not. I think it's necessary, important for consumers to have a great experience, but has been less critical to monetization.”
Levine: Pinterest Had No Technical Founder When Bessemer Invested
“Young internet founding teams included a highly technical founder, and Pinterest had no technical founder.”
Levine: 40% of Early Pinterest Sign-Ups Stayed Active Month Over Month
“And I think in the early years of Pinterest, seeing that something like 40% of the users who had ever signed up were using it month on month on month, relative to most consumer services, was unbelievably impressive.”
Levine: Pinterest Grew 50% to 70% Monthly After Bessemer's Investment
“I think in that first year or so after we invested, the business was growing like 50 or 70% in a month.”
Levine: Bessemer Invested $9M in Pinterest's Series A at $40M Pre-Money
“The first step was a simple ten million dollar investment. It was a forty million dollar pre-money valuation, fifty million dollar post-money valuation. I think Bessemer was eight and a half or nine million of the 10 existing investors put up the balance.”
Young Women Are the Primary Early Adopters for Social Platforms
“Whether it be Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest or Vine or Tumblr back in the day or TikTok, you know, it's always been young women who've been that first set of early adopters”
Pinterest raised at a $40M valuation with four employees and 30,000 users
“For Pinterest, I remember the company was four people when we invested, and we did it at 40 pre, which doesn't seem that crazy now. It was 30,000 registered users”
Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann rejected almost every early feature proposal
“Ben was so adamant every time basically I suggested we should build something new, it was rejected. And he was so good about staying true to this sort of the core mission of the company, keeping the product incredibly simple, hiring very, very carefully.”
Wilkinson: MetaLab designed Slack and worked with Shopify, Coinbase, and Pinterest
“Also worked with a lot of startups really early on, Shopify, Tumblr, Coinbase, Pinterest. We designed Slack.”
Startup boards function best with short, issue-focused meetings
“There were also very short board meetings, you were constantly thinking and helping the company think through its meatiest issues. That's, I would say, the highest way a board can function with the company.”
Airbnb, Uber, and Amazon all launched in seemingly small niche markets
“All of those companies look small in the beginning, you know, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, like the lists, you know, even Uber in the beginning, they all looked like they were going after something small in the beginning, Amazon just doing books.”
Lanman invested in Pinterest after seeing his wife use it for weddings
“Pinterest is another example where I had never been using catalogs and stuff. I'd collected butterflies as a kid and done some of these things that I think work well in terms of this digital form of Pinterest, but really it was only until I went to my wife and…”
Felicis passed on investing in Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest
“Passed on Uber, passed on Airbnb, passed on Pinterest.”
Bessemer Invested in Pinterest When It Had Five Employees
“When we invested, it was a five-person company with tens of thousands of users”
Diao: Customer support ticket data holds golden nuggets for growth hypotheses
“After that, I started to look at the data around the customer support tickets. What were the most common questions? What were the inquiries? Who was writing in? It was just written with golden nuggets there.”
Pinterest evolved its North Star metric from visitors to active board creators
“And one of my favorite stories of a metric changing is from Pinterest and from Casey. They actually changed the metric to go down the funnel. Like first it was just people arriving at the site, like kind of weekly active users and then weekly active pinners an…”
OpenSea and Clubhouse Founders Both Originated From Pinterest
“Two out of three founders, OpenSea founder and Clubhouse founder all came from Pinterest, and a huge chunk of our team is actually now from Pinterest.”
Winters: Pinterest grew from 40M to 150M MAUs during his tenure
“Stayed there from about forty million monthly actives to a hundred and fifty million monthly actives.”
Casey Winters scaled Pinterest signup conversion 5x via SEO
“At Pinterest, Casey turned SEO into a scalable acquisition strategy, increasing conversion to signups, five X.”
Levine: Pinterest's User Base Was 90% Female at 2011 Series A
“The product was used at that time, probably by women in 90% of all cases. The male user base was tiny.”
Levine: Bessemer Kept Its 2011 Pinterest Investment Secret for Nine Months
“Our initial investment in Pinterest was maybe in March or April of 2011. You can't find anything on the internet about our involvement with the company for at least six or nine months. In fact, it was the subsequent financing That somehow got leaked to the pre…”
FirstMark Capital led the seed round for Pinterest
“We were excited to be the lead investor in the seed round for Pinterest.”
Pinterest's early seed extension round went unfilled and open to anyone
“Pinterest actually had a Seed extension round that wasn't even completely filled out. So, you know, there was a round very early on at Pinterest where anybody could have invested.”
Diao answered 500 support tickets during her first week at Pinterest
“One of the first things that I did in that first week was Basically answer 500 support tickets.”
Malik: Early adoption of unique channels drove growth for Dropbox and Pinterest
“Dropbox, Dropbox, like with the referral program, Groupon and email, Pinterest and SEO, Duolingo, and just like a totally unhinged social media, right? All of them were kind of first to this concept and it really, really worked.”