Pinterest

“Favorite failed idea, favorite of mine, which failed, but became useful, but not because of us is Pinterest. I was at Google. This was one of the problems which we were thinking about of how do people look at collection of things. It was a project which failed…”

“This is a business that is gonna go like this, like slowly grow and have lower churn because it's a mature market. You know that these Pinterest people have been there for 10 years, and it's a totally proven thing. It's not like some AI tool that's a flash in …”

“I simply believe that it will be difficult for smaller platforms to make own Gen AI video generation systems, and essentially companies like Pinterest, Snapchat, and many others, they really will have to have some AI-generate capabilities.”

“A really important thing happened in 2015, and that's that Pinterest opened up their platform for advertisers. And so they had the Pinterest promoted pins where you could pay them like any other advertising platform, and they would show your pins more often to…”

“One of the first things that I did in that first week was Basically answer 500 support tickets.”

“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 is in trouble. Feels like this is what people use Pinterest for. Here's all the inspiration. Now it's just AI doing it all.”

“He you know, he was in the three million dollar post-money valuation round of Airbnb. He was the first dollar into Pinterest. He was early in Uber. He was early in PayPal.”

“Really hard to compete in this category on Google Pinterest, you can actually compete really effectively in it.”

“I came to think that the job of a startup was to grow the founder so they could continue to lead the startup. And I think what's true for founders is also true for a lot of other folks in the executive staff. It's very hard to grow emotionally and developmenta…”

“I had this other theory that a startup is still a startup until the founder moves aside. So by my definition of even meta is still a startup in a way that Amazon's not. And, you know, an Airbnb is still a startup in a way that Pinterest is not because Ben's mo…”

“Slack and Pinterest, I think are examples of companies products that became companies, but neither one of those places really knew what to do next because they didn't have a bigger vision of the change they were trying to see in the world.”

“Yeah, these are, you know, Ben Silverman and Brian Chesky, these guys are, like, top end technical founders in addition to being, you know, good designers, great designers.”

“If you think about Pinterest as this data set of consumer intent, you can think about Aura's data as a set of information on employee intent to save, spend, and invest their paycheck.”

“I don't even care so much about the conversion into an actual purchase, but if, like Pinterest, there's people who go on there every day four times a day and never purchase anything, but that engagement is really powerful.”

“I think it's hard to actually be both of those. I think you are either one or the other, so if you're in the small group, it's all about small groups... Or you're more in the Pinterest category... But I feel like trying to message both is going to be very chal…”

“Companies like Spotify, Pinterest, Wayfair, and Vistaprint, hundreds of others are using our platform every single month.”

“Search engines evolve out of every new content type. We've seen this in the past with the websites with Google, products and images with Pinterest, videos with YouTube, and GIFs with Giphy. Immersive content will be no different.”

“I know I've had many talks with Brad Feld, who's a, you know, one of the leading VCs in the country, and he said to me over and over, Pinterest is not your competitor, and we agree a hundred percent.”

“This giant filing cabinet is worth more than Snapchat. It's worth more than Pinterest. It's worth more than Twitter as a company. Isn't that crazy? The thirty billion dollar company.”

“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?”

“I remember the early days when Pinterest started to scale in, like, 2011, 2012, and the team was, like, racing to keep this product up and running. There was this big road map, you know, of how to get scalability and performance and improve performance of the …”

“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.”

“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.”

“So, one way to come up with ideas for anti-trends is just to look at what is trending on platforms like Pinterest. And do the opposite of it.”

“Less than one percent of our sales came from that. And the amount of ad space they gave us was 200,000 dollars worth of ad space. Less than one percent of my sales came from that.”

“Airbnb, Pinterest Bitcoin.”

“At Pinterest, we were able to double the activation rates after a year of work, but we had to dramatically simplify onboarding. We had to make sure it worked a lot better in all these international use cases that we weren't that good in. We had to delete a bun…”

“For Pinterest, that was like, okay, we have to get them pinning at least once in the first four weeks. And after four weeks, if they're doing it by the fourth week, we know week five, week six, week seven, we got them. Like they're going to stick around basica…”

“When I went and worked at Facebook on the way in, one senior executive reviewed all my investments and told me which ones I had to divest from. Interestingly, path was fine at the time, but Venmo was a big problem. And then, yeah, believe it or not, I had to s…”

“If you think about a lot of, it's not just Snap, Instagram, Facebook, MySpace, they all started with the young female users. Pinterest, maybe older female users. I think Reddit's really the only big social media example that started with a primarily male audie…”

“Companies like Airbnb and Pinterest Were leading an industry, and they were leading not just because they, like, built technology and made it accessible, but because they were really using the interface layer to differentiate.”

“See Pinterest and you see those things as a company that is most vulnerable to, like, AI.”

“Just like I built Pinterest for iPhone as a freelancer initially. Right. I didn't get any equity in it because I was a freelancer.”

“It was actually, it may have been the first algorithmic feed that was in a social product because suddenly your home feed wasn't just things, people that you followed.”

“What we saw was that if you pin something, repin something, which is finding something on Pinterest, I'm using those synonymously or click through, you had an incredibly high probability that you would come back. So if someone's pinning something, they're comi…”

“Because we aligned with the way the entrepreneur was thinking, we decided to do a seed investment in Pinterest.”

“If you're doing multiple non-consensus things and you're able to execute, that's how you create the Grand Slam home runs, the Shopify's, the Pinterest's, the Riot Games of the world.”

“You see something which is trending on Pinterest, you can bet your life that Three months later, you're going to see 40 restaurants, which are going to look exactly the same.”

“I actually think probably more businesses make more money on Instagram and on Pinterest than on Twitter. Like, I never think they managed to really in a meaningful way monetize that.”

“And then there's other ones with 1010 of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of pages, which are either user generated content. Like TripAdvisor and Pinterest and others, or marketplaces like Thumb Attack and other types of websites like that. Those are…”

“And I think there's like, there's, like, there's basically two bifurcated cultures out here in Silicon Valley. There's the culture of like, you know, Google, Facebook, Pinterest, that like, you know, we're here for you. We'll pay you as much money as possible,…”

“You know, I think of Pinterest, you know, I, and I was Ben's first seed angel or, you know, and product advisor”

“There was an observation for a long time that Pinterest was sort of like invisible in Silicon Valley, because basically like 80 or 90% of the user pay, it's in New York. Is it New York? I think it's in New York. Yeah. 90% of the users are women. And so like, a…”

“Snapchat, Pinterest, those work, but those are hard to scale. Like you don't get large scale, similar to Facebook and Google.”

“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…”

“So when people ask me, you know, like what's your regret as an investor, it's like, well, I was presented Pinterest three times and misunderstood it and didn't invest in it.”

“I'm pretty sure each of these 15,000 dollar checks turned into around 50 to a hundred million dollars each inside a span of like, you'll have to look up when they went public, but they almost went public right around the same time.”

“We were a fast growing startup that stopped growing due to some changes in, in the market related to Facebook. And then actually, once we had switched to growing primarily through SEO, there was an algorithm change that severely impacted our growth at one poin…”

“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…”

“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”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“PayPal was rumored to be buying Pinterest. And, you know, there was such an incredible shareholder revolt that they had to put out a press release saying we have absolutely no interest In acquiring Pinterest.”

“Then, when he was 24, he invested 15,000 dollars into Pinterest when it was worth three million dollars, and 15,000 dollars into Uber when it was worth three million dollars.”

“At Pinterest, Casey turned SEO into a scalable acquisition strategy, increasing conversion to signups, five X.”

“Stayed there from about forty million monthly actives to a hundred and fifty million monthly actives.”