Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:29)
Let's jump into Peppa's world of play. Look for spring flowers, hunt for muddy puddles, and bravely explore exciting places with Peppa play sets.
Peppa Pig, inspiring kid confidence.

**Rich Filoni** (0:44)
This Is Success is brought to you by Trinet, human resources that know your business. For Ben Silbermann, this is success.

**Ben Silbermann** (0:54)
We can look back and say that the products and services we built brought people joy and were useful in their lives.

**Rich Filoni** (1:01)
Ben Silbermann is the co-founder and CEO of Pinterest, the image search tool that lets users save and share their favorite photos, designs, and recipes. Over the last eight years, Silbermann has quietly built Pinterest into a global brand with 250 million active users. And while the company is private and keeps financials to itself, CNBC reported that Pinterest may hit $1 billion in ad revenue this year and is valued at $13 to $15 billion. But Silbermann doesn't want to be just like all the other big tech brands. He wants his site to feel like a real community, even as it grows larger than he ever expected.
His journey to Pinterest started when he was still working at Google in 2007 His buddy, Paul Sharrow, decided to tap into the potential of the newly released iPhone.

**Ben Silbermann** (1:47)
And we just started brainstorming what are the different things that we could do on the phone that would be different than what you could do on the computer.
We made a game with some friends. It was a trivia game, so anybody could write trivia on any topic, and anybody around the world could play it. So I was always playing with that idea of what could you do with technology, with the internet, that would be fun and useful for lots and lots of people.

**Rich Filoni** (2:11)
And how did this first company pan out?

**Ben Silbermann** (2:15)
It wasn't that great. Paul and I decided that we wanted to help put catalogs on the phone.
Everyone was getting catalogs in the mail, and it felt so archaic, you'd get this big stack of paper catalogs.

**Rich Filoni** (2:27)
Like retail catalogs?

**Ben Silbermann** (2:28)
Yeah, just everyone's mailbox was full, and we thought, what if you could put that on the phone? You'd save a lot of paper, and you could only look at the stuff that you wanted to look at. So we set out to build that, but it was bad timing. So this was right after the financial crisis, and we needed to put together a little bit of money to support ourselves and to build the technology. And it was just the worst time to raise money. I remember we would visit investors, and they would be telling us, we're putting all of our money into gold. We're not investing in technology startups.
So we spent a long time trying to put together that very first round. And I remember at some point we became pretty desperate because all of the traditional routes have been closed to us. And so I started reading about these college business plan competitions that you could enter that had a cash prize. And I found one, it was NYU, and the rules were written pretty loosely. It said you didn't have to go to NYU, you just had to know somebody that was a student at NYU.
And we ended up entering that contest. We got second place, and second place had no cash prize, but you got a meeting with a venture capitalist. And so at the meeting, the venture capitalist, I don't know, maybe because he took pity on us, said, we'll do half of your round if you can put together the other half of the round.
And so when he said that, we then called up all the other people that we'd ever spoken to. And this was random people out of college alumni directories, people that we'd read about in the newspaper that were wealthy. We said, hey, we talked to you before, a venture capitalist from New York is going to fund us. If you want in the round, get in there, it's going to close in a few days. And that's how we put together our first little bundle of money.