Recode Decode: Ben Silbermann

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**Kara Swisher** (0:59)
Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, Editor-at-Large of Recode. You may know me as someone who only uses Pinterest to collect pictures of Elon Musk dancing, but in my spare time, I'm just a reporter, and you're listening to Recode Decode, a podcast about power change and the people you need to know around tech and beyond. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today, we're going to play a live interview I conducted this week with Ben Silbermann, the CEO of Pinterest. We spoke at the National Retail Federation's annual conference, The Big Show in New York City, and we talked about how Pinterest is fairing as a smaller but powerful player in social media and how it's deliberately trying to make users feel better.
So let's go now to the NRF Big Show in New York City to hear my conversation with Pinterest CEO, Ben Silbermann.

**Kara Swisher** (1:41)
Ben, question, I bet you know a lot more about tech than Paul Ryan, right?

**Ben Silbermann** (1:46)
I don't know, Kara. I haven't met Paul.

**Kara Swisher** (1:48)
Yeah, he's good.

**Kara Swisher** (1:49)
Don't say anything. Just ignore my...

**Kara Swisher** (1:51)
I'm in a mood. I'm in a mood, people.
I just finished a really angry call about Bill Barr trying to get Apple to open the iPhone, and I just can't stop myself.

**Kara Swisher** (2:00)
All right, let's get to Pinterest. I want to talk about a wide range of things in the overall tech atmosphere right now around safety and the challenges being faced by tech platforms that do retail, and all tech platforms, really. And then I want to get into the features that you guys are... where you think the big trends are. So I want to sort of have a two-part to this.

**Kara Swisher** (2:20)
So let's start about that.

**Kara Swisher** (2:22)
How do you look at the landscape? Because one of the things... I'd pick two or three companies like yours.
I would pick Airbnb and several others that are concerned about, you know, doing the right thing on these platforms. So talk a little bit about where you think tech is in general about protecting users, dealing with terrible things that come on the platform naturally because they're platforms and people load up all manner of nefarious things. So talk about the overall space and what tech needs to do right now.

**Ben Silbermann** (2:52)
You know, Kara, I think it's pretty complicated, but usually, at least the way I think about it is, it kind of starts with the mission of what the company is there for. And so different companies, they have different missions. Ours has always been about being the place people go for inspiration, for inspiration for everyday things, you know, what they wear, where they travel. And from that mission, all of our other decisions come out of that.
I think that the best companies start from their mission, and then they think about how do all their decisions contribute to that mission, or they go away from it. So I remember in 2010, when we started the company, I think back then it was just sort of a foregone conclusion that if you build technology platforms, good things will automatically happen.
And I think the lesson that everyone's learned over the last few years is that if you want positive things to come out of internet technology, they have to be deliberately engineered that way. And at least at Pinterest, my belief is that if you care about the well-being of the people who use your service, you have to care about the content and the things they do on that service. So that's the approach that we've taken.

**Kara Swisher** (3:54)
Talk about deliberately engineered, because some of this stuff, I'm going to be kind when I say unintended consequences, because I think many of these companies, and including you all, should have known that possibly this could happen, because you look at humanity and that happens everywhere you go.