David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Okay. Listeners, if you remember one thing from this episode to take away it’s Pinterest thought so far ahead on a lot of things that most companies say, “We’ll think about that later.” Think finance, think HR, think people ops, think workplace, think culture. It was amazing starting really very early on from a company that Ben wanted to build and also in bringing Leslie, an employee 10, really starting to invest ahead of their growth, rather than a ship that’s burning down and you’re trying to patch it when it’s on fire. I feel this is really where the story of Pinterest and the history of Pinterest diverges from a lot of your typical kind of Silicon Valley hyper growth company. They’ve done the A, then they have this crazy growth, they’ve done the B a couple of months later. Your average Silicon Valley company at this point would have been like, “Great, let’s pour all this money into growth and go. ” To Pinterest and Ben’s credit, I think in the long term—this has really impacted the trajectory of the company—they said, “Now is the time to pause and build the foundation, to support this hyper growth that we know we’re going to go through. They brought in Leslie as Site Operations Manager. They got really serious about hiring executives. Again, remember Divya was the first HR person of Facebook. They started bringing over some great people from Facebook to come in and build out all the infrastructure around the company. A guy named Tim Kendall comes over. Tim had been an early Amazon guy and then had joined Facebook also very early with head of all monetization within Facebook. He joins Pinterest in March 2012 at first running product. He then eventually runs product engineering and builds the whole ads business for the company. He becomes president of the company. They bring up Barry Schnitt, who was running marketing and communications at Facebook. He comes and joins Pinterest. Don Fall who is running operations at Facebook comes and does the same at Pinterest. Really a whole suite of them. I remember I have lots of friends who also were at Facebook and moved over to Pinterest at this point in time and they start really building out a lot of the senior management and functions to scale up the company. All these people end up staying a really long time. Tim is now CEO of a company called Moment but he stayed about six years and built out all of these things at Pinterest. The other thing that they started really investing and employing to their strengths is women engineers and women on the engineering team. This becomes a huge asset. This is well ahead of all of the things we’ll cover in the Uber episode. Philosophy was our team across all functions should reflect our user base or trend much closer to that than most of the industry.…

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