Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Fun story too around all this time, and [...] Leslie was joining the company. They’ve been in Palo Alto and their first office there—you can go and look at all their photos and they’re great early photos—they end up moving to San Francisco and this was a huge moment at the time. I remember this because Palo Alto was still headquarters of Silicon Valley and where startups were. There were very few companies that were in the city and Pinterest moving up from Palo Alto to SF was really the center of gravity shifting up to San Francisco. It happened because Tim and Kendall had just joined and they were looking for a big office space to support all this hiring they’re going to do. They had a friend who knew about an abandoned chicken factory in Selma in San Francisco, right next to the Caltrain station, like perfect location. So, they jumped on it and the core of what’s now the Pinterest campus right around the Caltrain station there started in an abandoned chicken factory. Through all this time and all these fun stories, there’s no revenue. There’s no business model. The product is seeing tons of usage, engagement, and growth, but they’re not making any money, not a dollar revenue. And they’re even making noise about the fact that they’re not. They’re getting press for this, Ben Silbermann is getting asked at conferences and his party line as we really want to be thoughtful about this. We want to have something like measured growth or a thoughtful growth and we wanted to do monetization we feel that is right for our users, which they towed for years after you would think they would start experimenting with monetization. Which is too and also fits their personality. But also, they have a very traumatic experience with this right after the Series B but before Tim Kendall joins to come in and ultimately built out the ad and monetization platform. One of the things that started happening on Pinterest from the early days and especially coming from the blogging community, is people posted pins and they put affiliate links in them. When you click the pins, there would be an affiliate link to whatever the retailer was that was selling the product, and then the bloggers or whoever posted the pin, they make a cut on that transaction. Pinterest definitely saw that this was going on. They thought, “Well, this is pretty interesting.” It was probably designed as an experiment from the get-go but where too the company called Skimlinks in early 2012, without warning, they pulled all of the affiliate links, rewraps them with Skimlinks-powered Pinterest affiliate links, and Pinterest took over all those affiliate links that were running through the site. It caused a huge uproar and to Pinterest’s credit they pulled the plug on it immediately and they apologized. Actually, later on in 2015 the would kick all affiliate links, period, off the platform and just banned them totally. But it was so powerful and demonstrated the monetization potential and Pinterest’s place in the commerce flow, that for years afterwards, they were still getting checks from that week or two that they had affiliate links on. They were still getting affiliate checks and it was a very powerful way to prove the potential here. But then, they bring Tim on and they don’t do anything. Ben has alluded to for the next two years around monetization after.…

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