Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. It’s like ads in the newspaper. Whereas to bring it full circle, Pinterest is like browsing a catalog where you are intending to get inspiration and then act on that inspiration. The biggest bear case, at least to me, is that they will not be the only ones to own this market for long. We’ve seen Instagram before tried to get into both commerce and a Pinterest-style functionality of discovery. Both of them have not gone well. There are recent effort in the commerce as much more serious and they’ve launched collections, which is going to look a lot like Pinterest boards. If Instagram can do to Pinterest what it did to Snapchat with stories, they’ll be in big trouble. But I think—it’s a flipback to bull real quick—it’s a reasonable argument to make that Pinterest actually fulfills a much different emotional need when you open that app than Instagram does. Instagram may not be able to offer the same solution to that job to be done of getting inspired and collecting things in its format that Pinterest has been able to do by really solidifying its brand and this is what you go to Pinterest for. Yeah. Totally too, having gone and watched all these talks by Ben Silbermann over the last few years, to his total credit, if you were to listen to the narratives leading up to the IPO, he and Pinterest are talking about how Pinterest’s goal is not to get you to spend more time online. It’s to inspire you to do projects offline and take action in the real world. That sounds like a sound bite he came out with to market Pinterest in reaction to everything that’s happened with Facebook, Instagram, and the rest of the internet over the last 24 months. That’s not true. He’s been saying that since 2012 and Pinterest has always been about that. Yes, the potential mitigation to Instagram is like, Instagram’s cultural DNA and Facebook’s business model is about the attention suck and that is neither the cultural nor the business model of Pinterest.…

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