Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

……and is also going to have a huge impact on Pinterest, we shall see. Ben works at Google for a little under two years, I believe. But he really wants to do a startup. He’s obsessed with TechCrunch; he’s tinkering with all sorts of stuff on the side and every night he’s talking to Divya. He’s like, “What about this? I want to work on this.” And again, supposedly, they’re having dinner one night and Divya is just sick of this. She’s working at a startup and she’s like, “Ben, you know, you might want to just either do this or just stop talking to me about it.” I could so imagine this. Jenny and I have had many versions of this conversation. Ben’s like, “You know what, you’re right.” So, it’s Fall of 2008, at this point and he decides he’s going to leave Google. He’s going to launch his own startup; he’s going to live the dream. He has an idea and he’s got a couple of friends that he’s going to work on this company idea with. He wants to build a website that stores your family’s medical history, so not like an EMR but a place where you can store, “What is your grandparents’ family medical history? Your parents’ medical history? Your siblings?” Actually, it seems really relevant. It’s Fall of 2008, he goes off to do this, he quits Google, he walks out and then a week later, Lehman Brothers collapse. We’ll get back later in the show to how impactful that event was on so many things in the world but… I think there’s probably four or five episodes now where that’s been a turning point in the history of each of these companies. Yeah, totally. The most direct impact that has on young Ben Silbermann and the company that would become Pinterest is nobody else who he was talking about doing with this ends up leaving and joining full-time. I think some people might have been in Google, some people might have been friends. He’s talked about they were in PHD programs. Everybody is like, “Nope, the world is falling apart.”…

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