Ben Silbermann Quotes
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We want the average person to use it and think that it makes the experience of using Pinterest better.
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One of the things I've learned is to be receptive of feedback.
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From the outside, there's a perception Silicon Valley is full of really young, geeky guys. The reality is there are lots of different types of people there.
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At a small company, so much of the trick is focus. Not only can you only do a finite number of things, but you have to do them in the right order.
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I hope Pinterest is my last job.
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I look around my neighborhood, and I see people hailing a cab or ordering their food and then paying for it all with their phone. I've read about that stuff for a really long time, and now it's starting to become commonplace.
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My parents are doctors, both my sisters are doctors, so I figured I'd just be a doctor too. Sometime in my junior year, I had this sudden realization that maybe that wasn't for me. I was sort of lost at sea.
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We're trying to do something so that when the average person uses Pinterest, it has to make the service better.
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I really believe that the raw ingredient of any creative business is the set of experiences that the team has, the set of skills. I think a simple fact is that if you have a different set of experiences based on how you grew up or how other people perceive you, or if you have a different set of skills, that will produce a better company.
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I was obsessed with this idea that these things that you collect, they just say so much about who you are. I can't say it came from hard-nosed business analysis... It was just something I really want to see built.
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When Pinterest works well, it helps you find things that are meaningful to you. We want to build a system that helps you do that.
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I've worked on products where they go down in the middle of the night, and no one notices. You get the 'site down' notice, but it doesn't matter.
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The whole reason Pinterest exists is to help people discover the things that they love and then go take action on them, and a lot of the things they take action on are tied to commercial intent.
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As a kid, I always idolized entrepreneurs. I thought they were cool people in the way that I thought basketball players were cool people. It's cool that some people get paid to dunk basketballs, but I'm not one of those people.
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The companies that I really admire the most are the ones that have a deep visceral understanding of why people use their service, and they figure out ways of making money that are completely consistent with how people are feeling and what they are doing at the time.
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Most people generalize whatever they did, and say that was the strategy that made it work.
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I use Pinterest for everything. Book collections, trips, hobbies. It's all there. I planned my wedding on it. When I had a kid, I planned all his stuff on it. So it was nice to discover that I wasn't the only one.
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One of the hard parts about building a service that you use yourself is that it's easy to forget what it was like the very first time someone signs up. Every once in a while, I'll create a brand new account and give it a try and see how hard it is to find things that I really love, see if I'm using it or thinking about it differently.
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I thought Google was the coolest place. People there were so smart and they were all doing these really interesting things. I just felt really lucky to be a part of it even in a small way.
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I always read about these stories of entrepreneurs - it's like they're in the desert with no water, and they're the ones that survive. But I've been really fortunate to have people on my team who are optimistic about the future and who know that if you work through hard times that there's usually something good at the end.
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I want Pinterest to be human. The Internet's still so abstract... To me, boards are a very human way of looking at the world.
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I really think that even though Pinterest isn't a lot of people's idea of hard technology, it helps make everyday things a little bit better. And I believe that for most people, everyday things, those are everything.
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I kind of think of engineering like the chefs at a restaurant. Nobody's going to deny chefs are integrally important, but there's also so many other people who contribute to a great meal.
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When you open up Pinterest, you should feel like you've walked into a building full of stuff that only you are interested in. Everything should feel handpicked for you.