Judging by Ben Silbermann’s latest pins, the co-founder and chief executive of Pinterest is a great cook, a keen photographer and a marvellous husband and father. His boards, as they’re called, may be self-promotional but they made me wish I’d seen his ideas for things to do with small children when mine were smaller; want to cook a Star Wars-themed breakfast; and covet a leather and waxed-canvas backpack for a roomy $420.
And that’s sort of the point of Pinterest, a site Silbermann likes to call “a catalogue of ideas”, but which offers a vision of the internet as a temple to consumerism. With a focus on food, fashion, home decor and parenting, Pinterest is not as shouty as Twitter, as instant as Instagram or as sexy as Snapchat, but acts like a glossy magazine with childcare advice and lovely helpful people in it.
When we meet in Pinterest’s new London headquarters, built for the original manufacturer of car speedometers but now kitted out with the obligatory fridges and blond wood of a technology company Silbermann describes himself as “really typical” of his company’s users. Seeing my raised eyebrow at the idea of a man with a sizeable chunk of a company recently valued at $11bn being a typical user, he says, “I meant in what I collect. I enjoy cooking so I collect lots of recipes. I have two kids and I collect activities for the older one and toys and books for the younger one. I have a collection of business articles or quotes that I think are memorable.”
His gender as well as his billionaire status separates him from the majority of the more than 100 million active monthly “pinners”. Women dominate the site – they make up some 80% of users – although the gender split is said to be more balanced outside the US. One-third of all new sign-ups are men This female bias and the fact that lower-income midwesterners are thought to make up its largest individual grouping are often seen as reasons why a site which stacked up 2bn searches last month is less well reported and perhaps less valued than its technology rivals.
Launched by Silbermann in 2009 with a college friend, Pinterest was called both the “hottest small startup in the world” and the “next Facebook” as long ago as 2012. Today, the breathless articles have decreased in number while the usage has not. The number of active users has doubled in the past two years. Even seven years in, Pinterest is difficult to define. “When we talk to people about Pinterest we often describe it as not a social network,” says Silbermann. “Social networks are about communicating with other people. Pinterest is really about planning and getting ideas for your own personal life.” He likes to cite the views of early adopters, who said: “With social networks, it’s them time. With Pinterest, it’s me time.”
A native of Iowa, Silberman is also now an atypical pinner because more than half of users are based outside the US. After opening in London three years ago, He has described international markets - which include other parts of western Europe as well as Brazil and Japan - as the company’s “highest priority”. As if to prove this, Pinterest last month launched its first ever global advertising campaign on Channel 4’s Eating Well With Helmsley And Helmsley food programme, and staged a takeover of London’s Bond Street tube station last week.
Although companies such as John Lewis and Tesco like the straight-through-to-purchase nature of the site, its revenues (just $169m in 2015 but with a target of $2.8bn by 2018, according to figures leaked to TechCrunch) are all derived from promoted pins. The fact that it can be quite hard to tell the corporate and homegrown content apart is what excites advertisers, according to Sarah Treliving, head of digital at the company’s media agency Mediacom. “It’s native advertising as it was meant to be,” she says.
When searching for a corporate comparison Silbermann cites Google, where he once worked as a product specialist. “I don’t know if you’d consider it a media platform, but what Google really did is make information retrieval incredibly fast, easy and universal. We want to do for discovery what they want to do for search.”
What this “discovery” has led to is a relatively friendly place full of strangers who largely shun politics or anything too unpleasant. “The biggest thing about Pinterest is that people are there saving ideas for their personal lives,” says Silbermann. “Not to rile up other people or make a big statement.” He adds, “We do think of ourselves as a technology company but at the same time we really value really good design and a really good community, without being snarky.”
Unlike other technology companies, Pinterest appeared to recognise early on that the images posted by its users could also be damaging. Perhaps unusually, Silbermann is happy to say the company has “efficient ways of identifying that [content] and pulling it down”. It refuses ads for weight loss products and services, prescription drugs, tobacco, weapons and gambling among other things, for example.
Yet Silbermann’s own experience suggests policing the internet is easier said than done. As part of a policy prohibiting promotion of self-harm, the company worked with the National Eating Disorders Association in the US, with a warning and links to websites offering help prompted when the word “thinspiration” is searched for. Yet a simple search suggests there are plenty of pictures of really skinny young women and only a tiny “Are you struggling with an eating disorder?” link.
Unwholesome messages do not shift food and drink, of course, but the character of the site also seems to echo the character of its founder, one of the most polite and unassuming chief executives I’ve ever interviewed. When I make a mistake over the name of a co-founder (easy to do, there are four of them and this one joined ages after it actually started), Silbermann fails to pick up on it. Slight and incredibly softly spoken, he may refuse to answer questions about, say, his personal stake but at least he has the good grace to ask “Does that answer your question?” twice.
He is too an atypical tech billionaire, despite his crumpled white shirt and black jeans. “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,” he points out. The relentless focus on all things technical in Palo Alto does mean that he appreciates getting away, particularly back to see family in the midwest - he comes from a long line of doctors. “It’s sometimes good to travel somewhere else, just because you get a bit more diversity of interests.”
Asked about his five-year plan for the company, Silbermann cites two main goals: making consumers visit for “ideas for everyday life” and “to make as many of our pins buyable as possible”. He says he also wants Pinterest to remain “self-sufficient”, which could suggest a stock market listing is not imminent. “The product is still very, very young. And five years is a long time in the technology business.”
Curriculum vitae
Age 33
Education Roosevelt High School, Yale University
Career 2003 consultant at Corporate Executive Board 2006 product specialist at Google focused on display advertising products 2009 co-founder and chief executive of Pinterest