Sunday, June 2, 2013
Ben Silbermann says that the startup isn't making money -- yet.
FORTUNE -- Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann leads one of a small number of
privileged startups for whom growth is so strong that money is not (yet)
the point. Instead he's focused on solving one of the largest
conundrums on the web. Google is great when you're searching for "West Elm couch gray,"
but what happens when you want to discover more broadly? Speaking at
the AllThingsD conference outside Los Angeles on May 29, he explained,
"The problem of how you discover things is a really tough one. Problems
like, 'What should my living room look like?' That's at the heart of our
interests right now."
That's a personal question at the moment. My partner, Frances, and I
just moved into a new home, and we've been trying to figure out how to
decorate. Pinterest -- the visually stunning collection of digital pin boards -- has
become the logical organizing tool for the search. I created a board
called "Upper West Side" that I shared with her, and we've populated it
with couches and rugs and lamps and the occasional plastic moose head
(looks great on a wall, I'm told). Neither of us knows what we want
exactly, so we plunge through images on Pinterest and on the larger web,
pinning anything that looks interesting.
MORE: Apple Maps is still struggling
We're part of a growing community of Pinterest power-users. In the past
year, Pinterest has jumped 82% to 54 million users. Thanks to a recent
$200 million round of funding, it has been valued at $2.5 billion. And
it is one of the largest sources of referral traffic on the web. Yet its
reclusive co-founder and CEO, Ben Silbermann, still thinks of the
company as small. He's reticent to offer too much information on plans
for the future or suggest a business model, saying only: "Right now, we
don't make money."
The most compelling opportunity for Pinterest to turn a profit off of
this likely exists in the list of sources that Frances and I follow.
They include my friend Carla, West Elm, and a former college classmate
with great taste. Each of these resources is useful to me at the moment
that I'm searching in the same way. Social networks like Facebook (FB) are experimenting with opportunities to make advertising in the newsfeed
as useful as content from my friends is to me, but usually when I'm on
Facebook, I'm not shopping explicitly. That's not so with Pinterest.
Says Silbermann, "When we think about this mission -- we think there's a
direct link between the things people think, the things people do, and
the things they buy. It's explicit."
In the future that could be a big opportunity. But at the moment,
Silbermann will stick to making Pinterest better -- more simple and more
beautiful -- for its pinners.
