Ben Silbermann

Cofounder and CEO of Pinterest

• Born: July 14, 1982
• Place of Birth: Des Moines, Iowa

Primary Company/Organization: Pinterest

Introduction

Ben Silbermann is cofounder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Pinterest, one of the world's most popular social networks. In 2009, Silbermann, along with Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp, began working on a site on which people could share collections of things that interested them by electronically pinning images of those things to an interactive virtual bulletin board. Less than three years later, Pinterest had nearly 20 million unique visitors each month and $138 million in funding. By 2012 it was recognized as the fastest-growing social media site, outdistancing both Facebook and Twitter. At its initial public offering in April 2019, the company was valued at about $12 billion.

Early Life

Ben Silbermann was born in 1982 in Des Moines, Iowa, His parents, Jane Wang and Neil Silbermann, are ophthalmologists with a family practice in Urbandale, Iowa. Silbermann grew up in West Des Moines, the wealthiest suburb of Des Moines. He was a collector as a child, avidly accumulating stamps and leaves. His greatest enthusiasm was reserved for insects, which he remembers collecting “maniacally.”

He attended Roosevelt High School, where he competed on the debate team and played cello for the Des Moines Youth Symphony. He graduated from Roosevelt High School and from Central Academy, an educational program specifically designed for highly gifted and talented students, where qualified students from every Des Moines Public middle and high school spend part of their day. In 1998, he attended the Research Science Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a summer science and engineering program. Attendance at the institute is an honor reserved for eighty of the nation's most accomplished high school students.

Silbermann entered Yale University in 1999. With grandparents, both parents, and his sisters (doctors), becoming a premedical student was a logical choice for Silbermann, but in his junior year he changed his mind and decided that medicine was not for him. He graduated from Yale in 2003 and moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked for an information technology consulting firm, making charts and giving presentations. A history buff and a fan of sites like Digg, Reddit, and TechCrunch, he decided that the Internet defined his generation and he wanted to be a part of it. He and his then girlfriend, Divya Bhaskaran, packed up and moved across the country to California in 2006. Silbermann cajoled his way into a job with Google, where he spent two years as a product designer. While he enjoyed the Google culture, he knew that without an engineering degree, his future with the company was limited. He thought about a start-up, but it was his girlfriend's encouragement to stop talking and act that pushed him into leaving Google in August 2008.

Life's Work

At the same time Silbermann was leaving Google, a friend from Yale, Paul Sciarra, was cutting ties with the New York venture capital firm that had employed him. The two started a company called Cold Brew Labs. Because Sciarra brought some venture capital experience to the start-up, they agreed that he would be CEO and Silbermann would be the idea man. His first idea was Tote, an application for the iPhone that took data from online catalogs to create a meta catalog. By early 2009, the app was ready to launch. Sciarra found an investor, and the app was visually appealing. However, it did not work. No one was using mobile apps for shopping. Nonetheless, some people were using it to send images of products to themselves.

Silbermann considered the use of the Tote app, remembered his childhood fascination with collections, and thought about the different things people collected and their desire to display them. From this rumination came an idea for a website that would allow users to collect and display images online. Silbermann worked with a small group to create the site. The group spent two and a half months working on the basic screen, trying fifty coded versions before arriving at the one that seemed the best fit for their purpose. Silbermann's fiancée suggested the name Pinterest (combining the words pin and interest). The site launched in March 2010.

Although Silbermann and his cofounders contacted friends and family several months before the launch to tell them about the site and invite them to try it, the early months were slow. Cash was limited, and investors showed little interest in a start-up founded by three men without a technical degree among them. Investors who were willing to review Pinterest saw no purpose in people collecting and posting a bunch of images. By the end of their first quarter year, Pinterest had only a few hundred users.

Then the site began to attract an audience. Silbermann's friends in Iowa began using it. When he traveled to a Utah design conference, the interior designers attending the conference found it useful. As numbers increased, it was clear that the growing base was made up not of the usual early adapters located primarily on the two coasts but rather from Middle America, where people were using Pinterest for sharing things that were important to them. A bride-to-be used it to plan her wedding, a homeschooling parent kept and shared boards of lesson-plan ideas, and cooks found that it was a great way to collect recipes. Silbermann personally contacted the first five thousand users, even meeting with some of them.

The growth of Pinterest proved consistent, growing on average 40 to 50 percent each month. The company's future looked bright when 2010 ended, but no one was prepared for the rate of change that came in 2011. Silbermann started the year by making Evan Sharp, a designer who had interrupted his graduate studies in architecture at Columbia to design products for Facebook, officially a part of Pinterest, listing him as a cofounder. In March, the company added an iPhone app that brought new users on board. In May, Pinterest raised $27 million from venture capital. Marc Andreessen, whose firm Andreessen Horowitz led the investors, credited a woman at his firm, a researcher, with fostering his interest in Silbermann's company.

On August 16, 2011, Time magazine included Pinterest in its list of the fifty best websites of the year, driving traffic numbers still higher. Between May and November 2011, traffic at the site increased from 500,000 to 5 million active monthly users. Another 2 million had joined by the end of the year. A substantial majority of those users, like Andreessen's researcher, were women. The site lent itself to beautiful displays of fashion and food that appealed to women accustomed to leafing through glossy magazines. This growth took place while Pinterest was operating with an invitation-only policy.

During this period of phenomenal growth, Sciarra was nominally at least president and CEO of the company, but in 2012, as everyone from the U.S. Army to The New York Times, from Silbermann's fiancée to Michele Obama and Ann Romney established a presence on Pinterest, Silbermann became the public face of the company. It was Silbermann who described his vision for the company in interviews, and it was he who was a featured speaker at conferences such as South by Southwest (SXSW), the annual music, film, and interactive conference and festival in Austin, Texas. Sciarra resigned as CEO in April 2012, although he remained on the board. Silbermann became CEO in title as well as role. Silbermann maintained this position until June 28, 2022, when he stepped down. He remained with the company as executive chair while Google executive Bill Ready took his place as CEO.

In 2016 Silbermann was ranked twelfth on Forbes's America's Richest Entrepreneurs under 40 list. Silberman became even richer in April 2019, when Pinterest offered its shares at $19 during its initial public offering. By the end of the day, the shares were worth $23.75 each, an increase of 25 percent, which brought its valuation up to more than $12 billion, and within days Silbermann's networth was estimated at $1.6 billion. In October 2019 he was ranked 1425th on Forbes's annual billionaires list.

Personal Life

Pinterest was named Best New Startup of 2011 by TechCrunch, one of the online technology publications that inspired Silbermann to move to California to realize his dream of a start-up. In 2012, Inc. magazine named him one of America's Coolest Young Entrepreneurs. The modest Silbermann carefully restricts his public comments to information on his company and remains silent on the subject of awards.

Silbermann married longtime girlfriend Divya Bhaskaran on July 22, 2011, in a ceremony at Nestldown, a private retreat in Los Gatos, California. The festivities combined Western food and music with Hindi wedding traditions, honoring the cultures of both the Indian bride and her groom. Like thousands of other brides, Bhaskaran pinned her wedding plans and photographs on a board on Pinterest, the site she named; the title read, “So it turns out we're getting married.” A board she posted in 2012 read, “Preparations for baby b&d.” Since then, the couple have had two children.

Bibliography

Griffith, Erin. "Pinterest's Ben Silbermann Steps Down as Chief Executive." The New York Times, 28 June 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/06/28/business/pinterest-ben-silbermann.html. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Habash, Gabe, Calvin Reid, and Diane Roback. “The Pinterest Experiment.” Publishers Weekly 30 Apr. 2012: 4–5. Print.

Hempel, Jessi, and Alex Konrad. “Is Pinterest the Next Facebook?” Fortune 9 Apr. 2012: 108–14. Print.

Li, Shan. “Pinterest Rises Fast in Social Networking, but Can It Stick It Out?” Los Angeles Times 13 Apr. 2012: A1. Print.

MacMillan, Douglas. “A Startup Builds the Bulletin Board 2.0.” Bloomberg Businessweek 21 November 2011: 48–49. Print.

Wortham, Jenna. “A Site That Aims to Unleash the Scrapbook Maker in All of Us.” New York Times 12 Mar. 2012: B1. Print.