Cohen said he was busy and to keep the pitch short, and then listened to Silbermann for 15 seconds before telling him, “I don’t really care what you’re doing, I’ll invest with you.” The pitch was so “crisp” and Silbermann had so “succinctly” described customers’ needs

While the app was a suitable replacement for bulky catalogs, what Tote didn’t do was make mobile payments easy.

The lack of a workable transaction system was more than a little inconvenient for an app that marketed itself as making shopping more convenient. It threatened its very existence.

while Tote users weren’t making purchases via the app, they were amassing growing collections of “favorite” items to share with their friends.

while there was already a plethora of sites that allowed people to display virtual collections, they were all limited to a single item. Silbermann in the 2010 L2 Innovation Forum as a “fragmented” way for people to show one another the things that interested them.

a year after launching Tote, Silbermann pivoted to offer people a visually appealing way to display all their collections

Cohen said, he viewed the Tote-to-Pinterest transformation as an “iterative” one, a “direct outgrowth of what he learned from the first business.” Silbermann, Cohen said, saw “an unmet need, and obviously a huge opportunity.”