Ben Silbermann
Ben Silbermann is an American entrepreneur known for co-founding Pinterest, a popular social media platform focused on visual discovery and bookmarking. Born on July 14, 1982, Silbermann's vision was to create a platform where users could collect and share inspiration, ideas, and visual content. He launched Pinterest in 2010, and the platform quickly gained widespread popularity for its unique approach to online content curation. Under Silbermann's leadership, Pinterest has grown into a significant online community where users can discover, organize, and save images and links related to their interests.
44 Quotes
"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"
— Ben Silbermann
The Pinterest Pivot"While the app was a suitable replacement for bulky catalogs, what Tote didn’t do was make mobile payments easy."
— Ben Silbermann
The Pinterest Pivot"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."
— Ben Silbermann
The Pinterest Pivot"while Tote users weren’t making purchases via the app, they were amassing growing collections of “favorite” items to share with their friends."
— Ben Silbermann
The Pinterest Pivot"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."
— Ben Silbermann
The Pinterest Pivot"a year after launching Tote, Silbermann pivoted to offer people a visually appealing way to display all their collections"
— Ben Silbermann
The Pinterest Pivot"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.”"
— Ben Silbermann
The Pinterest Pivot"Despite slow initial growth, Silbermann told the crowd why he never gave up on the startup."
— Ben Silbermann
Meet Ben Silbermann, The Brilliant Young Co-Founder Of Pinterest"As a child, Silbermann enjoyed collecting things, from insects to stamps. ""What you collect says so much about who you are,"" he mused. Pinterest was built to help people continue their collections online."
— Ben Silbermann
Meet Ben Silbermann, The Brilliant Young Co-Founder Of Pinterest"After nine months, Silbermann said the site had less than 10,000 users and many weren't using it daily. ""I sent Pinterest to 200 of my friends and I think 100 of them opened the email. It was catastrophically small numbers,"""
— Ben Silbermann
Meet Ben Silbermann, The Brilliant Young Co-Founder Of Pinterest"""I included a lot of people from Google and California, and I emailed a lot of people from Iowa. The people who started using it used it the way we had hoped. I think those few people kept Pinterest going."""
— Ben Silbermann
Meet Ben Silbermann, The Brilliant Young Co-Founder Of Pinterest"Silbermann personally contacted the first 5,000 users. He has given many of them his cell phone number and continues to communicate with them."
— Ben Silbermann
Meet Ben Silbermann, The Brilliant Young Co-Founder Of Pinterest"When asked why he didn't give up during the tough first year, Silbermann said, ""The idea of telling everyone we blew it was so embarrassing. I thought, 'Google is never going to take me back -- they barely hired me the first time!'"""
— Ben Silbermann
Meet Ben Silbermann, The Brilliant Young Co-Founder Of Pinterest"""To me boards are a very human way of looking at the world,"" said Silbermann, who admitted he sees the world as a series of people's collections. He even referred to his wife's closet as a collection of shoes and clothes."
— Ben Silbermann
Meet Ben Silbermann, The Brilliant Young Co-Founder Of Pinterest"Not everyone loved Pinterest's grid-like design though. Most of the world was caught up with real time feeds and text when Pinterest launched."
— Ben Silbermann
Meet Ben Silbermann, The Brilliant Young Co-Founder Of Pinterest"Eventually, the site started to catch on but Silbermann says Pinterest wasn't an overnight success -- no actor signed up and brought in a flood of people."
— Ben Silbermann
Meet Ben Silbermann, The Brilliant Young Co-Founder Of Pinterest"The movie ""Pirates Of Silicon Valley,"" about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, inspired him to move west."
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest CEO: Here's How We Became The Web's Next Big Thing [DECK]"He says of moving to the Valley: ""being close to people that inspire you is a very good first step."""
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest CEO: Here's How We Became The Web's Next Big Thing [DECK]"Finally his girlfriend said: stop complaining and just go do it."
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest CEO: Here's How We Became The Web's Next Big Thing [DECK]"After finally getting a check from an investor, Ben called investors who'd say no and told them: ""You're going to miss out, this is the hot deal."" It worked."
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest CEO: Here's How We Became The Web's Next Big Thing [DECK]"""I'd always thought that the things you collect say so much about who you are."" Ben says this childhood bug collection is ""Pinterest 1.0."""
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest CEO: Here's How We Became The Web's Next Big Thing [DECK]"When Pinterest launched, Ben sent it to all his friends in California – ""and actually, no one got it."""
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest CEO: Here's How We Became The Web's Next Big Thing [DECK]"In May 2010, a woman named Victoria helped organize a program called ""Pin It Forward"" – a ""chain letter"" where bloggers would exchange pinboards about what home meant to them. It was an inflection point."
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest CEO: Here's How We Became The Web's Next Big Thing [DECK]"This is the first Pinterest meet-up, organized by Victoria, now the company's community manager. Ben says: ""That was the moment where I was like, 'We've got it.'"""
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest CEO: Here's How We Became The Web's Next Big Thing [DECK]"Ben says this venn diagram explains how he's felt Ever since Pinterest started taking off"
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest CEO: Here's How We Became The Web's Next Big Thing [DECK]"""there can be only one. First place takes all; second place takes very little value."""
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest CEO: Here's How We Became The Web's Next Big Thing [DECK]"Pinterest's mission is to get you offline and do the things you love."
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest CEO: Here's How We Became The Web's Next Big Thing [DECK]"“Collecting tells a lot about who you are,” he said, and when they looked at the web “there wasn’t a place to share that side of who you were.”"
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest's Ben Silbermann on turning his collection hobby into a product and not making money"“if Google teaches you anything, it’s that small ideas can be big.”"
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest's Ben Silbermann on turning his collection hobby into a product and not making money"“The exciting thing for me about Pinterest is what we can do as this graph of people and what they’re interested in grows.”"
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest's Ben Silbermann on turning his collection hobby into a product and not making money"“The people who used the product early were designers and bloggers, and they really set the tone.”"
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest's Ben Silbermann on turning his collection hobby into a product and not making money"When it came to making money though, Silbermann says that they didn’t want to commodify someone’s actions as that would cheapen the experience of using Pinterest."
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest's Ben Silbermann on turning his collection hobby into a product and not making money"“Don’t take too much advice….Most people generalize whatever they did, and say that was the strategy that made it work…In reality, there’s very little way of knowing how various factors contributed to success or failure”."
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest Startup Story - How Founder Ben Silberman Started Pinterest"Pinterest generates over 400% more revenue per click as Twitter and 27% more than Facebook."
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest Startup Story - How Founder Ben Silberman Started Pinterest"79% of Pinterest users are Women."
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest Startup Story - How Founder Ben Silberman Started Pinterest"Pinterest’s founders are smart guys, but they’re not prodigies. The product is huge now, but no one liked it when it launched. They weren’t well funded and for a very long time."
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest’s Unlikely Journey To Top Of The Startup Mountain – TechCrunch"After a consulting gig in Washington DC, he headed to Silicon Valley in 2006 to join Google working in customer support and sales."
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest’s Unlikely Journey To Top Of The Startup Mountain – TechCrunch"Four months after launching, Pinterest only had 200 users."
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest’s Unlikely Journey To Top Of The Startup Mountain – TechCrunch"It didn’t pop in California for the first year and a half."
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest’s Unlikely Journey To Top Of The Startup Mountain – TechCrunch"“The site grew by the same percentage (40%-50%) every single month. It’s just that the number started so low that it took a while to get going.”"
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest’s Unlikely Journey To Top Of The Startup Mountain – TechCrunch"Remarkably the Pinterest team maintained their original vision despite the Valley’s pressure to be successful quickly or pivot (aka: admit failure)."
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest’s Unlikely Journey To Top Of The Startup Mountain – TechCrunch"While feeling the pressures of possible embarrassment if he had to go to Google to ask for his old job back, Ben never seriously considered giving up."
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest’s Unlikely Journey To Top Of The Startup Mountain – TechCrunch"“We were obsessive about the product. We were obsessive about all the writing and how it was described. We were obsessive about the community. I personally wrote to the first 5,000-7,000 people that joined the site.”"
— Ben Silbermann
Pinterest’s Unlikely Journey To Top Of The Startup Mountain – TechCrunchExplore More Quotes 📚
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