Ben Silbermann at Startup School 2012

Well, first thanks a lot for having me. Um, it's really exciting for me to be here in front of like so many people that all want to build cool things.

I was getting ready for the talk last night, and I was going back through old emails because sometimes your memory is a little bit hazy. I found an email from March 2010, which was roughly like three and a half to four months after we launched Pinterest.

It's an email to our advisers and our investors at the time, and I thought I would read it to you because it was kind of like a cool blast from the past for me.

Um, Emil says, "Hey everyone, I wanted to provide a quick update from C Brew Labs, which was our company name. Just to review, we launched a website called Pinterest. It's a tool for people to share and discover the things they love. People join Pinterest to create these collections or pin boards and to follow collections created by their friends.

We're happy to say that we're making good progress. To date, we have almost 3,000 registered users, and our daily pin count is steadily increasing. I'm also happy to say that we made big operational improvements. We're relocating our offices to a new building just a few blocks away. The price will decrease as we're sharing it with another Y Combinator startup, Chardo.

And we've also gotten some free Amazon hosting credits. So, a couple of funny things about the email in general. Um, the first is that the new location in question is a dilapidated two-bedroom apartment on California Avenue. In fact, when I told Jessica Livingston that we were moving there, she said, "Oh my God, I thought that place was a brothel."

And the second is the exact setup of the place. So, we had two bedrooms, one of which my co-founder Paul lived in, and one of which Dave, the co-founder of Chardo, lived in. This is a picture of Dave. Um, and we worked out of the living room; these two companies all together pretty much all day.

And Dave was a late-night guy, Hacker's hacker, always up till 4 A.M. And so, when we were having meetings with investors or with users, every once in a while, Dave would kind of saunter out in his towel because that was how you had to get to the shower and just sort of wave at everyone. And it was really awkward.

Um, and so, a little bit later when we all got to go watch The Social Network, we made a pact that if anyone ever made a movie about our company, um, they'd get to be played by Ryan Gosling because Ryan Gosling has awesome abs.

Um, so the other thing, though, that's like a little bit more serious is if you think about it, four months in, 3,000 accounts for a consumer startup is really not very good.

And I think the thing that surprised me the most, um, in starting a company after reading about, you know, Facebook hits Harvard 95% penetration in two weeks; like, Instagram shoots to a million people is that it can take a really, really long time to build things that are worthwhile.

So, March 2010, we launched Pinterest; we're at 3,000 accounts. And that wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't started building Pinterest actually in November 2009. And that alone wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't left my job to start a company in May 2008.

Um, a lot of people say things like running a startup is like running a marathon. And I think that the part of the analogy that's right is that it's long, but it's actually really different. I mean, I think when I think about my experience, it's more like going on a road trip, like in a car that doesn't have good headlights and you don't have very much gas.

And you think you're going to Toledo, but you find out you're supposed to be in Miami. And if you really run out of gas, you might have to buy gas from someone that might just kick you out of your own driver's seat.

And that uncertainty, the fact that every single day you're dealing with a lot of choices and you don't have a lot of perfect information is, for me, this lesson that was hardest to learn and continues to be a real challenge in doing a startup today.

So, I'm going to talk a little bit about kind of our journey through this kind of weird process and a few of the things that we learned along the way.

Number one lesson: Making things can take a long time.

So, in 2008, I was working at Google, um, and I was in AdSense, not as an engineer but working basically doing customer support, taking feedback from users and feeding it back into the advertising products. The reason I was there was because I'd come from Washington DC, where I was working as a consultant.

And growing up, even though I'd always looked up to anybody that made things, whether it was an architect or an engineer or an artist, I'd always kind of thought that I was going to be a doctor. And so, I pursued that path, which is the same path my parents pursued, the same path that both my sisters pursued.

So, when I graduated from college and decided I didn't want to be a doctor, I was a little bit lost. But even then, like, even at the time that I thought I was going to be a doctor, I had this real interest in technology; I thought it was really cool.

So, when I was an undergrad, I made a program with some friends that let you try on glasses online. Um, and it was appropriate because both my parents were ophthalmologists. Um, when I was at my consulting job in DC, a good friend of mine named Alai had me help him out with his YC startup where he was trying to help market bands, was a musician in a band.

And even when I moved out to California and I was at Google, I was working on another website, which was a quiz website that let anybody play quiz questions about anything they wanted.

And the common theme through all these things was that for some reason, I kept going back to the idea of building a product. I thought that was a really exciting thing to do, but it always stalled, and I always had an excuse for why it stalled.

It wasn't the right market; I needed to learn more by working at Google. Um, it wasn't the right timing, but actually, the dependent variable was just me, right? The dependent variable was that I never actually committed and put myself in a situation where I had to make it work.

And so, I think for me, I paid too much attention to talks where people basically built something huge on the side and they were pulled out of their job and everything was working. For me, at least, the act of committing to going out and doing it turned out to be a really important thing.

And so, I don't know if this applies to everyone. I've heard of a lot of people that have successfully built things on the side and then gently transitioned it into a full-time gig. But at least in my situation, for a person that really puts his heart into whatever job is at hand, it was a really important step.

I actually remember the night that I made the call. Um, I was sitting at dinner with my girlfriend, then now my wife, and I was talking about some cool idea that I think would be great and how we could build it and how we could market it.

And she looked at me and said, "You know, you should either do it or just stop talking about it." And it was a little bit harsh, but honestly, it was the best thing someone could have told me because she was absolutely right.

And I feel genuinely thankful that someone was honest enough in my life to just call me out and say, "Make it happen or don't make it happen, but just make your call and be happy with that call." And so, I'm always really thankful for her giving me that advice.

So, I left in 2008 and I hooked up with one of my friends named Paul. He was a great friend from college, super driven guy, and we decided the thing we were really interested in was mobile. So, the iPhone had come out recently and the platform had come out, and so people were really excited about it.

And the product that we wanted to build was called Tote. It was a shopping catalog on the phone. And the reason I thought this would be so cool was that I got all these catalogs in the mail dumped on my doorstep, and I had this brand new, like really cool phone, and I just wanted to see something running on this phone.

And so, we got to work, and we started prototyping it. We did it out of savings, um, but there were some problems. Um, the first was that it took a really long time to get things built and approved by Apple, like a really long time. Back then, you had no idea when it was going to get approved, you had no idea what was going to happen.

And second, there were a lot of unsolved problems back then. Um, we had sort of these grand ideas of doing all sorts of offline caching, of being able to use this thing in the subway, being able to eventually process payments. We put all those ideas into this prototype, and it made it really hard to ship.

And not surprisingly, sooner or later, we were in a situation where we really needed to raise some money, and it was 2008, and you had two non-technical co-founders, and it was a really bleak time.

There are lots of ways for investors to say no to you, and I'm pretty sure that I've heard all of them. Like I've heard every single one. Like these are the top three:

Like, number one is, "Call me back in a few months." This is kind of the most painful. This is like you ask someone out on a date and they're like, "Not right now, but maybe in November." Right? That one is like really, really hard to hear because you're going to have even less money and you're going to have even less leverage in a negotiation.

The second is, "Who else is in?" Right? This is one that you hear all the time. It's like, "It's not good enough for me by myself, but if there are other people that commit money, I'd be willing to consider it."

And then there were the occasional people that were really blunt; they were just like, "There's no way this is going to happen. This is, this is insane. It's totally crazy."

I remember really vividly I went to a session where I was pitching actually a whole group of investors up in Silicon Valley, and it's really intimidating, right? You're looking, and these people have built great companies, and I'm about five minutes into explaining what we're doing, and everyone starts just like heading for the door. And I was like, "Man, like what, what am I doing wrong?"

And I found out they had brought a tray of free cookies, and what I was saying was interesting enough to keep them in their seats as long as there were like no cookies in the background.

Um, you know, we've done fundraising a few times, and sometimes it's been easier, and sometimes it's been really, really hard. Um, we've done it where we've flown all over the coasts. We've tracked down sort of everyone in our alumni directory, whether they were tech investors or not investors.

We've done it a bunch, and I think I've learned like three important lessons that I think any entrepreneur should know if they're starting the kind of company they think will need funding.

The first is that like even rich people are subject to free cookies, right? Like even if you're really rich, you're probably still the kind of person that is influenced by free.

And that lesson is actually something really important; it's that investors are just people too, right? Investors are just regular people that happen to have other people's money or their own money that they're willing to put forward. And even though they have a really good opinion on things, they might be wrong.

And that was something that was really hard for me to swallow because I really looked up to all these people. Now, the second lesson is that if you really need money and they have money and they know they're the only person that can give you the money, you don't really have any leverage whatsoever.

You have zero leverage, and that puts you in a really tough spot, right? You can't really negotiate. It's 2008; they know it's 2008; they see your app; it's kind of crappy; nobody really uses it. There's nothing you can do unless you hack that system, right?

Unless you somehow turn the tables and give them a reason that you should have the leverage. And those reasons generally are fear of losing the deal, right? Or the belief that this thing is just going to be so big that whether you give the money or not, like, you're just going to be wildly successful. Number two was a hard case for us to sell.

Uh, so we solved for number one, and that was a really important thing. And the very last thing I learned, um, and this was something that was especially true when you're kind of driving up San Hill Road, which I don't know if you guys have been.

I sort of thought it would look like the Emerald City, but it kind of looks like a ski lodge with no mountain. It's just very, like, normal buildings.

The final thing I learned is that people are going to give you all kinds of advice, and I think that it's really easy to take that advice because you walk into a room and there's like Google's first stock certificate, um, and you know they like invented Yahoo.

Like these people are really, really, really smart. But if you look at the returns on venture capital, it's pretty shaky. Like, we're in a pretty high volatility industry.

And one thing that we always told ourselves and one thing that I really, really believe is that fundamentally, like, the future is unwritten. Like, if they knew, they'd be done, right?

And so, people can tell you that you should be more technical; they can tell you that you're in the wrong market; they can tell you all of these things, and those things might be true, and you should assess them for yourself, but you shouldn't take it on face because they could be wrong.

And in the back of your head, you have to remember something: that for all the millions of dollars venture capital investors have made, for all the certificates that are on the wall, they have these little trophies when things go IPO, for all those things there are things that they passed on.

And those are the things that actually burn them up; like those are the ones that haunt them at night. And I think that if you can convince somebody that you just might be the one that's going to beat the odds, you can be successful.

And it's a general attitude that I think is important whether you're recruiting, whether you're raising money, whether you just need to make a final push in adjusting your product.

So eventually we put money together, and we were working back on Tote. We were still having the same fundamental problem that we couldn't iterate and improve fast enough. And we were fundraising on the East Coast, and while I was out there, I met this really great guy named Evan Sharp.

Um, Evan is a Columbia graduate student at the time; he's studying architecture, and we just hit it off. And Evan and Paul and I are commiserating about this whole dilemma, and we're just thinking about what would be cool to build; like, what do we just want to see?

And really, what we wanted to see was we wanted to see something out there in the world. We just wanted to see somebody using something. Somebody asked me once like what's my big plan, like what would make me really happy? When we were starting Pinterest, I was like, "Geez, I just want to go somewhere and see somebody that I don't know using something that I made and have it be kind of useful."

Like that is what I thought was really exciting. And so we came up with this idea for something that was web-based, really simple, something that we would use personally, and that was Pinterest.

We learned a lesson from doing the iPhone app, and it was that even though we had all these ideas of all these great features that we were cramming in, we weren't great at one thing, right? There wasn't one thing that was special about it.

People talk a lot about like a minimum viable product or when you should ship something, and my advice is you should ship when you have one thing that you're proud of. Like one thing that is worthy of someone's time, and that could take you a long time, and it could take you not very long at all.

But if it's not worth their time to check out, you're not going to get any good feedback on whether it's good or not; they're going to see it, and they're going to be like, "This is crap." Thank you for the feedback; start again.

And we decided that the one thing we had to do really well if we were going to make a website collection, we had to make it look really cool. Like if it didn't look cool, then no one's going to make a collection because they don't want to show their friends because this thing that they just made looks really lame.

So this is the first version of Pinterest; it didn't look very cool. In November 2009, we started building the basic infrastructure and started really iterating on what it could look like, how could we make it look really interesting?

So we went through a lot of versions of this: vertical grid, horizontal grid, both left side nav, right side nav, top nav, different logos, and we waited until we felt we had something that we thought was really cool, and we would show it to people along the way.

We would show them something that we thought was a little bit of an improvement, and we finally felt ready to launch it. I emailed out to all my friends, like all my family, I'm like, "Look at this really cool thing. We're really jazzed about it," and basically no one responded, right?

There's basically no response at all. 3,000 accounts, not active users; accounts is pretty bad if you have three people actively pushing it out to every single person they know every day for four months.

But there was something that was really positive, and it was that the few people that used it, myself amongst them, actually really loved it. And instead of immediately changing the product, I was like maybe I can just find more people like me.

And that also fits with our current operating strategy since we don't have very good engineering resources, so we're just going to market this thing, and that's what we started to do.

Um, we started to have meetups. This is our first Meetup in San Francisco; it was at a store called Rare Device. Um, we did another meetup later at West Elm a little bit later. We all tried to make it fun, do fun pictures, and we also marketed online.

So we had a campaign with a blogger that I had met named Victoria, who's a wonderful woman, and we had something called Pin It Forward, where everyone would create a pinboard about what home meant to them, and it was organized like a chain letter.

Like one person would introduce the next person, would introduce the next person, and everyone who participated would get invites to invite other people. And the thing about it that really worked was we found this little group of people that were interested in the same thing, and we showed them how the service could be helpful to them.

And fundamentally, that's what Pinterest is about; it's about finding people who share common interests, and those people may be your friends; they may not be your friends. But we needed a different strategy for going at it than all the strategies that we were reading about in terms of general social sites.

So, it was a really, really exciting moment for us, and the best moment of all was when things started to grow. When we went to that Meetup, even though we had very, very few users, I distinctly remember people who hadn't met each other before were having real conversations, right?

They weren't superficial conversations; they were asking about things in their life that they never would have known if they were just following each other on Twitter or if they were just looking at each other's Facebook projects.

They found people that were saying, "Hey, how's the gardening project that you're working on? How's your new living room? How's all that stuff going?" And it felt like that was the kernel of something really special; the idea that you could use a service online that you found out about, you could go to a physical place, and you could find that same person, and you had a genuine connection.

A lot of people in Silicon Valley didn't get, and I still don't know if they really get Pinterest. A lot of them kind of look at it and they say, "Well, it's visual; it's not organized in real-time," which was a big theme back then. "It doesn't have a feed," like it didn't really make sense to them why anyone would use it.

But the fact that it made sense to someone was what really mattered to me. And I think it ties back to what I told you guys about investors.

A lot of people are reading Tech Press; investors read the same Hacker News articles that everyone reads. There's not some secret special Hacker News that has the real companies that you want to invest in, right? They're reading the same TechCrunch articles; they're getting the same data.

It's incredibly democratic. You have access to all the information they have access to, and that also means that just like anyone else, they may be subject to the same biases and trends and bubbles and reports that happen in the general consumer media.

At the time, we were like the polar opposite of what people wanted to see. Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook were the hot companies, right? Because they were real-time. Google was like, "We need to do real-time search." Everything had to be a text-based feed that could be accessed on your phone.

And here we come, and we're saying, "It's not real-time; it's all visual." And so if they're drawing their 2 by 2 matrix, they're like, "This is a disaster." Right? This is like the worst thing that could happen.

And eventually what would compel them eventually is we would show them real users. And eventually, those users were their wives, or eventually their users were people they knew in their real life, and that's when it became a lot easier to get things done.

So where are we today? We live in San Francisco now. We just moved our office from Palo Alto. Sadly, I love Palo Alto. And we're building out a team of people that are really diverse. I mean, I think the thing that we learned in building the service was that our problem in distribution wasn't an engineering problem; it was a community problem.

The problem in building the first really cool thing didn't happen to be anything but a design problem, and those three things just had to work together for our kind of business to succeed. When I came out of Google, I thought, "Man, the only way I can get this done is if I get the most brilliant graduate student out of Stanford who doesn't know that he's invented PageRank yet, get him into a room, and we'll just build all this really, really awesome stuff."

We called our company Cold Brew Labs because all the cool companies call themselves labs, right? We're like, "Oh my God; we got to be Labs, or no one is going to want to work here 'cause Labs companies are really cool."

And one of the most kind of satisfying realizations is that there are a lot of different ways to succeed. There are a lot of different companies; there are companies that don't raise money; there are companies that do raise money; there are companies that go B2B; there are companies that are consumer.

And then within consumer, there are a lot of different things that are successful for the very simple reason that there are a lot of different kinds of people in the world. And as much as people want to give you advice about exactly how you should run your startup, exactly the strategy, I think you need to trust the data; you need to trust the users that you have, and you need to trust your own instinct to do what you think is going to be right for your company.

Pinterest right now is a tool where we help people find their inspiration. And to some people, that sounds really hokey, but to me, the idea that we can show people things they want to do in their future, help them get closer to actually doing those things, whether it's redecorating their home, going on a vacation, or buying a gift, and in that process inspire someone else is a really cool thing to be working on.

And it's not what we thought the site was going to do when we first launched it, but it's what it's come to be. And sometimes the product finds its purpose, and sometimes it goes the other way around, and either way is okay as long as you get to something that people really love.

Pinterest is a network, right? We have millions of people that are connected through billions of objects; it's the third largest source of referral traffic on the internet. And so, in the early days when people were like, "We don't need to be a technology company," now we have to, right?

All of a sudden, now we need folks that can mine for data, and those people have really interesting things to do. Like, we're on that road trip; like we're heading towards the Midwest. It turns out we had to veer the other way, and I think that adaptability to change is really fundamental.

And at the same time, Pinterest is a tool where people can do these things, right? You can plan a vacation, you can plan cooking and recipes, you can plan holiday shopping; you can plan all these things in your life.

And the very last thing that's important to me is that Pinterest is a team of talented people. Like, I feel genuinely lucky to walk into the office and work with people that are better than me at pretty much everything I do.

And I think that to me, even though there are a lot of stories told about entrepreneurs that toil alone, the best things in the world are made by groups of people.

I think when you're really early on in a startup, you're really worried about, "Oh my gosh, like I can't give my equity to this person; it's going to run out." But it's the size of the total pie, right? It's how many people can you actually build something that's bigger than who they are?

And if you can find those people, if you can find people that want to work with you on something that's bigger than they are, I think that it's the best investment that you can make to give them ownership in what you're actually building.

And to me, it's just been a really gratifying experience to know that everyone that works with us actually owns part of the fate of the company.

So, this is just people from around the office. We obviously value collaboration; it's kind of how the company was founded.

And so if I had two pieces of advice, they're really, really simple, right? The first is that you should really just build something you believe in. If you're going to go on a five-year, seven-year, ten-year, fifteen-year journey, at least build something that you really, really love, because otherwise, you're definitely going to burn out.

Right? You'd have to be like the most mercenary person to give themselves 15 years and take all this risk if you didn't at least love the idea of where you're going to end up.

And the second is just, "Don't give up. Don't let somebody talk you out of your dream." And the reason that I think Startup School is so cool is because if you look around in the room, like, you're surrounded by all these people that really want to do what you're doing.

Silicon Valley is like a weird place; like people always seem to be talking about doing startups. But people are from all over the country; they're from all over the world, and those early parts of doing a startup can actually be really lonely.

It can just be a total bummer because you're toiling on this thing; no one cares about it; it's not getting anywhere. And there's a tendency, I think, with a lot of people that I meet who are doing startups that are like, "I just need to work harder; I need to go out into the world less; I need to turn on the lights less frequently; maybe I need to sit closer to the screen."

And I think that it's a really dangerous game to play. Like, there's a reason that I started the presentation by showing a really good friend of mine who wasn't working at the company I was but was still hanging out with us all the time.

The fact that we could get a beer and talk about, "Hey, this is really tough; this is a hard time," made it a lot easier, and wherever you live, the great thing now is that you can find those people.

Like, they may be in your neighborhood; they may be online; they may be some part of a meetup. But you can find those people somewhere, and I personally think it's good advice to take the time and to invest in those people.

So part of the reason I was so excited to come was to me it's just really exciting to be in a room full of so many people that basically want to do what I want to do, right?

I basically just want to build something bigger than myself that a lot of people in the world will find useful, and to be with lots of those people just makes me happy. It gets me excited about doing what we do every day.