Ben Silbermann at Startup School SV 2016

Good morning! Nice to see everyone here. Uh, my name is Ali Rani. I'm a partner at Y Combinator. I run our late-stage fund; it's called the Y Combinator Continuity Fund. I couldn't be happier to be here today to conduct a fireside chat with Ben Berman, who, as you guys all probably know, is the co-founder and CEO of Pinterest. Ben has a fascinating background and a set of diverse experiences with entrepreneurship, so we're thrilled to have him here, and I want to welcome him here today. [Applause]

Ben, thank you for coming.

Ben: Thanks for having me.

Ali: Wow, there are a lot of people, right? A lot of people, and it's very bright lights.

Ben: Smokes.

Ali: Um, Ben, let me just start first by asking you to tell us a little bit about Ben before Pinterest, sort of what you were interested in growing up and through college, and what you graduated college and then went and did, and how that kind of all led to today.

Ben: Sure. Um, well, I grew up in Iowa. I grew up outside of Des Moines, and a lot of the time when I grew up, I thought I was going to be a doctor. Both my parents are doctors; both my sisters are doctors. And so it didn't even feel like really a choice. Um, but as a kid, I loved all kinds of things. You know, I loved nature. I loved stories. I loved fiction. I loved movies. Um, and then when I went to school, I went to Yale, and I was premed, but I didn't really have a specific plan other than maybe I should be a doctor. So, that was sort of my first chapter.

And then somewhere along that line, I thought, geez, I don't know if medicine is for me, and I feel like medicine is one of those professions where if you think that, you actually know that. And, uh, and so I just, you know, I started taking other classes. I ended up getting a major in political science. Um, but the other thing that happened was, you know, college was the first time that I had like my own laptop with high-speed internet, which makes me sound super old, but things change fast.

Um, but I remember actually that being a really transformative experience—just being able to get access to all kinds of information. Um, and I just became, it sounds really corny; I just kind of fell in love with the internet. I loved the idea that everyone could access the same information no matter where you were in the world. Um, and I would always play these kind of "what if" games. Whenever I saw a problem, I'm like, like, ah, you know, what if the internet could help solve this problem? And so I think that's how I really got excited about technology.

Ali: So you didn't drop out; you got your degree, you graduated, and then you took—you didn't start a company right away. Is that right?

Ben: No. Um, you know, I decided not to be a doctor; my parents were like, okay, well, better figure out something to do to make money. Um, and I took a job at a consulting firm, um, and I took that job mainly because they offered it to me. Um, and, uh, I went to Washington, D.C., and I worked in consulting. I worked in an IT group.

Um, and then along the way, I was kind of working with friends in building these toys on the internet, and I say toys because they weren't really intended to be these serious businesses or anything. I was just really curious about what we could do. So I remember one of the first things that I had started making in college, um, it was a tool that let you try on glasses online. Um, because, you know, my parents—I spent a lot of time—they're ophthalmologists, and they had an optical shop attached. And, you know, people were there because they couldn't see. And so I would watch all these people go in and try on these blanks of glasses, and then they try to look in the mirror, but they couldn't see. And so then they'd ask, like, how do these look?

Um, and I was thinking, oh, you know, maybe we could build software to help people see that maybe they could do it online. So instead of having like 12 pairs of glasses that were available, you could have the whole access. So that was an example of kind of one of these toys. Um, I worked with a friend of mine named Alai, and we made a tool to help his band promote themselves all over the country.

Um, all on the side while you had a day job.

Ali: All projects?

Ben: Yeah. Um, and so yeah, that's how I kind of got started—more playing with things than just sort of focusing on building a serious company.

Ali: Now, you're clearly creative; you clearly had a sense of like the internet could be something interesting to solve various problems, but you weren't technical. So how did you like overcome that in the early days in terms of actually being able to kind of create the things you wanted to create?

Ben: Yeah, well, you know, I would always start off thinking about an idea, and I had some friends that were technical. And then none of us were super technical, so we'd always just sort of chip in and learn what we needed to do to get the next part. Um, so learning about things like product design, um, you know, I would do like simple, like front-end coding, and just you end up learning like little bits at a time.

And for me at least, it's a lot easier to learn things when there's something that you want to build than doing it in a very abstract kind of classroom way.

Ali: Got it. Uh, when did you or how did you decide, okay, I'm gonna now leave my job and jump and commit fully to starting a company?

Ben: You know, it was a while. Um, so when I was in D.C., I was like always reading these blogs. I was like, I remember typing in TechCrunch; I was like, whoa, like something is going on on the internet. Um, and, uh, I just really wanted to be part of it. So I didn't feel like I could start a company, but I thought maybe a good half-step would be to try to work at a company that I really respected. And so I really wanted to work at Google. So I moved out to California and I got a job at Google, and the only job I was qualified for at the time was online sales and operations—were just kind of like customer support.

Um, and I worked there for about a year and a half, and all the while, I'm like, oh trying these little projects on the side. And it was actually my girlfriend at the time—who's now my wife—she was the one that kind of gave me the kick in the pants. You know, I was like a normal night; I was like, oh wouldn't it be cool? I should build this—like, here's what it's going to look like. Here's the early prototype. And she's like, you know, Ben, maybe you should either do it or stop talking about it.

Um, that turned out to be really good advice.

Ali: Yeah. So you left Google. What was the first thing you tried to build?

Ben: Well, immediately when I left, I hooked up with some friends of mine, and I was still interested in medicine. I had kind of this latent interest in medicine, so we wanted to build a tool that would help people gather your medical records across your family; you could kind of build a family tree, and everyone could update it.

And I started with these friends that were kind of on a break period before they got their Ph.D. But in a few months, then they got their Ph.D., and they're like, hey, you know, like, we have Ph.D.s; we're going to go be professors, and you're sort of on your own. Um, and then, you know, I was kind of like in the void; it wasn't even the trough of despair; it was just like just not doing—not doing that much.

Um, but I hooked up, you know, with a friend of mine from college, and at that time, um, the iPhone had just recently come out. Um, and actually, I remember so vividly like watching that keynote on this laptop and being like holy cow, this thing is going to change everything. I hooked up with a friend to build products for the iPhone, and one of those products—our idea was like why don't we take all those catalogs in your mailbox and put them on the phone because catalogs suck, and phones are great, but people still want to shop. That was our first idea that we really formed into that company, and that was Tote.

Yeah, the product was called Tote. Um, and we knew that to build that we would have to raise a little bit of money. We set out to raise money on that premise.

Ali: Was that the first time you'd raised money for Tote?

Ben: It was the first time that I'd been in charge of raising the money and done it really formally, and, um, it was a total show to be honest. Uh, you know, the other part of this was this is 2008, so the economy is just like collapsed. Um, and we would just like go to these meetings, and these folks would just be like, why are you even here? And I'm like, I don't know; you took the meeting.

Like, I was like, I was like, why am I here? Uh, but it was really a tough time, and so, you know, we went through the full, like, West Coast investors; we went to the East Coast—struck out on the West Coast, struck out on the West Coast—not for lack of effort. I think that everyone who could have gotten a call got a call.

Um, we would cold-call people out of alumni directories—like whether we went to the school or not; we were like, this looks like a wealthy individual. And, uh, we ended up doing something quite desperate, which is I ended up finding all the college business plan competitions that had loosely written rules about attendance in that school, right?

And I entered one, um, and we got second place, and the prize for second place was a meeting with the venture capitalist who was an alumni of the school.

Okay, and they were able to give us our first couple hundred, which to me felt like all the money in the world. Like I couldn't believe it. I was like, I was looking at the bank account, um, and that's how we got it started.

Ali: Amazing. And there were two of you at the time, right?

Ben: There were.

Ali: So what did you do with the money? Did you go out and hire some people?

Ben: Uh, we did. We paid the awesome engineers that were helping us out, um, and we set out to build this iPhone app. Um, but at the time, iPhone development was really slow, and not only was it slow to develop; it was also slow to get approved.

Um, and so even after we had built this app and we were ready, I thought it was going to be like in the movie, like you push like release, and then like all these people would get your thing. Um, we couldn't even get the thing approved, and so at the same time, you know, I had met another friend in New York, um, named Evan, and we had this other idea that was, again, it was kind of like one of these toys.

Um, you know, looking back, there were elements of all these other projects we'd worked on, but it was this toy, and the toy was like, you know, what if there was a tool to let you collect things online? Um, you know, it had some of these elements of this catalog on the phone. It had some things that I just loved as a kid. I was a big collector as a kid, and Evan was too, and we started to build this toy.

Um, and ironically, like that toy is what would later become the whole company, right?

Ali: So that—so Tote then sort of morphed into Pinterest?

Ben: Yeah, I mean, I think morphed is a generous word. Tote launched, and no one really used it, and then Pinterest was kind of—it was getting done, and we thought it was really cool. Um, and so we thought, hey, let's put this thing out into the world. Um, and that was sort of how the switch over happened.

So when you reflect back and think about the early days of Pinterest, um, what was the problem that you were trying to solve out there? Like who were you trying to—was it something you were building at the time for a group of people or for everyone? And what was the thing that you were trying to solve?

Ben: Well, I'm going to sound like kind of the worst business person, but we just thought it would be cool for ourselves at first. You know, I'm a really curious person. Um, Evan, um, he was an architect at the time; he was studying in architecture school in Columbia—like buildings, not computers.

Um, and we thought, gosh, if you had this tool to collect things for yourself, that would be really useful. And not only that, you know, those collections could kind of give you a window into how other people saw the world. Um, and we just thought that would be a really fun product that people might be interested in.

Um, and so I think what initially motivated us and that early team was we really enjoyed using the product for ourselves. Um, and when we released it, um, it actually was not a runaway success; it grew really, really slowly. But part of what kept us going is we thought it was a really cool product that we enjoyed, and we thought, well, maybe there are people like us that would also enjoy it.

Ali: Yeah. Um, how did you find your first users? Like how did you, you know, you've talked a little bit about like trying to market it and being scrappy about that. Can you talk about that?

Ben: Yeah, so we released it, and you know, I did probably what everyone does. Like the first thing you do is you email all your friends, and you kind of hope that it’s G to—and no one really got it, to be totally honest with you. Um, neither the people on the East Coast that Evan knew nor the people on the West Coast that I knew, they just didn't really get it, and they were really polite. They were like, oh, looks interesting, yeah, yeah, yeah, like very interesting.

Um, but there was a small group of people that were enjoying it, um, and those folks were not who I think stereotypically you think about early adopters. They were folks that I grew up with. Um, people that were using it for regular stuff in their life, you know, what was my house going to look like? Uh, you know, what kind of food do I want to eat? Things like that.

Um, and we really thought, you know, where are those people congregating? Who's their community? Um, and I ended up, you know, going to a conference where a lot of the blogs that people, uh, were reading about those things—a lot of those bloggers gathered—and I met these bloggers. Um, and they seemed like the kind of people that would really enjoy it, and so we organized a marketing event with those bloggers where we had each of them introduce the service to their audience.

Ali: How many users did you have at this point? How small was P— was this like a few hundred?

Ben: A few hundred, so very early. A few thousand, pretty early on. Um, and that’s how we got started, but you know, in between, I mean, we did all kinds of honestly like pretty desperate things.

Uh, like I used to walk home, and I was in Palo Alto, and I’d walk by the Apple Store, and I would like stand in the Apple Store and just like change all the computers to say Pinterest and then like kind of stand in the back being like wow, this Pinterest thing, it’s like really blowing up.

And, but you know, slowly we started, we started to get folks who really loved this service, um, and then since it took us so long to get those users, uh, we cared about them so, so much. Um, I used to have my cell phone on all the customer support emails. I would take customer support calls all the time. So when the service would go down, um, I had this problem where everyone would start calling me, be like, hey, I can’t get my pins, you know?

Um, and I don't know, I think that for me, there were these two lessons, and one, it's that, you know, there's a stereotype of where early adopters come from, and they should be these technology-forward folks, and I just think that that idea is really outdated now. Yeah. Um, I think that, um, so many people have these amazing computers in their pockets; so many people have data that early adopters are coming from everywhere.

And it could be, you know, taxi cab drivers in India or Midwestern folks who are planning their homes. Um, and I think if we had been really dogmatic about wanting kind of cool Silicon Valley people to like it, we probably wouldn’t have made the service that we made.

I—and then I think there was a lesson in really taking care of users, and so all the time, um, you know, I would sit in coffee shops and ask people to try this service and just try to watch them and see what they were doing to see where we could smooth out the edges and improve the service.

Right? And what did you—would you ask for user ideas and user feedback, and would that inform what you were building, or was it more the case that you would observe and continue to build something that felt good for you?

Ben: It was a little bit of both. Um, you know, one thing is that what people say they want and what people mean can sometimes be different.

Yeah. Um, so a really common thing that I would ask people, um, sitting in a coffee shop, I'd be like, hey, you know, why don't you try to create a board or try to pin something, um, and then I would ask them to do it, or I'd ask them to look at a button and push it, and right before I'd say, you know, what do you expect to see on the other side of that? And then right after I'd be like, is that what you saw? And if it was different, I'd be like, good; we should fix that up.

And so I do think that listening to the people that use the service is incredibly important, but you have to use judgment to decide, you know, what parts of the product you really want to invest in.

Ali: And do you still do that today? I mean, Pinterest now has millions and millions of users. How do you still carry that forward in terms of caring for your users and you personally kind of observing or getting feedback from them?

Ben: Yeah, I mean, when we started growing and we realized there were users that we couldn't fully understand in a first-person perspective because maybe they were in a different country or they were on a different infrastructure, we started to build out a research team.

And today we have researchers that go around the world and bring people into the office to do that kind of work. Um, we obviously look at data as one tool; um, we run experiments as one tool, um, but after you have all that, there's still these pieces where you have to use your judgment. You take all these signals in and you put something out, and sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't, and you have to go figure that out.

Right? So from those early days, how long did it take before you thought you were onto something that could be really, really big, that you'd built something that could be useful for lots and lots of people?

Ben: You know what's funny is like I don't think there was this one moment. Like, um, we were growing every month, um, and I think it wasn't until we went out to go raise some more money because we felt like things were going well; we want to use money as a tool to grow the business that we were first forced to say, you know, how big do we think this can be?

Um, and I remember feeling kind of this dual feeling; one is like my nature isn't to be like this thing is going to be really grand, but I remember talking to an investor who became a mentor of mine. He said, you know, why not? You know, why couldn't it be? Um, and if you thought about it that way, how would it change?

Um, and that's how we think about it today. You know, today when I talk to the company, I say, you know, we want to build the world's catalog of ideas—like the tool that everyone uses to discover things in their everyday life.

Um, and in a weird way, sort of raising the bar on what the company can be ends up attracting people who are more ambitious and are more creative in solving big problems.

So, um, between the time of kind of launching Pinterest—you're working on Tote—you decided that's not getting much traction; let's launch Pinterest, something that feels great to us. Um, did you between that time of sort of launching Pinterest and growing it, as you mentioned, and getting to your Series A, did you have multiple small kind of fundraisings, or how did you finance the company?

Ben: Um, we did a little bit more money from some of the angel investors. But we also were not spending very much money, so the team was incredibly small.

Yeah, how small?

Ben: I think it was like five, five, six people. Um, it was bring your own computer. Um, it was in a two-bedroom apartment where one of the rooms was rented to a guy who didn't work at the company. Um, and I think that's because we'd been without money for so long; we just didn't really know. Right?

Um, we didn't really know how long it would take, um, so everything was kind of through that lens of like how do we make sure that we just have what we can to keep going? And for us, I don't think fundraising has ever been like a goal.

It's just this tool that you use to get to the next step, and actually, I think a problem that's happened sometimes recently is people confuse money, the tool, with the goal of the company. The goal is not to raise a bunch of money; uh, the goal is to get the resources you need, whether they're talented people or whether they're users or whether they're pieces of technology, to then achieve, uh, and build the product and service that you want.

So let's talk about attracting people. Um, one of the things that you've said—you've been quoted as saying is that when you're trying to attract people to your startup, great people to your startup, um, people are attracted; they don't want a guarantee of success necessarily; they want a guarantee of an adventure.

Um, and that was a sort of approach you took in recruiting people in. Can you talk about that?

Ben: Yeah, you know, really early on, like I didn't have like a network of engineers in Silicon Valley. Right? So we did all kinds of things like similar to marketing. Um, you know, the first engineer—one of the first ones we hired, um, I put an ad on Craigslist, and he replied.

Um, and then as we started to get a little bit of momentum, um, we would try to just use the assets we had, and what we had was this shitty apartment on California Avenue with a patio, and we were like our asset is going to be this apartment because if people see it, they're definitely going to know that we haven't made it yet.

Um, but if we throw barbecues there, they're going to know we're cool people. I mean, so we would throw these barbecues every Friday, and it was like bring your own food, uh, and then we would bring beer. So, um, and actually, we recruited a lot of people there, and I think that the people that we loved to recruit—kind of intuitively, you kind of recruit people that are a little bit like yourself.

Like when you get bigger, you want to recruit people that are very different from yourself, but I loved—I loved people that at their core; they were builders. You know, they wanted to be known for what they built, not what they said. Um, they tended to be curious about a ton of different things, um, but then deep in something.

Um, and so, you know, our first engineers, you know, one of the guys in his first interview, I'm like, what have you built? And he pulled out his phone; he built like magic tricks for his kids.

Um, he built these crazy games; he was building these crazy, crazy robots in his garage. Um, one of our next early engineers, he was actually a cartoonist that stopped cartooning and became an engineer, and that kind of became the calling card of a lot of our early folks—people that were almost outsiders to technology.

Um, and I think that's served us really well as a company.

Ali: That's fascinating. Um, today with Pinterest, you know, you have millions and millions of users. Are you still trying to solve the same problem today as you were originally trying to solve, or how has your conception of Pinterest as a product changed?

Ben: I think a lot of the problems stay the same, but the scope of the ambition has changed. I always think like if I could go back in time and say like, oh, you know Ben, 2008, you know, if you had a million users, would you be happy? I'd be like really overjoyed.

Um, but for me, there's always this widening gap between where you are and the scope of your ambition. You know, today, uh, when I think about Pinterest, I mentioned that I have this idea of wanting to build the catalog of ideas, and that to me means like what if there was a tool where everyone published ideas that you could use into one place?

Um, what if it was so personalized that it understood your preferences, and every time you used it, it became more customized to you? And what if when you saw those ideas, they had all the information you needed to make it happen? If it's a product, you could buy it; if it's a recipe, you could cook it.

And I think there's something very, very beautiful about that because today there are a lot of services that try to give you objective answers to everything.

Um, you know, if you ask Google a question, it'll return like a factually right answer very quickly, but there aren't as many tools that are fully devoted to helping you discover what's right for yourself.

And in fact, I think that a lot of technology is pushing people to project an image of who other people want them to be rather than giving them a space just to think about who am I?

And I'd love Pinterest to play a small role in doing that for small things, you know, like making dinner, or maybe for big things like designing your home or doing a big creative project, and that's kind of my dream—but then how we're doing it, I couldn't have imagined.

Um, one of the great perks of starting a company is that you get to hire people that are way better than you in all these other areas, and so we have computer vision folks now. Uh, we have great engineers; we have wonderful designers; uh, we have writers.

Um, and I think that's one of the fun things about trying to assemble a team against a north star goal.

Ali: Now that you've built this really meaningful product that millions of people or hundreds of millions of people use, you reflect back. What was your moment of greatest discouragement? Like what was your sort of lowest point in the history of Pinterest, and how did you get through it?

Ben: So many. Um, like I think everyone has real moments of self-doubt. Um, you know, I can think of a whole bunch, you know, times where there were things that were going on outside—like we didn't think we could scale the service.

I actually remember a day we had three engineers, and we had to shard the database, and I was like, well, is this thing going to work? And they're like, well, we have to do it. And I'm like, what could go wrong? They're like, well, we could lose everyone's user data forever.

I was like, that sounds really bad. They're like, it's not that bad because we're guaranteed to lose it if we don't do something soon. I was like, it's not the most inspiring thing. I mean, there are all these moments, but I think you just kind of keep going.

Um, and one of the real privileges that I've had in Silicon Valley is I've gotten to meet a lot of these entrepreneurs who are honestly my idols—like people that I read about like they were fictional characters, like Robinson Crusoe or something.

Uh, and finding out that actually they got where they got by making a series of mistakes and then learning from them and moving forward. Right? Um, that was a really long lesson for me to learn. You know, um, as I said, you know, my parents are doctors.

Like, uh, you know, Facebook's famous for having these signs that say move fast and break things. Like when you go to the doctor's office, like when you’re going to the O, you don't want a sign that's like who fast make things right!

And so that mentality took me a long time. And part of I think my job as the leader of the company is to make sure everyone at the company feels like they can take risks and learn from them, and that process of learning is more important than avoiding errors at any given point.

Got it. I want to ask you about mentors and mentorship. Um, are there mentors that you have relied on? Have they made a difference, and how did you find them? Um, and how important is that even?

Ben: It's been really important, actually. You’ve—I've had different folks at different times. Um, I mentioned there was an early investor; there was a guy named Kevin Hartz who founded the company Eventbrite. He was one of the first people that was really successful in Silicon Valley that really took time to talk to me about things.

Um, I think there are other mentors that offer you support. You know, sometimes I cringe a little bit at sort of the life-and-death language used to describe startups, um, because I think the biggest risk of a startup is actually the founders becoming so discouraged they burn out.

But if you go into it saying like survive or die, or like tying your personal self-worth to the outcome of this company, I think that only increases the peril of that happening.

So I've had friends—I mean, they're not even mentors—they're just people that are like, hey, things aren't going so bad; life keeps moving on. Um, you know, and now I've sought out people, many people, who have seen companies that are bigger than the ones that we're building to ask them, hey, what should I look out for here?

Um, just to maybe see around some corners. So all different forms.

Ali: So you've been active about trying to develop that?

Ben: Yeah, I mean, I think that I'm not under any illusion that I know how to run a company of the size. Like I've never done it before—not that many people have. And so one of my core jobs is to learn as fast as I can, and in starting companies, just like anything else, you learn by trying and failing, and you learn by talking to people that might have succeeded before you.

Yeah, how has your job changed and your day-to-day activities changed from, you know, the five-person company that built the first version of Pinterest to, you know, the company with several hundred people that you're running today?

Ben: Well, there were some parts that are the same and some that are different. I mean, I think that the founder is always responsible for driving clarity on what you're building and why, and for talking about what is the standard, um, culturally and objectively, the people you want to bring into the company—I don't think that ever changes.

I think what changes is that more and more your job becomes creating an organization and finding people that can build that, um, uh, and that will do it better than yours and also making sure that those people feel like they are part of that mission. They're not like building it for somebody else.

Um, and in really practical ways, that means that like I have to communicate a lot more.

Uh, it means that I had to start to learn how to manage people, and I say start to learn like that’s—I've never managed anyone before. Um, as anyone who I've managed can attest.

Um, and those parts have changed quite a bit. Um, I don't know, talking to lots of people—that’s changed. Um, when we were really small, when we would get press inquiries, I was a pretty introverted person, so I just wouldn't reply or I'd be like, we're busy. That was my strategy, right?

So like the New York Times would come in, and I'd be like, I'm really busy right now. Right? Um, and uh, that's not a good strategy, right?

Ali: Uh, do you—how deeply are you involved in the product today and the design decisions, or is that now that you've hired so many great people, are you a step removed from that?

Ben: So I'm still involved in product, but you know, my job isn't to literally pixel by pixel critique, uh, you know, the service. It's hopefully to ask the right questions and get the teams to come up with better ideas.

That's actually, I think, a hard transition for a lot of founders to make.

Um, but I think it's a really important one. Um, at some point, you have to not let go of the product but have faith that the people you've hired that are closer to the problem, um, and that you've hired because they have great judgment and because they're talented; they're going to execute better.

But your job is to sort of unify that into a singular product vision.

Got it. I have one last question for you, and it's a squishy one. I wanted to ask you about culture at a company or an organization.

Um, and for you at Pinterest, you know, what do you think actively about the culture of the company? What values is it based on? And how do you build that? How do you build it from, you know, being this tiny thing to this company now that I'm sure you have employees who you don’t know their names?

Um, like what—what's the glue that binds?

Ben: Well, it is, you know, it's kind of—it's a squishy topic. And when you're small, you don't have to write down your culture; it just sort of takes care of itself. I mean, you were saying you hire people who love to build things, and you know that you know through your recruiting you kind of have a certain DNA that you—that's right.

You know, some parts of our culture are similar to others. Like I want people to be obsessed with, uh, the users that we build for, the people that use our service, and so we have values around that, and we try to reduce every decision to like what’s really best for pinners.

I would say the unique thing for us—the thing that might be different is, um, I'm really—I'm a really firm believer that for Pinterest, the more diverse the skills that we have in the building, the more diverse the backgrounds of the people that we hire, the better the product will be.

Um, you—I think that you're kind of a sum of all your experiences, and so when we build products, um, I value engineering, and we value design, and we value writing, and we value marketing very, very deeply. We hire people that are multi-talented.

Um, and I'm very interested in hiring people who don't share the same backgrounds to kind of fight the natural inertia that I described before where you hire people like yourselves.

Um, I'm very interested in hiring women; I'm very interested in hiring underrepresented minorities; I'm very interested in hiring people from outside the United States that bring different perspectives—not because it's like a nice thing to do, but because I genuinely believe that we will build better products if you can knit all of those ideas, uh, together into something unified.

And so that’s one thing that we value when we try to live, and, um, we try to push very, very hard amongst our teams.

Ali: Wonderful. We're—I think I speak for everyone—we're so excited to see where you continue to take Pinterest, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Ben: Thanks for having me.