Top 30 Ben Silbermann Quotes

As a kid, I always idolized entrepreneurs. I thought they were cool people in the way that I thought basketball players were cool people. It’s cool that some people get paid to dunk basketballs, but I’m not one of those people.

When you open up Pinterest, you should feel like you’ve walked into a building full of stuff that only you are interested in. Everything should feel handpicked for you.

So March 2010, we launched Pinterest, and we were 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.

I’d never managed anyone before, so I don’t have a lot of experience. But I’m lucky – I have a lot of team members who have a really honest relationship with me.

I always just want to move along to the next step.

There’s a lot of pressure to look like the last company that was successful.

I use Pinterest for everything. Book collections, trips, hobbies. It’s all there. I planned my wedding on it. When I had a kid, I planned all his stuff on it. So it was nice to discover that I wasn’t the only one.

I look around my neighborhood, and I see people hailing a cab or ordering their food and then paying for it all with their phone. I’ve read about that stuff for a really long time, and now it’s starting to become commonplace.

A lot of the future of search is going to be about pictures instead of keywords. Computer vision technology is going to be a big deal.

We want the average person to use it and think that it makes the experience of using Pinterest better.

At a small company, so much of the trick is focus. Not only can you only do a finite number of things, but you have to do them in the right order.

There are a lot of really valuable services that are always pushing you to communicate with other people. But there are relatively few services that are about helping you be the person you want to be and fulfilling your ambitions.

The No. 1 challenge is getting people to understand that Pinterest isn’t a social network.

So many things that I was excited about as a kid were about proximity. The idea that somebody could grow up in rural Iowa and be into break dancing because of YouTube – that was a really simple, profound idea.

I really think that even though Pinterest isn’t a lot of people’s idea of hard technology, it helps make everyday things a little bit better. And I believe that for most people, everyday things, those are everything.

I kind of think of engineering like the chefs at a restaurant. Nobody’s going to deny chefs are integrally important, but there’s also so many other people who contribute to a great meal.

I’ve worked on products where they go down in the middle of the night, and no one notices. You get the ‘site down’ notice, but it doesn’t matter.

If Google teaches you anything, it’s that small ideas can be big.

My parents are doctors, both my sisters are doctors, so I figured I’d just be a doctor too. Sometime in my junior year, I had this sudden realization that maybe that wasn’t for me. I was sort of lost at sea.

I was obsessed with this idea that these things that you collect, they just say so much about who you are. I can’t say it came from hard-nosed business analysis… It was just something I really want to see built.

When Pinterest works well, it helps you find things that are meaningful to you. We want to build a system that helps you do that.

Don’t take too much advice.

The companies that I really admire the most are the ones that have a deep visceral understanding of why people use their service, and they figure out ways of making money that are completely consistent with how people are feeling and what they are doing at the time.

The whole reason Pinterest exists is to help people discover the things that they love and then go take action on them, and a lot of the things they take action on are tied to commercial intent.

Google was like the only company that was like, ‘We’re making so much money; let’s take a picture of every street in the world.’ Nobody does that.

I think anyone who makes products has this simultaneous joy and, almost, shame looking at it. You look at it all day, and all you can see is all these things you want to make better.

We’re trying to do something so that when the average person uses Pinterest, it has to make the service better.

The biggest thing about Pinterest is that people are there saving ideas for their personal lives. Not to rile up other people or make a big statement.

I used to wake up and look at our analytics and think, ‘What if yesterday was the last day anyone used Pinterest?’ Like, everyone collectively decided, ‘We’re done!’ Over time I got more confidence.

One of the things I’ve learned is to be receptive of feedback.