Pinterest has always upended expectations, and for a service devoted to enabling its users to curate whatever they cared about, the company has also ironically defied categorization. It sits between social media and search. It pioneered the concept of the infinite scroll, yet it resisted the idea of a feed. It leaned heavily on Facebook alums to drive many elements of its business, yet it often made more sense as a visually driven alternative to Google search advertising. Women helped define Pinterest in a number of essential ways, but then women were the focal point of the largest scandal in the company’s history. It was always born to be the best shopping tool ever devised on the internet, yet Pinterest’s path to get there was more methodical than early watchers could have anticipated. As CEO Bill Ready continues to transform the business and the experience, these 65 signal moments in Pinterest’s history showcase precisely how Pinterest became an underrated force in the digital sphere—in discovery, design, commerce, and culture.
2008: Ben Silbermann, a low-level Google employee, and Paul Sciarra, his college friend who’d worked at a VC firm, launch Cold Brew Labs, a “mobile shopping startup.” (Why Cold Brew Labs? The name sounded cool.) Its first app, Tote, touts that it’s “the first woman’s fashion catalog on the iPhone.”
2009: Tote isn’t a hit, but users like the feature allowing them to save items. Silbermann, who collected bugs as a kid, realizes that they’re sharing their taste with friends. Silbermann and Sciarra decide to pivot to a “social commerce application” that would make “curating and sharing collections of products dead simple.”
2009: Silbermann, while visiting Sciarra in New York (where he’s based), gets introduced by a mutual friend to a Columbia University architecture student named Evan Sharp. The two become fast friends, and Silbermann wants Sharp to join Cold Brew. Sharp demurs, opting to take a job at Facebook in product design, but he decides to help out as a side hustle. Sharp has thousands of photos and architectural drawings that he wants to organize effectively online.
2009: Sharp designs a grid layout for images. The grid, which represents a breakthrough digital experience that would quickly be emulated across the internet, is a web experience that allows the images to be “liquid,” as Silbermann would describe it, adapting to any size screen. The small team devotes months to refining the grid’s details—from where the text would be placed to the borders to the number of pixels (192) that each image commands. “The grid was everything,” as Sharp would later say.
October 2009: FirstMark Capital invests in the startup’s seed-stage financing as part of its FirstSteps program, later describing the product as a tool that lets users “curate and share the things you love.”
Recognize your brand’s excellence by applying to this year’s Brands That Matter Awards before the early-rate deadline, May 3.
