- The speaker found an old email from 2010 when they launched Pinterest and shared it with the audience.
- The email mentioned the progress of Pinterest at that time, including the number of registered users and daily pin count.
- The speaker talked about the humble beginnings of Pinterest, working out of a dilapidated apartment and sharing it with another startup.
- They mentioned the challenges of building a successful startup and the importance of commitment and making a decision to pursue it.
- The speaker discussed their initial idea for a mobile shopping catalog called Tote and the difficulties they faced in getting it approved and raising funds.
- They shared some experiences and lessons learned from fundraising, including the influence of free incentives on investors and the fact that investors are just regular people.

- The speaker learned that even respected individuals can be wrong in their opinions.
- When in need of money and lacking leverage, it is important to find a way to turn the tables and convince the investor that you have something valuable.
- People will give advice, but it is important to remember that the future is unwritten and they could be wrong.
- The speaker and his team created Pinterest with a focus on making it look cool and appealing to users.
- They initially struggled to gain users, but found success by targeting a specific group of people and showing them how the service could be helpful.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of trusting the data, users, and one's own instincts when running a startup.

- Pinterest is a tool that helps people find inspiration and achieve their goals.
- It has become a network with millions of users and billions of objects.
- Pinterest has had to adapt to become a technology company and mine data.
- The company values collaboration and believes in building something bigger than oneself.
- The speaker advises to build something you believe in and not give up on your dreams.
- Startup school provides a supportive community for entrepreneurs.
- It is important to find and invest in people who share your vision.
- The speaker is excited to be surrounded by people who want to build something useful.

- The speaker shared an old email from 2010 about the early days of Pinterest.
- They discussed the challenges of building a startup and the importance of commitment.
- The speaker talked about their initial idea for a mobile shopping catalog and the difficulties they faced.
- Lessons learned from fundraising were shared, including the importance of finding a way to convince investors.
- The speaker emphasized the importance of trusting data, users, and instincts in running a startup.
- Pinterest has become a successful tool with millions of users and a focus on collaboration.
- The speaker advises not giving up on dreams and finding supportive communities like startup school.

Ben Silbermann, founder of Pinterest, at Y Combinator Startup School on October 20, 2012.

Presented in Stanford Memorial Auditorium by Y Combinator and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

It's really exciting for me to be here in front of 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's a little bit hazy.

And I found an email from March 2010, which was roughly like 3 and a half, 4 months after we launched Pinterest.

And it's an email to our advisors 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.

The email says, hey, everyone, I wanted to provide a quick update from cold 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.

Today we have almost 3,000 registered users and our daily pin count is steadily increasing.

I'm also happy to say that we've 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, Chartio, and we've also gotten some free Amazon hosting credits.

So a couple funny things about the email in general.

The first is that the new location in question is a dilapidated two-bedroom apartment on California Avenue.

And 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 2 bedrooms, 1 of which my cofounder Paul lived in and 1 of which Dave, the cofounder of Chartio, lived in.

And we worked out of the living room, these 2 companies, all together pretty much all day.

And Dave was a late night guy who's hacker's hacker, always up until 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 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, they would get to be played by Ryan Gosling.

So the other thing, though, that's a little bit more serious is if you think about it, 4 months in, 3,000 accounts for a consumer startup is really not very good.

And I think the thing that surprised me the most in starting a company, after reading about Facebook hits Harvard, 95% penetration in 2 weeks, 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.

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 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 the 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 1 lesson, Making things can take a long time.

So 2008, I was working at Google, 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 always looked up to anybody that made things, whether it was an architect or an engineer or an artist, I always thought I was going to be a doctor.

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, 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.

And it was appropriate because both my parents were ophthalmologists.

When I was at my consulting job in D.C., a good friend of mine named Altai had me help him out with his YC startup where he was trying to help market bands.

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.

I needed to learn more by working at Google.

But actually, the dependent variable was just me.

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.

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 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 1 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.

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, and we did it out of savings, but there were some problems.

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.

We had these grand ideas of doing all sorts of offline caching, of being able to use this thing in the subway, of 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 2 non-technical cofounders, 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.

Number 1 is call me back in a few months.

It's like you ask someone out on a date, and they're like, not right now, but maybe in November.

That 1 is really, really hard to hear because you're going to have even less money and you're going to even have less leverage in a negotiation.

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 is no way this is going to happen.

I remember really vividly I went to a session where I was pitching actually a whole group of investors up on Silicon Valley.

You're looking and these people at build great companies and I'm about 5 minutes into explaining what we're doing and everyone starts just like heading for the door.

And I was like, man, like 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 no cookies in the background.

We've done fundraising a few times, and sometimes it's been easier and sometimes it's been really, really hard.

We've done it where we've flown to all the coasts.

We've tracked down sort of everyone in our alumni directory, whether they were tech investors or not investors.

And I think I've learned like 3 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 even rich people are subject to free cookies.

Even though you're really rich, you're probably still the kind of person that is influenced by free.

And in that lesson is actually something really important.

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.

You know, 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.

And that puts you in a really tough spot.

There's nothing you can do unless you hack that system, 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, or the belief that this thing is just going to be so big that whether you give them money or not, you're just going to be wildly successful.

Number 2 was a hard case for us to sell, so we solved for number 1, and that was a really important thing.

And the very last thing I learned, and this was something that was especially true when you're kind of driving up Sand Hill Road, which I don't know if you guys have been to.

I sort of thought it would look like the Emerald City, but it kind of looks like a ski lodge with no mountain.

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, and, you know, they've, 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.

We're in a pretty high volatility industry.

And 1 thing that we always told ourselves and 1 thing that I really, really believe is that fundamentally, like, the future is unwritten.

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 of those things, there are things that they passed on.

And those are the things that actually burn them up.

Those are the ones that haunt them at night.

And I think that if you can convince somebody that you just might be the 1 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.

Evan is a Columbia graduate student at the time.

And Evan and Paul and I are commiserating about this whole dilemma.

And we're just thinking about what would be cool to build?

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, jeez, 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.

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'd 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're cramming in, we weren't great at 1 thing, right?

There wasn't 1 thing that was special about it.

People talk a lot about a minimum viable product or when you should ship something.

And my advice is you should ship when you have 1 thing that you're proud of.

1 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.

And we decided that the 1 thing we had to do really well if we were going to make a website about collections, we had to make it look really cool.

If it didn't look cool, then no 1 is going to make a collection, because they don't want to show their friends, because this thing they just made looks really lame.

So this is the first version of Pinterest.

And 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.

I emailed out to all my friends, all my family.

I'm like, look at this really cool thing.

3,000 accounts, not active users accounts, is pretty bad if you have 3 people actively pushing it out to every single person they know every day for 4 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.

This is our first meetup in San Francisco.

We all tried to make it fun, do fun pictures.

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 pin board about what home meant to them.

And it was organized like a chain letter.

Like 1 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 that people hadn't met each other before, were having real 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?

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 said 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.

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.

They're reading the same TechCrunch articles.

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 happened 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 two-by-two matrix, they're like, this is a disaster.

This is like the worst thing that could happen.

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.

And we're building out a team of people that are really diverse.

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 3 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 call our company Cold Brew Labs because all the cool companies call themselves labs.

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Ben Silbermann at Startup School 2012