Pintrest CEO Ben Silbermann has found himself in a remarkable situation as he is the head of a company valued at $2.5 billion despite one small thing; the company has yet to profit even $2.50. Silbermann spoke at the All Things D conference today and gave some insight into what makes his Pintrest such a success story, reports engadget.com.
Like many forms of social media Pintrest is heavily focused on how it allows a person to broadcast to the world what they are interested in. People are allowed to group pictures and other items of interest from the internet and display them on Pintrest; it's sort of a digital equivalent of how you can determine a teenager's interests by looking at the posters on their bedroom wall or the collections of trinkets on a person mantle.
Silbermann addressed the idea of what collections mean to a person and how Pintrest takes that idea into the future.
"Collecting tells a lot about who you are as a person," Silbermann said. "There are millions of people that are basically organizing all of the objects online and on the Web according to the things they are interested about."
Silbermann also seems to view Pintrest as a sort of online to-do list; it's a way to gather ideas about things people would like to accomplish in their offline life.
"For a lot of people, Pintrest is a service about what are the things you want to do in the future," Silbermann said. "What it gives you is a really intuitive and human ways to discover things, instead of coming at discovery in a really oblique way."
Tablets and smart phones have changed the way that people consume the internet over the last couple of years and Silbermann believes that if a company such as Pintrest fails to adapt to the mobile platform that it will soon become a dinosaur.
"A growing number of users use Pintrest exclusively on their phone or tablet, " Silbermann said. "When we released our mobile apps, we were taking bets on how long it'd take for those to surpass our web traffic. I figured it'd take a few weeks. It was literally the day it was released. I think it's because phones and tablets are largely always around you, whereas you're not always around a computer."
Pintrest is still facing the lingering issue of money, as in, the company doesn't make any. According to allthingsD.com, Silbermann wants to make sure that the company monetizes itself in the best way possible.
"We tried to take a bit more of a long-term perspective," Silbermann said. "We decided we wanted to try and build a company that would be around."
