Quotes from Ben Silbermann

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 always just want to move along to the next step.

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 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.

I think the thing that I've learned is that really great people, they actually want to work on hard problems.

I think there are a lot more people that don't use Pinterest in the world than do use it, so for most people, that first experience is really, really important. I think feeling really close and in touch with that first user experience is pretty basic to making it better every day.

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

One of the hard parts about building a service that you use yourself is that it's easy to forget what it was like the very first time someone signs up. Every once in a while, I'll create a brand new account and give it a try and see how hard it is to find things that I really love, see if I'm using it or thinking about it differently.

From the outside, there's a perception Silicon Valley is full of really young, geeky guys. The reality is there are lots of different types of people there.

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.

Most people generalize whatever they did, and say that was the strategy that made it work.

Don't take too much advice.

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

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.

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.