My favorite parts:
Don’t take too much advice:
But here’s Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann’s advice: “Don’t take too much advice.”
“Most people generalize whatever they did, and say that was the strategy that made it work,” Silbermann said. In reality, there’s very little way of knowing how various factors contributed to success or failure.
Being comfortable as a non-engineer:
Silbermann is not an engineer, so at Google he worked in online sales and operations.
“I left, not because I didn’t love the company, but because [with] my particular background, it would have been really hard to built products,” he said.
The fallacy of fail fast, lean, and traction:
Silbermann said, “The hard part about that idea of ‘minimum viable product,’ for me, is you don’t know what ‘minimum’ is, and you don’t know what ‘viable’ is.”
In the early days, Pinterest had “catastrophically small numbers,” Silbermann said. Nine months after launch, the site counted 10,000 users, with few of them active on a daily basis.
Silbermann said he recently picked up Eric Ries’s “The Lean Startup,” and was grateful he didn’t read it at the time, because it might have convinced him to give up at that point.
