Ben Silbermann is an American entrepreneur known as the co-founder and CEO of Pinterest, an online pinboard that allows users to discover and organize images, recipes, home ideas, style inspirations, and many other things.
Early years and education
Ben Silbermann, born in July 1982 was raised in Des Moines, Iowa. As a child, he enjoyed collecting things such as insects and stamps. He once said in an interview, “”What you collect says so much about who you are”. He built Pinterest so that people can continue their collections online.
In 1999, Silbermann graduated from Des Moines Central Academy and Des Moines Roosevelt, and then from Yale College with a degree in political science in 2003.
Career
In 2003 – 2006, Silbermann worked in CEB, now Gartner, as a consultant for infrastructure and IT for CIOs and Infrastructure Executives at Fortune 1000 companies.
In December 2006, Silbermann worked at Google as a product specialist though he didn’t come from an engineering background. His parent’s Jane Wang and Neil Silbermann are ophthalmologists and he was taking pre-med in college, but in his junior year, Silbermann was interested into something else. At Google, Silbermann helped design and test new advertising products. He learned to think outside the box and met people that built amazing products.
He left Google in November 2008 and started designing iPhone apps with his friend Paul Sciarra. When their first app did not gain much success, Silbermann and Sciarra eventually themed up with Evan Sharp to create a pinboard product in 2009. SIlbermann loved collecting things a kid and the idea to create PInterest came to his mind when he realized there was no place online where people can share their collections.
Pinterest looked like another failure at the beginning. After 9 months, Pinterest had less than 10,000 users and most of them were not actively using it daily. Silbermann shared it with at least 200 of his friends, only 100 opened his email. It was not an easy beginning for Silbermann. Out of those 10,000 initial users, he personally reached out to 5,000 of them. He remained in contact and even gave them his personal mobile number. Silbermann and Sciarra kept their hopes up and continued improving the product. They focused on Pinterest’s design – from the width of a profile to the side of the screen to display it on.
Funding
Pinterest kept growing at 50% month on month in 2010 and in the year 2011 started gaining public attention. In May, 2011, Bessemer Partner and SV Angel invested about $10 million at a $40 million valuation. Media and bloggers started writing about it. In October, 2011, Pinterest raised $27 million from Andreessen Horowitz at a $200 million valuation. It became so popular that it was the biggest thing next to Facebook.
Pinterest was valued at $12.3 billion after its latest fundraising round in June 2017.
Net Worth
Benn Silbermann’s net worth as of December 2018 is $1.6 billion.