
Pinterest Raises $200M - bdehaaff
http://readwrite.com/2014/05/15/pinterest-funding-5-billion-valuation?utm_campaign=&utm_source=t.co&awesm=readwr.it_c1lW&utm_content=readwrite3-orionautotweet&utm_medium=readwr.it-twitter#awesm=~oEnyPbNPuqcMEH
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bobbles
I thought pinterest was a waste of time. Then I got engaged to get married.

Searching for something like 'wedding favours' on google gives a pretty boring
list of top10 lists and other cruft, but a similar search on pinterest gives a
great view of peoples ideas, descriptions, alternatives, etc.

For me, this type of searching is pretty rare, but pinterest is definitely the
best tool I've seen for this

~~~
chaz
It's great for design ideas of almost any kind. For example, I wanted to see
how people were setting up their stacked washer and dryer units:
[http://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=stacked%20washer%20d...](http://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=stacked%20washer%20dryer)

Another source for home decor is Houzz, which is more of a professional
designer portfolio + marketplace, but also a good source of inspiration.
[http://www.houzz.com/stacked-washer-dryer](http://www.houzz.com/stacked-
washer-dryer)

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austenallred
Pinterest adds considerably more value to my life than any other social
network.

It provides inspiration that plans my meals, my vacations, my clothing, the
style of my home, etc.

~~~
dingaling
Pinterest disturbs me somewhat in that it is the distillation of what society
has become these days: pure consumerism.

'These are the _things_ I _want_ '.

Actually it's quite clever, on reflection, to have found a way to make money
from consumerism without actually selling anything.

~~~
qq66
Well, they're not making any money yet, and to do so, they'll have to start
selling something to someone.

~~~
skizm
They just made $200 million. They sold a dream to some VCs.

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cletus
The one thing that annoys me about Pinterest is that it's one of those ideas I
really could have thought of and done (but obviously didn't).

I don't mean this in a way to take away anything from the Pinterest team. They
had a great idea and seem to be executing really well.

It's just one of those ideas that seems so _obvious_ in hindsight,
particularly if you've seen how, for example, women scrapbook for wedding
preparation and the like, the rise of "selfies" (and just having a way to list
what you're wearing) and so on.

There are many other services that have tried to allow you to share "things"
in a given context (eg locations in Foursquare, purchases on Blippy, social
integrations with the various music streaming services and so on) but the real
genius of Pinterest for me is that it's really about sharing the _combination_
of things, which is of far more value than the individual things themselves.

Pinterest is probably the startup I'm most bullish about. Seriously, congrats
guys.

~~~
adventured
One of the most impressive things I've found about Pinterest's success, is
that they stuck with it for over three years before it finally took off. Much
like Twitter, it was anything but an overnight success. As with most concepts,
getting traction is by far the most difficult aspect.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-pinterest-an-
overnight...](http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-pinterest-an-overnight-
success-four-years-in-the-making-2012-4)

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leorocky
I get why Pinterest is interesting. I don't use it, but I get why people use
it although maybe I should. But what I don't get is why a site with pictures
to pin needs $200M. It's basically still the same site it was when it had
$500K in funding. Does it cost $200M to scale from thousands of users to
hundreds of millions? Wikipedia doesn't need $200M to run.

~~~
adventured
They'd be crazy not to take $200m for 4% give or take. Given the beating high
flying tech stocks have taken lately on Wall St., and the continued Fed
tapering, who knows how much longer the easy money gates will remain open.
Better to take it now, and have tons of cash to ride out any eventuality. Bull
markets don't run forever, and clearly Pinterest is hardly even in the first
inning of monetization, so they're going to need the money. The public
markets, even in semi-euphoric mode, will not react well to zero sales and
$200m a year in losses.

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DigitalSea
I've always admired Pinterest. As a guy I don't really understand the appeal
of it myself, but my soon-to-be wife absolutely loves it, so does her mum, her
sisters, my sisters and my sisters friends. They seem to have done a fantastic
job at capturing the female demographic and it has paid dividends for them.

Congratulations to the team, curious to see how Pinterest can take it to the
next level. Most likely the e-commerce route is the one they will be taking.

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DaniFong
It is important to ask -- what on earth could this be _for_?

SpaceX achieved orbital flight on that amount of capital...

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sleepyhead
"Pinterest has raised a total of $764 million to date."

That is a lot of money to be able to pin some photos.

~~~
MichaelGG
Perhaps don't read it as "raised" but "was given". Giving away 4% for $200M
seems like a fairly slick deal for a company with no revenue(?) yet.

OTOH, in 2012 Twitter spent over $250M on staff and R&D. Pinterest is
nearing(?) that size of application (perhaps more as Pinterest has more photos
than Twitter had), although Twitter had many more employees then (I think 1500
or so compared to "140+" WP says for Pinterest). Billions is a hell of a lot
to share some SMSes.

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penguindev
Maybe they can use this money to hire someone who can fix their !$!@# pinit
button [the small gray button with numbers on the right] to actually stay
where I put it (and not move to the right 20px and bleed over other content).

Really, it's the only social button I put on each of my wife's blog posts
[echoing what others have mentioned, she likes pinterest for the 'bridal
trends', recipe ideas, art, ...], and it's easily the most annoying thing on
the page... sure let's have the JS totally remove all the css/elements that
were there and recreate it differently.

~~~
kentbrew
I've just pushed a test fix; if you will please add data-pin-pad-count="true"
to a Pin It button that has data-pin-config="beside" you should see whitespace
under your pin count.

I'm not pushing this out to everyone until I understand how badly it will
break other sites that have already implemented fixes like yours.

Hope this helps!

~~~
penguindev
Thanks, but doesn't change a thing for me. It's still breaking out of a
containing div to the right.

And I forgot to mention that the vertical alignment was/is also a PITA. Got
the image where I want it, and other text elements bottom-aligned to it?
Great, now once the JS munges things it's all changed - the image gets higher.

edit: submitted a ticket to pinterest support, keyword kentbrewster

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uses
Shouldn't they have their own $200M by now? No but seriously.

Oh.
[http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=pinterest](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=pinterest)

~~~
k0
You must have a developer account or something. Pinterest, for me, is free and
they don't seem to be placing ads or monetizing sales like Etsy. I only
connect to Pinterest at 3 distinct times/places: waiting rooms, king
conference room (toilet), and when I'm looking for inspiration and ideas
(sometimes all in one :)...so I am probably not considered a hard-core user.

How does google search attempts equal 200 million USD...if that were the case
searches for Obamacare or Affordable Care Act would have paid the national
debt thrice over. [I just used a gov't example, I don't care what the
healthcare bill is called]

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goronbjorn
I can hear the sound of Yahoo! getting its Alibaba money ready…

~~~
kkwok
They better watch out for Alibaba getting its Alibaba money ready

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msoad
If I did the math right, Instagram when Facebook acquired it, was worth ONE
FIFTH today's Pinterest.

Does that make sense to you?

~~~
hagope
by today's math, Instagram was a bargain for fb...

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steve_benjamins
"In the future search will be a discovery tool" ... I think this sentence
needs some work. It feels empty of meaning. Am I missing something? Or does
the sentence really simply mean: "in the future search will be a way to
discover things"?

Because in that case the future may already be here :)

~~~
nwenzel
It may possibly be that search today is used to find a particular thing that
you are looking for (directions, a way to fix code, a specific book). Whereas
in the future, search will lead you to new things that you didn't specifically
know you needed to find. More like browsing random sections of a book store.

But yes, it definitely sounds like it's saying that search will be a tool to
search for things.

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loceng
I imagine Facebook will try to acquire Pinterest - if there is any money left.

~~~
duaneb
Pinterest would be fools to accept their money at orders of magnitude better
valuations. Pinterest has a solid product, a vastly better user experience
(albeit solving different problems), is not pressed to find or invent business
models, and could easily expand into more commercial areas. Facebook is a
brand people love to hate, it has a stench of evil, and a highly uncertain
financial future. What could Facebook do for Pinterest?

~~~
qq66
Pinterest makes literally no money today. Facebook made a billion dollars in
profit this quarter. Who, exactly, has the "highly uncertain financial
future"?

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gadders
Slightly off-topic - my wife has 20k followers on Pinterest. Is that a lot,
relatively speaking? Any suggestions as to monetisation? She already gets
invited to events via Pinterest.

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pyrrhotech
This values it 27% higher than Yelp and 4.2x Trulia for perspective

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ycpan
I use it as a tool to collect and save infographic data... quite a good tool
but the valuation is kinda beyond my understanding!

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forrecovery123
Remember the dot com bust days, when companies with ZERO revenues raised
BILLIONS on user (vanity?) numbers ?

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bstar77
Alternate title considered... "Pinterest adding $200M to it's debt"

~~~
colinbartlett
Where did you read that the $200M raised was debt financing?

~~~
k0
Think about it.

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i386
What exactly is the “Visual web”?

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mynameishere
I've heard the name and ignored it. But what the hell, let's take a look.
Obviously, this website is very popular with some people but if you go to the
default page you get this:

[http://imgur.com/XWdkO8i](http://imgur.com/XWdkO8i)

...a popup that says "He used Pinterest to start his collection" on top of a
blurry background. Who's "He"? Sign up with Facebook? Why? And all this
confusion in a popup? Really? The very worst aspect of 1990s web design--
pointless popups--on the front page of a trendy website? And with no obvious
way to close the popup? And I kept expecting the 45 seconds to go to zero,
like a time bomb, but nothing happened. Not only are you annoying and
threatening me with a timer, but it's totally static. Really? Why not put a
dancing William Shatner next to it? That would really bring back the memories.

But you can, in fact, close the popup. Go to the bottom and click "About
Pinterest", and you get this:

[http://imgur.com/6NDBdUm](http://imgur.com/6NDBdUm)

"It's helpful. New descriptive guides help steer your search in the right
directions" ...with a picture of a phone and links to install pinterest on my
iphone or android devices. ...but, why would I do that? Even after reading an
article about the company and looking at their "about us" page, I have no clue
what their reason for existence is. Visual Web? You mean "img" tags? That part
of the web?

What am I doing wrong? Am I like a person outside of the 14-22 year
demographic watching MTV for the first time?

~~~
120738470293740
I am in agreement with how jmduke responded to your comment, but wanted to add
a couple things.

I contracted with Pinterest for several months on a team directly adjacent to
the team responsible for designing, testing, and building the logged out home
page you see here. It was very thorough, going through immense amounts of
research with a multitude of completely different design experiences, and this
page (and the others in this set) tested better than everything else
throughout the process. And the team didn't simply A/B test what had the
highest conversion, they tested sentiment in terms of: "After converting from
this specific experience, is using the actual product in line with what that
landing page led me to believe?"

I got to see this process firsthand, be in meetings that involved discussions
around how to handle a massively important project like this, and I couldn't
imagine the team doing a better job.

It's easy to dismiss this when you aren't a user and don't see it as useful
for you specifically. But the landing page isn't aimed at you. It's aimed at
many demographics who could find it useful if they arrived here. And in that
regard, after seeing the improvement in actual conversion data myself, I find
it successful thus far.

~~~
janesvilleseo
Exactly! They are optimizing for their current users (or soon to be users). In
other words, you may be a little out of their target market. Second, if
someone came to the site directly, then they have at least some brand
awareness. So they have some idea what Pinterest is about in the first place.

