
Pinterest raises $27 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz - noelsequeira
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/07/confirmed-pinterest-raises-27-million-round-led-by-andreessen-horowitz/
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callmeed
I have not seen my wife so engaged with a site or mobile app since Facebook
and possibly Angry Birds. That's when I knew Pinterest was going to be huge.
Good for them on raising this round.

I think the path to monetization will be a no-brainer as well.

Contrast that with the folks as Svpply (I heard hopes for them for early on)
who sit around saying "They’ve (pinterest) locked themselves into a niche
community of 22-35yr old women" while Pinterest is absolutely blowing up and
eating their lunch. Very stupid and short-sighted view IMO.
[http://pieratt.tumblr.com/post/10452105095/who-svpply-is-
com...](http://pieratt.tumblr.com/post/10452105095/who-svpply-is-competing-
with-sort-of)

Take note on what your spouse/kids/SO spend their time engaged in.

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natgordon
From the article you posted from by Svpply blog: "It’s going to be very
difficult for them to grow beyond puppies and photos of Ryan Gosling."

Wow. What a complete disregard for women as a desirable demographic. When
companies act like this it's an opportunity for the rest of us.

I've been using pinterest the same way I use twitter; as social media for my
business (whose target demographic is women 22-35).

~~~
rokhayakebe
_as social media for my business_

I wish I could say "OMG", but HN wouldn't allow me. This is exactly what I was
afraid of when I found Pinterest: marketers. This is the start of a decline.

~~~
salemh
Why so? The Twitter deluge of SM marketing? (I'm trying to figure out your
concern).

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rokhayakebe
When people start to promote their products on places like this, they end
dominating the content.

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usaar333
I always find it incredibly amazing to wander in to a wildly popular site that
no one I know uses. It's a sad testament to how incredibly isolated hackers
can be.

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zacharyz
"The start-up, which has no revenue to speak of yet"

This is the aspect of the site that always made me scratch my head and say
"huh?"

It is no doubt a well designed site that engages women. Despite being in beta
and invite only I know a bunch of women who are really into it. I don't think
being engaging is enough though - where do they go from here? How do they
actually justify the valuation? Are they going to have "paid" posts for
advertising? Are they going to some how sell the data mined from their users?
Paid accounts?

This site seems like it is going to be even harder to monetize than reddit.

~~~
diolpah
I'll take a wild guess, predicated on the fact that twitter is another social
platform that's difficult to monetize: sponsored pinboards.

My company would pay to have "sponsored pinboards" all day long if the net ROI
was positive. But that's a _huge_ "if".

~~~
ericsantos89
I think that pinterest needs to be careful on how many of these "sponsored
pinboards" they have. It is currently something cool and hip, but if the ratio
of "sponsored pinboards" and user pinboards isn't correct, they can turn off a
lot of users.

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girlvinyl
I am their target demo and have been completely sucked in to it. Pinterest is
addictive and engaging and completely enjoyable. It's the first place I go
when I am having a bad day. This is one of the most exciting sites I have seen
in a long time. My friends and I can't keep off of it.

Monetization will be a breeze. This demo doesn't get upset about ads,
especially if they're relevant. And ads are just the LCD, no-brainer way to
monetize. There is huge potential here.

I just don't understand why they need _so_ much money. Jeeez, what are they
spending it on?

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angelbob
If they raised $25 million while valued at $200 million, and earlier raised
$10 million, presumably at a much lower valuation...

That doesn't leave the company a huge amount of equity and control, does it?

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adient
It was $10 million based on $40 million valuation. Combined with the latest
investment, it seems a majority percentage of equity would still belong to the
founders. Well past successful at a $200 million valuation, for sure.

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kbd
One of my female friends is _obsessed_ with this site. I don't get it, but
then I'm not their demographic.

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rgrieselhuber
I remember meeting Ben in Palo Alto last year when he was still figuring
things out and trying to raise money. Sounds like it's been amazing year since
then. Congrats guys. :-)

~~~
rokhayakebe
_when he was still figuring things out_

I would like to hear a bit more about this. Did they start with a different
product or idea?

~~~
rgrieselhuber
No, it was the Pinterest you see today but I think they only had a core user
group and were figuring out how to make it grow from there.

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knarf55
Congrats to the team who built such an addicting product to users. Here's
hoping that you won't get comfortable with that money now and keep innovating!
:)

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GBKS
It's great to see all this action in the social commerce space. With
Pinterest, Polyvore, Svpply, Fancy, Weheartit, Wookmark, Wanelo, Sumally, et
al it will be interesting to see if there will be a big winner, or if we will
end up with several players for different demographics and more targeted
products.

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mrchess
Pinterest has existed for many years as a sub-product of a website called Lime
Life called MySnaps (<http://www.limelife.com/bookmarklet.html>). It is
essentially the exact same thing as Pinterest except that MySnaps but is not a
standalone product, nor is not as "clean" as Pinterest's implementation.

I only know about MySnaps as I once got a freelance e-mail about a two years
ago from someone asking me to recreate MySnaps for them but I shrugged it off.
Makes me wonder if it was the Pinterest guys ;)

It's really interesting how marketing, and presentation can make a product
more popular than your competitors. Other companies with success like this
include Quizlet, and Facebook.

EDIT: But now thinking about it, isn't this essentially Delicious all over
again as a different mutation?

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pumblechook
So it's a photo sharing site?

~~~
diolpah
Yes, but with links. So it's definitely worth billions.

Edit: Now that I've actually looked at the site to ensure I wasn't speaking
out of ignorance, I noticed that the external links are not rel="nofollow".
This will be a brilliant breeding ground for SEO spam.

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timjahn
Are we really congratulating a "company" that makes no revenue on raising
money again?

When will it stop?

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chsonnu
Looks like less engaging 4chan that just happens to have a female demographic.

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iambot
Congrats to the pinterest team, perhaps they can invest in more servers now ;P

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sahillavingia
They're killing it. Glad to have helped found it.

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jamesjyu
Care to elaborate?

