

Pinterest founder kept going to avoid embarassment of failure - acak
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/13/tech/web/pinterest-sxsw/index.html?

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sbisker
I'm impressed with Pinterest, don't get me wrong - but the article is painting
over a much more normal, steady trajectory - a long, quiet bootstrap, followed
by a steady rise amplified by the megaphone of VC funding.

The article speaks of a site that "few had heard of six months ago" - but even
a simple CrunchBase lookup tells you that enough people had heard of the
company six months ago to give them a Series B of 27 million dollars
(<http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pinterest>)

I understand that I'm not the intended audience of this article, and that few
"mainstream" folks had heard of it six months ago - but this is hardly a case
of sudden and unexpected stardom. On the contrary, it seems the founders
decided after some time that this wasn't the sort of idea that they could
easily bootstrap to success.

Indeed, TechCrunch hints at this as a possibility in their September article -
written a full six months before SXSW, as they started to get traction in the
startup community - where they muse that the company seemed to have quietly
raised a 10 million round _another_ six months prior (which I believe has been
confirmed true)([http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/15/sources-pinterest-has-
alrea...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/15/sources-pinterest-has-already-
pinned-down-10m-at-a-40m-valuation/))

No wonder the public thinks of startups as overnight successes - the press
gives them what they want to hear, and the startup itself has no incentive to
correct it (lest they lose that publicity.)

~~~
AznHisoka
I agree, ask any mommy blogger, and they'll tell you that you've been living
under a cave if you haven't heard of Pinterest 6 months ago. We in the tech
world live in a very different bubble.

That attitude you're referring to is dangerous as well. It makes startup
founders uneasy, and worrisome if they don't experience quick success, while
we all know it's a long long road that requires patience, and even some luck.

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gkoberger
I met Ben at a coffee shop a few years ago, and he explained Pinterest to me.
Going into the meeting, I didn't get it at all. But by the time I left, I knew
it would be huge.

His perseverance is impressive. He could have looked at the number of users he
had and logically decided to give up anytime over the past few years. However,
he believed in his product -- and now everyone does. Good for him.

~~~
joering2
Lets see how things are going to play. AFAIK they burned $70MM so far and have
some issues with copyrights in re to all those pictures "pinned".

~~~
garbowza
Where did you get the $70MM figure? Published reports show half that.

~~~
joering2
unable to find it now. it was in one of techcrunch articles. 76 to be exact.
now it says half of it.

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petercooper
Good on him/them :-) I was one of the early users a couple of years or so ago
and both I and my wife used it for a couple of weeks and didn't really "get"
it. Now it's going gangbusters and it's _actually found its audience_.

Finding the right user base can be as time consuming, or even impossible, as
finding the right life partner IMHO.

------
staunch
That's _partly_ the reason every founder has kept going.

~~~
rokhayakebe
I stopped telling people alltogether. This way only "I" know of my many
failures.

~~~
webwright
Telling people is a great psychological hack. Once you declare what you're
doing, failing is a lot harder. If you keep it under your hat, quitting is
easy.

------
jyou
I first heard this website from business week a while ago - guess that was
when most of the world began to notice it. I would not have been impressed
from a tech-crunch article....hmmm...another photo sharing site targeted at a
niche market/audience (craft community)

How smart they are! Same photo sharing plus "like", "follow", but they
definitely focused on the right community and audience - a group of people who
really love they are doing and are passionate of their work, and willing to
share with people alike.

And even better, it appears most of the images are actually "pinned" from
other web sites (which store and serve the images?), so they are building
their pin-board business on top of the whole internet. (how are they spending
those millions of dollars?)

