Ben Silbermann

“I want Pinterest to be human. The Internet's still so abstract... To me, boards are a very human way of looking at the world.”

“I hope Pinterest is my last job.”

“I was obsessed with this idea that these things that you collect, they just say so much about who you are. I can't say it came from hard-nosed business analysis... It was just something I really want to see built.”

“When Pinterest works well, it helps you find things that are meaningful to you. We want to build a system that helps you do that.”

“So many things that I was excited about as a kid were about proximity. The idea that somebody could grow up in rural Iowa and be into break dancing because of YouTube - that was a really simple, profound idea.”

“I think that a lot of the most talented and driven people, they're not super deterred by failure. So if you put out a really big challenge, I think they get reality excited by that - they say, 'Hey, why not, let's go give it a shot, and if we fall short on that, at least we took a shot at doing something really important and meaningful.'”

“One of the things I've learned is to be receptive of feedback.”

“I really think that even though Pinterest isn't a lot of people's idea of hard technology, it helps make everyday things a little bit better. And I believe that for most people, everyday things, those are everything.”

“For me, Google was the coolest place. It was the coolest place. People there were so smart. And they were all doing these really interesting things. I just felt lucky to be part of it even in a small way.”

“I always read about these stories of entrepreneurs - it's like they're in the desert with no water, and they're the ones that survive. But I've been really fortunate to have people on my team who are optimistic about the future and who know that if you work through hard times that there's usually something good at the end.”

“As a kid, I always idolized entrepreneurs. I thought they were cool people in the way that I thought basketball players were cool people. It's cool that some people get paid to dunk basketballs, but I'm not one of those people.”

“One of the hard parts about building a service that you use yourself is that it's easy to forget what it was like the very first time someone signs up. Every once in a while, I'll create a brand new account and give it a try and see how hard it is to find things that I really love, see if I'm using it or thinking about it differently.”

“At a small company, so much of the trick is focus. Not only can you only do a finite number of things, but you have to do them in the right order.”

“The companies that I really admire the most are the ones that have a deep visceral understanding of why people use their service, and they figure out ways of making money that are completely consistent with how people are feeling and what they are doing at the time.”

“What you collect says so much about who you are.”

“There's a lot of pressure to look like the last company that was successful.”

“I really liked insects - all kinds: flies, grasshoppers, weevils.”

“When you open up Pinterest, you should feel like you've walked into a building full of stuff that only you are interested in. Everything should feel handpicked for you.”

“No amount of technology is going to change the fact that people process information visually.”

“Google was like the only company that was like, 'We're making so much money; let's take a picture of every street in the world.' Nobody does that.”