The definitive timeline of Pinterest’s improbable journey to visual social media giant

Pinterest has always upended expectations, and for a service devoted to enabling its users to curate whatever they cared about, the company has also ironically defied categorization. It sits between social media and search. It pioneered the concept of the infinite scroll, yet it resisted the idea of a feed. It leaned heavily on Facebook alums to drive many elements of its business, yet it often made more sense as a visually driven alternative to Google search advertising. Women helped define Pinterest in a number of essential ways, but then women were the focal point of the largest scandal in the company’s history. It was always born to be the best shopping tool ever devised on the internet, yet Pinterest’s path to get there was more methodical than early watchers could have anticipated. As CEO Bill Ready continues to transform the business and the experience, these 65 signal moments in Pinterest’s history showcase precisely how Pinterest became an underrated force in the digital sphere—in discovery, design, commerce, and culture.2008: Ben Silbermann, a low-level Google employee, and Paul Sciarra, his college friend who’d worked at a VC firm, launch Cold Brew Labs, a “mobile shopping startup.” (Why Cold Brew Labs? The name sounded cool.) Its first app, Tote, touts that it’s “the first woman’s fashion catalog on the iPhone.”2009: Tote isn’t a hit, but users like the feature allowing them to save items. Silbermann, who collected bugs as a kid, realizes that they’re sharing their taste with friends. Silbermann and Sciarra decide to pivot to a “social commerce application” that would make “curating and sharing collections of products dead simple.”

2009: Silbermann, while visiting Sciarra in New York (where he’s based), gets introduced by a mutual friend to a Columbia University architecture student named Evan Sharp. The two become fast friends, and Silbermann wants Sharp to join Cold Brew. Sharp demurs, opting to take a job at Facebook in product design, but he decides to help out as a side hustle. Sharp has thousands of photos and architectural drawings that he wants to organize effectively online.

2009: Sharp designs a grid layout for images. The grid, which represents a breakthrough digital experience that would quickly be emulated across the internet, is a web experience that allows the images to be “liquid,” as Silbermann would describe it, adapting to any size screen. The small team devotes months to refining the grid’s details—from where the text would be placed to the borders to the number of pixels (192) that each image commands. “The grid was everything,” as Sharp would later say.

October 2009: FirstMark Capital invests in the startup’s seed-stage financing as part of its FirstSteps program, later describing the product as a tool that lets users “curate and share the things you love.”

November 2009: The company picks the name Pinterest when Silbermann’s girlfriend Divya (who would become his wife) coins the portmanteau of “pinboards” and “interesting,” inspired by seeing “The Most Interesting Man in the World” ad for Dos Equis during Thanksgiving weekend.

January 2010: Silbermann attends Alt Summit (formally known as the Altitude Design Summit), a convening of a “community of thousands of women influencers and entrepreneurs in creative fields.” Pinterest’s earliest users had been women, many of them in Silbermann’s hometown of Des Moines, Iowa, who were hipped to it by Silbermann’s mom. At the event, he meets Victoria Smith, a popular interior design blogger, and both at Alt Summit and during the plane ride home, they start to develop an idea on which they can collaborate.

March 2010: Pinterest enters private beta.

May 2010: The design blogger Smith launches Pin It Forward, a “chain letter of bloggers” as Silbermann described, about what home meant to them. Every day for a month, 10 bloggers shared and explained their pinboards and then introduced the next blogger. The collective reputations of the participants and their creative use of Pinterest helped attract more interest, notably among a community that could showcase its value as a place to collect beautiful things and plan projects. As Silbermann would say, “People began using it the way we had hoped.”

October 2010: MySpace, which had played a seminal role in the growth of social media in the 2000s and fostering a culture of digital self-expression, redesigned its site to look remarkably like Pinterest. A small firestorm ensues, but the contretemps reinforces that Pinterest is onto something. As one tweet crystallized the tempest, “So @myspace has completely ripped off @pinterest. It really pisses me off when an old, tired hack tries to undermine hardworking inovators [sic].”

January 2011: All the work in seeding Pinterest with a community of people who could showcase its utility and appeal—Silbermann reportedly reached out to the site’s first 5,000 users, even offering his phone number—starts to pay off as the site starts to take off. “We may have only had something like 40k users,” Sahil Lavingia, the startup’s first design employee, told Startup Grind, “but Pinterest was driving millions and millions of page views. More importantly, it was all doubling each month.”

March 2011: Pinterest launches its first iPhone app, designed by Lavingia (who would go on to start Gumroad), attracting more users to it than anticipated.

May 2011: Pinterest quietly raises a $10 million Series A round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, a deal sourced by then-VP Sarah Tavel. The deal reportedly values the company at $40 million. Within a year, Pinterest would hire Tavel, where she’d go on to be the company’s first product manager. [Today, she’s a partner at Benchmark.]

https://twitter.com/jess/status/114500096556679168

July 2011: Pinterest moves its headquarters from Palo Alto, California, to San Francisco, taking over what had been an abandoned chicken factory in the South of Market district. It also reputedly hits 1 million users.

October 2011: Pinterest continues to grow virally—it now has an estimated 3.2 million users—by breaking that era’s social media orthodoxy: Pinners didn’t actually need to be social with anyone to get value from the service, and its visual grid layout wasn’t a reverse chronological, text-based feed. Internet observers wonder whether the company—which would attain a $200 million valuation after raising a Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz despite not having picked a business model—will choose ads or shopping.

November 2011: Pinterest hires a young software engineer named Tracy Chou.

January 2012: Google acquisition rumors lead to some speculative coverage of a potential “Ginterest” tie-up, but as noted, Silbermann is already focused on an IPO and not a sale to a larger tech company.

February 2012: According to a report from the web analytics service comScore, Pinterest exceeded 10 million monthly unique visitors faster than any other stand-alone site in history. At that moment, Pinterest had 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors. As TechCrunch put it, “It’s beautiful, it’s addictive, and now Pinterest is having its glorious hockey stick moment.”

February 2012: Scandal erupts after a blogger reveals that Pinterest changed user pins to affiliate-marketing links, allowing the company to collect a commission if someone followed the pin and made a purchase. Silbermann acknowledges the test but says it’s over.

March 2012: The company changes its terms of service to ban pins that encourage self-harm in an effort to combat the rise of content that promotes anorexia and bulimia, known as “thinspo” or “thinspiration” content.

May 2012: Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant, leads a $100 million investment round in Pinterest, valuing it at $1.5 billion. Two months later, at the annual Sun Valley conference for tech and media moguls, Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani told the New York Times, “I would love to buy, but I don’t think they would like to sell.”

August 2012: Pinterest formally comes out of beta and is available to all, just before the company releases its Android app.

August 2012: As thinspo content remains a concern on the platform, Pinterest goes a step further from its change earlier in the year. If users search for “thinspo” or “thinspiration,” the service returned a message that stated, “Eating disorders are not lifestyle choices, they are mental disorders that if left untreated can cause serious health problems or could even be life-threatening.” It also referred users to the National Eating Disorder Association hotline.

October 2012: Silbermann appears on the cover of Fast Company, which dubs Pinterest “the internet’s latest Great Revenue-Generating Hope.”

January 2013: The startup makes its first acquisition—of Punchfork, a social network for sharing recipes, which is one of the more popular use cases on Pinterest. As one blog cheekily framed the news, “Pinterest Acquires Punchfork, Which is Basically Pinterest.”

March 2013: Pinterest adds analytics for the first time so that verified businesses can see which of their images are being pinned—and who is doing the pinning.

September 2013: Silbermann announces in a blog post that Pinterest will start to test advertising. “It’s so important that Pinterest is a service that will be here to stay,” he wrote. “To help make sure it does, we’re going to start experimenting with promoting certain pins from a select group of businesses.” He goes to promise that the ads will be “tasteful” and “transparent.”

October 2013: Just after the annual Grace Hopper Conference for women in engineering, Chou publishes a Medium post titled, “Where are the numbers?” criticizing the tech industry for obscuring exactly how many women hold technical roles. She volunteers in the essay that “Pinterest has 11 women out of 89 engineers, putting us at 12% female in engineering—the same percentage as coming out of undergraduate CS programs.” Chou’s leadership and transparency—especially when considered in the larger context of the role that women played in naming Pinterest, funding it, helping it spread virally, and ultimately attracting a reported 70% female audience—further cements Pinterest’s reputation as a very different company from the more bro-centric tech sector.

November 2013: Pinterest allows users to add location data to pins. These “Place Pins” formalize and enhance the popularity of travel-related content. The company notes that it already had more than 750 million travel pins on Pinterest.

May 2014: After more than two years of deliberation, raising capital at a $3.8 billion valuation, and hiring many former Facebook executives—Pinterest formally launches its advertising business model. It woos a small group of brands, including ABC Family, Gap, and Target, to commit to $1 million campaigns.

November 2014: Shareaholic, a content marketing platform, unveils its quarterly social media traffic report, and the big news is that Pinterest has increased more than 50% in the last year in the volume of social traffic it refers. This makes Pinterest number two to Facebook, and the company’s Promoted Pins is credited with the rise. Twenty-three percent of global social-mediated e-commerce sales can be attributed to Pinterest.

February 2015: Three years after the affiliate-links controversy, Pinterest cuts off users from adding affiliate marketing to pins to profit from the site and app. The company alternatively suggests that users seeking to monetize their participation on Pinterest do so via “paid social media marketing involving Pinterest, be paid to curate a board, or be paid to create original content for a business.”

March 2015: The company confirms an $11 billion valuation after raising $367 million of a planned $577.9 million round.

June 2015: Pinterest adds a “buy button” on more than 2 million products (out of 50 billion pins), but it isn’t the merchant and takes no sales cut, focusing on advertising revenue from retailers promoting those shoppable pins. Partners include Shopify and the payment provider Braintree, run by . . . Bill Ready.

September 2015: Pinterest hits the 100 million user milestone. It’s the first time the company itself shared an audience metric. At the same time, the company is further edging itself away from being compared with social networks, such as Facebook’s Instagram, and positioning itself closer to being a Google rival. Sharp at the time said that Pinterest “is much more like a search engine” than Instagram. “On Pinterest, you search for something, you find a great outfit, you can buy that outfit.”

June 2016: The company adds more e-commerce features, including a “virtual shopping bag” that allows people to compile items for potential purchase across the site as well as a refresh of merchant profiles so visitors can more clearly identify what’s new or on sale.

August 2016: Pinterest introduces video ads for the first time. Images of the products in the videos appeared alongside and were clickable. “Candidly, the company just in general has underinvested until now in video as a platform,” the company’s head of global sales told the New York Times. ”What you’re going to see going forward is a very big investment in video.”

February 2017: Pinterest “doubles down” on AI by launching Pinterest Labs, which is dedicated to exploring how to use these tools to improve “image recognition, user modeling, recommender systems, and big data analytics.” Around the same time, the company released a beta version of Lens, a visual search tool, allowing users to take a smartphone picture and discover related pins.

March 2017: China reportedly blocks access to Pinterest because of some of the politically sensitive material on the site, such as boards dedicated to human rights abuses.

February 2018: Pinterest shares that users are now conducting 600 million Lens searches a month, with nails, sunglasses, and tattoos among the most popular queries. On Lens’ anniversary, the company enhances the tool so that users can combine text with an image, what today would be hailed as an example of “multimodal AI.”

March 2018: Shopping Ads, which automatically transform a retailer’s product pins into Promoted Pins, expands widely after a successful test with such retailers as eBay, Ulta Beauty, and Wayfair.

April 2018: The company begins testing inclusive beauty searches on its web version, so users can refine beauty results by a range of skin tones. The following January, Pinterest will roll out this feature widely and add it to mobile searches as well.

October 2018: Amid growing pressure from Facebook, which is adding more shopping functionality to Instagram, Pinterest revamps shoppable pins with up-to-date info on pricing and whether items are in stock. It also adds related product suggestions in fashion and home decor pins.

February 2019: The company now blocks anti-vaccination searches across the board, and it even deletes anti-vaccination content it detects that is uploaded to the site. “People come to our platform to find inspiration,” says Pinterest’s Ifeoma Ozoma, “and there’s nothing inspiring about harmful content.”

March 2019: Pinterest IPO prospectus is publicly released. It reveals that the company had grown to $756 million in 2018 revenue with just a relatively modest loss of $63 million. The words “shopping” and “e-commerce” each appear only five times in its prospectus, compared with 199 instances of “ads” and “advertising.”

April 2019: Pinterest goes public. A small first-day pop in the share price gives the company a $16 billion market cap.

November 2019: Sharp redesigns Pinterest as part of a mission to create a kinder social network. The company updated its motto from “Help people discover and do the things they love” to “Bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love.” The updated site changes user profiles, eliminating follower counts and reducing the size of a profile picture. Sharp dubs his efforts a move to what he calls “compassionate design.”

January 2020: Pinterest enhances its Lens tool by adding an augmented reality-powered Try On feature for lipstick. Once users find a shade they like, they could then pick from brands offering that particular shade. The feature also incorporates Pinterest’s inclusive skin tones.

June 2020: Amid the national racial reckoning in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, two former Pinterest employees, Aerica Shimizu Banks and Ifeoma Ozoma (who promoted the company’s restriction of anti-vax content the year earlier), alleged that they faced racial discrimination while working for the company (each left in May 2020). The company launched a culture review that same month.

August 2020: Former COO Francoise Brougher files a lawsuit alleging gender discrimination at Pinterest, accusing Silbermann of overseeing an insular male culture at the most senior level of the company. Given the role that women played in so many foundational moments in Pinterest’s history (not to mention their influence as users), the accusations attract more attention and scrutiny than perhaps other companies going through similar moments of employee-led assessments of their companies’ role in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. That same month, Pinterest names its first Black board member, the film executive Andrea Wishom.

October 2020: Ahead of the presidential election, Pinterest announces that it has banned QAnon content and is proactively removing any content related to the conspiracy theory. A Pinterest spokesperson tells Insider that the platform had actually quietly initiated the ban in 2018. “We believe in a more inspired internet, and that means being deliberate about creating a safe and positive space for Pinners. Pinterest is not a place for QAnon conspiracy theories or other harmful and misleading content.”

December 2020: Pinterest settles Brougher’s lawsuit and at the same time commits to a number of recommendations from its culture review, including greater pay transparency and unconscious bias training.

March 2021: Pinterest hosts its first advertiser summit, called Pinterest Presents. The theme is a more inspired internet.

July 2021: As the “creator economy” heats up, Pinterest adds the ability for creators to make Idea Pins shoppable, earning affiliate link commissions and being able to make sponsored content for brands in the Idea Pins, multipage video format. “Creators deserve to be rewarded for the inspirat