Pinterest grew out of a habit Ben Silbermann had as a boy: he collected insects and stamps. His website let people collect pictures instead, pinned to boards for a kitchen, a wedding, or a trip. It launched in March 2010 as an invite-only site. By the time Pinterest filed to go public in March 2019, about 250 million people used it each month, and advertisers prized it because users came there to plan what to buy.

Boards Full of Wants

Silbermann left a job at Google to start a company. With Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp, an architecture student, he built Pinterest. Other social sites asked users to share their lives with friends. Pinterest asked them to save ideas for themselves. That made it calmer than Facebook or Twitter, and it drew many women in the American Midwest early on. The bet was that a board full of wants would one day make an ideal place to sell ads.

Above the Range

Pinterest priced its shares at $19 on April 17, 2019, above its planned range. The stock opened at $23.75 on the New York Stock Exchange the next day and closed at $24.40, up 28 percent. Lyft and Zoom were going public in the same weeks. Growth slowed after the pandemic, and in 2022 Silbermann handed the chief executive job to Bill Ready, a former Google commerce executive. Pinterest still trades on the NYSE under PINS.

Cover: Rack Picture for Dr. Nones, William A. Mitchell. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a rack picture of cards pinned to a board.