Pinterest Raises $225 Million at $3.8 Billion Valuation

The number of "I don't get it." comments on this thread should be a lesson for everyone. THIS is the reason diversity in your company and social circle is important. A forum full of men not understanding how a $3.8 billion company is successful.

In case anyone wants an easy way of understanding what Pinterest is and why it&#x27;s so popular with women, I urge you to find one of those cheesy women&#x27;s magazines (Cosmo will do) and flip through it. You will most certainly find a page that looks like this: <a href="http://www.zatchels.com/press/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Woman-Magazine-_-Feb-28th-_-Feature-762x1024.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zatchels.com&#x2F;press&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2013&#x2F;03&#x2F;Wom...</a><p>Pinterest is a digital representation of exactly that page, but now anyone can be the curator (not just Cosmo) <i>and</i> more importantly, it has the ability to make the buying process more frictionless. You want the hat, sunglasses, and skirt? Great, just click the button and buy.

This won&#x27;t go over well with the YC crowd given the forgiveness-is-better-than-permission indoctrination, but I find the scale of Pinterest&#x27;s copyright infringements (users or Pinterest copying images from blogs and other sites and republishing them on Pinterest pages) to be really mind-boggling. I guess as long as it&#x27;s not music or movies, both with powerful lobbies and lawyers behind them protecting their interests, still images are fair game (forget fair use) and rights-holders, often individual bloggers who took a nice photo, are at the mercy of DMCA. So Pinterest just pisses me off.

I think many HN readers have a hard time relating to Pinterest because we aren&#x27;t the target demographic, but from what I can find they have great metrics.<p>The question is whether they can monetize despite lack of purchasing intent (as compared to Google, Amazon, Yelp, etc). However from some anecdotal evidence[0], it appears that growing revenue may not be as difficult for Pinterest as it is for Facebook or Twitter.<p>I&#x27;m pretty bullish on Pinterest, and a $3.8B valuation doesn&#x27;t seem out of line compared to Twitter ($20B) and Facebook (~$80B pre-IPO), Instagram ($500M).<p>[0]: <a href="http://mashable.com/2012/03/28/pinterest-amazon-spam/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mashable.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;03&#x2F;28&#x2F;pinterest-amazon-spam&#x2F;</a>

Pinterest is the fastest growing source of social referrals on the web, 3x as many as twitter.(1) Price seems high, but they are only 2nd to Facebook on one of the holy grails of marketing - social referrals -<p>(1) <a href="https://blog.shareaholic.com/social-media-traffic-trends-10-2013/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.shareaholic.com&#x2F;social-media-traffic-trends-10-...</a>

I used to think that Pinterest was a fad but that&#x27;s because I had little understanding of its appeal and obviously I am not the target market but over the last few months for an article I&#x27;ve been writing about Pinterest being a silently growing dark horse in the social category I&#x27;ve come to realise it appeals to a lot of people. Amongst the fashion, make-up and hair niches Pinterest is pretty darn popular. Fashion stylists use it to create inspiration collections, make-up artists use it for helping create new looks and hairdressers especially love creating hair collections for inspiration as well.<p>There is also another segment that Pinterest appeals to and it&#x27;s massive: women. Pinterest is used by a lot of women to create wishlists and curate their own look collections. My girlfriend has an avid interest in vintage clothing &amp; decor and the TV show Mad Men and she uses Pinterest to create outfits that match those of the TV show. But not only that, she uses it as a shopping basket&#x2F;wishlist of sorts and that kind of data is surely valuable. I know for a fact she has made purchases as a result of collections she has created on Pinterest, more times than I can count and I assume many other people have as well.<p>Many might not see the appeal in what appears to be from the outside an over-glorified image collecting service, but it&#x27;s obvious it&#x27;s a lot easier for Pinterest to make money in comparison to the likes of Facebook which currently struggle with monetisation. Don&#x27;t underestimate Pinterest.

I&#x27;m not surprised, Pinterest is the ultimate consumerist social network and thus worth <i>a lot</i> of money. The method of self-expression is obsessively arranging and curating shopping lists of colorful items, and sharing them with like-minded people. It doesn&#x27;t take long to realize how much money there is to be made off this.

I smell a bubble. They&#x27;re not nearly worth any of this.<p>Their service is trivial, and can&#x27;t scale. They have a great user base, but I can&#x27;t imagine them moving in the right direction. At the moment, it looks like a glorified wishlist.<p>At one point, the paradox of choice will kick in, and they&#x27;ll realize that too much (without proper curation) is as bad as not enough.<p>I hope they will do the right thing (it&#x27;s quite obvious what they should do), but I predict that they won&#x27;t. They&#x27;ll miss the big picture, focus on scaling in quantity (not quality), and burn through their money in no time. That&#x27;s what happen to startups that think they have won.<p>But that&#x27;s just my prediction. We will see what will happen.

For pinterest user, why do you use it? I tried it once and thought it wasn&#x27;t so helpful to me. I am always skeptical about the outlook of Pinterest but it seems like it&#x27;s pretty strong with funding.

Perhaps I&#x27;m the only one that finds it odd that Pintrest, Imgur, and even Facebook are filled with photos of text, or text is the dominant theme, rather than images? A meme is really the utter destruction and decent of a meaningful image into a text-based cliche. The designers of the internet have created a world so poorly usable by the average joe that billionaires are made fixing and herding stupid.

How has Pinterest user growth been? Engagement?<p>My sister loves it, I however could never get into it.

Stunning. Supposedly they only have 150 employees. Probably all celebrating their millions!<p>Curious that they&#x27;re raising so much after having just raised $200 million in February. What are they planning to do with all of this capital?

Woah, that&#x27;s big. This is Pinterest trying to dominate the market, to be <i>the</i> online curated catalog for women. This space has seen a lot of new players, like Fab and Wanelo. And the nature of the product lends itself to network effects that aren&#x27;t nearly as sticky as FB&#x27;s and Twitter&#x27;s, so while they&#x27;ve seen incredibly massive growth, they can&#x27;t rely on user lock-in to maintain it longterm. But the traction is there, the intent is there, so now they need to rev their engine to red line to dominate. Fitbit&#x27;s recent round of funding comes to mind.

Do investors let their teenage daughters decide where funding goes or something?

Dunno, given how much my wife is on Pinterest checking things out, including intentionally looking for various products she may want to buy, I think Pinterest has a very bright future....

So my guess is they want to do something similar to fancy.com but probably on a more massive scale? What do you spend $200M on in less than 10 months with max 150 employees?