Building Pinterest’s video platform
As video content becomes more ubiquitous on the internet, it’s an increasingly important part of Pinterest. Pinterest is one of the largest visual platforms in the world, where people have saved billions of pieces of rich media, making it ripe for further video disruption. As part of our progress with video, we launched native video Pins last year to help Pinners more seamlessly watch videos right on Pinterest. Here Norbert Potocki covers how and why they built a video platform behind it.
Five Lessons from Scaling Pinterest
“I was involved with Pinterest from 5 employees through 650. Here’s what I learned.
This post is a distillation of the lessons I learned, first as an investor, then as one of the company’s first product managers, and finally leading product for our discovery team — overseeing search, recommendations, our visual search team, and more.”
Five More Lessons from Scaling Pinterest
These lessons focus more on team and culture building as you enter into hypergrowth.
Pinterest forms Labs research group under chief scientist Jure Leskovec
Pinterest today is announcing the formation of Pinterest Labs, a new research unit under the leadership of the startup’s chief scientist, Jure Leskovec.
Currently the group contains around 20 people who are spread across existing departments; they’ll keep working in their current positions, but they have the mandate to do more research-oriented activities, including collaborating with people inside and outside the company on academic papers, experimental applications, challenge problems, open source software, and releases of data. Over time, Pinterest will be increasing its research and development expenditures and bringing on people who will work completely under Pinterest Labs.
Pinterest Poaches 2 Longtime Google Execs to Develop New Ad Formats and Targeting
Pinterest is after Google’s talent. The San Francisco-based company has scooped up two Google execs as it looks to build out its advertising team. Jon Alferness and Meredith Guerriero bring search and programmatic expertise.
Pinterest’s president talks search and getting marketers to buy in
After a slow entry into advertising, Pinterest released a slew of new features last year. And it hasn’t slowed down in 2017. Last week, Pinterest rolled out search ads, and yesterday it announced more search tools that could broaden the platform’s e-commerce capabilities.
Digiday sat down with Pinterest’s president, Tim Kendall, to talk about the platform’s expansion into search and how it is pitching itself to marketers.
Redesigning Pinterest, block by block
“Over the years, the designs for our website, apps and marketing had all begun to drift, so they no longer felt like they had the same personality. A number of new features had also been added without a clear vision to how they fit into the overall design, so the interface had begun to feel cluttered and hard to understand. There was no visual hierarchy or system to help you understand what was important when you looked at any given page. As a result, all the inspiring ideas people save on Pinterest — by far the most important part of our experience — were getting lost.
As it turns out, it’s damn hard to design consistent and beautiful things at scale.”