Pinterest has announced that Ben Silbermann, CEO and co-founder of the company, will step down to be replaced by online trading expert Bill Ready, who will become CEO and member of the board of directors on June 29.
Ready has held important positions such as PayPal’s COO, CEO of Braintree and Venmo. The last two years he has served as Director of Commerce, Payments and the Next Billion Users at Googleoverseeing the vision, strategy, and delivery of your Google Commerce products.
Ben Silbermann to become CEO of Pinterest
Silbermann’s goodbye will not be definitive on Pinterest, at least not for the moment since will now hold the newly created position of executive chairmana new position that will allow him to continue overseeing the growth and development of the application, albeit with a slightly more distant view from the boardroom.
With a rather sentimental note in the Silbermann explains what this change means for him and his life project: “As you can imagine, this was a difficult decision. Much of my heart belongs to Pinterest. I guess you could call it a founder’s love. And, when you care so much about something, the natural instinct is to hug it as tight as you can. But often the most loving thing to do is to let it go and watch it blossom in new ways”.
Despite gathering more than 400 million monthly active users and building a healthy ad business that doubled revenues in the pandemic, the platform has always seemed like a missed opportunity to potential investors, with low growth and profits.
Instead of competing with retailers and other shopping platforms, Pinterest has become a very powerful discovery and curation engine for online shoppers, so this management change could mean that the time for dreaming is over and Now is the time to start earning more money.
Bill Ready, the new bet for the monetization of Pinterest
The question that perhaps many are asking is:who is bill readAnd why is Silbermann so confident that his appointment is the right move for Pinterest?
While at Google, Ready remained constantly updating its e-commerce tools, focusing primarily on improving the connection between search and purchase. A mission very similar to that of Pinterest.
Google has gone to various lengths to make its visual search results more similar to Pinterest, even adding a visual search tool almost the same as causing Pinterest referral traffic from search results to be limited.
It’s no secret that Google is not an easy competitor to beat and in fact the platform has the power to override any advantage Pinterest may have, so Ready, who knows Google’s internal plans and strategies on this front, it can be a key addition to achieving competitive advantage in the future.
Adding up the more than Pinterest has and Ready’s insights into how Google seeks to capitalize on them, we can assume that Pinterest is about to push its platform to the next level.
In this regard, Ready stated in a : “There is no better time to join Pinterest (…) I have long admired the brand and platform that Ben and the Pinterest team have created and all that the Company stands for. I am excited to build on that foundation to further scale the Company’s ecosystem and drive greater shareholder value. Having built multiple businesses from the ground up and operated at the scale of billions of users, I have a deep appreciation for what it takes to scale a business like this to the next level. I look forward to working closely with Ben, the Board and the rest of the leadership team to capitalize on the many opportunities that lie ahead and usher in the next chapter of Pinterest’s growth and success.”
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