Pinterest founder Hibberman, who insists on pursuing eternal beauty

The current popular picture sharing community--pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Hibberman (Ben Silbermann) had an interview at SXSW's interactive meeting with the Silicon Valley entrepreneur-writer Chris Dickson (Chris Dixon). In the interview talked about their unusual way of entrepreneurship.

Once, Pinterest was an obscure, rarely exposed internet start-up company, but it took six months to quickly jump red, and then the monthly number of independent visitors has exceeded 11 million, the average user per month on the site to stay 98 minutes- The long record is now behind Tumblr and Facebook in many social platforms.

Now the Hibberman has become the favorite of the technology media, and the 29-Year-old speaks softly, behaves unusually humbly, but embodies his original ideas everywhere.

Hibberman's advice to other tech entrepreneurs is "don't listen to too many suggestions." Indeed, his entrepreneurial path reflects the "atypical" features that deviate from the traditional laws of Silicon Valley. In many big decisions, he and Pinterest are different.

To pursue the beauty of eternity

Pinterest initially puzzled investors because it deviated from the prevailing trend. "When we first started a business, people were obsessed with the idea of ' real time ' and all the products were focused on the real-time text stream. Hibberman recalls.

But Pinterest does not care about speed and amount of information. "To me, [Pinterest's] picture nails are a very humane way of observing the world." "The message on Twitter is a novelty in two days, but I want to create a service that is Hibberman," he said, comparing Pinterest and Twitter. ”

Hibberman says one of Pinterest's ideas is to "help people discover what they are not aware of, so the beauty of simplicity is its high goal."

In addition, users of Apple's ipad Tablet PC are not far from the simplicity of Pinterest. Hibberman revealed that Pinterest will soon launch a "more beautiful" new version of the information page, and is developing ipad applications.

As the engineer "Chef"

Silicon Valley has always admired highly talented engineers, but Hibberman is not technically. After graduating from Yale University, he has worked on online sales and operations at Google.

"I left Google not because I didn't like it, but because I didn't have a technical background, so it's hard to create a product." "He said frankly. Then he met his start-up partner, who began paying heavily to hire people to develop iphone apps.

Today, Pinterest's 20-person team is not led by engineers. The company is divided into three functional departments: Engineering, design, social networking. "Social" employees are good at quantitative analysis or community operations, they analyze how and why users use Pinterest, and study the derivative laws of social groups and social norms.

"I think the engineer is like a chef in a restaurant. "There is no denying that the chef is an essential role, but a great meal is inseparable from the efforts of many others," he said. ”

To be in a difficult situation

"Mistakes to be early" is a golden rule of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, meaning that the products do not have to do the perfect before the introduction of the revised approach is more conducive to seize the opportunity. "If the first product is not a disgrace to you, it means you are too late," said Hoffman, founder and entrepreneur mentor Hoffman of the business social networking site LinkedIn. ”

But before launching its iconic "web format" layout, Pinterest has carefully studied dozens of layouts, and each version has perfect coding and design that can be done.

Hibberman elaborated his product view: "For me, ' The simplest possible product ' (Minimum viable product, or MVP, is the product strategy that shows the core concept at the lowest cost), and the difficulty is that I don't know what is ' minimalist ' and what's ' doable '. ”

Pinterest the first days are not easy, in the words of Hibberman, "the number of users is terrible." It launched 9 months later, barely had 10,000 users, of which daily Online active users are very few.

The Hibberman cherished the Hard-won early adopters who communicated with Pinterest's top 5,000 users via private mailboxes and told them their cell phone numbers, even some of whom drank coffee.

Hibberman said he had recently read Eric Riss (Eric Ries) 's "Lean Entrepreneurship" (the Lean startup) and said he was glad he hadn't read the book at Pinterest's most difficult time, or he might have been halfway.

In fact, he did not understand why he did not give up, he said perhaps because he felt that this is very embarrassing, but also worried that the old club Google refused to let him back to work.

"Alternative" Early users

As we all know, Pinterest different from other internet start-ups is a major feature of the user community-its success can not be separated from the pursuit of female users, many loyal users as their own interest in scrapbooks, handmade, food recipes, wedding items and home improvement ideas and other themes of the picture is particularly popular.

Hibberman has a unique insight into the so-called "early adopters". A decade ago, home internet connections and smartphones were fashionable and expensive technology luxuries, when internet "early adopters" tended to dominate the tech elite. However, today's internet and smartphones have already entered thousands of households.

"Now, in my hometown of Iowa, where the economy is predominantly agricultural, people are on Facebook, and many of them have iphones or Android phones, so I understand that people will find these internet services," he said. Hibberman said.

Hibberman also said that Pinterest began to advance by leaps and bounds (the number of independent users in January this year has reached 16.1 million, more than last November), not because of the popularity of celebrity users like Twitter, but because of the formation of their own unique creative network community.

Today's Pinterest has also ushered in an increasing number of unexpected users, such as travellers who like to write a detailed strategy, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and even some of the luxury yachts of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in Pinterest.

"I am excited to see people using our products in ways we didn't expect," he said happily. "(Yau LA)