BEN SILBERMANN

If Google teaches you anything, it's that small ideas can be big.

As a kid, I always idolized entrepreneurs. I thought they were cool people in the way that I thought basketball players were cool people. It's cool that some people get paid to dunk basketballs, but I'm not one of those people.

The companies that I really admire the most are the ones that have a deep visceral understanding of why people use their service, and they figure out ways of making money that are completely consistent with how people are feeling and what they are doing at the time.

I kind of think of engineering like the chefs at a restaurant. Nobody's going to deny chefs are integrally important, but there's also so many other people who contribute to a great meal.

When Pinterest works well, it helps you find things that are meaningful to you. We want to build a system that helps you do that.

What you collect says so much about who you are.

I want Pinterest to be human. The Internet's still so abstract... To me, boards are a very human way of looking at the world.

We're trying to do something so that when the average person uses Pinterest, it has to make the service better.

Most people generalize whatever they did, and say that was the strategy that made it work.

I always just want to move along to the next step.

There's a lot of pressure to look like the last company that was successful.

I was obsessed with this idea that these things that you collect, they just say so much about who you are. I can't say it came from hard-nosed business analysis... It was just something I really want to see built.

I used to wake up and look at our analytics and think, 'What if yesterday was the last day anyone used Pinterest?' Like, everyone collectively decided, 'We're done!' Over time I got more confidence.

Don't take too much advice.

I'd never managed anyone before, so I don't have a lot of experience. But I'm lucky - I have a lot of team members who have a really honest relationship with me.

I look around my neighborhood, and I see people hailing a cab or ordering their food and then paying for it all with their phone. I've read about that stuff for a really long time, and now it's starting to become commonplace.

I thought Google was the coolest place. People there were so smart and they were all doing these really interesting things. I just felt really lucky to be a part of it even in a small way.

I use Pinterest for everything. Book collections, trips, hobbies. It's all there. I planned my wedding on it. When I had a kid, I planned all his stuff on it. So it was nice to discover that I wasn't the only one.

We want the average person to use it and think that it makes the experience of using Pinterest better.

One of the things I've learned is to be receptive of feedback.

I always read about these stories of entrepreneurs - it's like they're in the desert with no water, and they're the ones that survive. But I've been really fortunate to have people on my team who are optimistic about the future and who know that if you work through hard times that there's usually something good at the end.

One of the hard parts about building a service that you use yourself is that it's easy to forget what it was like the very first time someone signs up. Every once in a while, I'll create a brand new account and give it a try and see how hard it is to find things that I really love, see if I'm using it or thinking about it differently.

A lot of the future of search is going to be about pictures instead of keywords. Computer vision technology is going to be a big deal.

So March 2010, we launched Pinterest, and we were at 3,000 accounts. And that wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't started building Pinterest actually in November 2009. And that alone wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't left my job to start a company in May 2008.

I really liked insects - all kinds: flies, grasshoppers, weevils.