Sharp, 35, lives with his wife, Christina, in San Francisco. Part of that means shaping good emotional outcomes for our users.” Personal “I’m interested in shaping the way people relate to things instead of just shaping the form of things. You have to make sure there are qualities that nurture and enrich human life.”įor Pinterest, that means asking questions beyond whether the app is pretty and easy to use. “But when designing a home, it’s much more nuanced. “If you’re designing a hammer, it’s clear that it should hit a nail,” Sharp said. As an architect, he feels great responsibility when forming the place where people spend their time. Over time, Sharp’s design-oriented mind has started to view the apps people use not as products or tools but as environments. You triangulate, in addition to behavioral data and user research, what impact we’re having and why it matters to people,” Sharp said. “If you do it enough, you start to see these patterns and experience them in full sensory reality. Over dinners in Ohio, Kentucky, Georgia and beyond, he asks people how and why they’re using Pinterest. To avoid the feedback loop of Silicon Valley, Sharp takes trips throughout the country to stay in touch with what pinners want. Pinterest’s success is predicated on building an environment where its users can be happy - a pleasant, personal corner of the web where the future matters more than the present or past. “If we’re not doing better, it’s almost always our own inability to execute, not because someone else is stealing our market share or something,” he said. However, he has never embraced the idea that he needs to beat out other companies. Sharp is familiar with Silicon Valley’s competitive culture. “I thought, ‘Wow, I could actually be the best.’ Someone like me could be really amazing.” Noncompetitive nature Like Sharp, Ive was creative, emotional and, most important, not the stereotypical leader featured in the Harvard Business Review. His perspective quickly changed when he met Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer. “They were all so professional and competent.” He wondered if he was good at starting companies but not at running them. “We hired all these great managers that were doing a great job, and I looked at myself in contrast to them,” he said. He had always been a creator, not a manager. Learning to leadĪs head honcho, Sharp found himself second-guessing his ability to lead. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram are about what’s happening right now, he said, but Pinterest focuses on its users’ futures. Consequently, Sharp shuns the “social media” label. You spend time on what you want, not what you share with others,” he said. “Pinterest is a positive, optimistic place online. Seven years and 175 billion pins later, those values still stand. In the early days, Sharp and Silbermann had to figure out the type of company they wanted to be, a process that led them to model Pinterest after their own personalities: introverted, optimistic and positive. “If we were more responsible as entrepreneurs, we would’ve pivoted to something else.” “It took a while for us to take off,” Sharp said. In 2011, he swapped being a team player at a successful company with a certain future to being the top dog of an aspiring company with an uncertain one. After a year, I decided that if I love it that much, I should be working there full time,” Sharp said. “The whole time, all I wanted to do was go work on Pinterest. He helped as the company transitioned from desktops to phones, but he always had other aspirations on his mind. Facebook doubled its employee count while Sharp was there, growing from about 800 to 1,500, in his estimation.
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