Pinterest's Palo Alto years

Pinterest is a San Francisco company today, with thousands of employees and a headquarters in the city's South of Market district. Its first years played out on the Peninsula. Pinterest was originally based in Palo Alto. It grew from a few people in an apartment into one of the most talked about websites in the country before it moved north in 2012.

This profile covers that early stretch, the office it used on High Street and why it left. It relies on reporting from 2012, when the move was news.

What Pinterest is

Pinterest is a visual discovery and bookmarking service. People save images and links to boards organized by topic, such as recipes, home design, fashion or travel. Others can browse, follow and save those pins in turn. Unlike most social networks, it is built around plans and interests more than around friends.

That focus made it popular with people planning projects and purchases. It also made it attractive to retailers and advertisers, which became the core of the business.

From Tote to Pinterest

Pinterest grew out of an earlier app called Tote, made by Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra. Tote was meant to replace paper catalogs on phones. It struggled, largely because mobile payments were still clumsy at the time. Its users did one thing enthusiastically, though: they built and shared collections of items they liked. Silbermann shifted the team to build a product around that habit.

Development of Pinterest began in December 2009. Evan Sharp joined Silbermann and Sciarra as the third co-founder. The site opened as a closed, invitation-only beta in March 2010. Nine months after launch it had about 10,000 users. Silbermann later said he wrote personally to the first 5,000 users and even met some of them.

For the first stretch, Silbermann and a few programmers ran the site out of a small apartment until mid 2011. We could not confirm from primary sources where that apartment was, so we do not claim it for Palo Alto.

Fast growth in 2011 and 2012

Pinterest took off in 2011. An iPhone app launched in early March 2011 and brought in more downloads than expected. Time listed Pinterest among its 50 best websites of 2011 in August. It won Best New Startup of 2011 at TechCrunch's Crunchies awards.

The numbers kept climbing. Hitwise data put it among the ten largest social network services by December 2011. In January 2012 comScore reported 11.7 million unique visitors in the United States, which it called the fastest any site had passed 10 million.

Money followed the traffic. The main rounds of this period were:

1. Early 2011. A $10 million Series A led by Jeremy Levine and Sarah Tavel of Bessemer Venture Partners.
2. October 2011. $27 million from Andreessen Horowitz, which valued the company at $200 million.
3. May 2012. A $100 million round led by the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten at a $1.5 billion valuation.

Andreessen Horowitz is based on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, a short drive from downtown Palo Alto. Our a16z profile covers the firm. In April 2012 Sciarra left his day-to-day role at Pinterest to become an entrepreneur in residence there.

The High Street office

By 2012 Pinterest worked out of an office at 635 High Street in Palo Alto. TechCrunch named the address in a June 7, 2012 report, which said the company had about 30 employees at last count with many more hires planned. High Street runs parallel to Alma Street and the Caltrain tracks on the downtown side. It is a short walk from University Avenue and the Palo Alto Caltrain station.

The building is a private office today and has no marker. If you walk through downtown Palo Alto, you are walking through the same few blocks where Pinterest, Facebook, Google and many other startups had early offices. Our page on University Avenue's tech history covers that pattern.

The move to San Francisco

The TechCrunch report in June 2012 said Pinterest was leaving its Palo Alto office and looking at space in San Francisco and further south. Nothing was final then. The writer had spotted Silbermann outside 410 Townsend Street in San Francisco, a building where Yammer was vacating about 30,000 square feet.

On July 9, 2012, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and the company announced the move. A Pinterest spokesperson said the company had around 50 employees. It had signed a short-term lease in the South of Market area to handle immediate growth while it finalized a long-term home there. Silbermann said the company was pleased to call one of the world's great cities home.

Business Insider called it a key shift at the time. At the time, many fast growing startups still chose the Peninsula. Pinterest's move was one sign that young companies were starting to see San Francisco as an equal choice.

Pinterest after Palo Alto

Pinterest kept growing in San Francisco. It opened sign-ups to everyone in August 2012 and launched business accounts in October 2012. It went public in 2019. In June 2022 Silbermann became executive chairman and Bill Ready, an online commerce executive, became chief executive. This page does not comment on the stock.

In August 2020 Pinterest paid $89.5 million to cancel a lease on a large office complex then being built in South of Market, near its existing headquarters.

Pinterest's place in Palo Alto history

Pinterest fits a familiar Palo Alto pattern. A company starts small near Stanford and Sand Hill Road, grows fast and then leaves for more space. Google went to Mountain View and Facebook to Menlo Park. Pinterest broke the pattern only in where it went. It moved north to the city instead of south or east along the Peninsula.

Our Facebook profile tells the best known version of that story. For the full list of companies with a Palo Alto chapter, see our companies hub.

Pinterest's Palo Alto era timeline

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