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Evan sharp jony ive4/5/2023 ![]() 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. He flew to San Francisco, and soon after, Facebook offered him a product designer position. In 2009, while studying architecture at Columbia University, he received an email from Facebook asking if he’d be interested in interviewing for a job. “I developed this passion for building and structuring things.” That passion remained as he held down jobs as an umpire, a Subway sandwich artist and an overnight fried food processor at a pretzel factory. ![]() “I spent an unreasonable amount of time drawing things on the computer and trying to mess up the computer,” Sharp said. Although he wasn’t raised in a very technological household - both his parents were park rangers - his father was a Macintosh hobbyist and always kept a computer around. Growing up in Pennsylvania, Sharp was drawn to computers and design. After building the service in 2009 and launching it a year later, he has seen the company grow to more than 250 million active monthly users who pin cookie recipes, wedding ideas, dream vacations and the like. Evan Sharp is co-founder and chief product officer of Pinterest, a web-based company with more than 1,500 employees that allows users to “pin” media they like from across the internet to virtual boards.
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