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Ben Silbermann, Pinterest: going global, modestlyBen Silbermann screws up his face as he considers what he could buy now he has been officially declared a billionaire by Forbes.
虽然本•西尔伯曼(Ben Silbermann)已经正式被《福布斯》(Forbes)宣布成为一名亿万富翁，但他此时正眉头紧锁，思考该买些什么。
As Pinterest co-founder and chief executive, he helped create the clean, white online scrapbook where more than 100m users catalogue their desires. The 33-year-old has some 750,000 followers of his pins on subjects including art, recipes and a travel bucket list. But he does not have a “billionaire” pinboard for the life stage that crept up on him as Pinterest became one of the world’s most valuable technology start-ups.
作为Pinterest联合创始人兼首席执行官，他帮助创建了这个简洁、白色的在线剪贴簿网站，有逾1亿用户在上面分类收藏自己的愿望物品。33岁的西尔伯曼在Pinterest上有约75万粉丝，他分享的图片主题涵盖艺术、食谱及旅行愿望清单。但在Pinterest成为世界最具价值的科技初创公司之一时，他并没有为这一悄悄临近的人生阶段设置一块“亿万富翁”愿望剪贴板。
Sitting in a small meeting room below a poster that reads “Say the hard thing”, he hesitates. “I want to buy a new camera but I haven’t gotten around to it,” he says. “I really love photography . . . I can’t think of anything that’s journalist-worthy or exciting.”
坐在一间挂有“说出困难”标语的小会议室里，他显得有些犹豫。“我想买一台新相机，但还没决定好，”他说，“我真的很喜欢摄影……我想不出任何其他值得报道或令人兴奋的事情。”
He is not part of the tech scene in San Francisco, but the “guys with young kids scene” — worlds he insists do not overlap. His Pinterest boards map his path to becoming “super grown up”. That journey went from stints as a consultant and at Google, to founding the start-up six years ago, to fathering two young children. His pinned pictures include sleek, wooden designer chairs for his first apartment without roommates, bouquets for his wedding and gifts for his children.
他不是典型的旧金山科技人士，而是那种“有童心的男人”——他坚称这两个世界没有重叠。他的Pinterest剪贴板描绘出他成为“超级成年人”的成长历程——从担任咨询顾问、任职谷歌(Google)，到六年前创建Pinterest，再到成为两个孩子的父亲。他在Pinterest上分享的图片包括为自己首个没有室友的公寓添加的造型优美的木制设计师座椅、自己婚礼上的花束以及给孩子们的礼物。
Pinterest’s $11bn valuation, despite being only a year into generating revenue, is the result of it being unashamedly commercial.Unlike with some other Silicon Valley “unicorns”, or highly valued private start-ups, few have questioned whether a platform filled with devoted planners of decorating, camping weekends and celebratory meals would make money. Advertisers clamoured to get on the app before it even began to sell adverts.
虽然实现创收才一年时间，但Pinterest毅然决然的商业化已使公司估值达到110亿美元。Pinterest平台聚集了大量全情投入地策划设计室内装饰、周末野营及庆祝宴会的人，很少有人质疑这样一个平台是否能够赚钱，这与硅谷其他一些“独角兽”公司或者高估值的私人初创公司的境遇不同。甚至在Pinterest开始卖广告之前，广告商已争着在这款应用上做广告。
But for Mr Silbermann, Pinterest is more than a fancy, interactive shopping list. He is modest enough not to proselytise about an innovation revolution and jet off to see world leaders, unlike some tech entrepreneurs. But he does say Pinterest is changing the world by encouraging people to improve their lives, one everyday activity at a time.
但对西尔伯曼而言，Pinterest不仅仅是一个别出心裁的互动式购物清单。他非常谦逊，并不希望像某些科技企业家那样引领一场创新革命，或者搭乘喷气式飞机去会见各种世界级领导人。但他确实表示，Pinterest正在通过鼓励人们改善自己的生活（每次改善一项日常活动）来改变世界。
“What would make me really happy five years from now was if [Pinterest] was really this global place where you could access the whole world’s ideas and they were just brought to you, totally personalised to you, every single day.”
“如果五年后Pinterest能真正成为一个全球聚集地，在这里，你每天都可以接触到全世界的各种创意，它们全都呈现在你眼前，完全为你个人定制，那么我会真正感到高兴。”
Pinterest was founded in 2010 by Mr Silbermann, Evan Sharp, chief creative officer, and Paul Sciarra, who left in 2010. Despite its male founders being keen to create a space for online collections, based on their geeky passions from bugs to design, it gained an early reputation as a social network for women shoppers, and above all else, a wedding emporium, stemming from its first nexus of committed users in Mr Silbermann’s native Midwest. But now about a third of US internet users have Pinterest accounts, according to the Pew Research Center, and it has a small but growing male audience encouraged to follow topics such as “man cave” and “survival skills”.
2010年，西尔伯曼与首席创意官埃文•夏普(Evan Sharp)以及保罗•夏拉(Paul Sciarra)共同创立了Pinterest。夏拉后于同年离开。虽然Pinterest的男性创始人对从安全漏洞到设计的东西抱有狂热激情，由此希望创建一个在线分类收藏空间，但该网站从一开始就作为女性购物者社交网络而闻名，尤其是，它简直是婚礼采购大全，这主要得益于来自西尔伯曼美国中西部家乡的第一批忠实用户。但如今，根据皮尤研究中心(Pew Research Center)的数据，约三分之一的美国互联网用户拥有Pinterest账号，而且越来越多的Pinterest男性用户（虽然目前较少）被鼓励关注“男人的私人空间”、“生存技能”等话题。
Pinterest’s next project is going global.
Pinterest的下一步计划是走向全球。
About 45 per cent of its users are outside the US and it has offices in the UK, France, Germany and Brazil. This shift can be seen at the Pinterest headquarters in SoMa, San Francisco’s start-up centre. The large former warehouse is, like the app, a temple to clean, white lines, with sunlight pouring through a swimming pool-sized skylight on to a central communal dining room. Like the pins on Pinterest, the office displays projects made by staff. On a previous visit, a wooden swing built by the legal team hung from the ceiling; this time, a board displays the flags of its five target countries in Lego.
Pinterest约45%的用户在美国以外地区，公司在英国、法国、德国及巴西设有办事处。这种转变可以在Pinterest位于旧金山创业中心SoMa的总部看出。由大型仓库改建的办公室与Pinterest应用一样，是一座简洁、纯白的“圣殿”，阳光从游泳池般大小的天窗照射进来，播洒在中央公共餐厅里。像在Pinterest上分享图片一样，办公室里展示着员工做过的项目。上次参观时，一个由法律团队做的木秋千从天花板上垂下来；这次我看到的是一块面板，上面展示的是用乐高积木搭成的五个目标国家的国旗。
Many social platforms do not target countries, because adoption soars naturally when users recruit their friends to chat. But Pinterest needs to make a concerted effort country by country because people come for content, not conversation. Users want pins in the right language, with projects suitable for the local climate or cuisine and shops they can buy from — and so Pinterest must encourage content providers on to the platform first.
很多社交平台并不以国家为目标，因为当用户拉来朋友聊天时，注册量自然会飙升。但Pinterest需逐个国家地做出协调努力，因为人们登录Pinterest为的是内容，而不是为了聊天。用户希望用地道的语言分享图片，话题应适合当地气候或美食以及他们购物的商店——因此，Pinterest必须首先鼓励内容提供者登录其平台。
Pinterest has 10 researchers who travel the world trying to understand how people might use the site. Mr Silbermann will embark on a global tour in June, saying he loves to learn about brand “mainstays” in other countries, such as the UK retailer John Lewis.
Pinterest有10名研究人员，他们环游世界，设法了解人们或将如何使用其网站。西尔伯曼将于6月开始一次环球旅行，他表示，自己喜欢了解其他国家的“支柱”品牌，如英国零售商John Lewis。
Pinterest rejects the social network tag, preferring to compare itself to Google: a place where people look for things, not people. “I don’t think the comparison is meant to be in size but rather in the spirit of building a tool that everyone can use to help make their life better,” he says. “Google, I think of as really about retrieving information. Pinterest is really about almost pushing you ideas that you’ve never seen before.”
Pinterest拒绝被贴上社交网络的标签，更喜欢将自己比作谷歌——一个人们找东西、而非找人的地方。“我不是说要在规模上与谷歌进行比较，而是我们都本着打造一款工具的精神，让每个人都可以用它帮助自己改善生活，”他说，“我认为谷歌真正做的是检索信息。Pinterest真正做的是激发你从未有过的灵感。”
“Whether it is television or a social network, [advertisers] feel that their ads have to pull people’s attention away because people aren’t there to talk about new ideas,” he says.
“无论是电视还是社交网络，（广告商）认为他们的广告必须把人们的注意力吸引到别的地方，因为人们不会在那里讨论新创意，”他说。
The start-up will need to seduce marketers on a larger scale to grow into its valuation. Only 10 minutes’ walk away, Twitter provides a warning of what Pinterest could become if user growth fails to live up to high expectations; its shares are down by two-thirds in the past year. Mr Silbermann takes comfort in the fact Pinterest has followed the latest Silicon Valley trend: to stay private for longer. This means he can focus on improving performance, rather than on how he communicates about expectations.
Pinterest需要吸引大量营销人员，以便让公司规模追上估值。距离Pinterest走路仅10分钟的Twitter提供了一项警示，即如果用户增长达不到高期望值，Pinterest会变成什么样子；过去一年，Twitter的股价下降了三分之二。让西尔伯曼感到欣慰的是，Pinterest跟上了硅谷的最新潮流：在更长时期内保持私有。这意味着他可以专注提升业绩，而不是如何就市场的期望进行沟通。
The venture capital Pinterest has raised — a total of $1.3bn from investors including fund manager Fidelity, Japanese retailer Rakuten and Silicon Valley VC SV Angel— has enabled him to hire smart people that can make products, he says, such as those improving search and computer vision, a way of understanding image data.
他说，Pinterest筹得的风险资本——从包括富达基金(Fidelity)、日本零售商乐天(Rakuten)和硅谷风投公司SV Angel在内的投资者总计获得13亿美元——使他能够聘请做得出产品的英才，比如那些能够改善搜索和计算机视觉（一种看懂图像数据的方式）的人才。
Neither he nor Mr Sharp, who went to architecture school, are software engineers and unlike many technology companies, Pinterest does not prioritise engineering above all else. If Mr Silbermann evangelises about anything, it is knitting — and not the woolly kind. “One of the values of the company is ‘knitting’ and the premise of it is that if you bring really diverse disciplines together, you can produce something better.” Pinterest employs a star engineer who wanted to be a cartoonist, a “world class” design team and former journalists.
他与建筑学院毕业的夏普都不是软件工程师，而且与许多科技公司不同的是，Pinterest没有将工程师放在高于一切的位置。如果西尔伯曼有什么秘籍的话，就是编织——当然不是织毛衣。“公司的价值观之一是‘编织’，前提是，如果你将真正不同的学科融合在一起，你就能够创造出更好的东西。”Pinterest聘请了一名希望成为漫画家的明星工程师，一个“世界级”设计团队以及多名前记者。
This week, the company, including the nascent international teams, will gather in San Francisco for the annual “KnitCon”. Last year, employees gave classes on wine-tasting, writing screenplays and amateur locksmithery.
不久前，公司员工（包括新组建的国际团队）齐聚在旧金山参加一年一度的“编织会议”(KnitCon)。去年，员工们担任老师，教大家品酒、写电影剧本和当业余锁匠。
Mr Silbermann’s eyes light up as he talks about the event, excited to be at the back of the class learning, rather than in the uncomfortable position of preaching to the company from the front. “I don’t know, I feel like I talk to the company too much,” he says.
谈到这件事时，西尔伯曼眼前一亮。坐在教室后面学习让他兴奋，而在员工面前讲话则让他感到不舒服。“我不知道，我觉得我对公司员工讲得太多了，”他说。
