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This is a timeline of Pinterest, an Internet service that serves as a "visual discovery tool", as well as the eponymous company.
Overview
Period
Development summary
More details
October 2006 - The product is presented as her invention and founded by Jackie Beverly while working at In Zone Brands, Inc. She has yet to be paid as the true inventor and founder.
Pinterest grows steadily, raises a few rounds of money, releases mobile apps, and makes policy changes to better accommodate concerns surrounding copyright, opt-out and not reusing user content.[citation needed]
Early 2012 onward
Large funding rounds and aggressive acquisitions
Pinterest raises multiple large rounds of funding at steadily rising valuations ($100 million Series C at $1.5 billion valuation, $200 million Series D at $2.5 billion valuation, $225 million Series E at $3.8 billion valuation, $200 million Series F at $5 billion valuation, and $553 million Series G at $11 billion valuation) and also aggressively acquires companies.[citation needed]
April 2014 onward
Search and monetization focus
Pinterest begins homing in on its focus as a search-based guided discovery platform. It also begins experimenting with monetization, beginning with Promoted Pins, and improves support for businesses using Pinterest by launching an analytics dashboard.[citation needed]
June 2015 onward
In-app commerce
Pinterest partners with Shopify and retailers to launch Buyable Pins, special types of pins that people can use to make purchases within Pinterest itself. Although Buyable Pins do not cost the seller money, Pinterest clarifies that sellers may choose to promote Buyable Pins just as they can promote other pins.[citation needed]
Full timeline
Year
Month and date
Event type
Details
2008
August
Company
Paul Sciarra quits his job at New York venture capital firm Radius Capital, and Ben Silbermann quits his job at Google, and the two together found Cold Brew Labs.[1][2]
2009
early year
Product
Cold Brew Labs receives institutional funding from FirstMark Capital for Tote, an app in the iPhone app store that they would eventually abandon in favor of developing Pinterest.[1]
2009
November, December
Product
Pinterest is conceptualized by co-founders Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp, and Paul Sciarra.[1][2]
2010
(date unclear, reported in some sources as January 1)
Funding
Pinterest completes an angel round of funding, with investors FirstMark Capital, Jeremy Stoppelman, Jack Abraham, Michael Birch, Scott Belsky, Shana Fisher, Kevin Hartz, Brian Cohen, Hank Vigil, Fritz Lanman, William Lohse.[1]
2010
March
Product
The first prototype of the product is launched and made available to a small group of colleagues and family members.[1]
2010
early year
Potential acquisition
The company's investors and co-founder Ben Silbermann try to encourage a New York-based magazine publishing company to buy Pinterest but the publisher declines to meet with the founders.[1]
2010
May 24–26
Publicity
Pinterest participates in the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City. According to a history of the company in Business Insider, the company is "nowhere near the main stage startup competition. It didn't even get the booth on its own merits; FirstMark Capital was a Disrupt sponsor, and it had to pull strings."[1]
2010
May 31
Funding
Former IAC M&A boss Shana Fisher calls the company and says that she loved its product, and wants to invest if they would let her.[1]
2011
March
Product
Pinterest releases an iPhone app that brings in more than the expected number of downloads.[1]
2011
May 7
Funding
Series A: The company secures a $10 million USD Series A financing led by Jeremy Levine and Sarah Tavel of Bessemer Venture Partners. Other investors include angel investor FirstMark Capital, Jack Abraham, Kevin Hartz, and Michael Birch from the angel round. as well as super angelRon Conway.[1][3]
2011
August 16
Publicity
Time magazine lists Pinterest in its "50 Best Websites of 2011" article.[4]
Series B: After an introduction from Kevin Hartz and Jeremy Stoppelman, the company secures $27 million USD in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, which values the company at $200 million USD. Earlier investors FirstMark Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners also invest.[5]
2012
February 20
Product, copyright
Pinterest releases a "nopin" HTML meta tag that allowed websites to opt out of allowing their content to be pinned.[6] Soon (February 24), Flickr implements the code to allow users to opt out of allowing their photos to be pinned.[7]
2012
March
Product, copyright
Pinterest releases a statement that it believes its use of photos and content in pins is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor provisions.[8]
2012
March 13
Product, publicity
Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann appears on stage at the South by Southwest conference, and announces that revamped profile pages and other product improvements are on their way.[9]
2012
March 23
Product, copyright
Pinterest eliminates the policy that gives it the right to sell user content, with the change going into effect on April 6.[10][11]
Pinterest adds automatic attribution of authors on images originating from Flickr, Behance, YouTube, and Vimeo. Automatic attribution is also added for Pins from sites mirroring content on Flickr. At the same time Flickr added a Pin shortcut to its share option menu to users who have not opted out of sharing their images.[16]
Pinterest announces the hiring of its new head of engineering, Jon Jenkins. Jenkins comes from Amazon, where he spent eight years as an engineering lead and was also a director of develop tools, platform analysis and website platform.[22]
2012
October 14
Product
Pinterest launches business accounts allowing businesses to either convert their existing personal accounts into business accounts, or start from scratch.[23]
2012
October 17
Product
Pinterest announces a new feature that would allow users to report others for negative and offensive activity or block other users if they do not want to view their content. Pinterest said they want to keep their community "positive and respectful."[24]
2013
January 3
Acquisitions by Pinterest
Pinterest acquires and announces plans to shut down recipe discovery site Punchfork.[25]
2013
February 20
Funding
Series D: Pinterest raises $200 million at a $2.5 billion valuation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital, and Valiant Capital Partners.[26]
2013
March 20
Acquisitions by Pinterest
Pinterest acquires mobile startup Livestar at undisclosed terms.[27][28]
2013
October 11
Acquisitions by Pinterest
Pinterest acquires Hackermeter. The company's co-founders, Lucas Baker and Frost Li, join Pinterest as engineers.[29]
2013
October 23
Funding
Series E: Pinterest receives a $225 million round of equity funding that valued the website at $3.8 billion. Investors include Fidelity Investments (new), as well as FirstMark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Valiant Capital Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners (from Series D).[30]
2014
January 6
Acquisitions by Pinterest
Pinterest acquires image recognition and visual search startup VisualGraph.[31]
2014
April 24, June 11
Product
April 24: Pinterest announces and releases Guided Search for its mobile apps, a new visual way to explore Pinterest's more than 30 billion pins—links or images chosen by users and assigned by them to topical collections.[32][33] June 11: Guided Search is released on the web version of the site.[34][35]
2014
May 12
Product (advertising)
Pinterest launches "Promoted Pins" that would allow companies to sponsor results in its search results and category feeds.[36][37][38]
2014
May 15
Funding
Series F: Pinterest receives $200 million in funding at a $5 billion valuation. Investors include SV Angel (a new investor, though partner Ron Conway had personally invested in Pinterest earlier) as well as Series E investors Valiant Capital Partners, FirstMark Capital, Fidelity Investments, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz.[39][40][41]
2014
July 30
Acquisitions by Pinterest
Pinterest acquires Icebergs, described as a "Pinterest for creatives" by TechCrunch.[42]
2014
August 6
Product
Pinterest adds a direct messaging feature that allows users to discuss pins privately.[43][44]
2014
August 26
Product
Pinterest launches a new analytics dashboard for business users.[45]
2014
October 6
Product
Pinterest releases "Pin Picks" that are weekly curations of their own content.[46]
2014
December 28
Product (advertising)
Pinterest opens up promoted pins to all advertisers, following what they perceive as success of their beta program.[47][48]
2015
January 23
Product
Pinterest debuts new search filters that give users more control over the pins they see. Commentators believe the aim of these is to go after the male demographic, which tends to be put off by the female-heavy pins on the site.[49]
2015
January 27
Product (advertising)
Pinterest announces that it will begin showing Promoted Pins in users' home feeds, thereby expanding the reach of Promoted Pins considerably.[50][51]
2015
February 11
Product, partnerships
Pinterest announces a partnership with Apple Inc. whereby people using Pinterest's iOS app on iPhones or iPads can directly download iOS apps from within Pinterest itself, using special types of pins called app Pins.[52][53]
2015
March 16, May 8
Funding
Series G: Pinterest raises a total of $553 million at a $11 billion valuation, and allows employees to sell part of their vested stock in secondary markets. It is initially reported (as of March 16) that the company has raised $367 million.[54][55] On May 8, the raising of an additional $186 million is announced.[56][57]
2015
April 2
Product
Pinterest debuts a new "Pin It" button that requires fewer steps to bookmark a Pin, and that, according to tests, increases the number of pinning actions by 3%. The new button is developed by the team from Icebergs, a company acquired by Pinterest the previous year.[58]
2015
April 3
Acquisitions by Pinterest
Pinterest acquires Hike Labs, a two-person startup developing a mobile publishing application called Drafty, in order to gain the technology expertise of the two people. One of the people, Jason Shellen, was a founding team member at Blogger and Google Reader as well as a co-founder at Thing Labs.[59]
2015
April 27
Product
Pinterest announces the launch of Marketing Developer Partners (MDP), its program to help marketers use Pinterest more effectively, by helping them schedule pins and incorporate performance feedback to post better pins.[60][61][62]
2015
May 4
Product, platform
Pinterest launches the beta version of its developer platform, that allows developers to use data about Pinterest users who connect their accounts to external applications.[63][64] Interested developers can sign up to have their names added to a white list that will be given this access.
2015
May 18
Product, advertising
Pinterest introduces a new video ad format called Cinematic Pins, where the video plays only either while the user is scrolling or if the user taps on the pin. This is in contrast with existing autoplay videos used by Facebook and other companies for their feeds.[65][66][67][68][69]
2015
June 2
Product
Pinterest announces the launch of Buyable Pins, a special type of pin that can be used to make purchases within Pinterest itself. When users select a Buyable Pin, they have the option of choosing the item they wish to buy (for instance, choosing between different dress sizes and colors), and they can then make the purchase within the app using a variety of payment methods, including Apple Pay. Launch partners include Shopify and Demandware. The buyable pins are free to use, and Pinterest does not take a cut of the purchases made. However, Pinterest intends to allow sellers to promote buyable pins just as they can promote other pins.[70][71][72][73]
2015
June 30
Product
Pinterest begins rolling out Buyable Pins on iPhone and iPad.[74]
2015
July 8
Product, platform
Pinterest rolls out the first integrations on its developer platform (first announced on May 4). These include integrations from IFTTT and Polyvore.[75]
2015
October 5
Product
Pinterest announces the expansion of Buyable Pins to new partners in addition to its original partner list of Shopify and Demandware. The new partners include Bigcommerce, Magento, and IBM Commerce. Pinterest also notes that there are now 60 million Buyable Pins on the site.[76][77][78]
2015
November 8
Product
Pinterest begins rolling out a visual search tool that allows users to select part of an image and find similar Pins.[79][80]
2015
December
Product
Pinterest launches a new way for users to monitor price drops on buyable pins. "When users save pins, they'll get a heads up when a price drops in the form of an in-app notification and an email. They can then jump straight to that pin and make the purchase."[81]
2016
June 15
Acquisition
Fleksy announces that it was purchased by Pinterest.[82] Half of the team moved to Pinterest's product engineering team. The Fleksy application itself was open sourced.[83]
2016
July
Acquisition
Pinterest acquires Math Camp, the team that built Highlight, Roll, and Shorts. Most of the Math Camp team would join Pinterest. Math Camp's products are not part of the deal, so these would shut down and the source code is planned to be open sourced.[84][85][86]
2016
August
Product
Pinterest launches a video player that lets users and brands upload and store clips of any length straight to the site.[87] It also begins implementing visual search tools on videos.[88]
2016
August 9
Company
Pinterest announces that it would open its first engineering office outside the Bay Area in Seattle. The office would temporarily be located in the WeWork building in downtown Seattle.[89][90]
2016
August 17
Product (advertising)
Pinterest launches video advertising to a limited number of partners. The feature is known as "Promoted Video Pins", and allows advertisers to place video ads.[91][92]
2016
August 23
Acquisition
Pinterest announces that it would be acquiring the team behind Instapaper, which will continue operating as a separate app. The Instapaper team will both work on the core Pinterest experience and updating Instapaper.[93]
2016
October 13
Userbase
Pinterest reaches 150 million monthly users. Leaked documents from late 2015 showed that Pinterest had been targeting 151 million users by the end of 2015, making this milestone behind schedule.[94]
2016
November 10
Product
Pinterest begins showing a "Tried it" checkmark on Pins, which allows users to share the products, recipes, and ideas they have tried.[95][96]
2017
February 1
Product (advertising)
Pinterest begins rolling out search advertising for a limited group of partners. These marketers will be able to run search ad campaigns through their Kenshoo dashboards.[97]
2017
February 7
Product
Pinterest simultaneously launches three products related to visual search: (1) Lens, which allows users to take photos of objects to find Pins related those objects; (2) Instant Ideas, a circle button that appears on each Pin that, when tapped, displays related Pins; and (3) Shop the Look, a circle button that appears on each individual item within a photo that, when tapped, displays Pins related to that item.[98][99]
2017
April 20
Product
Removal of their dedicated post "liking" feature as it seemed redundant to "boards", which are user collections of posts. Users' existing indexes of liked posts were converted into a collection ("board") named as such.[100][101]
^Christina DesMarais (24 March 2012). "Pinterest Responds to Concerns, Changes Terms of Service". PC World. Retrieved 24 March 2012. Among other things, Pinterest says it never intended to sell user content and has removed from its terms of service wording that granted the company the right to do so.