Jordyn Holman, who has recently been pinning nail art and floral arrangements, reported from Pinterest's headquarters in San Francisco.
Every social media platform has its own aesthetic. Instagram is polished. TikTok is manic. Snapchat is ephemeral.
What about Pinterest? It can be hard to describe. Users build their profiles with virtual pinboards of images related to their lives, such as a dream home, wedding or wardrobe.
Pinterest, which started in 2010, had "lost its way a bit," said Bill Ready, its chief executive. Mr. Ready, a serial entrepreneur who helped build Venmo and Braintree, joined Pinterest in 2022.
"Users were declining, the stock was way down, and people were questioning whether it was even going to be a viable ongoing business," Mr. Ready, 46, said.
The company culture was also under a cloud after the firm announced in 2020 and 2021 multimillion-dollar settlements of workplace suits accusing Pinterest of race and gender discrimination.
During Mr. Ready's tenure, the company has been investing in visual search technology and -- of course -- artificial intelligence. It has focused on winning over Gen Z partly by positioning itself as a different kind of social media.
He believes Pinterest can be a safer, better place on the internet. Social media platforms are grappling with their effects on users' mental health and self-esteem, particularly young people. This month, Instagram said it would limit the content its teenage users could see and add parental controls to A.I. chatbots.
Two years ago, Pinterest made the accounts of users younger than 16 private by default, with no option to make them public.
For Pinterest, Mr. Ready said, the goal is to "make you feel better after time spent on the platform."
The company has recorded double-digit growth in sales and users in recent quarters. More than half of Pinterest's user base now hails from Gen Z, who browse and buy products directly from the site's pinboards. "We're doing something that's exceptionally rare for consumer internet apps," Mr. Ready said, "which is we're aging down."
But not everything that Pinterest is doing is working for the site's 580 million users. Like other social media sites, A.I.-generated content is rife on Pinterest, and some users complain that they have to rummage through too much slop before they get to the human-generated material that attracted them to the app in the first place.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
What do young people see on Pinterest that is bringing them to the platform?
They see Pinterest as a safe space away from the toxicity they experience elsewhere.
So how does that business model work?
We are a visual search and discovery platform. Search has mostly been a command line interface. Even when you look at chatbots, you start with a blinking cursor. There’s a real opportunity to do something different around a purely visual form of search.
Three years ago, you really couldn’t take action on the platform. You could find lots of pictures, but one of the biggest user complaints was that it was all dead ends. We have revamped the platform to make it much easier to take action: from dreaming to deciding to doing.
As Pinterest has pivoted toward shopping, are you worried about the economy and consumers' ability to spend?
Broadly speaking, the consumer has been pretty resilient. You have pockets of consumers that are feeling more pressure. Budget-related searches are up 200 percent plus year on year.
That plays toward a platform like ours, where people are making intentional choices versus the platforms that are centered on impulse buys.
And how does that play out for advertisers?
Advertisers move to us because we have a unique demographic and because they see that we are a high-intent platform.
Pinterest is a place where more than 95 percent of queries are unbranded, like "cool running shoes" or "how do I style sneakers with a skirt?" The user clearly has intention, but they haven't decided yet what to buy—which is very different than much of social media.
The A.I.-generated content can be overwhelming when scrolling through the site. Is that an issue to you?
Every platform is going through this.
There's Gen A.I. content that is really good, and there's Gen A.I. content that isn't as compelling.
We will label when something is Gen A.I. We give the user the ability to say, "I want to see less of it."
We don't always get that right. When we don't get it right, people notice.
Generative A.I. is a huge tailwind for our platform generally. In the same way that Pinterest didn't create images on the web but brought new utility to those images, we have a moment where human creativity is just being unlocked by Gen A.I.
Is there a risk of driving people away who don't like all the A.I.?
Nobody can perfectly detect all of it, which is why we say, "see less."
If you think back, it used to be a big thing that images were Photoshopped. I think you will get to a place where almost all content has been either edited or altered in some way by Gen A.I.
What's the positive case for A.I.?
There are two competing factions here in Silicon Valley. You've got one faction that says the only way to win at A.I. is to throw caution to the wind. Safety shouldn't matter. If there are places that are going to build chatbots that will have a sexually explicit conversation with minors, you've got to do it to win.
There's another faction saying that it's a really powerful technology, so how should you put the right guardrails around it? How should you use it responsibly? We are clearly in that camp.
Let me ask about your work force. Engineers in A.I. are a hot commodity. Has it become harder to hire them?
It's definitely a hypercompetitive market. Fortunately, our business is healthier than it's ever been, which means that we're able to pay competitively. Not the $100 million price tags you see out there, but I think those are actually very few.
We are leading from the front on how to use A.I. responsibly and it is a huge attractor of talent for us.
Tell me about your childhood.
I grew up in a little town in Kentucky and was the first in the family to go to college. My parents had a little auto shop.
One of my most formative experiences was when I was 13 and I could work in the front of the shop instead of the back.
I remember I messed up on a farmer's truck. I tell my mom and dad, and I think they're going to go explain to him what happened. They said, "No, you go tell them what you did and what you're going to do to make it right."
He needed that truck for his livelihood, right?
It sits with me because for the people that are building A.I., they spend whole careers building for hundreds of millions of users—billions of users—but don’t have to face any of them. It’s nameless, it’s faceless.
What's a piece of advice you got from a mentor?
I had an early mentor ask me a rhetorical question: "With whom do you build your army? Do you want the conscripted, mercenaries or freedom fighters?"
I said the freedom fighters, of course.
He said: "Well, Bill, just so you know, the freedom fighters, they'll give you way more; but you better have a real mission. They are much harder to manage; but if you're doing something that makes a difference, they'll do so much more."
That has always stuck with me. I think we're working on one of the most important problems of our time: Is A.I. going to be a force for good or is A.I. going to be a force of preying upon humans and taking advantage of them?
I can't promise you that we'll succeed; but I can promise we're going to do the very best we can to be on the right side of history.
Time for the lightning round. What is pinned to your Pinterest board now?
We had a conference in Miami a few months back. I went to Pinterest and found a really great pink linen sport coat and some light-toned suede shoes. I probably haven't worn too many pink sport coats in my life, but I did it.
What was the last event that you used Pinterest to plan for?
Our daughter's birthday party. "Wicked" theme this year. Taylor Swift the year before.
What's your favorite tip or hack for Pinterest?
Shoppable boards. I save gift ideas for my daughter throughout the year. This way, I don’t have to scramble at the last minute or rack my brain to remember the thing that we talked about.
What's the last thing you asked A.I.?
Shopping recommendations, all the time. I'm constantly testing.
What are you trying to learn more about right now?
Where is A.I. a great tool for people versus a replacement for people?