Together with day three this day topped my SXSW visit. It was the last day but the events I went to were brilliant, inspiring and informative and as on all of the other days, in between and after the talks, the day was filled with great conversations with amazing people.
Chris Dixon talking to Ben Silberman about Pinterest
This was the first talk I went to on Tuesday and one I’d really looked forward to. I started using Pinterest just under a year ago and I’ve loved it ever since. It’s my happy place online and I wrote about it and the other networks I used when Google+ launched.
It was called Pinterest Explained: Q&A with Co-Founder Ben Silbermann and it was a really lovely conversation between the two.
Ben seemed quite humbled at the start sitting in front of a very large audience talking about the product he created out of a need he himself had. Chris asked him how he’d ended up where he now is and Ben talked about how he started out at Google and how inspiring working there had been. The high level of talent amongst everyone and how the things they did were just brilliant. Quite a few of Ben’s remarks about his time at Google, and working on Pinterst, made the audience laugh and the quote below, about the things Google could do, was one of them.
We’re making so much money. Let’s take a picture of every street in the world.
A lot of the talk at SXSW has been about Lean and Lean startups and Chris asked Ben about his experiences with Pinterst and the story behind it. Contrary to many people’s belief Pinterst started back in 2009 and had, for a long time, a really small user base. Ben started sharing it with 200 of his friends sending them an email. About 100 of them opened it and even less signed up. They had a catastrophically low number of users and he mentioned that he was pleased that he hadn’t read Eric Reis’ book The Lean Startup at that point because if he’d followed that he should have abandoned the product. But he didn’t and when Chris asked why he said it was mostly out of embarrassment as he didn’t want to say that the thing he’d been working on had failed, but also because he really believed in it and wanted to see it built.
For 9 months Pinterst had under 10,000 users. The turning point was at a design conference in Utah where he met people who were collecting things and started sharing Pinterst with them. The customer base grew but even so it took time before the Bay area or New York picked up on it which was really refreshing to hear. Another thing that was inspiring was how Ben talked about how he emailed the first 5000 users of Pinterst and talked to them a lot in the beginning about e.g. why they were using the product in a certain way. It’s help shape Pinterest and he is still in close contact with them, even to the point that these people have his personal cell phone number. It was a really great session and there are a few quotes from him that I pulled out:
What makes Pinterest special is not the logo or the CSS. It’s the people.
On clones and how he sees the competition
There are a lot of different ways that people can be successful…Every company cuts its own path.
On how to be successful
If you can, find people who are passionate about what you are doing and for the right reason.
On advice for other entrepreneurs
The team is the most exciting product that we’re building.
On the future and what excites him with Pinterst
The internet of things panel
Next up was Closer to One: Buddhism and the Internet of Things which was a panel with Vincent Horn, the guy behind Buddhist Geeks and Matt Rolandson from Ammunition Group, moderated by fellow Swede Sara Öhrvall from Bonnier R&D
The panel discussed the aspect of that now that we can make more or less anything, what is actually worth building and making meaningful? The panel’s view was that first up for creating meaningful experiences is putting meaning on the agenda and how meaningfulness depends on the intention of the designer so we need to design with that in mind.
The panel also talked about the potential with the internet of things and how it lies in making the invisible visible. Over 40 percent of the decision we make are based on habit so if we some how can visualise what is going on, we could have more power to change our decisions and behaviour. Matt brought up LARK as an example and how being able to view data of our sleeping patterns can help us identify how we sleep and assist in trying to modify our patterns so that we can get better sleep.
As the title of the talk indicates it drew parallels to Buddhism, which is very focused on that everything is [already] connected, and how the Internet of things can help us see this. By becoming aware of how things are connected we can in turn get more freedom to go with how things are connected and get more out of it. As for the link between the Buddhist side and technology it’s happening a lot in research, particularly in the bio and neuro feedback fields, but there are already examples of it available to the public, like IBM’s smart cities project, Nest and in the healthcare sector.
Panel on social curation and the taste graph
The final session I went to was Fashion and the New Taste Graph. As the title suggest it was shopping related and as one of the products we’re working on is also shopping related it was a panel I really wanted to go to.
It was more interesting than insightful talking a lot about Pinterest and drawing parallels to how as a brand you decide what channels to be present on as well as how they are handling, or advising clients, to be using e.g. Pinterest with regards to copyright issues etc.
The panel showcased a few interesting examples of players in the field and the woman from GAP talked about how the brand one day want to provide you with a personal in store shopping experience based on what you have collected or liked online.
The gist of the discussion was that this is an area that is of high interest and that we’re only seeing the start of it. It’s a little scary but exciting as I still think there are a few aspects that are missing, but more about that when we finally start talking about our shopping related product.
Tomorrow – Day 074 | Goodbye Austin. Hello New York
