Ben Silbermann


Ben Silbermann is an American billionaire Internet entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Pinterest, a visual discovery engine, which lets users organize images, links, recipes and other things.

Early life

Silbermann was born in 1982. He was raised in Des Moines, Iowa. His parents, Jane Wang and Neil Silbermann, are ophthalmologists with a family practice still based in his native city. In 1998, Silbermann attended the Research Science Institute at MIT. Subsequently, he graduated from Des Moines Central Academy and Des Moines Roosevelt with the class of 1999. He then graduated from Yale University in the spring of 2003 with a degree in political science.

Career

Prior to Pinterest, Silbermann worked at Google in the online advertising group. However, after a short time with the company he left and started designing his own iPhone apps with a college friend, Paul Sciarra. After their initial application, Tote, failed to gain significant traction, the cofounders teamed up with Evan Sharp to create a pinboard product that would eventually be named Pinterest. Silbermann says that the genesis of Pinterest really came from his love of collecting as a kid. "Collecting tells a lot about who you are," he said, and when they looked at the web "there wasn't a place to share that side of who you were." A little over nine years after starting Pinterest, the company held its IPO in April 2019 which valued the company around 12 billion dollars beating expectations.

Personal life

Silbermann is married to Divya Bhaskaran, with whom he has two children. He resides in San Francisco, California. According to Forbes, he is worth an estimated $1.6 billion as of 2018.