The Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ben Silbermann is handing the reins to Google and PayPal Inc. veteran Bill Ready, a co-founder and CEO of the company, as a result of the social-media company's focus on e-commerce.
Silbermann, 39, will be moving to a newly created role as executive chairman, and will retain his board seat, the San Francisco-based search- and- discovery platform said Tuesday. Ready will also join the company's board.
The changes mark the end of Silbermann's decadelong run as CEO during which Pinterest grew to more than 430 million users -- known as Pinners -- and annual revenue of more than 2.5 billion. In recent years the service has worked to build a bigger e-commerce business in order to help advertisers and retailers sell products directly on the service.
That goal is played into by the ready s appointment. He joined Pinterest after spending the past two years leading commerce and payments at Alphabet Inc.'s Google. Ready, 42, has worked at PayPal for years.
In our next chapter, we are focused on helping Pinners buy, try and act on all the great ideas they see, said Silbermann in the statement. Bill is a great leader in this transition. He is a builder who understands commerce and payments. Andrea Wishom, Pinterest's lead independent director, said Ready's experience in payments, product development and shopping uniquely positions him to take Pinterest to its next phase of growth. The site gained users during the early part of the epidemic as people stayed at home looking for things to do around the house, such as gardening and decorating. But holding onto that growth became hard as the intensity of the epidemic waned and people began returning to other activities. In April, Pinterest said that monthly active users fell 9% year-over-year in the first quarter.
Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Evercore ISI, called the move a drastic step. If you bring someone from the outside of the company in, you've just thrown a lot of uncertainty into Pinterest and into the management team, Mahaney said in an interview with Bloomberg Television s Emily Chang.
Silbermann is the latest CEO to step down from a company that gained customers and sales during the pandemic but has struggled to retain that growth a group that includes John Foley of Peloton Interactive Inc. and Dan Springer of DocuSign Inc. Other founders that have ended their tenures as CEOs include Amazon.com Inc., and Twitter Inc.'s Jack Dorsey.
Pinterest shares gained 4% in extended trading after closing at $19.70 in New York. The stock has declined by 46% this year.
The executive change at Pinterest follows a number of alleged cultural incidents at the company. Silbermann and other members of the board of Pinterest were accused of fostering a toxic work environment in a lawsuit filed by a pension fund in early 2021.
One year ago, the former chief operating officer of Pinterest, Francoise Brougher, claimed that the company engaged in gender discrimination. She was awarded $20 million in a settlement. Other former employees accused the company of racial discrimination in 2020.
A California state judge last week ruled that Pinterest must face a lawsuit from a digital marketing strategist who said she came up with the idea for the social media platform.
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