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Business Daily meets: Pinterest CEO Bill Ready
00:17:28
From fixing cars in Kentucky to leading one of the world’s biggest social platforms
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- [00:00]
Shona McCallum
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
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Podcast Advertiser/Host
I love ravioli. Since when do you speak Italian?
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SAP Concur Representative
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Podcast Advertiser/Host
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SAP Concur Representative
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SAP Concur Representative
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Podcast Advertiser/Host
I don't have kids.
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Bill Ready
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Podcast Advertiser/Host
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Bill Ready
You don't look like.
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SAP Concur Representative
Please.
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Shona McCallum
I'll take that as a compliment.
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BritBox Advertiser
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Shona McCallum
Hello and welcome to Business Daily meets. I'm Shona McCallum. In today's program, I'll be speaking to Bill Reddy. He started his working life in his parents auto repair shop. Now his world looks very different. As CEO of social media platform Pinterest.
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Bill Ready
We're the only place in the Western world where people go to go curate and refine their tastes. You know, there are other places that would know all the things that you bought or things like that, but they don't know how you style them together into an outfit or how you design the room in your house. And these are the things that people do on Pinterest all day long.
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Shona McCallum
Pinterest is an app where you search for things like recipes, home decor and fashion. The platform has been valued at more than $22 billion, but when it added controls for younger users, the share price tanked.
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Bill Ready
I made accounts private only for under 16, private by default for under 18. We just said full stop. We're basically turning off the social features for users under 16. When we did that, it was very counterintuitive. Our stock dropped over 20% when we did it.
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Shona McCallum
We'll hear how the company has navigated attempts to make the platform safer for younger users, where the business is growing globally and what the future might look like for Pinterest. That's Bill Ready. Coming up on Today's Business Daily meets. Today's program doesn't start where Most social media and big tech stories begin in Silicon Valley, the global hub for technology and innovation. Bill Reddy's story begins in the Southern United States.
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Bill Ready
I grew up in a little town in Kentucky.
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Shona McCallum
From the age of 13, Bill would be found under the hood of cars at his parents auto repair shop working as a mechanic.
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Bill Ready
But I grew up in a place where, you know, if we, you know, had to look customers in the eye and if we didn't do good things for customers, we weren't going to eat well, literally.
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Shona McCallum
Years later, he's graduating top of his class at the University of Louisville with a degree in information systems and finance.
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Bill Ready
I was first in my family to go to college. I had federal Pell Grants to help with going to college, which if you're not familiar with those, those are federal grants in the US for families below the poverty line. Yeah, Silicon Valley was a universe away from where I grew up.
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Shona McCallum
From turning wrenches as a teen to graduating with a master's from Harvard Business School, he moved into consulting at McKinsey, advising fintech companies before moving into venture capital with Accel Partners. He then quickly found his way into startups.
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Bill Ready
I've been fortunate. I've helped to build five startups and went through multiple IPOs and sales of those and led multiple products, over a billion users.
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Shona McCallum
But it was Braintree where Bill really made his mark, building its first payment products and leading the acquisition of Venmo, an American mobile payment payment service. That success brought him to PayPal, where he rose to chief operating officer. And in 2020, Bill joined Google. He was president of commerce and payment, helping to shape how billions of people shop and pay for services online. Two years later, Bill turned his attention to social media, joining Pinterest as Chief Executive officer.
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Interviewer/Host
So how do you see you? Maybe shiny, bright or bleached?
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Bill Ready
Hmm.
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Interviewer/Host
Let's think big.
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Shona McCallum
Founded in 2008, Pinterest says it now has close to 600 million users around the world. And the majority of those are women. In the UK, Pinterest data states that 70% of users are female. It's about visual discovery and idea curation. A digital pinboard for collecting inspiration, whether that's your dream kitchen, wedding, holiday, or even your next nanicure. Excuse me, I prefer my tips French.
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Interviewer/Host
You could try Chrome nails, Galaxy Snakeskin, Ombre, Flame Fire.
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Bill Ready
We're the only place in the western world where people go to go curate and refine their tastes. And so, you know, there are other places that would know all the things that you bought or things like that, but they don't know how you style them together into an outfit or how you design the room in your house, or how you sort of set the table for the meal that you prepared for friends. And these are the things that people do on Pinterest. All day long is thinking about like, well, which shoes are going to go with that outfit or which handbags and really make that outfit, you know, come together. How would I put an outfit together around that handbag that I really love? Or, you know, I'm going to make a meal for friends and here's, here's the meal I'm going to make. But how do I want to set the table for that? Because I really want it to be a great conversation with people I care about. These are the things that we're helping people do.
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Shona McCallum
And it's especially popular with one generation in particular. Generation z. Born between 1997 and 2012, they're the first true digital natives. Having grown up entirely in the Internet age, I have had so much luck lately thrifting my Pinterest board.
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Bill Ready
Consider this your full tutorial on how to create Pinterest worthy content. Howdy.
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Shona McCallum
I, like many, use Pinterest as my inspiration plays for a lot of the outfits that I wear. Okay, get dressed with me. Trying to recreate another outfit inspired by my Pinterest.
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Bill Ready
Two things you'll hear from Gen Z users when you ask them why they come to Pinterest. The first is, you know, they see it as a, you know, in Oasis, away from the toxicity they experience elsewhere. Or they'll say things like, oh, when I'm on other platforms, it's other people telling me who to be versus Pinterest. I just get to figure out who I want to be. Which also deals with some of the comparative and performative nature of social media. But the second thing we're helping them, you know, figure out their style, their taste, and how they can do things in their real life that make their real life better. Not just glued to a screen, but things they're going to do in the real world with friends, with people. You know, there's lots of different research out there, but there's commonly cited research that says nearly half of Gen Z, if given the choice, wishes social media didn't exist and they can't quite leave it because their friends are there. There's a fear of missing out. That's clearly a problem. You know, we need to be committed to investing in the well being of our users.
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Shona McCallum
When Bill Reddy took over as CEO in June 2022, social media companies were battling a wave of criticism from politicians and the public who felt they had prioritized profit over saf.
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Bill Ready
As a builder in tech for decades, I had seen a lot of what was happening with social media, with social media becoming more toxic and divisive, and wanted to prove that there was a more positive alternative to social media was actually possible. And so since coming in as CEO a little over three years ago, I've made that really central to our reason for being to say, not only do we want to prove that there's a positive alternative to social media in this not coming wave of AI, but we are deep in the midst of the onset of AI. I think it's even more important that we are thinking about how we are building platforms to be positive and to think about the emotional well being impact of these platforms on the people that use them. So some of the specific things that we have done around making Pinterest a positive place for our users is first of all, as I just mentioned, tuning AI for positivity, thinking about how do we actually make sure that, you know, we are providing experiences that have people leaving feeling better after time spent on our platform rather than worse.
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Shona McCallum
It's a bold ambition and one that directly affected the value of the company.
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Bill Ready
As a tech CEO and as a dad, you know, I looked at what was happening with across social media platforms with random strangers able to contact, you know, young teenagers online, and it just makes sense when you say it out loud that it's not safe for strangers to be able to contact children online. Most people say, well, of course not. But somehow social media has conditioned us to accept that that's okay. And so at Pinterest, I made accounts private only for under 16, private by default for under 18. And what that really means is that, you know, when I say private only for under 16, it's not a feature you can turn on and off. We just said full stop. We're basically turning off the social features for users under 16. And when we did that, it was very counterintuitive. Our stock dropped over 20% when we did it. People thought it'd be our end with young users. But my belief was that if we invested in doing what was right by our customers, right by our users, if we were willing to commit to their long term wellbeing, that in the long run that would pay off. And while our stock dropped over 20% when we did that, a year later we had nearly doubled and Gen Z is now more than half our platform because it turns out young users are looking for Safer, healthier alternatives to traditional social media. And as we've given them that safer, more private space, we're seeing that this is actually a place that they come. And if you ask them why they come to Pinterest, one of the first reasons they'll say is they see it as an oasis away from the toxicity they experience elsewhere online.
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Shona McCallum
So you would like stricter regulation, even if it meant less users on Pinterest?
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Bill Ready
What I'd like to see is regulation that held applications accountable for age appropriate experiences. That doesn't have to mean less users. In fact, I think we've proven the counter to that. As we made safer experiences, we got more users. You can have a good business by doing good things for customers. It's really about thinking about the long term instead of just the short term.
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Shona McCallum
Pinterest generates revenue by delivering ads on its website and mobile app. And like many other social media platforms, it's also becoming a place where people can go not only to look, but to shop and spend money.
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Bill Ready
Off.
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Podcast Advertiser/Host
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Shona McCallum
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Bill Ready
You know, there was a recent study by Adobe that we didn't sponsor, we didn't have a part in it, that said that you now have. More than 39% of Gen Z thinks of Pinterest as a first place to go search. I think that's, you know, quite an interesting thing, not just in how, you know, in demonstrating the progress we have made around visual search. That sort of stands in contrast to what people do on chatbots, you know, where it's still very text based, but we're solving for visual search, which is really, when you think about shopping and so many of these things, we're solving for people. The I'll know it when I see it problem, which is so much of how people actually shop in the real world. And so we've made tremendous progress there. But I actually think it's part of a broader trend in the industry that, you know, search is being rethought in ways that we couldn't have imagined even just a few years ago.
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Shona McCallum
According to Pinterest usage statistics, the largest Pinterest audience is in the U.S. followed by Brazil and Mexico.
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Bill Ready
You know, more than 80% of our users are outside the U.S. we're growing in every geography that we track, with every generation that we track. Gen Z is our largest and fastest growing. But also for us international, outside the US is where our fastest user growth is. Happening.
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Shona McCallum
You're listening to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
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Bill Ready
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Shona McCallum
I'm Shona McCallum and today I'm speaking to Bill Reddy, CEO of Pinterest. In 2022, Pinterest and fellow social media platform Instagram hit the headlines after an inquest into the death of a 14 year old schoolgirl from the UK. Molly Russell ended her life in November 2017 after viewing suicide and self harm content online.
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SAP Concur Representative
A coroner has ruled that social media played a role in the death of Molly Russell, the 14 year old who took her own life after watching thousands of videos about self harm on platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest. Molly's father, Ian Russell, said he hoped the ruling would help to bring about change.
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Bill Ready
First of all, just, you know, as a, as a parent of a young daughter, like, I just, it's such a tragedy and I can't imagine the pain her family feels on this. While that happened before my time here at Pinterest, you know, I think about it every day. You know, when I came in as CEO, you know, I shared that a primary reason I joined Pinterest was to prove that you could have a more positive alternative to social media. And we made trust and safety and user well being central to our reason for being. And I think, you know, when you look at what we've done relative to other platforms, I think we've put you know, very strong actions, you know, behind those things because, you know, I think it's a tragic example that more absolutely, you know, can and should be done. And I think we, while that was a tragic situation, you know, it has, you know, galvanized us around why it's so important that, you know, all tech platforms take these things really, really seriously.
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Shona McCallum
Since Molly's death, there has been a nationwide debate in the UK about the duty of care tech companies have towards children with calls for tighter regulation of social media.
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Bill Ready
We've looked at that and said we want to lead the way on this. And I think if you look objectively at what we're doing, the only platform doing private only for under 16, publishing our results on our emotional wellbeing, impact with users, leading the industry on those things, committing to continue to be better, sharing the work that we have done with others in hopes that others in the industry adopt it as well. You know, we absolutely are looking to lead the way on these things and again, I think about Molly every day and the work that we do and it guides us.
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Shona McCallum
That case really exposed the dangers of what can happen when harmful content isn't caught in time. And while social media platforms have said they'll do better, it raised the question of how you measure whether things are getting better online.
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Bill Ready
We're measuring our impact on emotional well being and study after study, independent studies find that people feel better after time spent on our platform, particularly when compared to social media platforms. People feel better after time spent and you know, that's both about reducing bad content. And we made other policy choices like no nudity on the platform, you know, making sure that there's, you know, we, we have policies that don't allow for harmful content and we're specifically tuning to show things that measurably make people feel better. But then we're also doing things in through the way we design the product. Not just private only for under 16, but we've done things like, you know, supporting, not only supporting phone free schools but doing things like in app prompts, you know, if we see a school age user comes to our app during school hours we'll give them a pop up that says we love you, we care about your education, come back and see us after school. I think in social media so much of the harmful interactions have crowded out the good parts that are there and how do we also crowd in the good parts. And so that's where as we've made it more private, surface more positive content, helping people do things that improve their real life. It's you know, help helping them to focus in on the good parts, even as we make sure we do everything that we can to make sure they don't encounter harmful content as well.
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Shona McCallum
The conversation doesn't stop at safety because looming over every corner of the tech world right now is this artificial intelligence. AI.
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Bill Ready
AI, artificial intelligence. This is really powerful technology. It can do a lot of good in the world, but we also need to think about how to use it responsibly. With any great new technology, it can be used for good or it can be used for bad. So I think it's a really important time in tech that as we have this amazing new technology and AI to have people that are really committed to how we use AI for good. I'm clearly on that side of it. That's why I came to Pinterest is to try to prove what could be done with responsible use of AI. You know, not only are we, you know, tuning AI for positivity, internally we've committed to measuring our impact on user well being, publishing that annually, committing to make it better year after year, and then sharing our work with others as to what we've done to actually lead to positive well being outcomes. Because we don't want to be the only ones. I'd love to wake up in a world where social media companies were competing on their safety records the same way that auto manufacturers do.
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Shona McCallum
That's nearly all from today's Business Daily Meet presented by me, Shona MacCallum. My thanks to my guest, Bill Reddy. From fixing cars in Kentucky to leading one of the world's biggest social platforms, he says his challenge now is making the Internet a more positive place. So I couldn't leave him without asking one final question. What's on his Pinterest board?
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Bill Ready
I'm looking for, you know, clothes and sneakers are a big one for me also. I grew up in a little town in Kentucky. My parents had a little auto repair shop and so I grew up working there. And so I'm a car enthusiast as well. So classic automobiles and things like that are a big interest for me also.
- [19:44]
Interviewer/Host
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