Ben Silbermann Steps Down As Pinterest’s CEO

In a surprising turn of events, the longtime CEO of Pinterest, Ben Silbermann is stepping down from his leading position. The news was recently announced through a public post by the company today.

And it came with the firm’s shares jumping by more than 5% in the after-hour share trading.

From Wednesday onwards, the company will be seeing Bill Ready take the lead. In case you might be familiar, he was the head of handling Google’s commerce department. And even before that, he was the VP and COO of PayPal. His working term at Google was stated to be just 3 years but the experience he has is definitely going to serve Pinterest well.

On average, the app boasts a staggering 400 million users on a monthly basis. There have been great efforts put forward in the app’s advertising domain. But recently only, we’ve seen an incredible transition toward e-commerce and the response has been great so far.

This past month, there were great speculations about the firm taking on The Yes which is a leading AI-based platform for online shopping of different fashion brands.

Silbermann mentioned in his farewell statement how Bill was certainly the right man for the job and how the company’s next chapter will surely be needed his ideas for progression and transition. After all, who better understand payments and the world of commerce than he?

Silbermann revealed how he would be acting as the company’s Executive Chairman. Certainly, he’s come a long way, if we look at how the app was founded in 2010, and then publicized in 2019.

There were plenty of hurdles along the way which included missing out on user expectations to a number of different workforce complaints such as discrimination against employees of color.

Bill Ready certainly has a huge task in front of him including the company’s shares falling by 45.8% this year. And the task of leading a firm to compete with the likes of Amazon in the e-commerce industry is definitely one mega challenge.

But Ready has introduced some wonderful features on Google in terms of e-commerce like great chances to buy products with a single click at merchants’ sites or perhaps displaying in detail shopping tidbits on the search page.

In addition to that, Bill Ready also has the experience needed to drive a ship into the diverse e-commerce sector during the daunting period of the pandemic. So, we believe he’ll do just great over here.


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