Bessemer Venture Partners picked up a piece of everyone's favorite pinboard site back when it was barely making a blip on the Silicon Valley radar. Jeremy Levine tells us why he decided it was a good bet.
Bessemer Venture Partners led Pinterest's Series A financing last year (the startup now has $37.5 in investments, including a Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz). The pinboard site, where users create visual collections of things they love, has recently exploded into the public consciousness, causing some observers to wonder what makes it so special.
Jeremy Levine, who led Bessemer's investment, tells us about all the ways Pinterest can make money, why it's not thinking about that right now, and why the company is more like Google than you might imagine.
JEREMY LEVINE: Five or six years ago, in the pre-TechCrunch era when most venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road and in Silicon Valley wouldn't touch a consumer company with a 10-foot pole (“consumer” was almost a dirty word), we at Bessemer got pretty excited about one idea: that you could build a really valuable media company based entirely on user-generated content. We made four or five investments in 2005-6, and every single one of them turned out to do pretty well: Yelp, LinkedIn, Wikia, and OLX (a global online classifieds and auction service).
But there was one particular kind of company that we were scouting for constantly--a user-generated content media property around products, because products are so wildly monetizable. So at the beginning of 2011, when I first learned about Pinterest, it struck a nerve immediately. I said: This is essentially the company I was looking for six year ago. That's why we jumped on it at a time it was probably not quite as intuitive or obvious as it is today.
How does a "product-related, user-generated" media company like Pinterest make money?
There are no specific ideas or projects i...
[Source: Fast Company]
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