How Fear of Embarrassment Turned into a $12.3 Billion Dollar Valuation – Info Entrepreneurship

Most of us look at Ben’s story and think: Holy shit, that’s amazing. Pinterest is an overnight success.

But was it really? Had Pinterest always been that successful?

No. In fact, for the first 9 months, growth had been steadily declining. Ben had done everything he could think of, but people just didn’t get it. They didn’t ‘see’ Ben’s vision. They didn’t see the concept behind Pinterest.

“I sent Pinterest to 200 of my friends and I think 100 of them opened the email. It was catastrophically small numbers”

The site had less than 10,000 users at the time, most of whom weren’t even using it.

Still, Ben never gave up. He persisted.

People asked him why and Ben responded:

“The idea of telling everyone we blew it was so embarrassing. I thought, Google is never going to take me back- they barely hired me the first time!”

To Ben, the fear of embarrassment was what had kept him going. But that wasn’t really the reason why he succeeded.

The reason was because Ben simply chose not to give up. Pinterest was his passion, and for that reason alone, despite all obstacles, he continued to work on it even things had been bleak.

And that’s where most of us differ from Ben. How many times have we given up when faced with a seemingly difficult obstacle? How many times have we gave up on our passions simply because we didn’t try? How often do we look back at what we could’ve done, should’ve done?

Unlike Ben, we’ll never know because we gave up too early.