I'm impressed with Pinterest, don't get me wrong - but the article is painting over a much more normal, steady trajectory - a long, quiet bootstrap, followed by a steady rise amplified by the megaphone of VC funding.
The article speaks of a site that "few had heard of six months ago" - but even a simple CrunchBase lookup tells you that enough people had heard of the company six months ago to give them a Series B of 27 million dollars (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pinterest)
I understand that I'm not the intended audience of this article, and that few "mainstream" folks had heard of it six months ago - but this is hardly a case of sudden and unexpected stardom. On the contrary, it seems the founders decided after some time that this wasn't the sort of idea that they could easily bootstrap to success.
Indeed, TechCrunch hints at this as a possibility in their September article - written a full six months before SXSW, as they started to get traction in the startup community - where they muse that the company seemed to have quietly raised a 10 million round another six months prior (which I believe has been confirmed true)(http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/15/sources-pinterest-has-alrea...)
No wonder the public thinks of startups as overnight successes - the press gives them what they want to hear, and the startup itself has no incentive to correct it (lest they lose that publicity.)
I agree, ask any mommy blogger, and they'll tell you that you've been living under a cave if you haven't heard of Pinterest 6 months ago. We in the tech world live in a very different bubble.
That attitude you're referring to is dangerous as well. It makes startup founders uneasy, and worrisome if they don't experience quick success, while we all know it's a long long road that requires patience, and even some luck.
The article speaks of a site that "few had heard of six months ago" - but even a simple CrunchBase lookup tells you that enough people had heard of the company six months ago to give them a Series B of 27 million dollars (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pinterest)
I understand that I'm not the intended audience of this article, and that few "mainstream" folks had heard of it six months ago - but this is hardly a case of sudden and unexpected stardom. On the contrary, it seems the founders decided after some time that this wasn't the sort of idea that they could easily bootstrap to success.
Indeed, TechCrunch hints at this as a possibility in their September article - written a full six months before SXSW, as they started to get traction in the startup community - where they muse that the company seemed to have quietly raised a 10 million round another six months prior (which I believe has been confirmed true)(http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/15/sources-pinterest-has-alrea...)
No wonder the public thinks of startups as overnight successes - the press gives them what they want to hear, and the startup itself has no incentive to correct it (lest they lose that publicity.)