I really liked insects – all kinds: flies, grasshoppers, weevils.

My parents are doctors, both my sisters are doctors, so I figured I’d just be a doctor too. Sometime in my junior year, I had this sudden realization that maybe that wasn’t for me. I was sort of lost at sea.

I’d never managed anyone before, so I don’t have a lot of experience. But I’m lucky – I have a lot of team members who have a really honest relationship with me.

Don’t take too much advice. Most people who have a lot of advice to give ~ with a few exceptions ~ generalize whatever they did. Don’t over-analyze everything. I myself have been guilty of over-thinking problems. Just build things and find out if they work.

So many things that I was excited about as a kid were about proximity. The idea that somebody could grow up in rural Iowa and be into break dancing because of YouTube – that was a really simple, profound idea.

The companies that I really admire the most are the ones that have a deep visceral understanding of why people use their service, and they figure out ways of making money that are completely consistent with how people are feeling and what they are doing at the time.

When you open up Pinterest, you should feel like you’ve walked into a building full of stuff that only you are interested in. Everything should feel handpicked for you.

I use Pinterest for everything. Book collections, trips, hobbies. It’s all there. I planned my wedding on it. When I had a kid, I planned all his stuff on it. So it was nice to discover that I wasn’t the only one.

A lot of the future of search is going to be about pictures instead of keywords. Computer vision technology is going to be a big deal.

There’s a lot of pressure to look like the last company that was successful.

I’d never managed anyone before, so I don’t have a lot of experience. But I’m lucky – I have a lot of team members who have a really honest relationship with me.

We want the average person to use it and think that it makes the experience of using Pinterest better.

The whole reason Pinterest exists is to help people discover the things that they love and then go take action on them, and a lot of the things they take action on are tied to commercial intent.

I used to wake up and look at our analytics and think, ‘What if yesterday was the last day anyone used Pinterest?’ Like, everyone collectively decided, ‘We’re done!’ Over time I got more confidence.

As a kid, I always idolized entrepreneurs. I thought they were cool people in the way that I thought basketball players were cool people. It’s cool that some people get paid to dunk basketballs, but I’m not one of those people.

The No. 1 challenge is getting people to understand that Pinterest isn’t a social network.

When Pinterest works well, it helps you find things that are meaningful to you. We want to build a system that helps you do that.

I always just want to move along to the next step.

So March 2010, we launched Pinterest, and we were at 3,000 accounts. And that wouldn’t be so bad if we hadn’t started building Pinterest actually in November 2009. And that alone wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t left my job to start a company in May 2008.

I used to wake up and look at our analytics and think, “What if yesterday was the last day anyone used Pinterest?” Like, everyone collectively decided, “We’re done!” Over time I got more confidence.

I think there are a lot more people that don’t use Pinterest in the world than do use it, so for most people, that first experience is really, really important. I think feeling really close and in touch with that first user experience is pretty basic to making it better every day.

If Google teaches you anything, it’s that small ideas can be big.

I thought Google was the coolest place. People there were so smart and they were all doing these really interesting things. I just felt really lucky to be a part of it even in a small way.

What you collect says so much about who you are.

I want Pinterest to be human. The Internet‘s still so abstract… To me, boards are a very human way of looking at the world.

The biggest thing about Pinterest is that people are there saving ideas for their personal lives. Not to rile up other people or make a big statement.

No amount of technology is going to change the fact that people process information visually.

Most people generalize whatever they did, and say that was the strategy that made it work.

People say doing a startup is like a marathon. It’s actually a roadtrip at night with no headlights. You think you’re going to Toledo but you’re actually going to Miami and you might not have enough gas so you might need to buy gas from someone who might take you out if you aren’t driving well

I think the thing that I’ve learned is that really great people, they actually want to work on hard problems.

I look around my neighborhood, and I see people hailing a cab or ordering their food and then paying for it all with their phone. I’ve read about that stuff for a really long time, and now it’s starting to become commonplace.

At a small company, so much of the trick is focus. Not only can you only do a finite number of things, but you have to do them in the right order.

We’re trying to do something so that when the average person uses Pinterest, it has to make the service better.