Pins and needs

For a guy running such a beautiful website, Ben Silbermann looks like hell; he has prominent bags under tired, watery eyes; his shoulders hang heavy; his shirt is wrinkled; and his dark hair is uncombed. When he speaks - with the open-vowel inflections of his upbringing in the United States Midwest - his voice is so slight that it often gets lost beneath the din of other conversations. When he moves, it is with the economy of a marathon runner trying to conserve every last bit of energy on the eve of a big race.

"I'm tired," says the 30-year-old chief executive of Pinterest, the social scrapbook that's one of the hottest websites on the planet, as he prepares to shovel down a bowl of noodles a few feet away from his desk. Silbermann leaves for the office at 7am most mornings and works non-stop until dinner. His only respite, if you can call it that, comes in the predawn hours, when he takes his newborn son, Max, into his arms and fires up his laptop to check his e-mails. Just a few weeks before Max was born, in early July, Silbermann declared a companywide lockdown, ordering his 35 employees to come early and stay late in order to build new iPad and Android applications. The goal: to stoke growth. He ordered commemorative T-shirts with the phrase "Summer of Apps" printed across the chest, and he cut off almost all contact with anyone outside the company, including potential business partners.

Such is life at what earlier this year was declared the fastest-growing web service in history.

This schedule is the price of running a site as beloved as Pinterest, which has won fans thanks to its breakthrough design. Think of Pinterest as a giant digital catalogue filled with the web's most beauti-ful images. Users - "pinners", in the twee parlance of the site - copy images they find elsewhere on the web and store them on one of their personal Pinterest pages, called pinboards. (Everything in the company's office, down to the Wi-fi password, has the word "pin" in it.)

On first blush, Pinterest may sound like a hundred other social media websites where people share images and comment on them. But the design choices of Silbermann and site co-founder Evan Sharp, based on a new way of browsing that dispenses with the web's rigid rules of presenting content, have made the service incredibly addictive. To create a pinboard is to say to the world, "Here are the beautiful things that make me who I am - or who I want to be." Young women use Pinterest to plan their weddings, men collect watches and bikes in de facto gift registries, and couples assemble furniture sets for their new homes. Pictures of attractive men and women in various states of undress abound. The sum of each user's choices is displayed in an ever-changing pastiche on each person's homepage.

"When you open up Pinterest," Silbermann says, distilling his vision, "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." In other words, it's a store in which every single product has been tailored to your needs, ambitions and desires.