More developments for Pinterest co-founder Paul Sciarra, who we reported yesterday was leaving Pinterest as Ben Silbermann officially took helm as CEO. Sciarra is going VC and joining Andreessen Horowitz as entrepreneur-in-residence.
The move follows the bigger trend of startup execs/founders getting snapped up by the VC firms, to help them get a bit smarter in how they work with their portfolio companies. Just yesterday, First Round Capital hired Scribd’s Jack Leidlein as head of talent.
“I hope that eventually leads me back to doing what I’ve done for the past three and a half years — namely, building cool things with awesome people with unexpected results,” Sciarra wrote in a blog post on the Pinterest site.
Andreessen Horowitz is one of Pinterest’s investors, along with Bessemer Venture Partners, Ron Conway and several others. Together they have put $35.7 million into Pinterest, considered one of the fastest-growing social networking sites ever, with comScore reporting in January 2012 that it had 11.7 million uniques.
Andreessen Horowitz is one of the leaders among VCs building out the services that they offer to young companies beyond funding. The EIC role will see Sciarra potentially help Andreessen evaluate future investments, offer advice and assistance to its portfolio companies and perhaps even aid Andreessen Horowitz to be more disruptive in its own ventures.
Pinterest, with its pinning of images on Pinboards, has shifted a lot of people’s thinking about how to represent information in a more visual way. It will be interesting to see how and if that follows through here, or whether the ideas Sciarra spins out will be in entirely different areas. Before Cold Brew Labs really got into its groove with Pinterest, there were probably a lot of other concepts floating around. Will we see some of them surfacing here?
One other question to ponder: With big changes afoot for both Silvermann and Sciarra, the remaining co-founder, Evan Sharp, is noted to be currently focused on product. What’s next for him?
Pinterest is a social networking site with a visually-pleasing “virtual pinboard” interface. Users collect photos and link to products they love, creating their own pinboards and following the pinboards of other people whom they find interesting. The site has experienced rapid growth in recent months.
Andreessen Horowitz is a $2.5 billion venture capital firm that was launched on July 6, 2009. Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, John O’Farrell, Scott Weiss, Jeff Jordan, and Peter Levine are the general partners of the firm.
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