Which three people founded Pinterest, Inc.?

Pinterest, Inc. was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp. The trio began developing the service in 2009, and Pinterest’s prototype launched as a closed beta in March 2010.

Pinterest grew out of Tote, an earlier mobile shopping application created by Silbermann and Sciarra. Tote users were collecting favorite products even though mobile payments were still inconvenient, inspiring the founders to build a visual service for organizing and sharing discoveries instead.

Silbermann came from Google’s online advertising group, Sciarra became Pinterest’s early president and CEO, and Sharp—who had worked at Facebook—designed and coded the original Pinterest grid. The first version was built from a small apartment in New York City.

A common mix-up is confusing Pinterest’s founders with later executives or founders of other social networks. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim founded YouTube, while Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger founded Instagram; none of them founded Pinterest.