Episode Details

Pinterest is giving their community tools to engage in commerce, not to interact more online but to get out and discover the world around them. In this episode, we interview Jeremy King, the SVP of Engineering at Pinterest and former CTO of Walmart.com, to discover how they're using advanced machine vision and context to power the catalogs and commerce experiences both on-and-off-platform.

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Main Takeaways:

• Jeremy King, SVP of Technology at Pinterest, joins Brian and Phillip on today's episode.

• Is the open-source format the "secret sauce" to being successful when developing advancements in technology?

• Inspiration engines like Pinterest are fostering real-world interactions and building communities.  

• Customization through personalization sometimes leads to repetitive product recommendations, but there are ways to battle this using big data.

Jeremy King: A Brief Professional History:

• Jeremy has been at Pinterest for only 4 months, but previously spent 8 years at Walmart running Walmart Labs and helped them go through their digital transformation. 

• Brian heard Jeremy's talk at NRF and asks Brian how he ended up at Walmart and to talk a bit about his journey with the company.

• Eight years ago, Walmart did not have a very large presence online, but throughout his tenure at the company, they vastly expanded their eCommerce entity. 

Technology Leadership: What is the Secret Sauce?:

• Phillip harkens back months ago to when Wayfair was on the show and comments on how open-source adoption can change the image of your brand.

• Leadership from a technology perspective is a monumental task in regards to advancement in technologies for brands. 

• Jeremy talks about the difficulties that corporations such as Walmart face in technology that simply does not scale to the massive size of the corporation itself. 

• Open-source contributions and a healthy approach to technology selection are the "secret sauce" that Jeremy attributes to success in technological leadership.

• "Most companies these days have to have a new respect for how much technology plays in their success or failure".

Open-Source Technology: The Power of the Community: 

• If you are using technologies that are not open-source, you are typically beholden to the direction and decisions of a single organization as opposed to the community of open-source technology. 

• Try things in house first, and then look for other solutions that don't already lie within your team. 

• Pick the places where you want to be innovative and insource those things then outsource everything else to save you time and effort. 

• What parts of your business do you outsource and where are you trying to innovate in-house? 

Social Media versus Discovery: How to Make Something Shoppable:

• With over 300 million visitors a month, Pinterest was going to be a unique opportunity for Jeremy to scale the team and build technology for a product that people already love. 

• How do you make a discovery platform like Pinterest more shoppable? 

• As a discovery engine, people go to Pinterest with a positive mentality so making shopping more accessible is the goal as opposed to interrupting social media behaviors. 

• Pinterest is also a great p