Funny story about Ben; I ran into him at a low-key gathering in downtown SF (I think Silicon Prairie news put it on).

I knew he looked familiar, but thought it was because we had met previously at a Meetup or something. We started chatting and he said that he worked for Pinterest. I asked "so, what employee # are you?" And he looked at me and said.. "One."

Lol, it finally dawned on me that he was a founder of Pinterest and that he looked familiar because I had read several interviews from him in the past.

He was incredibly humble and kind and was an absolute pleasure to talk with.

I had a similar experience! It was 2012 and the site Airtime had just launched. It was similar to Chatroulette, i.e. random video conversations with people on the web. I had only spoken to a handful of people until I got paired with Ben. It took a few minutes before he shared that he was the founder of a website called Pinterest, which I was intimately familiar with. Pinterest wasn't quite as famous at the time but already had millions of users. Ben was incredibly friendly, humble and smart. A few months later he gave me a tour of Pinterest HQ. It was such a random and wonderful thing, I'll always remember it.

I've had the fortunate opportunity to have a couple 30-minute 1:1 conversations with Ben. His humility is always what I find the most striking. I think that's why he's been so successful at pivoting from 1000 users to over 100 million users. He is always trying to learn and improve as a CEO-founder. Maybe someday the company will outgrow him, but he will always be an inspiration to me..

*Caveat, I work for Pinterest.