In the wave of global Internet development, there are a number of Chinese who have made important contributions, and the "2021 Forbes China North America Chinese Elite TOP 60" selection winner - Pinterest content platform engineering director Bin Liu is one of them.
Pinterest Content Platform Engineering Director Liu Bin
Middle school in Hangzhou Foreign Chinese, the college entrance examination into zhejiang University Zhu Kezhen College engineering platform, and then to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to continue further studies, after graduation to join the Silicon Valley giant Pinterest, 31 years old became one of the youngest Chinese executives in Silicon Valley, such achievements are mostly unattainable, but Liu Bin said that this is like "monkey tossing a coin", he is just lucky.
Along the way, Liu Bin has never stopped, and he believes that there are two important reasons behind it: luck and passion. People often say that luck is the humble word of the strong, but in Liu Bin's view, he can have today's harvest of luck is indispensable, "the rapid development of Internet companies in the past ten years has made many people achieve great success, in fact, looking back at us are just a grain of sand of the times, I am lucky to be in this industry and get some success, but also met a lot of like-minded, capable friends." ”
Liu Bin said that he has always been full of passion and mission in Pinterest, always thinking about "how to make users get more value, how to make products and make the company more successful", so he has also grown with the development of the company. When Liu joined Pinterest, the company had fewer than 100 employees, and now that number has increased to more than 4,000. After 8 years, Liu Bin himself has grown from an intern to a content platform engineering director, responsible for the product and engineering team of Pinterest content platform, a multinational team of nearly 100 people.
In Liu Bin's view, the biggest difference between Pinterest and other social media is that most software is helping users "pass the time", while Pinterest is helping users "solve problems", and users usually browse or search with problems. Pinterest's differentiated positioning has proven successful. As of July 2021, Pinterest has 440 million monthly active users, covering most countries and regions in North America, Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia.
With the rapid development of the company, Liu Bin has been looking for opportunities for internal innovation. Pinterest started from pictures, and then to video to e-commerce, major changes in the business, almost all of which have Liu Bin's contributions. According to Liu Bin, five or six years ago, there was only picture content on Pinterest, and there was no short video platform like TikTok on the market. But he noted the success of YouTube and Facebook in video content and decided that video would be the way forward.
"I told Ben (CEO/Founder of Pinterest) that we had to make videos." Subsequently, Liu Bin led the team to build an end-to-end video platform and began to promote substantive changes in the content of the Pinterest platform step by step. On December 6, 2021, Pinterest announced the completion of the acquisition of video editing software company VOCHI, the company's largest acquisition in recent years, after which the VOCHI team will join the content platform team and be directly managed by Liu Bin.
In addition, in Liu Bin's view, the strong social and sharing attributes make Pinterest "very suitable for e-commerce". According to the survey, 90% of users use Pinterest to help make shopping choices, and 72% say that Pinterest stimulates their desire to shop when they don't want to. Therefore, in 2019, Liu Bin led the team to invest a lot of resources in e-commerce products.
It turns out that e-commerce is indeed very suitable for Pinterest's products and user habits. By 2020, there are 12 million U.S. shoppers on the Pinterest platform, and consumers share and discover new product recommendations on the platform every day. At present, Pinterest is also increasing shopping-related functions and strengthening social e-commerce attributes. On October 29, 2021, Pinterest launched Pinterest TV, officially entering the live e-commerce market, which is also an important measure for Pinterest to embrace the trend of video and live e-commerce.
With the growth of Pinterest, in the past 8 years, Liu Bin's cognition has gradually changed, the most important of which is to recognize the importance of effective communication between people. At the beginning, Liu Bin believed that the code was well written, the technical ability was strong, the product was beautifully done, and the business ability was outstanding, which were the most important, so he has been studying technology. But then he found that if you want to do a good job in the company, communication skills are equally important, and their importance is no less important than business capabilities. "A company is like a machine that operates in people and teams, and the connections, collaboration and communication between people are very important, usually acting as lubricants and accelerants."
As a Chinese executive, Liu Bin is the director of content platform engineering for the company, and also serves as the co-chairman of Pinterest's internal organization Asians@, which unites the company's Asian-American partners to help Asian-American groups inside and outside the company. In 2021, Bin Liu organized and participated in many communities and events related to Asian-American rights, such as the #StopAsianHate protest and initiative and #TechForAAPI Hackathon. As a Chinese, he hopes to contribute to the relatively disadvantaged Asian-American community in the United States, while encouraging those around him to take on more social responsibilities together.
"I read Adam Grant's Give and Take before, and he summed up the different mindsets of the giver and taker and the impact they have on people, and I myself am slowly changing to the giver mentality." Liu Bin said.
(Note: The article is written by the Forbes China North American Chinese Elite Selection Organizing Committee)
The highlights are never to be missed
▽