 In a way, I feel like I've been doing the same career all along. But if you were to look at my CV, you'd be like, wow, how did she end up as a CMO? Like, I don't know. I'm as surprised as anybody. Hello, welcome to Top of Mind. I'm here at the FQ lounge with Andrea Mallard. She's the chief marketing officer of Pinterest. Andrea, I'm so happy you're here with us today. Thank you for including me. So what's going on at Pinterest? What are you excited about right now? So I'm excited about building an iconic global brand. Pinterest has been growing, obviously, very successfully for a long, long time. And now I think it's important for us to get our point of view out a little more emphatically into the world. So I'm most excited about really crafting the stories to articulate what the brand is really all about. Who do you see your core community as being right now? So we're so grateful to that early, really excited base of people who are using it for design, for creativity, for craft. But it's expanded so dramatically. What's interesting is we are meeting more and more people who are using it to inspire really interesting cultural work that you and I would both be familiar with. That's interesting. So do you see people using it for business? Absolutely. People are using it not just as a personal tool, but as a business tool as well more and more. What innovations are happening in the industry coming down the pike that you think are most going to change the way Pinterest sort of does business? Our mission is actually not to keep people online at all. It's to get people offline and doing things in the real world. So I think the biggest threat might be for a platform like Pinterest is people getting more and more addicted to online life and losing sight of where true happiness comes from, which is actually in the offline world. What keeps you up at night? What gets me excited? I wouldn't say it's keeping me up at night. It's actually motivating me is to say, how can companies like Pinterest, how can the advertisers on our platform use these tools to be a bigger catalyst for change? In service of their business, absolutely. But also realizing that a really important stakeholder is humanity. A really important stakeholder is the planet. And we actually can't ignore our role in those issues anymore. So I just want to make sure Pinterest is always doing well by doing good and that we're enabling other companies to do the same. What type of traits are you looking for when you're hiring? The most important trait for us is diversity. So it is really important, especially in tech, that you have as many diverse opinions as you can because what got us from A to B is not going to get us from B to C. I'll be honest, as I've gotten older, pedigree, education, all those things are seeming less and less important to me. I haven't seen a huge correlation necessarily between those things and success on the job. Not everyone has to get into these jobs through the same way. So for me, what I'm looking for is just someone who knows what they don't know and is willing to learn and is excited to do what it takes. That's kind of all the CV I need to get them excited. I hear that so much that there used to be this one path to become a marketer. That's right, for example. Well, and I didn't take that path myself. So I know it's completely untrue. Oh, really? What was, can you tell me what was untraditional? Well, I mean, I was a journalist. I, you know, I wanted to do your job. You know, I wanted to do his job and I started it as a journalist. And, you know, for me, it was like, I have a love of storytelling and that's what it sort of became. And then I moved into design and then I moved into brand. And all of a sudden, brand morphed into marketing. If there's a red thread, it is the love of story. And I think that's what great marketing is. In a way, I feel like I've been doing the same career all along. But if you were to look at my CV, you'd be like, wow, how does she end up as a CM? I'm like, I don't know. I'm as surprised as anybody. We're talking about careers. What is the best piece of advice that a mentor ever gave you or that you've passed on to someone else? One of my very first bosses said to me, you have as much right to success as anyone else. I remember being 12 years old and my dad took me to like take your daughter to work day. And I remember thinking to myself like, wow, if I work really hard one day, maybe I too can be the secretary to one of these men. And so at 20 years old when I was getting into the workforce to have someone say to me, actually you have as much right to that success as anybody was actually very transformative. People aren't necessarily better or smarter or more talented. They just believe in themselves a little differently than I did at the time. You're getting yourself permission to go for it. That's right. That's right. And it's amazing how deeply rooted that was in me that maybe I didn't have the right to it, which is ridiculous. So I tell, especially young women who work for me, I try to make it clear. Like, are you here for my job? I hope so. Like, and I don't, you know, you can be 21 years old. But if you want my job, let's figure out how to give it to you. Let's craft a path to get you there. That makes me, nothing excites me more than that. I love that. Andrea, thank you so much for being here today. This was great. And thank you for tuning in to Top of Mind. We'll see you next time.