Pinterest has hired former Google and Square executive Francoise Brougher as its first COO
Brougher joins as Pinterest is eyeing an IPO. — Pinterest just made an important new hire: The visual search company is bringing on Francoise Brougher, a former executive from both Google and Square, to be its first-ever COO.
Context & Ripple Effects
The COO hire caps a two-year build-out of Pinterest's executive bench with big-tech operators ahead of an expected IPO: the company had already brought in Twitter finance veteran Todd Morgenfeld as its first CFO and Google/Baidu search veteran Li Fan to lead engineering. Brougher, who scaled operations at both Google and Square, fills the last missing seat of that pre-public structure.
What makes this hire worth revisiting is how the arc resolved: Brougher was fired in April 2020, sued Pinterest alleging gender discrimination, and the company ultimately agreed to a $22.5M settlement after she published a detailed account of her claims.
First-order effects
- Pinterest gains its first-ever COO at the moment it is eyeing an IPO, giving founders Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp an experienced operator over sales, partnerships, and internal scaling while the CFO seat is already filled.
- Brougher's arrival deepens Pinterest's reliance on ex-Google leadership — she joins Li Fan from the same alma mater, concentrating institutional knowledge of how a large ad-driven platform runs.
Second-order effects
- Her subsequent firing and lawsuit turned a routine executive departure into a public-governance crisis, forcing Pinterest to defend its workplace culture in court and in public rather than quietly restructure.
- The settlement set a reference point for other pre-IPO startups facing discrimination claims from senior women, where equity-heavy packages and reputational stakes raise the cost of litigation.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, IPO-bound consumer platforms will treat executive-culture risk as a material disclosure issue, not just an HR matter — the gap between a polished pre-IPO bench and internal treatment of senior leaders becomes a valuation question.
- Pinterest's later decision to replace founder CEO Ben Silbermann with a Google commerce executive suggests the ex-Google hiring strategy eventually extended all the way to the top, completing the professionalization this COO hire began.
The trend: Pre-IPO tech companies are importing big-tech operating talent to build public-company structures, but the same hires are increasingly exposing governance and culture failures that follow them into the public markets.