Pinterest's VP of advertising products Jon Alferness, who joined the company from Google last summer, has left
Kurt Wagner / Recode :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second ad-leadership exit at Pinterest in four months: when Tim Kendall left the president role at the end of 2017, Jon Alferness — recruited from Google just last summer — absorbed his responsibilities. Now the person holding that combined brief is gone too, leaving Pinterest's advertising products organization without the executive who was supposed to stabilize it.
The churn sits inside a longer pattern in the related coverage: Pinterest has repeatedly turned to Google for senior talent, including the 2016 hire of Li Fan to lead engineering — a pipeline that later runs all the way to the top when Google commerce chief Bill Ready replaces Ben Silbermann as CEO in 2022.
First-order effects
- Pinterest must refill a VP of advertising products seat barely six months after Alferness joined, with the role now carrying the duties it inherited from Kendall's departure.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers and agencies buying into Pinterest's ad products face another leadership transition mid-scaling, and the company's demonstrated fix — hiring ex-Google operators like Alferness and Li Fan — points back to the same talent pool for the successor.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Pinterest's monetization leadership becomes a revolving seat filled from Google's bench, concentrating influence over its ad roadmap in executives shaped by a would-be competitor's playbook.
The trend: Consumer-internet ad platforms are increasingly staffed by a circulating class of ex-Google advertising executives, with Pinterest's repeated raids on that bench as a clear data point.