Pinterest Hires New CFO Out Of Twitter, IPO Rumors Percolate

Pinterest-IPO-April
Is Pinterest getting ready for an IPO?

Is Pinterest getting ready for an IPO?

That’s what the company’s latest move — the hiring of Pinterest’s first ever CFO, Todd Morgenfeld, formerly vice president of finance at Twitter for about a year and a half — seems to indicate.

“We are excited that Todd is joining Pinterest as CFO,” Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said in a statement. “Todd brings to the company a wide range of experience from HP to the military to a fast-paced environment like Twitter. He believes in our mission and the strong business opportunity it presents. We are committed to building our company for the long term and thrilled that Todd will be an integral part of continuing this growth.”

TechCrunch believes that the Morgenfeld hire could foreshadow an IPO.

“Generally, these kinds of hires can signal a few things. One is that, more simply, the company is getting more ambitious about getting its finances in order (the company has around 40 people on its finance staff, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal) for more general reasons,” according to TechCrunch. “But sometimes, the tea leaves reveal greater ambitions: getting things in order for a potential initial public offering.”

Pinterest had about $169 million in revenue in 2015, according to leaked documents, and was forecasting that number to rise to $2.8 billion by 2018 — although WSJ believes that Pinterest’s revenue in 2015 was only about $100 million, meaning the company fell below its own projected forecasts on its revenue benchmark.