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Back of Napkin

Pinterest, Inc. PINS

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The bet you're really making is that advertisers keep paying to reach people who come to Pinterest already planning a purchase, a kitchen remodel, a wedding, a pair of boots. You're betting the rest of the world, where most of the users are and where Pinterest barely earns a thing today, slowly starts paying the way Americans do. Right now it is going well on the measure that funds the company: revenue grew 18% last quarter to the biggest second quarter ever, and the business threw off about $1.6 billion in cash over the past year, even as the accounting showed a loss. You pay 60 times last year's reported earnings, near the top of its short history, but that number is bent by a one-time tax windfall and heavy stock pay, and against the cash it actually makes you pay about 8 times, a low valuation on the company's cash generation.

Key data

Price$20.40
52-week range$13.84–$38.57
P/E, ttm / FY28e60x / 7.6x
EV/EBITDA, ttm39x

PINS · price with moving averages

Daily · 6MWeekly · 3Y
$13$21$30$38$46 Sep '23Apr '24Nov '24Jul '25Feb '26Sep '26 BID
EMAs82140

Source: market data.

The business

Pinterest is a visual search app. People save images of things they want to make, buy, or do, boots, recipes, nurseries, wedding tables, and sort them onto boards. Because they arrive planning a purchase rather than scrolling to socialize, the audience carries commercial intent, and intent is what Pinterest sells: shoppable ads placed against a user who is already leaning toward buying. That is the moat, a first-party record of what half a billion people plan to spend money on, built for free by the users themselves and hard to copy without them.

The catch is geography. Most users sit outside the United States, yet no country other than the US contributes even a tenth of revenue. America is the engine, the world is the option. In February 2026 Pinterest bought tvScientific, a connected-TV ad platform, extending its ads into streaming and pulling in third-party ad demand to help close that gap.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04How it fails or surprises you
  5. 05Closing thoughts
  6. 06Methodology

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