Social media unicorn Pinterest finally has a chief financial officer.
The $11 billion tech company hired away Twitter’s vice president of finance, Todd Morgenfeld, to be its first-ever CFO, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
Morgenfeld joined Twitter (TWTR) in May 2015 after serving as the senior vice president of corporate development at Hewlett-Packard (HPE). Prior to that he was a chairman at Serena Software and an investment banker at Goldman Sachs (GS).
“We are excited that Todd is joining Pinterest as CFO. Todd brings to the company a wide range of experience from HP to the military to a fast paced environment like Twitter,” Pinterest’s CEO and co-founder Ben Silbermann said in a statement to Coins2Day.
While some might think the new hire means Pinterest is ramping up for an initial public offering, Silbermann said in an interview with the Journal that that’s not the case. The company, which launched in 2010 and now has over 500 employees, is simply “scaling the business up.”
At any rate, Morgenfeld has his work cut out for him. Pinterest, like Facebook (FB) and Twitter, generates the majority of its revenue from ad sales. But unlike Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest has yet to generate the same level of revenue. According to the Journal, a person familiar with the matter said the company generated roughly $100 million in revenue last year. That would fall short of the $169 million Pinterest forecasted in a document leaked to TechCrunch in October. Those same documents, which were used by Pinterest to solicit funding, say the company is aiming to have $2.8 billion in annual revenue by 2018. However, it’s not uncommon for startups to exaggerate estimates at times in order to woo investors.
In comparison, mobile application Snapchat, founded in 2011, hit $59 million in revenue by the end of last year, according to a leaked presentation seen by TechCrunch. Snapchat predicts that it will hit as much as $1 billion in revenue by 2017. And by 2018, Snapchat is expected to hit $1.8 billion in ad revenue, according to a report from data firm eMarketer. Snapchat is currently valued around $20 billion.
Over the past year, Pinterest has aggressively pushed toward becoming an e-commerce hub. That push includes the debut of the Buyable Pin in June 2015, which allows users to purchase items directing off the site.
At the same time, Twitter has been at the center of buyout rumors over the past week, sending shares of the troubled social media giant up 26%.
Shares of Twitter are trading slightly down by 2% in after hours trading Tuesday.
