[chatmasta]

There's something amazing about how Pintrest -- a seemingly simple social media app, roughly replicable with a few hours of CRUD framework programming -- takes on a life of its own when infused with venture capital funding and a strong engineering team. The core of the web product is so simple as to be almost trivial: show a grid of images and links to each user. Indeed, when Pintrest first started I'm sure the logic entailed little more than that. Now, billions of page views and dozens of engineering hires later, a once-simple app becomes a behemoth force, crunching data on the order of petabytes per day.

How do the operations powering an app like Pintrest evolve from simple to so complex? Do the complexities emerge from necessity, or simply from idle time on behalf of the engineers, who naturally crave hard problems to solve?

It's a fascinating meta-commentary on our industry that simple web apps grow to become such complex operations. A business can survive on the kernel of its core competency -- in this case, photo grids -- but to thrive, it requires careful attention to petabytes of peripheral decisions. Indeed, it seems such an evolutionary process is advantageous for a web startup. Friendster and MySpace may well have failed because they mistook their problems for simple ones. They were able to solve the core problem of a social network, but not the many peripheral ones of operating that network at scale. It's the ability to do the latter that sets apart the major successful startups from the also-rans.