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Pinterest hires the Amazon executive who ran finance for Ads and Prime Video as its CFO
Pinterest named James Dibbo, who ran finance for Amazon Ads and Prime Video, as its CFO from October 26, after forecasting slower third-quarter revenue growth. The fair test is whether revenue per user, about $1.60 a quarter, grows faster than Pinterest's user base.
The Investor · Invest desk
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What happened
- Julia Brau Donnelly gives up the CFO title on October 26 and advises through October 30, before leaving for a small private startup, according to Reuters.
- Dibbo will report to chief executive Bill Ready and run accounting, planning, investor relations, treasury, tax and corporate development.
- First-quarter revenue rose 18% to $1.008 billion as monthly users reached 631 million.
- European revenue grew 27% in the quarter, against 13% in the U.S. and Canada.
- Pinterest shares slipped about 1% in after-hours trading on the announcement.
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Why it matters
- decision Corporate development reports to Dibbo, as it did in his last Amazon title, so his office will price and fund any shopping acquisition Pinterest considers.
- cost The second-quarter guide implies a year-earlier quarter of about $994 million, so every point of lost growth takes roughly $10 million a quarter out of the budgets Dibbo will plan.
- exposure Europe is growing about twice as fast as the U.S. and Canada, so the forecasts Dibbo signs will depend on Europe holding that pace.
Five of the six Amazon businesses whose finances Dibbo covered in his last job there were media: Prime Video, Amazon MGM Studios, Music, Audible and Twitch [3][20]. Amazon Ads was the sixth. The shopping side of his record comes from earlier titles in his decade at Amazon, CFO of Worldwide Consumer and CFO of North America Consumer [4]. Before Amazon he was CFO of the restaurant chain P.F. Chang's [7].
Both men framed the job around ads and shopping. "James has led complex global businesses at scale, helped build high-performing teams and understands the intersection of consumer experience, shopping, advertising and technology," Ready said [9]. Dibbo, 56, said he admired Pinterest's "distinctive role at the intersection of visual search, shopping and advertising" [15][10].
The plainest efficiency measure in the reported figures is revenue per user. Dividing first-quarter revenue by monthly users gives about $1.60 per user for the quarter [12][17]. The reported figures do not include a year-earlier user count, so the trend in that number cannot be worked out from them.
Growth was already slowing. The second-quarter guide of $1.133 billion to $1.153 billion implied 14% to 16%, a midpoint three points below the first quarter's 18% [14][18]. The market Pinterest sells into is dominated by Meta's Instagram and Facebook, CNA reported [16].
The hire can go a few ways. One is continuity: Dibbo signs the forecasts, runs planning and investor relations, and the revenue line moves as it would have anyway [8]. A second is a deal for a shopping business. A third is cost, the part of ad efficiency a finance chief controls directly.
I think revenue per user, set against what it costs to earn, is the fair test. Ad revenue growth by itself is set mostly by product and by how Pinterest fares against Meta's platforms, and pinning it on a CFO credits or blames him for work other people do. The counter-case is that a finance chief from Amazon Ads brings habits in how ads are priced and measured, in which case the per-user number is partly his.
The ads-and-shopping reading fails if the first guidance Dibbo signs puts revenue growth below user growth. Revenue per user would then be shrinking from about $1.60, and Pinterest would have hired a steadier forecaster for a business earning less from each user [17].
What to watch
- Whether Pinterest's third-quarter revenue growth lands below 14%, the bottom of its second-quarter guide.
- Whether Pinterest's next results disclose user growth, the figure needed to tell if revenue per user is rising.