BUCKiT® #36-Tim Kendall: Former Pinterest President, talks about tech addiction and how to detox using Moment

In 2017, the President of Pinterest deleted the Facebook app from his phone, after secretly hiding away in the pantry checking his emails, messages, status updates and news alerts for the hundredth time in a day. Other people’s perfect lives, political discourse, twitter rants – it was too much to handle. Something had to change. He needed a Moment to think, but it was a light bulb Moment that changed his life and the lives of millions of other tech addicts forever. Tim Kendall is best known as the former President at Pinterest. In 2012, after leaving Facebook as the Director of Monetization, he joined the hugely popular web based image bulletin board, to build up its advertising business. He helped the company generate $472 million just 5 years later. Tim and his team at Pinterest gained a reputation for their successful marketing campaigns and generating all of their ad products, including the Promoted Pin. Tim also had unconventional work habits. He refused to use his phone or laptop at meetings and chose paper printouts over electronic ones, pretty unusual in a company that relies on people to be attached to handheld devices and laptops. But his own phone habit was getting to him and eventually he cut loose to start a very successful app called Moment - designed to help people detox and take back their time -- all while using their smartphones. Ironically it’s working and Tim recently unplugged long enough to tell me about this fascinating approach to what most of us are doing all day long --- incessantly checking our phones.