Pinterest hits out at influencer who claims she helped create the popular website

Pinterest Inc. says a woman who claims she helped conceive the social media platform waited too long to accuse its founders in a lawsuit of reneging on a promise to compensate her.  The company asked a California state court judge Friday to dismiss the lawsuit filed in September by Christine Martinez, a digital marketing strategist who says she was friends with Ben Silbermann when he asked her to help “salvage a failed shopping app” that he and co-founder Paul Sciarra would later call Pinterest. 

Martinez alleges Silbermann and Sciarra promised to compensate her when the company became profitable and even embedded her name in the platform’s source code as a signal of how integral she was in the site’s creation. The platform exploded in popularity in early 2010s, went public in 2019 and currently has an estimated 450 million active monthly users.

Pinterest’s lawyers called the suit a “sham” and said that even if Martinez’s claims are true, she missed the deadline to file lawsuit by more than five years. 

“Plaintiff says she created Pinterest at its inception in 2009, but then waited more than a decade to file suit in September 2021, long after Pinterest found widely publicized success,” the company’s lawyers said in a filing. 

The company also faults Martinez for failing to provide evidence that Silbermann and Sciarra ever agreed to pay her.

Her complaint in Alameda County Superior Court includes no facts regarding the amount, rate or form of her promised compensation, nor when she would be paid, according to the filing. “Without these essential terms, the complaint does not and cannot show that the parties ‘all agreed upon the same thing in the same sense’ -- as required to plead a claim for breach of implied contract,” the company’s lawyers wrote.

Martinez’s attorney didn’t immediately respond for a request for comment.

Martinez claims she contributed key ideas to the platform, including ways to attract women and how to design it so users would create pinboards reflecting their tastes in fashion, travel, design and other interests. 

The case is Martinez v. Pinterest, RG21112456, California Superior Court, Alameda County (Oakland).