John Thrall

Background

About John Thrall

Current: Head of Trust at Pinterest. Almost 5 years building out a team (systems, tool, machine learning, legal, identity) at Pinterest after an acquihire of the Brigade engineering team to Pinterest. The Trust team protects Pinners (Pinterest users) against content policy issues that impact many of our scaled competitors. We created policies and models that dealt with the Biden/Trump issue by excluding Pinterest from political discussions. We have also built a dedicated team that is successful on age identification/confirmation, policy enforcement on critical categories (CSE, Sexualization of minors, harassment, guns, violence, hate speech, etc.). This was done by creating a growing team with intense commitment to goals and high retention. The team we built (started at 10, now 60+ engineers) over the last 5 years has 3.5-4 years average tenure, with enormous benefits from this. My strength is building enduring, highly successful to target goals, teams with high retention that have a strong culture. I am not comfortable at 0-1. I don't like the feel of 50-100. I am best at 2-50. I love building or reforming teams, and I feel I am excellent at it and can provide references, and I don't need to 'own' the whole thing.