Sarah Tavel, Who Led Bessemer’s Investment In Pinterest, Gets Down To ‘Business’ At Pinterest

Pinterest is starting to fill up its own Pinboard… with money people. Sarah Tavel, a former VP at Bessemer Venture Partners (the same BVP that led a Series A round in Pinterest in 2011), has now joined the social startup in a business development role.

The move comes about a month after Pinterest hired Tim Kendall — Kendall had once been a key figure building out monetization strategy at Facebook, which he left in 2010.

Today’s news was announced by Tavel herself — not on Pinterest or on BVP’s own site, but on Twitter:

just made an important update to my twitter profile… blog post to follow… one day!

—
Sarah Tavel (@sarahtavel) May 01, 2012

That update now reads: “business at @pinterest.” She also notes the same job on her LinkedIn profile. (No, we don’t know what “business” means exactly: it could mean business development, it could mean the startup’s book-keeping. I think it might be more likely to be the former. What’s interesting is that, judging from the LinkedIn data, this is her first role at an actual startup.)

Tavel’s connection to Pinterest extends beyond happening to work at the same VC firm that led its first round of funding. She had been, along with Jeremy Levine, one of the people leading that investment:

Getting more business people on board right now is an important step for Pinterest as the site begins to look for ways of capitalizing on its audience without alienating them at the same time.

The site’s basic premise — building up pinboards of pictures that link to other bits of interesting content, often around themes — has attracted droves of users — primarily women.

And the fact that it is so visual by its nature, and so clickably sticky, makes Pinterest appear ripe to be as an advertising / e-commerce vehicle.

But what seemed like Pinterest’s most obvious money effort up to now — an affiliate deal powered by Skimlinks — did appear to bring in revenue. However, apparently that was only incidental to the partnership, which reportedly was more about analytics than revenue.

In the meantime, others have popped up, using Pinterest’s APIs to do some money making in the process.

There is another reason why now may be a good time for Pinterest to think a little more about not just how it will make money but what other services it can introduce to keep people returning and using the site. As we’ve pointed out recently, there are some signs that its growth may be slowing. (The headline number in that story, from April 22, is that monthly active users via Facebook — a key way for people to sign into Pinterest — dropped in the last 30 days to 8.3 million, from around 12.2 million a month before, and daily active users were also down but not by as much.)

As you might see from Tavel’s Twitter profile pic above, she’s not the retiring sort — and that could mean interesting times for Pinterest ahead.

We’ve reached out to Tavel, Pinterest and BVP for more comment and will update this story as we hear more.