Pinterest facing lawsuit by Oakland woman who says she helped create it

Pinterest Inc. must face a lawsuit from a digital marketing strategist who says she helped conceive the social media platform, but not one of its founders, a California judge ruled.

Late on Thursday, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Richard Seabolt denied the company’s motion to dismiss the suit, but he eliminated cofounder Paul Sciarra as a defendant because he left Pinterest a decade ago.

Christine Martinez sued the company in September, saying she contributed key ideas to the platform but was never compensated by founders Ben Silbermann and Sciarra. According to her complaint, Oakland resident Martinez was friends with Silbermann when he asked her to “salvage a failed shopping app” that later became Pinterest.

She says she developed some of the main concepts for the platform, including features that allowed users to create “pinboards” reflecting their cultural tastes and created a marketing plan to enlist bloggers to recruit users. Martinez claims she was so integral to the site’s creation that Silbermann and Sciarra embedded her name in the platform’s source code.

Pinterest moved to dismiss the case in December, saying Martinez’s claims were too old and therefore barred by statute of limitations. But Seabolt said Martinez “sufficiently alleges” that the parties agreed to deferred compensation and that her claims stem from the company’s 2019 initial public offering.