Leon Lin
Founder/CEOCurrently working on 1stCollab, the best platform for brands and creators to collaborate on influencer marketing campaigns. I was previously at Pinterest for over nine years, where I watched the company grow from 100 to 3k employees. Most recently, I was Head of Discovery product there where I led our Home, Search, and Pins teams and was responsible for user engagement. Before that, I was a tech lead on the Recommendations team.
Varun Bansal
FounderCo-founder at 1stCollab, a platform for brands and creators to connect and run marketing campaigns together. Before 1stCollab, I worked at Pinterest, where I was a product manager for the homefeed recommendations team, the international growth team, and—most recently—the creator engagement and community teams.
Andrew Liu
FounderCurrently working on building a network for brands and creators to connect and launch marketing campaigns. Previously, I was a Tech Lead on search and recommendations at Coupang and Pinterest.
If you're interested in search, recommendations, or creators, please reach out :)!
Origins
After working on creator-related products for three years at Pinterest—and talking with dozens of creators about the challenges they faced—Varun and Leon began brainstorming different ways creators could better monetize the enormous value they delivered to their audiences and to brands. After testing a number of concepts, they became excited by the idea of building better discovery experiences to help brands find creators for their campaigns. A mutual friend connected them with Carina, who was independently building something similar. Andrew had also previously worked with Varun and Leon on discovery at Pinterest, and joined the team as well. Soon after, 1stCollab was born!