By ANGIE MASON
Daily Record/Sunday News

York, PA – Has Pinterest inspired your kitchen renovation, latest craft project, or the cupcakes at your 5-year-old’s birthday party?

You can thank Evan Sharp for that.

Sharp, a 2001 graduate of York Suburban High School, is a co-founder of Pinterest, a fast-growing social bookmarking site now counted by some among the top 10 social networking sites. The site’s traffic has exploded in the past year.

“It’s hard to convey how surreal it is to start from nothing and go to something really big,” Sharp said.

Users of Pinterest create boards dedicated to certain topics — recipes, interior design, weddings, or books, for example — and then “pin” images there. Users can upload their own photos, pin items from around the web or repin posts from others.

“Pinterest allows you to organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web,” the site states. “You can browse pinboards created by other people to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.”

Born in 2010, Pinterest grew from 40,000 monthly unique visitors in October of that year to 3.2 million in October 2011, according to an article in the Atlantic Wire. It’s invitation-only, and its website has a form people can use to request an invitation.

Experian Hitwise, a company that analyzes website data such as site visits, reported that Pinterest received nearly 11 million visits during the week ending Dec. 17, 2011, almost 40 times the number it received six months earlier, in the week ending June 18, 2011.

Sharp, 29, and co-founder Ben Silbermann were included on Forbes 30 under 30 list for social/mobile. Forbes describes the list as including “tomorrow’s brightest stars,” culled from thousands of nominations.

The summer of 2011 is when Pinterest’s popularity began ballooning.

Working on the Internet, it’s easy to become disconnected from the scale of what you’re building, Sharp said. But then there are weird encounters, such as seeing someone at the airport using Pinterest.

“It’s a very strange experience … it’s really exciting,” he said.

From York Suburban to Palo Alto

After high school, Sharp studied at the University of Chicago, where he earned a degree in history. He worked in Chicago for a few years, first at City Hall and then for a software company doing design work.

But he’d always wanted to be an architect. He took night classes in Chicago and then began studying architecture at Columbia University in 2008.

While studying, he did freelance design work, mostly on the web, as a way to pay the bills and cover school expenses. Halfway through his time at Columbia, he received an email from Facebook, asking if he was interested in coming to work on the design team.

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