The director of global accounts at Facebook in the UK, Irish executive Adele Cooper, is understood to be leaving Facebook to take up the role of head of Pinterest in London.
Stanford and Harvard graduate Cooper is leaving Facebook imminently to spearhead Pinterest’s international growth, according to sources.
Cooper was part of the same management team led by John Herlihy that included Twitter’s Stephen McIntyre, Flipboard’s Colm Long and Facebook’s Sonia Anne Flynn that kickstarted Google’s growth in Dublin, leading it on a path to where it is today, employing 5,000 people directly and indirectly in Dublin. Another member from the same team, Twitter’s former number two in Dublin Don O’Leary, is now heading up Stripe’s expansion in Europe.
It emerged last week that Sonia Anne Flynn is also leaving Facebook to head up SoundCloud in Berlin.
Prior to joining Google in 2004 Cooper worked at start-up Exceptis Technologies, which was acquired by Trintech for US$26m.
In 2010 she joined Facebook as the company’s director of global customer marketing and worked out of the company’s headquarters in Silicon Valley.
For the past three years she has held the role as director of global accounts, where she looked after the leadership of the Unilever relationship for both Facebook and Instagram.
Pinterest is a fast-growing social media platform that lets users ‘pin’ items of interest from art to furniture, home decor, fashion and technology. According to Nielsen, 70pc of Pinterest’s user base are women.
In recent years the company has begun pushing business pages that allow firms to create pages aimed at promoting their companies online.
Pinterest was started in 2009 by Ben Silberman, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp.
In 2013 Pinterest secured a US$255m equity round that values it at around US$3.8bn.
