I get why Pinterest is interesting. I don't use it, but I get why people use it although maybe I should. But what I don't get is why a site with pictures to pin needs $200M. It's basically still the same site it was when it had $500K in funding. Does it cost $200M to scale from thousands of users to hundreds of millions? Wikipedia doesn't need $200M to run.
They'd be crazy not to take $200m for 4% give or take. Given the beating high flying tech stocks have taken lately on Wall St., and the continued Fed tapering, who knows how much longer the easy money gates will remain open. Better to take it now, and have tons of cash to ride out any eventuality. Bull markets don't run forever, and clearly Pinterest is hardly even in the first inning of monetization, so they're going to need the money. The public markets, even in semi-euphoric mode, will not react well to zero sales and $200m a year in losses.
It still costs money to acquire new users. It's easy to think when something becomes a household name there is no need to keep spending to bring new users on. As with most social sites the bigger the network is the harder it is for competitors to come in and steal their position. Pinterest user base is still "only" around 50 million. Thats 5% the size of Facebook.
Additionally the markets are not treating tech stocks so well right now, this might last another three months, and it might last a year and a half. What you know for sure is that you don't want to go out and try to raise money when the market is really down. You'll be terribly diluted if you're even able to raise money at all. They get what you can now, because they don't know how long it will be until the IPO.
These are only a couple of the considerations, if they are planning an IPO very soon then there's a completely different motivation. Hope this helps.
Growth...growth might be in their future plans. Acquisitions, KLO, more employees, new directions. I hope they go big. Great service, smart design that works. Monetizing would be easy.
