Mr. Sciarra (twitter.com/sciarra)

Looks like not everything at Pinterest is pictures of kittens and chic pastel rompers. Startup Grind reported today that Paul Sciarra, one of the image sharing network's cofounders, is leaving the company, according to numerous inside sources.

Though Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp are widely known as Pinterest's cofounders, according to Startup Grind, "Mr. Sciarra was one of the original founders of Cold Brew Labs (established in 2008) with Ben Silbermann which incubated Pinterest and other products."

The details of why Mr. Sciarra is leaving the company have yet to be announced, but as VentureBeat points out, "we doubt they’re anywhere near as pretty as the site Sciarra helped to create."

So is this another case of defoundering? Was Mr. Sciarra growing nervous over Pinterest's copyright issues, and wanted to bow out before they came to a head? Or is he simply moving on to new projects?

With more and more attention focused on Pinterest's problem with copyright infringement, the Pinterest management team does appear to be growing a little nervous. Even the U.S. President himself is on the budding social network, but apparently even the other cofounders of the site, Mr. Silbermann and Mr. Sharp, are growing wary of the potential legal implications of Pinterest. The Daily Dot reported last month that Mr. Silbermann and Mr. Sharp both deleted their original profiles in favor of creating new, assumedly non-infringing accounts.

Details of Mr. Sciarra's departure have yet to be confirmed, but the situation is obviously quite stressful. Might we suggest easing your worried mind by pinning (non-copyrighted) photos of cutesy cupcakes?

UPDATE: TechCrunch reported that Mr. Sciarra was originally listed on company documents as CEO, but Mr. Silbermann's actions had the media thinking he was actually CEO. "Silberman[sic] was so convincing that press had already bestowed on him the CEO title, though the truth is that both he and Sciarra co-ran the company until last Friday," wrote TechCrunch.

With Mr. Sciarra's departure, Mr. Silbermann will now officially take on the role of CEO.

via LinkedIn

Pinterest, the only hockey-stick startup with the distinction of being embraced by women and Mormons, gets the full New York Times treatment today with a profile by Jenna Wortham, well-timed to the clusterfuck hullabaloo currently underway in Austin. While other startups clamor over themselves to preach to the choir and woo early-adopters, Pinterest user base began in Des Moines, Iowa, where cofounder Ben Silbermann grew up.

While the startup's hearting-the-heartland approach has caused "some headscratching" at SXSW, its also infected investors with a wicked case of envy. "It defies the mold that you have to build something for New York and San Francisco and then spread it out from there," Chris Dixon, who is slated to interview Mr. Silbermann on stage tomorrow, told the Times, adding, "Everyone’s envious. I’m envious. I wish I was an investor. I wish I’d created the site.”

One investor who may be immune? New York Angels founder Brian Cohen, who also has the distinction of being Pinterest's very first investor.Mr. Cohen tells Mashable how he met Mr. Silbermann and cofounder Evan Sharp when the two were just "a couple of young guys from NYU" at a business plan competition. (Mr. Silbermann's LinkedIn profile, however, lists him as alma mater as Yale.)

According to Mr. Cohen, what distinguished Pinterest, which went through 30 to 40 iterations, was the founders' ability to listen:

That listening started with a different product Silbermann was working on at Cold Brew Labs — an app called Tote. The idea was the first woman’s fashion catalog on the iPhone. Cohen told me Silbermann watched user behavior on Tote. “As the app was being used, he recognized that women were grabbing, tagging specific items that they were able to view later when they got home,” said Cohen. What Silbermann saw was that huge numbers of people were grabbing items and sharing them with friends. “He recognized that these women were sharing their tastes.”

Betabeat has mentioned before how Pinterest's boards and aspirational/consumerist bent look to us more like the next-generation of those snail-mail catalogs, except one you in create yourself. The Times likens it more to scrapbooking.

In search of Mr. Silbermann's New York University connections, we came across this video of a speech he gave at NYU-Stern in 2010, where he discussed the idea of collecting, something he used to do with bugs and stamps as a young boy in Iowa. Moving that impulse online, he said, is "fundamentally changing the way regular people discover the things around them":

Why is collection so basic to who we are? I think the answer lies in self-expression. If you walk around Brooklyn and ask people how they express themselves. Everyone's a musician or an artist or a filmmaker. But most of us aren't that interesting. Most of us are just consumers of that. And when we collect things and when we share those collections with people that's how we show who we are in the world. That's how we express our taste to the people around us."

Not that Pinterest, which boasts $40 million in financing, needs our help with the pitch. But we might stick with "regular" folks and leave out the less interesting part going forward . . .