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Pinterest: Now with executive drama!

Departure of co-founder Paul Sciarra will likely take attention off the site's torrent growth.

Paul Sloan Former Editor
Paul Sloan is editor in chief of CNET News. Before joining CNET, he had been a San Francisco-based correspondent for Fortune magazine, an editor at large for Business 2.0 magazine, and a senior producer for CNN. When his fingers aren't on a keyboard, they're usually on a guitar. Email him here.
Paul Sloan

When a startup is hot, there's often drama -- and now the startup world wants to know what exactly is going on at Pinterest, the virtual pinboard site that has quickly become a phenomenon.

One of the company's three co-founders, Paul Sciarra, is on his way out of the company, according to Startup Grind. There is speculation that Sciarra will join a venture capital firm.

What's it mean for millions of Pinterest fans? Most like, not a thing.

The man who's the public face of Pinterest, Ben Silbermann, will now officially become the CEO, and the third co-founder, Evan Sharp, is still in place. Sharp is the man who gets credit for the site's compelling design, which is influencing the look of sites across the Web.

By the end of 2011, Pinterest had become a top-10 social destination, and site saw its unique visits jump 52 percent from January to February alone -- to a total of 17.7 million.

The company has raised $35.7 million from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Ron Conway, and it seems so firmly on track that any executive drama -- if that's what's going on -- is unlikely to derail it. A bigger issue may be its challenges with copyrighted images and content that people are freely pinning from around the Web.