Diving into the Pinterest earning reports is a great way to find out about the health of the company, future direction hints and more.

Stock reports aren’t that fun to read, but you do get a little sneak peek into where the company is headed and what their goals are.

Before we dive in, let’s set a reminder of Pinterest’s mission:

Our mission is to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love

Opening words from the Pinterest Q4 earnings report:

“Pinterest is where over 400 million people around the world go to get inspiration to live their best lives. They come to discover and bring to life ideas for their daily activities like cooking dinner or deciding what to wear; for major commitments like remodeling a house or training for a marathon; for ongoing passions like gardening or fashion; and for milestone events like planning a wedding or a dream vacation.

Our users (who we call Pinners) often don’t have the words to describe what they want, but they know it when they see it. Images and video can communicate concepts that are impossible to describe with words.

On Pinterest, people discover inspiring and personalized visual content, which we call Pins. Pins are created when Pinners, creators and businesses make new content for or save existing web content to our platform. Pins are saved and organized into collections, which we call boards and sections. Browsing and saving visual ideas on our service helps Pinners imagine what their future could look like, which propels them from inspiration to action. Pinterest is the productivity tool for planning your dreams.

Dreaming and productivity may seem like polar opposites, but on Pinterest, inspiration enables action and dreams become reality. Visualizing the future helps bring it to life. In this way, Pinterest is unique. Most consumer internet companies are either tools (search, ecommerce) or media (newsfeeds, video, social networks). Pinterest is not a pure media channel; it is a mediarich utility.

Pinterest is also unique because we’ve designed it to be an inspiring platform, that we foster through our policies and product development — for example, Pinterest has banned political and weight loss ads, developed inclusive beauty search functionality and launched compassionate search for Pinners seeking mental health support.

This work is foundational to our mission because we believe people are less likely to imagine their future and bring it to life when they feel self-conscious, excluded, or unhappy. It also creates value for businesses and brands on the platform (including our advertising partners), who have the opportunity to showcase their products and services in an inspiring environment that we believe is conducive to building an emotional connection with consumers.

Pinners can choose between two different Home Feed experiences: Browse or Watch. The “Browse” tab is Pinterest’s traditional inspiration feed (consisting of a two column grid featuring a variety of Standard, Video, Product and Idea Pins), while the “Watch” tab is an immersive feed of full-screen, auto-playing Idea Pins.”

Okay, we’ve set the stage for the investors to understand what Pinterest is.

Next came the…

Letter to Shareholders – basically a pretty slideshow to get the investors excited

A summary of what’s included: