Exclusive: Clubhouse has hired its first general counsel, who was a key early employee at Pinterest

• The social-audio app Clubhouse has hired its first general counsel, Insider has learned.
• Anthony Falzone is leaving Pinterest, where he was the deputy general counsel, after nine years.

Clubhouse has hired away a key early employee at Pinterest to become its first general counsel, Insider has learned.

Anthony Falzone, who was the second lawyer at Pinterest, is leaving after nine years to join a growing team at Clubhouse, the social-audio app that surged in popularity during pandemic lockdowns. Pinterest has been the subject of takeover speculation recently.

In an email, Falzone said he watched Pinterest "explode in scale" over nine years, building key legal functions and helping establish the company's international structure to pave the way for worldwide growth. "Clubhouse is in a similar stage as Pinterest was when I first joined," he wrote, "and I'm excited to be a part of its success and help the team build a new social platform for a new kind of creator and community building authentic, human connections."

The growth of Clubhouse has tapered off in recent months, with downloads falling and a steady drip of users leaving for rival products from Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify. Still, data suggest retention remains strong among users.

Falzone's hire adds to a team of more than 80 employees at the startup, which was founded near the start of the pandemic by a pair of serial entrepreneurs. Clubhouse started 2021 with eight employees but has quickly grown its ranks with a new round of funding in the spring from major investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global.

The new brass include:

• NPR's Nina Gregory as head of news and media publishers.
• TED's Kelly Stoetzel as head of thought leadership programming.
• Facebook's Aarthi Ramamurthy as head of international.
• Scale AI's Hunter Scrivner as head of finance.
• Google's Justin Uberti as head of streaming.
• Spotify's Grey Munford as head of global communications.
• Instagram's Chelsea Macdonald as head of entertainment partnerships.
• Wasserman's Sean Brown as head of sports partnerships.
• Netflix's Maya Watson as head of global marketing.

Falzone, who's in San Francisco, helped build Pinterest from its earliest days. He's represented artists to help them protect their intellectual property on the app, which lets people share images. Falzone previously represented the artist Shepard Fairey in copyright litigation over Fairey's Barack Obama "Hope" posters and was the trial counsel for RDR Books in a copyright dispute with J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers over its "Harry Potter" wiki.

The new general counsel at Clubhouse will no doubt tangle with the same sorts of legal challenges that other dominant social-media companies have faced over the decade, such as content moderation, misinformation, and harassment.

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