Each morning, Tim Kendall wakes at 5:30 and draws himself a bath.

Then the 40-year-old president of Pinterest dumps in a tray full of ice, uses a rubber duck thermometer to get the water temperature down to precisely 55 degrees, and slides in for a five-minute soak.

Kendall says the baths — popular among Silicon Valley health-hacking types like Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose — are meant to help your immune system. But they also have another purpose.

"It's kind of like drinking coffee," he said. "I get out and I just feel super focused, really energized."

Kendall carries on the same way at the office. He wears the same T-shirt with the word "Focus" across the chest every day. During meetings, Kendall won't use a laptop or phone, and forbids others from using theirs. Instead, he likes paper printouts detailing the meeting's agenda.

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Kendall may seem like a character from HBO's satirical "Silicon Valley" series, but lots of people take him very seriously. He's responsible for all of Pinterest's money-making endeavors, including ad products, sales and product marketing.

In other words, he's the one who helped the company grow its revenue from less than $25 million in 2014 to an expected $500 million-plus in 2017. And he's the one responsible for helping it live up to its new $12 billion valuation.

"This is the year that Pinterest puts huge numbers up on the board ... hundreds of millions of dollars," said Pinterest investor Ron Conway, co-founder of the VC firm SV Angel. "After that, that's how the company will be measured. Tim knows that."

Kendall joined Pinterest in early 2012 after almost five years of building ad products at Facebook. He started as Pinterest's head of product, where he helped create the company's first growth team, a group focused exclusively on adding new users; he also built the company's flagship ad unit, the Promoted Pin.

Kendall took over Pinterest's monetization efforts entirely in early 2015 and was promoted to the role of president a year later.

Kendall and his teams are credited with building all of Pinterest's ad products, including Pinterest's new search ads, buy buttons, video ads and its self-serve ad-buying platform. Since he took the monetization job in 2015, the number of employees working on Pinterest's business efforts has grown from 100 to 250.

That makes Kendall the company's most important non-founder, a crucial complement to Pinterest's product-minded founders, CEO Ben Silbermann and chief product officer Evan Sharp. Kendall is the one who helps sell the company's long-term vision to investors during fundraising efforts.