growth hacking

pages: 125 words: 28,222

Growth Hacking Techniques, Disruptive Technology - How 40 Companies Made It BIG – Online Growth Hacker Marketing Strategy by Robert Peters

Airbnb, bounce rate, business climate, citizen journalism, content marketing, crowdsourcing, digital map, fake it until you make it, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, pull request, revision control, ride hailing / ride sharing, search engine result page, sharing economy, Skype, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, turn-by-turn navigation, Twitter Arab Spring, ubercab

by Josh Elan at medium.com/what-i-learned-building/f445b04cbd20 “Defining A Growth Hacker: Three Common Characteristics” at techcrunch.com/2012/09/02/defining-a-growth-hacker-three-common-characteristics/ “The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking” at www.quicksprout.com/2013/08/26/the-definitive-guide-to-growth-hacking/ “Defining A Growth Hacker: Debunking The 6 Most Common Myths About Growth Hacking” at techcrunch.com/2012/12/08/defining-a-growth-hacker-6-myths-about-growth-hackers/ “Defining A Growth Hacker: Building Growth into Your Team” at techcrunch.com/2012/10/21/defining-a-growth-hacker-building-growth-into-your-team/ “How to Hire a Growth Hacker” at www.aginnt.com/post/64205739421/how-to-hire-a-growth-hacker#.U2_ZiK1dXR1 “13 Critically Important Lessons from Over 50 Growth Hackers” at blog.kissmetrics.com/lessons-from-growth-hackers/ “What is a Growth Hacker?

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While you’re working your own growth hacking strategies, immerse yourself in what other growth hackers are doing. Read case studies like those I have included in this text. Get ideas from idea people. The specific growth hack may not apply to your product or your business model, but it might inspire you to do something similar — or even NOT to do something. Growth Hacking Reference Sources There are a plethora of online resources on growth hacking to broaden your understanding and learn from the “masters.” Here are some of my favorites to get you started: “What is ‘Growth Hacking’ Really?” by Josh Elan at medium.com/what-i-learned-building/f445b04cbd20 “Defining A Growth Hacker: Three Common Characteristics” at techcrunch.com/2012/09/02/defining-a-growth-hacker-three-common-characteristics/ “The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking” at www.quicksprout.com/2013/08/26/the-definitive-guide-to-growth-hacking/ “Defining A Growth Hacker: Debunking The 6 Most Common Myths About Growth Hacking” at techcrunch.com/2012/12/08/defining-a-growth-hacker-6-myths-about-growth-hackers/ “Defining A Growth Hacker: Building Growth into Your Team” at techcrunch.com/2012/10/21/defining-a-growth-hacker-building-growth-into-your-team/ “How to Hire a Growth Hacker” at www.aginnt.com/post/64205739421/how-to-hire-a-growth-hacker#.U2_ZiK1dXR1 “13 Critically Important Lessons from Over 50 Growth Hackers” at blog.kissmetrics.com/lessons-from-growth-hackers/ “What is a Growth Hacker?

pages: 52 words: 14,333

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising by Ryan Holiday

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, data science, growth hacking, Hacker News, iterative process, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, market design, minimum viable product, Multics, Paul Graham, pets.com, post-work, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Wozniak, Travis Kalanick

Contents Author Bio Also by Ryan Holiday Title Page Copyright Page Epigraph GROWTH HACKER MARKETING An Introduction to Growth Hacking STEP 1 It Begins with Product Market Fit STEP 2 Finding Your Growth Hack STEP 3 Turn 1 into 2 and 2 into 4—Going Viral STEP 4 Close the Loop: Retention and Optimization My Conversion: Putting the Lessons into Practice Special Bonus Becoming a Growth Hacker: The Next Steps Endnotes PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN GROWTH HACKER MARKETING Ryan Holiday is a media strategist for notorious clients such as Tucker Max and Dov Charney.

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Penenberg Contagious by Jonah Berger Lean Startup Marketing by Sean Ellis Presentations, Shows, and Classes: http://www.creativelive.com/courses/smart-pr-artists-entrepreneurs-and-small-business-ryan-holiday (a ten-hour course I made with creativeLIVE on marketing, attention, and free publicity) http://www.slideshare.net/mattangriffel/growth-hacking http://quibb.com/links/growth-hackers-conference-all-the-lessons-from-every-presentation http://www.slideshare.net/yongfook/growth-hacking-101-your-first-500000-users http://www.slideshare.net/gueste94e4c/dropbox-startup-lessons-learned-3836587 https://www.growthhacker.tv http://www.slideshare.net/yongfook/actionable-growth-hacking-tactics https://generalassemb.ly/education/user-acquisition-growth-hacking-for-startups https://www.udemy.com/growth-hacking-lean-marketing-for-startups http://www.slideshare.net/vlaskovits/growthhacker-live-preso-by-patrick-vlaskovits-pv http://www.slideshare.net/timhomuth/think-like-a-growth-hacker http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2011/09/24/how-to-create-a-million-dollar-business-this-weekend-examples-appsumo-mint-chihuahuas http://www.growhack.com/case-studies There Is Even a Growth Hackers’ Conference: http://growthhackersconference.com Endnotes 1 http://andrewchen.co/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an-airbnbcraigslist-case-study. 2 E-mail to author, April 18, 2013. 3 Dialogue from Viral Loop by Adam L.

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When I filed my taxes this year with TurboTax, it asked me if I wanted to send out a prewritten tweet that said I’d gotten a refund by using its service. All of this is free branding—and that’s immensely powerful. Remember, a growth hacker doesn’t think branding is worthless, just that it’s not worth the premium that traditional marketers pay for it. A growth hacker isn’t going to try to create brand awareness by buying product placement on national television or by paying a celebrity to be associated with your product. Instead, a growth hacker will look for ways to get this social currency for free. Growth Hacking Your Virality Dropbox’s founders, after pulling in their first set of users with their awesome demo video and social media strategy, had a choice.

pages: 344 words: 96,020

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, DevOps, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, minimum viable product, multi-armed bandit, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, working poor, Y Combinator, young professional

Later in the book we’ll profile how leading growth teams, such as those at Facebook, LinkedIn, Uber, Pinterest, and the team at Dropbox, continue to work furiously every day on generating, testing, and refining ideas for new growth hacks. Second, many companies believe they can simply hire a single Lone Ranger to be the growth hacker, who will swoop in with a bag of magic tricks to bring growth to their business. This, too, is badly misguided. Throughout the book we show that, in reality, growth hacking is a team effort, that the greatest successes come from combining programming know-how with expertise in data analytics and strong marketing experience, and very few individuals are proficient in all of these skills. Growth hacking is also too often thought to be all about devising clever work-arounds that break the rules of existing websites and social platforms.

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It is the solution to the misplaced, often quite stubborn, devotion to features or marketing approaches that don’t work, replacing wasteful, outdated, and unproven approaches with market-tested and data-driven alternatives. WHO CAN BECOME A GROWTH HACKER? Growth hacking is not just a tool for marketers. It can be applied to new product innovation and to the continuous improvement of products as well as to growing an existing customer base. As such, it’s equally useful to everyone from product developers, to engineers, to designers, to salespeople, to managers. Nor is it just a tool for entrepreneurs; in fact, it can be implemented just as effectively at a large established company as at a small fledgling start-up.

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The fact is, growth is too important to delegate, and consultants often lack the organizational authority, time, or intrinsic motivation to get the hard work done that results in sustainable growth. A GROWTH HACK TO START GROWTH HACKING Implementing the growth hacking process can seem daunting. Creating a cross-functional team can be tricky, as managers of groups may push back about rededicating the time of some of their staff. The notion of so much experimenting can also be uncomfortable for people. Inevitably, there will be naysayers and resisters. The good news is that there is also a virtuous growth cycle in the adoption of growth hacking. A small team with a narrow focus that begins running the growth hacking process and generates a series of wins can spark growing enthusiasm for the process around a company.

pages: 567 words: 122,311

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, constrained optimization, data science, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, frictionless market, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, Network effects, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, platform as a service, power law, price elasticity of demand, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social software, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, web application, Y Combinator

Email invite loops have a simple set of steps and metrics to track While ProductPlanner is no longer available—its founders are focusing on KISSmetrics instead—you can design patterns of your own using this model, then quickly see what metrics you should be tracking within a process. Then you can instrument the viral loop you’ve built, see where it’s collapsing, and tweak it, edging your way toward that elusive coefficient of 1. Growth Hacking Most startups won’t survive on gradual growth alone. It’s just too slow. If you want to grow, you need an unfair advantage. You need to tweak the future. You need a hack. Growth hacking is an increasingly popular term for data-driven guerilla marketing. It relies on a deep understanding of how parts of the business are related, and how tweaks to one aspect of a customer’s experience impact others.

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., suggesting people a user might know), assuming today’s metric is causing a change in tomorrow’s goal The key to the growth hacking process is the early metric, (which is also known as a leading indicator—something you know today that predicts tomorrow). While this seems relatively straightforward, finding a good leading indicator, and experimenting to determine how it affects the future of the company, is hard work. It’s also how many of today’s break-out entrepreneurs drove their growth. Attacking the Leading Indicator Academia.edu founder Richard Price shared stories[66] from a recent Growth Hacking conference[67] at which several veterans of successful startups shared their leading indicators.

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He could decide how many servers to buy in six months’ time based on how many moms signed up today. But what really mattered was this: he could target moms in his marketing, and change the engagement of his users dramatically. Mike’s hack was market-related, but growth hacks come in all shapes and sizes. Maybe it’s a change in pricing, or a time-limited offer, or a form of personalization. The point is to experiment in a disciplined manner. Product-focused growth hacks—what Chamath Palihapitiya calls “aha moments”—need to happen early in the user’s lifecycle in order to have an impact on the greatest number of possible users. That’s why social sites suggest friends for you almost immediately.

pages: 373 words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

“It’s not just exciting to build things but to explore new fields and to recognize what comes with that is a lot of uncertainty. That’s very true today and it has been true of Airbnb. It’s a whole new concept, around which there haven’t been many rules.” When Nathan Blecharczyk graduated from college, he was not just a skilled programmer but the embodiment of a new Silicon Valley hero: the growth hacker. Growth hackers use their engineering chops to find clever, often controversial ways to improve the popularity of their products and services. Blecharczyk, it turned out, was an exceedingly good one. That makes the mysterious rise of Airbnb in the year after its graduation from Y Combinator easier to understand.

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“No other site had that slick an integration. It was quite successful for us.” Other growth hackers noticed this and applauded it as a sophisticated technical achievement. Craigslist has different versions of its site in hundreds of cities, each with different web domains and menu formats. Blecharczyk had designed a way to make it simple for Airbnb to post seamlessly onto the right site. “It’s integrated simply and deeply into the product, and is one of the most impressive ad-hoc integrations I’ve seen in years,” wrote Andrew Chen, a fellow growth hacker who would later work at Uber, in an admiring blog post. “Certainly a traditional marketer would not have come up with this, or known it was even possible.

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Dave Gooden, “How Airbnb Became a Billion-Dollar Company,” May 31, 2011, http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-company/. 9. Ryan Tate, “Did Airbnb Scam Its Way to $1 Billion?,” Gawker, May 31, 2011, http://gawker.com/5807189/did-airbnb-scam-its-way-to-1-billion. 10. Andrew Chen, “Growth Hacker Is the New VP Marketing,” http://andrewchen.co/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an-airbnbcraigslist-case-study/. 11. “Airbnb Announces New Product Advancements and $7.2M in Series A Funding to Accelerate Global Growth,” Marketwired, November 11, 2010, http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/Airbnb-Announces-New-Product-Advancements-72M-Series-A-Funding-Accelerate-Global-Growth-1351692.htm. 12.

pages: 258 words: 74,942

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business by Paul Jarvis

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, big-box store, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, call centre, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital nomad, drop ship, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, follow your passion, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, growth hacking, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, index fund, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, passive investing, Paul Graham, pets.com, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, software as a service, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, uber lyft, web application, William MacAskill, Y Combinator, Y2K

Building a genuine audience around your business, product, or brand is not the same as growth-hacking. In fact, the overall concept of this entire book is antithetical to that practice. Companies of one don’t growth-hack, because the true north of growth-hacking is, of course, growth. Growth to growth-hacking companies is the single metric used to gauge validity or success, and thinking of it as always beneficial (which, as we’ve learned from the countless stories and research studies reported in previous chapters, is untrue), they consider it not only useful but entirely necessary. Relationships for growth-hackers mostly revolve around offsetting churn, in that their goal is to build an audience as quickly as possible, then sell as much as possible to them until they relent, buy, or give up and leave.

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After a lot of negative press and pushback, Glide said that it had changed its “growth strategy” away from spamviting customers’ entire address books, but in reality, it was still happening years later. Glide has since dropped hundreds of spots in the social networking section of Apple’s app store. The Circle, another app that focused on growth-hacking, spam-blasted its customers’ contact lists in hopes of gaining faster growth. CEO Evan Reas later changed his view on growth-hacking after it repeatedly backfired for his company; he came to believe that a business should grow as the result of great customer experience, not just grow for the sake of growing while taking away from great customer experience. Andy Johns, head of Product at Wealthfront (formerly at Facebook, Twitter, and Quora), found that startups that focus aggressively on exponential growth above all else will expedite their path to failure, exponentially.

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The Hidden Value of Relationships 183 social networking section of Apple’s app store: Sarah Perez, “Video Texting App Glide Is Going ‘Viral,’ Now Ranked Just Ahead of Instagram in App Store,” TechCrunch, July 24, 2013, https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/24/video-texting-app-glide-is-going-viral-now-ranked-just-ahead-of-instagram-in-app-store/. 184 great customer experience: Sarah Perez, “When Growth Hacking Goes Bad,” TechCrunch, January 3, 2014, https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/03/when-growth-hacking-goes-bad/. 184path to failure, exponentially: Andy Johns, “What Does Andy Johns Think of Pinterest’s Rapid Growth? What Factors Do You Believe Drove Its Viral Growth, Especially from 2011–Present?” Quora, March 17, 2014, https://www.quora.com/Andy-Johns-4/What-does-Andy-Johns-think-of-Pinterests-rapid-growth-What-factors-do-you-believe-drove-its-viral-growth-especially-from-2011-present/answer/Andy-Johns?

pages: 282 words: 63,385

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance by Matthew Brennan

Airbnb, AltaVista, augmented reality, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, ImageNet competition, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, paypal mafia, Pearl River Delta, pre–internet, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WeWork, Y Combinator

Reliably extracting key terms was critical for accurate recommendation, but technologies such as natural language processing could only get you so far. Regardless, no matter how accurate their recommendation, merely having a better product than competitors was also not enough. To rapidly grow the Toutiao user base and scale the company to unicorn valuations, the team had to master the darker arts of growth hacking. Growth hacking - China style The Shenzhen airport warehouse 3A was filled with phones, hundreds of thousands of them. Wall to wall, pallet after pallet, a seemingly endless stack of smartphones fresh from the factory production lines. Later that day, all of them would be loaded onto planes and shipped out across China’s major cities, weaving their way through a byzantine system of provincial distributors, sub-distributors, and retail store networks before finally landing in the hands of a consumer.

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The platform’s terms of service gave it the right to do so. 270 After manually identifying and removing potentially inappropriate content, the company implemented a systematic process to experiment with various videos. 271 The adverts didn’t actually say anything about what TikTok was or why anyone would want to use it; they simply needed to pique people’s interest. The goal was simple—find the clips that got the most people to click on a big blue “install” button. This ad buying process was run from Beijing by the company’s experienced growth hacker teams. There was just one issue—the teams had a laser-like focus on conversion metrics but little understanding of the actual video content. Whatever converted best would be used more regardless of what the actual video showed. It turned out that wacky, outlandish, downright weird videos worked really well at getting people to click big blue “install” buttons.

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Numbers of total installations and activations from each distribution channel and manufacturer were laid out in neat rows. Multiple factors were broken down and analyzed in detail: 30-day retention rates, device models, A/B tests, the coverage rates of China’s myriad of cities and townships. A complex system had evolved to optimize the budget for what had become ByteDance’s most effective way to growth hack new users and fast track their company – the grey market of cutting deals with distributors to pre-install apps onto phones after they’ve left the factory but before they reach the consumer. 101 Above: A photo taken in Shenzhen of three app pre-installation machines in action. Even by the Chinese internet industry standards, the market for pre-installing apps on smartphones was a chaotic, wild west.

pages: 244 words: 66,977

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioﬀ, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

The best sales pitch for Netflix is binge-watching a great Netflix show. The same principle applies to buying glasses from Warby Parker. Or conducting a Google search. Or looking up a prospect on Salesforce. At the same time, we’re also hearing a lot more about how all these companies have in-house teams of “growth hackers,” which on a surface level sounds a lot like, well, marketing. They’re trying to come up with smarter ways to drive sales. But these folks tend to reject that label. Stitch Fix has more than ninety data scientists on its payroll. These people aren’t thinking of snappier punch lines for billboards; they’re looking for ways to optimize growth within the service itself.

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Superman (film), 41 Baxter, Robbie Kellman, 29 Ben Hur (film), 38 Benioff, Marc, 5–6, 165 Berg, Björn, 110–11 Berger, Edgar, 47 Bezos, Jeff, 26 Birchbox, 23, 28, 34 Bishop, Bill, 66 BlaBlaCar, 62–63 Blockbuster, 3, 17 blockbuster business model, 38 Boll & Branch, 23 Bonnington, Christina, 52 Bonobos, 33 Borders, 17 Born to Run (album), 38 Bowie, David, 47 BowieNet, 47 Box, 2, 13–14, 167–68, 185, 190, 192 brick and mortar retail, 22–24 Budget, 3 budgeting for recurring expenses, 185 BuzzFeed, 66, 67, 71 cable industry, opportunity cord cutting presents for, 44–46 Cadillac, 52 capability-driven growth, and packaging, 153–54 Carey, Mariah, 38 Carr, Nicholas, 83, 96 Casablanca (film), 37 Casper, 23 Caterpillar, 99–100 channels, 146, 147–48 Chegg, 117 Chrono Therapeutics, 107 Chrysler, 57 churn accounting for, 181 reducing, 161–62 subscription churn rate statistics, 218–20 Circuit City, 17 Cisco, 93–96 CLEAR, 167 Columbia House, 28–29 Columbia Records, 38 Comcast, 46 Concur, 190 construction industry, 98–100 consumption-driven growth, and pricing, 153 content creation, 41 continuous innovation, 133–42 Gmail and, 133–35 Graze and, 137–38 Manifesto for Agile Software Development and, 135–36 market research as element of service, 137–38 Netflix and, 138–40 never-ending products and, 135 Starbucks’ subscriber IDs and, 140–42 sustainable development, creating environment to support, 135–36 user data and, 138–40 West’s The Life of Pablo album and, 136–37 cost plus pricing, 151 costs, recurring, 181 Cowboy Bebop (anime), 42 Cox, 46 cross-selling, 164–67 Crunchyroll, 42–43 customer-centric organizational mindset, 19–21 customer-first focus, 18 customer relationship management (CRM) databases, 18, 193 customers, 17–21 business model shift to circular, dynamic relationship with, 19–21 direct ongoing relationship with, establishing, 18 initial customers, acquisition of, 159–61 mindset of, 17 ownership not important to, 17 customer service departments, 16 CVS, 115 Daily Beast, The, 66 Daily Mail, 169 DAZN, 43–44 Dediu, Horace, 56 delivery service, 34 Dell, Michael, 16 Deploy element, of PADRE operating model, 203 DeRamus, Reid, 43 Digital Equipment Corporation, 56 digital transformation, 11–14, 19–21 digital twins of physical machinery, 104–6 Disney, 13, 107 Doctor, Ken, 69–70, 71 DocuSign, 163–64 Dollar Shave Club, 28, 33 double-entry bookkeeping, 176–79 Dragon Ball Z (anime), 42 Dropbox, 2 Drucker, Peter, 16 Economist, The, 63, 74, 79, 119 education, 116–17 Elgan, Mike, 32 EMEA growth, 220–21 ENGIE, 119 enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, 15–16, 189–95 enthusiast networks, 72–73 Enthusiast Network (TEN), 72–73 ESPN, 44–45 Expand element, of PADRE operating model, 204 Fabletics, 28 Facebook, 13, 67–68, 77 Fender, 30–32 Fender Play, 31 Fender Tune, 31 Field, Marshall, 18 finance, 129, 174–89 budgeting for recurring expenses, 185 finance team, role of, 129, 187–88 Growth Efficiency Index (GEI), 186 growth versus profitability, 182–84 subscription economy income statements, 179–82 trade-off between recurring expenses and growth expenses, managing, 185–86 traditional financial model income statements, problems with, 176–79 finance industry, 120–21 Financial Times, 73–74, 79, 198 fish model, 85–86 Fletcher, Anthony, 137 flexible consumption models, 118 FloorInMotion, 108, 112 Fluidware, 171 Ford, 52, 58–59 Ford, Henry, 14–15, 58–59 Forrester Research, 17 Fortune, 1 Fortune 500 companies, 11–13 characteristics of successful, 12–13 life expectancy of, 11 freemium model, 76 Freshly, 28 Friedland, Jonathan, 139 gaming industry, 125–27 Garrett, Mark, 80, 81, 82, 87–88 Gartner, 55, 84, 130, 209 General Electric (GE), 12, 104–6 General Motors (GM), 55–56, 57, 148 Gerber Technology, 112 Gilette, 33 Girouard, Mike, 94–95 Glow (show), 41 Gmail, 2, 133–35 Godless (show), 41 Gold, Carl, 114, 210 Goldman Sachs, 27 Google, 13, 67–68, 77, 133–35, 145 government, 116 Graze, 28, 137–38 Greenberg, Reid, 24 Grossman-Cohen, Rebecca, 77 growth costs, 182 Growth Efficiency Index (GEI), 186 growth hackers, 145 Guardian, The, 65–66 guided selling model, 164 Hajman, Pavel, 36 hardware technology companies, 93–96 Harry’s, 33 Hastings, Reed, 3, 40 HBR, 121 health care industry, 115 HealthIQ, 117 Heidelberg Druckmaschinen, 112 Hertz, 3 Heston, Charlton, 38 Hive, 106 HomeAway, 120 Honeywell, 108 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 117 House of Cards (show), 139–40 “How Investors React When Companies Announce They’re Moving to a SaaS Model” (HBR), 93 HP Enterprise, 90 Husqvarna, 35–36 hybrid sales model, 163 Hyundai, 51 IBM, 12, 56, 90 ID for customers, 26–27, 140–42, 146 Iger, Bob, 13 income statements for subscription economy (See income statements for subscription economy) traditional, 176–79 income statements for subscription economy, 179–82 annual recurring revenue, 179–81 churn, 181 growth costs, 182 recurring costs, 181 recurring profit margins, 182 industrial internet, 105 The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future (Kelly), 111 Information, The, 66 innovation.

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Because we finally have the kinds of customer insights that everyone has been dying to find for the past twenty years. We are swimming in new information. The skills you have as a marketer—storytelling, data analysis, customer knowledge—all of them are crucial to the success of your company. Are you really going to trust the engineers to “growth hack” their way into a great story? They need you! But here’s the thing—once you hit a critical mass of subscribers, and you know who they are, and you see how they’re acting, then the job becomes just as much science as art. And that’s good news! When the data wonks get together with the writers, that’s when the cool stuff happens.

pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

A company that prided itself on its software hacking roots perfected a new model to monetize its success. Growth hacking applies the intensely focused, iterative model of software hacking to the problem of increasing user count, time on site, and revenue. It works only when a company has a successful product and a form of monetization that can benefit from tinkering, but for the right kind of company, growth hacking can be transformational. Obsessive focus on metrics is a central feature of growth hacking, so it really matters that you pick the correct metrics. From late 2012 to 2017, Facebook perfected growth hacking. The company experimented constantly with algorithms, new data types, and small changes in design, measuring everything.

…

Every action a user took gave Facebook a better understanding of that user—and of that user’s friends—enabling the company to make tiny improvements in the “user experience” every day, which is to say they got better at manipulating the attention of users. The goal of growth hacking is to generate more revenue and profits, and at Facebook those metrics blocked out all other considerations. In the world of growth hacking, users are a metric, not people. It is unlikely that civic responsibility ever came up in Facebook’s internal conversations about growth hacking. Once the company started applying user data from outside the platform, there was no turning back. The data from outside Facebook transformed targeting inside Facebook.

…

He is a thoughtful and friendly man who feels he is being unfairly blamed for the consequences of persuasive technology on internet platforms. He told me that he made several attempts to call attention to the dangers of persuasive technology, but that Silicon Valley paid no attention. In companies like Facebook and Google, Fogg’s disciples often work in what is called the Growth group, the growth hackers charged with increasing the number of users, time on site, and engagement with ads. They have been very successful. When we humans interact with internet platforms, we think we are looking at cat videos and posts from friends in a simple news feed. What few people know is that behind the news feed is a large and advanced artificial intelligence.

pages: 291 words: 90,771

Upscale: What It Takes to Scale a Startup. By the People Who've Done It. by James Silver

Airbnb, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, call centre, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, DevOps, family office, flag carrier, fulfillment center, future of work, Google Hangouts, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, pattern recognition, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

In Miami, it’s still difficult to hire growth-hacking skills. But the universities there are very strong, so you can build your own pipeline of skilled people if you’re happy to invest.’ Moreover, Skyscanner does not plan to open any more hubs. ‘We can do the globe from our hubs as we’ve currently got them. Our Russian team has six Russians in it, but they’re all based out of Edinburgh. By finding cosmopolitan cities, you can get nationals there who can do the role you need them to do. Our offices are right next door to the University of Edinburgh for that reason. It allows us to get great engineers, growth hackers, and all kinds of talent right out of the university.’

pages: 326 words: 103,170

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

So Windows runs on 90 percent of the globe’s PCs thirty years after its first release. Google has a 65 percent market share. Android runs on 81 percent of new phones. WhatsApp neared a billion users with less than fifty engineers on staff. Facebook passed a billion connected people and faced no real competition. How? “Seven friends in ten days,” Facebook growth hackers repeated like a mantra in their early years. If you or I joined the service and found seven friends in ten days, we would most likely stay, enjoying the benefits of the gated world, making it that much harder (impossible, really) for friend number eight to wander somewhere else. Pretty soon, there was essentially nowhere else to go, anyhow.

…

winner takes all: Remco van der Hofstad, Random Graphs and Complex Networks (Eindhoven, the Netherlands: Eindhoven University of Technology, 2015), at http://www.win.tue.nl/~rhofstad/NotesRGCN.pdf, 24. “seven friends in ten days”: Chamath Palihapitiya, “How We Put Facebook on the Path to 1 Billion Users” (lecture for the Udemy course “Growth Hacking: An Introduction,” published January 9, 2013, and available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raIUQP71SBU). Pretty soon: Eman Yasser Daraghmi and Shyan-Ming Yuan, “We Are So Close, Less Than 4 Degrees Separating You and Me!,” Computers in Human Behavior 30 (January 2014), 273–85. Data scientists: Laurent Hébert-Dufresne et al.

pages: 468 words: 124,573

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time by George Berkowski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business intelligence, call centre, crowdsourcing, deal flow, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, Paul Graham, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, ubercab, Y Combinator

There is a path from the good, solid app you created to get to million-dollar stage – a minimum viable product out there in the hands of users – to one that users love. Let’s make it a bit less ephemeral. I am an engineer, after all. I’d like to be able to measure something that tells me whether I’ve reached product–market fit – or at least whether I am approaching it – via an objective measure. I like the way that Sean Ellis – founder of Growth Hackers – describes it: I’ve tried to make the concept less abstract by offering a specific metric for determining product–market fit. I ask existing users of a product how they would feel if they could no longer use the product. In my experience, achieving product–market fit requires at least 40 per cent of users saying they would be ‘very disappointed’ without your product.

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Step 2: The Ten-Million-Dollar App Chapter 14: Make Something People Love 1 ‘The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters’, blog post on blog.Pmarca.com, 25 June 2007, web.archive.org/web/20070701074943; http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html. 2 Sean Ellis, ‘The Startup Pyramid’, article for Startup-Marketing.com, http://www.startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/. 3 Chamath Palihapitiya, ‘How We Put Facebook on the Path to 1 billion Users’, part of a 10-hour course from the Growth Hackers Conference, published 9 January 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=raIUQP7 1SBU. Chapter 16: The Metrics of Success 1 Paul Graham, ‘How to Start a Startup’, blog post on PaulGraham.com, March 2005, paulgraham.com/start.html. Chapter 17: Getting Your Growth On 1 For more information about Mobile App Tracking, visit mobileapptracking.com/. 2 ‘An Introduction to Mobile App Tracking’, 1 May 2012, www.slideshare.net/MobileAppTracking/mobile-app-tracking-how-it-works.

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Index Note: page numbers in bold refer to illustrations, page numbers in italics refer to information contained in tables. 99designs.com 111 500 Startups accelerator 136, 160 Accel Partners 3, 158, 261, 304, 321, 336, 383 accelerators 136, 159–60, 160 accountants 164, 316 accounting software 164 acquisition (of users) costs 148–9, 184, 236–7, 275–9, 282 and Facebook 271, 272, 273–4 for five hundred-million-dollar apps 327, 341–3 for hundred-million-dollar apps 252, 259, 266, 267–74, 275–84, 295–307 and incentive-based networks 270–1 international 295–307 for million dollar apps 136–7, 139, 140–51, 148–9, 153 and mobile social media channels 271–3, 272 and mobile user-acquisition channels 269–70 strategy 222–31 for ten-million-dollar apps 211–12, 213, 222–31, 236–7, 248–9 and traditional channels 268–9 and ‘viral’ growth 225, 278, 279–84 zero-user-acquisition cost 278 acquisitions 414–25 buying sustained growth 417–18 by non-tech corporations 418–20 initial public offerings 420–2 Waze 415–16 activation (user) 136, 137, 139, 153–4, 211–12, 213 Acton, Brian 54, 394 addiction, smartphone 30–1 Adler, Micah 269 administrators 409 AdMob 414–15 advertising 43 business model 67, 89–90 costs 140 and Facebook 271, 272, 273–4 mobile 148–9, 268–70, 272–3, 272 mobile social media 272–3, 272 mobile user-acquisition channels 269–70 outdoor 264 shunning of 42, 54–6 video ads 273 aesthetics 131 after product–market fit (APMF) 180 agencies 195–7, 264, 343 ‘agile coaches’ see scrum masters agile software development 192–3, 299, 315, 357, 377 Ahonen, Tomi 45 ‘aiming high’ 40–1 Airbnb 160, 301 alarm features 48 Albion 111 alerts 293 Alexa.com 146 Alibaba 227 ‘ALT tags’ 147 Amazon 7, 29, 131, 164, 227, 276, 366, 374–5, 401, 406 Amazon Web Services 374 American Express 347 Amobee 149 analytics 134–5, 149, 199, 205, 210, 212, 217–21, 294 and cohort analysis 287–8 Flurry 135, 149, 220 function 217–18 Google Analytics 135, 219–20, 345 limitations 284 Localytics 135, 221 and marketing 263 mistakes involving 218–19 Mixpanel.com tool 135, 217–18, 220–1, 287, 290–1, 345 Andreessen, Marc 180, 418–19 Andreessen Horowitz 72, 80, 180, 321, 383, 385, 418–19 Android (mobile operating system) 6, 23–4, 38, 415 advertising 274 audience size 119 beta testing 202 building apps for 116–22 and international apps 296 in Japan 306 scaling development and engineering 357–8 time spent on 26 and WhatsApp 55 Angel Capital Association 162 angel investors 154, 155–6, 323 AngelList 99, 131, 155, 159, 233 Angry Birds (game) 6, 42, 47, 57–8, 87, 89, 97 and application programming interface 36 delivering delight 207 design 131 funding 321 game in game 348–9 international growth 297–9 platform 117, 118 product extension 356 virality 282 annual offsites 379 annual revenue per user (ARPU) 215, 219, 232, 236 anonymity 43, 56–7 anti-poaching clauses 247 antidilution rights 245 API see application programming interface app descriptions 143 app development billion-dollar app 8, 389–425 CEO advice 406–13 getting acquired 414–25 people 395–405 process 390–1 five-hundred-million-dollar app 325–87 funding 328, 383–7 hiring staff 334–6, 337–40 killer product expansion 350–63 process 326–8 scaling 326, 330–6, 331–2 scaling marketing 341–9 scaling people 364–72, 377–9 scaling process 373–82 scaling product development 357–63 hundred-million-dollar app 251–324 international growth 295–307 process 252–4 product-market fit 255–6 retention of users 286–94 revenue engines 257–66, 275–85 user acquisition 267–74 million-dollar app 81–171 app Version 0.1 123–35 coding 133–4 design 129–33 feedback 127, 134–5 funding 152–60, 161–71, 176, 235–49 identity of the business 106–14 lean companies 115–22 metrics 136–9, 139 process 82–4 startup process 85–105 testing 126–8 user acquisition 140–51 ten-million-dollar app 173–249 growth engine 222–31, 235–49 metrics 211–21 new and improved Version 1.0 198–210 process 174–6 product–market fit 180–97 revenue engine 232–4 venture capital 235–49 app stores 22, 27–8, 33–4 see also Apple App Store; Google Play app-store optimisation (ASO) 142, 225 AppAnnie 205 Apple 19, 20, 31–2, 393 application programming interface 35–6 designers 129 Facetime app 46 iWatch 38–9 profit per employee 402–3 revenue per employee 401 visual voicemail 50 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 313 see also iPad; iPhone Apple App Store 22, 27, 32–3, 75, 88, 89, 117, 226 finding apps in 140, 141, 142–5 international apps 297–9 making submissions to 152–3 and profit per employee 403 ratings plus comments 204–5 Apple Enterprise Distribution 201–2 application programming interface (API) 35–6, 185, 360, 374 ARPU see annual revenue per user articles of incorporation 169 ASO see app-store optimisation Atari 20 Atomico 3, 261, 321, 383 attribution 227–31 for referrals 230–1 average transaction value (ATV) 214–15, 219, 232, 236, 387 Avis 95 backlinking to yourself 146 ‘bad leavers’ 247 Balsamiq.com 128 Banana Republic 352 bank accounts 164 banking 156–7 Bardin, Noam 43 Barr, Tom 338 Barra, Hugo 120, 306 Baseline Ventures 72 Baudu 226 beauty 131 BeeJiveIM 33 before product–market fit (BPMF) 180 ‘below the fold’ 143 Beluga Linguistics 297 Benchmark 75 benefits 398–400 beta testing 201–4 Betfair 358 Bezos, Jeff 366, 374 Bible apps 45 billion 9–10 Billion-Dollar Club 5 billionaires 9 Bing 226 ‘black-swan’ events 54 BlackBerry 23 Blank, Steve 257 Blogger 41 blood sugar monitoring devices 38 board seats 242, 243–4 board-member election consent 169 Bolt Peters 363 Booking.com 320 Bootstrap 145 Botha, Roelof 76, 77, 80 Box 7, 90, 276, 396–7, 411 brains 10 brainstorming 108 branding 111–13, 143, 263–4 Braun 129 Bregman, Jay xiii, 14–16, 95, 124, 209, 303 bridge loans 323 Brin, Sergey 366 Bring Your Own Infrastructure (BYOI) 17–18 Brougher, Francoise 340 Brown, Donald 44 Brown, Reggie 104–5 Bubble Witch 421 Buffet, Warren 4 build-measure-learn cycle 116 Burbn.com 72–4, 80 business advisors/coaches 103 business analysts 343 business culture 395–8 business goal setting 310–11 business models 67, 83, 87, 88–91, 175, 253, 259, 327, 351–2, 391, 400, 423–4 business success, engines of 183–4, 423–4 Business Wire 150 CAC see Customer Acquisition Cost Cagan, Marty 314 calendars 49 calorie measurement sensors 38 Cambridge Computer Scientists 160 camera feature 48 Camera+ app 48 Candy Crush Saga 6, 47, 87, 89, 131, 278–81, 318, 349, 421–2 card-readers 41–2 cash flow 164 CEOs see Chief Executive Officers CFOs see Chief Financial Officers channels incentive-based networks 270–1 mobile social-media 271–3, 272 mobile user-acquisition 269–70 source attribution 227–31 testing 224–7 traditional 268–9 viral 280–2 charging phones 49–50 Chartboost 149 chauffer hire see Uber app check-ins, location-based 72, 74 Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) 309, 380 advice from 406–13 and the long haul 68 and product centricity 185–6 role 337 Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) 316 Chief Operations Officers (COOs) 309, 326, 337–40, 380 Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) 186–7, 195 Chillingo 298 China 24–5, 146, 226, 306–7 Cisco 402 Clash of Clans (game) 6, 28, 36, 47, 87, 89, 97, 118, 227, 348–9, 398 Clements, Dave 120 Climate Corporation 412, 419 clock features 47 cloud-based software 67, 90 Clover 419 coding 133–4 cofounders 85, 91–105, 188, 191 chemistry 92–3 complementary skills 93 finding 96–9 level of control 94 passion 93–4 red flags 102–3 successful matches 104–5 testing out 100–2 cohort analysis 237, 287–8 Color.com (social photo-sharing) app 113, 255 colour schemes 111 Commodore 20 communication open 412–13 team 194 with users 208–9 Companiesmadesimple.com 163–4 computers 20–1, 29 conferences 97–8, 202, 312–13 confidentiality provisions 244 connectedness 30 ConnectU 105 consumer audience apps 233–4 content, fresh 147 contracts 165–6 convertible loans 163 Cook, Daren 112 cookies 228–9 Coors 348 COOs see Chief Operations Officers Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) 148–9 Cost Per Download (CPD) 148 Costolo, Dick 77–8, 79–80 costs, and user acquisition 148–9, 184, 236–7, 275–9, 282 Crash Bandicoot 33 crawlers 146–7 Cray-1 supercomputer 20 CRM see customer-relationship management CrunchBase 238 CTOs see Chief Technology Officers Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) 148–9, 184, 236–7, 275–9 customer lifecycle 212–14 customer segments 346–7 customer-centric approach 344 customer-relationship management (CRM) 290–4, 343 customer-support 208–9 Cutright, Alyssa 369 daily active users (DAUs) 142 D’Angelo, Adam 75–6 data 284–5, 345–7 data engineers 284 dating, online 14, 87–8, 101–2, 263 decision making 379–82, 407–8 defining apps 31–4 delegation 407 delight, delivery 205–7 design 82, 129–33, 206–7 responsive 144 designers 132, 189–91, 363, 376 developer meetups 97 developers see engineers/developers development see app development; software development development agencies 196 ‘development sprint’ 192 Devine, Rory 358–9 Digital Sky Technologies 385 directors of finance 316–17 Distimo 205 DLD 97 Doerr, John 164, 310 Doll, Evan 42–3, 105 domain names 109–10 international 146 protection 145–6 Domainnamesoup.com 109 Dorsey, Jack 41, 58, 72, 75–7, 79–80, 104, 112, 215–16, 305, 312, 412–13 ‘double-trigger’ vesting 247 DoubleClick 414 Dow Jones VentureSource 64 down rounds 322–3 downloads, driving 150–1 drag along rights 245 Dribbble.com 132 Dropbox 7, 90, 131, 276 CEO 407, 410–11 funding 160 scaling 336 staff 399 Dunbar, Robin 364–5 Dunbar number 365 e-commerce/marketplace 28–9, 67, 89, 213–14 Chinese 306 Flipboard and 351–2 and revenue engines 232, 233–4, 276 social media generated 271–2 and user retention 288, 289 eBay 7, 28–9, 131, 180, 276 economic models 275 economies of scale 331–2, 331–2 eCourier 15, 95 education 68–9 edX 69 Ek, Daniel 357 Ellis, Sean 182 emails 291–3 emotion effects of smartphones on 29–30, 30 inspiring 223–4 employees see staff employment contracts 246–7 engagement 236, 278, 283 engineering VPs 337, 358–9 engineers/developers 190–1, 194–5, 361–2, 362, 370, 375–7, 405 enterprise 90, 233–4 Entrepreneur First programme 160 entrepreneurs 3–5, 7–8, 65, 262, 393–4, 409, 424 Ericsson 21 Etsy 107, 109, 110, 358 Euclid Analytics 149 Evernote 7, 90, 131, 399 ExactTarget 291 excitement 30 executive assistants 367 Exitround 419 experience 67–8, 264, 397 Fab.com 352 Facebook 7, 10, 26, 32, 48, 76, 226, 394, 422 and acquisition of users 271, 272, 273–4 acquisitions 416–18, 417 agile culture 375 alerts 293 and application programming interface 36 board 180 and business identity 114 and Candy Crush 280–1 Chief Executive Officer 406 cofounders 100–1 and Color 255–6 design 131, 206, 363 Developer Garage 97 driving downloads on 151 and e-commerce decisions 271, 272 and FreeMyApps.com 271 funding 419 and getting your app found 147 and the ‘hacker way’ 375 initial public offering 420–1 and Instagram 29, 51, 76–80, 90, 117 name 110 ‘No-Meeting Wednesday’ 376 product development 187 profit per employee 403 revenue per employee 401 scaling 336 and Snapchat 57 staff 339, 362, 363, 398, 401, 403 and virality 281 WhatsApp purchase 42, 54–6, 416–17, 417 zero-user-acquisition cost 278 and Zynga 279, 281 Facetime app 46 fanatical users 294 feedback 86, 127, 134–5, 182, 192–3, 198–201, 256, 396 loops 204, 211 qualitative 199 quantitative 199 see also analytics Feld, Brad 170, 241 Fenwick and West 168 Fiksu 264, 269–70 finance, VP of 317–18 finding apps 140–8, 148–9 FireEye 90 First Data 419 first impressions 107–10 Fitbit 38 fitness bracelets 38 flat rounds 322–3 Flipboard 6, 29, 42–3, 49, 51, 89–90 and application programming interface 36 Catalogs 351–2 cofounders 105 design 131, 207 funding 164 growth 351–2 platform choice 119 product innovation 351–2 user notifications 292 virality 281 zero-user-acquisition cost 278 Flurry 135, 149, 220 Fontana, Ash 233 Forbes magazine 40 Ford Motors 419 Founder Institute, The 168 founder vesting 166–7, 244 Foursquare 419 France Telecom 13 franchising 354 FreeMyApps.com 270–1 Friedberg, David 412 Froyo (Android mobile software) 7 Fujii, Kiyotaka 304 full service agencies 195–6 functionality 25–6, 45–50, 131 funding 72, 75–6, 84, 87–8, 152–60, 161–71, 179 accelerators 159–60 angel investors 154, 155–6, 323 for billion-dollar apps 391 convertible loans 163 core documents 169–70 for five-hundred-million-dollar apps 328, 383–7 founder vesting 166–7 for hundred-million-dollar apps 254, 258, 316–17, 318–24 incubators 159–60 legal aspects 163–4 and revenue engines 233–4 Series A 234, 238–40, 238, 240, 241, 242–6, 255, 319–21, 385 Series B 238, 241, 253, 260, 284, 319–21, 322, 384 Series C 384 signing a deal 167–8 for ten-million-dollar apps 152–60, 161–71, 176, 235–49 venture capital 72, 75, 156–8, 165–6, 235–49, 261–2, 383–5, 385, 418–19 game in game 348–9 gaming 42, 47, 318, 355 business model 67, 89 and revenue engines 232, 278–9 and user retention 288, 289 see also specific games Gandhi, Sameer 336 Gartner 271 Gates, Bill 4 general managers (GMs) 300–3 Gladwell, Malcolm 424 Glassdoor 361–2 Global Positioning System (GPS) 23 Gmail 72 GMs see general managers goal setting 40–1, 310–11 Goldberg, Dave 397 Goldman Sachs 385 ‘good leavers’ 247 Google 7, 19, 23, 27, 72, 88, 164, 226 acquisitions 43, 414–16, 418 application programming interface 35–6 beta testing 202 Chief Executive Officer 406–8 developer meetups 97 finding your app on 144, 147 Hangouts app 46 meetings 381–2 mission 404, 408–9 and the OKR framework 310 profit per employee 403, 405 revenue per employee 401, 405 scaling 332 and Snapchat 57 and source attribution 228–9 staff 339, 340, 361–2, 366, 401, 403, 404–5, 412 Thank God It’s Friday (TGIF) meetings 311–12 transparency 413 value 78 Waze app purchase 43 and WhatsApp 56 zero-user-acquisition cost 278 see also Android (mobile operating system) Google Ad Mob 149 Google AdSense 149 Google Analytics 135, 219–20, 345 Google Glass 38–9, 405 Google I/O conference 313 Google Maps 33, 35, 414, 416 Google Now 37 Google Play 88, 89, 117, 120, 226 and beta testing 202 finding apps in 141–5 profit per employee 403 ratings plus comments 204–5 Google Reader 72 Google Ventures 384 Google X 405 Google+ and business identity 114 and virality 281 Google.org 339 GPS see Global Positioning System Graham, Paul 184–5, 211 Graphical User Interface (GUI) 20 Greylock 321, 383 Gross, Bill 406–7, 409–10 Groupon 7, 51–2, 227, 344–5, 419 Grove, Andy 310 growth 267, 308–17 buying sustained 417–18 engines 184, 210, 222–31, 259, 265 and five-hundred-million-dollar apps 329–36 and Friday update meetings 311–12 and goal setting 310–11 and hiring staff 308–9, 411–12 and product and development teams 313–14 and staff conferences 312–13 targets 234, 260 see also acquisition (of users); international growth; scaling Growth Hackers 182 GUI see Graphical User Interface hackathons 99 Haig, Patrick 143 Hailo app xiii–xiv, 5, 36, 89, 386 big data 284–5 branding 112–13 cofounders 94–6 customer segments 346–7 customer-support 208–9 design 131, 132, 133, 206–7 development 123–7, 153–4 Friday update meetings 311 funding 162, 242 goal setting 310 growth 296–7, 299, 302–4, 308–11, 313, 315–17, 329–30, 334–6 hiring staff 308–9, 334–6, 338, 366–7 idea for 14–18 international growth 296, 297, 299, 302–4 market research 182 marketing 263, 264, 268, 270, 273, 341, 347–8 meetings 381 metrics 137–9, 216 name 107 organisational culture 396 platform choice 117, 120, 121 premises xiii–xiv, 177–8, 329–30, 371–2, 386 product development 189, 191, 196 retention 293–4 revenue engine 276 scaling development and engineering 357 scaling people 365–7 scaling process 377 team 258 testing 177–8, 201–4 and user emotionality 224 virality 280, 282 Hangouts app 46 Harris Interactive 31 HasOffers 149 Hay Day 47, 97 head of data 342 Heads Up Display (HUD) 38 heart rate measurement devices 37–8 Hed, Niklas 42 hiring staff 308–9, 334–6, 337–40, 365–70 history of apps 31–2 HMS President xiii–xiv, 177–9, 329, 371, 386 HockeyApp 202 HootSuite 151 Houston, Drew 407, 410–11 HP 180, 402 HTC smartphone 121 HUD see Heads Up Display human universals 44–5 Humedica 419 hyperlinks 147 hypertext markup language (HTML) 147 I/O conference 2013 202 IAd mobile advertising platform 149 IBM 20, 402 icons 143 ideas see ‘thinking big’ identity of the business 86 branding 111–13 identity crises 106–14 names 106–11 websites 113–14 image descriptions 147 in Mobi 149 in-app purchases 28 incentive-based networks 270–1 incorporation 163–4, 179 incubators 159–60 Index Ventures 3, 261 initial public offerings (IPOs) 64, 67–9, 78, 80, 246, 420–2 innovation 404–5 Instagram 6, 29, 48, 51, 67, 71–80, 88–90, 114, 117, 226, 278, 340, 417–18 cofounders 73–4 design 131 funding 75–6, 77–8 X-Pro II 75 zero-user-acquisition cost 278 instant messaging 46 Instantdomainsearch.com 109 integrators 410 Intel 310 intellectual property 165–6, 244, 247 international growth 295–307 Angry Birds 297–9 Hailo 296, 297, 299, 302–4 language tools 297 Square 295, 299, 304–6 strings files 296 Uber 299–302 International Space Station 13 Internet bubble 13 investment see funding iOS software (Apple operating system) 7, 23–4, 46, 75, 104 advertising 274 audience size 119 building apps for 116–22 and international apps 296 scaling development and engineering 357–8 time spent on 26 iPad 42–3, 118–20, 351 iPhone 6, 19, 22–3, 32, 38–9, 183, 351 advertising on 274 camera 48 designing apps for 117–18, 120 finding apps with 145 games 42, 47, 58 and Instagram 74–6 in Japan 306 and Square 104, 306 and Uber 301 user spend 117 and WhatsApp app 54–5 iPod 22 IPOs see initial public offerings Isaacson, Walter 32 iTunes app 22, 47, 88, 143 iTunes U app 69 Ive, Jony 129 iZettle 304 Jackson, Eric 40 Jain, Ankit 142 Japan 227, 304–6 Jawbone Up 38 Jelly Bean (Android mobile software) 7 Jobs, Steve 4, 22, 32, 323, 393, 425 journalists 150–1 Jun, Lei 306 Kalanick, Travis 299–300, 384, 422 Kayak 336 Keret, Samuel 43 Keyhole Inc. 414 keywords 143, 146 Kidd, Greg 104 King.com 349, 421–2 see also Candy Crush Saga KISSmetrics 291 KitKat (Android mobile software) 7 Klein Perkins Caulfield Byers (KPCB) 158, 261, 321, 383 Kontagent 135 Koolen, Kees 320, 339 Korea 30 Koum, Jan 42, 54, 55–6, 154, 321, 394, 416 Kreiger, Mike 73–6 language tools 297 Launchrock.com 113–14, 145, 202 Lawee, David 415 lawyers 103, 169, 170, 242 leadership 410–11 see also Chief Executive Officers; managers lean companies 69, 115–22, 154, 257, 320–1 Lee, Bob 340 legalities 163–70, 242–7, 301 letting go 406–7 Levie, Aaron 396–7, 411 Levinson, Art 32 LeWeb 97 Libin, Phil 399 licensing 356 life experience 67–8, 264 lifetime value (LTV) 184, 215, 219, 220–1, 232, 275–7, 279, 291, 342 Line app 46, 226 Lingo24 297 LinkedIn 97, 226, 406, 408–9 links 147 liquidation preference 242, 243, 245 non-participating 245 Livio 419 loans, convertible 163 Localytics 135, 221 locations 69 logos 111–14 LTV see lifetime value luck 412 Luckey, Palmer 39 LVMH 304 Lyons, Carl 263 Maiden 95 makers 375–7 see also designers; engineers/developers managers 189–90, 300–3, 375–7, 405 MapMyFitness 419 market research 115, 127, 182 marketing data 345–7 and Facebook 271, 272, 273–4 and incentive-based networks 270–1 marketing engineering team 344–5 and mobile social media channels 271–3, 272 and mobile user-acquisition channels 269–70 partner marketing 347–8 scaling 341–9 teams 262–6, 337, 342 and traditional channels 268–9 VPs 262–6, 337, 342 marketplace see e-commerce/marketplace MasterCard 347–8 Matrix Partners 283 McClure, Dave 136, 160, 211, 234 McCue, Mike 42–3, 105, 351 McKelvey, Jim 41, 104 ‘me-too’ products 181 Medium 41 Meebo 73 meetings 379–82, 412–13 annual offsite 379 daily check-ins 381 disruptive nature 376–7 Friday update 311–12 meaningful 381–2 monthly strategic 380 quarterly 380 weekly tactical 380 Meetup.com 98–9 Mendelsen, Jason 170 messaging platforms 226 time spent on 46 and user retention 288, 289 metrics 136–9, 139, 211–21 activation 136, 137, 139, 153–4, 211–12, 213 annual revenue per user (ARPU) 215, 219, 232, 236 average transaction value (ATV) 214–15, 219, 232, 236, 387 consensual 215–16 lifetime value (LTV) 184, 215, 219, 220–1, 232, 275–7, 279, 291, 342 and product-market fit 209–10 referral 137, 138, 139, 153, 154, 211–12, 213, 230–1 revenue 137, 138, 139, 154, 211–12, 213, 214–15, 219, 291 transparency regarding 312 see also acquisition (of users); retention (of users) mice 20 Microsoft application programming interface 35–6 revenue per employee 401 Windows 20, 22, 24 Millennial Media 149 minimum viable product (MVP) 123, 153 MirCorp 13–14 mission 261, 404, 408–9 Mitchell, Jason 51 Mitsui Sumitomo Bank 305 Mixpanel.com tool 135, 217–18, 220–1, 287, 290–1, 345 MMS see Multimedia Messaging Service Mobile Almanac 45 Mobile App Tracking 230, 231 mobile technology, rise of 19–39 MoMo app 306 Monsanto 419 moonshots 404–5 Moore, Jonathan 200 MoPub 149 Moqups.com 128 Mosaic 180 Motorola 21 Moz.com 143 Mullins, Jacob 419 Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) 47 Murphy, Bobby 43, 104–5, 152–3 music player apps 47 MVP see Metrics into Action; minimum viable product names 106–11, 142 NameStation.com 108 Nanigans 273–4 National Venture Capital Association 64 native apps 33–4 NDA see Non Disclosure Agreement negotiation 265 Net Promoter Score (NPS) 206, 209 net-adding users 206 Netflix 400 Netscape 164, 180 New Enterprise Associates 385 New York Times news app 32–3, 256 news and alerts feature 48–9 Nextstop 72 Nguyen, Bill 255–6 NHN 227 Nike Fuelband 38 Nintendo Game Boy 47 Nokia 21, 35–6 Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) 165 noncompetition/non-solicitation provision 244, 247 notifications 291–4 NPS see Net Promoter Score Oculus VR 39 OKR (‘objectives and key results’) framework 310–11, 380 OmniGraffle 128 open-source software 23, 34–5, 185 OpenCourseWare 68–9 operating systems 20–4 see also Android; iOS software operations VPs 337 org charts 258, 309 organisational culture 395–8 O’Tierney, Tristan 104 outsourcing 194–7 ownership and founder vesting 166–7 and funding 155, 156, 161–3, 318 oxygen saturation measurement devices 37–8 Paananen, Ilkka 118–19, 397–8 Page, Larry 4, 23, 382, 404, 407–8 Palantir 90 Palihapitiya, Chamath 187 Pandora 7, 47, 67, 131, 410 pay-before-you-download model 28 pay-per-download (PPD) 225 Payleven 304 payment systems 7, 33–4, 227, 304, 305 see also Square app PayPal 7, 227, 304, 305 Pepsi 196 Perka 419 perks 398–400 perseverance 67, 394, 410 personal computers (PCs) 29 perspiration measurement devices 38 Pet Rescue Saga 349, 421 Petrov, Alex 369 phablets 7 Pham, Peter 255 PhoneSaber 33 Photoshop 128 PIN technology 305 Pincus, Mark 311 Pinterest app 48, 226 and business identity 114 and e-commerce decisions 271, 272 and getting your app found 147 name 107 and virality 281 Pishevar, Shervin 300 pivoting 73–4 population, global 9–10 portfolio companies 261–2 PowerPoint 128 PPD see pay-per-download preferential return 243 premises 370–2 preparation 412 press kits 148, 150 press releases 150 Preuss, Dom 98 privacy issues 43, 56–7 private vehicle hire see Uber pro-rata rights 242, 243 producers 409 product chunks 360 product development scaling 357–63 scope 199 team building for 188–91 and team location 193–4 and vision 186–8, 191 see also app development; testing product expansion 350–63 product extension 354 product managers 189–90, 405 product-centricity 185–6, 314, 360 product-market fit 9, 180–97, 235–6, 248, 256–7 measurement 209–10, 212, 286–8 profit 267, 320, 342 profit margin 258–9, 318, 321 profit per employee 402–4, 403, 405 profitability 260, 277, 400 Project Loon 405 proms 12 proto.io tool 133 prototype apps 86, 174 app Version 0.1 123–35, 174 new and improved Version 1.0 198–210 rapid-design prototyping 132–3 PRWeb 150 PSP 47 psychological effects of smartphones 29–30, 30 pttrns.com 131 public-relations agencies 343 publicity 150–1, 225, 313 putting metrics into action 138–9 Puzzles and Dragons 47, 131 QlikView 221, 284–5 QQ 307 quality assurance (QA) 190–1, 196 Quora 76 QZone 307 Rabois, Keith 368, 369 Rakuten 227 Rams, Dieter 129 rapid-design prototyping 132–3 ratings plus comments 204–5 Red Bull 223 redemption codes 230 referrals (user) 137, 138, 139, 153, 154, 211–12, 213 attribution for referrals 230–1 referral codes 230 religious apps 45 remuneration 361–2, 362, 363 Renault 13 restated certification 169 retention (of users) 136–9, 153, 154 for five hundred-million-dollar apps 327, 341–3 for hundred-million-dollar apps 286–94, 288–9 measurement 286–8 for ten-million-dollar apps 206, 211–12, 213, 278 revenue 137–8, 139, 154, 211–12, 213, 214–15, 219, 236, 239–40, 267, 291, 331–2, 341–2, 354 revenue engines 184, 210, 232–4, 257–66, 265, 275–85 revenue per employee 400–2, 402, 405 revenue streams 27–9 Ries, Eric, The Lean Startup 115–16 Rockefeller, John D. 9 Rocket Internet 304 Rolando 33 Rosenberg, Jonathan 413 Rovio 58, 97, 118, 297–9, 318, 320–1, 336, 354, 409 see also Angry Birds Rowghani, Ali 77 Rubin, Andy 23 Runa 419 SaaS see software as a service Sacca, Chris 75–6 sacrifice 86–7 Safari Web browser 32 salaries 361–2, 362, 363 sales VPs 337 Salesforce 291 Samsung 23 Galaxy Gear smartwatch 38 smartphones 121 Sandberg, Sheryl 4, 100–1, 339, 397 SAP 304 scaling 259, 308, 312, 323–4, 326, 330–6, 331–2, 384–5 decision making 379–81 international growth 295–307 marketing 341–9 and organisational culture 396–8 people 338–9, 364–72 premature 334–5 process 373–82 product development and engineering 357–63 and product innovation 350–6 reasons for 333–4 skill set for 335–6 Schmidt, Eric 120 scope 199 screenshots 131, 144, 206 scrum masters (‘agile coaches’) 315, 359, 360 search functions 49 organic 141–2, 141, 145 search-engine optimisation (SEO) 142, 145–8, 225 Sedo.com 109 Seed Fund 136 Seedcamp 160 Sega Game Gear 47 segmentation 220, 287, 290, 346–7 self-empowered squads/units 360 SEO see search-engine optimisation Sequoia Capital 76, 77–80, 158, 255, 321, 383, 385 Series A funding 234, 238–40, 238, 240, 241, 242–6, 255, 261, 262, 319–21, 385 Series B funding 238, 241, 253, 260, 319–21, 322, 384 Series C funding 384 Series Seed documents 168 Sesar, Steven 263 sex, smartphone use during 31 Shabtai, Ehud 43 shares 156, 166–8, 244 ‘sharing big’ 51–2, 52 Shinar, Amir 43 Shopzilla 263 Short Message Service (SMS) 21, 46–7 Silicon Valley 71–4, 77, 79, 99, 162, 168, 180, 184, 255, 340, 361, 411, 422 Sina 227 sitemaps 146–7 skills sets complementary 93 diverse 409–10 for scaling 335–6 Skok, David 283 Skype app 7, 46, 111, 200–1, 226, 357, 419 Sleep Cycle app 48 Smartling 297 smartwatches 7, 38–9 SMS see Short Message Service Snapchat app 6, 43, 46, 56–7, 88, 89, 223, 226, 416, 418 cofounders 104–5 design 131 funding 152–3, 307, 320 name 107 platform 117 staff 340 valuations 333 virality 280, 283 zero-user-acquisition cost 278 social magazines 42–3 see also Flipboard social media 48 driving downloads through 151 and getting your app found 147 mobile channels 271–3, 272 and user retention 288, 289 Sofa 363 SoftBank 227 software development agile 192–3, 299, 315, 357, 377 outsourcing 194–5 see also app development software as a service (SaaS) 67, 90, 208, 214, 233, 276–7 Somerset House 329–30, 371 Sony 21, 47 SoundCloud 358 source attribution 227–31 space tourism 13–14 speech-to-text technology 50 speed 20 Spiegel, Evan 43, 56–7, 104–5, 152–3 Spinvox 50 Splunk 90 Spotify app 47, 357–8 SQL 284 Square app 6, 41–2, 58–9, 87, 89, 333, 350 branding 112 Chief Executive Officer 412–13 cofounders 104 design 131, 363 funding 320–1 international growth 295, 299, 304–6 marketing 348 metrics 215–16 name 107, 110 product–market fit 183 revenue engine 276 scaling people 367–8 scaling product innovation 352–3 staff 340, 367–8 transparency 312 virality 282 Square Cash 353 Square Market 353 Square Register 350, 352–3 Square Wallet 348, 350, 353 Squareup.com 144 staff at billion-dollar app scale 395–405, 423 attracting the best 91 benefits 398–400 conferences 312–13 conflict 334, 378 employee agreements 244 employee legals 246–7 employee option pool 244 employee-feedback systems 378 firing 370, 378 hiring 308–9, 334–6, 411–12 induction programmes 370 investment in 360 mistakes 369–70, 411–12 and premises 370–2 profit per employee 402–4, 403 revenue per employee 400–2, 402 reviews 370 scaling people 364–72, 377–9 scrum masters 315, 359, 360 training programmes 370 see also cofounders; specific job roles; teams Staples 419 Starbucks 338, 348 startup weekends 98 startups, technology difficulties of building 63–80 failure 63–5, 73–4 identity 106–14 lean 115–22, 154 process 82–4, 85–105 secrets of success 66–9 step sensors 38 stock markets 420–1 straplines 111 strings files 296 Stripe 160 style 111 subscriptions 90 success, engines of 183–4, 423–4 SumUp 304 Supercell 28, 47, 97, 118–19, 318, 336, 397–8, 401, 403 see also Clash of Clans; Hay Day SurveyMonkey 397 surveys 206, 209 synapses 10 Systrom, Kevin 71–80 tablets 7 Tableau Software 90 Taleb, Nicholas Nassim 54 Tamir, Diana 51 Tap Tap Revolution (game) 42 Target 419 taxation 164 taxi hailing apps see Hailo app TaxiLight 16 team builders 264 team building 188–91 teams 82, 174, 252, 390 complementary people 409–10 for five-hundred-million-dollar apps 326, 342–5, 357–63, 374, 386 growth 313–14, 326, 342–4 for hundred-million-dollar apps 258–61 located in one place 193–4 marketing 262–6, 342–4 marketing engineering 344–5 product development and engineering 357–63 ‘two-pizza’ 374 TechCrunch Disrupt 97, 99 technology conferences 97–8, 202, 312–13 Techstars 159, 160, 168 Tencent 307 Tencent QQ 226 term sheets 168, 169, 170, 243–4 testing 126–8, 177–8, 187–8, 192–3, 199–201 beta 201–4 channels 224–7 text messaging 21 unlimited packages 42 see also Short Message Service ‘thinking big’ 40–59, 82, 85 big problem solutions 41–3 disruptive ideas 53–9 human universals 44–5 sharing big 51–2, 52 smartphones uses 45–50 Thoughtworks 196 time, spent checking smartphones 25–6, 26, 45–50 Tito, Dennis 13 tone of voice 111 top-down approaches 311 traction 233, 252 traffic information apps 43 traffic trackers 146 translation 296–7 transparency 311–12, 412–13 Trilogy 13 Tumblr 110, 226, 399, 418 Twitter 41, 48, 54, 72, 226, 394 acquisitions 418 and application programming interface 36 and Bootstrap 145 and business identity 114 delivering delight 206 and e-commerce decisions 272 and FreeMyApps.com 271 funding 419, 421 and getting your app found 147 initial public offering 421 and Instagram 51, 76–7, 79–80 name 110 and virality 281 ‘two-pizza’ teams 374 Uber 6, 36, 87, 89, 333, 350 and attribution for referrals 231 design 131 funding 320, 384, 422 international growth 295, 299–302 name 107, 110 revenue engine 276 revenue per employee 401 scaling product innovation 355–6 staff 339, 399 user notifications 292 virality 280 Under Armour 419 Union Square Ventures (USV) 3, 158, 242, 261, 262, 288, 321, 323, 377, 383 unique propositions 198 UnitedHealth Group 419 URLs 110 ‘user experience’ (UX) experts 190 user journeys 127–8, 213–14 user notifications 291–4 user stories 193 users 83, 175, 252, 327, 390 activation 136, 137, 139, 153–4, 211–12, 213 annual revenue per user (ARPU) 215, 219, 232, 236 communication with 208–9 definition 137 emotional response of 223–4 fanatical 294 finding apps 140–8 lifetime value (LTV) 184, 215, 219, 220–1, 232, 275–7, 279, 291 metrics 136–9 net-adding of 206 ratings plus comments 204–5 referrals 137, 138, 139, 153, 154, 211–12, 213, 230–1 target 83, 115, 127 wants 180–97 see also acquisition (of users); retention (of users) Usertesting.com 200–1 USV see Union Square Ventures valuations 83, 161–3, 175, 237–8, 238, 253, 318, 319, 322, 327, 333, 391 venture capital 72, 75, 156–8, 165–6, 235–49, 261–2, 383–5, 385, 418–19 Viber app 6, 46, 1341 video calls 46, 47 viral coefficient 282–4 ‘viral’ growth 225, 278, 279–84 Communication virality 281 and cycle time 283–4 incentivised virality 280–1 inherent virality 280 measurement 282–4 social-network virality 281 word-of-mouth virality 281–2 virtual reality 39 vision 261, 393–4, 408–9, 414, 415 voice calls 46–7 voice-over-Internet protocol (VOIP) 46 voicemail 50 Wall Street Journal 43, 55 warranties 246 Waze app 6, 43, 97 acquisition 415–16 design 131 name 107 zero-user-acquisition cost 278 web browsing 49 Web Summit 97 websites 113–14, 144–8 WebTranslateIt (WTI) 297 WeChat app 46, 226, 306 Weibo 48 Weiner, Jeff 408–9 Wellington Partners 4 Weskamp, Marcos 207 Westergren, Tim 410 WhatsApp 6, 42, 46, 54–6, 87, 90, 226, 394 acquisition 42, 54–6, 416, 416–17, 417 cofounders 96 design 131, 144 funding 154, 320–1 platform 117–18 valuations 333 virality 280 White, Emily 340 Williams, Evan 41, 65 Williams, Rich 344 Wilson, Fred 110, 242, 288, 323, 377 Windows (Microsoft) 20–1, 22, 24, 24 Winklevoss twins 105 wireframes 127–8 Woolley, Caspar 15–16, 95, 124, 338 WooMe.com 14, 87–8, 101–2, 263 Workday 90 world population 9–10 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 313 wowing people 8–9 WTI see WebTranslateIt Xiaomi 306 Y Combinator 159–60, 184–5, 211, 407, 410–11 Yahoo!

pages: 444 words: 124,631

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay by Jonathan Shapiro, James Eyers

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple Newton, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, book value, British Empire, clockwatching, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial deregulation, George Floyd, greed is good, growth hacking, index fund, Jones Act, Kickstarter, late fees, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, managed futures, Max Levchin, meme stock, Mount Scopus, Network effects, new economy, passive investing, payday loans, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Rainbow capitalism, regulatory arbitrage, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, short squeeze, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, tech bro, technology bubble, the payments system, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

After running global customer acquisition at eBay, he joined PayPal in 2004, which eBay had acquired two years earlier, leading product, sales, marketing and technology. He joined Matrix in 2008, which had a 40-year history in the Valley and was an early investor in Apple. As part of the deal, an employee share-option plan was set up with the intention of luring Silicon Valley’s best and brightest to the Afterpay cause. Engineers, sales whizzes and growth hackers would receive options to buy shares in Afterpay’s US business at low prices, and cash them in later at an enormous profit. If the US business was a success, they too could end up owning up to 10 per cent of the entire Afterpay Group in 2023, when a conversion date was set. Although the new structure was slightly complicated, the headline was that Afterpay was heading to the United States—and it had the smarts and capital to make success happen.

…

There was an abundance of private capital, and the venture capitalists had mastered the art of the ‘up-round’, in which backers can get rich and get out long before the IPO. And the IPO had nothing to do with raising funds to grow, but to create a ‘liquidity event’ so staff could access the shares they were promised and sell them to new shareholders to realise some profit. For Afterpay to go public so early meant the growth-hacking venture funds had deemed the business unworthy of their moonshot money, and had allowed it to pass through to the uneducated masses. And the measures of success had changed. A company’s prospects were no longer its profit potential, or even (in some cases) its ability to generate sales. This was the age of the opportunity.

pages: 94 words: 26,453

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

…And that inexplicable thing is something uniquely human, something that no other animal does, that no machine can do, that provides joy and fulfillment and cannot be routinised, replicated and 3D-printed – it is simply to be creative. Being futureproof is about creativity in the broadest sense. The sense that recognises the daring, the flights of imagination realised by chemists, builders, business owners, chefs, growth hackers and teachers can be creative. It’s what comes from wanting to make a difference, to make a connection, to innovate and add value by bringing the best of yourself to bear upon the world. It’s not restricted to schools of art, posh music or thick-rimmed black glasses. “A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting,” Abraham Maslow once said, as he made the point that it is not any specific discipline that determines creativity but how you apply yourself to the task.

pages: 199 words: 43,653

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Airbnb, AltaVista, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark pattern, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, framing effect, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, invention of the telephone, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, lock screen, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, the new new thing, Toyota Production System, Y Combinator

What of the people, then, who make these manipulative experiences? After all, the corporations that unleash these habit-forming, at times downright addictive technologies are made up of human beings with a moral sense of right and wrong. They too have families and kids who are susceptible to manipulation. What shared responsibilities do we so-called growth hackers and behavior designers have to our users, to future generations, and to ourselves? With the increasing pervasiveness and persuasiveness of personal technology, some industry insiders have proposed creating an ethical code of conduct.6 Others believe differently: Chris Nodder, author of the book Evil by Design, writes, “It’s OK to deceive people if it’s in their best interests, or if they’ve given implicit consent to be deceived as part of a persuasive strategy.”7 I offer the Manipulation Matrix, a simple decision-support tool entrepreneurs, employees, and investors can use long before product is shipped or code is written.

pages: 177 words: 54,421

Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, delayed gratification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Paul Graham, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, side project, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Upton Sinclair

Reading this inspiring book brought me back to the humility and work ethic it took to win the Olympics.” —CHANDRA CRAWFORD, Olympic Gold Medalist “What a valuable book for those in positions of authority! It has made me a better judge.” —THE HONORABLE FREDERIC BLOCK, U.S. District Judge and author of Disrobed ALSO BY RYAN HOLIDAY Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2016 by Ryan Holiday Penguin supports copyright.

pages: 244 words: 73,700

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

The twelve-day New Age boot camp was promised to offer one hundred guests exclusive access to Massaro’s most profound teachings. By then, “cult leader” accusations had already started trickling onto the web. The day before the retreat, a Sedona-based reporter named Be Scofield published an incriminating exposé characterizing Massaro as a “tech bro guru” using growth-hacker marketing to build a quack spiritual consortium: endangering followers’ bodies with ridiculous health advice (like living on nothing but grape juice for weeks—Massaro called this “dry fasting”), manipulating them into cutting off friends and family (“Fuck your relationships. They mean nothing,” he’d say), and trusting him as an all-knowing deity.

pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

The room hadn’t settled yet, and whoever pitched first would need to shout over the mingling crowd. And I was oddly nervous. First into the maw was a timid young Android developer pitching an app called Visa Doctor. The concept was, uh, unclear. “I will need a back-end developer, designer, and growth hacker. Together we can build mumble mumble mumble,” he concluded. Everyone applauded. “Yay,” the woman in line behind me said. The next idea was a service whereby prospective U.S. citizens could upload videos of themselves, which “verified citizens” could then watch and rate in the manner of stupid pet tricks on YouTube or prospective Tinder dates.

pages: 284 words: 92,688

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

But it remains online, because, as one manager tells me, if they take it down that might hurt Ashley’s feelings. Six months later, Ashley gets a promotion. These are the bozos. They are graspers and self-promoters, shameless resume padders, people who describe themselves as “product marketing professionals,” “growth hackers,” “creative rockstar interns,” and “public speakers.” They create websites to build their “personal brands,” with huge photos of themselves and lists of their accomplishments. They have a Toastmasters club, where they take turns giving presentations and sharing tips on the art of making PowerPoint slide decks.

pages: 302 words: 73,581

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary

3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, fake it until you make it, frictionless, game design, gamification, growth hacking, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, search costs, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, software as a service, software is eating the world, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, TaskRabbit, the long tail, the payments system, too big to fail, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Wave and Pay

The importance of the right business architecture for achieving platform scale is explained in detail in Section 2. Startups may often implement tactical “growth hacks” without understanding the real drivers of platform scale. This is ineffective in achieving sustainable scale and does not create the conditions by which the platform can seemingly scale of its own accord. Sustainable platform scale depends on the platform’s ability to foster activity in an ecosystem of producers and consumers, and it is achieved only through the right business design and architectural decisions, not through superficial “growth hacks.” The preceding chapters explained how the repeated participation of producers and consumers leads to platform scale.

…

Data-rich environments help to create strong filters and implement behavior design. In particular, network effects and minimal marginal costs of production are drivers that are unique to platforms. The best platforms implement all of the above drivers into their business architecture. Platform scale is achieved not through marketing initiatives and growth hacks but through a series of architectural considerations while designing the platform that optimize the platform for high participation by producers and consumers. The drivers of platform scale must be architected into the platform. The section that follows lays out a detailed framework for architecting toward platform scale.

…

This isn’t merely an issue of scaling the ability to generate and fulfill demand. Achieving platform scale requires the ability to scale value creation to scale value exchange – the ability to scale production and consumption simultaneously – and to repeat the two so that each reinforces the other. Hence, a superficial understanding of growth hacks and viral loops isn’t sufficient while building platforms. Subsequent sections may address some of these tactical issues, but achieving platform scale requires a deep understanding of the fundamental business design and architecture principles that help achieve scale in platforms. The quest for platform scale starts with understanding the design principles that enable value creation through ecosystem interactions.

pages: 387 words: 106,753

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

A startup is ready to scale: Marc Andreessen coined the term “product-market fit” in “Part 4: The Only Thing That Matters,” The Pmarca Guide to Startups blog, June 25, 2007. See also Andrew Chen, “When Has a Consumer Startup Hit Product-Market Fit?” @andrewchen blog; Sean Ellis, “Using Product/Market Fit to Drive Sustainable Growth,” Medium: Growth Hackers, Apr. 5, 2019; and Brian Balfour, “The Neverending Road to Product-Market Fit,” Brian Balfour blog, Dec. 11, 2013. Long-term profitability: See citations for LTV/CAC calculations in Ch. 2. Businesses with high fixed expenses: The target 3.0 ratio is referenced in, among many other sources, Jared Sleeper, “Why Early-Stage Startups Should Wait to Calculate LTV: CAC, and How They Should Use It When They Do,” for Entrepreneurs blog.

pages: 401 words: 112,784

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump by Tom Clark, Anthony Heath

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, Greenspan put, growth hacking, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, income inequality, interest rate swap, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unconventional monetary instruments, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

(i), (ii) Gallup polls (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Galton, Francis (i) GDP (gross domestic product) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Geithner, Tim (i) gender divide (i) General Social Survey (GSS) (i), (ii), (iii) generational divide (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Gen X (i), (ii), (iii) Gen Y (i) Germany employment protection (i), (ii) human unhappiness (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) inequality (i) social networks (i), (ii), (iii) social security (i), (ii) unemployment (i) girls, employment of (i) graduates (i), (ii), (iii) The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck) (i) Great Depression change in GDP (i), (ii) crime rates (i) death rates (i) Europe (i) and Great Recession (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) growth and national income (i) human unhappiness (i), (ii), (iii) hysteresis (i) lynchings (i) polarised public opinion (i), (ii) public policy (i) social mood (i) social networks (i), (ii), (iii) social security (i), (ii), (iii) Steinbeck on (i) unemployment (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) ‘Great Gatsby Curve’ (i) Great Hanshin earthquake (i) Great Recession change in GDP (i), (ii) economic gap (i) and Great Depression (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) growth and national income (i), (ii) human unhappiness (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) long shadow of class action (i) future generations (i) overview (i) unemployment (i) young people (i) low-grade jobs (i), (ii) polarised public opinion (i), (ii), (iii) post-recession agenda (i) Cameron conundrum (i) future policy (i) polarisation (i) public policy (i), (ii) social mood (i) social networks (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) social security (i) start of (i) unemployment (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) uneven impact (i) Greece (i), (ii), (iii) Greenberg Quinlan Rosner (i), (ii) Greenspan, Alan (i) Gregg, Paul (i) growth see economic growth Hacker, Jacob (i) Hansard (i) Hansard Society (i) happiness (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii) Happiness (Layard) (i) ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ song (i) hardship (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) Hatton, Timothy (i), (ii) health (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) healthcare (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) ‘hedonic treadmill’ (i) helping (informal volunteering) (i), (ii), (iii) Help to Buy (i) heritability of unemployment (i) Heritage Foundation (i), (ii) Hills, Sir John (i) Hispanic community (i), (ii) home ownership (i), (ii) Hoover, Herbert (i), (ii), (iii) household incomes (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) household leverage (i) housing costs (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) home ownership (i), (ii) housing benefit (i) poverty (i) social housing (i) wealth reduction (i) human unhappiness (i) family life (i) overview (i) public policy (i) suicide (i) unemployment (i) well-being data (i) working population (i) hysteresis (i), (ii) identity (i), (ii) immigration (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) incapacity benefit (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) income (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) income distribution (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii) income support (i), (ii) inequality (i) causes (i) economic gap (i) income distribution (i), (ii) job insecurity (i) life satisfaction (i) polarised public opinion (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) post-recession agenda (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) poverty (i) public policy (i), (ii) social mobility (i), (ii), (iii) social security (i) unemployment (i) inflation (i), (ii), (iii) informal volunteering (helping) (i), (ii), (iii) insecurity austerity (i) class divide (i) human unhappiness (i), (ii), (iii) job insecurity (i) pay gap (i) polarised public opinion (i) post-recession agenda (i), (ii), (iii) social networks (i), (ii) unemployment (i) Institute for Employment Research (i) Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) intergenerational income (i) investment (i) Ipsos MORI (i), (ii) Ireland (i) isolation (i), (ii) Italy (i), (ii) Japan (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) Jarrow March (i) job insecurity see insecurity Jobseeker's Allowance (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) jobs growth (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Kahn, Lisa (i) Kan, Naoto (i) Kantar (i) Keynes, John Maynard (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) King, Mervyn (i) Kobe (i) Komarovsky, Mirra (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x) Krueger, Alan (i), (ii) Krugman, Paul (i) Labour Force Survey (i) labour market (i), (ii) labour productivity (i), (ii), (iii) ladder of opportunity (i) Layard, Richard (i) Lehman Brothers (i), (ii) Leunig, Tim (i) Lewis, Michael (i), (ii) life expectancy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) life satisfaction (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Lilley, Peter (i) living standards (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) Li, Yaojun (i) loans (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) London (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) lone parents (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) long-term unemployment (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) low-grade jobs (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) Machin, Stephen (i) Macmillan, Harold (i) macroeconomic policy (i) male employment (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) male suicide (i) manufacturing (i), (ii), (iii) ‘marginalised’ workers (i) Marie Antoinette (i) Marienthal hardship (i), (ii), (iii) human unhappiness (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) neighbours informing on each other (i) social networks and groups (i) unemployment (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) marriage rates (i), (ii), (iii) medical bills (i) medical staff (i) mental health (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Mexico (i) middle class (i), (ii) migration (i) minimum wage (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) mobility (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) monetary policy (i), (ii) money-saving activities (i) money supply (i) money worries (i), (ii), (iii) mortality rates (i), (ii) motivation (i) National Child Development Survey (NCDS) (i), (ii) National Conference on Citizenship (i) National Government (i) National Housing Federation (i) national income (i), (ii), (iii) National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (i) necessities (i), (ii) NEETs (not in education, employment or training) (i) neighbourliness (i), (ii), (iii) neoliberalism (i) net worth (i) New Deal (i), (ii) New Labour (i), (ii) New Right (i), (ii) New York Times (i) New Zealand (i) Nixon, Richard (i) Northern Rock (i) North–South divide (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Obama, Barack (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii) Occupy (i) OECD see Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development old age (i), (ii), (iii) O'Loughlan, Joel (i), (ii) optimism (i), (ii), (iii) Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) Orwell, George (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Osborne, George (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii) Packer, George (i) Pakistani community (i) parental income (i), (ii), (iii) parenting (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) parent–teacher associations (PTAs) (i), (ii), (iii) participation careers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) part-time work (i), (ii) path dependency (i) pay squeeze (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix) Peck, Don (i) pensions (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) People's Budget (1909) (i) Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (i) Pew Center (i), (ii), (iii) Philip, Prince (i) Philpott, Mick (i) The Pinch (Willetts) (i) polarised public opinion (i) desired level of inequality (i) divided communities (i) economic divide (i) genetic discrimination in healthcare (i) post-recession agenda (i) social security (i), (ii) solidarity (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) unemployment (i) policy see public policy postal deliveries (i) poverty absolute poverty (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) debt (i) health (i) housing costs (i), (ii) income distribution (i) losing face (i), (ii) low-grade jobs (i), (ii) post-recession agenda (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) public policy (i), (ii) relative poverty (i), (ii) social security (i), (ii) UK (i), (ii), (iii) unemployment (i), (ii) uneven impact of recessions (i) US (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) working population (i), (ii) poverty pay (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) pregnancy (i), (ii) Prescott, John (i) Priestley, J.B.

pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

Viguerie and his admirers in Washington political circles rehashed the incident for decades as an example of conservative pluck—in fact, Dinesh D’Souza was said to have pulled off a similar caper at the Dartmouth Review—but of course any Silicon Valley entrepreneur would now recognize the tactics by a different name: growth hacking. Today, the use of unsustainable or ethically dubious tricks to get a startup off the ground is widely accepted—even celebrated in some circles of tech—and has been widely credited to the growth hacks that Thiel and his peers developed at PayPal. But at the time, Thiel’s competitors complained about his company’s tactics. PayPal was spending money recklessly, allowing transactions to pass through its system that would never have passed muster at a normal bank, and signing up customers without following many of the basic rules.

…

* * * — even so, in late 2000, Thiel wasn’t thinking about moving fast and breaking things. The tech crash was well underway, and he was thinking about surviving. If Thiel wanted to avoid the fate of companies like Pets.com, he desperately needed to reduce PayPal’s losses, which meant dealing with fraud. Criminals had begun to notice that the company’s growth hacks—one of which was its decision not to verify users’ identities when they opened an account—had made it an ideal place to launder money stolen from victims of identity theft. They would get their hands on a batch of stolen credit card numbers, then use a software bot to open PayPal accounts for each one.

…

This in the end was how most of Silicon Valley processed Thiel’s support of a reactionary reality television star: cynically. They chose to ignore his proximity to the alt-right and the ways the white supremacist threads of Trumpism fit with Thiel’s own feelings toward immigrants. These were perhaps the necessary moral compromises made by any real disrupter—and no different from the growth hacking at PayPal, or the privacy violations at Facebook, or the lies that Thiel and his peers had told throughout their careers to hasten the advent of the future. “It almost doesn’t matter if you agree with it or not, he was right,” said former Thiel Fellow Austin Russell, now the CEO of Luminar, which makes sensors for self-driving cars.

pages: 391 words: 71,600

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

Another student improved so much he was moved to a higher-level reading class. Today, the functionality that began as a Hackathon project is now built into some of our most important products, including Word, Outlook, and the Edge browser. Now the annual growth hack has become a Microsoft tradition. Every year, employees—engineers, marketers, all professions—prepare in their home countries for the OneWeek growth hack like students preparing for a science fair, working in teams to hack problems they feel passionate about and then developing presentations designed to win votes from their colleagues. Gathered in tents named Hacknado and Codapalooza, they consume thousands of pounds of doughnuts, chicken, baby carrots, energy bars, coffee, and the occasional beer to fuel their creativity.

…

See also smartphones; and specific products mobility, 42, 43, 54, 58, 70, 73, 88, 108, 216, 225 Mojang, 106–8 Moore, Gordon, 161 Moore’s Law, 140, 161 motion-sensing, 145 Motorola, 72 Mount Rainier, 19 mouse, 142 movable type, 152 Mulally, Alan, 64 multiculturalism, 19 multinational corporations, role of, 12, 235–39 Mundie, Craig, 30, 163 Musk, Elon, 203 Muslims, 19 Myerson, Terry, 3, 82, 105, 109 Myhrvold, Nathan, 30 Nadella, Anu, 7–8, 14, 27, 30–33, 41, 86, 92–93, 114 Nadella, father, 16–18, 20–21, 36, 56 Nadella, mother, 16–18, 20, 22, 86, 114, 181 nano-machines, 228 Nanyuki, Kenya, 99 Napoleonic Wars, 188 Narayen, Shantanu, 20, 136 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 144, 146 National Football League (NFL), 10–11 National ICT for Development Policy (Malawi), 216 national security, 174–75, 228 National Security Agency (NSA), 172, 174–75, 181 Native Americans, 156 natural language, 151 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 16 Nepal, 44 Netflix, 30, 126 Netherland (O’Neill), 18 .Net, 58 networking, 45, 49, 213 Neuborne, Burt, 190 New Yorker, 233 New York Times, 24, 80, 176, 195, 209 New Zealand, 78 Nichols, Jill Tracie, 66–67, 95 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 79, 147 Nilekani, Nandan, 222 Nokia, 64, 71–73, 106, 133 nondeterministic polynomial time (NP-complete), 25 North, Douglass, 184 North Dakota, 47 North Korea, 169–70 Novell, 26 Numoto, Takeshi, 59 Obama, Barack, 3, 81, 175–76, 211–12, 214 Obama, Michelle, 211 Oculus Rift, 125, 144 Office, 2, 47, 53–54, 59, 68, 73, 81, 85, 123–25, 137, 203 Office 365, 44–45, 61, 62, 85, 123–25, 152, 233 OneDrive, 121 O’Neill, Joseph, 18 One Microsoft, 102, 108 OneNote, 103, 121 OneWeek growth hack, 103–5 online services, 46–47, 51 open-source, 62, 102 opportunity, 79, 238 Oracle, 3, 26, 81 Orlando nightclub massacre, 117 Osmania University, 36 Outlook, 104, 121 Ozzie, Ray, 46, 52–53 Parthasarathy, Sanjay, 115–16 Partnership on AI, 200 partnerships, 76, 78, 120–38 passion, 92, 94, 100, 103, 242 Pataudi, Tiger, 37 pattern recognition, 54, 150, 152, 201 pay equity, 113–14 PC Revolution, 1, 28, 45, 71, 89, 108, 139, 213 decline of, 66, 70, 79 perception, 150, 152, 154 pharmacies, 218, 223 Phillips, James, 58 PhotoShop, 136 photosynthesis, 160 Pichai, Sundar, 131 pivot tables, 143 Pixar, 13 platform shifts, 76, 142 point-of-sales devices, 128–29 Poland, 223 policymaking, 82, 182, 189–92, 214, 223–28, 235 poverty, 99, 237 Power BI, 121 Powerpoint, 121 Practo, 222 predictive power, 42, 88 Predix platform, 127 printing press, 152 PRISM, 172–73 Prism Skylabs, 153 privacy, 170, 172–80, 186–91, 193–94, 202, 205, 224, 230, 238 probabilistic decision making, 54 productivity, 76, 79, 88, 124, 126, 226–28 product launches, 98–100 public health, 237 public-private partnerships, 225–26 public sector, 222, 228, 237–38 Qatar, 225 Qi Lu, Dr., 51–52 Qualcomm, 3, 80, 131–32 quantum computing, 11, 110, 140–42, 159–67, 209, 212, 239 qubits, 160–61, 164, 166–67 logical, 167 topological, 162, 166 radiation monitoring, 44 railroads, 215 Ramakrishnan, Raghu, 58–59 Ranji Trophy, 38, 40 Rashid, Rick, 30 Reagan, Ronald, 181 Real Madrid, 71 Red Dog, 52–53, 58 Red Hat, 125 Reform Government Surveillance alliance, 174 refugees, 218 regulatory systems, 130, 186–90, 215, 227–28 relational algebra, 26 respect, 135, 202 retailers, 128–29, 153 rice production, 44 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 12 Rise and Fall of American Growth (Gordon), 234 risk-taking, 111, 220 River Runs Through It, A (Maclean), 56 Roberts, John, 185–86 robotics, 13, 145, 149–50, 202–4, 208–9, 228, 231–32, 239 Rochester Institute of Technology, 146 Rocky movies, 44–45 Rogan, Seth, 169 Rolling Stones, 98 Rolls-Royce, 127 Romer, Paul, 229 root-cause analysis, 61 RSA-2048 encryption, 162 Rubinstein, Ira, 32–33 run times, 203 rural areas, connecting, 99 Russia, 172 Russinovich, Mark, 58 Rwanda Vision 2020, 216 safety, 153, 172, 176–80, 182, 185, 188, 194, 228 sales conference, 86–95, 100, 118 Salesforce, 121 Samsung, 132–34 San Bernardino attacks, 177, 179, 189 Sanders, Bernie, 230 Sanskrit, 16, 181 Saudi Arabia, 225 scale, 50, 161 Schiller, Phil, 124 Schmidt, Eric, 26 Scott, Kevin, 82 search and seizure, 185–86 Search Checkpoint #1, 51 search engines, 46–52.

pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

These “reply girls” swamped the site that summer. Fifteen-year-old boys could not not click; YouTube’s algorithmic system could not not promote. Most viewers who clicked immediately left the video, yet YouTube counted a view as soon as a video began. (In some ways, these women behaved like the savvy “growth hackers” celebrated across Silicon Valley, but unlike coders these women on YouTube received death threats for their persistence.) YouTube wrote code specifically to stymie these reply girls. Still the phenomenon contributed to a broader sense internally that rewarding videos for clicks was not working.

pages: 237 words: 74,109

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

I returned to my desk and didn’t think about it again—until the following afternoon, when the CTO messaged me in the company chat room and told me he had built it. * * * The startup hosted a monthly salon for the data curious, a catered happy hour with presentations from product managers and engineers, sourced from our customer list, about how to use analytics to run A/B tests, or growth-hack, or monitor user flows. Though I had loved going to publishing parties, where chatty editorial assistants quickly eschewed professional networking to gossip and gripe, nibble on stale pretzels and drugstore holiday cookies, and drink too much cheap wine—which always gave these evenings a coursing undercurrent of peculiar sexual energy—I had not been to tech networking events in either New York or San Francisco.

…

He was constantly changing his job title on a website where people voluntarily posted their own résumés, giving himself promotions to positions that did not exist. He told us, with some reluctance, that he was in his early forties. Age discrimination was crazy in this industry, he said. Local cosmetic surgeons were making a mint. The influencer brought a scooter into the office and rolled around barking into a wireless headset about growth hacking: value prop, first-mover advantage, proactive technology, parallelization. Leading-edge solutions. Holy grail. It was garbage language to my ears, but customers loved him. I couldn’t believe that it worked. One afternoon, he rolled up to my desk. “I love dating Jewish women,” he said. “You’re so sensual.”

…

We were helping marketing managers A/B test subject-line copy to increase click-throughs from mass emails; helping developers at e-commerce platforms make it harder for users to abandon shopping carts; helping designers tighten the endorphin feedback loop. Helping people make better decisions, we had always said. Helping people test their assumptions. Answer tough questions. Eliminate bias. Develop best-of-breed message targeting. Increase conversions. Improve key business metrics. Measure user-adoption strategy. Prioritize impact. Drive ROI. Growth-hack. What gets measured gets managed, I sometimes told customers, quoting a management guru whose writing I had never read. The endgame was the same for everyone: Growth at any cost. Scale above all. Disrupt, then dominate. At the end of the idea: A world improved by companies improved by data. A world of actionable metrics, in which developers would never stop optimizing and users would never stop looking at their screens.

pages: 290 words: 87,549

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

Many of the company’s new listings and users were coming from PR and word of mouth, as well as from the frequent trips Gebbia and Chesky would take around big conventions to try to “turn on” new markets with events, host meet-ups, and other guerilla-marketing tactics. But they had another secret weapon in Blecharczyk, who was making clever use of new tools and technologies available to implement several “growth hacks.” He’d created technology to interface with Google’s AdWords advertising service, for example, to allow Airbnb to more efficiently target potential users in specific cities. He also cooked up a clever tool by building a back door into Craigslist. In 2009, Craigslist was one of the few sites that had massive scale—it had amassed tens of millions of users—yet it was easily penetrable by marketers and clever entrepreneurs looking to tap in.

…

(The company says leveraging Craigslist was common back in those days but it wasn’t aware the contractors were engaging in the spamming, which didn’t result in meaningful business, and that when they found out they shut it down.) And, of course, when they went to South by Southwest back in 2008, they had lured their first host, Tiendung Le, off of Craigslist to host Chesky on AirBed & Breakfast instead. The growth hacks became less meaningful over time, as real momentum grew. But it’s hard to overestimate the significance of the ability to find these “free ways to grow,” as Blecharczyk calls them; had the founders not implemented them, the company might not have mushroomed the way it did. So how, exactly, does Airbnb work?

…

See housing shortage AirBed & Breakfast cereal gimmick, 20–23 challenges faced by, 27 investors, 17–18 lite version, 12–14 media and press coverage, 19–20 original idea, 8–9 redefining of, 28 Y Combinator and, 23–29 Airbnb advantages, xiii company building, 35–38 competition (see competitors) consumer support for, 133–37, 146–47 contact phone number, 95–96 core values, 36, 186–87 diversity in, 187–88 forces behind, 134 home-sharing history, xvi–xvii initial public offering, 196–202 investors in, 30–32 love/hate reaction to, 10, 135–36, 203–4 naming of, 28 obstacles faced by, xiv–xv payment system for, 14 platform, 43–47, 125 pop culture and, xv–xvi product evolution, 59–60 safety, 50–55 scale of, 126–27 super-users, 67–69 user experience, 41–47 valuation of, xii, 31, 47, 161 workspace, 183–84 Airbnb Friendly Building Program, 130 “Airbnb law,” 128 Airbnb Open, x–xi, 69, 74, 76–78, 133, 190–91 Airdna, 111, 116, 126, 131, 151 Airizu, 49–50 AllThingsD (website), 47 Americans with Disabilities Act, 98, 144 Andreessen, Marc, 34, 47, 52, 54, 161, 168, 170, 173 Arlo, 156 Atkin, Douglas, 64, 66, 78–79, 111–12, 127, 184, 186–87 authenticity, of travel experience, 62–63, 66, 79, 116 B Badia, Evelyn, 73–74, 122 Barcelona, 126, 127 Bassini, Rachel, 81, 99 Bazin, Sébastien, 138, 154 bed-and-breakfasts, 158 Bélo, 64–65, 191 “belong anywhere” (mission), 64–67, 78–79, 117, 171, 172, 194, 205 Benioff, Marc, 165, 170 Benner, Katie, 65 Berlin, 126 Best Western, 152, 157, 159 Bezos, Jeff, 166, 196, 201 Blecharczyk, Nathan on cereal gimmick, 21 early skepticism of, 12, 15–16, 25 family background, 11 fiancée, 31 growth hacks, 38–41 on hotel vs. Airbnb market, 140 leadership of, xviii, 178–82 payment system, 42–43 site crashes, 45–46 South by Southwest launch, 12–14 Y Combinator and, 23–29 “bleisure,” 146 Boatbound, 56 Bolton–St. Johns, 105 Botton, Alain de, 77 Bowerman, Bill, 1 brand awareness, xii, 38, 40, 58–59, 198 Brannan Street, 170 Brown, Clayton, 75–76, 132 Brown-Philpot, Stacy, 171 Bryant, Kimberly, 187 Buffett, Warren, xvi, 166–67, 172, 209 Burch, Tory, 174 Bush, George W., 60 business travel, 145–47 C Campbell, Michael and Debbie, 68–69 Cap’n McCain’s, 21–23 Case, Steve, 174 castles, xii, 59–60, 61 Chafkin, Max, 172–73 challenges, 80–104 deaths and, 96–97 EJ incident, 50–55, 80, 93 fines and violations, 108–9 key exchange, 75–76 Paris Airbnb Open, 77–78 parties, 81–90 sexual assault incident, 90–93 Chan, Robert “Toshi,” 111 Chesky, Allison, 169 Chesky, Brian on accidents, 97 at Airbnb Open, 76, 77 background of, 3–4, 11, 42–43, 169 on corporate rentals, 115, 116–17 on culture, 182–83 on EJ safety crisis, 53–55 on future directions, 193–94, 197–98 on future regulations, 136 on home sharing, 130 hospitality and, 70–72 on hosts and brand, 117 on hotels, 140, 159 on law enforcement, 91–92 Los Angeles move, 4–5 on mission of Airbnb, 172 on NYC and politics, 105, 113, 133 praise for, 161–62 on public companies, 201 on racism, 101, 102, 103 on rebranding, 64–65, 78–79 at Rhode Island School of Design, 1–4, 169 on safety, 48 San Francisco move, 6–7 strengths, 167–69 on Wimdu competition, 49–50 Y Combinator and, 23–29 Chesky, Deb and Bob, 3–4, 23, 32, 166, 168–69, 174, 208–9 Chicago, short-term rentals, 125 Choice Hotels, 153 Cianci, Buddy, 2 City Hosts, 191 Civil Rights Act, 101, 103 Clampet, Jason, 93, 141, 148–49 Clinton, Bill, 124 Clooney, George and Amal, 209 cloud computing, 45 Clouse, Dave and Lynn, 149–50 Collins, Jim, 181 commercial listings, 110–13, 114, 115 Common, 156 “community compact,” 114 competitors, xi–xii, xvii Couchsurfing.com, 13, 14, 41, 46 Craigslist (see Craigslist) HomeAway (see HomeAway) tourism, 112–13, 191–96 VRBO.com, xi, xvii, 41, 87, 106, 149–50 Wimdu (Samwer brothers), 48–50 See also hotels compression pricing, 144 Conair internship, 1–3 Concur, 145 conferences Airbnb and corporate travel, 145–46 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, 166–67 Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech, 103, 131, 187 International Council of Societies of Industrial Design/Industrial Designers Society of America, ix, 1, 7–10 South by Southwest, 12–14, 39 Conley, Chip on business travelers, 146 on Chesky, 171 on company goals, 117, 172 on home-sharing history, 149 on hospitality industry, 73, 76–77, 139–40, 147 in joining Airbnb, 70–72 Corden, James, 191 core values, 36, 186–87, 219 Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, 70, 166 Couchsurfing.com, xi, 13, 14, 41, 46 Craigslist, 38–39, 41, 51, 82, 100, 108, 149, 179 crisis management, 48–50, 51–54, 77–78, 90–93 CritBuns, 5–6, 11, 209 Crittenden, Quirtina, 100–101 Crossing the Chasm (Moore), 181 Cuba, 161–62, 185–86 Culting of Brands, The (Atkin), 64 culture, of company, 35–38, 165, 174–75, 182–88 Cuomo, Andrew, 106–7, 108, 121, 126 Curtis, Mike, 77, 181, 184, 185 customer-service platform, 44, 52–54, 56, 86–90, 94 D Dandapani, Vijay, 115, 122 de Blasio, Bill, 113, 119 Democratic National Convention (Denver), 15, 18–20 Diller, Barry, 142 Dimon, Jamie, x discrimination controversy, xv, 99–104, 171 Disney, Walt, 166, 167, 197 diversity, 187–88 DogVacay, 56 Donahoe, John, 71, 165, 168 Dorsey, Jack, 165 Drybar, 152 Dubost, Lisa, 171 dukana, 56 E Ecolect.net, 11 Edition, 148, 152 Eisenhower, Dwight, 139 EJ incident, 50–55, 80, 93 emergency reaction policy, 91 “entrepreneur,” as term, 11 European market, 48–50 Everbooked, 75 Expedia, 142, 148, 154, 198 Experiences, 192 F Federal Highway Act, 139 fee structure, 39–40 Ferriss, Tim, 93 fines and violations, 108–9, 117, 129, 134 Firestarter, 127 Five Dysfunctions of a Team, The (Lencioni), 181 Flatbook, 156 FlipKey, 146 Friedman, Tom, 173 future directions, 130–31, 145–47, 177–79, 188–210 G Gandhi, 160, 227 Gates, Bill and Melinda, 209 Gatto, Chris, 132 Gebbia, Joe background of, 42–43 culture, of company, 185 hometown, 12 leadership of, xviii, 174–79 prototyping/design studio, 177–79 refugee crisis, 209 at Rhode Island School of Design, 1–3 San Francisco, ix, 5 TED talk, 172 Y Combinator and, 23–29 Gilbert, Elizabeth, 191 Giving Pledge, 209 Glassdoor survey, 185, 186 GLō, 152 Golden, Jonathan, 184 golf party incident, 82–90 Gonzales, Emily, 89, 90 Good to Great (Collins), 181 Google, 145, 188, 195, 197 Google AdWords, 38, 179 Gore, Al, 60, 124 Gothamist, 111 Graham, Paul on Chesky, 171–72 interview with, 23–24 mentoring of Airbnb founders, 26–27, 28–29, 164, 170–71 on Wimdu competition, 49–50 Y Combinator and, 15, 25–26, 59 Grandy, Nick, 36 Grazer, Brian, 191 Grove, Andy, 166 growth, xii–xiii, 38–41, 46–47, 56, 144, 162, 198–99 guest arrivals August 2009, 35 average age of, 66 fee structure, 39–40 growth of, xii, 41, 58–59, 180 number of, 26–27, 199 as term, ix–x Guesty, 75 Gupta, Prerna, 67–68 H Hantman, David, 109 Hartz, Kevin, 31 Hempel, Jessi, 201, 203–4 Hewlett, Bill, 1 High Output Management (Grove), 166 Hilton, Conrad, 139 Hilton hotels, 141–42, 152, 167 hiring, 25, 35–38, 49–50, 55, 56–57 Hoffman, Reid as adviser, 49–50, 164, 197 “Blitzscaling” course, 188 on Chesky, 167–68 on growth, 56, 199 as investor, 46–47 NYC politics, 121 on uniqueness, 62 Holder, Eric, 102, 171 Holiday Inn, origin, 138–39 home sharing, xvi–xvii, 125–26, 149 HomeAway, xvii, 41, 82, 106, 108, 133, 146, 150, 154, 198 HonorTab, 75 Hoplamazian, Mark, 152 Horowitz, Ben, 47, 52, 164, 171 hospitality, 70–73, 115, 117, 129–31, 139–45, 151–53, 165, 166 Host Assist platform, 76 Host Guarantee, 82, 86, 87, 88, 89, 94 hosts as asset and lobbyists, 111–12, 126–29 average age of, xii–xiii, 65 as career choice, 73–75 from Cuba, 185–86 data and behavior, 114–15 defined, x discrimination, 99–102 experiences offered by, 178 fee structure and earnings, 39–40, 73, 110, 112–13 growth challenges, 40–41, 180 hospitality and, 70–73, 117 initial public offering, 199–200 liability and legal issues, 97, 106, 109–10, 122, 128–29 matching with guests, 44–45 Verified ID, 95 See also Airbnb Open hotels vs.

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Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Josh Costine, “BranchOut Launches Talk.co to Expand from Networking into a WhatsApp for the Workplace,” TechCrunch, October 7, 2013, http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/07/talk-co/. 3. Teresa Torres, “Why the BranchOut Decline Isn’t Surprising,” Product Talk, June 7, 2012, http://www.producttalk.org/2012/06/why-the-branchout-decline-isnt-surpising/. 4. John Egan, “Anatomy of a Failed Growth Hack,” John Egan blog, December 6, 2012, http://jwegan.com/growth-hacking/autopsy-of-a-failed-growth-hack/. 5. Derek Sivers, “The Lean Startup—by Eric Ries,” Derek Sivers blog, October 23, 2011, https://sivers.org/book/LeanStartup. 6. Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz, Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2013). 7.

pages: 484 words: 114,613

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Frank Gehry, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Zipcar

Everyone with a blue checkmark, after realizing that their comments would be prominently displayed, had an incentive to comment more. The comment ranking helped brands, influencers, and Hollywood types fight their deprioritization by the main algorithm. Instagram commenting became marketing, or, in the vernacular of Silicon Valley engineers, “growth hacking.” The “hacking” didn’t end there. The most strategic Insta-famous weren’t just commenting on their friends’ posts, but on accounts that might make them seem more well-connected and relevant than they actually were. One influencer with a verified account, Sia Cooper, @diaryofafitmommyofficial, told Vogue she gained 80,000 followers in just a few weeks by lovingly commenting on Kardashian-Jenner posts, though she didn’t actually know the family: “I choose to comment on the highest followed accounts because this means my comment is more likely to be seen by many more users,” positioned at the top of the stack.

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., 118 Formspring, 40, 42 Formula One, 204 FOSes (friends of Sandberg), 101 Foster, David, 129 Foster, Erin, 129–30 Foursquare, 14, 15, 19, 28, 29, 55 Fox Interactive Media, 24 Fox News, 208 Francis, Pope, 195–96 free speech, 232–33 #fromwhereirun, 163 Froome, Chris, 148 FuckJerry, 239 Fulk, Ken, 185, 186 Furlan, Brittany, 110, 112 Fyre Festival scandal, 238–39 Gabriel (Brazilian IG user), xvi Game of Thrones (TV series), 64 Gant boutique, 95 Gates, Bill, 200 @gdax, 48 Gehry, Frank, 115 Gil, Elad, 48, 49 Gizmodo, 37, 207–8 Glass, Ira, 188–90 Glossier, 247–48 Gmail, 8–9, 24 Golden Globes, 127, 192 Gomez, Selena, 131, 230 as early IG user, 39 González Iñarrítu, Alejandro, 158 Google, 8–9, 56, 59, 202, 225, 234 Blogger acquired by, 6 early IG acquisition interest of, 28 Nest acquired by, 64 social network launched by, 108 Systrom at, 7, 8–9, 11, 23, 37, 62, 194 YouTube acquired by, 53, 59, 105 Google search, 155, 183 Gorgon, Cecilia, 247 Gowalla, 14, 15, 51, 53, 73 Grammy Awards, 36 Grande, Ariana, 134–35, 142, 218, 230 Great Recession of 2008–2009, 9, 35, 53 Grier, Nash, 110 Griswold, Ivan, 86 Groban, Josh, 129 growth hacking, 231 Guardian, 99, 166 Gucci, 195 Gulf of Mexico, BP oil spill in, 113 Gutierrez, Manny, 265 Hadid, Bella, 238 Hamilton, Lewis, 204 Hammam, Imaan, 156 Hansen, Scott (Tycho), 34–35 Happy Hippie Foundation, 160 Harris, Calvin, 218 Harvard University, 1 Harvey, Del (pseud.), 42 hashtags, xxi, 59, 140, 147, 154–55, 260, 262, 262, 270 Hasselblad camera, 22 Hatch, Orrin, 259 Hatching Twitter (Bilton), 14 Hathaway, Paige, 144–45, 153 Hensley, Dustin, 243 Hewlett-Packard, 2 Hilton, Paris, 136–37, 139 Hipstamatic, 21, 22, 76 Hochmuth, Gregor, 10, 11, 20–21, 47, 50–51, 52, 90 Hocke, Jean, 239–41 Holga camera, 5 Hollande, François, 186 Holliston, Mass., Systrom’s childhood in, 3–4 HomeGoods, 4 Honan, Mat, 37 Hong Kong, InstaMeets in, 168–69, 246 Horsley, Hunter, 176 House of Representatives, U.S., Zuckerberg’s testimony to, 258 see also Congress, U.S., Senate, U.S.

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Hsieh, Tony, 105 HTML5, 19 @hudabeauty, 247 Hudgens, Vanessa, 236 Hudson, Kate, 192 Hudson photo filter, 23 Huffine, Candice, 250 Huffington, Arianna, 171 Huffington Post, 154, 170 Hughes, Chris, 78 Hunch, 11 hyperlinks, xxi, 8, 80, 210 #iammorethan, 161 Iceland, 242 identity theft, 97 iFart app, 10 @ileosheng, 161 #imwithher, 208 Incredibles, The (film), 180 India, IG Stories and, 203 Indonesia, IG in, 226 influencer economy, xxi, 128–29, 170–71 influencers, 25, 36, 83, 127, 165, 166, 170, 184, 231, 237–38, 240–41, 265 branding and, 138–39, 167, 235–36; see also brand advertising, of IG users celebrity, 138–39, 172, 239 fake followers and, 173–75 IG analytics increasingly available to, 275–76 IG as, see @instagram IG’s comments ordering algorithm and, 230–31 IG’s feed order algorithm and, 197–98, 229–30 pods joined by, 246 teen digital-first, 171 Insta-bae (Instagrammable design movement), xviii “INSTAGIRLS, THE” (Vogue cover headline), 156, 167 @instagram, xxii, 102, 104, 141, 143, 160–61, 167, 169, 171, 203, 204, 210, 216, 241, 247 Instagram: advertising business of, 104, 118–21, 124, 151, 155, 163–65, 174, 175–76, 184, 225, 241, 277 algorithmic ordering of comments on, 230–32, 233, 251 algorithmic post order shift by, 197–98, 218, 229 ambiguous advertising on, 35–36 ambiguous content rules of, 143 analytics team at, 183, 226 Android app of, 50, 51 blocked from Twitter access, 84, 99 board of, 37, 56, 60, 62, 63 Boomerang and, 187, 190 bot detection algorithm of, 174 brand advertising on, see brand advertising brand of, 27, 41, 89, 94, 100, 104, 111, 119, 132, 160, 162, 164, 177, 209, 216, 217–18, 254 bullying on, 41, 135, 161, 163, 218–19, 271, 279 business model lacked by, 54, 75, 77, 100, 118, 124–25 business team of, 118 celebrities courted by, 128–29, 132–36, 139, 264; see also celebrity, celebrities as celebrity-making machine, xvii–xviii; see also influencers chronological order of posts on, 117, 196–97 communications team at, 154, 202, 222, 271 community team at, 80, 81, 103, 104, 140, 141, 155–56, 160, 166, 169, 170, 176, 203–4, 226, 234 community valued by, 34, 40, 72, 94, 95, 102, 108–9, 139, 147, 205, 271, 272, 274 content curated by, 25, 41, 43, 81, 103–4, 114, 140–41, 143, 151, 152, 161–62, 169, 170, 210, 235, 279; see also @instagram content moderation of, transitioned to FB, 97, 225, 249, 260 creativity, design, and experiences as focus of, xxi, 35, 66, 83, 91, 93, 100, 103, 108–9, 128, 139, 160, 167, 175, 180, 205, 264, 276 customer service lacked by, 32, 132, 230 daily habit strategy of, 13–14 direct messaging of, 123, 276 Dorsey’s early promotion of, 25–26 earliest incarnations of, see Burbn; Codename early investors in, 24, 26, 27, 37 events team at, 265 Explore page on, 170 fake news and, 225, 256 fakery detection algorithm of, 174 fashion industry and, 131–32, 145–47 FB infrastructure and resources available to, 96, 159, 162, 225, 249–50 FB infrastructure and resources denied to, 262, 268–69 as feel-good app, 154, 157, 171, 210, 217–18, 219–20 finsta accounts on, 182–83, 184, 243 first photo posted on, 21, 180 first users chosen carefully by, 25, 33, 34 founders of, see Krieger, Mike; Systrom, Kevin Fyre Festival scandal and, 238–39 growing resentment of FB at, 254, 262, 263, 274 growth rate of, 216 growth team of, 177–78, 269–70 hashtag tool on, xxi, 59, 140, 147, 154–55, 260, 262, 270 hyperlinks not allowed in, xxi, 80, 210 IGTV of, 252, 254–55, 257, 264–67, 270 illegal drug sales content on, 261–62, 270, 271, 278 independence of, at FB, 54, 63, 65, 67, 89, 96, 106, 118, 121, 124, 209, 222–23 integration of, at FB, 100–101, 114, 223 as internet’s utopia, 220, 225 Krieger’s resignation from, xxii, 272–75 link to, removed from FB, 228, 269 link to FB added on, 228, 257 live video on, 261 lockdown at, 269–70 logo of, xvi, 20, 34 mainstreaming of, 35, 47, 168, 169, 170, 173 media outreach of, 154–55 mission statement of, 102 as mobile-only app, 27, 89 mounting tensions between FB and, 262, 263, 274 in move out of FB headquarters, 204–5 naming of, 24 network effects of, 77–78 $1 billion revenue milestone reached by, 186 $1 billion valuation of, xx, 53, 54, 58, 85 1-billion-user milestone reached by, 264–65, 267, 280 operations team at, 180, 204 Paradigm Shift program of, 184, 186, 187, 190 partnerships team at, 160, 219, 230, 235 photo filters on, see filter apps, photo photo tagging on, 95 Pixel Cloud of, 190 politics and, 207–8 Popular page of, 81, 140, 144, 170 public policy team at, 160, 249 rebranded as “Instagram from Facebook,” 276 reciprocal follower problem at, 183–84 rectangular photo format added on, 176–77 research team at, 199 re-sharing not allowed on, 43, 44, 140, 157 sales team at, 165 seen as threat to FB, xvii, 38, 57, 77–78, 90, 95, 252–53 server meltdowns of, 26, 30, 32, 38–39, 51, 79–81 simplicity valued at, 27, 30, 65, 102–3, 125, 160, 178, 180, 199 Snapchat as threat to, 123, 178, 181, 184, 192–93, 201 sold by Systrom and Krieger to Facebook, see Facebook, Instagram acquired by South Park office of, 32, 44, 52, 79, 181, 193 spam on, 80, 226 square photo format of, 19, 31, 110, 147, 176 suggested user list of, 48, 81, 82, 103, 143, 153, 168 suicide content on, 41–42, 261, 277–78 Systrom as public face of, 33 Systrom’s resignation from, xxii, 272–75 teens team at, 161, 170 “terms of service” debacle at, 99–100 Third Thursday Teens series of, 182, 183 translated into other languages, 43, 97 travel influenced by, 169, 241, 242 troubling user content on, 80, 160–61, 260–61, 270 and Twitter’s efforts to buy, 25, 46, 48–49, 55–56, 86, 109 2010 launch of, 26–27, 31–32 underlying culture of, 248–49 user anonymity on, 41, 80, 163, 173, 218, 219, 260, 261 user guidelines of, 155 user types cultivated by, 153 verified accounts on, 132–33, 231, 232, 279 video launch of, 110–11, 118, 145 weekend hashtag project of, 104 well-being team at, 249, 260, 271, 275 worldwide impact of, xvi–xx Zuckerberg’s concern about cannibalization of FB by, 223, 226, 227–28, 257, 280 Zuckerberg as taking credit for success of, 266–67 “Instagrammable,” xix, 81, 166–67, 172–73, 254, 265–66 Instagrammable design movement, xviii, 168 Instagram Stories, 198–99, 201–4, 205, 207, 214, 226, 227, 245, 248, 250–51, 264 Instagram users, 197, 233 brand advertising by, see brand advertising, by IG users changing behavior of, in posting to IG, 80–81, 83, 169, 172, 233, 239–40, 243 as concerned over FB’s acquisition of IG, 54 feelings of inadequacy among, 275 growth hacking by, 231 IG’s analytics tools available to, 275 IG’s relationships with, 166 IG used as publisher by, 237 pods used by, 246 as pressured to post the best, 29, 114, 172, 173, 175, 178, 275 self promotion by, 233 as unofficial ambassadors for IG, 43–44 see also celebrity, celebrities; content, user; influencers Instagress, 175, 245–46 InstaMeets, 81, 102 organized by IG, 34–35, 39–40 organized by IG users, 43, 44, 48, 104, 143, 148, 167, 168, 246 instant messaging services, 12 Instazood, 175, 246 Intel, 2 internet, 9, 16, 31, 56, 65, 79–80, 108, 109, 115, 126, 136, 229, 233 early days of, 3–4 FB as largest network on, 78, 88, 163, 253, 255 first generation of, 5 IG as top pop culture destination on, 126, 195 Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and, 41–42 smartphones and, 10, 40 Web 2.0 and, 5 world population connected to, 124, 163, 234 Internet.org, 124 internet trolls, 219 investors, angel, 16, 17, 24 iPhones, 10, 30–31, 145 Burbn app for, 17 5S launch, 146 IG featured in launches of, 28 Krieger’s early apps for, 12 photo filters on, 147 photo technology of, 18, 152 square photo format on, 147, 176 Iribe, Brendan, 217, 253 iTunes, 137 Jackson Colaço, Nicky, 160, 207, 208, 219, 220, 225–26, 249 JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery, 244 James, LeBron, 131 Japan, IG users in, 30 Jarre, Jérôme, 112 Ja Rule, 239 JavaScript, 6 @jayzombie, 42 Jenner, Kendall, xix, 174, 186, 238–39 Jenner, Kris, xix–xx, 135, 137–38, 180 Jenner, Kylie, xix–xx, 161, 162–63, 174, 230, 245 as youngest self-made billionaire, xx Jobs, Steve, 65 Jolie, Angelina, 152 Jonas, Nick, 192 Jonas Brothers, 133 @JonBuscemi, 236 @jordandoww, 171 #jumpstagram, 104 Justice Department, U.S., 278 Kalanick, Travis, 23 Kaplan, Joel, 211 Kardashian, Khloé, xix Kardashian, Kourtney, xix Kardashian-Jenner family, 129, 230, 231, 264 IG as main branding tool of, 135, 137–38 Kardashian West, Kim, xix, 47, 135–36, 137–38, 139, 180, 218, 230, 244–45 Kattan, Huda, 247 Keeping Up with the Kardashians, xix, 135, 137, 218 Kelly, Drew, 81–82 Kendrick, Anna, 148 @kevinbrennermd, 244 Keys, Alicia, 203 Khan, Imran, 200–201 Kicksta, 246 #kindcomments, 250 King, Nate, 185, 186, 205, 206 Klip, 109 Kloss, Karlie, 156, 218 Knowles-Carter, Beyoncé, 230 Koum, Jan, 125, 256 Kramer, Julie, 232 Krieger, Mike, xvii, xxii, 37, 50–51, 55, 63, 69, 76, 105, 140, 219 Brazilian childhood of, 12 Cox and, 257 Crime Desk SF app of, 12, 32 as disillusioned with FB’s grow-at-all-costs culture, xvii in effort to preserve IG’s brand, 176, 209 at Golden Globe Awards, 192 IG posts by, 31 in increasing conflict with FB, 95–96, 214, 262–63, 271 leadership philosophy of, 18 at Meebo, 12 philanthropy of, 72 post-IG, 277 problem solving by, 18, 30–31, 32, 33, 38–39, 110 rectangular photo format and, 177 resignation of, from IG, xxii, 272–75 simplicity valued by, 18, 20, 21, 27, 102, 119, 191, 255 Snapchat Stories and, 188, 192–93 Systrom’s relationship with, 11–12, 13, 16–17, 33–34, 107, 254 Zuckerberg’s meeting with, 60 Zuckerberg’s relationship with, 252–53, 254–55, 256, 264 Kushner, Joshua, 45, 70, 218 Kutcher, Ashton, 44–46, 148, 172, 229 Systrom’s friendship with, 46, 133 Lady Gaga, 158, 192, 204 @ladyvenom, 142 Lafley, A.

pages: 286 words: 87,401

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

UNDERLYING PRINCIPLE #3: ADAPTATION, NOT OPTIMIZATION At a higher level of abstraction, successful scale-ups place more emphasis on adaptation than optimization. Rather than the giant assembly lines of Detroit automakers, which trace their origins to Henry Ford’s Model T, the current generation of Silicon Valley companies practice continuous improvement, whether through an emphasis on speed or the constant experiments and A/B testing of growth hacking. This emphasis makes sense in an environment where companies need to seek product/market fit for new and rapidly changing products and markets. Consider how Amazon expanded into new markets like AWS rather than simply honing its retail capabilities, or how Facebook has been able to adapt to the shift from a text-based social network accessed via desktop Web browsers to an image- and video-based social network accessed via smartphones (and soon, perhaps, VR).

…

I leveraged my reputation to secure a small investment, but I knew we needed to show significant progress in distribution before we could raise our next round. Since we didn’t have the capital to pay for traditional marketing, we implemented a number of techniques similar to what people today call “growth hacking” to get to one million users, which allowed us to raise money from Greylock. Our core distribution strategy was organic virality, much as it had been at PayPal. Our users would invite their contacts via e-mail because it helped them build their networks and keep track of their key connections.

pages: 361 words: 107,461

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Or you just want to spend less and be similarly effective in reaching your target consumers? This, it turns out, is what I could teach Procter & Gamble’s marketing team about storytelling: Telling your story is a more cost-effective way to take your advertising beyond usefulness and efficacy and efficiency as topics of conversation. It’s like a growth hack that enables consumers to connect to your brand in a deeper, more personal way, which is a big part of how you differentiate and de-commodify your product, create brand loyalty, and set yourself up for long-term success. While many legacy companies struggle to see the innovation and origin stories right under their noses, it is nevertheless as true for them as it is for young upstart brands that their business is a story—that every business is a story.

…

We know that word of mouth is important, but how do we create it? How do we engineer it so more people buy our burgers, visit our website, come to our salon, or, in my case, download our new podcast? I wish I could tell you that there is some kind of formula for creating word of mouth, or that there is an easy growth hack to accelerating its spread. But what I have found in my own experience and from listening to the experiences of entrepreneurs across the spectrum is that there is only one reliable way to engineer word of mouth: you have to make a really good product. Actually, that’s not precisely true. It can’t just be really good.

pages: 439 words: 131,081

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

When John Doerr invested $12.5 million in Google, founded and run by two grad students, he brought in Eric Schmidt, a veteran executive twenty years their senior, as their boss. The cloud-computing era changed everything. Now that any founder could start a web business and get their first thousand customers on their own, and now that VCs were looking for high-risk, quick-burn, growth-hacking startups, investors needed to place more bets just as founders needed them less. Suddenly, VCs competed to pitch founders, rather than vice versa. “When you have venture capitalists now vying to fund someone, versus entrepreneurs on their knees begging for money, it’s a completely different power dynamic,” with startup founders increasingly setting the terms, Berlin said.

…

To me, it seemed like a play for self-absolution. For every ad campaign telling consumers that Silicon Valley now stood for digital wellness, there were many more inward-facing yoga retreats or meditation groups telling Valleyites the same. Executives met to cleanse their souls of guilt, congratulate themselves for evolving, then go back to growth hacking. Self-flagellation as self-affirmation—feeling good about feeling bad—became a cottage industry. “The CEOs, inside they’re hurting. They can’t sleep at night,” Ben Tauber, a former product manager at Google who’d turned a seaside hippie commune called Esalen into a tech executive retreat, told the New York Times.

pages: 260 words: 67,823

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

In their unrestrained quest for growth, they’ve worked their people to the bone, missed obvious abuses of their technology, and retaliated against earnest internal dissent. Such excesses have caused the US government to consider regulation, and politicians to call for their breakup. Largely with cause. So to state it for the record: this book is not about growth, or growth hacking, or beating down smaller companies. It’s about creating inventive cultures, which I believe everyone can learn from. And for those looking to rein these companies in, understanding how their internal systems work can be a strategic advantage. To effectively diagnose illness, it’s helpful not only to look at the symptoms, but to understand the physiology.

pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

It’s called People You May Know, referred to internally by the acronym PYMK. Officially launched in August 2008, People You May Know is a feature that identifies personally selected prospects for one’s friend list. PYMK proved to be one of Growth Circle’s most effective tools, and also one of its most controversial ones, a symbol of how the dark art of growth hacking can lead to unexpected consequences. It wasn’t a Facebook invention—LinkedIn, a growth-crazy company in its own right, did it first. (Reid Hoffman would later put a ribbon on the growth-at-all-costs phenomenon and dub it “blitz-scaling.”) But Facebook took the idea of presenting current members to new and current users to dizzying heights.

…

Bret Taylor: Riva Richmond, “As ‘Like’ Buttons Spread, So Do Facebook’s Tentacles,” New York Times, September 27, 2011. “What people don’t realize”: Ibid. CHAPTER TEN: Growth! a heroic rise: Palihapitiya has spoken numerous times about his background and his Facebook career. Most helpful were “How We Put Facebook on the Path to 1 Billion Users” (a lecture for a Udemy course on growth hacking); and Palihapitiya’s appearance on the Recode/Decode podcast August 31, 2017. Evelyn Rusli’s New York Times profile, “In Flip Flops and Jeans, an Unconventional Venture Capitalist” (October 6, 2011) is an excellent one. Speeches by others in the Growth Circle were also helpful, especially Alex Schultz’s talk at the Y Combinator/Stanford Startup School course.

pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Estonia became a new entrepreneurial hotspot since the engineers came from there, and that in turn brought on e-Governance there (more on that later). From viral marketing evolved Skype audio calls, video calls, social media, email blasting, marketing magnets, gaming customer rankings on search engines, growth hacking, crowdsourcing, and collaborative marketplaces. When we are all connected, progress accelerates faster. Every piece of software, website, program, app, and novel new product, whether digital or physical is, will be or should be using viral marketing. Your goal as a Startup Hero should be to best figure out how to market products liberally throughout the world with little or no cost of distribution.

pages: 337 words: 101,440

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation by Sophie Pedder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, ghettoisation, growth hacking, haute couture, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, mittelstand, new economy, post-industrial society, public intellectual, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, urban planning, éminence grise

We lost zero time and spent zero energy managing internal problems,’ Emelien told me.12 The key, he said, was to ‘make them feel useful, and trusted. And we gave them responsibility, territorial autonomy and the freedom to organize.’ At the same time, this was a political movement built by business-school graduates who knew the value of ‘growth-hacking’, using free membership (En Marche charged no fee to join) to secure a valuable database, for crowd-funding and campaigning. The starting point, Emelien said, was to ‘give our members useful tasks. That is to say, to give them responsibility, to treat them as our only resource, our only asset, our only chance.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

We like to think of ourselves as immune from influence or our cognitive biases, because we want to feel like we are in control, but industries like alcohol, tobacco, fast food, and gaming all know we are creatures that are subject to cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities. And tech has caught on to this with its research into “user experience,” “gamification,” “growth hacking,” and “engagement” by activating ludic loops and reinforcement schedules in the same way slot machines do. So far, this gamification has been contained to social media and digital platforms, but what will happen as we further integrate our lives with networked information architectures designed to exploit evolutionary flaws in our cognition?

pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

., Nicholas Confessore and Megan Thee-Brenan, “Poll Shows Americans Favor an Overhaul of Campaign Financing,” New York Times, June 2, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/06/03/us/politics/poll-shows-americans-favor-overhaul-of-campaign-financing.html. 59. www.maketimetovote.org/. 60. Abigail J. Hess, “A Record 44% of US Employers Will Give Their Workers Paid Time off to Vote This Year,” CNBC, Oct. 31, 2018, www.cnbc.com/2018/10/31/just-44percent-of-us-employers-give-their-workers-paid-time-off-to-vote.html. 61. Tina Nguyen, “Reid Hoffman’s Hundred-Million-Dollar Plan to Growth-Hack Democracy,” Vanity Fair, July 15, 2019, www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/linkedin-founder-reid-hoffman-spends-millions-to-grow-democracy. 62. James Rickards, “Rickards: Warren Buffett and Hugo Stinnes,” Darien Times, January 5, 2015, www.darientimes.com/38651/rickards-warren-buffett-and-hugo-stinnes/. 63.

pages: 329 words: 100,162

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following by Gabrielle Bluestone

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, cashless society, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, financial thriller, forensic accounting, gig economy, global pandemic, growth hacking, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Kevin Roose, lock screen, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Mason jar, Menlo Park, Multics, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post-truth, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Russell Brand, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech bro, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork

For an additional $40,000 a month, they would also run the client’s social channel, creating thirty pieces of content and growing its audience organically by “approximately 10-20k new followers per month.” Part of that strategy, records show, required setting profiles as private to track incoming friend requests, a growth hack employed by a lot of large meme pages, which typically require you to request to follow them before you can see the funny image your friend direct messaged you on Instagram. But beyond their algorithmic insights, the Jerry team knew how to get to and negotiate with the kinds of celebrities that might be willing to advertise an unknown music festival to their followers—for the right price, of course.

pages: 309 words: 96,168

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

Fanatical users are in it for the long haul; they stand by you, they stick with you—and importantly, they tell their friends. In contrast, there are endless new flash-in-the-pan offerings that receive early attention that doesn’t sustain. You can get a lot of people to try your product with a clever growth hack, but unless they fall in love with the product, that clever tactic eventually stops working. This is “the illusion of scale”—the one million users who show up and then quickly disappear, simply because, as Sam notes, “People don’t stick with products they don’t love.” This is why it makes sense to super-serve your early users, to really understand what they want and what they love.

pages: 420 words: 130,503

Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards by Yu-Kai Chou

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, functional fixedness, game design, gamification, growth hacking, IKEA effect, Internet of things, Kickstarter, late fees, lifelogging, loss aversion, Maui Hawaii, Minecraft, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, software as a service, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs

Because the time of the activity, whether one will win or not, and what the winner will get are all unknown, there’s a strong sense of excitement. Even in the campaign’s Discovery Phase (where users first decide to try out a product or experience, which works hand-in-hand through marketing and so-called growth hacking), if you are watching TV with a group and you see someone suddenly shake their phone when a commercial comes on, your curiosity will surely be piqued and perhaps compel you to join. Coca Cola strategically aligned this campaign with its brand strategy and Chok received 380,000 downloads from Hong Kong users alone within a month of launch.

pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

So he started making an organizational tool called Basecamp, and charging a relatively low subscription fee; soon he was employing dozens of people and catering to oodles of paying customers, without needing to track them or trick them into overusing his wares. “There’s a magical relationship you have with people who are paying you money,” he tells me. It also means his company isn’t clotted with “growth hacking” marketers, ad people, or “business development” critters, he adds. Nearly everyone he employs is a coder or designer, working on solving the real problems of his customers. “You get to be a company of builders,” he says. “That is a wonderful feeling. We’re in this to build a long-term, sustainable company.”

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

They each created several, or rather several dozen, in order to make the site appear more vibrant—like it had actual users instead of just two nerds posting news from other websites to the little thing they’d built in their living room. Graham, u/bugbear, did too. It’s a concept now known as “growth hacking,” the usually not so technical act of actually turning a product into a vibrant business, or, in this case, making it look like their website had early traction. “The first hundred or so Reddit users were video-game characters, or pieces of furniture in our apartment. Lampshade was a big user,” Huffman later joked.

pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

To prepare for ours, we didn’t want to leave anything to chance, so we interviewed 15 of the top-earning Kickstarter creators. I’ve worked with PR firms that charge $20K a month and spend 3 months planning a launch. Follow our advice—based on what we learned—and there’s a good chance you’ll get better results without spending anything. Using virtual assistants, growth-hacking techniques, and principles from Tim’s books, we raised more than $100K in less than 10 days. Having accomplished our goal with almost 30 days to spare, we were able to relax for the holidays. Here are just a few of the non-obvious keys we learned. Find the MED for Kickstarter Traffic If you want to raise a lot of money on Kickstarter, you need to drive a lot of traffic to your project.