Discipline By editor on February 20, 2018 — 1 min read You have to have discipline around user acquisition, and you can not fall victim to the pressure of trying to get huge numbers of people to use it in a short period of time because it never ends up working. I repeat: it never works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H37iyvEZJ8 (55:58) More
Fast Growth By editor on February 20, 2018 — 1 min read What Google did was they basically tricked 20-odd million people to try it in the first three weeks. What we did, was we meticulously found the first 20 million people that loved Facebook. It took us 50x longer. 50x longer! Right now, the culture will reward people to get there in 24 days. But I... More
Slow Growth By editor on February 20, 2018 — 1 min read This framework is something that we actually borrowed from another very successful company: eBay. And I changed it slightly, but a lot of it is still the same. Again, sometimes when you start a company, the ego is that you have to invent everything. My ego was actually around winning: I just wanted to win.... More
The Strategy to Winning in Entrepreneurship By editor on February 20, 2018 — 1 min read When everybody was focusing on memory, [Intel] focused on a CPU, they built abstractions, they created product leverage, they won. When everybody was focused on building PCs, [Microsoft] focused on building the operating system. They built elegant abstractions, they created product leverage, they won. When everybody was focused on operating systems, [Cisco] decided to connect... More
The Three States of Users By editor on February 20, 2018 — 1 min read Whenever you build any product, any product in the world. It could be a pair of pants, it could be a pair of shoes, it could be a smartphone, it could be an online product… Users are only in three states. #1, people who have never heard about your product. #2, are people who have... More
Abstract Uniqueness for Understanding By editor on February 20, 2018 — 2 mins read Here’s the problem with working on things that are unique: If nobody else understands it, most people will not be interested in supporting you. Not because they dislike you, not because they want you to fail, but because it’s very hard for them to understand. And so you have to find a way of building... More
Why People Are Skeptical of Scarce Resources By editor on February 20, 2018 — 1 min read Things that are scarce are not in abundance. And so most people aren’t thinking about it. Most people can’t think about it, and most people are very skeptical about it. So, if you propose something that tried to solve a scarce problem, most people would have a very negative reaction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H37iyvEZJ8 (1:31:29) More
People Won’t Validate Uniqueness By editor on February 20, 2018 — 1 min read Most of the time you will want to go and tell your friends, or tell other people, and have them validate — have them tell you, “Oh, that’s really smart. Oh fantastic, that’s a really good idea.” That is not right. And this may feel really difficult for you, but the most important lesson is... More
Identify Scarcity By editor on February 20, 2018 — 1 min read There is always a scarce resource somewhere. So whether it was all of us deciding to organize around safety, inventing language, creating money, building a machine, creating a smartphone, somewhere along the way, someone was asking the question, what is the next great problem that needs to be solved? Where I stand today, what is... More
Make the Scarce Abundant By editor on February 20, 2018 — 2 mins read On and on, this cycle of taking something that was a problem, and that was limited and scarce, we would solve it in a way that made it abundant. And that kept going on for centuries. What’s amazing is, two really important things happened in the last several hundred years. The first was asking the... More
