Startup Advice

Say you have 100,000 DAUs and a retention rate of 80%, and for every five users, one of them tells a friend each day to download your app (and they do it). You get 20k new users per day just from word of mouth. In this equation, Xn is the number of DAUs today and Xn+1 is the number of DAUs tomorrow:

X n+1 = (X n * 80%) + (X n * (1⁄5))

If you start... See more

Airbnb cofounder: "I thought of a way to make a few bucks" September 22, 2007 https://t.co/mPPTqLO04z

Think about distribution from day one

If you’re going to build a product, you want people to use it. But far too often, founders get drawn to the building and tinkering side of the business, forgoing the go-to-market piece until they’re actually ready to get out and sell.

That’s a mistake, says Foster. “I think one of the biggest things that... See more

Maintain a sense of urgency to drive compound growth

One of the core things we’ve learned is that a sense of urgency leads to compounding growth .

To get the best long-term gains, you should always have a sense of urgency. The quicker you launch winning experiments, the quicker those changes impact your growth. Not only that, but these improvements... See more

Projects rarely unfold in a linear fashion; they require frequent course correction. Most trainees should spend more time on a project’s decision tree than they currently do. Once you get into a project, you will have learned from your initial experiments, new papers will have been published, and technology will have advanced. As a result, at any... See more

-1 to 0 is when you figure out what you want to work on. It’s when you decide where to allocate the next 5-10 years of your life.

This may sound simple, but it can be overwhelming and isolating in practice. That period before SPC was not my first -1 to 0 experience. I spent the year after leaving Facebook to start Cove feeling like I was banging my... See more