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

Time to Value is a metric that considers the amount of time required after starting to use a product for the user/customer/buyer to begin experiencing meaningful results.

For example, if you buy a car and drive it off the lot, the TTV value — let’s call it a TTV ratio — is basically 1:1. You buy the car, you start driving to where you want to go,... See more

ON SMALL TEAMS

Impressive things accomplished by small teams:

• Instagram had 13 employees when they were acquired by Facebook for $1 billion. They had 30 millions users at the time.


• Mojang (the company behind Minecraft) had 37 employees when they were acquired by Microsoft for $2.5 billion. At that time, Mojang had revenue of about $290 million

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Designing products for a single person

In business, there are countless examples of products invented for a single person that then became mass-marketable. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Baking soda —invented in the 1800s by British chemist Alfred Bird so that he could make bread for his wife, who was allergic to yeast.


• The typewriter —one of the

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It is no coincidence that these three skills – managing the pace of change, elevating the next generation of leaders, and enabling the entire company to hit its goals – often make the difference between a functional leader topping out as an SVP and a cross-functional leader accelerating their trajectory as part of the C-Suite.