Startup Advice

One of the best ways to introduce a sense of urgency is to create a series of forcing functions: deadlines, milestones and goals with clearly-defined objectives,” Palan writes in a Medium article about the experience. “TechCrunch Disrupt was just the forcing function we needed. It forced us to tackle many of the things we’d been postponing. We... See more

“Liberation,” viewed through a behavioral lens, is the ability to orient toward what’s appetitive (i.e., pleasant or meaningful), even in an environment full of aversive stimuli. For me, this has meant learning to stay connected to a larger vision and the joy of creativity, even during difficult times.

Yet, this is hard to do. When we perceive a... See more

People act like having a startup fail is the worst thing that can happen to you. And man, that's not even in the top 10. It's bad, I've done it, it's awful. It's really bad, but far worse is to be in a company that won't die, a zombie, undead company that you hate, but you can't leave. Oof, have I met people like that, and we're having a mental... See more

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

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