(Above: No, it doesn’t really look like this — and yes it’s mostly office parks and tech billboards. But I like to pretend) You’ll never regret spending time in SF If you work in tech, you’ll never regret spending 3-5 years in the Bay Area. This is advice I’ve been giving to people for years, and it’s shaped by my own experience — after all, I moved to the Bay Area in 2007 and it completely changed my life. How? I met tons of incredible people, some of whom went on to create major products and found unicorn companies. Most are still building I was introduced to many investors who today ..read more

The “Dinner Party Jerk” test is a solution to a common problem: Startups often struggle at pitching their team, even though for the earliest stage companies, it’s incredibly important to do it well to raise capital — as I’ve described it below: Pre-seed- Bet on the team ‍ Seed- Bet on the product Series A- Bet on the traction Series B- Bet on the revenue Series C- Bet on the unit economics To figure out if you are properly pitching yourself in your team, run the thought experiment of describing yourselves at a dinner party. If you are pitching yourself hard, then if you are a kind human, you ..read more

It’s hard to be a product without a strong theory of distribution Here’s a common startup situation. A team busts their ass for months building the first version of their product. It’s almost done. Now a big question emerges — how do you get the first people to use your product? Hmm… If you find yourself at this moment, then you are already in a bad place. 99% of startups are not differentiated on their underlying technology, and there is very little engineering risk involved. (I’m ignoring deep tech and foundational AI research companies, for the sake of this conversation). Because technolog ..read more

Every time you ask the user click you lose half of them.(And this why tutorials, splash screens, and lengthy signup flows are a bad idea) If you’ve been building apps for a long time and have seen the results of a lot of A/B tests, you quickly realize that people are a flighty bunch. Ask them to download an app and 80% will bounce right on that page. Ask them to sign up and 90% will hit the back button to avoid putting in their email and password. Ask people who’ve arrived from Google to read an article, to subscribe and get more updates, and 99% will head back to find the next article. What ..read more

Above: Many small business figured out the hard way why coupon sites generate worse users Incentive programs often don’t perform The people you attract with referral programs, free trials, coupons, and gamification — folks who are “incentivized” as a broad umbrella category — are usually MUCH WORSE than organic ones. Worse LTVs, worse conversion, less engaged, and so on. In a previous life, I headed up Uber’s $300m+/year referral program (“give $5 and get $5”) and learned a ton. Much of the learnings apply to the next wave of gamified consumer apps, web3 games, etc. So why are these users wo ..read more

Grand Theft Auto 6 and the future of AI If you happened to miss it, a few weeks back, here is the game trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6. It’s worth watching, and is amazing on multiple levels. But GTA 6 might be the peak of the open world category, untouched by the next wave of tech, particularly generative AI. Let’s start some facts: First, GTA has a reported budget of $1-2B, making it THE MOST EXPENSIVE GAME EVER Not only is this the most expensive game ever, but compare it to movies. The most expensive movies, modern installments of the Star Wars and Avengers and Pirates franchises, clock in ..read more

Dear readers, As we enter a new year, many of us are setting goals to write more and create more content. As someone who has been writing consistently for the past decade, I wanted to share some strategies that have helped me in my writing journey, particularly in a professional context. Collecting ideas First and foremost, I emphasize the importance of collecting ideas. These ideas can come from anywhere – opinions, statements of fact, interesting factoids, statistics, or even visual content such as charts and graphs. These are things from X or books or Reddit or whatever. I use an app called ..read more

(above: Me in Sep 2023, a happy author, finding the Japanese translated version of my book at the wonderful Daikanyama Tsutaya Books in Tokyo)   Dear readers, As many of you know, 2 years ago I published my first book THE COLD START PROBLEM. It aims to tell the story of why some products — YouTube, Instagram, Uber, Slack, Dropbox, and others — end up with hundreds of millions (and sometimes billions!) of users, and to provide the definitive theory of network effects which are often referenced in the tech industry, but only superficially understood. It’s been a success, now in a dozen mar ..read more

Hey readers, This is a small deviation from my usual topics, but wanted to share. This is one of the most important graphs that I saw in 2023 that has led to behavioral change for me. This is in Peter Attia’s book Outlive. Here’s the graph: tldr: if you want to be able to briskly climb stairs when you are 75, you need to be in the top 95th percentile of cardiovascular fitness. Even at 95th percentile, it’ll be hard to jog up steep hills, etc — you’d have to be an elite athlete. But if you are average/low, you may not even be able to do any of that. And it seems unlikely you’ll be avg/low now ..read more

Dear readers, I was recently interviewed by the great Brian Balfour (CEO/cofounder of Reforge) and Fareed Mosavat (ex-Reforge/Slack/Zynga) which turned into a lively discussion — I think we could have gone longer! — which we just published in two parts. You can listen to both parts below, and the kind folks at Reforge also typed up some notes summarizing some of the major points made in the interview discussion. Hope you enjoy! Andrew   Part 1 — 2024 Predictions: The Future of Product, Growth, and AI with Andrew Chen Part 2 — New Marketing Channels and Trends for 2024: The Power of Organ ..read more