4. Who I'm not...
● I'm not Paul Graham, Reid Hoffman, Dave
McClure, Marc Andreessen (sorry)
● I don't own a company
● I'm a "rank amateur"
5. What I offer is a different perspective:
"from the trenches"
6. Who I am
● Had front row seats at very successful startups:
LinkedIn, TripAdvisor
● Wrote a lot of code:
Monetization, Platform, Infrastructure, Apps
● Created a few programs:
Hackdays, [in]cubator, engineering blog, open source
7. These are my personal observations on a
few traits that make startups successful.
8. Outline
1. Make excellent mistakes
2. Speed wins
3. Boyd's law
4. If you can't measure it, you can't fix it
5. Distribution
6. Sharing
9. Outline
1. Make excellent mistakes
2. Speed wins
3. Boyd's law
4. If you can't measure it, you can't fix it
5. Distribution
6. Sharing
16. ● Started as a way to share images in Game
Neverending, a massively multiplayer online
game.
● Rewritten to focus on photo sharing
● Acquired by Yahoo for $35m in 2005
17. ● Started out as burbn, an HTML5 mobile app
for location-based social networking with
photo sharing as one of many features
● Completely rewritten as a photo sharing
focused native app
● Sold to facebook for $1bn in 2012
18. Twitter
● Started out as odeo, a site to create and
share podcasts
● Struggling to stay alive, they held a
hackathon. Jack Dorsey proposed the
microblogging concept (originally, text
message only).
● 500m users and $10b valuation in 2012
19. "Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying
will eventually make you look like an overnight
success."
Biz Stone [2]
24. Reid Hoffman
● His first startup was Socialnet.com: a social
network for dating.
● Never heard of it? Exactly.
● Went on to become COO of Paypal, co-
founder of LinkedIn, and one of the most
successful angel investors of the last
decade.
25.
26. "If you're not failing every now and again, it's a
sign you're not doing anything very innovative."
Woody Allen
27. Outline
1. Make excellent mistakes
2. Speed wins
3. Boyd's law
4. If you can't measure it, you can't fix it
5. Distribution
6. Sharing
35. Time
Maturity
Mature, stable
Proof of concept
Dynamic/interpreted
languages Static languages
Innovation
Advantage
Product development (technology comparison)
Idea
44. "A canvas or sketchbook serves as an
external imagination."
Bret Victor [4]
45. "A programming language is for thinking of
programs, not for expressing programs you've
already thought of."
Paul Graham [5]
46. Leverage
● Always, always, always google first
● "There's an open source library for that"
● Many minds are better than one
● Bonus: learn from the code
71. "Poor distribution - not product - is the number
one cause of failure."
Peter Thiel [7]
72. All credit goes to Peter Thiel [7] and Adam Nash [8]
Common distribution channels
73. Sales
● Dedicated sales team: LinkedIn
● Employees as sales team: Square
● CEO as sales team: Palantir [7]
● Competitions, grants: SpaceX [7]
74. Email
● No one likes spam, but email can work:
personalized, universal, measurable.
● Direct marketing emails: very low CTR
● Product emails: built into to product
interactions. Far better CTRs.
75. Year in Review Email
CTRs so high, it was "clicks-per-email"! [8]
77. SEO
● Free, measurable, effective
● LinkedIn: public profiles, public groups,
LinkedIn Today, LinkedIn influencers
● TripAdvisor: the vast majority of TripAdvisor
traffic comes from Google
80. Social
● Put it in the stream
● Social gestures: comments, likes, votes
● Just like email spam, the feed is becoming
flooded
81. Media
● Blogs, news sites: techcrunch, mashable,
huffpost, wired, and many others
● Newspapers, magazines, TV
● Huge reach and a great way to bring in
many users in a short time
83. Marketing
● Traditional ads: TV, print ads, billboards.
Expensive, hard to measure, and rarely used
by startups.
● Online ads: CTR, CPM, SEM. Measure
everything!
84. Viral Marketing
● Your users attract more users
● Game theory, psychology, sociology
● Free, often measurable (tracking codes)
86. Key Viral Marketing Concepts
● Viral loops: in my product, where do users
interact with non-users?
● Viral factor: how many non-users do they
reach per viral interaction?
● Cycle time: how often do these viral
interactions occur?
87. People You May Know (PYMK)
Invite notification shows up via email, web UI, and mobile. When
the other member accepts the invite, we show them PYMK too!
