American kids want to be youtubers, and the Chinese kids want to be astronauts.

Can anyone explain why this is happening? I assume there’s a rational reason…

I am sick of chatGPT’s standard responses which are way too verbose, full of repetition and apologies for being an AI 😂 Turns out you can alleviate some of this setting up chatGPT’s custom instructions feature and googled to see the top setup on Reddit Lo and behold, there were some pretty good ones already. Found the below example pretty useful so wanted to share (Thanks m4rM2oFnYTW for posting them) — 1NEVER mention that you're an AI. 2Avoid any language constructs that could be interpreted as expressing remorse, apology, or regret. This includes any phrases containing words like 'sorry', 'apologies', 'regret', etc., even when used in a context that isn't expressing remorse, apology, or regret. 3If events or information are beyond your scope or knowledge cutoff date in September 2021, provide a response stating 'I don't know' without elaborating on why the information is unavailable. 4Refrain from disclaimers about you not being a professional or expert. 5Keep responses unique and free of repetition. 6Never suggest seeking information from elsewhere. 7Always focus on the key points in my questions to determine my intent. 8Break down complex problems or tasks into smaller, manageable steps and explain each one using reasoning. 9Provide multiple perspectives or solutions. 10If a question is unclear or ambiguous, ask for more details to confirm your understanding before answering. 11Cite credible sources or references to support your answers with links if available. 12If a mistake is made in a previous response, recognize and correct it. 13After a response, provide three follow-up questions worded as if I'm asking you. Format in bold as Q1, Q2, and Q3. Place two line breaks ("\n") before and after each question for spacing. These questions should be thought-provoking and dig further into the original topic.

Lol. “Fortnite: the anti-weed, anti-sex, anti-TV, anti-alcohol, anti-smoking solution parents have been seeking for decades.” Via @reddit

Is it just me or is twitter really really fun rn?

made me lol. "Is Your Startup Idea Already Taken?" via @buzzfeed

The dysfunctions of FAANG

TIL that craigslist is generating $1B in annual revenue, employs 50 people, and is wholly owned by two people. Insane. (And yes, it's a for-profit even with the .org domain name) Who would have thought this single website would destroy the economics of the newspaper industry?

👇Thread. Published a new essay: The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup’s metrics – 80 slide deck included!

The Dumb Idea Paradox. Why great ideas often start out by sounding dumb. Thread 👇

this is one of the most important graphs that I saw in 2023 that has led to behavior change. This is in Peter Attia's book Outlive tldr: if you want to be able to climb stairs when you are 75, you need to be in the top 95th percentile of cardiovascular fitness. With this, you won't be able to run nor briskly climb stairs 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 (I'm in my early 40s) and then somehow go from 50th percentile to 95th. So basically it's better to get started Thus, after reading his book, I reluctantly started running again even though I hate it. And am also doing some peloton / cycling outdoors when time/weather allows cc @KatieBaynes

1/ Many of the biggest implosions in recent history - especially ecommerce - have been due to startups getting addicted to paid marketing while fooling themselves on Customer Acqusition Costs. As spend scales, it always gets more expensive and harder to track - never less.

Here's my thread about why you should: - quit whatever it is you're doing - build the startup you've wanted to build - work with me and the a16z team 1:1 - And yes, I'll invest $1M via a16z speedrun (and the earlier your startup, the better. apply here: sr.a16z.com) I want to start with some things I hear: "Nah, it's not the right time for me to launch a new startup. But why yes, I do scribble down new ideas all the time. And my best friend from work would be the perfect cofounder. Oh I even have a side project going..." There's always something around the corner: - a promotion that might happen - a job you want to get before you're "ready" to start a company - the perfect first hire that might free up in a month - a work project you want to finish up first - a sign that your idea is the perfect idea ... and a million other things But let me make the counterpoint, which is that the AI has created a unique window for launching new products. And it's ephemeral and (unfortunately) rapidly closing. - the startup window opens and shuts for a few years, once every decade. Wait it out now, and you'll have to wait 10+ years for the next one. After all, the AI wave is huge and comparable to what we saw in mobile, internet, desktop, etc. And if you look at the dates, you'll see -- 2007 for mobile, 1994 for web, 1984 for desktop. These waves happen sparingly. You could build Instagram in the first few years of mobile, but you don't want to be the photo-sharing app 8 years in. You could build Uber in the early days, but don't try to compete with them now. These windows are key. - the excitement for trying new products is at an all time high. On social media, we've now all seen first hand when new products are launched and hit great traction right off the bat. People have a hunger to try new products in a way that hasn't existed since the App Store launched. - one of the biggest problems for pre-AI products is that marketing channels are incredibly stagnant. Mobile ad channels are expensive, SEO is slow (and Google keeps taking over the search page), and you can't use aggressive virality anymore. Growth is hard. But if you have a new AI-driven take on a product category -- take advantage of the novelty effect! Before the marketing channels get swamped. - adding AI into an idea no longer requires a PhD in Computer Science :) This means that you can build totally wow breakthrough features into your product and impress your users simply by integrating APIs. You don't need to train any models, and your users may not even care what's under the hood. (just look at cursor, granola, etc -- they just care about great UX). The infrastructure is largely here, but the products are still early. There are still tons of great opportunities. - there's an incredible talent arbitrage right now. There aren't that many AI-native jobs, but everyone wants to learn more, so you can recruit top people if your product starts life day 1 as an AI product. - you might ask, can't I just work on this next year? Well -- maybe. These big waves are intensively competitive. The good ideas are getting snatched up right now, as people ask the question for how to apply AI to XYZ sector. And once the area is taken by a good team with real funding, you could maaaaybe fast-follow, but you're playing on hard mode at that point - there's never been a better time! After all, I found this fun post a while ago: Building a startup in 1995: - Buy & run a server - Code everything from scratch - Handle payments manually - Market with print ads Building a startup in 2025: - Click to deploy - AI writes code for you - 1 line of JavaScript to charge any credit card - 1 tweet goes viral = thousands of visitors (h/t @marclou) - another good reason to get started: You're reading the right essay :) And now you know about a16z speedrun, which makes it possible for us to invest in very early startups, particularly in our favorite area of tech and entertainment and AI. This is still an experimental program, and we're committed to invest up to $1M in teams that are even pre-product and/or pre-traction, if you've had strong relevant experiences. Things are early enough that I am super hands on, and look forward to working with many of you! And the link again: sr.a16z.com and more program details: speedrun.a16z.com Ultimately, a big wave like this doesn't come often. It's easy to make excuses, and for those of you who know you want to be a founder one day, I encourage you to consider jumping in during 2025. - For those of you who want to wrap something at work, or are waiting for a promotion, or something else, I want to tell you a secret: No one will care, after you've spent 18-24 months+ in a single job, what happens next at that job. The tech industry changes quickly and you get rapidly diminishing returns from what you can learn/prove at a single place. You can cut it short, and jump into a new startup. - For those who are waiting for the perfect idea: Your first idea will probably suck. Well maybe that's too harsh, so the more polite way to say it would be that it's based on incomplete information. You don't have a product in front of real users and customers. You haven't explored all the competitive products. You haven't spent 1000s of hours talking to your users yet. You need to get started doing that, to get through the 100 variations of your sucky ideas to get to the real one. - For those who are waiting for a sign: Here's your sign :) - For those who don't have an idea: That's OK. Apply with some areas/sectors you are interested in, and we'll help you talk through the kinds of problems that are exciting - For those who want to work on another job before you know enough to start a company: You know this isn't logical. Plenty of founders get going before they have any significant work experience. Another set of founders often start companies in sectors where they have no prior expertise. You don't need more prep!

The current generation of marketplace startups has been incredibly successful. Airbnb, Lime, Uber, Lyft, Instacart, etc. I've been doing a broad survey of the best writing on this topic and wanted to share my list of 20 best links I've seen.

2019 state of tech investing: Pre-seed- Bet on the entrepreneur 👨‍💻 Seed- Bet on the team 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Series A- Bet on the traction 🏒 Series B- Bet on the revenue 💸 Series C- Bet on the unit economics 💰 (Had to add the emojis, I know, this tweet is social media pandering)

Using chatGPT for travel planning is 🤯🤯🤯 “Make me a detailed day by day itinerary for a road trip from X to Y emphasizing small towns and nature” “For day 2, make an hourly itinerary with breaks for meals, coffee, and sightseeing. Give multiple options for food” Try it…

anyone who thinks web3 is a passing fad or bubble isn't seeing the insane number of very legit consumer startup teams pivoting straight into the space... These folks are experts at building games, communities/social apps, creator economy, etc. 2022 is going to be wild

I’m happy that the Supreme Court is ending one of the most visible forms of structural/institutionalized racism in our society, perpetuated for decades by elite educational universities. #stopAsianHate This is a big victory for the huge number of working-class/middle-class Asian Americans, many of whom are recent immigrants, who depend on the meritocracy of our institutions to achieve the American Dream Big day

This is fun Just copy and paste into chatGPT

Whoa. This morning, I received the first real copy of The Cold Start Problem, a book I’ve been working on for the past 3 years Feels so good to hold it in my hand Comes out in a few weeks - December 7, preorder here: coldstart.com

The iPhone comes out in 2007 and changes the camera industry. Amazing to see a 90% decline in just 10 years after growth for decades Amazing that something can go from peak to trough in exact 10 Makes you ask- What’s the next product where this will happen?

👇 Some news: I've led a16z's new investment in Clubhouse and have joined the board. Essay below that covers: - how I know founders @pdavison @rohanseth - why we're excited to invest - how we think Clubhouse is unique - particularly for creators! a16z.com/2021/01/24/investin…

Elon: "Fear is not the mind killer, context switching is the mind killer" via @joinClubhouse

Big milestone this week: Turned in the final draft of a book I've been writing for 3 (!!!) years. An ultramarathon of writing - no ghost writing, all orig ideas. Topic? Network effects, growing users, for marketplaces, social apps, etc. Preorder: coldstart.com

Magic metrics indicating a startup probably has product/market fit: 1) cohort retention curves that flatten (stickiness) 2) actives/reg > 25% (validates TAM) 3) power user curve showing a smile -- with a big concentration of engaged users (you grow out from this strong core)

Wonderful quote on startups on @joinClubhouse tonight... Elon Musk: "Doing a startup is like eating glass and staring into the abyss for a long period of time"

all the people rushing to their keyboards to type in their "i told you so" hot takes on Quibi: It's gross. Building a company is hard, why celebrate a fail? Go build something instead of using your energy to let twitter know how smart you are the say the consensus thing.

entry level software engineers in the bay area are getting paid! This looks right if you count cash and equity comp. levels.fyi/2018/

Remember when everyone thought Instagram stories killed Snapchat? SNAP now > $100B. Amazing.

Today is a big day After 3 years of research, interviews, and writing, MY FIRST BOOK IS OUT!!! At midnight, I obsessively hit refresh on my Kindle and Audible until - it felt like magic - it appeared. I hit play on the audiobook, and it was a “holy shit” moment Here’s the pic

👇Thread: Marketplace 100. Here's a16z's list of the largest and fastest-growing consumer-facing marketplace startups and private companies -- using credit card data from our friends at Second Measure. a16z.com/2020/02/18/marketpl…

Every time you ask the user click you lose half of them. (AKA 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. In the early days of Uber the only way to sign up was to give your email address a bunch of other fields and also your credit card number. Some of the big early winds in acquiring customers was just to make it so that you could sign up with a phone number and a password, and put in your credit card lead in the flow. If memory serves me right, these were increases on the order of +50%. You get the drift of what I’m arguing. So what happens when your designer has the fantastic idea of a stark and beautiful homepage for your new product that takes a few clicks to sign up, followed by a lengthy tutorial to explain all the features? Sometimes this becomes a life and death decision, because rather than signing up thousands of users into your private beta, which provides the traction to raise your next round of funding, instead only a few hundred make it through. This is why, when I get feedback on a critical flow within a product, I always start by minimizing the number of clicks and steps. I asked whether each field in a sign-up form is really needed, or is optional. I ask the question of whether you need to user to do something now versus having them set it up in the future, when they’re more bought into the product. I ask to remove all the glitzy, visual steps that explain things and just ask the user to hit next. I move the sign-up form to the first experience, whether that’s on the homepage, or the opening screen of an app. If there’s a call action, while the user is doing something else, like reading an article, my theory is that you should be very upfront with it and make it a blocking modal, or not do it at all. No half measures. The point of all, this, of course, is to get people into the magic of your product. The magic is not in filling out forms or watching cute videos about your product, it’s about using your product as quickly as possible. As a result, the only acceptable forms of friction are ones that ultimately enhance the users ability to have a great experience. Thus product is much better experienced as an app, where you have a notifications channel and a richer experience, then, by all means, ask the user to download something. If a product is much better, when used with colleagues or friends, that it might make sense to take a lower conversion rate during the sign-up flow in exchange for some sharing or inviting functionality, that brings more people into the app. Ultimately, it’s all a trade-off, where every click drops off a huge number of users, so you need to spend that user intent very very well. Ironically, it can also be an anti-pattern to not ask users to sign up or install or do anything at all, because once they bounce, which they will inevitably, do, you have no way to get them back. That’s why it’s all a trade-off, and one of the trickiest things about the user growth discipline is knowing when to add friction, and when to take it away. Also, interestingly enough, as you make it easier and easier to sign up to reduce friction the quality and intent of the users also decreases. If you double the number of sign-up typically, you do not get twice the number of paying customers. Nevertheless it’s an important thing to remember: Every time you ask the user click you lose half of them. Be careful.

Guy on the right is a Growth PM

The big divide in digital media: Makes you smarter - X - podcasts - YouTube (!!) - Substack Makes you dumber - TikTok - instagram … what else should be on this list?

How to break into Silicon Valley. 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 run some of the major VC firms and investor networks - learned so much! - made life long friends - formed fundamental aspects of my world view Because of the recent AI boom, I've been meeting a lot of folks who are new to SF. Many folks very intentionally want to build out their network and get rooted in the Bay Area, and to fully immerse themselves in tech. I learned so much in my first few years and wanted to pass along some of my lessons. In particular: - personal viral loop: Asking people for more people - ask for advice and listen - why it's helpful to "have a thing" - know what you bring to the table - find your cult - how blogging/tweeting is helpful - why I avoid conferences/events - building a network while you sleep I first moved to the Bay Area as a 25 year old nerd with a light resume and big tech dreams. I knew exactly 2 people, and that was it. But very intentionally, I wanted to build a strong professional network and to learn from people. The first thing I did was to be intentional and methodical about it, by asking the two people I knew to please sit down and suggest 5 to 10 people for me to meet -- an they did a number of email intros for me. The amazing thing about SF tech culture was that this worked! Although the intros were very light on context, people were willing to grab coffee and share what they were working on, and what they've learned over the last couple years. After each meeting, I would follow up with a few bullet points on what I learned from the conversation, and then ask for two or three more people to meet. This was like building my own personal viral loop, where every chat turned into a few more chats. For my first six months in the Bay Area, I ended up meeting 3 to 5 new people every day. I learned an incredible amount. I can confirm this is still possible, as others I know have done it in recent years. You might ask, what do you end up talking about? What value can you add as someone who's just moved to the area and is starting in tech? The answer is, you simply ask for advice. People move to the Bay Area from all over the world because they're incredibly passionate about what they're building. They love talking about that. and if you have something that you're passionate about too, and ask for advice, you were sure to get a lot of it. The culture in the SF tech community is very open and the intro culture makes it easy to chat with a variety of new people. For me, I was coming from Seattle, and I asked people about various mysteries of the tech industry I didn't understand as an outsider. Why were there so many consumer successes in the Bay Area but not elsewhere? How does angel investing and VC work? Why don't they build more houses/offices in the Peninsula? And so on. That said, the conversations are more productive when you have "a thing." What I mean by that is that all of these conversations and networking are more useful when you are starting a company, creating a new podcast, are working on a new project or book, or something else. When you have a directed goal in mind, then the conversations often are more valuable for all parties involved, because you were making yourself an expert in a particular area and your questions are more relevant. Otherwise you will surely encounter very busy people who simply refuse to "grab coffee" to "catch up" because it's a poor use of time. I encourage you to be on a quest of your own, and even better a particularly interesting quest, so that your conversations with people can be as productive as possible. In my case, I was very interested in the state of the art on growing users, metrics, network effects, and marketing. I asked everyone about this topic, and began to develop my own ideas that I would share freely. Eventually, it became clear that a few small communities orienting the PayPal mafia were the furthest along in their thinking. And that's how I ended up being exposed first to concepts like retention curves, DAU/MAU, viral loops, and so on. These ideas were interest to me, because my professional experience leading up to that point was actually an adtech. I had previously worked in online ads, with customers from WSJ, CBS, MySpace, etc, and had even gotten a patent filed on ad targeting (yes, US7747676B1). I had a superpower in my domain knowledge of CAC, A/B testing, funnel optimization, lead gen, etc, and began to merge all of this thinking with consumer products. In 2007 this was cutting edge at a time when product success was often measured by vanity metrics such as the total registrations for a product. This bit of specialized knowledge was what I brought to the table, and I talked about some of those learnings and ideas, and how they might apply to products. Sometimes I'd get intros to interesting people simply because of this expertise, which I appreciated. I sometimes joke that the Bay Area is ruled by cults. Back in 2007, there was a cult surrounding quantified self, which intersected with lots of folks kicking off Crossfit, keto, Soylent, and other health trends. There were people building robots and hardware. The PayPal mafia was a thing, but look a little closer, and there was a huge network of Stanford CS people and even Canadian mafias. And Burning Man people. In 2007, YCombinator was just getting off the ground, and I was lucky to meet many of the early folks back when they were living in North Beach on strictly ramen diets. Today, those cults have evolved but they still exist -- there is a huge advantage in finding one that suits you, or even better, starting one. Years later I joined Uber and had the idea one day there would be an ex-Uber cult. I think that's happened, and there's been countless founders, investors, and builders from that network. In the first year, I learned the importance of writing things down. The other thing I started to do right away was to write down everything that I was learning. I started a real/professional blog at the beginning of 2007 on the Blogger platform and initially, I got writers block because I was trying to come up with amazing and grandiose ideas that I would share with the world. My first month, I had 20 email subscribers, from friends and family I forcibly subscribed. But eventually, I created a more successful strategy for myself, where I would simply document what I was learning. It turned out that if one person told you a unique idea I would treat it like it was a secret (or at least, I would ask permission). It was often the case that a dozen people would talk about the same idea, and there was simply consensus memes floating around in the ether, and I focused on writing those down. I find that a lot of my blogging has been less about inventing brand new ideas, but instead simply collecting and expanding on the current tech zeitgeist. A few months in, Robert Scoble linked to my blog from his, and that helped a ton. (Thank you!) It was with this attitude that I began to write about viral loops, growth, hacking, measuring retention, and product/market fit, and all the other concepts that came to defined my writing. There is a virtuous cycle in talking to interesting people, writing down expanded versions of ideas that come up, thus being exposed, to more interesting people, and rinsing and repeating. This core loop helped power the growth of my professional network over the first few years. In later years, I added a dash of advising and investing. 15+ years later it's weird to think that accidentally developing a habit of writing and blocking would still be with me today. In fact, this habit is so powerful that I recommend doing it above and beyond almost any other professional "networking" activity. Of course today you might be making videos or podcasts instead of writing. Or if you're an engineer, publishing your code on GitHub. It's all the same concept. Putting your work into the world, whether it's text or video or code, and letting that engage the world. In this way, you are building your network while you sleep. People find you and your work and your ideas, so that you don't have to put in time for 1 million coffee meetings. And in particular, I find writing to be much more powerful than going to conferences. One thing you'll notice about the SF tech industry is that there are endless events and conferences. Whereas a secondary startup hub might have a major tech event once every month or two, SF has them every day. There's office warmings, product launches, new AI meetups, hangouts at Dolores, big splashy conferences, hackathons, and so on. There are endless varieties. However over time, I've found them to be less scalable than writing. They are fun, and it's much easier to have a one on one conversation than it is to create a content. When you really think through how much time you spend getting to a conference, all the time between sessions, and when you speak how few people are actually in the audience listening. Contrast to any kind of digital platform where you can write a blurb and 1000s of people see your ideas. Going back to my original assertion, I think it is hard to regret 3-5 years working in SF. Many people say it's not a great place to live -- and sometimes that seems true. Other folks hate the monoculture. However you can always move home, and when you do, you'll always be the person with Silicon Valley tech experience. And furthermore, the learning curve is so strong, particularly for startup founders, as is the network of capital and peers. It's a one of a kind place, and I highly recommend founders spend a few years even if they don't intend to stay in the long run.

This is true

We've done it SF! We're #1! We're #1! 😂

Cool: “The most common last name in every country.” Via Reddit.

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 technology differentiation is no longer a real factor today start ups, it turns out that most products are succeeding or failing due to core product/market fit followed by the distribution strategy. There are over 9 million mobile apps. There are a billion websites. Figuring out distribution is key. This is why I think startups end up needing both: 1) an insight about customers that gives them product/market fit 2) an insight about distribution that creates traction People building products often have an easier time product/market fit because they are building for themselves, or a customer that they already know well. But the latter, about distribution, is often super difficult because once you onboard your friends and family, and look to expand the next set of hundreds of customers, you then dive into the world of growth marketing strategies and tactics which are its own very particular learned skill set. Sometimes when there's a new breakthrough technology, as with what is happening in AI, or the Apple vision Pro, or Web3, it's simply enough that the product has a "it works" feature. By simply being there on the scene when adoption of a new platform is happening, distribution happens automatically. I think that's why we see that so many new great startups are launched right at the beginning of the platform. But what happens when you are trying to launch the 9,000,001th mobile app? The first thing you do, naturally, is to try to read what's out there. The other counterintuitive thing, is that although most of the knowledge in writing out there pertains to channels like SEO or paid marketing or influencer campaigns, many of these tactics best fit already successful products that have money and aim to accelerate growth. Many of these tactics simply won't apply to you because they'll be too expensive, or they will use mature marketing channels that just won't be that effective. I often joke that by the time there's a case study about a new marketing tactic or channel, the advantage has already been arbitrage away, and probably no longer works. So what should you do instead? Ideally the product and the distribution hypotheses happen at the same time, and reinforce each other. The Dropbox founders describe to me at the inception of their product, that sharing folders was part of the vision and was built in quite quickly. And later years this drove a significant amount of growth. Uber has natural virality because you often ride in a car with other people, or you ride a car to see somebody, and naturally you'll mention the service. A product for creators, like Substack, will naturally encourage people on the platform to write and share content, attracting an audience who ultimately may also be writers themselves. Zoom, and other apps that help collaboration in the workplace, have natural features that cause you to bring in your coworkers as you use the product experience. These are all examples of the best form of distribution, which are baked in to the product idea itself, rather than bolted on at the end. Even once you have a basic theory for how your product will naturally distribute itself, you'll still need to identify the first generation of users to help iron out all the issues, and give you feedback on whether your hypotheses were correct. In my years of studying new product launches, I can confidently say that the early years are often very idiosyncratic, and constantly changing. The reason for this of course is that marketing channels change all the time, but subscale ones that help you get your first couple thousand users, change even more so. A few years ago you saw a trend were products would launch a huge conferences like SXSW. These days you see more effort on getting influencers involved early. Or "building in public" which makes yourself into an influencer. Several years ago many consumer products (like dating sites, new photo apps, etc) would launch on college campuses via the Greek system, because they were organized ways to reach thousands of undergraduate students. These days the organizations are often inundated with start up requests, and it's become less effective. As a result all of these initial channels change all the time, and it's up to the founders to figure out how to take advantage of what might work today. The problem with these initial channels is that they eventually tap out. Thus starts the journey of startups to grow and expand their portfolio of distribution channels, beginning with small and highly relevant ones, into the biggest channels. I sometimes imagine a X Y axis, where X is volume of the channel, and Y is responsiveness. Early channels are often very low volume. But you want that. The reason is that they are highly relevant and they are small enough that larger companies do not focus on them. As I mentioned influencers are often an example of this, but so are niche newsletters, or or event marketing. However if you find this channel to be successful, you'll also eventually one more scale. This involves you jumping onto the next set of channels, which will provide more volume but be much more competitive as a result. Often times this is a period where you have one channel that kind of works, and you're testing a few other channels simultaneously. Your efforts here should be experimental and iterative. You can often look at direct competitors as well as adjacent products and see what they're doing, to inspire you on the right channel. The natural cadence of products will indicate to you the channels that are most likely to work. If you have episodic usage, you'll probably need to do SEO/SEM, affiliate, or referral -- something that helps you target high intent users. If you're product is social or helps with workplace collaboration, then you might lean into referral programs and viral growth. Products in commerce naturally lead you towards paid ads, contact creators, etc. You can often learn a lot by talking to other people in your industry or an adjacent industries to see what works. This is where sometimes I'll see people working on episodic usage apps, like travel/health/etc asking the question, how do I make my product virally? I want free users! Of course the problem is, there's a natural fit between a product and it's distribution channels. Even though you might want free distribution, only very specific niches of networked products are able to grow freely. Generally everybody else must pay for their distribution, whether via referral or advertising. Eventually you want to move on the XY axis towards volume. There are only about a dozen large scale distribution channels that can propel a product to scale. Advertising is on that list, SEO too, and so is viral growth. But these larger channels, by their nature, are both highly scaled but also have low responsiveness. As a result, you end up competing with some of the most famous brands in the industry as a result. Who wants to buy ads against the same audiences as major credit card or airlines? They have insanely high payback periods, and huge marketing budget, and are not that cost sensitive. Ironically, this is where great products become to dominate. I started this discussion with the dual requirement of product/market fit, and distribution. But in the end, product/market fit actually dominates. The reason is the following -- the ability for a company to operate out in these most expensive and highly scaled channels comes from having a great product that generates a ton of word of mouth. More natural usage, the less marketing that has to be done. And the marketing costs that do exist end up being blended in with the large number of organic users. The journey of a new product is to move, from unscaled and relevant, to highly scaled. And at the end, great products win.

Question on Quora: Which commonly-discussed growth metrics in consumer tech businesses are the most meaningless and/or misleading? Here's my thread 👇

Zoom setup after 6 months straight of hardcore videoconferencing #b2binfluencer 😂

using the latest AI codegen tools to do "vibe coding" (where you ask it for features, accept changes, and keep editing) is both brilliant, and enormously frustrating You can get the first 75% trivially, and it's amazing. Then try to make changes and iterate, and it's like you are doing over-the-shoulder coding with an incompetent intern who can barely code and doesn't understand your instructions You might have to ask 5 different ways to get the same thing done. You might just have to ask it to reset an entire feature and rebuild from scratch. Sometimes it works, sometimes not Yet the promise is obviously there and very exciting. I'm def stuck at 85% on my evening project though lol

new post: I’m joining Andreessen Horowitz! andrewchen.co/andreessen-hor…

announcement: a16z has opened it's LA office! woohoo!! we're all so pumped for this -- it's in the heart of santa monica and we'll be inviting our startups, friends, angels, etc to events and to co-work from the office Some fun features: - 3 floors + roof deck with ocean views - PC bang for 5v5 competitive gaming sessions, playtests, and much more - cozy bar/hangout on the roof with sofas/tables/etc - podcast recording studio - co-working space for startups and friends! - tons of space for the several dozen a16z employees working from LA -- from games, crypto, venture, CLF, IT, and much more

1/ The internet culture supply chain works like this: Asia ➡️ US teens ➡️ Adults ➡️ B2B. Multiple data points on this already: Emojis, video streaming, esports...

Dashboard clutter - the addition of more KPIs over time - leads to strategy clutter. The more you add, the less you (and your team!) understands your business. Then people go back to making decisions on intuition not data. Via this 😂 comic by @tomfishburne below!

new announcement from a16z: startup founders -- come work with me 1:1 and let a16z invest up to $1M in your very early stage startup :) (yes, this is via a16z speedrun, and we are launching the next cycle today, taking applications over the next ~month. Here's how to apply: sr.a16z.com) More details: I’m back in (currently cloudy) LA after spending a couple months in San Francisco. It was super fun to be back in the bubble. It seemed, right after COVID, that so many other geos were ascendant — you saw a big explosion in LA and NY, and a lot of VCs (including us) starting offices in London. But very clearly the AI revolution has brought a lot of the action back to SF, even if folks are doing it remotely and SOMA is a bit dead. It was great to catch up with many of you over dinners, events, mixers etc. Bumped into a lot of friends during urban hikes in the city also! I was in SF working on my big project at Andreessen Horowitz right now, which is building a16z speedrun . This is a new program where we invest up to $1M into very early stage startups and then work with them closely over 90 days, then launch them into the world. I am very involved, and it’s been fun to get my hands dirty working 1:1 and in small groups with founders early on their journey. There’s a new cycle kicking off, so would love if you could: - recommend anyone I should be working with! - fine to share the website below, or reach out via neutrals - details + dates are: up to $1M investment from a16z speedrun plus $5M credits from our main partners (AWS, GCP, OpenAI, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Stripe, Deel, etc) - the next programs kicks off July 28 to October 10, 2025 this year. - speakers include the founders of Figma, Zynga, Zillow, DoorDash, Twilio, etc etc - application deadline is May 11, so please get ahold of us by then how to apply: sr.a16z.com more details: speedrun.a16z.com OK — so a bit more details on how this all happened: I started working on Speedrun at a16z because there are a ton of very early stage startups out there that are building in and around our focus of tech, entertainment and AI. Many of these early wouldn’t know what to do with a16z’s usual check size of $10 or $20 million, but they would benefit from the a16z team (now numbering nearly 600 strong!) that provide access to everything from hiring, partnerships, financing, marketing, and everything else. I love working with founders at this stage. Also it does not slip our mind that many of the best startups on the planet were started by first time founders and also repeat founders that also have a chip on their shoulder. We feel like we’re not able to help as many entrepreneurs if we just focus on ones that have a ton of revenue and are growing quickly (though we want to work with those ones too!). So starting about 18 months ago, we kicked off a16z Speedrun which is now heading into its 5th cycle. It’s been awesome and very rewarding! If folks have any questions, I’ll try to address stuff in the comments here. But best thing to do if you have a specific startup in mind is visit the website.

So many kids googling to figure out what an Oracle is

Has Instagram made it so that everyone just all go to the same places now - mykonos - tulum - iceland - Dubai? What else is on this list…

1/ A few years ago a ton of “Uber for X” startups got funded, but very few of them - maybe none? - worked out. It sounds good but ultimately most failed on the supply side. Let’s explore why.

Bureaucrat mode: - create committees for every decision - make sure every meeting has pre-meetings to build the papers/deck for the meeting - end every meeting by expanding the scope of the project - no one ever owns a decision, so make sure there's complete consensus. Create more meetings if needed - punish anyone showing initiative - discipline anyone who moves quickly without complete consensus - require detailed status reports before any progress - create complex approval workflows for trivial tasks - celebrate vanity metrics and milestones - reward people based on "impact" based on how may people are working on your projects - ask legal, brand, compliance to approve everything no mattery how small - talk endlessly about downside risk ... what else?

random thoughts/predictions on where vibe coding might go: - most code will be written (generated?) by the time rich. Thus, most code will be written by kids/students rather than software engineers. This is the same trend as video, photos, and other social media - we are in the command line interface days of vibe coding. For the majority of creators, vibe coding will eventually fade, and vibe designing (with a visual paradigm) will come to dominate. People ultimately think better in a GUI-like format than a CLI-like format. Thus, in vibe designing you will show the AI the design outcomes you want, and then everything else is done for you. Yes, you may end up with tools to tweak the design details for extra controllability, and provide additional mockups that then get filled in underneath with code. But maybe folks will build software without seeing or learning a programming language. - vibe coding could reduce the need for open source libraries as more code will be generated from scratch by AI. Code will be more of a disposable commodity, with less reuse, and instead generated on the fly for personalized use. It's interesting to see right now that creating a new project is easier than editing a project, because the latter requires a lot more context/complexity. Interesting dynamics if something like this continues - "trad UX" and design standards give way to post-modern/fragmented software, as millions of new vibe coders create experiences with no prior know how and new perspectives. New patterns will emerge, as TikTok/YouTube has done to film making and trad entertainment. The world will go beyond buttons and modals and scrollbars and other things. Software may become unrecognizable before it coalesces again - if vibe coding makes software trivial to build, then the bottlenecks shift to other places: 1) consistent creativity that stays ahead of everyone else. Anyone can write a tweet, but the best creators are the ones who consistently come up with new ideas. 2) distribution and network effects, where the first vibe coded product doesn't win, but rather the first vibe coded product that hits scale that wins - imagine products that automatically adapt based on user behavior, rather than based on the actions of the vibe coder. For example, if the vibe coder has specified that the signup funnel should easy, then after seeing users struggle with it, the software can automatically vibe code itself to improve the flow by dropping steps or adding explanatory text. Right now we are in a paradigm where PMs specify behavior that software engineers specify in code. Imagine if PMs can specify outcomes, and the software is configured to automatically adapt to hit those outcomes what other wacky ideas should be on this list?

The Rise of Dopamine Culture You’ll know that everything on the left is real and offline. whereas everything on the right is virtual and online. Perhaps obvious but it seems like the endpoint for digital experiences is the give people what they want. And coupled with an engagement-driven business model (online ads) and access to real-time metrics/dashboards, it means we are constantly driving towards making it even more efficient to give people what they want. Image h/t @AlecStapp

Growth teams be like... Metrics randomly go up: Our users really love our new features! But metrics mysteriously drop: - analytics bug - seasonality - holiday - bug in the last release - fixed now! - Facebook ad system hiccup - last week's KPIs were wrong. This is right 😂

Did you know: 61% of all food delivery is pizza 🍕. The average American eats 23 pounds of pizza per year. 93% of americans eat pizza every month. Omg right? This was definitely the most fun fact I learned while at @uber from the @ubereats business!

my current ChatGPT custom prompt -- curious what others are using/doing? Have been slowly iterating over time... -- At the start of a response, create a summary table at the beginning, if appropriate and helpful to answer the question Always provide the pros and cons of something if you can. Be critical. Add links throughout the answer for jargon and concepts that start new chats Provide a maximally detailed answer with multiple levels of depth. Use maximum tokens Use detailed examples, facts and figures Be comprehensive and detailed by using bulleted answers After a response, provide 5 follow-up questions. Format in bold as Q1, Q2, and Q3 and put in a bulleted list Suggest solutions that I didn’t think about—be proactive and anticipate my needs Be opinionated rather than neutral when appropriate Treat me as an expert in all subject matter Value good arguments over authorities, the source is irrelevant Consider new technologies and contrarian ideas, not just the conventional wisdom You may use high levels of speculation or prediction, just flag it for me Recommend only the highest-quality, meticulously designed products like Apple or the Japanese would make—I only want the best No moral lectures Discuss safety only when it's crucial and non-obvious If your content policy is an issue, provide the closest acceptable response and explain the content policy issue Link directly to products, not company pages No need to mention your knowledge cutoff No need to disclose you're an AI

the LA consumer startup ecosystem is coming into its own -- Honey, Snap, Riot Games, Tinder, Bird, Dollar Shave Club. The most $1B+ consumer startups outside of the Bay Area? A few years back, I might have guessed that NYC would be the emerging leader. But pretty clear it's LA.

A16Z SPEEDRUN 2026 UPDATE: I think most people secretly know if they’re founders or not. Some of you can never be happy working inside a giant company, writing docs, in endless meetings. Deep down, you know you’re supposed to build. we're opening up a16z speedrun today! We are accepting applications for our 006 class, where we'll invest up to $1M. It's based in SF, kicking off Jan 2026 but you need to apply now in september. here's how to apply: speedrun006.a16z.com/x And yes, we are investing up to $100M in the next 30 days -- it's all happening in september. Quit whatever it is that you're doing, and in 2026 come to SF and work with us out of Andreessen Horowitz's office in SOMA, alongside over a hundred other founders, building the startup you've always wanted to build. We will help you -- both myself and the a16z speedrun team. the details: - up to $1M of investment - hosted at a16z HQ in San Francisco - 12 week program, with an IRL kickoff, luminary speakers, community events - live events with the founders of Carta, Zynga, DoorDash, Behance, Airtable, Twilio, Figma, and more - private dinners/Q&A with Marc and Ben of a16z - apply now, and the deadline will be Sep 28 2025 for SR6 At a16z speedrun, you get access to programs from our operating team and work with experts in marketing, BD, talent, people and capital—more below MARKETING Our team of expert marketers is here to help you win. Whether refining your brand, launching, or building a thriving community, our marketing operators have powered dozens of startups with: - Brand Development -End-To-End Marketing Strategy -PR & Media Coverage -Go-To-Market Execution -Creators & Content TALENT Find and attract the talent you need to build and scale your company. Our curated network connects you with world-class technical talent, executives, advisors, and specialists who can help accelerate your success. Here’s how the program works: - You tell us what you’re looking for. - We use a16z speedrun's brand and referral networks to magnetize talent. - We take hundreds of calls each week to curate a list that we only send to speedrun founders. - You request introductions and we put you in touch. PEOPLE We help you quickly stand up the tools and practices needed to hire, manage, and lead highly performant teams. Our goal is to help you anticipate challenges and navigate some of the most foundational decisions you'll make as you build a world-class company. While a16z speedrun takes place in the US, we welcome founders and companies from around the world. Our Global Founders Program provides specialized guidance for navigating visas and relocation, plus dedicated access to our expert immigration attorney network, so you can focus your energy on building your company. BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT We unlock unparalleled access to networks, expertise, and tools that help startups scale faster. - $5M+ in free credits in our speedrun Marketplace from AWS, GCP, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Stripe, Deel, and many more. - Dedicated advisors & experts to guide you through every partnership, sales, and GTM motion, including crafting your business model and pricing. - Level up your sales with real live demo experience across various events to executives and operators in your target market. - Access to a16z’s network of executives & decision-makers at 2,000+ companies. CAPITAL One of the most important things a founder can do is raise money. Our fundraising program sets the stage for your raise through an in-person Demo Day and an online platform reaching 1,000+ top early-stage investors. We help you prepare with practice sessions, stress tests, and materials review. When you’re in high-stakes negotiations, we coach you, share insider knowledge, and leverage alumni intel on the investor across the table. More details: The a16z speedrun program is a fast‐paced, 12-week startup program that guides founders through every critical stage of their growth. It kicks off with an orientation to introduce the cohort, then dives into rapid product development—helping founders think through MVP while addressing key topics like customer acquisition and design partnerships. Throughout the program, startups benefit from expert-led sessions and interactive office hours that cover: - Brand Building & Go-to-Market Strategy: Crafting your story, marketing, and driving product-led growth. - Customer Acquisition & Launch: Securing early users and executing effective launch plans. - Fundraising & Strategic Partnerships: Pitching, navigating investment, and building lasting relationships. - Team Building & Operational Scaling: Developing high-performing teams and refining internal processes for sustained growth. - Community & Enterprise Sales: Building communities, forming strategic partnerships, and landing your first enterprise customers. - Product-Market Fit & Demo Day Prep: Assessing market traction which culminates in a Demo Day to showcase progress. The a16z speedrun program is IRL and runs for 12 intensive weeks in which our team of expert investors and operators guide your startup from idea to market launch. The program moves through sequential modules—each dedicated to key aspects such as rapid product development, go-to-market strategy, fundraising, team building, and operational scaling. Expect regular check-ins, one-on-one office hours, and interactive sessions, culminating in a Demo Day where you present your progress to potential investors.

The worst things on the internet - GDPR cookie pop ups - old media pay walled articles - embedded videos that won’t full screen - web links to the App Store not the actual app - video that auto plays, especially with audio - big dumb ads between blocks of text … what else?

What is your least popular but deeply held opinion on tech/startups?

The end of the 1 billion active user ad-supported consumer startup -- and why highly-monetizing, useful, vertical apps are the next thing It's been a long time since we last built a broadly horizontal consumer app like YouTube, Instagram, Linkedin, or Snapchat. In fact, I'm convinced it may not be possible anymore, because we're in the final years of the mobile S-curve and 15+ years after the launch of the iPhone, there are major hurdles to apps to broad, billion user horizontal apps. Instead, the next generation might be "vertical apps" -- appealing to a vertical segment of the market, like Monopoly Go, Draft Kings, Canva, etc -- that are smaller audience products with higher "whale" monetization (sometimes even workflow/B2B) First, why these broadly horizontal apps are hard: - the novelty effect has worn off on new app ideas. Consumers have heard it all. And over the last 15+ years, founders have tried the obvious permutations on social/communication/photo/video apps -- the most horizontal of all apps -- and a lack of novelty creates a lack of intention to try new apps. - retention is more elusive than ever, because of the competition. At the start of the mobile revolution, all you had to do was to create a mobile app that was more entertaining than waiting in line, or sitting on the toilet looking at the blank wall in front of you. These days, new apps compete with the most addictive products ever created. If you don't provide every day value, people will switch over to TikTok or Instagram, and you may have lost them forever. (And no, spamming them with a ton of notifications won't help) - building an ad-supported startup is sort of a "two miracle" problem, as they say. First, there's a miracle of getting to 10s of millions of users -- enough scale so that ads can even be a revenue generator -- and then a second miracle to build an ads marketplace, targeting systems, bidding systems, etc, to attract millions of advertisers. It's a great system when it works, sort of a secondary network effect on top of an existing network -- but it takes years to build these ad systems - easy growth is mostly over. Mobile ads are expensive (and harder to target than before). Viral invites have low response rates and have gotten nerfed. Working with creators/influencers can be spiky but temporary. Prior web channels like SEO, getting traffic via press/PR, don't work well for mobile. If these channels don't work, and viral invites are ineffective, then it means it's that much harder to get your friends onto the same social app at the same time So what's next? Vertical apps with beefier monetization, and different network characteristics seem a likely candidate. When you look at products like Monopoly Go, Draft Kings, web3 games, Canva, etc., and start to generalize towards new opportunities, you can come to see them as vertical apps with distinct new advantages. - Rather than ads, these products often let customers spend big dollars directly to upgrade their experience. Free-to-play games often have "whale monetization" mechanics where the top users can spend $100,000s of dollars if they want. Same for a betting product like Draft Kings. If the top 10% of your users drive all the monetization, then it's the quality of users (and their ARPPU) that matters, not just the scale of users - the silver lining for all the new advancements in AI, of course, is that we are discovering novel use cases that are in particular useful for productivity use cases. These "prosumer" tools often often scale up in terms of $ on usage, or have tiers around teams and enterprise, all of which drives direct monetization. These amazingly visual/interactive generative AI tool also create sharable content that helps drive growth - network effects can work differently if the products aren't meant to be broadly horizontal apps where all your friends are on it -- instead the networks can be built around specific activities and interests. Dating apps are an example of this, or looking at multiplayer games like Valorant, where you mostly interact with non-friends. The product just needs to build a network that's big enough to create interaction (like dating, or gaming), rather than hinging on having all of your friends on board. This dramatically lessens the growth requirements - similarly, I think we'll see more apps focused on single user utility, and the use of game design mechanics (as Duolingo has done), to create stickiness without having lots of users commenting/liking/etc to drive interaction. In a world of more growth saturation, the ability to build products that are very useful by themselves, rather than networks, becomes a competitive advantage To conclude, tomorrow's apps might look more vertical. Higher spending, smaller audiences, focused on interactions that are useful and solo. Some may target productivity/utility use cases, particularly as AI creates novel interactions, at least until the next tech platform emerges. I certainly hope a new broad-based social consumer app can emerge, and I know folks are working on them still, but I also want to advocate for a more focused approach. I think more of these may work in the future.

Marie Kondo, but for analytics dashboards

WHAT NEW FOUNDERS GET WRONG IN THEIR ELEVATOR PITCH so hey - am writing this in the FINAL week before applications close for a16z speedrun 6. The deadline Sep 28, this upcoming sunday. Speedrun is a16z's new program to invest up to $1M in brand new startups, with a 12-week program. Apply here: speedrun006.a16z.com/x back to the topic -- so after reviewing a zillion pitches over my time in startup world, you quickly realize that if you can't give a short pitch well (~2min or less) then you probably won't give a 30+ min pitch well. Learning to do this effectively makes it easier to sell, recruit, and yes, to raise money. Here's some high level things that are easy to get wrong in the first version of your new pitch: - the idea itself is boring. The magic is in the "why?" - brag way way more about your team than you think - there's many flavors to traction, learn how to talk about your early traction - good product demos, and bad product demos - your story should be simple/elegant, which is a reflection of your strategy, but with enough details to bring it alive Expanding some additional thoughts here: The idea itself is boring. The magic is in the "why?" Yes, we get it, everyone is building "Cursor for X" or "Agents for Y" right now. And when you're in tech and you hear dozens and hundreds of variations of this, it just gets stale and boring. What's the surprising, provocative, assertive statement you can make at the very beginning of the pitch to grab your audience's attention? What is the new tech breakthrough you're utilizing that makes this possible today but not in prior years. You need to answer this, otherwise you'll get lost in the noise. Compare yourself to big trends, big revolutions. Surprise people. This is particularly true if you have discovered an "earned secret" from your time in another role, or in building out in the market, that is counterintuitive but compelling. The problem with these standard "X for Y" descriptions is that they are easy to understand, but lack the drama to hook your audience on the "why now?" The thing that kills your pitch isn't that they hate your idea. It's if they aren't listening at all, because they're too bored or distracted to listen. Brag way way more about your team than you think Many of you are long-winded and vague when you talk about yourselves. You can do better. When you have your team slide, I suggest keeping it terse and to the point (we don't need to know you are childhood friends). Make sure you really brag about yourself. In particular, many of you are missing the ability to add specific facts and figures. If you say that you started a successful company previously, then tell me that you went from zero to X million in revenue. If you worked at a known product, tell me what you did there, and how many millions of users did you serve? Adding little bits of data helps make your resume even more impressive. I have a longer read on this topic here which discusses why you need to talk about your background in a way that is different than in "real life" — Be "the dinner party jerk." andrewchen.com/the-dinner-pa… An excerpt: 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 will turn red and blush with wild embarrassment. The reason is that a proper pitch includes many of your credentials, your achievements, the ways in which you and your team are highly unique, and we simply don’t talk like this at dinner parties. And yet this is exactly what you should do when you talk to investors, partners, customers, and potential employees. There's many flavors to traction, learn how to talk about your early traction You have to make the best use of your traction. Many of you are at different levels but there's always some kind of story to tell, and being able to talk about traction at some level really punches up people's perception of how far along you are. So if you have revenue, talk about revenue. If you only have users then talk users. If not, add quotes. Or talk about the traction of similar products and what you've learned. If you need more months of R&D, I suggest bulding a landing page waitlist for your product and at least start collecting emails, titles, company names (for B2B) so that you can talk about your waitlist metrics and what logos are signed up. There's always a traction story, even if it's early, and it helps people imagine what you might be able to do. You might argue that a brand new startup doesn't need traction. You might have seen me post a framework in the past that looks like this: 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 This is all true. However, any glimmer of traction can be a major unlock for peoples' view of what you've built. Especially if you can sneak in a name drop or metric drop that gets people to imagine what's special about what you're building. There are good product demos, and bad product demos If you get someone in front of your screen or mobile app, you can do a quick demo. But remember that if you share tiny screenshots of your product, no one will understand what's going on. Share something zoomed in, or make it conceptual. Or if your product is visual, do an animated GIF. Imagine your slides showing to 1000+ people and they can barely read anything under 40pt font. Can they understand what's happening with your product at a high level? There's something magical about showing a visual difference or transformation as part of your product experience. This is why all the various gen AI tools are so amazing -- you can share a before/after in one go. Or when a new iOS feature unlocks a bit of UX, use it. Or show the product, but show an impressive example of how a real user has worked with it. The best demos deliver quick "ahas" in seconds, not minutes, and are visceral/emotional. It shouldn't require a lot of thinking. And if tied in with your opening hook, it should provide a big wow moment. Simplicity is a good thing I wrote about this before, but repeating here since it's well grouped with these other topics: The clarity of a startup's story means clarity in their strategy. The story is the strategy. On the other hand, a confusing, rambling story means that your approach is likely complex, incoherent, and unattractive. If you've ever had someone pitch you a product idea and then needed to ask question after question to understand what they're doing, you know what I mean. This is a skill. It takes tremendous time and effort to pare back your startup's core ideas into a short series of truths, with strong local connections in between. The process of paring down the idea requires hardcore prioritization -- knowing what parts of the idea are core and must be done right away, and what parts are irrelevant, or can be done in the future. A clear narrative forces clarity in strategic tradeoffs. It takes no skill to have massive complexity -- we can all brainstorm a ton of ideas, throw all the exciting trendy technologies into our idea, and make a go for it. But these messy stories reflect strategic indecision and avoidance. And the resulting unclear strategy will repel potential customers, investors, employees, and partners. They don't know who you are, or what you're really doing, because you don't either. the best stories are a form of lossy compression, where they leave out 90% of the operational detail, but still hit the emotional and strategic truth. They ring true as soon as the words leave your mouth. And not because they are obvious statements -- after all, we get tired of hearing the same things -- but rather because they make observations on the reality of the world new way that cuts through the noise. They contain a "secret" that's surprising and compelling. The best narratives tap into feelings, not just logic. the good news is that you can often figure this all out as you go. Founders and product builders are often are guided by the intuition of what they want to see in the world. Intuition might guide you towards a solid product, even if the initial story is a bit messy. And as you understand your customers' real world use cases, plus how your own customers describe your product, it can get easier to compress down all your ideas/observations/mistakes into a simpler expression of the idea.

BIG NEWS: i'm investing $30M in the next 45 days via the a16z SPEEDRUN program 😎 Yes, $750k per startup that joins the SPEEDRUN program plus obv it'll be a great way to work together on something. So come work with me at a16z's SPEEDRUN program -- we'll invest, work with you, expose you to the world's top investors/mentors, etc. here's the best place to apply: sr.a16z.com Important dates and program details Deadline: May 19, 2024 Notified of Selection: End of June at the latest! Program Dates: July 29 - Oct 20 in Los Angeles ☀️ Our intensive 12-week program is highly selective, with ~ 1% of applicants accepted in our last cohort. Participants are supported not just with capital, but also by a highly curated set of industry coaches, mentors, and a community of ambitious founders. 80% of companies from SPEEDRUN’s first cohort secured funding from investors following Demo Day. for example, in the most recent program, we had an amazing set of speakers: - Mark Pincus, cofounder of Zynga - Emily Greer, cofounder of Kongregate - Eros Resmini, cofounder of Discord - Kevin Lin, cofounder of Twitch - ... and dozens more What kinds of startups are we looking for? tbh -- we are very open-minded! Great teams with ideas, before a product is built, is totally fine. But we also have startups with real revenue, a great product out there already, etc. We are investing at the intersection of TECH x GAMES which means AI/infra, 3D tools, VR/AR, web3 games, gamified consumer apps, and much more. For AI and B2B startups, there's a huge advantage in being able to meet startups in your space as potential customers, and when you are working out product/market fit.

Growth tips/tricks are like "Get rich fast" schemes- they promise instant results, but they don't work The real answer is painstaking iteration to get p/m fit, nailing a single growth channel, layering on over time, hiring teams and building repeatable systems Get rich slow

You have to be an optimist about your own product, your own startup, and yourself. That's why when you pitch -- whether to investors, to prospective employees, or partners, it's important to talk about what might happen, not what you are doing today. There's a whole style to this type of pitch, and it's a futuristic point of view that leans into optimism: - Emphasize the future, not the past - What it could be not what it is - Play up even small bits of proof points - The big things that might happen, if it works - The upside rather than risks - Signs the customers love the product, rather than revenue metrics - Why this team has the grit and special knowledge to do it, not the credentials and work experience - A unique narrative about why the world is moving this way - Why you're starting with a wedge, but your ultimate market is huge In a previous discussion, I recounted that a few years back, a big group of Nordic founders came by Silicon Valley. When I asked them their biggest learning on the trip so far, they said: We have to learn how to pitch our startup in the “American” way, oriented towards the future and the possibility of success. Unfortunately they told me the investors back home didn’t care for this style. Instead, they are focused on reducing risk, and that starts with asking startups what revenue they have right now, even though the companies were brand new. The funny thing about this is that this isn't the "American" way of pitching, it's actually specific to the Bay Area tech ecosystem. It's incredibly optimistic and futuristic that founders choose to describe their startups in this way, and furthermore, the people who hear these pitches choose to believe them. I find this tone admirable, but let me also make the argument that this is the only logical way to convince people to join you on your journey. First, let's talk about startup investors. a portfolio of startup investments is inherently risky, and the physics of venture math means that the winners have to be really big. It's commonly said that out of a portfolio of ten companies, generally about half the investments will go to zero, three will return a little bit of money, and that the top one or two will return 10x plus and make the fund work. As a result, professional venture investors are trying to understand if you have what it takes to be one of those top two, and if you don't if you'll die trying. A lot of this assessment focused on the market or your numbers, but sometimes the real question is about your ambition. So they are trying to answer a simple question: Do you WANT to create one of the leading companies in the industry? Focusing on the future and on the upside shows your will to power. It allows investors to gain a sense of that signal. If you're focused too early on profitability, rather than growth, or retaining your piece of the pie, as opposed to growing the pie as large as possible, that's an important signal. The point of this isn't to mislead investors into thinking that you're trying to do something that you're not, but rather, if you are shooting for something big, you have to really express that in the clearest way possible. The perspective is often directly reflected (and not) in the slide decks I review at a16z. Does the product slide describe the features of what the app has today, or does it talk about the product roadmap of what's going to be built in the future? Do they user projections or financial forecasts simply show the last year's performance, or does it tell a story about how the business is about to inflect? Oftentimes when founders are too conservative about their story it's hard for investors to understand what they're trying to do in the long run. Instead, I love it when founders tell the big story. Of course I'm going to discount it and round down, and assume that many features are never shipped. But I love to see it. Second, let's talk about employees. typically when you're hiring your first few employees, you might be able to give out a few percentage points each, particularly for key people (like engineers or designers). but within a few hires, you end up needing to convince people to work for below pay, and for a fraction of a percent of the company. Why would they do this? Why would they work for you instead of either starting their own company or getting a cushy gig somewhere else where they might be paid much more? The asymmetric advantage of startups compared to many other opportunities, is that they are adventurous and fun. The startup might fail, but the work is generally a lot more interesting than what you can do elsewhere. The responsibility and scope that a junior employee might have might go way beyond what makes sense at any other company. And of course financially there is upside. For founders to convince high-quality employees to join their outfit, it's often important to lean into a sense of adventure. What's more adventurous than tackling a big huge goal, that might not work, but if it works, it's going to be amazing? For founders to communicate the sense of adventure, they need to be able to weave a narrative. Maybe it's us versus them, or David and Goliath. Perhaps it's exploring the unknown, and going to the frontier when no one else is there. If you can't tell the stories, how can you expect people to follow you? Thus I find it important to tell the futuristic narrative that's ambitious, full of surprises and upside, and has a possibility of failure too. It makes the work meaningful and makes the potential economic upside worth something. We've talked about investors and employees, but there's actually a long tail of many other constituents that benefit from a futuristic outlook. if you're talking to journalists and pundits, you have to compete with thousands of other companies that they're going to meet this year, and you have to catch their attention. If you're marketing, an event at a conference adjacent to dozens of other events, you have to catch the eye of attendees. An optimistic, futuristic perspective gives you room to tell the story about the problem you're trying to solve, and why your startup will be incredibly important once you get there. You might say that the world is full of cynics. Perhaps you are from a region or an industry where most people nitpick all the reasons why fail. Maybe they want you to focus on minimizing downside risks, or acknowledging your potential problems, and won't treat you as credible unless you do. If that's your industry network or your social network, I urge to you to escape. Seek out those who share your optimism, and the same values and beliefs about the future. it's one of the reasons why the Bay Area has been such a powerhouse over the last few decades. Yes, there's knowledge and investors here, but more important is the culture. The last point I make is about yourself. You should talk about what you're working on in an optimistic way to help create meaning for yourself. For those of us who grew up in a generation that adored Steve Jobs, there's always been the goal to put a dent in the universe rather than to sell sugar water. Thinking about the future, and the upside of what you might be able to create, is a great way to give meaning to the nights and blood and tears that we put into our work. If you're simply working on a new product only because it's a good money-making opportunity, I guarantee that your sense of meaning will fade when times get tough. You'll ask yourself, why am I doing this? If you don't have a Northstar to guide you on an inevitably rocky, entrepreneurial journey, you'll inevitably get lost. That's when the FAANG job will seem really appealing. This is all about the pitch. Of course it's important to simultaneously hold in your mind all the truths about what you're working on. Maybe you don't actually have product market fit yet, or your marketing strategy. Perhaps your unit economics don't yet work, or your team has major gaps. If you're working on a new startup, likely, everything feels constantly broken, and everyone's maybe going to quit. You have to go and tackle all of those challenges with a clear mind -- while simultaneously keeping a futuristic spirit that motivated people to join you on your journey.

Why are Thiel fellows so successful relative to “30 under 30” people?

Here’s why it’s so dangerous to scale a product with questionable product/market fit: The Traction Treadmill It’ll kill your company. Let me explain why it happens.

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 worse? When a new product comes to market, usually the team will measure a baseline set of metrics around lifetime value, etc. if the numbers look good, they might say OK let’s roll out some incentives and get more users like this. Spreadsheets are built, budgets are planned, growth is forecasted, and the new growth project kicks off. The problem is, all of these forms of incentives usually end up attracting a different type of marginal user that wouldn’t have signed up earlier. They are less qualified, more discount seeking, and behave differently. There is negative selection. This is especially true when the product has been out there for a while and the core market has mostly been saturated. You also see significant amounts of fraud as users scheme to profit from the incentives. This could be a simple as creating a new account to grab an incentive or it could be something much more organized and nefarious. This is why core metrics like LTV and engagement can often be half as good or lower, which is often enough to defeat the mathematics that justified the program in the first place. The only solution is to make the customer acquisition natural rather than artificial. If users invite other users, because the product becomes better as a result, then acquisition will naturally happen. An example of this is at Dropbox, which pioneer many of the early referral programs around, giving and getting free space. By the time I was an advisor, a few years later, most of the growth had shifted towards people sharing folders with each other, the act of doing so provided to both parties. The referral program still existed, but had moved to become a small slice of the total pie. The ramifications of this are wide, especially on the world of web3, consumer apps that are gamified, etc. First, it tells you that if you take a game or an app that does not have inherent engagement and retention, it is not enough to add gaming mechanics. If anything, the new mechanics might make things worse, not better, as they attract a group of users who respond to the mechanics, but wouldn’t otherwise use the underlying product. I think we saw a lot of this in web3, where incentivized attracted speculators early on, but struggled to find fun gameplay to attain actual users. Similarly gamified consumer apps (the trad kind) might attract and sustain a certain type of user who is happy to engage in any gamified app, and who will quickly move on because the underlying app doesn’t engage either. Final story on this from Uber, funny enough the referral program on the driver side attracted very positively selected users. Whereas the rider referral program got discount seekers, the drivers were highly money motivated. Because they were so motivated and signed up for larger referral bounties, they actually performed better after sign up. Even though referrals was 15% of sign-up they were well over 30% of first trips. Incentives are a form of selection and you need to make sure you know what you’re selecting for.

WHY RETENTION IS SO HARD FOR NEW TECH PRODUCTS I’ve been staring at retention curve data for 15-plus years now. I was a founder, a product manager, and now a VC. And at Andreessen Horowitz, I end up meeting hundreds of startups each year, many of them through our a16z speedrun program, where we invest up to $1M in brand new startups. NOTE: And yes, we just announced the 2026 program and you can apply now: speedrun006.a16z.com/x But back to retention — I’ve seen thousands of curves, and it’s among the first things I ask for when evaluating a new startups. I've looked through thousands of data rooms, analyzed retention curves sliced across many segments and denominators. I've also seen it from the other side, as someone building products. I’ve run hundreds of A/B tests and drafted countless variations of onboarding and notification emails in attempts to bend the curve. There are patterns. Just as there’s the laws of physics, weirdly there are some constant patterns that keep cropping up over time. Here are a few that I’ll share: - You can’t fix bad retention. No, adding more notifications will not fix your retention curve. You can’t A/B test your way to good retention - Retention goes down, it doesn’t go up. And weirdly, it decays (oh, does it decay) at a predictable half life. Early retention predicts later retention. - Revenue retention expands, while usage retention shrinks. Good news: You lose people over over time, but the ones that remain sometimes spend more more money! - Retention is relative to your product category. There’s nature, and there’s nurture. Sorry, you’ll never make a hotel booking app a daily use product - Retention gets worse as users expand and grow. The best users are early and organic. The worst users come after that - Churn is asymmetric. It’s far easier to lose a user forever than to re-win them back - Retention is weirdly hard to measure. Seasonality is a real thing. New tests throw things off. Bugs happen. D365 is a real metric but you can’t wait - Crazy viral growth with shitty retention fails. We’ve run this experiment many many times already, across multiple platforms and categories - Great retention is magic. When you see it out in the wild, it’s amazing. We’ll dive into each of these. You can’t fix bad retention. You've seen this happen before: You spend months developing a new product, and then you launch it. Bad news hits. The initial retention stats come in, and it’s terrible. You're already months into the product development, and it's hard to turn back now. How do we improve retention? I know, let’s add notifications and remind people to come back. Let's add a bunch of new features. Maybe we can A/B test the landing page and increase conversion. I think we know how this ends. Unfortunately, it seems to be the case that when you have poorer retention, it's very, very hard to fix - nearly impossible. Yes, you might be able to make a marginal improvement. Let's say that your D1 retention is 40% and you'd like it to be 50%. This is great and potentially workable. If the D1 is 10% on the other hand, well, you probably just have built something that nobody wants, and all the local optimizations around A/B tests and notifications aren't actually enough to bend the curve enough for it to work. When there's been months of development and sunk cost, it's hard to not just give it a college try. But I think in many cases new products are better off pivoting right away. The type of pivot that fixes retention involves a complete new redesign of the app's home screen. If it looks like a feed, maybe it needs to be a structured step-by-step flow. If the product is about sharing, maybe it needs to be mostly about creating and saving. You might need to describe the product in a totally different way and position it against a different product. It needs to be a big pivot in many ways, the bigger the better, in order to have a chance at changing retention. Retention goes down, it doesn’t go up. Retention curves often follow very geometric curves that you see. For instance many curves I see resemble the following: Whatever the D1, it drops by 50% on D7. Whatever the D7, it drops by another 50% at D30. Months out you might end up at roughly zero, or if you’re lucky you might retain 10% overall. There’s just a predictable decay. What you never see is a curve that starts high, then goes low, then becomes high again. That’s not possible. In other words, if your early retention isn't incredibly good, then it means that your late retention also probably isn't any good. You need to start strong in order to end strong. There are some interesting exceptions to this rule that are worth calling out: - Some products are extremely hardcore (e.g. online poker). You might have relatively low retention, but those who stay are extremely sticky and spend a ton of money. It turns out that this can work. - A product that has network effects where new users might start out strong, then drift for a bit. But if the product (which might be a social network or a collaboration tool or something else that has network effects) is able to use more and more users to reactivate older users, you often see a small curve where retention comes up. This is a very rare type of situation but amazing when possible. Revenue retention expands, while usage retention shrinks. One of the best and most important dynamics with retention curves is that you can apply them to users, but then also revenue. Thus far, we've been talking about user retention, and unfortunately, it has the undesirable dynamic of always going down. Revenue retention on the other hand is really interesting because people often end up spending more money over time with you, at least the ones that remain. This is one of the biggest strengths of B2B SaaS products. Take a product like Slack. If you look at the user cohorts, what you'd likely find is that the retention curves go down just like any other product. Some people take to it, and some people don't. However, for the companies where people spend time adopting Slack, what happens is it will start to organically grow, and the amount of revenue you earn from that company starts to increase dramatically over time. The revenue retention curves start to grow rather than shrink. This is amazing, and unfortunately doesn’t apply to most consumer products. It’s one of the biggest ways in which B2B products have easier business model dynamics than consumer. The consumer version of this looks more like Amazon where you might have started by buying books and music and over time as the product grows in its capabilities you start to use it to buy more and more things. Because of that your LTV in the product is essentially unbounded. We also saw this at Uber as well where user cohorts would decay over time but the amount of money that people would spend initially on Uber rides to the airport would grow into rides to restaurants or for commuting purposes to work. So the user retention curves go down but the revenue retention curves go up. Retention is relative to your product category. I've written about this in the past on the concept of nature vs. nurture for retention. The reality is that there's just a natural use case for many products - for example with collaboration tools or coding apps, you might use them every day at work, capping your usage to 5 active days out of 7. Contrast that to something like a bug alert system - hopefully you don’t use it often! Same with consumer products, where people check news, messaging, and social apps daily, but generally don’t use medical reference guides frequently. Some apps have great retention but infrequent usage, like weather or banking apps. And some categories like gaming are highly addictive and frequent, but people usually quit after a few weeks of use once the content is played out. Nature vs. nurture is important because it tells you that many new products simply don't have a chance. If you're developing a travel app, but it's meant to be social, the reality is people don't travel that much. It'll be hard to create a product that sole mission is interaction with friends. Instead, it would be better to accept its infrequent nature and figure out how to monetize it better by owning part of the transaction or to have a more frequent use case like a restaurant and nightlife app like Yelp but also be able to use travel features as well. It's just hard to fight nature. You can only do so much. It's also for this reason that if you want to build a very, very high retention, high frequency app, you have to probably build within some of the categories that people are already identifying as core daily products. This means that most likely if your app is successful, it takes away from some other daily product. It's no wonder that my constant use of ChatGPT has dramatically diminished the number of Google searches that I do. Or that when I began to use Substack for reading and writing blogs that I stopped using many other kinds of social news software. Retention gets worse as users expand and grow. If you are lucky enough to build a product that experiences great retention, one of the natural things is simply to extrapolate all the behavior, monetization, and usage to a much broader market and assume that naturally you end up with a very, very big good number because you're multiplying a bunch of small good numbers together with a big one. The reality is that as you start to scale your user base, bad things start to happen. Let’s say you begin adding Android and international users and you acquire more customers using paid marketing and other channels — you'll quickly find that all of your metrics get worse. The reason is that the best users show up early. The ones that are the most highly monetizable, that have the highest intent, that are the most digital and plugged in, well, these guys tend to find your product early and start using it due to a recommendation from a friend. Later on, as you bring in new users from other sources, it's likely that your product just isn't as good for them. It could be as simple as building an iPhone app for college students in Western countries and simply getting worse metrics as you bring in Android users from emerging countries where the feature sets just don't quite work. Of course you can work to improve this over time, but I assure you it will never be the same. Instead, the question is: As you grow your users and they get worse and worse, are they still valuable and can you still operate your product profitably? And more importantly, are you able to hold on to that core highly valuable user base that came in early? No wonder these early users are often called The Golden Cohort. Churn is asymmetric. It's incredibly easy to churn users. In fact, most products churn 90% or more in the first 30 days. Simultaneously, it's incredibly hard to win back a user that's already quit. This is the core asymmetry around churn. In fact, it's so bad that it's often easier to simply try to acquire a new user rather than to try to get someone back. It's for this reason that life cycle marketing that involves trying to resurrect dormant users by sending them discounts or offers tends to be extremely painful and expensive. The version of this that often works is to get existing engaged users to resurrect somebody through the natural usage of the product. For example, if somebody at work tries a new project management tool and it doesn't stick, then you probably won't get them back by bombarding their emails with reminders of features. Instead, you try to get one of their coworkers to invite them back into the tool to work on a new project. That's what works. But again, insanely difficult and complex and is really only available to products that have network effects (i.e., sharing and collaboration). Retention is weirdly hard to measure. When people talk about retention, they tend to try to measure what happens in the first day, first week, and first month. But they'll rarely talk about what happens two years ahead. The reason is that when you're working on a product, you need a short enough time frame and a thing that's easy enough to measure that teams can make decisions about what is happening. As a result, although annual churn or long-term monetization is incredibly important, you tend not to measure it, instead focusing on what's right in front of you and what's easy. However, this approach has many problems. Unfortunately, many categories of products experience huge amounts of seasonality. Anything involving commerce, travel, wellness, or online dating are obvious examples. But there are cycles even to the way that companies use business software as well. Seasonality throws things off because you might be down month over month or quarter over quarter, but is that because of features that you launched? Or is it because user behavior is simply different in this quarter? It's just hard to measure retention when it's super laggy. Same with bugs or new tests that you're running or new market launches. These are all things that muck up the data, and you end up finding yourself reviewing reports where retention curves went up or down. But there's an asterisk on every number because they're trying to validate that the new Android launch didn't create an apples-to-oranges comparison. Crazy viral growth with shitty retention fails. Many folks working on new products find themselves very focused on signing up new users and not on retention at all. After all, if you just want to see a graph that goes up and to the right, why not simply ramp your top of funnel and show that you're growing quickly, raise a bunch of venture capital money, and then you can figure out the retention issue later. We're seeing this all the time right now in the industry when products have a crazy TikTok ramp because a creator pushed their app to millions of followers or because a launch video caused a bunch of revenue growth. Even though the usage and churn are not in a good place. The tech industry has already run this experiment many, many times. And the conclusion is the same: Highly viral products with shitty retention do not last because it's so hard to fix retention. Eventually, the user acquisition fades as the novelty factor goes away, and eventually you're left with shitty user acquisition and shitty retention, and what goes up must come down. We've seen this across many contexts. During the early social network phase, there were many products that used email address books to spam their way to growth, but drove users to bad products. Sometimes, if you could get them to sign up to some shitty ringtone annual subscription, you could try to monetize them and make some money along the way. It wasn't until Facebook, of course, with their UX innovations like The Feed and Real Names, that eventually created a product that was both highly viral and had very high retention. The same thing has happened in mobile apps as well, where you see big hits pop up sometimes caused by forced invitations via SMS, but again, if the products aren't sticky, the whole thing collapses quickly. Great retention is magic. You might read this whole essay and feel a little bit depressed. I know that sometimes it's hard to get things going. However, it's amazing when something really works. When you see a product out in the wild with a 50% D30 (I do once every couple years), it's just amazing. I've come to believe that these lightning-in-a-bottle products happen not because the builders had some incredibly systematic way to A/B test their way to great metrics or that they employed some kind of high-velocity iteration process that got them there, but simply that there's a little bit of magic that's required. This magic comes from a fresh insight about the market or customer needs, and while it might seem obvious in retrospect, it drives super high retention because this product is the first to figure it out. We can say this now about video conferencing software or disappearing photos or a magic AI that replies back to you about any topic. There's just a magic here that no amount of iteration and metrics-driven testing can get you to. The Big Question You might read all of this and still have a big question: So wait, how do you get to great retention? (If I knew the answer in a deterministic way, my job as a startup investor would be so much easier, wouldn’t it?) But let’s try our best. In my points above, there’s a few clues: The idea really matters. - If you want a high retention product, you need to pick a category that is high retention already. - You need to pick a product category where you already use an existing product every day. - You're going to build something that directly competes against that. - If you win, then you'll stop using that other product and use your product instead. - That's a high bar, but I think it's a good start. Of course, if you build something that's quite head-to-head with something that already exists, you might suitably object: "that's going to be really hard to switch somebody over." It is. So then this is where you need to decide to take enough market risk, but just the appropriate amount, where you do something new and different that reinvents that core interaction. But you're probably talking more about a 20% remix rather than an 80%. Ideally, you need to be able to describe this to your users in a way that they can understand quickly and viscerally within the first 60 seconds of usage. This is where the dreaded investor question "why now?" starts to matter quite a bit. Because what you're saying here is that ideally there's some kind of new development in the industry, whether that's a general-purpose technology like LLMs or a societal difference like the oversaturation of social media, that allows you to make this twist happen at exactly the right moment. This gets you into an existing market quickly, and you're more likely to have great retention numbers early on. Timing matters a lot. If you get the timing off, and it's a low-interest category, and your differentiation isn't different enough, then what you'll find is you've traded a retention problem for a user acquisition problem. Here's the difficulty with building a new kind of internet browser: if you win, it's incredibly sticky. But people are so happy with their existing browsers that it's very expensive and complex to get them to try yours in the first place. This is why I don’t blame folks who have a “Cursor for X” idea, or “Figma for X,” just like the “Uber for X” ideas of the past generation. They’re trying to piggy off some existing markets and behavior so that they don’t have to take crazy market risk. And if you get the differentiation right, the timing right, and there’s a ton of user demand, and you’ve nailed the right base product category, then I think it can really work. But what about new markets? The natural counterpoint is that new markets are often more exciting than existing ones. Isn't tech about building brand new things rather than innovating 20% on old stuff? Of course this is true, but I think this is the tiny tiny minority of products. My counterpoint to this counterpoint is that most products actually have some kind of prior lineage, even if those prior products are quickly forgotten. Before Instagram there was Hipstamatic, which had become the #1 paid photo app in the early App Store. It demonstrated the success of photo filters. Of course Google was not the first search engine, it was actually #10 or whatever, after Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, etc., which demonstrated consumers wanted search but that it was impossible to monetize. Tesla was not the first electric car, nor iPhone the first smartphone. Sometimes it’s the 10th iteration that matters. Some call this “last mover advantage” rather than first mover. I think an important point. Yet sometimes new things do happen. Uber was created to turn an existing offline action — calling a cab — into an app, not because there was already a hugely successful ridehailing app. (And no, not Lyft — it was a weird bus booking thing at the time). Of course a lot of ChatGPT, with OpenAI’s 5 year journey between inception and v3 which really took off, and without any real blueprints for what it might replace. These types of journeys are remarkable, and the tech industry is better off for it, because they involve real risk as part of new category creation.

What’s your biggest miss so far in tech? In terms of a totally wrong / bad prediction

My order of operations when I sit down with a startup to figure out how to grow their new product. 1) first, is it working? Usually the answer is no :) I look at retention rates, DAU/MAU, session lengths, how many visits are driven via push notifs, etc etc. Lots of benchmarking

New essay: Every marketing channel sucks right now (full thing on my newsletter, just subscribe via link in bio) These days I’m spending a lot of my time with very early stage startups (yes, as part of the program at a16z to invest up to $1M into each, called a16z speedrun -- speedrun.a16z.com) and as part of this, I spend a lot of time talking about launch and marketing strategy for new products. The options for marketing pretty grim right now. Here are my complaints: - SEO: Takes too long, you’re competing against listicles (and Reddit threads), Google might screw you over at any moment, maybe AI one boxing will kill your traffic next year anyway :( - Influencer marketing: Get a big spike of traffic but none of it converts, the spike goes away after a few days, big creators are too expensive and a slew of small creators need to be cobbled together, lots of babysitting :( - PR/comms: Doesn’t actually generate signups, doesn’t scale and not repeatable, expensive retainers for PR experts to grab coffee with journalists, your competitors will get the same article next month, and press is as likely to attack you as to cover you :( - Email marketing: hope you like spam folders, building a good list takes forever, open rate rates are <30% and CTRs are <5% so hope you weren’t expecting a lot of clicks - Viral loops: doh you need an actually great product, all the contacts spamming techniques no longer work (neither email nor SMS!), your UX will be ruined by aggressive popups and onboarding schemes, and it’s nearly impossible to get viral factor >1 - Referral/affiliate/etc: be ready for a crazy amount of fraud, it’s just as expensive as paid marketing (though people fool themselves into thinking it’s not paid), and surprisingly most people don’t care and will get fatigued quickly! :( - Big launch on social: it can only happen once, you’ll have to spam all your friends to share and over time they might come to resent you, the algo is always working against you, and it only lasts for a few hours :( I could keep going… but you get the picture! Unfortunately this is the state of growth marketing. A lot of channels are not working, or are slow, expensive, or one-time only. This is the natural end state for things, and maybe we’re in a bit of a lull due to the technology super cycle as we’re 15+ years into the mobile wave, we’ve had various kinds of paid ads for 20+ years, and so on. All of these aforementioned marketing channels are now fully mature. The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs, Redux This is the logical ecosystem-wide conclusion for the concept I wrote about many years back, The Law of Shitty Clickthoughs which inspired by the efficient market hypothesis. It said the following: "Over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty clickthrough rates." I encourage you to read the full essay if you haven’t, but the tldr; is that when marketing channels work, everyone jumps in on them, and they start to decay like crazy. Why do they decay? Because customers stop responding over time — they start ignoring things as the novelty wears off. The ROI also goes down, as all the intermediaries that charge you for access to their audiences jack up prices. The super slick self-serve, automated auction model for paid marketing offers many pros and cons, first that it lets you aggregate much larger audiences with simple tools, but by making it easier, of course you end up with a ton of competition that then drives up CAC. In other words, as a marketing channel scales and ages over time — and yes, we’ve had SEO as a concept for 25+ years now — consumer engagement goes down, costs go up, competition goes up, ROI drops like crazy. Big channels versus Little channels All the aforementioned marketing channels are what I describe as “Big Channels.” They have scale, can be moved using $ (or labor, which costs $). And if you’re a big successful company, you might be fine because you have a (hopefully) strong brand, you get a bunch of organic traffic from word of mouth, you (hopefully) have a successful product that can cross-sell into new products, etc. You can have badly performing Big Channels because it’s all blended into a longer LTV recovery period, more organic, and all the other advantages that successful companies have. But let’s talk startups, who have none of these positive dynamics? I want to lay out a few thoughts: Don’t focus on Big Channels, focus on Little Channels. first, you should just know that all the aforementioned big, mature channels will suck for you. These channels have mostly all been bid up by bigger companies, and they are mostly stale to consumers, and you don’t have the same LTV and financial strength as an established product. Instead, a new startup has to be asymmetrical — what you can do that they can’t? The natural solution points towards Little Channels, which are all the smaller marketing strategies that are tried in the early days and abandoned over time. Don’t worry about scaling. Let’s say you have a new product with only 100 active users. If your marketing campaign gets you +500 actives, you’re ecstatic. Gain a few hundred users inside an established company, and you should clean up your resume. Thus, little channels can work: Running mini events with cool speakers, organizing a Facebook group, going after a single college/company/town, emailing your ex-colleagues/friends to try a new thing — these can all help in the early days. You won’t have the competition, the response rates will be higher since you’re doing it all by hand, and you can always scale over time by moving onto the next channel. Novelty is in your favor. There are only so many ways to sell a big established product to customers. The “wow” moments have all been used, the value prop is already understood. The response rate on marketing declines as a result. But if you’re a new, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed product on the market, and you have a “wow” product that presents well in a hype video, then you can get a nice big spike when you launch. And maybe even a few more smaller ones over time. One-time is fine, repeatability is what you do later. A lot of marketing tactics that work in the early days only work once — like a social media launch — but that’s OK. If you can prove that a few unscalable tactics work, and it helps you gain momentum via funding/hiring/otherwise, then over time you’ll have more time to try additional strategies. Your product is brand new, so your marketing can be brand new as well. When you build a new product, it’s always smart to take advantage of the new tech wave, so that you can create something different than what’s existed before. You want to be building a mobile app in 2010, not a website, and you want to be building in AI now. But in the same way, you can use these new technologies on the marketing side too. What does AI allow you to do in marketing that previously couldn’t happen? Whether it’s rapidly creating personalized creative, or generating concepts faster, or creating an interactive bot — what can you do different than no one is doing, using the new tech? Take risks with your brand. You can attract people with your brand by being polarizing. Say “this product is not for you, it’s for these other cooler people.” Or hit competitors directly in the face, in your marketing. Be aggressive. These are things that long-term employees of the world’s trustworthy brands can’t do, because they are being protective, and managing the downside. You need to do everything you can to stand out, because being ignored is the worst outcome for any marketing tactic. The point is — yes, today’s marketing channels sucks, but that has everything to do with the level of competition and the rate of customer fatigue. So go innovate! Try reaching people in new ways, say novel things to people they haven’t yet heard, and if you have to trade off anything, just trade off scalability. (You can deal with that later once your product is successful even at a small scale) Product is (unfortunately) King So I have bad news: Your product actually has to be very good. I wish I lived in a world where you could have amazing marketing and growth strategies, have a shitty product, and you would win. Then marketers would run tech, and they do not. It’s the people visionaries that create the products that run tech, and that’s a good thing! The reason is that even if you do a ton of work to acquire a bunch of users, it won’t matter if they leak out of the DAU number. I’ve come to think of great marketing strategy as a multiplier effect on your inherent product quality. If you have a great product, you will multiply that into greatness. If you have a shitty product, you will multiply that into… well, you get it. I think we’re seeing this in the AI wave at the moment. You have great, highly novel products and when one startup makes a hype video, it just goes viral. They don’t know anything about funnels, A/B testing, CAC, etc. The product is just killer, and the output is highly marketable, and as a result social media really works well for them. A year from now, I think the novelty value will have faded a bit — we aren’t as impressed by the output of image generation models compared to when they first came out. If the novelty fades, as I predict, then in a few years we’ll need to really figure out how to market these products. (Sorry AI researchers, you’re going to have to learn marketing and sales!) Every marketing channel sucks, but it’s going to be OK This essay was not meant to be depressing, but rather to just call out the idea what we can all see — that most of the channels we work with are decades old, that the performance is teetering on an edge. Just as products are innovating by adopting new tech — AI, XR, web3, and so on — we in the marketing field need to innovate as well, by asking ourselves, where can I do something new with XYZ new tech? And it’s very clear that we should not copy incumbent products. They have too many features — try something smaller and more targeted. But the same is true in marketing. Don’t copy the established products and try to execute in Big Channels — instead, think asymmetrically. What can you do that they can’t, and going with small channels is always a great place to start.

We've hit the 1 year mark!!!! 🥳🥳🥳 A year ago, we raised GAMES FUND ONE, our first $660M fund focused on games. 25 investments and 10 new hires later, we’ve learned so much. To celebrate, I'm going to share some slides we used to raise the fund. Yes, even VCs have to pitch :)

👇🏼pro tip: switch NYT payment to PayPal, then cancel from the PayPal side.

1/ The Startup Brand Fallacy. Brand marketing is mostly useless for consumer startups. Startups build a great brand by being successful, finding product market fit and scaling traction, etc. But it’s not a real lever. Let’s not mix up correlation with causation!

🔥 My first book is dropping late 2021! THE COLD START PROBLEM - Five-part theory for products like Social networks, chat apps, marketplaces, workplace collab - Interviews w CEOs/teams: Slack, Clubhouse, Zoom, Twitch, Tinder, Reddit, Uber, Airbnb, PayPal coldstart.com/

1/ After 10+ years of publishing professional writing at andrewchen.co, I have a couple opinions on how to get your stuff read

The past generation of social apps won the market through a playbook: - building big networks with feeds for discovery - creating a followers/status competition for engagement - bringing together creators and audiences - monetizing with ads - supporting photo, text, video

Wow - unemployment rates for top-tier MBA programs Thoughts?

Every blog post / book on business processes — OKRs, hiring, PRDs, launching, etc., etc., almost need a label to describe the stage of co the ideas are for. The workflows that are effective in the big co stages are simply not appropriate for early stage startups with <10 ppl

Fascinating infographic: Top grossing media franchises of all time. Pokémon, Hello Kitty, Mickey Mouse, Star Wars, etc Observations: - most of the money has been made in merchandise and video games - so many Japanese brands! 5 out of the top 10 - many created in the past decade

OH: Clubhouse is the new Silicon Valley, not Miami or Austin 😂

Big news in my personal life! I’m so lucky to have @EmmaBWaldron and Fro (yes, she’s a shar-pei pug) in my life ❤️

Personal update: Today, I'm excited to be part of a16z's newest fund - a project that's taken years of teamwork to put together A16Z GAMES FUND ONE: A new $600M fund to build the future of games ... and we're dropping a hype vid. ... and blog: a16z.com/2022/05/18/games-fu… 🚀🚀🚀

My go-to interview question when talking to folks on growth teams: How would you 10x the growth of Product X? It's sort of an infinite depth question that really shows the expertise level of the person answering

New post: Announcing my first book, Clubhouse, and more. It’s 2021, and I’m back! andrewchen.co/first-book-202…

The “Dinner Party Asshole” 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 will turn red and blush with wild embarrassment. The reason is that a proper pitch includes many of your credentials, your achievements, the ways in which you and your team are highly unique, and we simply don’t talk like this at dinner parties. And yet this is exactly what you should do when you talk to investors, partners, customers, and potential employees. Be the dinner party jerk, pitch yourself hard. Don’t hold back. Your shyness and cordiality is not helping. I find that most founders tend to focus, primarily on describing their idea to the exclusion of everything else. I’ve heard thousands of “elevator pitches” and they generally focus on the idea and not the team, the market, differentiation, or anything else. And they downplay their achievements or omit them. Of course what you emphasize depends on your background. It’s often described that there are repeat founders and first time founders, but furthermore, there’s another axis, which is about obvious credentialing versus not. For first time founders that are starting a gaming company, for instance, but have already spent years at a top company in the field, a quick modification to the elevator pitch, mentioning that, is both beneficial and quite obvious. But what do you do, you’re an uncredentialed first time founder? Then the question becomes, what is your “earned secret“ behind the idea? Having a pithy story about how you were a Shopify seller, and that’s how you got to building any commerce product, is incredibly helpful. And if you have some metrics or an observation about the market that’s non-obvious, showing your expertise in the field, is even more valuable. If you have various credentials either professional, or academic or open source, achievements, it might be worth working those in even if not directly related. The other very awkward thing is to use facts and figures to describe yourself. If in your previous work, you worked on an app that served millions of people, or for your current company, you recently launched and got your first 10,000 users, you should save these numbers. Any traction and any validation is incredibly helpful proving your case. And of course, this is another thing that would make you a dinner party jerk. You might be going through a moment of introspection now and asking why am I like this? Why do I downplay achievements when I should be amping them up? My answer to this, is conformity. In real life, we often subconsciously conform to the people around us. If you go off at a friendly gathering about all the cool stuff you’ve done, and why you’re going to be great, there’s a fear that you’re exaggerating the differences between yourself and others. There’s a fun theory from evolutionary psychology that shyness is an evolved trait to keep us safe in a world where we grew up and tribes of a few hundred people, and a few wrong words might follow us around for our lifetimes. This is also my theory for why people are reluctant to engage on social media and share their knowledge, when it’s obvious that it might be very helpful to them professionally. TLDR; there’s pitch mode and dinner party mode. Learn to turn the former mode on!

Dear lazyweb, Reddit in its early days famously had fake users posting content to make it seem like there was more activity than there really was - as a means of solving the chicken and egg problem in building a network Know if any other examples like this?

Teams often use bad metrics to hype themselves up to investors, yes, but they also use them to lie to themselves. 👇 Thread.

What if zoom was the metaverse company all along?

The new battleground for startups targeting creators: "Link in bio" It's now some of the most valuable real estate in the digital world Whoever controls the link controls the business model for the new economy that's being built

Something big is happening at the intersection of tech and entertainment - of SF and LA From LA, you see celebs angel investing, and promoting tech And SF startups are actively courting creators, both mainstream and digital native, as the anchors in their new social products

who are the best new/early angel investors and seed funds?

Which funnels growth teams should be targeting, by stage: - seed: None - worry about P/M fit! - series A: Signup/Invite/sharing funnels - B: Activation funnel - C+: Monetization funnel - Big co: Reactivation and cross-sell flow to new products

There's a lot of hype around the "Creator Economy" but I actually find it limited in scope. Not everyone can/wants to make TikToks for a living or take pictures or plug brands. Not everyone is obsessed with social media like the folks reading this tweet -- yes, I'm talking you!

What is your least popular but deeply held opinion on personal productivity?

LAST CALL FOR A16Z SPEEDRUN 2026: you've got two options in life: 1/ build for yourself 2/ build for someone else (as a wise account once said). Those of you who have been following our work at a16z speedrun have been tracking us bc building for yourself, and betting on yourself, is the highest calling. It's the most fun, you learn the most, and there's a chance to build something great. this is why you should: - quit whatever it is you're doing - build the startup you've wanted to build - work with me and the a16z team 1:1 - And yes, I'll invest up to $1M via a16z speedrun (and the earlier your startup, the better. apply here: speedrun006.a16z.com/x) In fact we are entering the final 72 hours before the deadline Sunday Sep 28 2025, 11:59PM PST. the details: - easy/quick to apply - we wire immediately - up to $1M of investment - hosted at a16z HQ in SF SOMA - 12 week program, with an IRL kickoff - private dinners/Q&A with Marc/Ben of a16z - live events with the founders of Carta, Zynga, DoorDash, Behance, Airtable, Twilio, Figma, and more there's a lot more to the program that's on our website, and you can check out the FAQ for more. Some common questions that come up: - do you accept global founders? YES - do you accept solo founders? YES - do you need to be technical? NO - do I need a referral? NO in general, anyone can apply. But the ones that are selected need to stand out. If you don't have a cofounder, that's fine -- but have you recruited a few people to be a team? Do you have some customers? Those are all useful to demonstrate that you're serious, and you've been able to start the first steps of your journey by convincing other people to join you. Are you international? Great -- we'll help you with relo and O-1 visas. Not technical? That's fine, but then tell us the prototype you vibecoded, or the engineer you recruited. How we're different Sometimes we're asked how we designed speedrun to be different. There's a lot of ways: - we're part of a16z, a broader firm with a big network, lots of vertical expertise, and a long track record - we have a deep operating team, with experts from talent, people, BD, creators, marketing, and so on. We've invested big here and help - we host speedrun from a16z's offices in SF (for SR6), where you're part of our community of founders - we're the only multistage firm with a scaled effort to invest in the unique needs of early stage startups. We have a whole team on it and we're working hard! scouts and referrals You might have noticed a number of folks announcing themselves as scouts who invest in a16z speedrun companies. If you know them, great! Please reach out. They are often founders who have gone through the program, and they can give you tips, connect you to folks at speedrun with a warm intro, etc. Sometimes they invest, sometimes they don't :) just ask. In general, referrals are useful but not required. They are useful in that we get a lot of interest for speedrun and it often takes us a few weeks to work through everyone. (sorry!) Thus, if someone flags your startup to us, we can help prioritize and get to it earlier. But again, not required. The deadline Consider this your last call! The final deadline is Sunday 11:59PM PST. Apply to speedrun, we'll get back to you shortly, we wire ASAP, and then we kick off SR6 in SF in Jan 2026. Here's your chance to bet on yourself.

we're investing $30M over the next 30 days 🚀 I'll be co-hosting our new program kicking off in San Francisco, starting January 2025, alongside folks from the a16z SPEEDRUN team -- with speakers, personalized coaching, and a bunch of funding! Applications now open. Deadline at end of month, Sep 30. And yes, we're focused on brand new startups that are just getting going. We'll be hosting a variety of speakers and coaches, including folks like: - Mark Pincus, cofounder of Zynga - Spencer Rascoff, cofounder of Zillow - Sean Rad, cofounder of Tinder - Nikita Bier, cofounder of Gas - Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz - ... and much more How it'll work: - $750K Investment for each startup - 12-week program from 01/06 to 03/21 with IRL speakers, office hours, personalized coaching, and events - Demo Day in front of 500+ angels/investors - Applications are open from August 26th through September 30th, 2024 - Referrals appreciated. If a referred company is selected, we’ll send you custom speedrun swag What kinds of startups are we looking for? - b2b/infra startups focused on AI, 3D, game engines, etc - game studios focused on web3, VR, AI, discord, etc - gamified/playable apps -- the next gen of Duolingo, Tinder, etc, using fun mechanics to drive engagement - products at the intersection of gaming and health, defense, and other categories - smart teams figuring out their next idea! - ... and in general we're open minded!

Me: Why aren't there more @benthompson and @stratechery -like newsletters in the world, at that scale? Seems like a great gig. Friend: Don't you know there's a severe lack of really talented people in the world? Think about what that guy has to write every day!