Founder Musings

Four types of people that can drive or kill your company

Everyone within an organization at a given time can be bucketed into these four categories. What an organization does with them can drive the business forward or kill the business. Let’s start with the easy ones first…

#1 High Culture Fit — High Performance

This is what you wish your company was made of and a continual striving towards this nirvana. These types of people are the pace cars. They set the bar high in their performance as well as their behaviors. These people you want to make sure are happy, visible and are promoted. You want to constantly be identifying these high performers and make sure you are providing them with opportunities that will help them leapfrog in their career and professional aspirations. Not nurturing and promoting these people you run the risk of having the entire organization slow down. 
 
Recommendation: Nurture and promote, lest they leave you.

#2 Low Culture Fit — Low Performance

An organization is as strong as their weakest link. These people are best stopped before they enter the organization, but sometimes they get past your rigorous interview process. The best thing to do is get rid of them fast. And after you do that, do a de-brief on how this person was able to get hired by the organization. Learn from the mistake and improve its processes for the future. 
 
Recommendation: Get rid of these people — quickly.

#3 High Culture Fit — Low Performance

This person may not be performing well, but is a role model of behavior as well as culture. As a company, you want to hold a high standard of performance that makes everyone better, and the company will only be as strong as the weakest link. However, what is considered “weak”? Is it just performance? As an organization gets larger, weak, good or better must include a cultural or behavioral fit component. An organization cannot scale unless trust becomes built in, culture creates the foundation for that. What good is it to have a talented marketer (high performance), but never communicates his ideas or sabotages the work of everyone else (low cultural fit). Any organization of scale must include culture as part of its high performer definition.
 
Recommendation: Find a new home / role.

We usually found a new role that might have been a better fit. The thinking is usually if they are a culture fit, then they may not be in the best fit. This works better when the company is large enough to have more specialities. And it has worked for our company. However, one company called this a “leftover” problem where they found that finding a new role within the company never really worked for them. Either way they found that person a new home.

#4 Low Culture Fit — High Performance

This might be the most difficult situation of them all. Most advisors are at a loss in this situation and have told us this is a “tough call.” While it is tough, it is much better to get rid of this person, and the sooner, the better — especially if it is an executive. Otherwise, keeping them accumulates organizational and cultural debt. Usually cultural debt is likened to a cancer where it is slow growing and can eventually kill a company. However, a better ananlogy I heard is accumulating cultural debt is like dealing with bad breath, inititally it is a nuisance, but at some point being the receiving end just wants the person the bad breath to stop.

Accumulating cultural debt is like saying it is better to put up with bad breath than no breath.

Here is what happens: a leader begins to behave in ways not aligned with the culture. This signals to the rest of the organization, that his/her behavior is okay. Soon people start acting the same way: not sharing information, micromanaging, or sexually harassing others — creating an environment that high performers cannot do their very best.

The CEO must ask these things:
 
 a) How many high performers are you willing to lose over this person? More than likely this behavior is causing others to leave, you just want to make sure it’s not the high performers that leave because of the leader’s bad behavior. 
 
 b) Is this person in a mission critical role? If not, you can get rid of him or her quickly without damaging operations. If it is a mission critical role, be strategic on timing and come up with plans to fill the hole.

When it comes to behavior that is of morals, just remember that once the action comes to light, there is a portion of the organization that will be okay with certain behavior from a moral standpoint (the French president has a mistress) and others who will not be okay (Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky). The problem for the CEO is that she will not know which group the high performers are in.

And yes, companies have the right to (and should)hire and fire based off of company values, but it is not to discriminate against race, gender or creed.

Recommendation: Ask those questions, time box it, but eventually every high performaning organization gets rid of them. And you’ll feel better the faster you do it.

When dealing with low performers or toxic employees, I have never met a manager say, “I wish I really held onto that person longer”. It was always the opposite.

I am co-founder of Kabam a mobile gaming company that recently sold for sub $2 billion dollars. We grew Kabam to over 1500 employees with 6 offices worldwide. The thoughts here are my own and lessons I have learned. If you would like to reach out to me, please DM me on twitter @hollyhliu

A few weeks ago I was asked this question.

How do you build confidence?

This is a common question, and if you do a quick search you find results that are cosmetic: body posing, grooming, mindset changes. Those are absolutely needed, but it is situational. And it does do the very thing that helps you build confidence, but it doesn’t build confidence itself.

Confidence is absolutely important to living life and getting out of bed. But, deeper than that — confidence leads to courage. And courage leads to cataclysmic shifts in our world that leads to lasting impact.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

I used to think perfecting skill sets and “being good” at something is how you build confidence. But how do you get good if you have no confidence because you are not good? Let’s look to kids.

Kids are born not being good at anything. They can’t walk, sit up or even roll over. All new parents lose a lot of sleep just trying to comfort the child and make them feel happy. Many contraptions are created to simulate the baby being back in the womb and slowly get them familiar to this new world — so they can try things.

Kids only have instinct and emotion as tools. As a kid, many emotions are clear, simple and often binary. Kids are happy, sad, anxious or fearful. Happiness is an indication that they are comfortable. If they are comfortable, then they will continue doing it. As they continue doing it over and over again, then it becomes practice.

Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.- Malcolm Gladwell

If a person is practiced enough, two things happen:
a) They gain familiarity
b) They get better

…..which yields confidence.

Every person has a temperament that pre-disposes them to preferences. But that’s just the start. It doesn’t determine the end point. What is in between determines the end point.

The slope matters much more than where you begin or where you end.

Virtuous cycle of building confidence

Get well-practiced at trying at the fastest rate possible.

To increase confidence, set a personal goal activity and do the following steps to achieve confidence in that activity. This not only applies to people building confidence but also building confidence as a startup or company.

1. Get Familiar
   Create safety nets around the situation. For example, if you lack confidence in public speaking and have been asked to speak, get a photo of the stage, know what is surrounding you, will there be a podium? Is the mic hands free? etc… If you are running a company, before you start, research the market, talk to people in that market.
2. Try
   Walk out on stage and give that talk. If you are running a company, try many experiments , oftentimes unscalable in the beginning.
3. Get feedback
   As difficult as it is, review tapes of your talk. Have the organizer or a friend give feedback on items you have been practicing. If you are running a company, review the results of the experiments
4. Try Again
   Say “yes” to the next speaking opportunity so you can gain confidence. If you are running a company, create a framework to do multiple experiments.
5. Practice
   Once you found what works for you, practice practice practice. If you are running a company, this will build your core competency which will lead to your competitive advantage.

Don’t get comfortable with failing, get comfortable with trying.

HR, the complicit org

When I was first asked to take over HR by my co-founder and CEO, it was the furthest function in my mind. My original thoughts about the function were not very positive. I thought they were the police of the organization, and could not do much in impacting organization culture. My CEO convinced me that it was the place to build culture and he needed founder talent and someone he could trust.

I have no doubt that our HR department did phenomenal work in building building the culture for the organization; however, it was only because the CEO allowed me the space as a founder to help shape and build the culture. This is rare in any other organization that does not have founders at the top or at any org.

To this day, whenever I am asked if they should go to HR with a problem, I tell them not if you want the organization to know about it. Reality is that HR is there to represent the company, not fight for you — the employee. Their primary purpose is to reduce risk for the organization. And, only recently has HR been tasked or taken on help with employee effectiveness — at the request of the organization. Reducing risk comes in many forms: employee issues, compliance training, compensation leveling, promotion guidelines, performance reviews etc… — all of this is with the purpose of reducing risk for the organization.

HR departments in America operate under a dubious mandate: Keep workers engaged and happy, but make sure nobody sues the company. (Myth: HR is on your side.)

Sexual harassment complaints are a nightmare for HR, just as much as they are for the victim. Several times, I have had heard the story of a woman who does not want to quit her job but has no choice. And the only way to stop being harassed is to take herself out of the situation.

This does not mean do not make complaints, but it is often seen that HR is incompetent, but the HR is set up to do the bidding of the corporation, it is less incompetent and much more complicit to these issues.

Why competent HR could not save Uber

Many critics fault “incompetent” or bad HR at Uber for letting Susan Fowler’s complaints go unaddressed as well as perpetrating bad behavior. The proper response from HR would be to involve Legal and an investigation should have ensured.

So what if that did happen? If Legal were to find fault with the organization it is up to the business (not HR) to decide to take that risk and how to deal with the risk. If Legal were to find fault with the employee, it is up to the business (not HR) to decide what to do with the employee. HR can only advise. They cannot make hiring or firing decisions, that is up to the manager. They can advise and recommend, but cannot and are not accountable for hiring and firing — just the process around it.

So, if you find yourself frustrated with a nice empathetic HR organization that can’t get anything executed, or an incompetent HR organization that doesn’t listen to you — that’s because the HR org does not work on your behalf, it works on the company’s behalf.

At most companies, HR is an administrative department that has no real authority beyond our four walls. At our best, we are business partners and advisers. At our worst, we are babysitters and police officers.
 (Myth: HR is on your side.)

Even good HR could not have saved Uber (or any company for that matter). Uber failed to scale the people of its organization by continuing to allow bad behavior proliferate. Eventually this type of cultural debt that is rooted in morality and ethics will always disrupt the organization — you just won’t know if it disrupts the part with the high performers or not. By allowing the behavior to continue, HR is complicit.

Hiring HR won’t help stop VC sexual harassment

HR again shows up in the middle of another sexual harassment case within a kissing cousin industry to startups — the VC world. And finally, some traction to a long open complaint (7 years!) and open secret.

In Reid Hoffman’s call for the #Decency Pledge, the root of the lack of outrage is that

…the venture capital industry faces is that it lacks a good HR function that covers what happens between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.

Thus, on a structural level, venture capitalists unfortunately have no HR department to prevent predatory and inappropriate behavior, and so try to characterize (falsely) their actions as innocent flirtatiousness or banter.

Good HR will not fix the matter for two reasons:

(1) VC firms are too small to have HR. When an org is so small, no amount of HR can help. HR is a way to scale people. When the org is small, it is just a way to not work out people problems and blame someone else for poor behavior.

Also the VC community has too much at stake to self-police. It is currently only about 4% women, and therefore, it naturally tips in favor of men who currently tend to be transgressors in harassment cases.

(2) Good HR cannot fix bad behavior. In fact it might proliferate it. Imagine if Binary Capital had hired HR, they would have their hands busy with non-disparagement agreements trying to clean up his mess and make sure it did not get to the LPs.

The #Decency Pledge (*) has asked a pledge to stop sexual harassment through clearer communications, a reporting to their colleagues “appropriately”, and everyone (entrepreneurs and LPs) stop investing. This is an ideal state upon a power dynamic rooted in gender bias, unfortunately no amount of good HR can help with decency.

So, what can help?

Here are some ideas, for all the fixers in us, where the onus is not on HR. Mostly these are taken from female founder groups, and other great thinkers, like Ellen Pao or Brittany Laughlin, feel free to add more in the comments.

• Allow space to discuss. While a zero tolerance does raise the bar, but can put the onus on the victim to have even more to lose as Brittany points out. Oftentimes, it’s hard to find the language to talk about tough issues. Language has changed to use words such as “bias” rather than “racist” or “sexist”. The only choice is to report and have an investigation — binary policies.
• Game Theory + Tech. An app that uses game theory to reduce rape on college campuses. If two independent nodes report the same person, the system will file a report. In VC world like college world no formal authority or relationship is established until funding is received and even then the rules around this are murky. For Uber or any private organization, HR should be the Callisto.
• Commit to changing the landscape. Instead of a #decencypledge, many women have suggested an #equalitypledge. VCs should hire more women investment partners as well as commit to a certain percentage of portfolio dedicated to women founders. Capital is still the oxygen for any business and it should not be used to curry sexual favors.

(*) While the #Decency Pledge has rallied male allies, are they really allies?Women groups have reported that some male VCs who have signed the pledge are “the most sexist VCs they have met”. One must ask,could it be a way to offset and cover up their behavior?

I am co-founder of Kabam, a billion dollar mobile gaming company that recently exited. These views are my own and do not represent Kabam or any other organization.

The problem with paid acquisition and how to fix it

With the mobile world saturated, great product without thinking about marketing is a way to ensure no one will see your product and your company will not get built.

Acquiring users in the mobile space becomes one of the biggest challenges. Because everyone has a phone, you can’t NOT have a mobile app or some mobile solution to access your mail, social media, etc…

You will fight with everyone else to get on the device.

The noise to signal ratio is high. This forces companies to use paid acquisition as a strategy, but has proven the fastest way to burn cash and in many cases without the highest ROI.

Paid acquisition, especially when the business model monetizes your customers directly, becomes an effective and direct tool to ensure you are working towards an ROI.

While paid acquisition is a necessary evil, what makes it so dangerous — especially when a company solely relies on it? Here are the three largest problems with paid acquisition:

Will these customers be the biggest evangelists?

Most customers that are willing to pay within an app tend to be the most fervent of fans. While fans generally make the best evangelists, the earliest fans may not be.

They may be so ardent that they are so focused on how much the app fulfills their tastes and solutions. Telling others about their experience, may not be their top priority, but rather using the app to solve their issue will be their focus.

Monetary incentives only last so long

Daniel Pink, the author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, cited a study to where creatives were incentivized to create something. They found putting monetary rewards as an incentive caused them to take longer to find a solution to the problem:

Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind; that’s why they work in so many cases. So, for tasks like this, a narrow focus, where you just see the goal right there, zoom straight ahead to it, they work really well.

— Daniel Pink, The Puzzle of Motivation, Ted Talk 2009

Solutions that require creativity rely on other pieces of motivation such as mastery and autonomy. Solely incentivizing creative problems or tasks can lead to de-motivation in an odd way. One could argue this what happened to Vessel.

Vessel

Vessel was a video platform company that was created by Jason Kilar, former CEO and founder of Hulu. There should be no question that Kilar knew video content and how to distribute it. He paid YouTube stars gobs of money to come to their platform.

Their business model was then to make money by charging viewers for early access to the videos by the YouTube star. Sounds like a very logical and good plan — especially if you have gobs of money.

Unfortunately, frequently paying for content may be like paying for friends — when they money dries out, you find out if you have real content. This ultimately led to the selling of Vessel.

Arbitrage is ecosystem and platform dependent

Paid user acquisition is reliant on arbitrage opportunity and arbitrage for acquiring users is usually dependent on the ecosystem and platform.

Kabam Case Study

At Kabam we built our core competency around paid acquisition. This works well when platforms are emerging and growing. The users are cheap and you can calculate ROI easily.

This allowed us to achieve a competitive advantage within the platform markets — on both Facebook as well as mobile. In fact, our decreased reliance on virality helped accelerate our competencies in paid acquisition. We knew how to make it as efficient as possible without leaning into virality.

In many ways, this caused us to be the first Facebook gaming company to expand past Facebook — mainly because we did not depend on virality and its tactics of the platform.

As the platforms began to change and mature, very quickly being great at paid user acquisition was not enough. CPIs became too exorbitantly expensive.

To lower our user acquisition, we had started moving towards traditional methods of marketing such as PR or existing brands for leverage. It went full circle, and eventually, as with almost all mature platforms paid acquisition does not amount to much clear ROI and more influential measures (PR, WOM) becomes more and more impactful but hard to measure.

Like SEO — arbitrage is opportunistic and opportunistic things usually have a window that closes. This does not mean to not to take advantage of these opportunities as they come by. Take advantage and double down! It is cheap (hopefully quality) traffic because the platform is growing and it is the growth that will enable you to market as wide as possible. And in the end for consumer products:

Whoever wins the market, wins.

But to last in the market and to even change the market, a product and marketing strategy that relies solely on paid acquisition will have a very difficult time winning. And, eventually, economics will get the best of you.

It gets expensive

Paid user acquisition can and is incredibly expensive when the platforms are no longer growing. You should always be looking to drive your CAC (Customer Acquisition Costs) down. Over time, it will naturally rise given that you usually convert your most excited or best users first.

Solutions

1. Grow as organically as possible : WOM

The highest compliment is your referral

This is written on many real estate flyers. In cash constrained, small businesses not only do they rely on cheap forms of user acquisition but also require the testimonials. The type of customer that becomes a net promoter (someone who tells others about you) is much better than trying to convince as much as possible.

It is the same reason why people us a wing(wo)man or testimonials. It provides social proof “where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation”.

The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more the idea will be correct.

— Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

It also removes any ulterior motive a person tooting their own horn may have, causing the conversion to be more sincere. Thus, producing a higher quality user as a result of that net promoter. Furthermore, it reduces costs to zero and creates free marketing and evangelism!

2. Inherently viral , not necessarily network effects

Network effects are things that need a network or someone else to be effective. Classic examples of these are communication devices. Phones are useless unless there is someone else who has a phone to call. This truism has moved into messaging applications as well. A messaging app with no one to message with is useless to the user.

However, when more people have the device or the app, it becomes more and more useful; and people get upset when you do not have one or are not on the same app.

Therefore, expected growth for these applications should always be exponential due to the more people use it, the more configurations of communication that can happen between each app user (or within each node of the graph).

However, inherent virality is something different. Something that is inherently viral focuses on what is being shared rather than the platform. For example, if a parent takes a photo of their baby, they will want to share it with their partner, family or friends.

This is why baby photos, your baby photos are inherently viral — they are made to share. Combine the network effects of a social network like Facebook and the continuous uploads of personal photos; you have an inherent virtuous superhighway loop that reinforces each other.

Of course, as the network matures, these highways can be manipulated for bad — hence fake news or echo chambers.

3. Support paid acquisition — PR pushes, SEO , brand

Now given the maturity of the mobile app economy we have delved into the black arts of influencing. Just because the impact is more influential it does not mean you should not try to measure your channels to see what makes sense.

What you should do is not only measure what you can (using promo codes, time stamps, etc..), but you should also coordinate your influencing efforts with your paid acquisition efforts.

Coupled with your paid acquisition influencing work that supports it can create a halo effect that well timed can increase your reach much farther than paid acquisition can do.

Think of it this way: paid acquisition is great for highly targeted and growing platforms and is like starting a fire; however, adding fuel at the right time can grow the fire and help sustain it — like influencing marketing strategies.

Kabam was able to grow with the ascent of Facebook and later mobile markets. We grew through paid acquisitions on each platform. We know the bruises from moving a business that relied solely on paid acquisition to larger marketing strategy.

I am co-founder and Chief Development Officer at Kabam, which exited for close to $1 billion dollars.

How to climb the app charts

It was 2015. Hardly any new apps had seen movement to the top of the charts, but a new app called musical.ly got there with now over 100 million users.

What is even more amazing is a Chinese team created this app, and their entire market is in the US. How were they able to do this?

Below is based on a conversation between Josh Elman from Greylock Partners and Alex Zhu of musical.ly:

Make compelling content creation super simple

The whole idea behind musical.ly is to easily use music clips and allow users to put a video of themselves lip synching or dancing to the music clip. They focused their product in enabling content creation to be as simple as possible to be done in seconds — milliseconds. 
 
The secret beauty of their product is they helped make the user look better. Who doesn’t want to sing like Katie Perry? All they need to do is provide the dance moves. On top of that, the videos are inherently viral — just like baby videos, you want to share them.

If you make content creation super simple, then you can focus on the sharing and virality side — enabling the content to get out easily.

Exploit growth hacks

In the consumer world, many admired companies grew from being aggressive and some borderline unethical. Facebook famously obtained email lists from Harvard. LinkedIn built an aggressive email importer that caused many people to “spam” their contacts. However, if neither of them were aggressive, arguably, they would not have gotten to where they are today.

Two growth hacks musical.ly exploited were:

1. AppStore naming. They figured out that the AppStore search algorithm weighed the title a lot more than the actual keywords. So they had about a 20 word title with as many keywords as possible. Since then, this hack has been closed.
2. Attribution. They were finding out that people were sharing their lip synch videos on Instagram. It wasn’t until they put an attribution “@[handle] musical.ly” that they saw real growth.

Use the external zeitgeist

Lip Synch Battle. musical.ly also found that their search for the app was the highest after the popular show Lip Synch Battle. They used this to their advantage and put it in the title so people could find it. They used the popularity of the show to market the app and tied it into their app.

Instagram. musical.ly also used existing popular social media to distribute their content. They made it easy to share on the most popular platforms. Everyone wants to build a platform and “own the user”, meaning they want to be the Facebook of apps, but in the mobile consumer environment, it is hard to get the growth you need in the amount of time by not integrating with existing social platforms.

We learned this early on at Kabam when we were called Watercooler. We emailed a bunch of people: friends, family, and targeted leads; however, the most effective was when we went to Facebook.

If the users won’t come to you, go to where the users are.

Offer unique opportunities

How they grew was that they needed to offer something that could not be obtained in mature platforms.

They offered three things:

1. Dead simple content creation that did not require too much thought
2. The content creation made creators look good
3. An eco-system that allowed them to rise and be recognized in a way the mature platforms could not.

Alex likened it to attracting people from a developed country to move to a developing country. It is also a similar analogy of attracting people from the corporate world to the startup world. You must provide unique opportunities they could not get elsewhere.

This is exactly how America was founded. The first immigrants to America left Britain (a developed country) for America (a developing country). The main attraction was fleeing religious persecution, but persecution aside, many political and economic opportunities compared to their status back home.

Bonus: Coordinate spend and marketing efforts

This was not done at musical.ly but something that the gaming industry has pushed forward , which is coordinating spend and marketing efforts.

Because of the difficulties of getting users or discover for your mobile app, it is expensive, and usually, you get very few shots. Make the few shots count. Therefore, many gaming companies will make a three-pronged approach: spend money on marketing, PR push and any offline events they can work around — it could be an event that ties into theirs.

Finding symbiotic events, partners and synergies is always better than trying to do it alone. It’s always better to tack your marketing activities with other events happening in the zeitgeist. Much like musical.ly did with Lip Synch Battle and what Kabam does with the Marvel movies and their game Marvel: Contest of Champions. It’s a missed opportunity that could have you trying to sell ice cream during the winter.

Remember when it comes to distribution — use the buddy system.

While growth of a mobile consumer app is incredibly challenging to find growth in the mature mobile markets, musical.ly found away through these simple steps. Simple, but extremely difficult.

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I am the co-founder and Chief Development Officer of Kabam, these perspectives are my own and do not necessarily represent Kabam.

Read a little closer — and saw the word “never”. I am assuming you are talking about either a life or death situation like an AED or a fully automated situation. If there is any human contact you need to think about usability when it is task oriented and do not care about stickiness in that case. For a fully automated solution — the tech should be so good the user doesn’t need to engage and hence the stickiness is how good the tech is — that it just works is sticky enough. Hope both responses help!

Lessons learned in going from $0 to $26 billion from LinkedIn Reid Hoffman

The legendary founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman shared some pearls of wisdom with an audience of founders and product managers. Here are some pearls of wisdom in building awesomeness…

Product Distribution first, then product definition

One of the biggest failures with SocialNet was that they didn’t have a distribution strategy nor a focused vertical. They spent a week doing a PR blitz and only received about 6 users. They could have better spent their time just going into a phone book (remember those?) and calling users asking them to sign up. Their time at Paypal taught them it was much better to give $5 to the user to acquire new users than spend $45 on acquiring a user through advertising.

Product distribution strategy is even more important than the product itself.

Therefore, when starting LinkedIn they thought hard on how they would distribute and acquire users. They did this by focusing on contacts within a vertical (professional networking). The vertical allows context, and the contacts allows for the network effects. Then they lowered this friction as much as possible — with the import of the address book (remember those?).

In consumer markets, how companies win is via a distribution strategy that has a market advantage

In the early days at LinkedIn, the mantra was GUR (Growth, Usage and Revenue). Focusing first on growth enabled them to build the key engagement metrics that they felt would be incredibly useful to users on LinkedIn. Until LinkedIn got to about a million users, the key features would not kick in, so first growth. Start with a hypothesis on markets first, and build a product that will best map to that theory. Then you can focus on the key engagement features of your product. If you do not have a theory or strategy on how you are going to distribute your product or acquire users, you are flying blind.

If nobody can see your work, it’s not great work.

Fundamental strategy in a startup is a financing strategy

The basis for any startup is how it is financed. You should always be thinking about how to finance your company. It is the basis of the existence of your company and will drive will how early you focus on revenue and monetization. But if you can finance without making revenue, you should do that 😉

There are two types of pitches: one based on data and the other that is based on concept. Often entrepreneurs mix up the two, and this deeply affects valuation. When pitching, be very clear on which pitch it is based on and tell the story that way, or else the supporting stories get too muddled. See LinkedIn Series B pitch.

Org hierarchy is for coordinating and decision making

As LinkedIn grew, he spent at least 40 hours with Jeff Weiner before talking about him possibly taking over the job as CEO. Most of the time was talking about agreements and meeting of minds.

Organization hierarchy mainly exists for coordinating and for decision making / resolution. As long as Reid could still influence the ecosystem without disrupting the purpose of the hierarchy there was no need for him to be a part of the org structure within the organization. And he still has an office at LinkedIn right next to Jeff.

Having a founder as deeply as involved as Reid in the product still be a part of the Board as Chairman enables him to continue to influence the core and soul of the organization, but letting Jeff run the company and product.

Crux of M&A

Going from 0 users and $0 to IPO to a $26 billion M&A exit is not a common journey.

In considering M&A Reid always had a reserve price set in his head for his investors and shareholders as his fiduciary responsibility.

But, the crux was whether or not the activity would be in service to the mission of LinkedIn.

When the opportunity came up for the M&A, he thought about how Microsoft was looking to make offices more productive and it made a lot of sense to partner with the mission of helping people professionally more productive and successful. It felt that the mission could be achieved better together than as a public standalone company.

LinkedIn’s Mission: To connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.

Thank you Greylock Partners and Josh Elman, for bringing together amazing builders from across the Bay Area to share what they are learning and have learned.

You can learn why posting on mobile at 6:30 PM is a good time via twitter hashtag #productsf

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I am the co-founder and Chief Development Officer of Kabam, these perspectives are my own and do not necessarily represent Kabam.

That is true amount of growth depends on markets. But in consumer markets it is true that market dominance plays a large factor in who wins as it is much closer to “winner take all”. Enterprise seemingly is less so and does not necessarily need growth or engagement to win — just renewals.

Maha Ibrahim — Investor and Partner @Canaan Ventures

Do this one thing to make your product sticky

One question I often get asked often is this…

How can I make my product as sticky as a game?

People know that games fall into the realm of entertainment. Therefore, people choose to be glued to their screens and even pay money to complete tasks and quests. Oh, wouldn’t it be great if they did that for your fitness app, your social networking app, homework app, your messaging app, your live streaming app, etc.? Yes, of course! However, the approaches to designing games and designing apps are incredibly different. But, they need not be — especially the parts that make it sticky.
 
Often, many people think that it’s a tactic of leaderboards, badges and points (which is called gamification) that make a game so sticky. But it’s not. Almost all games have this, but only a small percentage of games succeed. So would it be so easy to slap on leaderboards, badges and points and make your product magically sticky? Of course not.

A great game is so much more than just points, badges and leaderboards.

As a product designer for non-entertainment apps, the designer thinks of the interface and experience regarding features and tasks.

Sometimes, these features can be built in silos and separate teams from one another. The features can be released at different times, and sometimes never impact each other. Therefore, they can be bolted on without affecting one another. You can see most of the product requirements document (PRD) within the interface tab or navigation structure.
 
However, for a game designer, it is different. For the game designer, she thinks about the game in regarding story and loops.

Often, you will hear game designers talk about the “core loop”. A core loop is the basic action of the game that people do over and over and is the “main event” of the game. For a fighting game, it is the “fighting”, for a puzzle game, it is “solving”, for an RPG game, it is “your character” and so on and so forth. The game designer works on that core loop to be as fun and as engaging as possible. Then, the game designer builds around the core loop much similar to co-centric circles.Without the core loop, the game has no heart or soul; it is dead.

From there, the game designer makes this core loop a part of a habit, which if successful, turns into a daily habit. In our flagship game Kingdoms of Camelot, a strategy based empire building game, “building” was the core loop. The game required the player to build its resources, which allowed you to build a kingdom and ultimately build your army so you can attack other empires and grow your empire.

When I began to play, the core loop of building began to control my life. I had set my alarm to wake up in the middle of the night so that when a building had finished constructing, I could construct another building and use the next 3 hours to sleep soundly, knowing my kingdom was building every hour I was asleep.

Eventually, this game became a daily ritual in which I did three things in the morning and the afternoon: collect/harvest my resources, train my troops, and build my kingdom.

Think about the core of your product. What is it? Is it micro-blogging? Is it posting? Is it live streaming? Whatever it is, make that feature really, really, really awesome and core to your product. 
 
 Next, build a daily ritual of three habits from that. This forms a sticky daily ritual that translates into a sticky product.
 
Facebook is a great example of this. Their vision is to connect the world. Their core feature is the newsfeed. Every morning I have a daily ritual of checking my newsfeed.

My ritual comprises of:
 1) Checking notifications if there are any new ones (red indicator)
 2) If not, I scroll through my newsfeed
 3) Like/comment on anything interesting. 
 
 These three habits make up my daily ritual with Facebook. Other people may do those things in a different order or check something else first, but I’m sure it revolves around the newsfeed.

So, to make your product sticky…

• Find your core function and work on that really, really well
• Make at least 3 daily habits that the user can do around the core

These three habits become a daily ritual, and in this daily ritual, the user becomes the center of your product experience.

And, only good things can come from that.

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I am the co-founder and Chief Development Officer of Kabam, these perspectives are my own and do not necessarily represent Kabam.