App Launching Quotes

Our culture today confuses great attention with great success, assuming them to be the same thing, but they are not. You are great, already. Whether you realize it or not. Whether anybody else realizes it or not. And it's not because you launched an iPhone app, or finished school a year early, or bought yourself a sweet ass boat. These things do not define greatness. You are already great because in the face of endless confusion and certain death, you continue to choose what to give a fuck about and what not to.

If we get lost, I enlist the GPS, which has the whitest voice of all. Chanel supplants it with her own impoverished GPS, reengineering each set of directions into phrases like 'Yo bitch, I said hang a right on Roosevelt" or " AH shit, you missed it again, now we gotta reroute this motherfucker. " She wants to launch an app called Hood GPS , to spare drivers from the robotic white voices in their ears.

Resist your initial impulse to immediately jump to social media websites to launch your project. Instead, start with the network you already have (and that already trusts you).

I bring up the Utility panel on the main screen and launch the calculator app. Something 217 meters away is occupying 35.44 degrees of the view. Presuming the radar can see in all 360 degrees (it would be a pretty cruddy radar if it couldn’t)…I type some numbers into the calculator to do an ARCTAN operation, and: The ship is 139 meters long. Roughly. I bring the Astrophage panel up on another screen.

Shifting to an outcome mindset is harder than it looks. We spend most of our time talking about outputs. So, it’s not surprising that we tend to confuse the two. Even when teams intend to choose an outcome, they often fall into the trap of selecting an output. I see teams set their outcome as “Launch an Android app” instead of “Increase mobile engagement” or “Get to feature parity on the new tech stack” instead of “Transition customer to the new tech stack.

In 2013, Alibaba’s money fund Yu’e Bao (“leftover treasure”) was launched and marketed to users of Alipay. They then expanded into banking in 2015, launching MyBank during the summer and, in an audacious move, opened their bank capabilities to other Chinese banks through an open marketplace of apps and APIs.

Mark Pincus smelled the social-game opportunity first. He was the guy who, with Reid Hoffman, had been part of the angel investment that, in his words, was like winning lotto. In late 2006, Matt Cohler tipped him off that Facebook was going to launch a platform and was looking for entrepreneurs to come up with apps. We don’t want any money from you, he told Pincus. Just build cool stuff and we’ll expose you to our traffic.

Bitcoin is a dumb network supporting really smart devices, and that is an incredibly powerful concept because bitcoin pushes all of the intelligence to the edge. It doesn’t care if the bitcoin address is the address of a multimillionaire, the address of a central bank, the address of a smart contract, the address of a device, or the address of a human. It doesn’t know. It doesn’t care if the transaction is carrying lots of money or not much money at all. It doesn’t care if the address is in Kuala Lumpur or downtown New York. It doesn’t know, it doesn’t care.​ It moves money from one address to another based on a simple locking script. And that means that if you want to build a new application on top of bitcoin, you can upgrade the devices and you can build an application. You don’t need to ask for anyone’s permission to innovate. ​ ​Write the app, launch it on your endpoint, and bitcoin will route it, because bitcoin is a dumb network. That is the power of innovation on the internet. It’s innovation without permission. It’s innovation without central approval. It’s innovation without a broad network upgrade. And that means bitcoin is not a specific financial network. It’s not a financial network for large transactions or small transactions, fast transactions or slow transactions. It’s whatever you want to use it for, based upon what you choose to do at the endpoint.

Noer was reading a science fiction novel on his iPad while staying at a dairy farm in a rural area north of Bogotá, Colombia, when a poor six-year-old boy who cleaned the stables came up to him. Curious, Noer handed him the device. With no instruction, and never having seen a computer before, the boy started using it intuitively. He began swiping the screen, launching apps, playing a pinball game. “Steve Jobs has designed a powerful computer that an illiterate six-year-old can use without instruction,” Noer wrote. “If that isn’t magical, I don’t know what is.

You are great. Already. Whether you realize it or not. Whether anybody else realizes it or not. And it’s not because you launched an iPhone app, or finished school a year early, or bought yourself a sweet-ass boat. These things do not define greatness. You are already great because in the face of endless confusion and certain death, you continue to choose what to give a fuck about and what not to. This mere fact, this simple optioning for your own values in life, already makes you beautiful, already makes you successful, and already makes you loved. Even if you don’t realize it. Even if you’re sleeping in a gutter and starving.

Jobs was stirred by a story, which he forwarded to me, by Michael Noer on Forbes.com. Noer was reading a science fiction novel on his iPad while staying at a dairy farm in a rural area north of Bogotá, Colombia, when a poor six-year-old boy who cleaned the stables came up to him. Curious, Noer handed him the device. With no instruction, and never having seen a computer before, the boy started using it intuitively. He began swiping the screen, launching apps, playing a pinball game. “Steve Jobs has designed a powerful computer that an illiterate six-year-old can use without instruction,” Noer wrote. “If that isn’t magical, I don’t know what

John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist who backed Netscape, Google, and Amazon, doesn’t remember the exact day anymore; all he remembers is that it was shortly before Steve Jobs took the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on January 9, 2007, to announce that Apple had reinvented the mobile phone. Doerr will never forget, though, the moment he first laid eyes on that phone. He and Jobs, his friend and neighbor, were watching a soccer match that Jobs’s daughter was playing in at a school near their homes in Palo Alto. As play dragged on, Jobs told Doerr that he wanted to show him something. “Steve reached into the top pocket of his jeans and pulled out the first iPhone,” Doerr recalled for me, “and he said, ‘John, this device nearly broke the company. It is the hardest thing we’ve ever done.’ So I asked for the specs. Steve said that it had five radios in different bands, it had so much processing power, so much RAM [random access memory], and so many gigabits of flash memory. I had never heard of so much flash memory in such a small device. He also said it had no buttons—it would use software to do everything—and that in one device ‘we will have the world’s best media player, world’s best telephone, and world’s best way to get to the Web—all three in one.’” Doerr immediately volunteered to start a fund that would support creation of applications for this device by third-party developers, but Jobs wasn’t interested at the time. He didn’t want outsiders messing with his elegant phone. Apple would do the apps. A year later, though, he changed his mind; that fund was launched, and the mobile phone app industry exploded. The moment that Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone turns out to have been a pivotal junction in the history of technology—and the world.

Patrick Vlaskovits, who was part of the initial conversation that the term “growth hacker” came out of, put it well: “The more innovative your product is, the more likely you will have to find new and novel ways to get at your customers.”12 For example: 1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads like a virus (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population). 5. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 6. You can absolutely dominate the App Store because your product provides totally new features that everyone is dying for (which is what Instagram did—twenty-five thousand downloads on its first day—and later Snapchat). 7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated). 8. You can set up a special sub-domain on your e-commerce site where a percentage of every purchase users make goes to a charity of their choice (which is what Amazon did with Smile.Amazon.com this year to great success, proving that even a successful company can find little growth hacks). 9. You can try to name a Planned Parenthood clinic after your client or pay D-list celebrities to say offensive things about themselves to get all sorts of publicity that promotes your book (OK, those stunts were mine).

Kiip’s move comes at a time when more and more data on people’s actions is becoming available as wearable devices, Internet-connected home automation equipment, and cars with integrated data connections head to market. Those new data streams could form the basis for many new services and products, but they also bring new privacy concerns. Ads tailored to driving behavior will be possible thanks to a partnership between Kiip and fellow startup Mojio. It expects to launch a $149 device this summer that plugs into a car’s diagnostic port and streams vehicle data to a smartphone app to help users track their driving, their fuel economy, and their vehicle’s maintenance status. Kiip will use data from that device to target promotions inside the Mojio app.

The foundation of your greatness is in your head. Your brain is the most sophisticated computer there is. Its ten billion parts can store the equivalent of one hundred trillion words. It would take dozens of buildings to house computers capable of containing that much information. You have the potential to become a gifted genius, because you were born with the equivalent of a Pentium 10000 processor with hundreds of “cores” and millions of gigabytes of memory. However, like any powerful computer, your brain requires to be turned on and programed properly! Any computer today has more capacity and processing power than all the computers used by NASA to send rockets to the moon. However, you cannot launch rockets from your iPhone (or your Galaxy!) because you don’t have the necessary software (and hopefully nor the rockets...) However, with the right apps, you COULD! It is the same with that amazing computer in your head: You have to turn it on, and then upload the right programs or apps that will allow you to develop your potential and achieve everything you set out to do in life.

LEADERSHIP | Intuit’s CEO on Building a Design-Driven Company Brad Smith | 222 words Although 46 similar products were on the market when Intuit launched Quicken, in 1983, it immediately became the market leader in personal finance software and has held that position for three decades. That’s because Quicken was so well designed that using it is intuitive. But by the time Smith became CEO, in 2008, the company had become overly focused on adding incremental features that delivered ease of use but not delight. What was missing was an emotional connection with customers. He and his team set out to integrate design thinking into every part of Intuit. They changed the layout of the office, reduced the number of cubes, and added more collaboration spaces and places for impromptu work. They increased the number of designers by nearly 600% and now hold quarterly design conferences. They bring in people who have created exceptionally designed products, such as the Nest thermostat and the Kayak travel website, to share insights with Intuit employees. The company acquired one start-up, called Mint, and collaborates with another, called ZenPayroll, to improve customer experience. Although most people don’t think of financial software as a category driven by emotion or design, Smith writes, Intuit’s D4D (“design for delight”) program has paid off. For example, its SnapTax app, inspired by consumers’ migration to smartphones, led one user to write, “I want this app to have my babies.

1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads like a virus (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population). 5. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 6. You can absolutely dominate the App Store because your product provides totally new features that everyone is dying for (which is what Instagram did—twenty-five thousand downloads on its first day—and later Snapchat). 7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated). 8. You can set up a special sub-domain on your e-commerce site where a percentage of every purchase users make goes to a charity of their choice (which is what Amazon did with Smile.Amazon.com this year to great success, proving that even a successful company can find little growth hacks).

The study, by a research firm called Localytics, looked at the use of five hundred news apps between July of 2012 and July of 2013. It found that people were spending 26 percent less time in each session. At the same time, it found that people were launching their news apps 39 percent more each month. It’s important not to read too much into one study. But the research points to a very interesting dynamic: The reason people are spending less time in each app session isn’t because their interest in news is declining. After all, people are launching news apps more and more often. They like and want news. They just don’t have the patience to spend much time with it.

If the tech-philosophers who write think-pieces about their lifestyle and productivity hacks were ever forced to really consider how they live, why they do the things they do, why they’re trying to achieve ‘passive incomes,’ I bet we’d have a lot of twenty-somethings running around, confused, their startups abandoned, their half-finished apps in programming purgatory. Millions of logo t-shirts would go unprinted, thousands of launch parties would remain unthrown.

You are great. Already. Whether you realize it or not. Whether anybody else realizes it or not. And it’s not because you launched an iPhone app, or finished school a year early, or bought yourself a sweet-ass boat. These things do not define greatness.

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The trainers at Uberversity, where new employees underwent a three-day initiation, began schooling everyone on this scenario: a rival company is launching a carpooling service in four weeks. It’s impossible for Uber to beat them to market with a reliable carpool service of its own. What should the company do? The correct answer at Uberversity—and what Uber actually did when it learned about Lyft Line—was “Rig up a makeshift solution that we pretend is totally ready to go so we can beat the competitor to market.” (Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm where I work, invested in Lyft and I am on its board, so I was keenly aware of the dynamic between the companies—and I am decidedly biased.) Those, including the company’s legal team, who proposed taking the time to come up with a workable product, one far better than Uber Pool 1.0, were told “That’s not the Uber way.” The underlying message was clear: if the choice is integrity or winning, at Uber we do whatever we have to do to win. This competitiveness issue also came up when Uber began to challenge Didi Chuxing, the Chinese market leader in ride-sharing. To counter Uber, Didi employed very aggressive techniques including hacking Uber’s app to send it fake riders. The Chinese law on the tactic wasn’t entirely clear. The Chinese branch of Uber countered by hacking Didi right back. Uber then brought those techniques home to the United States by hacking Lyft with a program known as Hell, which inserted fake riders into Lyft’s system while simultaneously funneling Uber the information it needed to recruit Lyft drivers. Did Kalanick instruct his subordinates to employ these measures, which were at best anticompetitive and at worst arguably illegal? It’s difficult to say, but the point is that he didn’t have to—he had already programmed the culture that engendered those measures.

Our culture today confuses great attention and great success, assuming them to be the same thing. But they are not. You are great. Already. Whether you realize it or not. Whether anybody else realizes it or not. And it’s not because you launched an iPhone app, or finished school a year early, or bought yourself a sweet-ass boat. These things do not define greatness.

Walmart launched its own scan-and-pay app within WeChat mini-programs

Ethereum’s network with its underlying blockchain went live on July 30, 2015. While much development energy had gone into creating the Ethereum software, this was the first time that miners could get involved because there was finally a blockchain for them to support. Prior to this launch, Ethereum was quite literally suspended in the ether. Now, Ethereum’s decentralization platform was open for business, serving as the hardware and software base for decentralized applications (dApps). These dApps can be thought of as complex smart contracts, and could be created by developers independent of the core Ethereum team, providing leverage to the reach of the technology.

Since the launch of Ethereum, a near endless stream of dApps have been released to run on it, many of which have their own native unit. We refer to many of these dApp native units as cryptotokens, while others refer to them as appcoins. A dApp with its own native cryptotoken will use ether as a cryptocommodity to pay the Ethereum network to process certain dApp transactions. While many dApps use a cryptotoken, the native units of some dApps should be classified as a cryptocommodity layered on top of Ethereum,

Yonomi   Yonomi rules are called "routines". I really like the user interface on the Yonomi app. As Yonomi is dedicated to automation on smart devices, they propose some specific services. When you signup, you can launch a discovery of your devices. It is way easier than checking each device available on the Yonomi platform to see if there is one you own. One of the other advantages of Yonomi was the ability to have several actions linked to one trigger but IFTTT recently did an update to propose the same features. Yonomi will have a simpler way to trigger routines than IFTTT. Because they have an Alexa skill, they let you use queries such as "Alexa, turn on [routines name]" or "Alexa, turn off [routines name]" which feels more natural than the trigger keyword from IFTTT.

Activists have not been passive. For decades, we have tried every tactic to shift the course of our governments. We have voted, written editorials and manifestos, donated money, held signs, protests in marches, blocked streets, shared links, signed petitions, held workshops, knitted scarves, learn to farm, turned off the television, programmed apps, engaged in direct action, committed vandalism, launched legal challenges against pipelines . . . and occupied the financial districts. All this has been for naught. A new approach to activism and a new kind of protest are desperately needed.

One of the masters of trendspotting is Rohit Bhargava, author of Non-Obvious. He curates the biggest trends each year and packages them up into a book. Then he explains how people and businesses can take advantage of these trends to improve their position in the marketplace. Thinking deliberately about trends is a secret sauce for most successful hustlers, because it creates an unfair advantage. When Evan Spiegel built Snapchat, he was capitalizing on a trend. He saw people using Facebook and their phones to share photos, but noticed they felt inhibited by the fact that the images were either permanent, or public. By reversing those two elements―making image-sharing ephemeral and private, he solved a big problem. Snapchat exploded across the younger demographics and quickly became a multibillion-dollar business. Another example is Kik, a popular messaging app. When Kik launched, plenty of messaging services already existed. In fact, the ultimate messaging services seemed to be the ones already  built into everyone's phones. Apple had a messaging app, and so did Android. So, why reinvent the wheel? Ted Livingston, the founder of Kik, had other ideas. Why? Because he had identified a trend. Consumers were clearly upset with the built-in messaging services. First, the telecom companies were charging per message sent and received, which was a horrible experience. It felt like classic, capitalistic highway robbery. Second―and this was a big problem for teens: You could only exchange messages by giving out your phone number. Livingston noticed that teens wanted to chat with other people they met online, but had no safe way of doing that without giving out their number. So he created Kik, which allows people to create a username instead. Kiksters can then share their username to start chatting, while keeping their digits private. But even better, messaging is unlimited, and completely free. By examining the trends happening in the messaging market, Livingston was able to build a product that rivaled the multi-billion dollar incumbents. Now his company is valued at over a billion.   

Noah Kagan went to UC Berkeley and graduated with degrees in Business and Economics. He worked at Intel for a short stint, and then found himself at Facebook, as employee #30. You’d think this is where the story would get really good: Noah went on to become the head of product and is now worth 10 billion dollars! That’s not what happened. Instead, he was fired after eight months. Noah has been very public about this, and it’s well documented. He even wrote about why it happened, which mostly comes down to the fact that he was young and inexperienced. Here’s where the real story gets interesting. After being fired, Noah spent ten months at Mint, another successful startup. For Noah, that was a side-hustle. After Mint, he founded KickFlip, a payment provider for social games. He also started an ad company called Gambit. Both of those companies fluttered around for a while and then fizzled out. Next came AppSumo, a daily deals website for tech software. AppSumo has done very well, and it’s still in business as of this writing, but Noah eventually turned his attention to another opportunity. While building up his other businesses, he had become an expert at email marketing, and realized there was a huge need for effective marketing tools. So he created SumoMe, a software company that helps people and companies build their email lists. SumoMe has exploded since its launch. Over 200,000 sites now use it in some capacity, and that number is growing every day. It’s easy to imagine SumoMe becoming a $100 million dollar company in a matter of years, and it’s completely bootstrapped. The company has taken zero funding from venture capitalists. That means Noah can run the business exactly how he wants. I’ve known Noah for almost ten years. I met him when my first company was getting off the ground. Several months ago, we were emailing back and forth about promoting my first book. He ended one of the emails with, “Keep the hustle strong.” I smiled when I read that. Noah is, and always will be, a hustler. He’s been hustling for his entire career―for over a decade. And he deserves everything that’s coming his way. Hustle never comes without defeat. It never comes without detours and side-projects. But the best hustlers all know this simple truth: All that matters is that you keep on hustling.

A friend of mine raised a lot of money to launch a mobile app, however, his app was trounced by one from another company that had raised a tenth of what he had, but had done so through 1,000 angels on Kickstarter. Those thousand angels became the customers and evangelists that provided the all-important critical mass early on. Any future project I do, I’ll do through Kickstarter, even if I don’t need the money. Lesson

In general, be it at startups or aggressive companies like Facebook, there should be a cultural bias for launching. The perfect is very often the enemy of the good, and as the Facebook poster screamed from every wall: DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT. Very few companies have died due to launching early; at worst, you’ll have a one time product embarrassment (as Apple did with the first version of its iPhone Maps app). However, countless companies have died by losing the nerve to ship, and freezing into a coma of second-guessing, hesitation, and internal indecision. As in life, so in business: maintain a bias for action over inaction.

Charles Du designed NASA’s first iPhone app, an award winner and a huge hit with more than 10 million downloads. But he also faced challenges from NASA brass who tried to water down his vision for the app. In a guest blog for Aha!, he laid out a basic principle: Maintaining your product vision is just as important as getting buy-in for that vision. After I got buy-in for the NASA app, a project manager was assigned to our team . . . a project manager is not the same as a product manager. Since my project manager didn’t understand the difference between the two roles and had seniority over me, we fought many battles. The vision of the app was user-driven. So, I validated my product hypothesis by talking to users and looking at our website metrics — a user-centered design approach. The project manager took a different approach. She saw this app as an opportunity to get more resources for our local center . . . She was advocating for politics-centered design that was divorced from any customer conversations. To me, this is a clear case of why product vision should drive everything you do as a product manager. I had clearly communicated why the vision for this app would achieve NASA’s high-level goals. This allowed senior leadership to see that I was working to help grow the whole organization. And it prevented politics from entering the picture. . . . We ended up launching a pure product designed 100 percent for our users — and it was a huge success.11

When Facebook launched Facebook Platform to help developers create apps in May 2007, the big shift began. An ecosystem of partners willing to extend the capabilities of Facebook quickly took root.7 By November 2007, there were 7,000 outside applications on the site.8 Recognizing how this flood of new apps was enhancing its rival’s appeal, Myspace responded by opening to developers in February 2008. But the tide had already turned,

When the iPhone was launched in 2007, Apple did not yet have its App Store,

Measuring the Acquisition Network Effect To increase the Acquisition Effect, you have to be able to directly measure it. The good news is that viral growth can be rolled up into one number. Here’s how you calculate it: Let’s say you’ve built a new productivity tool for sharing notes, and after it launches, 1,000 users download the new app. A percentage of these users invite their colleagues and friends, and over the next month, 500 users download and sign up—what happens next? Well, those 500 users then invite their friends, and get 250 to sign up, who create another 125 sign-ups, and so on. Pay attention to the ratios between each set of users—1000 to 500 to 250. This ratio is often called the viral factor, and in this case can be calculated at 0.5, because each cohort of users generates 0.5 of the next cohort. In this example, things are looking good—starting with 1,000 users with a viral factor of 0.5 leads to a total of 2,000 users by the end of the amplification—meaning an amplification rate of 2x. A higher ratio is better, since it means each cohort is more efficiently bringing on the next batch of users.

There’s a reason why the term used for viral growth is to “land and expand”—to build new networks as well as increasing the density of existing networks. By “landing,” viral growth can start new atomic networks, as a Dropbox invite from an ad agency to their client brings a new company into the collaboration network. Or, when a WhatsApp group chat invite brings onboard a new set of friends who hadn’t previously used the service. But then the product “expands”—increasing the density of a network as all the coworkers in an office ultimately join Dropbox. It’s for this reason that networks built through viral growth are healthier and more engaged than those that are launched in the typical “Big Bang” fashion, as Google+ did years back. Big Bang Launches can be great at landing, but often fail at expanding—and as we discussed, many networks with low density and low engagement will fail. The result of increasing density and engagement isn’t just easier new user acquisition, but also stronger Engagement and Economic network effects. That’s because these network effects are ultimately derived by the density and size of the network, and as more users join, they naturally become stronger.

Tinder would work with Justin’s younger brother to throw a birthday party for one of his popular, hyperconnected friends on campus, and use it to promote Tinder. The Tinder team would do all the work to make it an incredible party. The day of the party, students from USC were getting bused to a luxurious house in LA, where everything had been set up to pull you inside. Sean described how it worked: There was one catch with the party: First, you had to download the Tinder app to get in. We put a bouncer in the house to check that you had done it. The party was great—it was a success, and more importantly, the next day, everyone at the party woke up and remembered they had a new app on their phone. There were attractive people they hadn’t gotten to talk to, and this was their second chance. The college party launch tactic worked. For the Tinder team, this one party created the highest ever one-day spike of downloads, however modest it might seem in retrospect. It’s not just the number that matters here, but that it was “500 of the right people”—Sean would explain to me later. It was a group of the most social, most hyperconnected people on the USC campus, all on Tinder at the same time. Tinder started to work. Matches began to happen, as the students who met each other from the previous night started to swipe through and then chat. Amazingly, 95 percent of this initial cohort started to use this app every day for three hours a day.

Tinder would work with Justin’s younger brother to throw a birthday party for one of his popular, hyperconnected friends on campus, and use it to promote Tinder. The Tinder team would do all the work to make it an incredible party. The day of the party, students from USC were getting bused to a luxurious house in LA, where everything had been set up to pull you inside. Sean described how it worked: There was one catch with the party: First, you had to download the Tinder app to get in. We put a bouncer in the house to check that you had done it. The party was great—it was a success, and more importantly, the next day, everyone at the party woke up and remembered they had a new app on their phone. There were attractive people they hadn’t gotten to talk to, and this was their second chance. The college party launch tactic worked. For the Tinder team, this one party created the highest ever one-day spike of downloads, however modest it might seem in retrospect. It’s not just the number that matters here, but that it was “500 of the right people”—Sean would explain to me later. It was a group of the most social, most hyperconnected people on the USC campus, all on Tinder at the same time. Tinder started to work. Matches began to happen, as the students who met each other from the previous night started to swipe through and then chat. Amazingly, 95 percent of this initial cohort started to use this app every day for three hours a day. The Tinder team built one atomic network, but soon figured out how to build the next one—just throw another party. And then another, by going to other schools, and throwing even more parties. Each network was successively easier to start. Tinder quickly reached 4,000 downloads, then 15,000 within a month, and then 500,000 just a month after that—first by replicating the campus launch, but then letting the organic viral growth take over.

When examined through the lens of Meerkat’s Law and the central framework of this book, it is obvious why the resulting networks generated by big launches are weak. You’d rather have a smaller set of atomic networks that are denser and more engaged than a large number of networks that aren’t there. When a networked product depends on having other people in order to be useful, it’s better to ignore the top-line aggregate numbers. Instead, the quality of the traction can only be seen when you zoom all the way into the perspective of an individual user within the network. Does a new person who joins the product see value based on how many other users are already on it? You might as well ignore the aggregate numbers, and in particular the spike of users that a new product might see in its first days. As Eric Ries describes in his book The Lean Startup, these are “vanity metrics.” The numbers might make you feel good, especially when they are going up, but it doesn’t matter if you have a hundred million users if they are churning out at a high rate, due to a lack of other users engaging. When networks are built bottom-up, they are more likely to be densely interconnected, and thus healthier and more engaged. There are multiple reasons for this: A new product is often incubated within a subcommunity, whether that’s a college campus, San Francisco techies, gamers, or freelancers—as recent tech successes have shown. It will grow within this group before spreading into other verticals, allowing time for its developers to tune features like inviting or sharing, while honing the core value proposition. Once a new networked product is spreading via word of mouth, then each user is likely to know at least one other user already on the network. By the time it reaches the broader consciousness, it will be seen as a phenomenon, and top-down efforts can always be added on to scale a network that’s already big and engaged. If Big Bang Launches work so poorly in general, why do they work for Apple? This type of launch works for Apple because their core offerings can stand alone as premium, high-utility products that generally don’t need to construct new networks to function. At most, they tap into existing networks like email and SMS. Famously, Apple has not succeeded with social offerings like the now-defunct Game Center and Ping. The closest new networked product they’ve launched is arguably the App Store, but even that was initially not in Steve Jobs’s vision for the phone.87 Most important, though, you aren’t Apple. So don’t try to copy them without having their kinds of products.

Over the years, Facebook has executed an effective playbook that does exactly this, at scale. Take Instagram as an example—in the early days, the core product tapped into Facebook’s network by making it easy to share photos from one product to the other. This creates a viral loop that drives new users, but engagement, too, when likes and comments appear on both services. Being able to sign up to Instagram using your Facebook account also increases conversion rate, which creates a frictionless experience while simultaneously setting up integrations later in the experience. A direct approach to tying together the networks relies on using the very established social graph of Facebook to create more engagement. Bangaly Kaba, formerly head of growth at Instagram, describes how Instagram built off the network of its larger parent: Tapping into Facebook’s social graph became very powerful when we realized that following your real friends and having an audience of real friends was the most important factor for long-term retention. Facebook has a very rich social graph with not only address books but also years of friend interaction data. Using that info supercharged our ability to recommend the most relevant, real-life friends within the Instagram app in a way we couldn’t before, which boosted retention in a big way. The previous theory had been that getting users to follow celebrities and influencers was the most impactful action, but this was much better—the influencers rarely followed back and engaged with a new user’s content. Your friends would do that, bringing you back to the app, and we wouldn’t have been able to create this feature without Facebook’s network. Rather than using Facebook only as a source of new users, Instagram was able to use its larger parent to build stronger, denser networks. This is the foundation for stronger network effects. Instagram is a great example of bundling done well, and why a networked product that launches another networked product is at a huge advantage. The goal is to compete not just on features or product, but to always be the “big guy” in a competitive situation—to bring your bigger network as a competitive weapon, which in turn unlocks benefits for acquisition, engagement, and monetization. Going back to Microsoft, part of their competitive magic came when they could bring their entire ecosystem—developers, customers, PC makers, and others—to compete at multiple levels, not just on building more features. And the most important part of this ecosystem was the developers.

My friend Bangaly Kaba, formerly head of growth at Instagram, called this idea the theory of “Adjacent Users.” He describes his experience at Instagram, which several years post-launch was growing fast but not at rocketship speed: When I joined Instagram in 2016, the product had over 400 million users, but the growth rate had slowed. We were growing linearly, not exponentially. For many products, that would be viewed as an amazing success, but for a viral social product like Instagram, linear growth doesn’t cut it. Over the next 3 years, the growth team and I discovered why Instagram had slowed, developed a methodology to diagnose our issues, and solved a series of problems that reignited growth and helped us get to over a billion users by the time I left. Our success was anchored on what I now call The Adjacent User Theory. The Adjacent Users are aware of a product and possibly tried using it, but are not able to successfully become an engaged user. This is typically because the current product positioning or experience has too many barriers to adoption for them. While Instagram had product-market fit for 400+ million people, we discovered new groups of billions of users who didn’t quite understand Instagram and how it fit into their lives.67 In my conversations with Bangaly on this topic, he described his approach as a systematic evaluation of the network of networks that constituted Instagram. Rather than focusing on the core network of Power Users—the loud and vocal minority that often drive product decisions—instead the approach was to constantly figure out the adjacent set of users whose experience was subpar. There might be multiple sets of nonfunctional adjacent networks at any given time, and it might require different approaches to fix each one. For some networks, it might be the features of the product, like Instagram not having great support for low-end Android apps. Or it might be because of the quality of their networks—if the right content creators or celebrities hadn’t yet arrived. You fix the experience for these users, then ask yourself again, who are the adjacent users? Then repeat. Bangaly describes this approach: When I started at Instagram, the Adjacent User was women 35–45 years old in the US who had a Facebook account but didn’t see the value of Instagram. By the time I left Instagram, the Adjacent User was women in Jakarta, on an older 3G Android phone with a prepaid mobile plan. There were probably 8 different types of Adjacent Users that we solved for in-between those two points. To solve for the needs of the Adjacent User, the Instagram team had to be nimble, focusing first on pulling the audience of US women from the Facebook network. This required the team to build algorithmic recommendations that utilized Facebook profiles and connections, so that Instagram could surface friends and family on the platform—not just influencers. Later on, targeting users in Jakarta and in other developing countries might involve completely different approaches—refining apps for low-end Android phones with low data connections. As the Adjacent User changes, the strategy has to change as well.

When Wimdu launched, the Samwers reached out to Airbnb to discuss combining forces, as they had done with Groupon and eBay to facilitate a speedy exit. Discussions ensued between Airbnb and Wimdu cofounders and investors—meeting multiple times, touring the Wimdu offices, and checking with other founders like Andrew Mason from Groupon to best understand the potential outcome. In the end, Airbnb chose to fight. Brian Chesky described his thought process: My view was, my biggest punishment, my biggest revenge on you is, I’m gonna make you run this company long term. So you had the baby, now you gotta raise the child. And you’re stuck with it for 18 years. Because I knew he wanted to sell the company. I knew he could move faster than me for a year, but he wasn’t gonna keep doing it. And so that was our strategy. And we built the company long term. And the ultimate way we won is, we had a better community. He couldn’t understand community. And I think we had a better product.82 To do this, the company would mobilize their product teams to rapidly improve their support for international regions. Jonathan Golden, the first product manager at Airbnb, described their efforts: Early on, Airbnb’s listing experience was basic. You filled out forms, uploaded 1 photo—usually not professional—and editing the listing after the fact was hard. The mobile app in the early days was lightweight, where you could only browse but not book. There were a lot of markets in those days with just 1 or 2 listings. Booking only supported US dollars, so it catered towards American travelers only, and for hosts, they could get money out via a bank transfer to an American bank via ACH, or PayPal. We needed to get from this skeleton of a product into something that could work internationally if we wanted to fend off Wimdu. We internationalized the product, translating it into all the major languages. We went from supporting 1 currency to adding 32. We bought all the local domains, like airbnb.co.uk for the UK website and airbnb.es for Spain. It was important to move quickly to close off the opportunity in Europe.83 Alongside the product, the fastest way to fight on Wimdu’s turf was to quickly scale up paid marketing in Europe using Facebook, Google, and other channels to augment the company’s organic channels, built over years. Most important, Airbnb finally pulled the trigger on putting boots on the ground—hiring Martin Reiter, the company’s first head of international, and also partnering with Springstar, a German incubator and peer of Rocket Internet’s, to accelerate their international expansion.

The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. The products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.84 Because Buffett generally invests in low-tech companies like See’s Candies or Coca-Cola, the moat he refers to is often a strong brand or a unique business model. For software products with network effects, a strong moat means something different: how much effort, time, and capital does it take to replicate a product’s features and its network? In the modern era, cloning software features is usually not the hard part—replicating the complete functionality of a Slack or Airbnb might take time, but it is tractable. It’s the difficulty of cloning their network that makes these types of products highly defensible. I’ll use an example to think through the competitive moat. Let’s start from first principles, with an example of Airbnb trying to launch in a new city with no competitors in sight. As the early Airbnb team described, the Cold Start Problem lies in the difficulty of launching a new city to a Tipping Point of over 300 listings with 100 reviews. This requires real effort, because the minimum network size is quite large—contrasted to many other network types like communication apps, which might only require two or three people to get started. But once Airbnb has reached Escape Velocity in a market, the Cold Start Problem creates the defense against new entrants.

If a networked product can begin to win over a series of networks faster than its competition, then it develops an accumulating advantage. These advantages, naturally, manifest as increasing network effects across customer acquisition, engagement, and monetization. Smaller networks might unravel and lose their users, who might switch over. Naturally, it becomes important for every player to figure out how to compete in this type of high-stakes environment. But how does the competitive playbook work in a world with network effects? First, I’ll tell you what it’s not: it’s certainly not a contest to see who can ship more features. In fact, sometimes the products seem roughly the same—just think about food-delivery or messaging apps—and if not, they often become undifferentiated since the features are relatively easy to copy. Instead, it’s often the dynamics of the underlying network that make all the difference. Although the apps for DoorDash and Uber Eats look similar, the former’s focus on high-value, low-competition areas like suburbs and college towns made all the difference—today, DoorDash’s market share is 2x that of Uber Eats. Facebook built highly dense and engaged networks starting with college campuses versus Google+’s scattered launch that built weak, disconnected networks. Rarely in network-effects-driven categories does a product win based on features—instead, it’s a combination of harnessing network effects and building a product experience that reinforces those advantages. It’s also not about whose network is bigger, a counterpoint to jargon like “first mover advantage.” In reality, you see examples of startups disrupting the big guys all the time. There’s been a slew of players who have “unbundled” parts of Craigslist, cherry-picking the best subcategories and making them apps unto themselves. Airbnb, Zillow, Thumbtack, Indeed, and many others fall into this category. Facebook won in a world where MySpace was already huge. And more recently, collaboration tools like Notion and Zoom are succeeding in a world where Google Suite, WebEx, and Skype already have significant traction. Instead, the quality of the networks matters a lot—which makes it important for new entrants to figure out which networks to cherry-pick to get started, which I’ll discuss in its own chapter.

Data could be misleading sometimes, too. In the early days, Dropbox was growing so fast that it was often hard to do analyses on what types of content people were putting in their folders. One of the simplest analyses was to randomly sample snapshots of folders, and count the file extensions. Perhaps it is not surprising to some that the most popular files were photos—lots and lots of photos, especially on mobile. Combined with the natural virality of this media type, Dropbox embarked on a road map of photos-related features, culminating in the launch of Carousel, a separate app to let consumers manage and view their photos on Dropbox. It did okay, but underperformed relative to expectations and was eventually shut down so that the company could invest in what is now its core focus: businesses.

The Instagram versus Hipstamatic story is perhaps the canonical example of a strategy made famous by Chris Dixon’s 2015 essay “Come for the tool, stay for the network.” Chris writes: A popular strategy for bootstrapping networks is what I like to call “come for the tool, stay for the network.” The idea is to initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network. The tool helps get to initial critical mass. The network creates the long term value for users, and defensibility for the company.40 There are many other examples across many sectors beyond photo apps: The Google Suite provides stand-alone tools for people to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, but also network features around collaborative editing, and comments. Games like Minecraft or even classics like Street Fighter can be played in single-player mode where you play against the computer, or multiplayer mode where you play with friends. Yelp started out effectively as a directory tool for people to look up local businesses, showing addresses and phone numbers, but the network eventually built out the database of photos and reviews. LinkedIn started as a tool to put your resume online, but encouraged you to build up your professional network over time. “Come for the tool, stay for the network” circumvents the Cold Start Problem and makes it easier to launch into an entire network—with PR, paid marketing, influencers, sales, or any number of tried-and-true channels. It minimizes the size requirement of an atomic network and in turn makes it easy to take on an entire network. Whether it’s photo-sharing apps or restaurant directories, in the framework of the Cold Start Theory, this strategy can be visualized. In effect, a tool can be used to “prop up” the value of the network effects curve when the network is small.

The biggest advantage that Android has over iOS is that Android has absolutely no review process whereas updating an app on iOS can sometimes take a few days. You can quietly launch your app on Android and update your app multiple times a day if you want.

You are great. Already. Whether you realize it or not. Whether anybody else realizes it or not. And its not because you launched an iPhone app, or finished school a year early, or bought yourself a sweet ass boat. These things do not define greatness. You are already great because in the face of endless confusion and certain death, you continue to choose what to give a fuck about and what not to.

A well-configured board will comprise people with a broad range of skills and experiences, probably from disciplines and professions not directly related to the mission of the organization itself. I know what that is like because on two boards I have been the one and only CEO of a public company. I was able to bring a perspective about growth, finance, organization structure, and regulation that no other director offered. At Dunkin’, we invited Carl Sparks to join the board in 2013 because he had deep expertise in digital marketing, thanks to his work with Expedia and Travelocity. When he came onboard, we were in the midst of a big push toward the launch of our DD Perks mobile app rewards program. Carl’s participation proved invaluable. As we’ve seen, outsiders and fresh voices are one of the most reliable sources of status quo questioning.

Zego is a London based insurtech start-up that provides flexible motor, personal and commercial insurance. The company sells policies ranging in length from an hour to a year. Customers purchase these online, via phone and through Zego’s app. Zego was founded by former Deliveroo employees Sten Saar and Harry Franks, alongside Stuart Kelly, former Head of Engineering at Hubble. The company originally began operating in the motor insurance market, selling policies by the hour to part-time fast food delivery drivers. In 2020 Zego started to offer private hire insurance policies. Since 2016, the company has expanded into other areas of insurance, including public liability insurance for self-employed professionals and employers’ liability cover for businesses. In September 2018, Zego launched overseas, making flexible motor insurance products available to delivery drivers in Ireland. In December 2018, Zego began offering motor insurance policies in Spain.

founders and CEOs of Apple, Google, and even the explicitly kid-targeted Snapchat app (!)—go to concerted lengths to limit their own kids’ screen time at home.[*][14] Tellingly, the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs forbade his young children to play with the then newly launched iPad.

Is Threads a threat to Twitter? Threads on Twitter refer to the ability to connect multiple tweets together in a continuous conversation. By simply replying to one's own tweets, users can create a chain of related messages, providing a coherent and concise narrative. The feature was rolled out to enable users to share longer stories, thoughts, or discussions without having to break them down into individual tweets. Threads also allows longer videos and does not use hashtags, unlike Twitter. The app requires an Instagram account and has gained immense popularity, with millions of users joining within hours of its launch. As Threads continues to evolve, it remains to be seen how Twitter, under Elon Musk’s ownership, will respond to this competition.

Zapier is the prototypical example of this. It’s a juggernaut, and not only because it’s integrated with over 3,000 apps. It has widened its moat with nonpublic API integrations, meaning that if you want to compete with it, you have to go to that other company and get their internal development team to build an API for you. That’s a huge hill to climb if you want to launch a Zapier competitor.

A TikTok clone app script is a pre-built software solution that allows you to create a short-form video sharing app that is similar to TikTok in terms of features and functionality. TikTok clone scripts are typically much less expensive than developing a custom app from scratch, and they can be deployed quickly, allowing you to launch your video sharing app in a short amount of time. TikTok clone scripts are highly customizable, allowing you to tailor the platform to your specific needs. For example, you can change the branding of the app, add or remove features, and integrate your own monetization strategies. Here are some of the key features that you should look for in a TikTok clone app script: • Video recording and editing: The script should allow users to record and edit short-form videos. Editing features should include trimming, cropping, adding music and effects, and more. • Social features: The script should include social features such as following other users, liking and commenting on videos, and creating and participating in challenges. • Content moderation: The script should have robust content moderation systems in place to prevent the spread of harmful or offensive content. • Monetization options: The script should support a variety of monetization options, such as in-app advertising, subscription fees, and virtual goods. Once you have chosen a TikTok clone app script, you will need to work with a development team to customize the script and deploy your app. The development team will also help you to set up your monetization strategies and launch your app on the App Store and Google Play.

Back in 2011, as the smartphone space came to dominate the tech sector, Tencent launched its mobile messaging app WeChat. According to a Business Insider profile, although it started as a simple, WhatsApp-like service, “it grew explosively as it expanded into a kind of super-app that takes the place of Uber, GrubHub, Venmo, Craigslist, and a whole bunch of other services.”16 This super-app structure began in 2017, when WeChat launched its Mini Program or Mini-app feature, which allows developers to build pre-approved lightweight apps that are embedded within WeChat and function as an extension of it. The mini-apps proved incredibly popular as they allowed customers to use external services with just four clicks and without leaving WeChat or downloading a new app.

The lies are of a scale and of a nature that in modern political life I think you can only compare to Donald Trump. I don't think anybody has lied or can lie as casually and as cooly and as completely as Boris Johnson does - accept Boris Johnson. We have learned over the last few weeks that his closest colleagues thought he was diabolical. The cabinet secretary that Boris Johnson appointed because he would prove to be, or he was believed to be, a soft touch has described Boris Johnson as being utterly unfit for the job. The advisor that he brought in as a sort of mastermind - having overseen Brexit - Dominick Cummings has described Johnson in terms that you would reserve for your worst enemies. These are the people working closest by him. The only person who's had anything vaguely warm to say about him is Matt Hancock and let me tell you why. They've shaken hands on it. I'd bet my house on some sort of gentleman's... let's rephrase that... I'd bet my house on some sort of charlatan’s agreement behind the scenes that they won't slag each other off because everybody else is telling the truth about them - about Johnson and about Hancock. Hancock's uselessness facilitated and enabled by Johnson's uselessness, by Johnson's moral corruption effectively. And now the lies begin. 5,000 WhatsApp messages. ‘No idea. No, no, no, no idea. Don't know. Don't know technical people. Uh... factory reset. Don't know. Bleep, bleep.’ And then the classic: the flooding of the Zone. With so much manure that it's hard to know where to start. ‘We may have made mistakes’ is one of the latest statements to come out. Turns up 3 hours early so that he doesn't have to walk the gamut of people congregating to remember their lost loved ones and to share their feelings with the man that they consider to be partly responsible for their death. Absolutely extraordinary scenes, truly extraordinary scenes. How does he get away with it? Hugo Keith is a much tougher inquisitor than Lindsay flipping Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons. He's a much tougher inquisitor than any of the interviewers that Boris Johnson deigns to have his toes tickled by on a regular basis. He's a much tougher interviewer or scrutineer than the newspaper editors who have given him half a million pounds a year to write columns or already published articles about why he's the real victim in this story. Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph today writing an article before Boris Johnson has given a single syllable of evidence, claiming that Boris Johnson is the real victim of this. I'd love him to go and read that out to the Covid families assembled outside the inquiry. And remember it was Daily Telegraph columnists and former editors that convened at the Club with Jacob Rees-Mogg and others to launch the Save Owen Paterson Society after another one of these charlatans was found to have breached parliamentary standards. Their response of course was not to advise their ally to accept the punishment that was coming his way but to attempt to get him off the hook and rip up the rule book under which he'd been found to be guilty.

Think big, yet narrow your sights. Ideas are your equity, but how you bring them to life is what your focus should be. A big idea is insignificant if you cannot fulfill the promise. Reach high, but start small and manageable. There’s always time to do more later.

The venture must provide value to an audience that is quantifiable and sustainable.

The Parlor app, which was one of the fastest growing apps in the country and which was taking on Facebook and Twitter, would be taken down by Apple, Google and Amazon.

devices and you can build an application. You don’t need to ask for anyone’s permission to innovate. Write the app, launch it on your endpoint, and bitcoin will route it, because bitcoin is a dumb network. That is the power of innovation on the internet. It’s innovation without permission. It’s innovation without central approval. It’s innovation without a broad network upgrade. And that means bitcoin is not a specific financial network. It’s not a financial network for large transactions or small transactions, fast transactions or slow transactions. It’s whatever you want to use it for, based upon what you choose to do at the endpoint. Compare that to the current banking system. The current banking system is built around very smart networks, absolutely and tightly controlled to deliver very specific applications to very dumb endpoints. Even with your most sophisticated online banking, all you can do with your bank is access some HTML that delivers a set of services that they decided they were going to give you. You get no APIs, no ability to run additional applications, no ability to upgrade or innovate or change anything unless the entire network changes to support your new application. The current system has networks for large payments, small payments, or fast payments, but it’s not all of the above. Bitcoin is all of those things because it’s not discriminating, it’s neutral, it doesn’t care, it’s dumb. The power of pushing intelligence to the edge, of not making decisions in the center, moves the innovation into the hands of its end users and gives those end users the ability to build applications that are so niche that only a handful of people around the world need them. And they can build those applications without asking for anyone’s permission.

Todo.ly is an online to-do list and task manager. The founders had a goal to reach millions of new users and make Todo.ly widely available as a web application. They succeeded in securing a partnership with Google Chrome and were able to leverage their 200 million user database to help them achieve their one-year growth goal in just three weeks: ● 1000% increase in average daily traffic ● 780% increase in user base ● 400,000 new tasks each month The key was that the Chrome platform was brand new and the Todo.ly application was submitted three to four months prior its launch date. As the Todo.ly app was exactly what Google was looking for to add to the Chrome Webstore, they have contacted the founders and asked for an integrated two clicks login through Google OpenID. Todo.ly has implemented that and became featured from day one. There was a huge marketing campaign around the Chrome Webstore, TV spots, prints, and press conference. Peter Varadi, the founder of Todo.ly, shared his advice based on his personal experience: “Look for new waves of technology, new platforms that are expected to be used by a massive number of people and try to be on that platform as one of first.” In Todo. ly case, it was clearly visible that Chrome had 200 million users already and when they launched their webstore, they would obviously put it front of all their users. Google needed web apps to fill their webstore for the launch and they opened the app submission process a few months earlier. That was a timely opportunity for Todo.ly to jump in. What could be your new wave and chance?

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Dubsmash hit the number-one spot in the German app store just seven days after launch.

Presenting to Investors TEAM FIRST • Who are you? • Why are you personally passionate (or uniquely qualified) about creating this business? MARKET/OPPORTUNITY • Who are you serving? • What is their unmet need? • Why is there an opportunity? • How big is that opportunity? IDEA • Why is your idea unique in the market? • Why is it changing how this customer need or problem is already being addressed? RISKS • What are the risks? (And be honest, there are always risks.) • How will you address them (if at all)? THE ASK • How much capital do you need to fund a pilot? The Beta? • In Year 1, what do you believe the costs and revenue will be? What about in Year 5?

Just don’t think of them as “apps,” but as digital delivery systems that are popular for many types of content and interaction that people enjoy and are supported by the first wave of mobile operating systems.

Your first in a series of goals should be to design and develop something of value that can be delivered to an intended audience.

The goal is to show how extensive the venture can be and how the creator(s) will go about developing the prototype or final product.

My work habits match my natural rhythms,

Another example: In 2012 Boston launched a smartphone app, Street Bump, which used an iPhone’s accelerometer to detect potholes. The idea was that citizens of Boston would download the app and, as they drove around the city, their phones would automatically notify city hall when the road surface needed repair—city workers would no longer have to patrol the streets looking for potholes. It’s a pleasingly elegant idea, and it did successfully find some holes in the road. Yet what Street Bump really produced, left to its own devices, was a map of potholes that systematically favored young, affluent areas where more people owned iPhones and had heard about the app. Street Bump offers us N = All in the sense that every bump from every enabled phone can be recorded. That is not the same thing as recording every pothole. The project has since been shelved.

Among the many private initiatives in this field, the latest, launched in the summer of 2012, is aimed at middle-school female students in New York. Girls who Code is a seminar, hosted by a startup (AppNexus in 2012), where 13-17 year-old girls learn how to write software programs, design websites, and build applications. Mainly, they learn that these subjects are fun and accessible to them, and not only to male computer geeks. “Girls who Code is not just a program, it's a movement to close the sexist gap in the technological sector,” explained the program’s two organizers, Reshma Saujani and Kristen Titus, to attendees of a big gala that took place on the evening of Oct. 22, 2012 on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The occasion was to celebrate the success of the first edition of Girls Who Code and collect additional funds in support of the initiative. The first 20 “graduates” of the course spoke of their experience and their dreams for the future, while sitting at the gigantic table in the NYSE’s Board Room. Tomorrow, one of them could return as the CEO of a high-tech business, and perhaps ring the bell on the trading floor to inaugurate her company’s Initial Public Offering.

Mind the App: Just days after the original Android Marketplace app store launched, thousands of people happily downloaded their bank's new Android apps. After entering their account numbers and passwords, the apps failed to work as promised leading angry customers to call their banks. When they reached customer service, the banks advised "we don’t have an Android app." Whoops! In turned out, criminals had created and uploaded fake banking apps—designed with the bank’s own logos in order to to extract sensitive financial information. Many apps stores, particularly third-party sites, are essentially the Wild West. In fact, by 2013, more than 42,000 apps—many of them targeted at children who think they’re simply downloading a free game—in Google's Play store had been found to contain spyware and information-stealing Trojan programs. Pay close attention to the apps you and your family download, particularly their permission settings. They are generally "free" for a reason and you're paying with your privacy—or worse. If a flashlight app tells you it needs access to your location and contacts, run the other way!

David and Neil were MBA students at the Wharton School when the cash-strapped David lost his eyeglasses and had to pay $700 for replacements. That got them thinking: Could there be a better way? Neil had previously worked for a nonprofit, VisionSpring, that trained poor women in the developing world to start businesses offering eye exams and selling glasses that were affordable to people making less than four dollars a day. He had helped expand the nonprofit’s presence to ten countries, supporting thousands of female entrepreneurs and boosting the organization’s staff from two to thirty. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Neil that an idea birthed in the nonprofit sector could be transferred to the private sector. But later at Wharton, as he and David considered entering the eyeglass business, after being shocked by the high cost of replacing David’s glasses, they decided they were out to build more than a company—they were on a social mission as well. They asked a simple question: Why had no one ever sold eyeglasses online? Well, because some believed it was impossible. For one thing, the eyeglass industry operated under a near monopoly that controlled the sales pipeline and price points. That these high prices would be passed on to consumers went unquestioned, even if that meant some people would go without glasses altogether. For another, people didn’t really want to buy a product as carefully calibrated and individualized as glasses online. Besides, how could an online company even work? David and Neil would have to be able to offer stylish frames, a perfect fit, and various options for prescriptions. With a $2,500 seed investment from Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program, David and Neil launched their company in 2010 with a selection of styles, a low price of $95, and a hip marketing program. (They named the company Warby Parker after two characters in a Jack Kerouac novel.) Within a month, they’d sold out all their stock and had a 20,000-person waiting list. Within a year, they’d received serious funding. They kept perfecting their concept, offering an innovative home try-on program, a collection of boutique retail outlets, and an eye test app for distance vision. Today Warby Parker is valued at $1.75 billion, with 1,400 employees and 65 retail stores. It’s no surprise that Neil and David continued to use Warby Parker’s success to deliver eyeglasses to those in need. The company’s Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program is unique: instead of simply providing free eyeglasses, Warby Parker trains and equips entrepreneurs in developing countries to sell the glasses they’re given. To date, 4 million pairs of glasses have been distributed through Warby Parker’s program. This dual commitment to inexpensive eyewear for all, paired with a program to improve access to eyewear for the global poor, makes Warby Parker an exemplary assumption-busting social enterprise.

Tencent had partnered with leading mobile carriers like China Mobile to receive 40 percent of the SMS charges that QQ users racked up when they sent messages to mobile phones. A new service could hurt Tencent’s financial bottom line and at the same time risk its relationships with some of China’s most powerful companies. It was the sort of decision that publicly traded, ten-thousand-person companies typically refer to a committee for further study. But Ma wasn’t a typical corporate executive. That very night, he gave Zhang the go-ahead to pursue the idea. Zhang put together a ten-person team, including seven engineers, to build and launch the new product. In just two months, Zhang’s small team had built a mobile-first social messaging network with a clean, minimalistic design that was the polar opposite of QQ. Ma named the service Weixin, which means “micromessage” in Mandarin. Outside of China, the service became known as WeChat. What came next was staggering. Just sixteen months after Zhang’s fateful late-night message to Ma, WeChat celebrated its one hundred millionth user. Six months after that, it had grown to two hundred million users. Four months after that, it had grown to three hundred million users. Pony Ma’s late-night bet paid off handsomely. Tencent reported 2016 revenues of $ 22 billion, up 48 percent from the previous year, and up nearly 700 percent since 2010, the year before WeChat’s launch. By early 2018, Tencent reached a market capitalization of over $ 500 billion, making it one of the world’s most valuable companies, and WeChat was one of the most widely and intensively used services in the world. Fast Company called WeChat “China’s app for everything,” and the Financial Times reported that more than half of its users spend over ninety minutes a day using the app. To put WeChat in an American context, it’s as if one single service combined the functions of Facebook, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Venmo, Grubhub, Amazon, Uber, Apple Pay, Gmail, and even Slack into a single megaservice. You can use WeChat to do run-of-the-mill things like texting and calling people, participating in social media, and reading articles, but you can also book a taxi, buy movie tickets, make doctors’ appointments, send money to friends, play games, pay your rent, order dinner for the night, plus so much more. All from a single app on your smartphone.

Don was the one who figured out how we would make our code quick. One day, a month or two after the Black Slab Encounter, he called me into his office and asked me to create a test program to measure browser speed. He envisioned an automated tool that would launch our browser app and command it to load a suite of web pages, one after the other, in rapid succession. Over the next couple days, I wrote the code to do just that. I named it the Page Load Test, but we soon took to calling the PLT.

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When a hugely popular chat app, ToTok, was launched in the United Arab Emirates in 2019, it attracted millions of downloads. But it was in fact a spying tool, just the latest entry from a long list of repressive states in the Gulf that have used private American and Israeli companies to design surveillance systems to monitor their own citizens. The firm DarkMatter was behind it, an Emirati corporation that has attracted former Israeli intelligence officials and National Security Agency staff.93

Choosing an output as an outcome. Shifting to an outcome mindset is harder than it looks. We spend most of our time talking about outputs. So, it’s not surprising that we tend to confuse the two. Even when teams intend to choose an outcome, they often fall into the trap of selecting an output. I see teams set their outcome as “Launch an Android app” instead of “Increase mobile engagement” or “Get to feature parity on the new tech stack” instead of “Transition customer to the new tech stack.” A good place to start is to make sure your outcome represents a number even if you aren’t sure yet how to measure it. But even then, outputs can creep in. I worked with a team that helped students choose university courses who set their outcome as “Increase the number of course reviews on our platform.” When I asked them what the impact of more reviews was, they answered, “More students would see courses with reviews.” That’s not necessarily true. The team could have increased the number of reviews on their platform, but if they all clustered around a small number of courses, or if they were all on courses that students didn’t view, they wouldn’t have an impact. A better outcome is “Increase the number of course views that include reviews.” To shift your outcome from less of an output to more of an outcome, question the impact it will have.

On the positive side, perhaps the best example of a creative and (potentially) helpful use of AI is Chat2024, an AI-powered chatbot that serves as a stand-in for each candidate. This gives any visitor to Chat2024.com the ability to ask any candidate any question you want. Through the site, you can carry on a conversation with each candidate just as you’d engage a friend over any other messaging app. The AI has been programmed with everything it needs to field any question, even answering in the voice, tone, and attitude of each candidate (mostly). The company behind Chat2024 is also developing a voice feature that will allow people to engage in a voice conversation with each candidate’s AI avatar, which will have a voice eerily close to the real thing. I tried Chat2024 soon after it launched, and the results were interesting, to say the least. I can see some real value here for voter education … but I can also see how tools like this could go horribly wrong. We’ve opened a Pandora’s Box, and there’s no going back. Obviously, the big potential danger with a tool like Chat2024 is that these answers are not actually coming from a candidate. The AI is using all the information at its disposal to approximate what it thinks the candidate would say in response to each question. But, as anyone who’s played around with ChatGPT and other AI-powered search engines knows, sometimes the AI is just … wrong. Sometimes, woefully so.