Growthflow Bi-Weekly - Digest #19

I was involved with Pinterest from 5 employees through 650. Here’s what I learned. When you’re scaling quickly, you get a lot right, but you inevitably get some things wrong. The best companies — like Pinterest — are the ones that learn from those mistakes and adjust quickly. This post is a distillation of the lessons learned, first as an investor, then as one of the company’s first product managers, and finally leading product for our discovery team — overseeing search, recommendations, our visual search team, and more.

Bad problems ruin great products. Many solvable problems exist around a customer’s workflow. But as a startup, you don’t just want to solve any problem; you want to solve the best problem. The best possible problem is different because it sits at the heart of what your customer is trying to accomplish. It’s so necessary for users to solve it that they are willing to take extra steps—to sign up for a new product, pay for a subscription, and learn how to use a new tool.

Before you can fix your onboarding efforts, you need to define what successful onboarding is to you. What does it mean to have someone habitually using your product? Only then can measure how successful you are at onboarding them. To do so, you need to answer two questions:

We like to think of ourselves as rational beings. But nothing could be further from the truth. We’re emotional, irrational and unpredictable, especially when it comes to our buying habits

Building and investing in startups is rapidly proliferating to the many, instead of remaining the preserve of few

Tomasz Tunguz is a venture capitalist at Redpoint and writes about startups, fund raising, SaaS companies, and best practices for founders.

A quarter-century ago, Facebook’s director of artificial intelligence made an AI chip. He was 25 years ahead of his time.