Chamath Palihapitiya on the growth principles that got Facebook to billions of users

All right, so let's talk about growth. Everyone asks me because this is like, the topic du jour. It's what everyone wants to know. It's like, what was the secret? It's like almost as if, like, you know, we're the NSA and we've, like, developed something and like, nobody knows or, like, you know, some secret backroom negotiation between us and governments, and it's like, none of that shit. So the most important thing that we did against our framework was I teased out virality and said, you cannot do it. Don't talk about it, don't touch it. I don't want you to give me any product plans that revolve around this idea of virality. I don't want to hear it. What I want to hear about is the three most difficult and hard problems that any consumer product has to deal with. How do you get people in the front door? How do you get them to an aha moment as quickly as possible? And then how do you deliver core product value as often as possible? And after all of that is said and done, only then can you propose to me how you are going to get people to get more people. And that single decision about not even allowing the conversation to revolve around this last thing, in my opinion, was the most important thing that we did. And when I look again in the landscape, things that scale understand that principle, whether it's explicitly or intuitively, and things that don't, and also things that have this amazingly steep rise and then fall off a cliff, and there are really visible examples of that today, also ignore that principle. And it's the discipline to not optimize for the thing that gives you the shortest and most immediate roi, because that is never the sustainable thing that allows you to build something useful. And then the second is to invalidate all the lore in any given product. There's always people who strut around the office like, you know, I have this gut feeling. It's all about gut feeling. And most people with gut feeling are fucking morons. They don't know what they're talking about. They just don't. Gut feel is not useful because most people can't predict correctly. We know this. So one of the most important things that we did was just invalidate all of the lore. You can't believe your own BS because when you do, you start to compound these massively structural mistakes that, again, don't expose core product value and then don't allow real engagement and real product value to emerge. You don't listen to consumers because you Think it's all about your gut. You don't bother doing any of the traditional, straightforward, obvious things that would allow you to answer very straightforward, obvious questions, and you lose yourself. Tell me how I'm acquiring people. Tell me how we're doing, getting them to their aha moment, and tell me core engagement. We knew we were going to beat MySpace when we had like 45 million users. They had like 115 million. We just knew. And the reason was because we had started to do enough things right where we could just see now we understood what we were doing. After all the testing, all the iterating, all of this stuff, you know what the single biggest thing we realized? Get any individual to seven friends in 10 days. That was it. You want a keystone? That was our keystone. There was not much more complexity than that. There's an entire team now, hundreds of people that have helped ramp this product to a billion users based on that one simple rule, a very simple, elegant statement of what it was to both capture core product value, to define what it meant, to be able to onboard into a product that allowed you to communicate, to get into a network, define density, and, and then to basically iterate around that. And then what we did at that company was we talked about nothing else. Every Q and A, every all hands. Nothing was spoken about other than this. It was the single sole focus. But because we had defined it in this very elegant way that expressed it as a function of product value, it was something that everyone could intrinsically wrap their arms around. When you understand core product value and. And then you can basically pivot around it and create these loops that expose that over and over and over again, this becomes the most important and obvious thing to do. You have to work backwards from what is the thing that people are here to do. What is the aha moment that they want? Why can I not give that to them as fast as possible? That's how you win. And if you can't even understand what the thing does, optimizing all of this stuff over time, I think it just creates these really bad, crappy companies that all they do is just spam and destroy the Internet for everybody else. I mean, if I had to give you a framework, it would probably be, you got to start with a broad cross section of engaged users. And when you work backwards from each of those and you are smart enough and clever enough to really figure out the different pathways in which they got to that place, you can probably tease out what those simple things are. And then hopefully, and I think most products are structured this way, and you can then sort of path people, more and more of those people into those same click flows that allow them to get to that state. But again, it starts with looking at an engaged user, not just thinking about how many emails can I send and how do I trick everyone to click on a select all or not unselect a select all right.