What to look for in a startup?

Hi, this is Nir Eyal, author of how to Build Habit Forming Products. And today's question of the day is what do I look for in a company I'm considering investing in? So I'm going to give you my three part filter that I use to look at companies and then you can use this to evaluate companies that you're thinking about investing in or thinking about joining. Alright, here it is. So I look for gems. G E M stand for growth, engagement and monetization. Growth is all about how you're going to acquire users. Engagement is about how you're going to keep them coming back, and monetization, you know how you're going to make money. Important thing here is that each of these three things is necessary but not sufficient. A lot of companies are buried in the graveyards of Silicon Valley that had amazing growth, discovered some amazing viral channel, but died because they didn't have engagement. Call those kind of companies leaky buckets. Engagement is also super important to keep people around. But if you don't have enough users and you don't figure out a way to monetize them, then you've also got niddly. Even all the stuff I teach about habit formation and user retention is really all about engagement. But that's just one of three core elements. Remember, every great company needs to be a gem. You need growth, you need engagement, you need monetization. At a minimum, companies need to have two out of the three and a plan for the third. My quick and dirty tool for assessing companies. I look for gems, growth, engagement and monetization. Of course that's not an exhaustive list of everything you need to look for, but that's my kind of quick and dirty tool. Now if you have a question I can answer, please send it to me over Facebook, Twitter or right here on Snapchat. You can always find me on my blog, near and far dot com.