Getting2Alpha
Getting2Alpha
Josh Elman on the dynamics of online social experiences
Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Want to get a feeling for Josh Elman's career? Just trace the history of modern social networks.
Josh held increasingly senior roles at Real Networks, LinkedIn, Facebook. He's now supporting the next generation of breakthrough entrepreneurs as a partner at Greylock. In his VC role, Josh sees a lot of pitches and he's got a keen eye for the tricky balance that successful product creators need to strike.
Josh: There's no good answer to this question because at the end of the day, you do have to trust your own gut. And when we're investing in a company, we're investing in many ways. In the founder and the leadership team's gut [00:01:00] to take in all this input and still make the tough decisions based on what they believe, but what we're looking for is people whose guts are constantly informed and tuned by the stories they hear.
And when they hear something that doesn't fit the narrative that they believe in their head, they don't just dismiss it because it doesn't fit the narrative. They go and figure out why and figure out, should I actually adjust the narrative? Are the users telling me they want to do something with my product that I didn't expect them to be doing?
Is that what they really should be doing? Or do I have a flaw in my product that is guiding them down this wrong use path? And you kind of have to be constantly asking those questions. In order to get closer to the core vision. On the other hand, we don't want people who are like, Oh, well, the data says to make it red.
We should make it red. Oh, the data says to build it this way. We should build it this way because then you'll also miss the overall narrative for the story you really want to tell through your product. So it's a constant trade off of questioning your core narrative, but never losing your core narrative.
Amy: I always enjoy [00:02:00] getting a chance to hang out with Josh and get his take on the landscape of innovation and entrepreneurship. Join us for a trip through the recent past and exciting future of network social experiences.
Welcome Josh, to the Getting2Alpha podcast.
Josh: Thanks so much for having me.
Amy: I'm thrilled to get to talk to you about all this awesome stuff you're doing. But first, for those who aren't familiar with your background. Give us a whirlwind tour. How did you first get started in design and tech? And then how did you decide what to pursue along the way?
Josh: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I had computers in my life since I was five. Um, we had a Vic 20 back in 1980 and my dad was programming some stuff on it and I was able to play a lot of games and I just felt like it was the future. You know, when I went to college, I thought I was going to major in business and, you know, kind of become a businessman of the world.
I didn't actually know what that meant. And that was right [00:03:00] when Netscape was coming out. It was like, or might've been the web browsers, Mosaic 0. 7. And I realized the web and the internet was going to be the defining technology of my generation. Back in the mid nineties, I was in college. And I ended up finding this program at Stanford called Symbolic Systems, which just really appealed to me because I really liked the way that things interconnect and you get to study linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and computer science all in this one major.
And it really just led me down this set of classes where we get to study psychology and how people think. And then computer science and like compilers, how do you actually give computers instructions? And when you put those two things together, you have this really interesting interface, this human computer interface of how people connect.
And as I got further into my college career and I kind of followed my brother's footsteps a little bit because he had studied a bunch of this before me at Stanford. I fell in love with how do we create technology that changes people's lives? And I started my career as an engineer, but I knew over [00:04:00] time, I really wanted to be involved in the definition and depiction and figuring out what actual products we should make.
And I felt like it was really important. And I think it still is really important to have that. Baseline understanding of what it takes to actually make this software that we all use. And so that was really what got me started is sort of wanting to do that. My resume, when I graduated from college, had an objective to create great technology that changes people's lives.
And I've kind of kept trying to do that through my whole career. In my first job, I was looking for a company that I thought was really interesting, it wasn't public yet. And it had a chance to be a defining company. And I also want to go back up to the Seattle area. So there's this company called real networks that was trying to put audio and video on the internet, which was really hard back in those days.
Cause you had to compress the audio and video down into really small things and stream them over the internet and deal with packet loss and deal with low bandwidth. And so real was really a pioneer in that technology. And I got to work on the consumer products of how we [00:05:00] created these ways. You could interact with your music and rip your CDs and play videos and find content on the internet.
You know, back in the kind of, I was there, I joined in 1997 and it was so nascent. And a lot of the things that are now the iPod and YouTube and Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV and Netflix all stem from even a lot of this early work we were doing at Real Networks. And I got to learn so much and being an engineer, building a product that, you know, and then eventually running the team that was building the product that was shipping to hundreds of millions of people was an incredible first job.
Amy: Wow. Did you overlap with Philip Rosedale when he was there?
Josh: You know, Philip, who's the founder now of Second Life and is on to High Fidelity, uh, he was the one who technically hired me, um, and was my very first sort of uber boss. He ran the group that I was in, but he left shortly after, uh, to move down to the Valley and do Second Life.
Um, so I didn't overlap with him that much, but we've run into each other since and, you know, he was really a pioneer of real video back in those days. [00:06:00]
Amy: So after the Real Networks experience, then what happened? I don't know.
Josh: You know, I learned something really interesting at Real Networks. It had gone public, you know, maybe six months after I joined in 1997.
It was run as a public company. This was through the dot com bust. And it was really hard to both be a forward business, keep making money and keep building great products. And I go to these meetings at Real Networks. Where we would present things that the product should do and there'd be a business people in the room would have Excel spreadsheets that have different opinions of what the product could do and they could model the business to show how we'd make more money if we showed more ads or showed an ad every time the player started or went back to the ad in the web view and made sure we showed an ad every time the player started even if the last thing you were doing in the player was listening to something on your CD.
And we thought from the product side, we should go back to the last experience. The user was on and there were a bunch of meetings like this, where people with Excel spreadsheets would sort of make model based business decisions that I thought weren't in the best interest of [00:07:00] users. And I thought long term, we wouldn't end up with as many users passionate about our products.
Products and using them because they'd be frustrated by all these annoying things that might make a little bit of money in the short term. But I didn't know the business side. I didn't understand, you know, the Excel models, and I certainly couldn't get in and tweak them and try to put zeros at the end if we lost all our users.
Which is what I wanted to do. And I thought, gosh, maybe I need business school. Maybe I need an MBA to help figure this out. And back in those days, there really was a difference in like the Microsoft culture where you had MBAs who were sort of making a lot of the product and business decisions, and then sort of engineers and designers who are making a lot of the day to day product decisions under that direction.
And Google had come out in like 2001 or two and said, our slogan is don't be evil, which means don't do evil things for users, which was fairly novel at the time. And now it turns out to be how I think a lot of us thinking about building software that sort of user first and engagement first and monetization later.
But that certainly wasn't the case at [00:08:00] real networks at the time. So. I moved down to Silicon Valley and started the MBA program at Berkeley thinking that this MBA would really change my thinking and allow me to be part of those business decisions. But this was 2003 that I started, and at the very same time, social networking was just getting started.
There was a company called Friendster and one called LinkedIn that were these like, we're going to try to build a social network that connects everybody. Friendster is more for friends and dating, LinkedIn was more for your professional contacts, and I got super excited about that. A buddy of mine at business school and I wrote a point counterpoint for the little business school newspaper.
And we tried to connect with these companies. And it turned out because I had done symbolic systems at Stanford. So it'd read Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and Eric Lee, who was the CTO at LinkedIn at the time. And so I reached out to them, or they wanted a windows programmer to help them with something.
And I was like, Hey, I could program for you while I'm on the side in business school. And as we kept talking, they were like, well, why are you in business school? And I said, I want to become a product manager. And they were like, why don't you drop out and become a product manager [00:09:00] here. And I ended up doing that.
And it was 15 people. And I thought it was, this is the kind of job I wanted after business school. So I might as well just go take it now. And it turned out to be the best decision I ever made. I learned so much in the early days at LinkedIn, working with Reid, trying to figure out how to grow a network virally, trying to really get in the intricacies of viral growth and how that can lead to long term engagement, or at least having enough people in our system that the LinkedIn system became more valuable.
And then I launched the first LinkedIn jobs products that were built on top of the social network to see if we could build a little bit of a jobs business and show he could use LinkedIn for jobs and how jobs is just a subset of all the things you could use LinkedIn for.
And that sort of sparked kind of the next decade of my career really around user generated systems, social networks, you know, people connecting.
Amy: So you mentioned how viral growth can spark long term engagement. I think that's like a tricky line to walk there. You know, the most of the systems [00:10:00] that grow virally quickly don't end up with long term engagement.
Josh: So the key to really understanding viral growth is understanding the core behaviors and the habits you're trying to build on the other side.
For LinkedIn, we really had two premises. One was find, and the other one is be found. And find means you're looking for, you're a business development person looking for leads. You are a recruiter looking for people you can hire. You're somebody who's looking for expertise and you want to search this network of professionals to find it, the right person.
And be found means you want to be present in the network with an updated enough profile that if somebody is trying to find somebody that you could be, whether for a job or expertise or a connection between their company and your company, you're findable. And so the beauty of LinkedIn was we had to get most people to have a full enough profile and be contactable through the system that they were willing to be found, but we didn't need them using it every day.
So our viral growth was make sure we get everybody who want is findable to be willing to be present in the system and be found and [00:11:00] strengthen their network. And at the same time, make sure that everybody who wants to do the finding keeps building their network and brings more people in. They tend to be more aggressive at bringing people into the network who can help them reach other people in the network in order to make it work.
You know, when you look at a lot of other systems, like a Facebook or Twitter that grew more virally, They need to be systems that you start using every day to find out what's going on with your friends and connections, or find out what's just going on in the world through news. And so the viral growth there only really matters if it leads to that sticky behavior.
So not only do you need someone to kind of get invited, but then they need to sign up. And get situated in the system and onboarded properly so that they're using it on a very habitual cycle. So when I look at all viral growth, viral growth is really, really powerful in and of itself, but it needs to be pointed towards a system that leads people to those core habits.
And those core cycles on a daily basis with LinkedIn. It was be contactable with Twitter. It is, you know, use it every day to find out what's going on in the world.
Amy: With [00:12:00] LinkedIn, it's tricky because people want to be found when they're looking for a new job, but you don't always want people to know you're looking for a new job.
So it gets into some interesting behaviors and LinkedIn has evolved a lot since those days.
Josh: You know, what's amazing with LinkedIn and sort of what I've learned in my career is it is certainly evolved a lot, but a lot of it was part of the original premise of how can we help professionals be better and access all the relationships that can make them better at their jobs and better at their careers and further their economic development.
And the words economic development came in later, but really a LinkedIn news feed of information that's relevant to you to be a better professional, a job service, A, you know, way to find the right PR person or lawyer or whatever you might need. These were all part of the very early thinking at LinkedIn back in 2004 and five.
And then what's amazing is if you get one of these companies, right, you get the right to keep on building and keep on iterating and keep on. Adding all of these layers to the [00:13:00] company based around the core platform. And the point of LinkedIn was not that we wanted to be people to be findable only when they wanted a new job.
We want them to be findable when they were happy and they could constantly be approached for things that may or may not make sense for them. Now or in the future. And to constantly be building that network versus being in that moment of desperation where you're either so frustrated or you decided to quit or you lost your job that you desperately need a new job and you need your network right there.
You don't have it. We want it more to like be prepared and be kind of constantly able to think about it sort of on a better cycle.
Amy: How much of that do you feel like sprang from Reid Hoffman's innate networking skills? Cause he's a master networker.
Josh: You know, I do think, um, most companies stem, the core of it stems from the founder and who they are and how they think about the world and how they envision the world changing.
And so, you know, read, obviously the way that he thought about using his network was always an extreme [00:14:00] version of networking and helping connect people and sort of doing so much pay it forward without even expecting any kind of payback at all, you know, and just, he's so magnanimous now is always a big part of LinkedIn, but the other part of it was how do we take.
That's sort of at the extreme end of how to be a great networker and build tools to help everybody just be a little bit better. Like we don't expect everyone to do that kind of networking or that kind of relationship management all the time. But if we can build them tools and start to get them to build their network on LinkedIn, they'll realize.
It actually makes them a little bit better without even as much effort.
Amy: Exactly. And then part of the magic is figuring out what habits to build it around.
Josh: Exactly.
Amy: So I want to dig in on that. I'm really glad you brought that up. That's actually a core part of game thinking and game design is knowing how to build for habits.
And I think a lot of people think about habits as like shaping behavior with rewards, and that doesn't ever get you [00:15:00] long term engagement, as you know. So after LinkedIn, so that was your first product manager job. You dropped out of business school to learn on the job and you and I share this love of user generated content.
And then you went on and you did more work. What was your next job after that?
Josh: So I left LinkedIn early, too early in retrospect for a company called Zazzle. And at LinkedIn, the one thing I realized was we were helping professionals be better at their jobs, but a real networks I had gotten to audio and video that you played in your home and for entertainment and in your lives.
And at LinkedIn, I started going to a bunch of HR conventions, meeting a bunch of recruiters to build our jobs products. And I realized that I really had a passion for these things that consumers use kind of in their daily lives, even outside of their professional life, and wanted to get back to that.
And I met the founders of this company called Zazzle, and they had this vision for changing commerce. Zazzle is a marketplace where anybody with a creative idea [00:16:00] can Upload a design, have it immediately available for sale in the Zazzle marketplace, they can send out the design and then, you know, like a print on a t shirt or a print on a hat or even an embroidered design.
And then it's available for sale. And then when somebody orders it, Zazzle manufactures it and delivers it just in time. So instead of sitting on a bunch of inventory. They, um, do just in time manufacturing for every single commerce product offered that they can make.
And the vision was to really be commerce 3.0, where all commerce moves this way, where you don't need to pre make or pre order items at all. They can just be delivered. And we called it sort of bits to atoms, taking this digital. Work and creativity and ideas and marketplace and turning it into these physical atoms that we still have to go ship out and thought to be the pioneer of that.
And I was really compelled by the vision, but also the vision of empowering entrepreneurs everywhere, empowering anyone with a creative idea, actually make money from their creativity through selling these physical products that normally was a big hassle to go get printed, lay out a [00:17:00] lot of money, have inventory sitting in your trunk, either be able to ship it out on eBay or You know, sell it on the street, you know, or like at a festival.
And we thought it was going to be really transformative. You know, one of the things I learned at Zazzler, two things is it's really hard to do businesses that deal in atoms, like an orders of magnitude, harder than software businesses. Cause you have to deal with this physical stuff all the time. And what's, what makes companies like Amazon and Apple so absolutely impressive to me is.
How many atoms they deal with, you know, on a daily basis and just their operating efficiency is incredible. The other thing though, that I learned at Zazzle was it was run by a father and two sons, Robert Bobby and Jeff Beaver. And they are fantastic visionaries for the company. But it also created an interesting culture where it was sort of a family run company by the three of them, and it was a growing company with a great executive leadership team.
And it was a tension that I think was hard to fully resolve kind of in those formative scaling period. I spent a couple [00:18:00] years working with them and loved it, but ultimately for me decided that it was hard to kind of figure out that tension of when the executive team was making decisions or when the founders collectively were making decisions.
And I see every company going through that sort of challenge and how do you really scale organizational thinking? And, and after kind of a couple of years of doing that. And I got two speeding tickets in the same month driving home from work, which is sort of a good sign of stress. The first one, totally fine, but when you get a speeding ticket, you should start paying a lot more attention.
And I still was so stressed out leaving work that I thought it was time for me to try something new and actually go to a bigger company. At which point, and this is 2008, I thought Facebook at 500 people was the perfect bigger company for me to go join. And got lucky enough to have an opportunity to join them and work on a platform.
Amy: And that was in which year?
Josh: It was early 2008. So Facebook had just launched their consumer platform in 2007, and I thought it was the most important, significant change to [00:19:00] user acquisition on the consumer internet, really since search. And it looked like you could make social products that would connect people throughout the world.
And if you just want to build a new product, you just could hook it up to a social graph and have immediate distribution. And it was also kind of the period where it was so spammy and so messy and so crazy that it was hard to put the cat back in the bag, so to speak. And so I thought it'd be a great time to get into Facebook and get to go work on those problems.
And if I hadn't been able to get the job at Facebook, I was targeting Google OpenSocial, which was Google's competitive product for the Facebook platform, because I just knew I wanted to work on that class of problems.
Amy: So what was that like?
Josh: It was an incredible time. Facebook was growing so fast. It was maybe 50, 60 million monthly active users.
When I joined, uh, and they were just figuring out how do we scale this and grow more internationally and get it to hundreds of millions, they're like, maybe someday we could have a billion monthly active users. Now they're over like a billion daily. It's just [00:20:00] unbelievable. And the platform was the center of the consumer internet ecosystem, but it was messy, messy, messy.
Facebook didn't know how it was going to make money. The platform companies were all trying to make money and scale really quickly on top of Facebook. There were times that there were things that were good for the platform companies, like a game company that were bad for Facebook users. Because if you spam 30 friends to try to invite them to a game and two friends like the game, that's two new users for the game company and 28 annoyed people, uh, Facebook users who just got spammed by their friend.
And so is this really interesting set of tension and relationships and things we work through and Facebook's goal, you know, on our platform was we believe that a platform is really important for everybody, but we believe we aren't here to service the platform. We're here to service our users and Facebook had to keep making changes that would make things better and better for Facebook.
Even if they, you know, didn't work for every platform company. And it was an incredible time to be part of that shift, but I think really set the platform up for what it could [00:21:00] be. Then I had the fortune to get to be, uh, involved in leading the Facebook connect launch, which was our idea of like, how do we bring this social graph power out to the rest of the internet?
So it's not just these apps on Facebook, but really broadly the way to think about the whole. Internet should all be social. And I got to work with all the big companies. We're trying to convince them to go social and got to work with something like Huffington post. And we try to make news social and Facebook became the number two traffic source for Huffington post.
Cause we really figured out how to integrate social news, you know, and you can now see the effects of getting social news, right. And as Facebook's grown, you know, now we're into the world of fake news and so much news distributed through Facebook, but at the time it was, A big question opportunity of could we even make this Facebook an important distribution point for news?
So I get to work on all these early nascent problems and it was so fun and so challenging.
Amy: Wow. So, and then you went to Twitter, right?
Josh: One of the things that I realized is [00:22:00] there's a, I love the role of product management where you're working with an engineering team to kind of keep building and shipping the next thing.
And at Facebook, my role sort of had morphed into this platform evangelism where I was working with all these other companies and helping them figure out how to take the most advantage of Facebook's platform and how do we scale the Facebook platform and the support that we can give where we can enable it.
And I missed product management. And this is 2009. And I found myself using Twitter as much as Facebook. And I said, I can't leave Facebook. It's going to be a great company. But the one that I might consider if I could get a job at Twitter, maybe I would go do that instead of, you know, the great job I had at Facebook.
And especially I go work on back on product management, took me about six months to get to know the Twitter folks, convince them I could really help them on growth from my experience at LinkedIn and everything I'd seen the Facebook ecosystem. Um, And they finally made me an offer to come join as one of the first product managers.
And I got to start the user growth team at Twitter. And Twitter had a really interesting problem, which in some ways they still have today, which is tons of people have heard of Twitter, but the number who understand how [00:23:00] Twitter is meaningful in their lives, who, from the moment they sign up. It's actually getting Twitter to be a habitual thing in their lives.
It's still really hard. Twitter is a hard product to get started with. It's kind of like Othello. It takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. I think Twitter takes much longer to learn, but once you learn it, you've really mastered it. And it's still the most important product in my life, um, maybe outside of email, for how I just access the world and I'm in touch with what's going on.
And so we spent a ton of time, really, at Twitter. I had enough people signing up every day. Getting more acquisition without better retention wasn't useful. So we focused on retention. We focused on helping people on board and getting to a new plateau of learning and understanding.
And we did a ton of data analysis and user interviews and really tried to hone that to the point that we could really understand how to get someone signed up for Twitter and we got it from about 10 to a hundred million active users in that time. And then, you know, I think the learnings change and all the, the data models need to be redone to get that next a hundred [00:24:00] and 500 million users.
And I'm still optimistic they can do that. 'cause I still think Twitter's a billion user product.
Amy: Yeah. It's, uh, amazing product. So from there. After Twitter, is that when you went to VC?
Josh: Yeah. So everything's going really well for me at Twitter. We were growing really fast. I was involved in a ton of really interesting projects.
Twitter had its own set of, you know, executive and turnover. And I just ended up on the downside of one of those and ended up, you know, getting laid off with a couple of other product managers or laid off, really fired with a couple of other product managers that were trying to shift how they did product management.
Uh, when Jack Dorsey came back into the company. And I thought to myself, man, I have been involved in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Zazzle, seeing these companies early, seeing them growing rapidly and scaling and figuring out some really interesting hard problems. I wonder if. I'm not the person who scales these things the next level, or I'm really more of a [00:25:00] person who loves finding and getting involved early and helping.
And I wonder if there's a job that I could do that. Maybe it'd be venture capital. And I've been lucky. Reid Hoffman's a partner, was a partner at Greylock. David Z was running Greylock and he had been invested in LinkedIn back in 2000. Four or five when I was there. So I got to know them over the past decade and they said, why don't you come hang out with us, learn about venture capital, and we'll see if there's a long term role here.
Or most likely you'll go back into industry in a couple of years, but you'll have a great experience and exposure and sort of get out of a little bit of the day to day, you know, product churn and product cycle. And I thought that sounded like a great opportunity. And that was 2011. And then within a couple of years, I was finding some really interesting investments for the firm.
And they asked me, why don't you start leading a couple of these and we'll see what happens, you know, and then, you know, fast forward to now where I've now been here five and a half years. And, you know, I've been a GP in our current fund and our previous last fund and, and working on finding great [00:26:00] investments and working with them.
Amy: And it's interesting because a lot of your investments are the same theme, very social user generated content.
Josh: Yep. When you're investing, I think there's a couple of things you look for. One is. Can it be a really big company and do your instincts sort of fire on why it can be a really big company and two is going to be a company you can meaningfully help as an investor.
And so, you know, on the first one, you know, the instincts that led me to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, as opposed to the other social companies of those days, we're finding these things that could be real habits. And build the right network graph and network density and had founders who had great visions that I believed in.
And I thought, you know, I've kind of used those same instincts to try to find new companies that I can go work on and what they can become, you know, things like discord and musically and house party and medium, and. Also, I found that those are companies that I could uniquely help and got really excited and wanting to help.
I mean, when you join the board of a company [00:27:00] and you invest, you're really joining the company, not that dissimilarly than when you take a job. And actually it's even worse because once we invest, we're in, you know, like at a job, you can always leave. Like once you're in, you're in through the duration of the company.
So that's kind of been my MO. But I also think that those kinds of companies that bring people together. Are actually the kinds of companies that make the most can build these really defensible networks and systems and get to real scale. And so I've always been excited about companies that bring two people together onto a platform.
And so a lot of my investments are around the same theme, which was also what attracted me when I was building my career.
Amy: Right. So you've worked at the forefront of innovation now for many years, following your instincts. First, you're an operator. Now you're an investor. That's one thing that you wish you'd known earlier about what it takes to innovate successfully.
Josh: You know, I've always been learning [00:28:00] and trying to figure this stuff out. I think the one thing I wish I had known earlier was slightly better balance between patience and urgency. We often think things are going to work so fast and that when they don't work the first time we get really crushed and we're like, Oh, this is never going to work.
And then we move on to something else. We try something else radically. And the people that I've seen the most successful have a step more patience and they're like, okay, that one didn't quite work, but what are some learnings from that one so we can do it again slightly differently. But they're trying to stay on the same course.
They're trying to believe the same course and that little bit of extra patience and just constant, you know, learning and tweaking and adjusting, but not completely rethinking, I think is really important. Now, that said, there's also a piece of that says, when do you run out of patience and you say, okay, let's actually try something very different.
And that really comes when you run out of great ideas where you still think the core thing will work. And I wish I'd understood this [00:29:00] better because I was often so urgent that. Other people in the company were like, calm down, Josh, slow down. And I think that urgency helped kind of push a lot of things forward.
And of course you have to be. Urging them to start up with this extra balance of being willing to try something again and looking at it from a slightly different perspective versus just throwing it all out, I think is really important to what's helped some of the best innovators get where they are.
Amy: Like tacking on your way, heading to an island, like tacking with the winds rather than just changing course.
Josh: A hundred percent. It's a great way to talk about it.
Amy: One of the great things about being an investor is you get to see so many teams and you choose to work with only a few. What are some of the signals that you look for that make you lean in when you're investing?
What is it that pulls you in?
Josh: You know, this is the hardest part of the job, is there's so many more people I would like to work with. Then we ultimately do decide to invest in the first thing. I look for is a big vision of the world of how the world will be different in a few years. If this company succeeds and [00:30:00] has that impact, and I look for the founders vision that can really paint that once I get sort of excited about the vision, then I like to understand it.
Why now? Why is this company have a chance now to go realize that vision that it couldn't have been realized before? What are the trends today? Either technical trends or Sociological trends, the way people are behaving is different. So now they're gonna use this new thing that they wouldn't use before.
Or economic trends or environmental trends that are going to make something possible. And then we really look for some signs of traction, some signs of something's working, some signs that when you've launched your product, people use it. And a small amount of people are so committed to it already that we believe that that can scale up to the millions or tens of millions or billions or whatever.
And so those kind of understanding of what's working and why, where it can go in the big [00:31:00] picture, and what are the trends are going to make it possible to keep building it now, kind of what really get us over the line.
Amy: On the flip side, what are some of those red flags that push you away, that kind of get you to stop in your tracks?
Josh: One is people who don't seem to have a unique particular passion for this company or this product. They don't really articulate why they're doing it. Then I don't know that they'll be able to willing to go through all the hard bumps and turns they'll take to get there. The second one is people who don't really understand their data or understand why something's working or really aren't curious.
Like, whenever people show me a chart and there's like blips that go way up or blips that go way down, I'm like, Ooh, what happened? Why'd that blip go way up? Or why'd that blip go down? Or why don't these people come back as often as these people? And it's not that I'm like probing the data, looking for like a red flag.
I'm actually just curious about what are we learning? Because it's constant learning that'll do it. And people who can't explain their data in a way that they're asking those same questions, you know, really makes me [00:32:00] nervous. And I think people think it's sometimes an exam. And like, I don't mean it to ever be an exam.
It's really a just curious because all data tells a story. Even when you're looking at charts of data, all it really was is 500, 000 people took an action that day. And each one of those is their own individual life story and life action. That's what caused that chart to go up or down. And your answer might be, it was really hot that day in San Francisco.
And so nobody sat in front of their computers. Like, that's a great answer. Like, that's, you know, who knows if it's right or not, but like, that's a great answer that can explain data.
Amy: Well, it's a hypothesis.
Josh: You know, sometimes it's a hypothesis, sometimes it's actually the story that came out of the data because you dug into it and that was really what happened.
Amy: Exactly. And that's where some really smart, qualitative interview style. Data can tell you the why when you've got the hard data that tells you the What.
Josh: A hundred percent. And, and I think doing that kind of interviews and talking to people, the best way that you learn kind of at every [00:33:00] phase of your product.
Amy: Yeah. You're really getting into something. That's one of the paradoxes of being a great entrepreneur, which is you need this blend of really strong vision. And then a willingness to take lots and lots of feedback. And one of the hardest things when you're doing that is to, you know, Identify who to listen to and who to tune out in terms of the data, in terms of the interviews, in terms of your colleagues, in terms of your stakeholders.
Yeah, there's no one answer, of course. But how do you counsel and work with teams and help them and, you know, reflect on your, your own learning of how you decide who to listen to and who to tune out when you are pursuing a vision, but actively collecting data.
Josh: There's no good answer to this question, because at the end of the day, you do have to trust your own gut.
And when we're investing in a company, we're investing in many ways in the founder and the leadership teams, gut to take in all this input and And still make the tough decisions based on what they believe. But what we're looking for is people whose guts are constantly [00:34:00] informed and tuned by the stories they hear.
And when they hear something that doesn't fit the narrative that they believe in their head, they don't just dismiss it because it doesn't fit the narrative. They go and figure out why and figure out, should I actually adjust the narrative? Are the users telling me they want to do something with my product that I didn't expect them to be doing?
Is that what they really should be doing? Or do I have a flaw in my product that is guiding them down this wrong use path? And you kind of have to be constantly asking those questions in order to get closer to the core vision. On the other hand, we don't want people who are like, oh, well, the data says to make it red, we should make it red.
Oh, the data says to build it this way, we should build it this way. Because then you'll also miss the overall narrative for the story you really want to tell through your product. So, it's a constant trade off of questioning your core narrative, but never losing your core narrative.
Amy: Yep. The best game designers I've worked with, they all do that.
Josh: Yeah, I think that's right.
Amy: And it's an amazing balancing act. Jenova Chen, who did, you know, [00:35:00] Journey and Flower before it, just very, very, Innovative, creative game designer was famous for having this rabid vision, but also just being voracious about feedback, particularly with player tests and, you know, just striving and striving to integrate the two.
It's a paradox cause it's, they're two different things, but the best innovators, the best creators, the best game designers, product creators, they walk that wire.
Josh: Yeah. And that's the toughest line to figure out is when do you trust your instincts When it's not quite what users are telling you and when do you trust your users and shift your, your thinking and I think the best people don't ever change their core instincts and their core belief.
They adjust it to kind of adopt and absorb these new things that they learn.
Amy: So what are some of the things when you are. Connecting with teams when you're, you know, coaching and helping out entrepreneurs. What are some [00:36:00] of the really common mistakes that you see, especially first time product creators making in the really early stage when they bring their ideas to life?
Josh: I think there's two. I think the first one is they do a little bit of the, if I build it, they will come, which is not thinking about how growth and distribution and the narrative of the product really do it because they built a great product. They just, everyone should just adopt it. And of course we could market it or tell people about it or get a press article somewhere or get it on product times, but they don't think about how growth is natively built into the product and natively we'll, we'll draw in more people.
I think the second thing they miss is onboarding, which is I might figure out how to grow and attract more people to my product, but getting them actually spun up and ready on my product. In a way that is ready for them to really use is I think something that people do way too little of in the early days of a product.
Amy: Yep. Although I have to tell you, I've had several [00:37:00] clients who just did all onboarding in the early days of a product. And against my advice, wouldn't really focus on the habit part. Like what is the 30 day, the 60 day experience? And that's a big old leaky bucket. So for me, one of the things I've learned, I'm wondering if you've learned this just in product development is road mapping wise.
If you just do onboarding without the habit piece, you've got a leaky bucket, which often, you know, people just abandon it because it doesn't get you where you need to go. But if you can get the habit piece. And then get the good onboarding after that, then you've got like a winning thing that you can ship and grow and develop, continue to develop.
Josh: You're totally right. And I think I was giving that the benefit of the doubt that a lot of great product people even build something. And if I get you trained on it, and if I get you to it, it's actually really useful at what it does. And they think that that will just work in and of itself. That's hard to do in the first place.
So I totally agree with you. That getting somebody trained on it. To a [00:38:00] habit and a thing that they really want to be using. And that really solves a meaningful problem. Like that's sort of like the baseline, like if you can't do that, then the rest of this doesn't matter. But I was saying, I see a lot of people who then think they've gotten there and then stop.
Amy: And they don't do the onboarding.
Josh: And they don't do the onboarding. They don't design for growth and acquisition in a way that just makes the whole system work.
Amy: Right. Which is the other piece of the puzzle. Looking back at all the different things you've done in your career and what you're doing now.
What do you see as your superpower or your sweet spot? What kinds of projects really light you up?
Josh: You know, I think the thing that I've really been excited about in my career has been this intersection of understanding the technology enough of what can be built, but understanding the human story of why an individual will use a product in a real, meaningful way.
And really being able to tell that story in a useful way where I can [00:39:00] translate it both to the engineers who need to build something and the business people who need to understand the why and how and how it can be a big business and being able to really sit at that sort of narrative side of telling the story and also in multiple languages to, you know, engineers, designers, everybody else.
And I think that's a, that communication is a really hard thing to be able to do. I think where I've been able to be at that intersection that has really helped me, you know, get pretty far. I think the other thing is being enough of a dreamer with great visionaries to kind of see what's possible.
Amy: So on that note.
What are you seeing right now on the frontiers that's new and exciting in design and tech these days? Which trends are you following?
Josh: You know, I think a lot of people right now are talking about what's gonna happen in a world of augmented reality Virtual reality as these really new deep experiences to to have in the world I think a lot of people are talking about sort of robotics and what's gonna happen when more robots penetrate even [00:40:00] more of our technologies Our daily lives or our work lives or automate more and more tasks, obviously driving cars, there's a lot of energy.
These are all really, really exciting trends. I mean, I'm excited about where those trends are going to go in the next several years, but I think it's early for all of them to be impacting our daily lives, where I'm really excited is I think there's a whole new generation of products and experiences and apps and businesses to be built even around our phones.
I look at Pokemon go last year that had 500 million downloads and had people walking around the streets, staring at their phones, interacting in the world, bumping into each other. And I think that was like a flare of like. Phones aren't just to keep sending messages and pictures to each other, which Instagram and Snapchat and Facebook and Twitter all do really well, but they're now part of changing our lives and change the way we interact with the world, having more entertainment experiences delivered on our phones and everything else.
And I just think that is so unique and so powerful. And I am. [00:41:00] Waiting to see what kind of the next wave of mobile entrepreneurs really do.
Amy: Ah, that's well put. So, uh, what's coming up for you? What's on the horizon? Is there anything exciting that you want to share with us?
Josh: You know, I think a story that isn't told as much in considering you have a lot of a gaming audience is the company discord.
You know, we invested them about a year and a half ago, and it's just been a phenomenal ride to see kind of gaming. It's sort of a social network for gamers, people who play PC games and, you know, they need a voice layer and a chat layer to be able to talk to each other. And the number of people who come to use Discord every day now to then find their friends and interact with their friends and then play games together is just growing at an exponential rate.
And I think that kind of community type of aspect is not seen as widespread because we still think of gaming as sort of a side business, a side entertainment. Versus a real mainstream behavior that the generation's growing up today. They're going to [00:42:00] assume is, is as common to play video games together as people playing sports together or going out and watching movies together.
And I think that that trend is going to become more and more powerful. We're obviously seeing this through e sports and everything else.
Amy: How does that relate to the trends you're seeing in Musical. ly?
Josh: You know, Musical.ly is a product that I love. It allows people to be creative with their phones. You know, again, most of the video and audio that we capture and share on social networks is sort of capturing life.
Musical.ly is the first time people turn the phones on themselves and have fun. They dance, they sing, they laugh, they perform, you know, at real scale. And I think turning our phones into creative tools and not just capture is going to be a really big trend that they sit right at the center of.
Amy: I mean, to me, Musical.ly is absolutely augmented reality. In just the way that it lets people express themselves, my 10 year old and her friends are all over it and they're creating these new [00:43:00] personas online. You know, they're, they're augmenting their personas.
Josh: Yeah.
Amy: Thank you so much, Josh, for joining us and sharing your stories and your insights.
It's absolutely fascinating.
Josh: No, thank you so much for having me. I look forward to hearing it.
Amy: All right. Talk to you soon.
Josh: Okay, thank you.
Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim. The shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com.
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