YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Chen

lines on the record: 118
first: 2021-11-30
most recent: 2021-11-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, so if you just go to reforge.com R-E and then forge.com, it'll list all the new programs that folks are doing in product management, in marketing, in growth, and a bunch of other upcoming programs that Brian Balfour, who's the CEO and that whole team is putting together.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Student debt is obviously a huge crisis, and it makes the whole process of going to one of these schools less attractive. And so it's part of a reforge is part of a really interesting new trend of trying to reinvent this whole system that we know, I think we all know needs to be reinvented and starting on kind of like business education and tech and so on.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And organized into ways that you can train kind of the next group of people. And so this company has been kind of a really interesting vehicle for me to be able to publish more of my thoughts and content in a very organized way. And so they'll work with folks like Casey Winters, who's the chief product officer at Eventbrite or a bunch of folks from Airbnb and Slack and some of the really interesting companies and really to bridge that disconnect that exists between academia and what actually happens in the real world and to provide it in a format where people can basically learn all these frontier skills from other people and to do it in a way where their employers are paying for it and it's part-time. And I think that really stands in stark contrast with this whole reinvention that we're seeing in kind of academia as a whole where the top 200 schools, maybe 500 universities will probably be fine, but you're actually seeing a ton of universities going bankrupt these days.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That I touch Kind of situat Just also just add that one of the things I've been doing over the years has been to take a lot of my Lessons and ideas, especially around metrics and growth and marketing, and packaging them into kind of multi-week programs under a company called ReForge, which you can check out. And the whole idea there is basically the whole concept of a business school needs to just be completely reinvented. I actually lived in a Stanford GSB pass-down house where it was basically a bunch of the MBA students and I just found it on Craigslist when I first moved to the Bay Area. And it was always one of those things where you ask them, oh, how's school? And it's like, we didn't learn anything, but you meet amazing people. The parties are really fun. And that's kind of the state of things. And so what the reforged people are trying to do is really to take all the knowledge out of all of these frontier skill sets, right? Everything that we've talked about today, actually, you know, everything from Web3 to metaverse and game design to all the creator economy stuff. And how do you take all these frontier skills and actually get them out of the practitioner's heads?”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, like how many gigabytes of memory does your thing have, et cetera? It'll just become fully just a natural part of every product experience we have”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So I think it's going to be one where hopefully in a couple years it's like any game that you download off of Steam or off the internet or whatever is going to have a bunch of crypto functionality and a wallet embedded and all that stuff. And it'll just be transparent to the user. It'll just seem like it just works. And a lot of what we're talking about now is just the underlying technologies will feel more like when people used to talk about megahertz and.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of Web3. Yeah. There's been several cycles of crypto now, but it definitely feels like this is the one where this particular cycle, where because of games and crypto, And then also kind of NFTs and kind of creators and all of that, where it's really burst into the mainstream of what a normal average consumer would actually be excited about. For them, as much as the NERS were excited about kind of new versions of different protocols and so on, that wasn't as appealing as now.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in the Kevin Kelly world. I wonder if there needs to be a new rule created now in NFT world where it's like actually instead of having a thousand true fans, you maybe just need 100 investors or you need, you know, yeah, that's true.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel the same way about my email list, by the way. I mean, if I could convert my Twitter followers into more email subscribers, I would if I could do that across all. I mean, it's the one thing that you really control. As you were talking about that, I was just thinking, you know, how there's the concept of like thousand true fans.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And being able to go direct in this way first through things like Substack, where it's now part of the playbook of the company as well as many, many other companies like it to basically have a creator fund and to be able to write advances of huge numbers. I mean, you can Google some of the rumored numbers out there, but like big numbers. I think just really fundamentally changes the way that the creators can then own their work. They don't have to be intermediated, et cetera. And then I completely agree. I think the whole NFT thing is fascinating and how it. Provides ownership kind of at the next level. So that's cool to hear that you're so engaged with the Web3 stuff.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The business models are so interesting because I think what we're figuring out in this era is that creative work has probably been wildly undervalued because it's the thing that so many consumers actually want and experience. But then you have this whole generation of middlemen, whether those are music labels or publishers or whatever that have artificially been constraining some of the economics in order for their businesses to be interesting.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of like a golden era, right? Like whoever would have thought that these kinds of contracts and these kinds of deals would be getting thrown around.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably closer to a hobby. And so you have to be careful about it. I was going to ask you one other question, which is for you as a creator, I imagine you must be pitched all sorts of stuff in kind of quote unquote creator economy. And I'm curious what's been resonating with you and like what you like and don't like in the market as all the trends have been going.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Have you been? I know back in the day, you were pretty prolific. Have you gotten? Back into investing or advising at all? Is that?”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“End up in a situation where they're adversely selected. These are companies that need your help. And so when a company needs your help, it ends up being a sign that maybe, okay, where is this going to go? Are they actually going to be mature enough to be able to be successful on their own? And then the final thing I wanted to mention is I think that writing and tweeting and social media has become such a big part of it because in a world where there's so much capital and so many new ways for people to do investing that You end up needing to really show your unique expertise and social media and writing and all of that has become like the way to do that for a very founder-oriented, founder-leaning ecosystem at this point.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. That's right. Yeah, exactly. And I think you need to scale down your check size to be small enough where you can put money into 20, 30, 40 companies. And so sometimes what that means is, you know, you're DMing founders and you're individually investing $5,000 or $10,000 or something into their company. And you're trying to spread it out across many of these. And then counterintuitively, I think a lot of folks are getting into startup investing and they're thinking about it as where they want to do advising first. And on one hand, those can work out, as you and I both know, especially if you do quite a few of them. But in a lot of cases, you're advising companies and”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Capital data out there. There's one of our LPs, Horsley Bridge, went and released a ton of data about how for the top tier venture capital funds, about half of your investments will actually lose money. And then you'll get another slice that basically where you get your money back. And then it's one out of ten, one out of 20 that makes money and pays for everything else. And so what that really tells you is that if you're not in a world where you're actually getting to 20 plus investments, then you're not doing it right first of all.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's a bunch of folks like Ryan Hoover and Jeff Morse Jr. and these folks that are running around basically where they start a venture capital fund, but it's just one person at the top of it. And they're investing other people's money, but oftentimes these are folks that have really interesting social media followings and have really unique insights about their particular markets. And so because of that, they go off and they raise $5 or $10 million funds. It's fascinating because we went from this world where we have been giving one or two million bucks to every credible entrepreneur. And now it seems like what we're doing is we're going to give five or ten million dollars to every credible person to now go and invest in their friends. And I think we've been happy with the former part of this experiment with all the innovation that it's been creating. And I think just generally making it so much easier for founders to get started is a huge deal. What's been happening now is as people get into the market and are starting to invest more. What I always tell them is, first of all, if you're going to get into investing in startups that you, number one, you really have to think about it like you're building a portfolio. And if you look at the venture capital capital.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, one of the trends that I've been following that I think is just incredibly fascinating is how much startup investing has become part of the overall vernacular of Twitter and just everyone who's an employee intech also everyone wants to invest. This crystallized for me recently where you guys may know Austin Alread from Lambda School, who's one of my favorite people, he said he basically thought maybe I should start a rolling fund and he just tweeted out, I think it was him and Sahil who put a couple tweets together and they immediately just instantaneously put together a $30 million rolling fund which he's now off investing. And it's a really interesting place because of both obviously Robinhood as well as OpenSea and I'm involved in a couple companies. One's called Stonks, which is a kind of a product that aims to be kind of Robin Hood for the private markets.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the SF expats that are visiting there. But I think it's very real that the same things that keep people all in these top cities are going to fundamentally change because of the way that we're working.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yeah, exactly. That's right. That's right. Well, I was telling you that during COVID, I drove around in a van for four or five months, and then I ended up actually staying in Austin for four or five months as well. And one of the things I put together was like the WhatsApp group of, I went on Twitter and just asked, who in SF is in Austin? DM me and I'll put together a WhatsApp group. And I think I still have like 200, 300 people in this WhatsApp group.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Move to the city, which is like an hour away. And I remember it was because one of my friends was saying, it's easier to get funded than it is to get Palo Alto office space And Pinterest actually started in Palo Alto and like moved to the city. It's been fascinating to watch also just thinking about some of these ideas in the context of cities because Obviously, having Zoom and having remote first as an option really weakens the network effects of all of these different cities because you can actually work from anywhere. And having seen the whole tech industry move from Palo Alto to San Francisco makes me actually wonder how likely it is that huge chunks of SF might actually, the tech industry might actually decamp and move to New York and LA and some of these other places.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was going to mention the other place where I've been very fascinated about network effects is actually the network effects of work in these cities that we live in. When I first moved to the Bay Area, I lived in Palo Alto. And it did not take that long for, and there was a period where basically everyone said all the Syria startups are in Palo Alto. That's where I think there was one building, 165 University Avenue, where Google and PayPal and a bunch of other companies had all been built in one building. It was like, you know, University Avenue is just like one street and had like all the companies were in one street. And I think it took four or five years before all the startups moved to San Francisco.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they basically fish for them every year with more and more and more, and they were fishing several dozen tons of these fish. And then one year they just all disappeared. And again, the math is the same kind of idea, which is that you need a critical mass of sardines. And if you overfish, then the whole population will collapse. And so those ideas are so fascinating how they sort of weave across nature and then also a lot of the different products that I was studying for the book.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remembered this class that I had taken at the University of Washington on the study of animal populations. And I was like, yes, that's the curve. That's the math behind it. And so I was excited to be able to actually put that into the book. One of my other favorite things to do in the Bay Area is to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. And if you go to the Monterey, it's such a great aquarium. And one of the funny things if you...”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you model them or flocks of birds or goldfish or whatever it is that you want to model, what you find is that you have to model them in such a way where there's a certain size of a Merkat grouping that you need in order for them to be able to warn each other for predators and so on. And if you bring them way far down, if you lose too many Meerkats, then what ends up happening is the whole grouping becomes much less effective. And on the other hand, if you have too many mere cats, then you end up with overpopulation because there's just too many in a given area and then the population will also tail off. And so that S curve is actually really at the heart of a theory that then you can apply to all of these social apps and marketplace companies and collaboration tools because the dynamics are really the same. And so when I was writing the Cold Star problem, I”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Castle has to be wrong because the value doesn't just go off into infinity, otherwise, we would never ever use any new products. We would just stick with the five big marketplace. We would all just use eBay for everything. We would all just use AOL Instant Messenger for everything. We wouldn't use anything else. And so the framework that I actually came to in trying to understand this is actually borrowing a theory that comes out of the world of ecology, which is that you have mere cats, which are, if you remember, this is one of the characters from the Lion King. There's Timon, who's the Meerkat and Pumba, who's the Warthog. And what happens with Meerkats, that's super interesting is that basically if you look at all the academic research on it,”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Slack folks and my interviewed Stuart for the book, one of the things he talks about is you need at least three people in a company using Slack together in order for it to work. And so Metcalfe's Logis doesn't capture any of that at all. And then the other thing is on the other side of it, which I think is really fascinating, is that very large networks end up having all these problems because there's just too much stuff. You get these overcrowding effects where now it's just really hard to find good content on a YouTube or it's really hard to find Craigslist has so much stuff in there where just the navigation and the fact that there's fraud and scams and like all that other stuff is really a core part of it. And I think this is something that you just see across all of these platforms, which is that not only do you get the Cold Star problem at the beginning, but then as it gets too big, you end up needing to deal with like trolls and spammers and overcrowding and all these other things. And so at the heart of what that tells you is, well,”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the more you stare at that, if you've been in the tech industry, the more you realize, oh my God, this really classic law is actually wrong. And it's really obvious why it's wrong. Because first of all, as we've been talking about today, Tim, it isn't just that more nodes on a network is better. You actually need like a critical mass of people. And there's a certain number that you need in order for it to work. And so if you talk to the...”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yeah, I talked to you about Merry Cats. Well, so one of the really interesting parts of the network effects literature, if you go back and read about it, there's this concept of Metcalfe's law, which has sort of been this framework that justified. It basically says the more users that use a network its value exponentially grows. It's very simple. It's what was used, especially in the original.com era to justify these enormous valuations for all these companies. And really is the heart of first mover advantage or kind of these ideas like winner-take-all.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Larger company while engaging one or two YouTube influencers is not going to be as interesting and move the needle as much as if you closely partner with another. So I think one of the things I'm always looking for is what is that next big edge, the new computing platform, the new technique that a startup can use to get a couple hundred users that the big companies are not going to be able to take advantage of.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And I think that that's why every startup that is getting created today has the advantage of looking at all the other companies that have been founded in the past and seeing all the idiosyncratic new growth hacks and techniques that they used, but also they get to use all of these new ones that are just emerging in the market. I mean, I think one of the big areas has definitely been the creator economy getting to scale. 10 years ago, being a creator was not a thing that a lot of people could do. And then now all of a sudden, you have all these people with millions of followers. And they want to work with startups. They want to work with communities. I mean, a lot of what we saw in the clubhouse journey so far is how many folks from the entertainment world are so interested in tech and want to invest in the companies and want to build ownership in these companies. And it's something where if you're a brand new startup, you can find that edge and go for it in a way where if you're a”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Customers into their product because it just feels like such a waste of time and just like way too much work. But I think in reality what you find is that you learn so much from doing that and then you find new ways to scale. And then once you've proven that you've built your atomic network and you can kind of go from there, then that's when you start to think about paid marketing and referral programs and all that good stuff. The whole brand and paid marketing thing is definitely one that I think startups should just completely avoid if they can.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of my favorite ones to debate people on Twitter about is the use of brand marketing in order to power your customer acquisition. It's just such a tough thing because there's sort of a brand marketing kind of industrial complex that exists out there that's just full of agencies and all these creative people. And it is what the big companies do. Because when you're doing brand marketing, you're working on a multi-decade timeframe if you're a bigger company to be able to recoup a bunch of those costs. But when you're a startup, I think the reality is that the world that you work in has to be very concrete. It has to be very much about how you use your very scarce resources to acquire your next batch of 100 users or 500 users. Paul Graham has a great essay about doing things that don't scale. And one of the things he talks about is”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More users is better, they ended up linking the Google Plus product from the Google homepage and from Google Maps and from YouTube. And of course, it looked like it had hundreds of millions of users very fast. But the question is, well, were people really using it with each other? And the answer was no. But if you define it by just active users, that's the kind of result that you get. And so I think that's an example where the strategy wasn't sound and then the metrics that were picked kind of overwhelmed what you ended up being there. So I think our founders have to be very careful about that and really start with the fundamentals there.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, that's right, exactly. And so I think instead what you really want to do is you want to actually pick your strategy first. What's your vision for the product? Are you going for a certain target audience? What is the unique value prop that you're trying to go for? And really tie that up, especially with what actually retains and generates business value for you. And then you set your metrics in a way to validate that your strategy is actually working. And I think some of the biggest blow-ups in all of tech history, whether you're looking at products that are, I'll leave the individual product names out, but ones where you spent way too much money trying to grow too many users and then it just turned out that they would never be unprofitable and it would kind of implode from there. Or actually an example that I have in the book is Google+ was a product that Google had released in order to compete against Facebook with the idea that”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You did an analysis of all the people who converted to becoming high value users, you could actually define it. And so they created an internal metric that they called HVA versus an LVA. So a high value active versus a low value active. And a high value active was somebody that was sharing folders with other people, had Dropbox installed on multiple computers, and were syncing files across it versus an LVA was somebody who maybe was just backing up their computer, maybe was sharing files, but not the right type, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think that this is an important example of how much your strategy and your metrics actually interplay. People tend to pick a metric, like a really simple one, and tend to say, okay, well, let's make that one bigger, but then not understand what are the actual downstream ramifications of what are actually registered users.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For monthly active users, what does that lead you to? Well, leads you to potentially giving away your product for free to as wide of an audience as possible. And so, for example, if you find a Dropbox folder that's just full of music or movies, that's good Dropbox usage because maybe a lot of people will download from that. And that's great. But what the company found over time was they basically started to really analyze, okay, like what are people actually using Dropbox for? And for the people especially who pay for Dropbox, what do they use it for? And we found that even though there was a lot of photos and a lot of movies and a lot of other things being shared, the files that actually got a lot of repeat usage and actually retain people tended to be documents, tended to be spreadsheets, tended to be things that people were using for work. And what that led them to understand was that if”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Continuing adding new products and continuing to monetize. And one of the things they did in the early days that I thought was so interesting was for many years, Dropbox actually saw themselves as a consumer company. And the reason for that was when you would look inside of a Dropbox folder, what you'd find is tons and tons of photos because that was kind of by far the most numerous thing that was in all the Dropbox folders. And so it was before that reason that they ended up building a bunch of photo apps, including Carousel and they had a bunch of other projects kind of over the years was because they thought they had a chance to build another form of social network around sharing photos. And as part of that, they ended up measuring, so going to the metrics point, they were thinking a lot about monthly active users. They were thinking a lot about all the standard things that we might associate with a social network. And what happened though was, well, if you're going”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Maybe I'll give a short story about how that maps into your strategy. Because I think it is such a fascinating interplay kind of between the two, which is I've been an advisor to Dropbox kind of off and on over the years, always on growth and things that they're trying to do to”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you get into it, because when you're with somebody that is as equally nerdy as you are about a topic, you can just go on and on and on. It's like me asking you what makes a good podcast. You probably could talk about that for.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, how do you measure it? How do you measure whether or not that loop is actually working or not? Because in a world of viral loops, for example, if you have 100 users using your app and they invite more than 100 users, then that group will then invite even more users. And on and on, and then that becomes exponential versus if those 100 users invites 50 users, then that'll drop off to 25 in the next one and then 12 in the next one. Then your loop will eventually die. And so I'm looking for that type of a theory about how it all fits together. And then I think once you set all of that scaffolding up, then I'm very interested in the exact details of what does the screen look like? Where does the button go? What does it say on the head, on the title page, and really get down into the nitty gritty. And I think that sort of encompasses everything from strategy all the way down to kind of measurement and into the tactics. But I love those kinds of questions.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then you can kind of describe within that, and you can call that a viral loop, or you could, there's kind of various forms, or you call it an engagement loop. But you want something that sort of feels like it's a theory that you can repeat over and over and over again.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some kind of a specific tactic where they're just like, oh, well, you know, you need a better invite mechanism or you really need to fix XYZ feature. Those tend to be all tactics and all tips and no organizing principle for how you can then generate 10 more ideas like that. And it doesn't indicate where you want to go. So what you want instead is you want something that looks more like a model of the world that you're describing, hopefully succinctly. And using that model, you can generate many, many ideas. So if you ask a question about Clubhouse, for instance, you need to, first of all, I think what I'm looking for ideally is a theory for how it is that a user maybe gets invited to Clubhouse from one of their friends and then they end up being activated because they connect with a certain number of rooms that they really like. And then as a result of that, do they then share one of those events to another set of friends? And then there's a loop.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you hit enter, explain in as much detail as you can about what actually happens that causes the web page to render at that point. If you're talking to somebody who really knows what they're doing, they'll go into as much details as you want. You hit enter and how does the keyboard actually interface with the device drivers on your operating system and how does DNS work and how does, you know, and you just go really, really deep in all this. And I love that and it gives you a sense for how people are strong or weak in different areas. And so what I'll often do with founders is to ask kind of these big broad questions like that and just see how deep the rabbit hole goes for. And one of those is to ask them, like, how do you 10x TikTok or how do you 10x Axie Infinity or how do you 10x Clubhouse or something like that? And what you're really looking for there is the people that kind of immediately jump to.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I love these questions you can ask. They're basically infinite depth in nature, where somebody who really, really knows their shit can just go incredibly, incredibly deep. And somebody who's just very shallow will just stop after five minutes. One really good one that you can ask technical people is if you type in”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. And I think for the founders, it's just a perfect time to do this because when you look at what's happened in the traditional mobile app world, I think one of the challenges right now is when you are building apps just as the App Store came alive, your apps would just compete with waiting in line and like you're sitting on the toilet or like whatever, right? It's like those are good forms of competition because of course whatever app you built is going to be better than those experiences. And then now it's, you don't compete against waiting in line. You're competing against the most engaging, most addictive products ever built that are on your phone. And it feels like it's so hard to break out these days. And so I think having the new Web3 angle and everything is a breath of fresh air in the whole ecosystem because of that.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The closest metaver I have probably is open source because it sort of seems like open source really changed the way that you could work as a software engineer because now with all of your nights and weekend time you could contribute to all these projects and you would then earn this kind of broader ecosystem kudos from other software engineers. And sometimes you could eventually then monetize that by starting a company or by getting hired into people, et cetera. But I think what's so fascinating about Web3 is of course it's all interlinked. I think what we'll find is a bunch of these quote unquote companies will actually just be an extended ecosystem of developers that are contributing to it and then they're benefiting economically through the tokens. And so I think we're potentially on the cusp of new ways to organize companies in the future. And my colleague Chrison and also Katie Hahn, they keep needing to figure out, okay, do you invest in equity for startups or do you buy tokens? And like, how do you structure it?”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the stories I read about in the book is how at Uber, especially in 2016 and 2017, how many protests there were outside the office. It wasn't just the San Francisco office. It was like all the Uber offices. And it would always be just like pissed off drivers who were complaining about whatever policies that were enacted in the app, often to balance kind of the rider side and the driver's side, because they all have different needs. The company has to kind of balance the needs. Sometimes the drivers would get upset. But no, I mean, I definitely agree that that's an example of a digital phenomenon that then causes this physical situation. But yeah, I think the whole governance thing will be.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually have this quote here. So Blizzard one day actually just nerfed he had a warlock, and his warlock had a siphon life spell that would create a lot of damage. And Blizzard one day just like removed it. And he literally has a funny quote. He says, I cried myself to sleep. And on that day, I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. And then he quit World of Warcraft later. And then a little bit later down the line started Ethereum. So anyway, I kind of love that as like poetic justice of how it all fits together.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT