Love Bijan's post on how to understand the contemporary era of hyper-growth. On one hand it's exciting because the platforms (FB, App Store) have evolved to the point where reaching scale is much easier than it was before. On the other, in my experience it takes a while to figure out what you are actually building. And it's directly informed by early use.

Given that the growth platforms aren't going away, how do companies adjust or is everyone just in a race to justify a $1B valuation?

i think the pressure to grow fast and hit the "new norm" of 20k per installs is causing folks to design/optimize in & around these growth platforms.

my concern is if they spend too much time on acquisition channels vs time on the core experience. also i would hate it if investors, founders & employees now start to panic if v1 doesn't take off like a rocket right away.

but there is no doubt the number of socially connected users is redefining scale.

I agree with Bijan that people should not panic if they don't find immediate hypergrowth. And a lot of initial hypergrowth can be artifically inflated via things FB is doing experimenting with its news feed or being featured on iTunes, techcrunch, or other places.

But I do think that what has is important is that people design in growth as a core part of their product experience and process.

And more importantly, that we measure what matters - how many people "come back" every day

Are there changes to the standard pitch deck that you wish entrepreneurs would make? That is, instead of having "Slide 3: We've add 30k users per day for the past 90 days" there's some other way of talking about growth that has a more long-term view in mind.

The focus on hyper growth seems dangerous as it will provoke the backlack of "sure it's easy to grow but what's it really good for." It's uncomfortably reminiscent on the "Don't worry about the fundamentals, look at the pageviews" paradigm.

I think the best pitch decks tell stories about behavior change and how the world looks different in 10 years because the product will exist and be massive. Showing early FAST traction is always cool, but just one part of the story until it becomes locked in habits. People look to Instagram as an example of what they want to do, but miss that like Twitter, it had become a daily habit for millions of people.

Here is a quick article I wrote about the best decks: joshelman.tumblr.com