Scaling Growth | Gustaf Alstromer, YC Partner (formerly Airbnb) & Ed Baker (formerly Uber)

What's pretty cool is a few guys who have been living the centre of building up these growth teams kind of for the past, you know, seven or eight years. Edie joined Uber to start the growth team when it was five people, and then over the three and half years became how the VP of both product and growth for kind of Olive Uber. Gustav joined and the Airbnb growth team was him and two other people when he got started a few years ago, and that has scaled over a hundred.

So it's fun at a scale-up off-site to talk about scaling. We most have been talking about scaling organizations; there's a chance to talk about how do you scale the organization that continues to scale your users. You know, what's fun for me is, and I've known Ed and Gustav now for most of a decade kind of in this growth world.

You know, we were all started back when sort of this idea of a growth team, this idea of a team that's focused on this sort of intersection product and marketing to build stuff, was pretty novel and almost didn't even really exist. We were all kind of doing it in a social world. I remember Ed started a company in 2008 called, you know, Friendly Jimmy Go, and then Friendly, you know, Gustav started a company in 2007 called Haste On and then went over to Boxer.

These were like how do we get to like millions of users in the early days? So I'm curious if you just kind of talk about for this heyday of social viral growth explosion and sort of what are some of the key kind of crazy things you learned then that have really helped you as you think about growth today.

I don't want to start. Sure. So, yeah, I guess 2007, summer of 2007 when Facebook launched the platform was, I think, part of that explosion of just crazy viral growth, spammy apps on the Facebook platform. That was actually the first apps I built that reached tens of millions of users, you know, within months' time.

I think it was a great platform on which to just experiment with a lot of different ideas, because it was so easy to build these simple Facebook apps and just run lots of A/B tests. So much of, I think, figuring out how to grow something is a combination of an art and a science, and by running lots of experiments, you start to build an intuition for the types of things that work and don't.

Okay, what were some of the early tricks you found that like made you go super viral? You were pretty famous back in those days.

Yeah, I mean, you were at Facebook back then, right? So I think Facebook created new rules after I found some loopholes almost.

Oh yes, yeah. There was one, I remember, I think the most viral Facebook app I'm hesitant to even admit this, but it was called Zodiac Photo Album. The way it worked was literally, with one click, it would create a photo album with 12 photos in it, one for each zodiac sign, and then show all of your friends who had that zodiac sign in each of the 12 photos and tag all of them.

I think we were allowed to tag like 20 people per photo, so it would show up to 20 of your friends per zodiac sign times 12. So with one click you tagged 240 friends, and all 240 people would get an email saying, "I just tagged you in a photo," so that has a very high response rate.

People kind of want to see you when they're tagged in the photo. They would go, they'd see, "Oh, it's a Zodiac Photo Album. Create your own at, you know, the Zodiac app." Within, I think within 24 hours, we had tagged tens of millions of people in photos, including Zuck, and then I heard the platform team shove it down shortly now.

The wonder of those days are over, of kind of those crazy viral pops. Well, and then Gustav, you were really central to a lot of the early experimentation on mobile. I remember we first met when Boxer was blowing up and you guys had figured out some really unique ways to blow up using notifications and inviting. Can you kind of remind us like, well, how did you get to this world of growth and how did you kind of figure out stuff in those early days, especially on mobile, which people think is a lot harder?

Yeah, and social was so before Boxer I...