The NFX Podcast

We all think we know how our users behave. It turns out, we don’t. Founders over-index on rational assumptions, but users most often behave irrationally.

Behavioral economics, by contrast, is the practice of truly seeing your users' emotions, beliefs, and habits. This kind of vision is critically missing from product design at most startups.

In this episode, NFX General Partner Gigi talks with Dan Ariely -- the world’s top expert in behavioral economics and a renowned professor at Duke -- as he breaks down the most common types of irrational user behavior and shares frameworks for predicting how your users will actually behave.

Can your company be a Billion-dollar business? When we look inside the early days of companies like Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart & Square, what are the patterns that may shed light on how great Founders beat incredible odds?

In this episode of the NFX podcast, Elad Gil — one of the world's top angel investors in an astonishing number of Billion-dollar companies (Airbnb, Airtable, Anduril, Brex, Checkr, Coinbase, Flexport, Gitlab, Gusto, Instacart, Opendoor, PagerDuty, Pinterest, Samsara, Square, Stripe, & Wish) and cofounder of ColorGenomics— joins NFX partner James Currier to unearth what makes certain Founders and teams exponentially better.

Together they examine the counterintuitive -- and often contrarian -- patterns that he has observed in many of the world’s best known Billion-dollar companies and their decision frameworks along the way.

NFX Essay - https://www.nfx.com/post/unusual-signs-billion-dollar-companies
Elad's Twitter - https://twitter.com/eladgil

This is The Founders' List - audio versions of essays from technology’s most important leaders, selected by the founder community.

Longtime Googler Steve Yegge posted an insightful rant on his Google+ page about how Google is failing to make platforms for its products. He also shares some interesting little tidbits about his six-year stint at Amazon working for the 'Dread Pirate Bezos'. The rant was intended to be shared only with his Google coworkers, but was accidentally made public.

Read the full memo here - https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

This is The Founders' List - audio versions of essays from technology’s most important leaders, selected by the founder community.

"Design is all of the conversations between designers and PMs about what to build. Building for this entire process doesn’t take away the importance of designers—it gives them a seat at the table for the core decisions a company makes. Companies that are successful in the long term are the ones that can repeatedly find the next loop."

This is the audio version of Kevin Kwok's essay, 'Why Figma Wins'.  His analysis of the trajectory of Figma reflects the incremental product thinking & execution required to build this type of bottoms-up giant. 

Kevin was formerly worked at Greylock Partners investing in marketplaces, autonomous vehicles, bottoms up productivity tools, and more. He is particularly interested in understanding the underlying structures that shape industries and the core loops that drive companies and writes on his popular site www.kwokchain.com.

Read the full article here - https://kwokchain.com/2020/06/19/why-figma-wins/

Status can be a volatile, powerful driver of engagement. Status and one of its underlying mechanisms, scarcity must be considered by product designers in every category, as early on as possible.

But it can also be a double-edged sword, as managing a network and the status dynamics within it is constantly recirculating, always shifting. For this reason, status that is more entertainment-based than utility-based can over time become precarious, as well as too restrictive for continued user growth.

NFX partner James Currier sits down with Eugene Wei (Product Lead at Amazon, Hulu, Erly, Flipboard, Oculus) to draw from his original Status-as-a-Service article and expand to discuss status in entertainment, frameworks for emotional product design, video games as world leaders in defining scarcity, the future of virtual goods, and the underlying status games that drive us all -- in technology and in life.

"What's happening in general on the internet is an evolution to visual storytelling. The image is more powerful than ever, but it's also much harder to be seen than ever due to saturation. What's happening is the exchange is in social capital - the exchange is in being seen."

NFX partner James Currier sits down and chats with Mikael Cho (CEO & Co-founder) and Luke Chesser (Head of Product & Co-founder) about their Founder journey to creating Unsplash, solving the chicken and egg problem within their marketplace, the psychology of their users, and what the future of digital advertising will look like.

This is The Founders' List - audio versions of essays from technology’s most important leaders, selected by the founder community.

Surfaced during the prolonged Justice Department antitrust action against Microsoft from 1998 to 2001, Bill Gates outlines a strategy internally for Microsoft to not only enter the internet, but to dominate it in his famous ‘Internet Tidal Wave’ memo.

Read the full memo here - https://sriramk.com/memos/billgates-tidalwave.pdf

This is The Founders' List - audio versions of essays from technology’s most important leaders, selected by the founder community.

"Conflating what makes a platform work versus e.g. an infrastructure product can backfire and cause a team to have the wrong strategy for building a product or getting customers. These startups tend to fail."

This is the audio version of Elad Gil's popular essay on The 3 Types of Platforms. Elad was the former Co-Founder/CEO of Color Genomics, Entrepreneur, Operating Executive at Twitter, and investor/advisor to companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Square, and Pinterest.

Read the full article here - http://blog.eladgil.com/2015/01/the-3-types-of-platform-companies.html

"I think that everybody is getting attuned to strategic communication in a way that was not happening before social media.

NFX partner James Currier talks with Sarah Frier, who reports on social media companies for Bloomberg News from San Francisco. Her stories have earned her a reputation as an expert on how Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter make business decisions that affect their future and our society as well as being the author of 'NO FILTER: The Inside Story of Instagram.'

Sarah and James touch on a variety of subjects including the role and effect social media has on society and how to think about navigating your potential influence as an early-stage Founder.