Summary
I read The Cold Start Problem for the same reason I read and reviewed Certain to Win — I wanted to understand business better now that I work for a startup instead of a school system.
Highlights
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A Review of The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen I read The Cold Start Problem for the same reason I read and reviewed Certain to Win — I wanted to understand business better now that I work for a startup instead of a school system. Happily, The Cold Start Problem turned out to be one of the more useful books I read last year, and it comes up in discussion with friends regularly in all sorts of contexts. Sometimes we’re talking about corporate recruiting, sometimes it’s about forming friend groups for kindergarteners, sometimes we’re pondering the nature of our book club… but The Cold Start Problem applies to all of it. Andrew Chen wrote The Cold Start Problem because he found his own understanding of network dynamics to be, in his words, “unforgivably shallow for something so core to the technology industry.” Chen was trying to build a shared vocabulary for discussing mechanics that most high-level tech folks understand intuitively, but struggle(d) to articulate. Most people, whether they work in
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tech or use social media or not, have an intuition about network effects. Products get more valuable as more people use them, that marketplaces need both buyers and sellers, and getting the first core group of people to start
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I have found this vocabulary incredibly useful not only for communicating in professional contexts, but also in personal ones. For example: we like the school our kids attend, but’s the network effects that keep us there more so than the quality of instruction or the educational philosophy. Let’s get to the vocabulary, then Chen organizes the book around five stages of network growth: Cold Start, Tipping