#13 - Scaling Growth - Gustaf Alstromer, Ed Baker, and Josh Elman

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is about scaling growth.

**Josh Elman** (0:05)
It's a conversation between Gustaf Alstromer, Ed Baker, and Josh Elman.

**Craig Cannon** (0:09)
Gustaf is a YC partner, and prior to that, he worked on growth at Airbnb. Ed worked on growth at Uber and Facebook, and Josh is a partner at Greylock.
The conversation was recorded at the Scale Up Offsite, a private event hosted by Y Combinator Continuity and Greylock Partners in April 2017
Okay, here we go.

**Josh Elman** (0:26)
What's pretty cool is, we have two guys who have been living the center of building up these growth teams kind of for the past seven or eight years.
Ed joined Uber to start the growth team when it was five people, and then over the three and a half years became kind of VP of both product and growth for kind of all of Uber, and Gustaf joined in the Airbnb growth team was him and two other people when he got started a few years ago, and that has scaled to over 100 So it's fun to scale up offsite to talk about scaling. We've mostly been talking about scaling organizations. This is a chance to talk about how do you scale the organization that continues to scale your users? What's fun for me is I've known Ed and Gustaf now for most of a decade kind of in this growth world, and 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 of product and marketing to build stuff was pretty novel and almost didn't even really exist, and we were all kind of doing it in the social world, and I remember Ed started a company in 2008 called Friendly, there was D'Amico and then Friendly.
Gustaf started a company in 2007 called Heisan and then went over to Voxer, and these were like, how do we get to millions of users in the early days? So I'm curious if you could just kind of talk about 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? You know, Ed, I don't know if you want to start.

**Ed Baker** (1:51)
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, those were the first apps I built that reached tens of millions of users, you know, within months time.
And 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. And so much of, I think, figuring out how to grow something is, it's 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 work.

**Josh Elman** (2:39)
That's great. What were some of the early tricks you found that like made you go super viral? You were pretty famous back in those days.

**Ed Baker** (2:45)
Yeah, I mean, you were at Facebook back then, right? So I think Facebook created new rules after I found some loopholes.

**Josh Elman** (2:54)
Almost often, yes.

**Ed Baker** (2:56)
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. And 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. And 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'd tag 240 friends. And all 240 people would get an email saying, Ed just tagged you in a photo. So that has a very high response rate, people kind of wanna see when they're tagged in a photo. They would go, they'd see, oh, it's a zodiac photo album, create your own at the zodiac app. Within, I think within 24 hours, we had tagged tens of millions of people in photos.
I think including Zuck. And then I heard the platform team shut it down shortly.