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John Collison: We only had 50 users two years after founding Stripe “We started working on Stripe in the Fall of 2009, and we launched Stripe in September 2011,” John Collison reflects. “I remember right at the beginning when we were starting it I said to Patrick [Collison], ‘Yeah... show more
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![Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users “We started working on [Discord] in January 2015, and within I’d say two months, some of our friends were very excited about it but we didn’t really have any users. It was pretty clear they wanted to use it, it just wasn’t exactly correct. We rebuilt the voice chat engine three times, for example. But I’d say within 3-4 months, we had 20 DAU that weren’t us.” However, as Jason explains, growth stalled after those first 20 users: “We were like, ‘How do we get the word out?’ Because everyone was actually very skeptical about a group chat app for gaming. People would say, ‘This is the dumbest idea ever, no one is going to use this.’ And even people who played games, many of them thought, ‘Why would I want this? I already have whatever app I’m using.’ And so we were having a hard time getting other people to try it.” Jason recalls a period of 3-4 weeks sitting around thinking, “We like this, but maybe no one else does.” Then they figured out their growth unlock: “The unlock for us was inviting people to give feedback on the app, as opposed to saying, ‘Try this thing out we’re selling to you.’ What we actually did was we went to the Final Fantasy 14 subreddit, and we got one of our friends to make a post on the subreddit basically saying, ‘Hey, I’m trying out this new voice over IP app. What do y’all think about it?’” Jason continues: “People found it on Reddit, clicked on that link, went into the server, and then they were talking to us and trying it out. And they went back to the subreddit and were like, ‘Hey, this is pretty cool. I met the devs. They seem pretty cool.’ We got 50 users that day from that post and then that 50 turned into 100 the next day and it sort of started to snowball. And then we did this playbook for six months and that was basically the beginning of how it started growing.” Video source: The Twenty Minute VC Harry Stebbings (2024)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1996562679339557031/amplify_video_thumb/1996539089969913856/img/tsHLTf_JaGLjcsn0.jpg)
![Evan Spiegel explains why he didn’t sell Snapchat to Mark Zuckerberg for $3 billion “A lot of people in the early days told us we should sell it,” Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel recalls of the time. He tells story from the early days of the company: “I remember joining a conference call with some of our lawyers and they were saying, ‘This thing is basically going to zero,’ ‘It’s just a fad.’… And I’m like, ‘Oh hey guys.’… They didn’t know I was there because I joined a minute or two early.” But it wasn’t just their lawyers. Everyone at the time thought that the big players in social media were going to put Snapchat out of business. Yet Evan and his co-founder Bobby Murphy ignored them. They even had so much faith in his vision for the company that they turned down a reported $3 billion dollar acquisition offer from Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. The founders were only 23 years old when Facebook reached out over email. Facebook told the young founders that they were working on a competitor called Poke and asked if they’d want to join Facebook’s growing social media portfolio after their acquisition of Instagram. But Evan and Bobby said no: “I wish I could say it was wisdom but I think Bobby and I just loved what we were doing. We loved what we were working on, and we believed in the future of it. Ultimately we were able to convince our investors too that our opportunity was much bigger over time.” Evan explains that him and his founder each taking $10 million of secondaries also played a big role: “[Our investors] did something very smart early on in a prior financing round. Bobby and I were each able to sell $10 million of stock… And that allowed us to just swing for the fences… There wasn’t that feeling of, ‘Oh no, I’m not going to be able to buy a house or have a family.’ We were like, ‘We each got $10 million bucks. Let’s go for it.’” Today Snap is valued at $13 billion. Video source: Steven Bartlett (2025)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1912835960837972427/amplify_video_thumb/1912813540781514752/img/mCExKXGeBlerpMW8.jpg)
![Keith Rabois explains that the key to LinkedIn’s success was investing 80% of resources in virality Keith was employee number 20 at LinkedIn, and when he left almost three years later, they were at employee 59: “People forget that it took two years to get to a million users, which in a social product feels like an eternity. Revenue - we had like none for the first 2-3 years.” He continues: “The key was Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn, was very savvy, and he knew what the ingredients for success were. He was very consciously aware that LinkedIn had to be a viral product. We could not afford to pay for customer acquisition. So almost everything was predicated on: How do you create a truly viral product? And there’s ways of measuring it. That was like 80% of resources. And once we nailed the viral product, and the [viral] coefficient was above 1, then we could take time to build other products.” Video source: Khosla Ventures (2024)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1908912242965311853/ext_tw_video_thumb/1908873453609910272/pu/img/UUy8uebvupb5UXNt.jpg)
![This is maddening. Speaking of the 2004 election in Ohio, John Kerry told Brian Lehrer in 2018 that “The problem for us was we were doubting whether the [voting] machines themselves had been appropriately measured & whether the algorithms were correct, etc. We challenged that ahead of time by the way. People don’t know that. And we were told by the court that we were not able to get that algorithm, to check it, bc it was proprietary information. And I believe that it was absolutely incorrect that in the United States of America, the election for the presidency of the United States should somehow be the purview of privately owned machines where the public doesn’t have the right to know whether the algorithms can be checked or whether they are hackable or not. And we now know they are hackable. But we knew as we sat there to decide where to go in terms of the challenge, that we were a nation at war, we had just been through a Supreme Court test of an election four years earlier. I thought once I measured it that whatever constitutional challenge we brought or whatever appropriate challenge we brought to the ballots that were counted, it was going to wind up ultimately in the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court would do the same thing that it did before. We would take the country through a three month exercise with a 5/4 decision that would award the presidency back to George Bush. Now some people may think that’s the right thing to have done. I thought it would have been horrendous for our country one year into a war, at that moment when there were serious doubts about terrorism and other things, to be going through a long period of questioning of the presidency, and I didn’t think it was the right thing to do for the nation.” 1/ Vice President JD Vance Marc E. Elias](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1861619552528056806/amplify_video_thumb/1861618796546662400/img/w1P2FMww2EN0tIa7.jpg)
![Peter Thiel tells the founding story of PayPal “When you start one of these companies, it’s typically not the case that you get the whole idea fully formed instantaneously,” Thiel begins. “There was this incredible internet boom going on in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s. It felt like there was this open frontier or gold rush, and one of the natural things to look at was finance.” At the time, Thiel was very interested in the idea of creating new forms of money. “There’s always something super mysterious, powerful, and important about money,” He explains. “And we had this general idea to do something with security, money, and payments very early on in the founding of the company. Then you iterate a lot on how to get the idea out.” Thiel continues: “The critical question for any consumer internet product is not what the idea is, but ‘how do you get distribution?’ There had been a lot of internet payments companies that had already started and failed by 1998… They would’ve worked if everybody used them, but you could never get the first person to start. So the challenge was how to make it go viral and how to get something to work where it’s good for the first person, the 10th person, and the 100th person. Once you have millions of people, you have a network and network effects. That was sort of the chicken and egg problem we wanted to solve.” Eventually the team stumbled on the idea of linking money with email: “There were already 300 million people in 1999 that had email accounts. So if you could send money to an email address… you didn’t need both counterparts to a transaction to be part of the PayPal network. Only the sender could be part of it, and then the recipient would sign up as they took money out. We started with the 24 people in our office, and they sent money to friends and other people. Then we gave these referral bonuses of $10 if you got someone to sign up, and it just grew exponentially. It grew about 7-10% compounding daily… We had 1,000 people in mid-November of 1999. By the end of December it was 12,000. By February 3, 2000, it was 100,000. By mid-April 2000, it was up to a million.” The other critical component of PayPal’s success was starting with customers who had an intense need and minimal downside risk: “One of the natural places that it started was on the eBay auction site where you had small dollar transactions of maybe $40 as the typical amount. If you send a check across the country, that’s a 10 day delay. It’s slow, and most people aren’t set up to process credit cards.” Thiel reflects on what it felt like to go from 1,000 users to 1 million in just a few months: “[It felt like] you were at the forefront of some sort of revolutionary thing. It’s incredibly exciting and incredibly scary. It was like ‘we’re going to take over the world’ or ‘we’re all going to die’ and you move between those two several times a day.” Fraud was a major challenge the company had to solve — especially because making a product hard to defraud is usually at odds with making it easy to use. Thiel had an interesting perspective of operating in strange regulatory zone with this new form of moving money: “I often thought of it at the time that we were in a race between technology and politics. The politicians didn’t like us, but if we got the PayPal network to be big enough, it would sort of overwhelm the regulators and they’d have to accept it as a fait accompli… One of the execs at PayPal said we needed to hire a whole bunch of lawyers to tell us what we can or can’t do, and we said no we’re not going to hire them. They’ll just tell us what we can’t do. We have to just go ahead and not hire the lawyers and just do it.” Video source: Dave Rubin Dave RubinShow (2018)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2033573405602251161/amplify_video_thumb/2033569540597231616/img/QMKZilTjksjfVhG5.jpg)
