Facebook Games Platform Experience

A discussion about the early Facebook platform/gaming era and its impact on entrepreneurs.

Shaan explains: "When Facebook's platform opened up, many of our friends caught their first big wave there. Like Sully, who made a Facebook app called Superlatives about which friends were most likely to end up in jail - goofy stuff like that. The Lo Labs guys were probably the fastest growing company in the world at the time. You'd launch a product and get to 10 million users in a day, which just breaks your mental model of the world.

Two important things came from this era: First, the people who went there were the type who sniffed out interesting spaces before they were proven. Second, you got this crash course on hypergrowth and marketing that you couldn't learn anywhere else.

It's like this guy who sold TBH to Facebook - first-time social app founders start wanting to build platforms for intellectual conversations and get 23 users with 5% retention. By the fifth year, they're having people vote on who's hot and getting 10 million users with 40% retention. You learn that you get rewarded for giving people what they want, not what you want people to want. If you really want to get good at anything, you have to be in the eye of the storm - these new platforms where there's a lot of growth and action happening. That's where you sharpen your skills."

Noah adds: "I think what's interesting is how to be around the tidal waves. I've been fortunate to be in the Facebook game world, personal finance world, social networking world, SaaS world with Sumo, e-commerce world with Shopify, and now back in the content world. The amazing part is it's opened up a world that's rich and fulfilling because of all the cool people I've gotten to connect with."