Chamath Palihapitiya - how we put Facebook on the path to 1 billion users

I see app after app after app and I get inundated. When I download and I try them I’m like, “Did you even spend eight seconds using your own product?” It’s unbelievable the lack of dogfooding that happens.

When most people think about growth, they think it’s this complex, difficult thing where you're trying to generate these extra normal behaviors in people. That's not what it's about.

Growth is about a very simple elegant understanding of product value and consumer behavior. When you surround yourself and all the bullshit veneer, you will miss the mark.

Don't spam your users we trick them because you'll end up alienating these people. You won't see it today but you'll see it three years from now or four years from now, and it accelerates when you compound that with a competitor who actually builds a better product that doesn't alienate people.

Teased out virality. Don't talk about it. Don't touch it.

Focus first on the 3 most difficult and hard problems that any consumer product has to deal with:

• How to get people at the front door
• How to get them to an “Aha” moment as quickly as possible
• How to deliver core product value as often as possible.

After all of that is said and done only then can think about how you are going to get people to get more people.

Build the discipline to not optimize for the thing that gives you the shortest and most immediate ROI because that is never the sustainable thing that allows you to build something useful.

When you look around, things that scale understand this principle, whether it's explicitly or intuitively, and things that don't and that have this amazingly steep rise and then fall off a cliff ignore this principle.

• Eliminate ego. And you have to be comfortable not being rewarded in the short term.
• Invalidate all the lore. In any given product there are always people who strut around the office like, “You know, I have this gut feeling. It's all about gut feeling". Gut feel is not useful because most people can't predict correctly.

If you can't be extremely clinical and extremely unemotionally detached from the thing that you're building you will make these massive mistakes and things won't grow because you don't understand what's happened.

You have to be, if you're in this type of job, relatively cynical. You can be confident, you can be arrogant, it doesn’t really matter.

But you can't believe your own BS, because when you do you start to compound these massively structural mistakes, that again, don't expose core product value, you don't allow real engagement and real product value to emerge.

Having the courage to reset and redefine what it means in any given market again takes a lot of courage. In every single market, people react differently, behave differently, and speak different languages.

The point is: even when you think something works it probably doesn't work for everyone, and finding a framework that allows you to actually restructure and reorganize the things that you're doing to expose value in different ways to different people in different situations is a crucial thing.

High integrity I think speaks for itself. It's really easy to focus on short-term results. I just don't think there's enough of the long-term thinking, being able to take some arrows along the way in the short term because you're trying to build something for the long term, and having a culture and set of values where that’s rewarded.

Surrounding yourself with good people seems obvious but I see a lot of people who are just not comfortable recruiting people that are better than them.