‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups
firstround.com
firstround.com
That was me. I was killing it at my company when it was 700 people, but two and a half years later it was over 1600 people and the pace slowed way down. Long story short, yesterday was my last day and I'm moving to a 150-200 person company where I'll have more influence/impact.
> That’s one of the other counterintuitive things: Adding people doesn’t mean there’s less work for the people that are already there. It means that the entire company can do more. If one person was managing all of marketing before and then you hire someone to manage your content channels — the person who was doing marketing before is not going to have less to do. It either means that she'll be able to do the rest of her job better, or that she'll be able to take on new things.
You might say that people are thinking in terms of Amdahl's Law, while what happens in reality is Gustafson's Law. The task increases to fit the available processing power.
Maybe it should have (2015) added to title.
It's probably so that they can spam you in the future with their newsletters that feature their portfolio companies and what not.
Not saying this is bad, but it shows how the priority has shifted. For the last couple of years it was trendy for VCs to blog. Basically VCs became marketers. They call it "inbound marketing". Basically they use content to gain mindshare so that founders will think of them when it's time for them to raise money.
But now that this channel has become commoditized--basically every VC firm has a blog and anyone can write analysis content on Medium--and people's average attention per publication has gone way down, they have shifted their focus from "inbound marketing" (basically a brand marketing) to "direct marketing" (A fancy term for spam email marketing).
What's interesting about this is that VCs are now more blatant about the fact that they're using content as marketing.
paywall
They aren't making you verify your email, before showing you the rest of the article, and this permits you to use "test@example.com" as the token acknowledgment of their solicitation.
This rates on par with a CAPTCHA to read the full article, since the user merely needs to adhere to the [a-z,A-Z,0-9]@[a-z,A-Z,0-9].[a-z,A-Z,0-9] regex, to dismiss, and providing a real email is an option, indicating that they're willing to accept junk data as part of their collection of subscribers, since mailing list email bounces aren't a disaster.
You only have to submit an email, not your email.
The text link at the bottom "Continue without an email address" worked for me, as did Reader mode in Safari.
This is toxic behavior from a content provider, please do not drive traffic to this site.
Not the person you're responding to, but: yes, of course.
They produced the content. They think it's valuable enough to put behind an (annoying) interaction that allows them to grow their newsletter. You don't think it's that valuable and you don't even want to find out if it is or not. That's 100% fine. Just don't read the article. It's not your content, and you're not entitled to an ad-free version of it just because you're on the internet.
It's not your site. It's not your content.
But then you go and call the site "toxic" and call for a boycott? On what basis? If the content is actually good, then I personally would be inclined to support the site.
It's amazing how much anger/vitriol a small little modal can generate.
Don't you have a back button?
Otherwise if you want the thing someone is offering in a simple quid-pro-quo take the deal or don't.
Otherwise all you a really shouting about is that you think the price is too high.
It's amazing how much anger/vitriol a small little modal can generate.
No it isn't, because if you spend a lot of time in the web you encounter them tens or potentially hundreds of times a day depending on what you're doing. It's an economic externality, just like the one person saying 'but my little bit of pollution won't impact the environment.'
Yes, I have a back button, but if you've wasted my time then I'm going to remember that fact. Semantic/social web technologies are going to make this sort of marketing obsolete.
It may amaze the designer, but it doesn't amaze me as a user.
The fundamental principle of a "modal" is that it suddenly and unexpectedly robs the user of control over his experience. If that's not a cardinal sin of interface design, I don't know what is.
We're often reminded that good design creates "delight"; that also means bad design can create delight's opposite - pain and frustration.
At least be honest about the situation up front. There was no hint that we would have some portion of the content locked without signing up until i got to the blurred out part. This is somewhat toxic.
At least it's not ad driven, too.
Yes, it's toxic to offer an article and then snatch it away mid-way. Try doing that with a small child or an animal and see what sort of reaction you get.
They should be upfront about the cost, and it would be nice if articles like this were marked here somehow so those of us who are uninterested in giving out our email to marketers can avoid clicking on the link.
What I don't understand is the sentiment that somehow every site must provide you the perfect user experience, high quality content, high production value and high quality research, all for nothing more than your time. I'm sorry but your measly few minutes isn't ultimately that valuable. Feel free to bounce from the site, you're not the intended customer.
And if a site doesn't provide this magical experience for free then people start calling it "toxic", start calling for the execution of the designers, and a boycott of the product.
I mostly see this sentiment on HN - and I bet it's the same group of people that want a decentralized social network...
Also to your last point, while this particular site prompts you for an email, they let you finish reading without you giving them your email. It's just a prompt and as a site, it's not even one of the worse offenders of this practice. It's quite tame and the rest of the reading experience is super clean.
> That’s why her talk is about Legos. The emotions you feel when new people are coming in and taking over pieces of your job — it’s not that different from how a kid feels when they have to share their Legos. There’s a lot of natural anxiety and insecurity that the new person won’t build your Lego tower in the right way, or that they'll get to take all the fun or important Legos, or that if they take over the part of the Lego tower you were building, then there won’t be any Legos left for you.