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Question about measuring weekly growth rate: A lot of YC startups are centered around an iPhone app. If it rides up the charts, it will likely get a huge bump in whatever metric you are trying to measure. But the bump's very often temporary, since more than likely the app will slide back down the charts in a week. How do you measure growth when this happens?

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That is a great point, and one of the things VCs see a lot are startups that perform all kinds of contortions to boost their app store chart rankings right before they raise money.

Because there are not very many ways to boost your rankings legitimately aside from true organic growth, sometimes this means paying for sketchy marketing techniques that can actually result in Apple banning your app when they find out.

I think the honest thing to do is probably to measure actual user engagement in the app. The high quality app startups that pitch us use something like Mixpanel (disclosure: one of our investments itself) to do this -- in fact, this is one of the reasons we invested in Mixpanel.

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