Alex Schultz on how Mark Zuckerberg cut the “gordian knot” of Facebook’s analysis paralysis

At the end of 2007, Facebook’s growth began to stall, which prompted them to create their famous growth team.

One of the first things the growth team did was try to figure out Facebook’s magic moment. But as Alex explains, arriving at their famous “7 friends in 10 days” magic moment wasn’t straightforward:

“We had this huge discussion internally because we saw a strong correlation between number of friends and percent active. But there was this huge conversation internally about whether it was causal or whether it was correlated…. We had this huge fight going on between data science, data analytics, engineering, product, and marketing, and we couldn’t get to a decision.”

Then Mark Zuckerberg just made a decision.

“Mark simplified things down and said, ‘Get everyone to 10 friends in 14 days.’”

And when the team did this, retention improved dramatically.

“It turns out making that change happen was the thing that told us whether or not it mattered… Cutting the Gordian Knot and making the decision to move forward was the most valuable thing that Mark did for the growth team because it took the shackles off of us and allowed us to just say, fine, we’re going to get people connected to their friends. And that was the magic moment for Facebook.”

Alex believes there’s an important lesson here for all startups:

“With every company that I have advised or worked with, there is a magic moment. There is a thing about your product that people love and their eyes light up. You often find that qualitatively, and then you back it up with correlations in the data. But it’s very hard to prove causally — especially when you’re very small and don’t have a lot of data. People will argue and argue about it. But the best way to find out if they’re right is to break it or make it move up tremendously and then see what happens.”

Full video: Khosla Ventures “Growth | Alex Schultz“ (Jun 2015)