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Interview With Ed Baker About Growth . Mike Rucker, Ph.D.

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Interview With Ed Baker About Growth . Mike Rucker, Ph.D.

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Ed Baker is known for his expertise on growth. He is the former co-founder and CEO of Friend.ly, a site acquired by Facebook in 2011. Ed has been working on viral growth for the past fifteen years across multiple mediums, including email, SMS, IM, and Facebook. Since the 2007 launch of the Facebook platform, he has worked on several Facebook applications that have grown to tens of millions of users, including Compare People and Send Hotness. He has an A.B. in Chemistry & Physics from Harvard, and an MBA from Stanford. Ed is now the Head of Growth at Uber.

Here are my 5 questions with Ed Baker about growth and my summary of his answers:
1) What is a comprehensive way to sum up the quantitative nature and entrepreneurial meaning of "viral factor" while outlining an actionable system to achieve it?

The term viral factor is the quantitative measure of a viral loop. Here is an example of a viral loop, solving for x*y*z:

The Viral Loop as explained by Ed Baker

If you have a viral factor greater than one, then you will see exponential growth without having to spend any money on user acquisition. In order to get your viral factor above one, you must multivariate test every step of your viral loop.
Step One Maximizing Install Rate

Create a catchy call to action

Analyze click data

Multivariate test invites

Step Two Maximizing Invite-Sending Rate

Create incentives to invite other friends

Multivariate test the messaging and the invitation

Step Three Maximizing Average Invites

Create incentives for inviting more users

Optimize the number of required invites to receive the incentive

Viral growth can also be combined with paid user acquisition. As long as Average Revenue per User rate is greater than Customer Acquisition Cost, keep tweaking and spending; you've created a cash machine.

2) Regarding viral campaigns, where is the line between the organic nature of a viral campaign and the ability for savvy creatives to engineer something viral? In other words, how does a viral engineer bake in the necessary mojo needed for something to go viral when one of the major ingredients of becoming viral is candidness and being genuine?

I think that "creatively engineering something" can actually mean a couple of different things. One, using your example, means creating compelling content that appeals to a wide audience so that it gets shared amongst friends. Any company that creates content and fools the user into thinking that an event actually took place, when in fact the event was staged, produced, and/or engineered, runs the risk of suffering consumer backlash. Then the question is whether the cost of the backlash is worth the gain from exposure.

When I think of "viral engineering", I tend to think of split-testing and tuning each step of the loop I discussed in your first question. There is just as much creativity involved in engineering the loop as there is in producing the content. Start with something organic in nature, such as user statistics or user input. By design this can't be faked by you, it is user generated content. What you can influence is the viral factor of the loop by measuring the conversion rate of each step in the loop and making adjustments to improve conversion wherever possible. That is where I believe creative engineering can have the most significant impact.

3a) With the Pareto Principle in mind (the 80/20 rule), what are viral marketers caring about, or doing too much of, that in your opinion could be time better served (the 80)?

Copycatting. I suppose there is some benefit to improving upon something that is already working but these days copycatting is overly exploited and continually dilutes the effectiveness of viral campaigns. You see this all the time on Facebook.

3b) What should they be doing more, that they're doing not enough of (the 20)?

Not copycatting. Facebook and other social platforms provide so much data and so many interesting and new ways to reach people. Facebook Connect is used by a few in really innovative ways. It would be great to see more of this.

3c) What are they not doing at all (but should be learning) because they haven't heard of it yet and it is coming?

Mobile. If you get ahead of the curve regarding mobile (and the future of viral activity on mobile devices) you will really be one step ahead of the game.

4) Can there be a legitimate business purpose for novelty viral initiatives like the current, "I feel sad today please LIKE me to make me happy" Facebook campaigns other than disingenuous lead farming?

No, not one I can think of.

5a) What is your favorite viral effort that didn't find an audience (i.e. failed)?

While at Demigo we created an iPhone application that audited your calls and texts to identify your "top friends". The application worked with Facebook and would identify the people you communicated with the most, add them to your contact list, and pull in their Facebook data (which was not being done yet at the level it is being done today). It ultimately failed for a couple of reasons. One, the iPhone was still new so the application's audience was not wide enough to support the critical mass needed to make it successful. Two, the application also required your ATT password and requiring this led to low user compliance. It was a great application though.

5b) What is your least favorite viral effort that amazingly did find a wide audience (i.e. succeeded)?

Facebook applications that use random number generators for content, for instance, "Your lucky number for the day is X." Who cares? This is just random meaningless data. However, people use these types of applications all the time.

5c) What is a question people should be asking about viral marketing that isn't being asked enough today?

Entrepreneurs need to start considering the tradeoff between short-term virality and long-term engagement. There is value in keeping users around. The question that they should be asking is, "how can we truly engage our users?" They should think less about getting User X to invite Y number of friends immediately. Instead, they should think about keeping User X around as long as possible in order to get him to invite many more friends over a longer period of time.

In order for this to work, entrepreneurs should think more about making things viral by creating a great product. It seems obvious, but if you are more focused on how to reach users than on how to make a great product you're doomed. Dropbox is an example of a great product that also has great virality as a result. I want to tell you and my friends about it because it is a great product.

A lot of new ventures lose sight of these basic fundamentals in order to chase the next big, new, exciting trend. They should really be asking themselves, "how can I make a product that people will use and enjoy so much it will inspire them to willingly broadcast their experience to their network?"

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Interview With Ed Baker About Growth * Mike Rucker, Ph.D.

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Ed Baker is known for his expertise on growth. He is the former co-founder and CEO of Friend.ly, a site acquired by Facebook in 2011. Ed has been working on viral growth for the past fifteen years across multiple mediums, including email, SMS, IM, and Facebook.

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Why Friend.ly's Question and Answer Facebook Connect App Gained Millions of Users - Adweek

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Why Friend.ly's Question and Answer Facebook Connect App Gained Millions of Users - Adweek

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At the end of March, Facebook Connect app friend.ly, a question and answer site designed to help you get to know your friends better and make new friends, hit a sudden growth spurt. It gained 2.3 million monthly active users and 247,ooo daily active users between March 24th and April 13th, according to AppData, our data service tracking growth and traffic for apps and developers

We spoke with friend.ly's co-founder and chief executive Ed Baker to find out what changes the app made to inspire this growth, how the company is working to accomodate demand, and how it plans to monetize its audience. Baker explained how the growth was aided by the addition of a more compelling mix of questions, that scaling has been a serious challenge, and that it plans to offer premium features to help users get noticed and meet new people.

When users Facebook Connect to friend.ly, the site pulls their friend and Like lists, allowing it to pose questions to the user about the people and things they care about. Other social Q&A services such as Badoo, whose explosive growth we covered last month, focus on asking questions about a user's friends. Friend.ly's integration of on the interest graph allows it to know if you Like "Skiing" and therefore ask relevant questions such as "Where's your favorite place to ski?" This ensures each user's experience is personalized, leading to more engagement and sharing

Baker tells us that friend.ly's 10-person Mountain View, California team had kept their heads down "focusing on product for the past year, and just a month ago started focusing on growth." Friend.ly analyzed data about what questions were being answered, shared to Facebook, and commented on the most to determine what topics it should add more questions to. It also noticed how different types of questions led users to share answers to their own wall, the walls of friends, and Page walls, and worked to intersperse these question types so users could share multiple answers per session without clogging up a certain channel.

The company noticed that the speed and reliability of the site were proportional to engagement, so it strived to make the site process answers and ask new questions as quickly as possible through daily infrastructure improvements. All of these changes combined to result in sizable growth, especially amongst users in the US and U.K.

But now the friend.ly team is scrambling to keep the site up and loading swiftly, spending the $5 million in funding it received from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Balderton Capital and angel investors including Ron Conway, Jeff Clavier, Naval Ravikant, and Michael Birch. Performance has dipped slightly over the past few days, with some pages loading slowly, bugs arising, and the service amassing a backlog of user Like lists that still need to be processed before those users can be asked questions about their interests.

Service is stabilizing now, though, and the company can start turning its attention to how it will generate revenue - something it has yet to tackle. Baker tells us that similar to some dating sites, friend.ly may soon give users the option to pay for added visibility, the ability to send messages to people who aren't their friends, or know who has been browsing their profile. What sets friend.ly apart from sites like Zoosk and Match.com is that those sites are specifically for dating, and therefore have to pay a lot for advertising in order to gain new users. In contrast friend.ly's less overtly romantic purpose and the use of Facebook's viral channel help it gain users organically.

Some might assume that friend.ly would work better as a Facebook canvas app where virality is close at hand than as a Connect site, but Baker wanted the ability to customize the look and feel of the product. Friend.ly also wanted the option to easily pull in information from other social networks such as Twitter.

Perhaps surprisingly, friend.ly doesn't have a plan to use the wealth of data it's stockpiling as a core part of its monetization strategy. Instead, Baker believes the product is a success if it can use that data to lead people to become Facebook friends, or even friends offline. "The way people become friends in real life is inefficient. It can be fun and interesting to meet people online, but most dating sites aren't that fun." By creating a informal, fast-paced atmosphere where users can meet by asking each other compelling questions, friend.ly has created a service that Facebook users enjoy, and may be willing to pay for.

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Why Friend.ly's Question and Answer Facebook Connect App Gained Millions of Users

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At the end of March, Facebook Connect app friend.ly, a question and answer site designed to help you get to know your friends better and make new friends, hit a sudden growth spurt.

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The ‘Facebook Class’ Built Apps, and Fortunes - The New York Times

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The ‘Facebook Class’ Built Apps, and Fortunes - The New York Times

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"I almost didn't realize what it all meant," he says.

Neither did many of his classmates. Back then, Facebook apps were a novelty. The iPhone had just arrived, and the first Android phone was a year off.

But by teaching students to build no-frills apps, distribute them quickly and worry about perfecting them later, the Facebook Class stumbled upon what has become standard operating procedure for a new generation of entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond. For many, the long trek from idea to product to company has turned into a sprint.

Start-ups once required a lot of money, time and people. But over the past decade, free, open-source software and "cloud" services have brought costs down, while ad networks help bring in revenue quickly.

The app phenomenon has accentuated the trend and helped unleash what some call a new wave of technology innovation - and what others call a bubble.

Early on, the Facebook Class became a microcosm of Silicon Valley. Working in teams of three, the 75 students created apps that collectively had 16 million users in just 10 weeks. Many of those apps were sort of silly: Mr. De Lombaert's, for example, allowed users to send "hotness" points to Facebook friends. Yet during the term, the apps, free for users, generated roughly $1 million in advertising revenue.

Such successes helped inspire entrepreneurs to ditch business plans and work on apps. Not all succeeded, but those that did helped to fuel the expansion of Facebook, which now has nearly 700 million users.

Venture capitalists also began rethinking their approach. Some created investment funds tailored to the new, bare-bones start-ups.

"A lot of the concepts and ideas that came out of the class influenced the structure of the fund that I am working on now," says Dave McClure, one of the class instructors and founder of 500 Startups, which invests in lean start-ups. "The class was the realization that this stuff really works."

Nearly four years later, many of the students have learned that building a business is a lot harder than creating an app - even an app worthy of an A+.

"Starting a company is definitely more work," says Edward Baker, who was Mr. De Lombaert's partner in the class and later in business. The two have founded Friend.ly, a social networking start-up.

Still, many students were richly rewarded. Some turned their homework into companies. A few have since sold those businesses to the likes of Zynga. Others joined hot start-ups like RockYou, a gaming site that at the time was among the most successful Facebook apps.

The Facebook Class changed Mr. De Lombaert's life. His team's app, Send Hotness, brought in more users and more money faster than any other in the class. And its success attracted the attention of venture capitalists.

"The class, more than anything, set the tone for us to try to start something big," says Mr. Baker, 32, Friend.ly's C.E.O.

When the Send Hotness app began to take off, Mr. Baker encouraged Mr. De Lombaert to treat himself to a new car. Mr. De Lombaert settled for a laptop. (He also put some money aside to help to pay his Stanford tuition.) They eventually sold the app to a dating Web site.

Facebook did not actively participate in the Stanford class. But some of its engineers attended sessions, and it benefited from the success of the students' apps. "It really felt like an incubator," says David Fetterman, a Facebook engineer who helped develop the applications platform.

The startling success of some of the class's projects got Silicon Valley buzzing. The final session, held in an auditorium in December 2007, was attended by more than 500 people, including many investors.

"The Facebook platform was taking off, and there was this feeling of a gold rush," said Mike Maples Jr., an investor who attended some of the classes and ended up backing one of the start-ups.

THE Facebook Class was the brainchild of B. J. Fogg, who runs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford. An energetic academic and an innovation guru, he focuses on how to harness technology and human psychology to influence people's behavior.

Mr. Fogg thought that the Facebook platform would be a good way to test some of his theories. Creating a new model of entrepreneurship was far from his mind.

At first, university administrators pushed back. "Facebook was not taken so seriously in academic circles back then," Mr. Fogg recalls.

But there was no hesitation among students - from undergraduates in computer science to M.B.A. candidates - who were spending much of their lives immersed in Facebook.

From the start, many approached the class from a business angle. Mr. Baker, for instance, was a graduate business student but lacked technical skills, so he spent his first week interviewing engineers. "I wanted a technical co-founder," he says.

He settled on Mr. De Lombaert, and the two, along with a third student, Alex Onsager, created Send Hotness. It let users send points to friends they considered "hot" and to compare "hotness" rankings.

Soon they found themselves in a proverbial "the dog ate my homework" situation. Three days before a presentation was due, Mr. De Lombaert accidentally deleted the computer code he was tinkering with. "We kind of freaked out," he recalls.

Rebuilding the app would take too long. So, working around the clock over a weekend, they built another version, with a more rudimentary algorithm.

The stripped-down app took off. In five weeks, five million people signed up. When the team began placing ads on the app, the money poured in.

They had stumbled upon one of the themes of the class: make things simple, and perfect them later.

"The students did an amazing job of getting stuff into the market very quickly," says Michael Dearing, a consulting associate professor at the Institute of Design at Stanford, who now teaches a class based on similar, rapid prototyping ideas. "It was a huge success."

DAN GREENBERG was sitting at the kitchen table one night when he and another teaching assistant decided to get into the app game. Mr. Greenberg, a graduate student who had done research for Mr. Fogg, hadn't planned to get app-happy. But the students' success whetted his appetite.

Four weeks into the quarter, he and his colleague, Rob Fan, set out to create an app that would let Facebook users send "hugs" to one another.

It took them all of five hours.

The app took off. So they moved on to apps for "kisses," "pillow fights" and other digital interactions - 70 in all.

Their apps caught on with millions of people and were soon bringing in nearly $100,000 a month in ads. After the class ended, the two started a company, 750 Industries, named after the 750 Pub at Stanford where Mr. Greenberg and Mr. Fan where drinking when they decided to become business partners.

But juggling the business and schoolwork was too much for Mr. Greenberg, then 22. So he called his father.

"I said, 'Dad, it is 10 p.m., and I've got so much stuff to do,' " Mr. Greenberg recalls. " 'We're running this business, and I've got customers, and we are earning money, and we got financing and we have people to hire. But I have to write a paper tonight, and I just don't have time for it.' "

His father advised him to pull a Mark Zuckerberg and drop out. The next day, Mr. Greenberg did just that.

Now 25, he works out of a glass-walled corner office in San Francisco. He is C.E.O. of his company, now called Sharethrough, which uses social media to distribute videos across the Web for companies. It employs 30 people and has raised about $6 million in venture capital. "It feels like a fairy tale when you look back on it," he says of the class.

He has upgraded his lifestyle somewhat, but still doesn't own a car. "I have a Vespa and skateboard," he says.

"LOVE CHILD." It sounds like an unlikely name for an app. But Johnny Hwin and his Stanford class team set out to build an app of that name, one that would let two users create and raise a virtual child. It never took off.

"We were overly ambitious," Mr. Hwin says.

Seeing his classmates strike gold with simpler ideas proved to be a valuable lesson. In 2009, he began working on Damntheradio.com, a Facebook marketing tool that helped bands and musicians connect with fans online.

It opened last June and was acquired in January by FanBridge, where Mr. Hwin is now a vice president, for a few million dollars, he says.

Mr. Hwin, who is 26 and also a musician, now lives in a loft space in the Mission neighborhood in San Francisco. He uses his place as a kind of salon for late-night art shows and concerts.

"With Love Child, we wanted it to be perfect," he says. With Damntheradio, he found his first clients by showing mockups of the product. "We were able to launch within weeks," he says.

Another class member, Robert Cezar Matei, says he had only modest success with his projects. One, he said, allowed users to send "cheesy pickup lines" to friends; another encouraged people to reveal something about themselves. After graduating from Stanford, he wanted to earn some money to go traveling, but instead of getting a job, he decided to write Facebook apps. "I'd seen my peers being so successful with apps," he says. "If they could do it, I could do it."

After a few false starts, he created an app that let people send points and "kisses" to friends. It struggled until Mr. Matei, who speaks several languages, translated the app. The next day, traffic jumped fivefold. He added games, and employees, and the app became one of the most popular Facebook programs in Europe. In late 2009, he sold to Zynga for an undisclosed sum.

Also in the class was Joshua Reeves, who built an app that created animations that Facebook members would send to one another as birthday greetings or other messages. It made enough money for him to quit his job in 2008 to start Buzzeo, a content management system for Facebook. A year ago, Buzzeo was acquired by Context Optional, where Mr. Reeves, 28, is now a vice president. Last week, Efficient Frontier, a digital marketing company, acquired Context Optional for an undisclosed sum.

ONE recent afternoon at the headquarters of Friend.ly in Mountain View, Calif., 10 engineers worked away as two employees turned their attention to a companywide project: a 24,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.

For much of the past year, Friend.ly has worked on developing its service, a social network for meeting new people, without much success. A few weeks ago, the work appeared to pay off: traffic took off, growing to nearly five million monthly users.

Mr. Baker says the Facebook platform is a magnet for young developers, even though the kind of simple apps that were the focus of his Stanford class now face bigger hurdles. Facebook has made it harder to develop big-hit apps by controlling how apps spread virally.

But Mr. Fogg, says that for those who were at the right place at the right time - in late 2007 - things were different. "There was a period of time when you could walk in and collect gold," he says. "It was landscape that was ready to be harvested."

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The 'Facebook Class' Built Apps, and Fortunes

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"I almost didn't realize what it all meant," he says. Neither did many of his classmates. Back then, Facebook apps were a novelty. The iPhone had just arrived, and the first Android phone was a year off.

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Former Uber Executive Ed Baker, Former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and Ekistic Ventures’ David Spielfogel Join LimeBike Advisory Board

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Former Uber Executive Ed Baker, Former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and Ekistic Ventures’ David Spielfogel Join LimeBike Advisory Board

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LimeBike, the nation's leading dockless bike sharing service provider, today announced the launch of its Lime Advisor Network with business luminaries, including the Honorable Michael Nutter, former Mayor of Philadelphia and former President of the United States Conference of Mayors; Ed Baker, former vice president of product and growth at Uber; David Spielfogel, co-founder and managing partner of Ekistic Ventures; and Arne Croce, former San Mateo City Manager. Members of Lime Advisor Network will work alongside LimeBike executives to steer the start-up in its efforts to improving urban mobility through dockelss bike sharing.

"We are proud to welcome top technology and government leaders as partners in the launch of the Lime Advisor Network," said Toby Sun, CEO and co-founder of LimeBike. "Together with our advisors, we will collaborate with more communities across the U.S. to provide an environmentally-conscious and fun solution to their existing transportation issues."

LimeBike launched the Lime Advisor Network with a vision of fostering a productive relationships with local governments across the country. The company has already worked closely with local officials to deploy in eight U.S. cities and seven university campuses, making LimeBike the most broadly adopted dockless bike sharing program in the country.

"I am excited to join the Lime Advisor Network as LimeBike shares my passion for providing communities with safe, accessible and affordable transportation options," said Ed Baker, former vice president of product and growth at Uber. "After successfully scaling an alternative transportation company, I am looking forward to helping LimeBike expand its innovative bike-sharing solutions across the country."

"There's a reason LimeBike is the first dockless bikeshare company to deploy successfully in a U.S. city: they have the right mix of innovative technology, on-the-ground experience, and collaborative approach to government to be effective," said David Spielfogel, co-founder and managing partner of Ekistic Ventures. "Having deployed expensive docked systems in Chicago, I'm excited to see the industry evolve to be more agile, affordable and scalable. I look forward to helping LimeBike become an integral transportation provider that solves a critical problem for cities."

LimeBike also welcomes two former public officials to its Lime Advisors Network, including the Honorable Michael A. Nutter, Philadelphia's 98th mayor, who served two terms in the nation's fifth largest city, along with longtime local Bay Area resident Arne Croce, who served as San Mateo City Manager for 18 years.

"LimeBike revolutionized the ease with which cities can deploy world-class bike share systems at no cost to taxpayers," said the Honorable Michael Nutter. "I am delighted to be part of the Lime Advisor Network and support a company that integrates seamlessly into urban transportation systems to provide a last-mile solution that is truly equitable and efficient."

For a video of LimeBike in action, click here.

Download the LimeBike press kit here.

About LimeBike
LimeBike aims to revolutionize mobility in cities and college campuses by empowering communities with a greener, more efficient, and affordable transportation option that also improves urban sustainability. By partnering with local key stakeholders and systematically deploying a fleet of smart-bikes that are enabled with GPS, wireless technology, and self-activating locks, LimeBike will dramatically improve urban mobility by making the first and last mile faster, cheaper, and healthier for riders. Funded by Silicon Valley's leading VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, LimeBike is based in San Mateo, CA. Learn more at limebike.com.

Media Contact:
Chris Schmidt
TRUE Communications
chris@trueoverdrive.com

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Former Uber Executive Ed Baker, Former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and Ekistic Ventures' David Spielfogel Join LimeBike Advisory Board

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LimeBike, the nation's leading dockless bike sharing service provider, today announced the launch of its Lime Advisor Network with business luminaries, including the Honorable Michael Nutter, former Mayor of Philadelphia and former President of the United States Conference of Mayors; Ed Baker, former vice president of product and growth at Uber; David Spielfogel, co-founder and managing partner of Ekistic Ventures; and Arne Croce, former San Mateo City Manager.

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Facebook Acquires Social Q&A Service Friend.ly — Team To Work On New Things, But Service Will Stay Open | TechCrunch

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Facebook Acquires Social Q&A Service Friend.ly — Team To Work On New Things, But Service Will Stay Open | TechCrunch

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The acquisitions continue for Facebook. Last week, the social network bought Friend.ly, the social question and answer service, both sides confirm today.

Friend.ly has more details in their blog post here. Meanwhile, Facebook has this to say on the deal:

We're excited to announce that we recently acquired friend.ly, a Silicon Valley startup that created a really compelling way for people to express themselves and meet others through answering questions. We've admired the team's efforts for some time now, and we're looking forward to having Ed and his colleagues make a big impact on the way millions of people connect and engage with each other on Facebook.

Of note, the Friend.ly team says that they'll be working on "new projects" at Facebook. But they also say that Friend.ly will continue to operate as a service. Facebook has a history of acquiring services just for their talent and shutting down old products, but in some cases, like FriendFeed, they've allowed them to stay open. It appears that will be happening here as well ( Update: Facebook confirms). At least for now.

As Inside Facebook noted back in April, Friend.ly was able to gain a ton of users on top of Facebook's graph very quickly.

Friend.ly had raised $5 million in funding from Lightspeed Ventures, Balderton Capital, SoftTechVC, and a range of angels.

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Facebook Acquires Social Q&A Service Friend.ly - Team To Work On New Things, But Service Will Stay Open

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The acquisitions continue for Facebook. Last week, the social network bought Friend.ly, the social question and answer service, both sides confirm today. Friend.ly has more details in their blog post here.

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The Man Driving Growth at Uber — The Information

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The Man Driving Growth at Uber — The Information

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Last winter and spring, two teams of Uber executives faced off over the company's strategy in China-specifically, how to attract more drivers than Didi Chuxing, the local leader in on-demand rides. One side was led by Uber's finance chief Gautam Gupta, which wanted to keep on matching or beating Didi's financial bonuses for drivers. The other side, led by Ed Baker, Uber's head of growth, believed the finance team's strategy was failing, needlessly causing losses to skyrocket.

Mr. Baker's team wanted to hand out bonuses on a completely different basis than Didi and also wanted Uber to look for new drivers who hadn't already been courted by Didi. A rising star within Uber, Mr. Baker convinced CEO Travis Kalanick to let him test his strategy to see which approach was more efficient, according to a person who was involved in the discussion. The result: Mr. Baker's team showed that his approach was cheaper and more effective at gaining drivers for the long term. Uber changed strategy this spring, though it was too late to turn the tide against Didi. Mr. Baker disputed this description of the episode generally but he declined to elaborate.

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Last winter and spring, two teams of Uber executives faced off over the company's strategy in China-specifically, how to attract more drivers than Didi Chuxing, the local leader in on-demand rides. One side was led by Uber's finance chief Gautam Gupta, which wanted to keep on matching or beating ...

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Engineering Virality Bootcamp: Panel Discussion One

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The Engineering Virality Bootcamp was part of the Stanford GSB marketing course - the Power of Social Technology (Dr. Jennifer Aaker), orchestrated by Julio Vasconcellos. A panel of experts, including Dave McClure, Andy Smith, Jeff Clavier, Ed Baker, Matt Wyndowe, Mark Hedrickson and Ben Katz, discussed how to engineer virality.

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Growth Panel with Gustaf Alströmer and Ed Baker, moderated by Josh Elman | The Scaleup Offsite 2017

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In this panel, Greylock's Josh Elman talks with Y Combinator Partner and former Airbnb Product Lead for Growth Gustaf Alströmer and former Uber Head of Product and VP of Growth Ed Baker about establishing a north star metric, growing in local markets, and how to measure the things that can't be measured.