Greymatter

Since its founding in 2008, Airbnb has changed the way people travel and stay in new places around the world. In this fireside, Greylock's Reid Hoffman sits down with Airbnb co-founder and Chief Product Officer Joe Gebbia to talk about doing things that don't scale, designing for trust, and creating a company culture that inspires their team and community. This fireside was recorded at The Scaleup Offsite, an event focused on scaling companies co-hosted by Greylock Partners and YC Continuity.

In the early days of a startup, founders can maintain control of company culture. But as the company grows, how can they ensure the DNA and values of the early team scale with it? Jason Kilar has worked at a number of iconic companies, including Disney and Amazon, before joining Hulu as the CEO and later founding Vessel. In this talk, he shares mechanisms some of these companies used to scale their culture as they grew to thousands of employees. This presentation was recorded at The Scaleup Offsite, an event focused on scaling companies co-hosted by Greylock Partners and YC Continuity.

Silicon Valley is home to many of the fastest growing and most well known startups in the world. In this fireside, Reid Hoffman from Greylock Partners and Sam Altman from Y Combinator share their perspectives on how Silicon Valley companies effectively blitzscale, how to think about hiring when a startup is growing quickly, and why culture is so connected to the success of a company. This fireside was recorded at The Scaleup Offsite, an event focused on scaling companies co-hosted by Greylock Partners and YC Continuity.

Forming a well crafted communications strategy is part action, and part reaction. It’s about developing and telling your brand story in a deliberate way, while at the same time understanding the macro media landscape and thoughtfully responding to the narratives about your industry. Aaron Zamost, the Head of Communications at Square who led comms through the company’s IPO, has done an amazing job at synthesizing how the tech press works in his blog posts including “What’s Your Hour in ‘Silicon Valley Time’?” and “The Invisible Force That Warps What You Read in the News.” In this podcast, Greylock Marketing Partner Elisa Schreiber sits down with Aaron to talk how a tech startup should think about communications from the early days all the way up to IPO.

The term “brand” is often misunderstood in business. Many attach it to your company aesthetic — logos, fonts, colors, and website design. But thoughtful and strategic brand represents so much more. Few people in the world understand building and maintaining brands better than Heidi Hackemer, the founder of Wolf & Wilhelmine — a New York-based brand strategy shop that has worked with clients ranging from small startups to the White House to iconic companies like Google and Nike. In our latest Greymatter podcast, Marketing Partner Elisa Schreiber sits down with Heidi to discuss how to empower your team to be more creative, define a brand strategy, and why external brand and internal culture are interrelated.

Snapchat’s public offering marked the biggest U.S. tech IPO since Alibaba in 2014. This milestone has put a spotlight on the social media company, with public investors digging into their long term growth potential and path to profitability. One of the increasing concerns about Snap is user growth. While Snapchat boasted 50M new daily actives users in 2016, their growth slowed down considerably at the end of the year, only adding 5M new users in Q4. This halt coincided with the launch of Instagram Stories, which many believe to be the biggest threat to Snapchat’s outlook. In 2017, Facebook has doubled down on their assault on Snap with more competitive products including Messenger Day and their new camera, featuring disappearing messages and the ability to add masks, frames and filters.   In our latest Greymatter podcast, we asked two experts to dissect different dimensions of Snapchat’s growth. Greylock Growth Advisor in Residence and former Pinterest Product Lead for Growth Casey Winters teamed up with former Yik Yak Director of Growth Julie Zhou to dig into whether Snapchat is at risk of losing their millennial core market, if they need to change their unique UX to move upmarket to older users, if they should be allocating resources to continue engaging with influencers, and what things they should be thinking about to scale on an international level.

We talk about growth all the time in the context of startups. How they grow, how they attract users, how they engage users. In this episode of Greymatter, two of the top minds in growth, Greylock Partner Josh Elman and Greylock Growth Advisor Casey Winters, talk about scaling Grubhub and Pinterest, starting growth teams, how to think about SEO, and optimizing user onboarding. The podcast is packed with full-stack growth marketing strategy and tactics Casey has implemented in his career, and these lessons are widely applicable to any consumer startup scaling up.

Demand for designers is higher than ever. Great products — the outcome of thoughtful design — are a result of stellar user experience. As design becomes a higher priority for startups, we are seeing a fundamental shift in how designers work. In this episode of Greymatter, John Lilly of Greylock catches up with Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field to talk about how he got started as a entrepreneur, the Figma product, and the shift they’re seeing in the design space.

Greylock's Josh Elman chats with Slow Ventures founder and partner Dave Morin about social networks, his experience building the Facebook platform, and learnings from his startup Path. #ProductSF is a product-centric event hosted by Greylock Partners. The conference brings together a community of founders, PMs, and product leaders to talk about the challenges of building new, innovative products that change lives and create habits.

At #ProductSF, Greylock's Sarah Tavel is joined by Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann to talk about the evolution of his roles as both CEO and product leader at a high growth company. Ben shares how thinks about distribution, hiring and scaling teams, and what makes a strong product manager. #ProductSF is a product-centric event hosted by Greylock Partners. The conference brings together a community of founders, PMs, and product leaders to talk about the challenges of building new, innovative products that change lives and create habits.

Growth expert and managing partner at NFX Guild James Currier teaches us, in the words of the wise master Yoda, to unlearn what we have learned about scaling a business. He provides eight counter-intuitive examples for ways to think about growing and developing an early product. #ProductSF is a product-centric event hosted by Greylock Partners. The conference brings together a community of founders, PMs, and product leaders to talk about the challenges of building new, innovative products that change lives and create habits.

dScout CEO Michael Winnick shares his eye opening research on how people interact with mobile technology. According to him, an average user touches their phone 2.5K times a day over 90 sessions, while a heavy user can reach over 4.6K touches a day in 300+ sessions. Another interesting point: apps owned by Facebook and Alphabet account for 43% of all touches. A lot of interesting data and insight into how we interact with our phones. #ProductSF is a product-centric event hosted by Greylock Partners. The conference brings together a community of founders, PMs, and product leaders to talk about the challenges of building new, innovative products that change lives and create habits.

Nextdoor Co-Founder and VP of Marketing & Operations Sarah Leary talks about the journey of pivoting from FanBase to Nextdoor. She shares both the emotions and learnings their team took away from the pivot, and how they eventually identified the burning need for a social network for neighborhoods. Sarah highlights the importance of creating a product that is a “need to have” versus a “nice to have” and why it's key to do unscalable things in the early stages of building community products. #ProductSF is a product-centric event hosted by Greylock Partners. The conference brings together a community of founders, PMs, and product leaders to talk about the challenges of building new, innovative products that change lives and create habits.

Scott Erickson takes us behind the scenes to the vision and design thinking that went into building Microsoft HoloLens. He demos the many applications that their untethered “mixed reality” technology can have for different industries. #ProductSF is a product-centric event hosted by Greylock Partners. The conference brings together a community of founders, PMs, and product leaders to talk about the challenges of building new, innovative products that change lives and create habits.

Musical.ly co-founder and co-CEO Alex Zhu takes us through his journey coming from an enterprise software background to starting an education startup and then pivoting into Musical.ly. He talks about the distribution hacks they used to instrument viral growth and how they think about fostering their user community. He also updates us on what's going on in the technology landscape in China. #ProductSF is a product-centric event hosted by Greylock Partners. The conference brings together a community of founders, PMs, and product leaders to talk about the challenges of building new, innovative products that change lives and create habits.