Scaling Growth | Gustaf Alstromer, YC Partner (formerly Airbnb) & Ed Baker (formerly Uber)

TL;DR

Growth teams evolved from early social viral hacks (Facebook apps, mobile address book matching) into structured organizations focused on a North Star metric, experimentation, and multi-functional teams (product, engineering, analytics, design, marketing).

Key insights

• Running many experiments builds intuition for what works and what doesn’t – growth is a combination of art and science.
• At Facebook, once the user base reached scale, retention and engagement (driven by friending) became larger levers for MAU growth than new user acquisition.
• A growth team should be structured with all functions (product, engineering, analytics, design, marketing) working together within the same org.