The Swyx Mixtape

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Listen to the Lex Fridman podcast (23 mins in) https://lexfridman.com/kevin-systrom/The Invisible Asymptotes essay

Listen to the Creator Lab: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/creator-lab/lenny-rachitsky-lennys-bUBLKO_NIG4/Growth Loops are the New Funnels: https://www.reforge.com/blog/growth-loopsThe Racecar Growth Gramework: https://www.reforge.com/blog/racecar-growth-frameworkTranscripttoday for the sake of focus we're going to start with this growth framework called the race car growth framework which i thought was really incredible um so let's just kick it off man from what i could see from the outside from reading your work there's four components to this product growth which is - the first one was the growth engine- the second one is called turbo boosts- third is lubricants - the fourth is fuel we're going to explain what all of those are in a second um but before we even go into the details could you just share like a bit of context around what who who is this for and who is it not for yeah because absolutely this isn't for every single company in the world and um you know you've probably applied this in many different contexts but yeah curious what what stands out to you there so maybe zooming out even further i spent a lot of my time with this newsletter looking into growth stories and how growth strategies and essentially understanding how all the most successful companies grew and i've spent a lot of time on the early days of how they got their first say a thousand users and then i've also spent a lot of time on the longer term down the road strategy of how do they grow long-term what can what needs to work for a company to continue growing and so now there's kind of these two ends of the spectrum that are coming into focus for me of how do i get your early users and then how to long term grow your business so this race car framework is focused on the long term how do you grow eventually and long term and then we can even talk about how to get your first users and then i'm slowly filling in these puzzle pieces through more and more of my research of how companies go from zero to say a million and it turns out it's it's not as mysterious as people think there's not actually that many options it's more of a question of which of the options do you choose and then how do you become the best at that or do something remarkable within that option so so we could start at the end and then we can come back to the beginning days so the end is this race car framework and i this is uh based on work that i did with a buddy of mine dan haukenmeyer so this post is something we both put together and what we found is there's a really cool mental model of thinking about how businesses grow long-term and it turns out you can think of your company like a race car which includes these four components that you're talking about there's the engine there's uh turbo boosts lubricants and then fuel and the engine is the most important part because that's what drives your business and it turns out there's essentially four engines you can choose from as a company and uh and these engines are self-sustaining loops that keep your business growing and there's kind of like a fuel that goes into it and then the output is growth so should we dive into those yeah yeah so i love that so i'll repeat kind of what i heard and understood and then you can clarify if i heard it wrong so the growth the growth engine is the most important part is self-sustaining the turbo boosts from what i understand are more like these one-off events or big hero moments maybe events a super bowl ad and they can maybe make a big splash but they're not self-sustainable the way a growth engine is and we'll go into the details of what that means and then the lubricants are more about running efficiently exactly things that make everything run better exactly and then the fuel is what's actually needed to make the car run so the input that's needed that's that's awesome so maybe yeah we can start off by going into the growth engine itself so i've heard you talk about loops and engines and i have a visual of this thing going around and people talk about flywheels i found like a lot of the jargon sometimes is like overly used but in this case i think it actually is really helpful to see it visually um because i think if you think of like a growth engine in a traditional business you think of a marketing funnel which is not exactly the same thing but a lot of the time when you're getting new users and getting them to convert and become paying users and then spread and share something like in business school you might learn it like a funnel and i think what i like about this is it's not necessarily like a linear thing that just goes from top to bottom it's more something that keeps feeding itself is that accurate before we move on from there yeah that's exactly accurate and there's this uh group called reforge who was one of the first uh i guess um groups that kind of figured out that this is the thing that matters more than funnels so they kind of have this famous blog post that loops for the new funnels and in reality they're both important like funnels are a part of these loops and so they both uh are worth thinking about but when you're starting out it's a lot more important to think about the flywheel slash engine slash loop they're all kind of the same idea and it's just your point there are these things that kind of feed themselves and keep going yeah and so what we're going to do is we're going to be talking about a lot of theory but what we're going to try to do is layer on examples wherever possible so if we're talking about a funnel or a sorry not a funnel a a uh flywheel is there one that we could just explain to people yeah like airbnb's flywheel or a company that people know about## ENGINESlet me share the four engines first and then we can talk about yeah that sounds great leverage each one so essentially the way to think about this is if you think about like all the things you can do to grow your business there's like pr there's events there's paid ads there's seo there's this like whole collection of options and what this concept tries to help you with is which ones should you focus on deeply and which are just kind of these one-off things or just micro-optimizations so the engines are the there's only four ways your business is really going to grow long term and the four ways are - performance marketing and the way that loop works is you spend money to run an ad the ad drives customers the customers generate revenue and you can feed that into more ads so that's a pretty straightforward one - the next is virality which is what we all know and love when we think about viral growth essentially users draw new users and those users join and invite their friends and their friends join and it goes on and on and they'll give examples but maybe an example that one is like yeah snapchat or telegram whatsapp facebook things where you're kind of encouraged in by your friends and we can talk about like how to know which of these your business is most naturally suited for because it's not like choose any it's usually based on the type of product that you have one is going to fit best and there's actually this kind of growing meme of first time founders focus on product and second time founders focus on distribution and a lot of that is that's actually very true i find and knowing these engines is how you think about that is almost working backwards from i have a unique way of being really good at one of these things what product can i build to take advantage of that that's that's in it that's a mental model that i find useful so anyway let me go through the four and then we can ta...

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Listen to Village Global: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/village-globals/andy-rachleff-on-investing-YaXZIM2WHuj/ (15 mins in)Don ValentineIf a startup can screw something up it willonly way it can succeed is if the market pulls the product out of its handsSteve Blank: Value hypothesis (what are you building, for whom is it relevant, whats your business model)THEN Growth hypothesis (acquire customers cost effectively)Almost no company succeeds with its original value hypothesis - they succeed and then they revise historyGreat tech companies don't start by evaluating the market and coming up with solutionsThey observe an inflection point in tech that allows them to build a product, then figure out what they can do with thatiterate on the who, don't iterate on the whatmost people change product - you lose insight on tech differentiationiterate on the customer base to find what you have to offerfind desperate people - they dont say maybe, they say WHEN CAN I HAVE IT

Listen to the Sourcegraph podcast: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/swyx/Video version: https://youtu.be/L1ATAYQFMn4We cover: Svelte Society, Learning in Public, and Temporal.

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Clip is 10 mins into this deleted Lindy Talk episode: https://web.archive.org/web/20210312232914/https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/03-lindy-talk-w-marc-andreessenProtocol on a16z and the Lindy Effect

Listen to the Lex Fridman podcast (25mins in): https://lexfridman.com/elon-musk-3/ How I Approach First Principles Thinking via Logic and EpistemologyTranscriptSo what's your source of belief in situations like this when the engineering problem is so difficult, there's a lot of experts, many of whom you admire, who have failed in the past. Yes. And a lot of people, you know, a lot of experts, maybe journalists, all the kinds of, you know, the public in general have a lot of doubt about whether it's possible and you yourself know that even if it's a, non-normal set, not empty set of success, it's still unlikely or very difficult. Like where do you go to both personally, intellectually as an engineer, as a team, like for source of strength needed to sort of persevere through this and to keep going with the project, take it to completion. 2 00:24:49I suppose the strength. Hmm. I just really not how I think about things. I mean, for me, it's simply this, this is something that is important to get done, and we, we should just keep doing it or die trying, and I, I don't need, I source of strength. So 0 00:25:07Quitting is not even like, I'm 2 00:25:10Just not, it's not in my nature. Okay. And I, I don't care about optimism or pessimism, fuck that. We're going to get it done. Gotta to get it done. 0 00:25:23Can you then zoom back in to specific problems with Starship or any engineering problems you work on? Can you try to introspect your particular biologic when you're in that network, your thinking process, and describe how you think through problems, the different engineering and design problems. Is there like a systematic process you've spoken about first principles thinking kind of, 2 00:25:45Well, you know, like saying like, like physics is low and everything else was a recommendation. I'm like, I've met a lot of people that can break the law, but I, I have never met anyone who could break physics. So, so first for any kind of technology problem, you have to sort of just make sure you're not violating physics. And, you know, first principles analysis, I think, is something that can be applied to really any walk of life, any anything really? It's just, it's, it's really just saying, you know, let's, let's boil something down to the most fundamental principles. 2 00:26:29The things that we are most confident are true at a foundational level, and that sits your at your sets, your axiomatic base, and then you reason up from there. And then you cross check your conclusion against the, the axiomatic truth. So, you know, some basics in physics would be like, oh, you Vida and conservation of energy or momentum or something like that, you know, then you're slugging to work. So that's yeah. So that's just to establish it. Is it, is it, is it possible? And then another good physics tool is thinking about things in the limit. If you, if you take a particular thing and you scale it to a very large number or to very small number, how does, how does things change 0 00:27:17Like temporary, like in number of things, you manufacturer, something like that. And then in time, 2 00:27:23Yeah. Like, let's say, take example of like, like manufacturing, which I think is just a very underrated problem. And, and like I said, it's, it's much harder to take a, an advanced technology product and bring it into volume manufacturing than it is to design it in the first place. My more's magnitude. So, so let's say, you're trying to figure out is like, why is this, this part or product expensive? Is it because of something fundamentally foolish that we're doing? Or is it because our volume is too low? And so then you say, okay, well, what if our volume was a million units a year? 2 00:28:05Is it still expensive? That's what I'm invaluable thinking about things to the limit. If it's too expensive at a million units a year, then volume is not the reason why your thing is expensive. There's something fundamental about design. 0 00:28:16And then you then can focus on the reducing complexity or something like that. 2 00:28:19We could change the design to change the chains apart to be something that is not fundamentally expensive, but like, that's a common thing in rocketry. Cause the, the unit volume is relatively low. And so a common excuse would be well, it's expensive because our unit volume is low. And if we were in like automotive or something like that, or consumer electronics, then our costs would be lower on like unlike. Okay. So let's say now you're making a million units a year. Is it still expensive? The answer is yes. Then economies of scale are not the issue. 0 00:28:53Do you throw into manufacturing? Do you throw like supply chain, you talked about resources and materials and stuff like that. Do you throw that into the calculation of trying to reason from first principles? Like how are we going to make the supply chain work here? Yeah, yeah. And then the cost of materials, things like that, or is that too? 2 00:29:10Exactly. So like another, like a good example, I, of thinking about things in the limit is if you take any, you know, any, any product, a machine or whatever, like take a rocket or whatever, and say, if you've got, if you look at the raw raw materials in the rocket, so you're going to have like an aluminum steel titanium in canal, especially specialty alloys, copper. And you say, what are the, what's the weight of the constituent elements of each of these elements and what is their own material value? 2 00:29:54And that sets the asymptotic limit for how low the cost of the vehicle can be, unless you change the materials. So, and then when you do that, call it like maybe the magic one number or something like that. So that would be like, if you had the, you know, like just a pile of these raw materials here, and you could wave a magic wand and rearrange the atoms into the final shape, that would be the lowest possible cost that you could make this thing for, unless you change the materials. So then, and that is always, almost always a very low number. So then the what's actually causing these to be expensive is how you put the atoms into the desired shape. 0 00:30:37Yeah. Actually, if you don't mind me taking a tiny tangent, had a, I often talked to Jim Keller, who's somebody that work with use. 2 00:30:45Yeah. Jim was a great work at Tesla. 0 00:30:49So I suppose he carries the flame of the same kind of thinking that you're, you're talking about now. And I, I guess I see the same thing at Tesla and, and space X folks who work there, they kind of learn this way of thinking and it kinda becomes obvious almost. But anyway, I had argument, not argument. He educated me about how cheap it might be to manufacture a Tesla bought. We just, we had an argument. What is, how can you reduce the cost of s...

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