The Cold Start Problem

The Cold Start Problem PDF Author: Andrew Chen
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062969757
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
A startup executive and investor draws on expertise developed at the premier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and as an executive at Uber to address how tech’s most successful products have solved the dreaded "cold start problem”—by leveraging network effects to launch and scale toward billions of users. Although software has become easier to build, launching and scaling new products and services remains difficult. Startups face daunting challenges entering the technology ecosystem, including stiff competition, copycats, and ineffective marketing channels. Teams launching new products must consider the advantages of “the network effect,” where a product or service’s value increases as more users engage with it. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants utilize network effects, and most tech products incorporate them, whether they’re messaging apps, workplace collaboration tools, or marketplaces. Network effects provide a path for fledgling products to break through, attracting new users through viral growth and word of mouth. Yet most entrepreneurs lack the vocabulary and context to describe them—much less understand the fundamental principles that drive the effect. What exactly are network effects? How do teams create and build them into their products? How do products compete in a market where every player has them? Andrew Chen draws on his experience and on interviews with the CEOs and founding teams of LinkedIn, Twitch, Zoom, Dropbox, Tinder, Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest to offer unique insights in answering these questions. Chen also provides practical frameworks and principles that can be applied across products and industries. The Cold Start Problem reveals what makes winning networks thrive, why some startups fail to successfully scale, and, most crucially, why products that create and compete using the network effect are vitally important today.

The Cold Start Problem

The Cold Start Problem PDF Author: Andrew Chen
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062969757
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book

Book Description
A startup executive and investor draws on expertise developed at the premier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and as an executive at Uber to address how tech’s most successful products have solved the dreaded "cold start problem”—by leveraging network effects to launch and scale toward billions of users. Although software has become easier to build, launching and scaling new products and services remains difficult. Startups face daunting challenges entering the technology ecosystem, including stiff competition, copycats, and ineffective marketing channels. Teams launching new products must consider the advantages of “the network effect,” where a product or service’s value increases as more users engage with it. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants utilize network effects, and most tech products incorporate them, whether they’re messaging apps, workplace collaboration tools, or marketplaces. Network effects provide a path for fledgling products to break through, attracting new users through viral growth and word of mouth. Yet most entrepreneurs lack the vocabulary and context to describe them—much less understand the fundamental principles that drive the effect. What exactly are network effects? How do teams create and build them into their products? How do products compete in a market where every player has them? Andrew Chen draws on his experience and on interviews with the CEOs and founding teams of LinkedIn, Twitch, Zoom, Dropbox, Tinder, Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest to offer unique insights in answering these questions. Chen also provides practical frameworks and principles that can be applied across products and industries. The Cold Start Problem reveals what makes winning networks thrive, why some startups fail to successfully scale, and, most crucially, why products that create and compete using the network effect are vitally important today.

Why Startups Fail

Why Startups Fail PDF Author: Tom Eisenmann
Publisher: Currency
ISBN: 0593137027
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

Fashion Recommender Systems

Fashion Recommender Systems PDF Author: Nima Dokoohaki
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030552187
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
This book includes the proceedings of the first workshop on Recommender Systems in Fashion 2019. It presents a state of the art view of the advancements within the field of recommendation systems with focused application to e-commerce, retail and fashion. The volume covers contributions from academic as well as industrial researchers active within this emerging new field. Recommender Systems are often used to solve different complex problems in this scenario, such as social fashion-based recommendations (outfits inspired by influencers), product recommendations, or size and fit recommendations. The impact of social networks and the influence that fashion influencers have on the choices people make for shopping is undeniable. For instance, many people use Instagram to learn about fashion trends from top influencers, which helps them to buy similar or even exact outfits from the tagged brands in the post. When traced, customers’ social behavior can be a very useful guide for online shopping websites, providing insights on the styles the customers are really interested in, and hence aiding the online shops in offering better recommendations and facilitating customers quest for outfits. Another well known difficulty with recommendation of similar items is the large quantities of clothing items which can be considered similar, but belong to different brands. Relying only on implicit customer behavioral data will not be sufficient in the coming future to distinguish between for recommendation that will lead to an item being purchased and kept, vs. a recommendation that might result in either the customer not following it, or eventually return the item. Finding the right size and fit for clothes is one of the major factors not only impacting customers purchase decision, but also their satisfaction from e-commerce fashion platforms. Moreover, fashion articles have important sizing variations. Finally, customer preferences towards perceived article size and fit for their body remain highly personal and subjective which influences the definition of the right size for each customer. The combination of the above factors leaves the customers alone to face a highly challenging problem of determining the right size and fit during their purchase journey, which in turn has resulted in having more than one third of apparel returns to be caused by not ordering the right article size. This challenge presents a huge opportunity for research in intelligent size and fit recommendation systems and machine learning solutions with direct impact on both customer satisfaction and business profitability.

Super Founders

Super Founders PDF Author: Ali Tamaseb
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541768418
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar startups from the rest—revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false! Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on startups, comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to become one—30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more. And what he found looked far different than expected. Just to mention a few: Most unicorn founders had no industry experience; There's no disadvantage to being a solo founder or to being a non-technical CEO; Less than 15% went through any kind of accelerator program; Over half had strong competitors when starting--being first to market with an idea does not actually matter. You will also hear the stories of the early days of billion-dollar startups first-hand. The book includes exclusive interviews with the founders/investors of Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Github, Flatiron Health, Kite Pharma, Facebook, Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, LinkedIn, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Square, venture capital investors like Elad Gil, Peter Thiel, Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital and Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, as well as previously untold stories about the early days of ByteDance (TikTok), WhatsApp, Dropbox, Discord, DiDi, Flipkart, Instagram, Careem, Peloton, and SpaceX. Packed with counterintuitive insights and inside stories from people who have built massively successful companies, Super Founders is a paradigm-shifting and actionable guide for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in what makes a startup successful.

Research in Intelligent and Computing in Engineering

Research in Intelligent and Computing in Engineering PDF Author: Raghvendra Kumar
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811575274
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 975

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Book Description
This book comprises select peer-reviewed proceedings of the international conference on Research in Intelligent and Computing in Engineering (RICE 2020) held at Thu Dau Mot University, Vietnam. The volume primarily focuses on latest research and advances in various computing models such as centralized, distributed, cluster, grid, and cloud computing. Practical examples and real-life applications of wireless sensor networks, mobile ad hoc networks, and internet of things, data mining and machine learning are also covered in the book. The contents aim to enable researchers and professionals to tackle the rapidly growing needs of network applications and the various complexities associated with them.

Model-Based Machine Learning

Model-Based Machine Learning PDF Author: John Winn
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1498756824
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
Today, machine learning is being applied to a growing variety of problems in a bewildering variety of domains. A fundamental challenge when using machine learning is connecting the abstract mathematics of a machine learning technique to a concrete, real world problem. This book tackles this challenge through model-based machine learning which focuses on understanding the assumptions encoded in a machine learning system and their corresponding impact on the behaviour of the system. The key ideas of model-based machine learning are introduced through a series of case studies involving real-world applications. Case studies play a central role because it is only in the context of applications that it makes sense to discuss modelling assumptions. Each chapter introduces one case study and works through step-by-step to solve it using a model-based approach. The aim is not just to explain machine learning methods, but also showcase how to create, debug, and evolve them to solve a problem. Features: Explores the assumptions being made by machine learning systems and the effect these assumptions have when the system is applied to concrete problems. Explains machine learning concepts as they arise in real-world case studies. Shows how to diagnose, understand and address problems with machine learning systems. Full source code available, allowing models and results to be reproduced and explored. Includes optional deep-dive sections with more mathematical details on inference algorithms for the interested reader.

Research Anthology on Multi-Industry Uses of Genetic Programming and Algorithms

Research Anthology on Multi-Industry Uses of Genetic Programming and Algorithms PDF Author: Management Association, Information Resources
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1799880990
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 1534

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Book Description
Genetic programming is a new and evolutionary method that has become a novel area of research within artificial intelligence known for automatically generating high-quality solutions to optimization and search problems. This automatic aspect of the algorithms and the mimicking of natural selection and genetics makes genetic programming an intelligent component of problem solving that is highly regarded for its efficiency and vast capabilities. With the ability to be modified and adapted, easily distributed, and effective in large-scale/wide variety of problems, genetic algorithms and programming can be utilized in many diverse industries. This multi-industry uses vary from finance and economics to business and management all the way to healthcare and the sciences. The use of genetic programming and algorithms goes beyond human capabilities, enhancing the business and processes of various essential industries and improving functionality along the way. The Research Anthology on Multi-Industry Uses of Genetic Programming and Algorithms covers the implementation, tools and technologies, and impact on society that genetic programming and algorithms have had throughout multiple industries. By taking a multi-industry approach, this book covers the fundamentals of genetic programming through its technological benefits and challenges along with the latest advancements and future outlooks for computer science. This book is ideal for academicians, biological engineers, computer programmers, scientists, researchers, and upper-level students seeking the latest research on genetic programming.

The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto PDF Author: Mitch Albom
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062294423
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
From the beloved author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven comes his most critically acclaimed novel yet—a stunningly original tale of love: love between a man and a woman, between an artist and his mentor, and between a musician and his God-given talent. Narrated by the voice of Music itself, the story follows Frankie Presto, a war orphan born in a burning church, through his extraordinary journey around the world. Raised by a blind guitar teacher in Spain and gifted with a talent to change people’s lives—using six mysterious blue strings—Frankie navigates the musical landscape of the twentieth century, from the 1950s jazz scene to the Grand Ole Opry to Elvis mania and Woodstock, all the while searching for his childhood love. As he becomes a famous star, he loses his way, until tragedy steals his ability to play the guitar that had so defined him. Overwhelmed by his loss, Frankie disappears for decades, reemerging late in life for one spectacular yet mystifying farewell. Part love story, part magical mystery, The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto is Mitch Albom at his finest, a Forrest Gump-like epic about one man’s journey to discover what truly matters and the power of talent to change our lives.

User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization

User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization PDF Author: Judith Masthoff
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9783642314537
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20 th International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization, held in Montreal, Canada, in July 2012. The 22 long and 7 short papers of the Research Paper Track presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 101 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on user engagement; trust; user motivation, attention, and effort; recommender systems (including topics such as matrix factorization, critiquing, noise and spam in recommender systems); user centered design and evaluation; educational data mining; modeling learners; user models in microblogging; and visualization. The Industry Paper Track covered innovative commercial implementations or applications of UMAP technologies, and experience in applying recent research advances in practice. 2 long and 1 short papers were accepted of 5 submissions.

The Cold Calling Equation

The Cold Calling Equation PDF Author: Michael Halper
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781468173543
Category : Telephone selling
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Cold calling is a blood sport. Sales professionals hate making cold calls and customers despise receiving them. Yet those who can rise above the competition and master cold-calling will find themselves closing deals, hitting targets, and positively improving their lives on both professional and personal levels. Powerful, practical, and logical, The Cold Calling Equation: Problem Solved teaches cold calling as a skill that anyone who exerts the effort can perfect. Readers can see immediate results from tactics that are spelled out in the book's first pages. It takes the intimidation out of calling a complete stranger and teaches a person with any level of education and experience how to make human connections and find opportunities to grow their business. Upending conventional wisdom, the author reveals that hard work and effort don't always result in successful cold calls. What works is when a caller learns how to succinctly state their company's value to another business. Forget selling the features. Cold callers need to show how their product will make a client's company run faster, smoother, and harder. The reader can formulate their own attack using the concepts and tools that are cleanly explained throughout the book. The Cold Calling Equation: Problem Solved is a book based on real-world scenarios and developed by Michael Halper who has thirteen years experience in cold calling. An energetic sales coach, he runs a telesales operation for other businesses and manages a team of callers. The book takes the reader, chapter by chapter, through the other stumbling blocks of cold calling and shows the salesperson how to clear these hurdles. He also demonstrates how to build target lists and scripts, deal with objections, find opportunities, build both rapport and interest, and more. The psychological state of the cold caller is taken into account as well. The book gives solid strategies for overcoming anxiety and breaks down the pernicious myth that all cold callers are born rather than made. Salespeople don't have to be extroverts or the life of the party. In fact, it's the ability to listen rather than the gift of gab that makes someone successful at business-to-business selling. Turning the tables on the seller, The Cold Calling Equation: Problem Solved also demonstrates that not every lead is worth pursuing. In a powerful section on qualifying, Halper shows the salesperson how to quickly screen prospects through incisive questions. It's a tactic that makes the phone call more controversial and gets the prospect talking. Cold callers will also learn how to manage gatekeepers, turning their enemies into allies who go from blocking to opening up and pointing in the right direction. This helpful guide shows callers how to navigate objections, those challenging phrases that prospects use to get off the phone. Whether it is "I do not have time right now" or "We are not interested," Halper will show you why prospects use objections and how cold callers can get around them. Even a reader with zero sales skills and no practical experience can read this book and learn how to utilize their phone and make it into a powerful sales tool. It will move the novice cold caller from frustration and failure to control and success.