Hope you like stories. I love stories. I use stories in order to communicate all the time. The thing about the growth team stories are the growth team stories behind the Great Silicon Valley companies are some of the most interesting stories you will ever reach. Companies talking about scaling up. In other words, how they got to their first 1000 customers, how they got to half a million customers, how they got over a million, and even Facebook is now approaching 2 billion. They're absolutely fascinating stories about different kinds of people came together. Metrics, they targeted, metrics they achieved, they are extremely easy to read. In the readings, you can read how the growth team at Facebook. The growth team and Facebook are legendary. They are one of the first people that really understood the exponential power of the network. They really always pursued. They had this dream to connect the world and they still have. In this reading, you can read about how they reached their first 500 years. You can also watch a video from Alex Schultz who was on this growth team tell the story in person about how they did it. One of the things about the story is that there was nothing random about it. It was a very specific strategy. In other words, this was a group of people from different backgrounds who came together, but they had a plan. I'm going to walk you through the plan now. First is they increase the acquisition. In other words, to get more startups, this is the basic thing you have to do to get more sign-ups. How do you get more sign-ups? How do you get more people to just go onto your side and do the necessary clicks to make it happen. The second thing is once they're signed up, how do you activate them? In other words, some people just sign up and do the basic. Particularly, if you think about Facebook, someone sends you a message, hey, sign this thing. Maybe you'll do the absolute minimum. But how will you go in the next few days? Would you start to use it a bit more? That's the question. That's activation. That's the step they had to get them passed. Then you have engagement and also retention. In other words, this idea of the toothbrush test of using it every day. You start to see these things with every product. Can you get people to use them every day? Also retention. Retention is one of the best understood things about customer service. In other words, people understand that one of the things you really need to do is retain your customers because it costs so much to acquire them in the first place. Then finally, the idea of bringing churned users back. In other words, people who have left, they may have left for various reasons that were nothing to do with you. They may have just been busy. However, you now have an opportunity to bring them back. These were the four things that Facebook is that I would recommend for any growth team that you can use. Either by going to some outlines, how to start a startup class, which is on YouTube, or Reid Hoffman split Scaling class, which were both Stanford classes. You can read how most of the great Silicon Valley companies did their growth stories. I find myself endlessly fascinated by reading these YouTube, DropBox, Facebook. They are all fantastically interesting and they talk about key metrics. They are some of the best parts of the company to work with, and if the growth team is going well, that will effect on the rest of the company. Mark Cuban likes to talk about the idea that sale solves all problems. In other words, if your sales are growing or if your growth metrics are growing, that will then bring a positive glow on the rest of the company and allow it to go over some other different problems. I recommend you to take the time to look at the story of how all these companies scales. Some parts of certain companies are complicated and tough, but this isn't one of them, very easy to watch. When I did my first startup, Marrakech in December 98 in Dublin, we didn't have any of this information. You had to physically be based in Silicon Valley in order to get this info. It's now available waiting for you on YouTube. I'm sometimes shocked at how little people have watched these incredible videos. Sometimes as little as thirty thousand people have looked at the story of how Netflix scaled or how DropBox scaled, or how Facebook scaled. It's fantastic information and it's free and available and accessible. I have watched them all and I recommend that you do too. I'm going to make a point about Silicon Valley. Some people might start to be getting annoyed about how many times I've referenced Silicon Valley companies. I've heard people in my students when they evaluate my classes, talk about business schools use too many examples from the Bay Area. Yes, I understand this, and it's not I'm biased because I've lived in work there. The thing is that this information is available. When these companies make their information available, we can find out things about them. You try to talk to a company like Inditex, like Zara, and it's just hard to get information about them. This is why we study them. This is why we have so much information because they're accessible because in Silicon Valley there is a culture moving forward. The other thing I want to say about the growth team at Facebook, they included a posh book in break called Alex, a war refugee from Sri Lanka via Canada. Finally, a Spaniard who got his job by going to Mark Zuckerberg in a party and saying, "hey Mark, who's handling international?" Marks answer was, you are. In other words, it's people coming from different places and nothing that they did can't be done anywhere else. In other words, less not be intimidated by Silicon Valley. Let's move to demystify the place. If I might be so bold, I might recommend that you watch the HBO series Silicon Valley. I know business schools sometimes frown on talking about cultural events in this way, but I'm not one of these people. Having lived there and even having no of the people who are indirectly satirized, I can say that it's really interesting account. Think sometimes we can be too precious about academic sources. Sometimes you need to understand how something works, and I think watching HBO Silicon Valley is as good a way to do it as any.