Musical.ly's Alex Zhu on Igniting Viral Growth and Building a User Community | #ProductSF

After all, one of the hardest lessons we learned from that period: It wasn’t enough to build the app, you needed to also grow a critical mass of users. Without the right users there at the beginning, a user-generated content product would inherently be too shallow on content. Low engagement would lead to more low engagement.

The path to onboarding 1 billion people to crypto probably looks like a combination of Mosseri’s vision and what Devin and Alice are building. It boils down to culture—and at the end of the day, content powers culture.

If we get big enough, there’s a real consideration on how we train the algorithm and what objective function we get or give it, and what content gets produced for it. We need to be very mindful of that because what I’d rather have is a world where we have more original content, more interesting content, and less of this gaming-the-algorithm content

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Launching a new platform, Zhu said, was like starting a new country: Getting users to move from an established network that had an ossified economy and social classes to a new network requires the possibility of success—the lure of the American Dream. Furthermore, the new social network had to create upward mobility for all users, to “make sure the... See more