David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…And even if they were as good as what Mark had built, they didn’t start at Harvard. It’s like Civilization. Nobody else could ever invade Facebook’s turf, but they could invade other people’s turf. Somebody put it to me in the research, there was a fairly big competitor in Germany, I think maybe called Study Vice or something like that. Facebook could really easily go into Germany and people in Germany would be like, oh Facebook, I’ve heard of that. This is interesting. Study Vice could never go into Boston, ever. It’s interesting. Yeah, that’s a great point. Okay, so weeks go by and they’ve saturated Harvard. Not only that, you start seeing this thing happen, which just to level set with listeners, this stayed true for several years. This is a crazy stat. 70% of people who ever signed up were active that day. There are not user engagement retention metrics better than that in the world. The fact that as they grew, it didn’t matter how many more people they added, it was still the case that 70% of users ever were daily active. So you have this crazy situation at Harvard where it’s just like, to your point, nuclear reactor levels engaging. In fact, this term wouldn’t get coined till later in the summer. But this is from The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick’s book. They had coined a term for how students seem to use a site. Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, and Parker, Sean Parker, who we’ll talk about who comes in, called it the trance. Once you start combing through the Facebook, it was very easy to keep going. It was hypnotic. You just kept clicking and clicking and clicking from profile to profile, viewing the data.…

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