How New Was Early Facebook Growth Work?

Julie Zhuo says a lot of what Facebook did back then was very new. The growth team, and the way Facebook used data to learn what people were doing, was pioneered there from first principles. The team kept asking the same questions and built a methodology around them. No off-the-shelf tool was being sold to explain cohort analysis, which numbers to track, or why cohort analysis was worth doing.

The obsession was simple: how do we keep growing, and how do we know the growth is healthy? For a social media company the mechanisms differ. Virality and network effects matter, and getting people on quickly was important very early. The company, the era, and the problem then produced the processes and the ways of working.

She is curious about Perplexity and other companies because the context has changed. Teams are building different experiences with different interfaces. The chat interface is a fundamental paradigm shift, in the same way mobile was. When things change, invention happens, so she asks how people think about product development and how they prioritize what to build. The choices show what a company values and what its mission is.