Andrew Chen Archives

Dear readers,
I have moved to Substack and I will be writing there from now on:

In the meantime, I will leave andrewchen.com up for posterity and for archives. Enjoy!

About me and archives

Hello there! I’m a partner at Andreessen Horowitz focused on tech startups based in LA and SF.

I write a newsletter. You’d enjoy if you like long-form essays on startups, user growth, and network effects — I’ve written over 650+ essays. If you want more, I’ve written The Cold Start Problem, a best-selling book featuring interviews from the founders/teams behind Slack, Clubhouse, Zoom, Twitch, Tinder, Reddit, Uber, Airbnb, PayPal, and more.

PS. Looking for recent essays? Look here.

PPS. Or, check out some of my best essays below or see the full list of featured essays.

• Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing
• The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup’s metrics (80 slide deck)
• Consumer startups are awesome, and here’s what I’m looking for at a16z (70 slide deck)
• How to build a growth team – lessons from Uber, Hubspot, and others (50 slides)
• How startups die from their addiction to paid marketing
• Why the best way to drive viral growth to increase retention and engagement
• How startups die from their addiction to paid marketing
• How to actually calculate CAC
• The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs
• After the Techcrunch bump: Life in the Trough of Sorrow
• Building the initial team for seed stage startups
• The Power User Curve
• A Practitioner’s Guide to Net Promoter Score
• Required reading for marketplace startups: The 20 best essays
• How to interview for your growth team (from execs at Atlassian, Gusto, Hubspot)
• Why “Uber for X” failed: The supply side is king
• Uber’s virtuous cycle. Geographic density, hyperlocal marketplaces, and why drivers are key
• The Next Feature Fallacy: The fallacy that the next new feature will suddenly make people use your product
  
• Why consumer product metrics are all terrible
• New data shows losing 80% of mobile users is normal, and why the best apps do better