Andrew Chen Archives

Grand Theft Auto 6 and the future of AI
If you happened to miss it, a few weeks back, here is the game trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6. It’s worth watching, and is amazing on multiple levels. But GTA 6 might be the peak of the open world category, untouched by the next wave of tech, particularly generative AI.

Let’s start some facts: First, GTA has a reported budget of $1-2B, making it THE MOST EXPENSIVE GAME EVER

Not only is this the most expensive game ever, but compare it to movies. The most expensive movies, modern installments of the Star Wars and Avengers and Pirates franchises, clock in at a mere $300-450M. So this is nearly 5X:

I also think this is indicative of the pole position that gaming is taking in culture.

The recent trailer is now the most viewed non-music video on YouTube following 24 hours after its release, beating any movie trailer, TV show premier, and it topped MrBeast. In the first 10 hours, it hit 70M views, and at the time of this writing, a few weeks later, it’s at over 140M

It’s also funny to compare this to building a product in tech. Rather than “move fast and break things” instead this game:

• took $1-2B to build, as we said
• started dev in 2014, so it’ll be 11 years from start to release
• 1000s of developers, designers, etc crunching to finish

But as most of us in tech have been following, the tools and approach to games is rapidly changing.

How generative AI is changing the games industry
We are seeing generative AI hit multiple parts of game development. It’s early days, but there are quite a few places where this is hitting — this includes everything from concept art to assets within the game, to interactions with NPCs:

• creating infinite varieties of concept art
• designing/creating 3D assets
• LLM powered NPCs
• generating environments and worlds
• synthesized speech for in-game characters
• bots to play against, to onboard into PvP competitive games
• endless quests, narrative stories, etc
• etc

But that’s just the “weak form” innovations that are easily imagined today. The “weak form,” as my colleague Chris Dixon talks about, often comes alongside a strong form version, in a pair. The weak form is more easily understandable by the market, but it’s often the strong form that ultimately makes the bigger impact.

The “strong form” AI innovations will impact GTA in more emergent formats. To take a metaphor, it’s been cool to see modding allow for the emergent GTA RP (role play) community emerge, allowing for new game play as people play as cops, gang leaders, and other folks. Millions of people have tried this format of GTA, and even more millions have watched. It’s a new inventive form of play that didn’t previously exist.

I think the same thing will happen for future editions of the Open World genre. Yes, generative AI will be used to make games like GTA more cheaply ($1-2B is a lot!) or to get more content with the same dollars. But also AI will unlock new forms of gameplay as well.

I’m so excited, for example, about what happens with the GTA version of AI town — where NPCs have their own inner voices, motivations, and needs. You could imagine this underlying platform being able to power next gen social, dating, or otherwise. You could imagine thinking of open world games like GTA almost more like a physics engine, with a layer of modding and AI built in. And at some level, it’s a large enough playground that you can build a lot of other game genres inside of it (as Roblox does).

It’s just as likely gen AI will reinvent genres, not just make it cheaper to build
Think about what happened in the last content revolution, where user-generated platforms like YouTube and TikTok allowed video creators to dramatically reduce the cost of content. What creators used the technology for wasn’t to try and compete with Hollywood. People aren’t disrupting the 2 hour film or the 10 episode TV season with short videos. Instead, you see completely new video formats that are native to the medium, whether it’s personality-driven vlogging, video game streaming, long-form podcasts, or otherwise. These don’t compete with Hollywood — they take on entertainment by a wholly other approach, stitching together hours of entertainment 6 seconds at a time.

All this time we’ve been talking about big open world games, I actually think the best new experiences won’t resemble Grand Theft Auto at all. Instead, we’ll see new game genres that are rapidly released that compete in different ways:

• Perhaps we’ll see games as a new format of meme. If a funny presidential debate moment happens between two candidates, perhaps later that evening you’ll see a fully-fledged fighting game (built in a no code, AI-enabled environment) become the huge hit later that evening
• Perhaps gaming will be ultra-personalized, and people will make huge, immersive, deep games for their 50 person college club — just because they can
• Perhaps gaming will be sold alongside commerce and other experiences. Today, you might build a huge gaming experience to accompany Harry Potter, but the economics don’t work to make it to promote your tiny Shopify store. If content creation costs fall close enough to zero, you might.

Either way, it’s really hard to imagine a big budget game like GTA happening the same way it is happening now. Instead, the content will be AI generated, along with the quest and maybe even the genre. And maybe it won’t look like what we consider a game today.

This last year has been a period of exploration for the games industry, but it’s still very early. Everyone is experimenting, which is a good start. And some tools, like Midjourney for concepting, has taken hold. But very little is actually in production. There’s a big transformation coming, and it’s going to be as big of a wave as anything we’ve seen in this industry.

Dear readers,

As we enter a new year, many of us are setting goals to write more and create more content. As someone who has been writing consistently for the past decade, I wanted to share some strategies that have helped me in my writing journey, particularly in a professional context.

Collecting ideas
First and foremost, I emphasize the importance of collecting ideas. These ideas can come from anywhere – opinions, statements of fact, interesting factoids, statistics, or even visual content such as charts and graphs. These are things from X or books or Reddit or whatever.

I use an app called “Email Me” to quickly email myself these ideas and then compile them into a single note with a headline that inspires me to explore the topic further. So then my workflow is to open up this note with a bunch of bullets, each one a headline for a post, and then decide what to pick from

Let yourself write small
You should allow yourself to write things that are both big and small. But particularly, it’s great to give yourself permission to do much shorter pieces – tweets or LinkedIn posts – and they can even be a few lines. The frequency of creating helps you build the muscle for more later. Short helps you get over perfectionism, or a feeling of imposter syndrome, etc

The idea of “templates” is useful too – these are commonly repeating versions of posts that you can repeat, over and over, that always generate interesting content. Here’s some examples:

• reviews of books
• quotes from podcasts/articles
• lessons learned from past projects
• Q&A with a colleague/friend
• top links about a particular topic
• your answer about a particular topic
• reflections on the past year/quarter
• a factoid/statistic you found surprising

If you can collect these templates together, you’ll never feel writer’s block!

Setting aside time to brainstorm, and to write
Another strategy that has been effective for me is to have regular brainstorming sessions with a writing partner. This not only provides accountability but also helps in generating new and fresh ideas. At a16z we actually have a weekly content where people talk about what they’re working on each week, and riff on different concepts. It helps a lot.

Setting aside dedicated time for writing is also crucial. I find that scheduling 60 to 90 minutes, particularly in the morning when I’m fresh, helps me focus and eliminates distractions. I often do my writing Sunday afternoons as well, in prep for the week ahead, and try to crack out something that takes a few hours. These are my routines, and maybe you’ll find yours!

Distraction-free devices
I own a whole series of distraction free devices – I wrote my book on a dedicated laptop for writing that has nothing installed on it besides Ulysses, a writing app, and a browser. There’s some really cool Android tablets called BOOX that can pair with bluetooth keyboards – or you can use the Remarkable tablet that’s recently been out, with has a keyboard attachment. I also lock my phone into a plexiglass container with a timer to force myself to stay off my entertainment apps

In addition to these strategies, I’ve found that leveraging technology, such as using AI for brainstorming and voice-to-text apps, has been incredibly helpful in enhancing my writing process. I found chatGPT to be a strong brainstorming tool – just say something like, “I have X opinion, make a list of ideas that align, starting with Y and Z.” Then if you want more ideas, ask it for more. The hit rate sometimes isn’t great but you curate things down and then use that for your topic sentences for what you’re going to write. Voice-to-text is useful as well since it’s often easier to talk than it is to write. So if you ramble for 5-10 minutes there’s tools like Oasis AI that will clean it up into acceptable prose, which you can edit more later

Why “quality” is the enemy to writing
The top top obstacle to people writing/creating/building more (and this includes me!) is a misguided focus on “quality” as an excuse to procrastinate and to enable many other bad behaviors

Some thoughts:

1. quality focus hinders more writing and content creation
2. leads to procrastination and restricts experimenting with styles
3. taste develops faster than skills, causing disappointment
4. it’s important to accept failure as part of learning
5. start small, expand based on audience feedback
6. regular writing, experimenting with styles keeps process enjoyable

People often use quality as an excuse, thinking they need to craft a masterpiece to stand out online. They aim to produce only their finest work, expecting it to be widely recognized.

They say, look, there’s so much writing on the internet, and so much content. In order for my work to break out, what I need to do is I need to sit down and put down a masterpiece, something that will be recognized by people and I’m going to come up with the best ideas in the world.

I’m going to polish, polish, and polish. I’m going to put out only the best work. And then once that masterpiece is out there, then people are going to recognize it. Now, I would argue that that does not work at all. And the reason why that doesn’t work are really rooted in some really practical things.

Here’s why this approach is flawed
Firstly, focusing too much on quality is a great way to procrastinate. It leads to endless editing, turning what could be a quick tweet storm into a months-long essay project.

Secondly, it hampers your ability to experiment. When starting out, finding your voice is crucial, and it often takes time and trial and error. For instance, my own blogging and writing journey took about two years to find its stride. Experimentation is key, and a high-quality standard can stifle creativity and output. Initially, you might dislike your work as your taste develops faster than your skills, creating a frustrating gap between your taste and abilities.

It’s essential to embrace failure and learning. An over-focus on quality can prevent you from trying new things and accepting that some attempts might fail, setting unrealistic standards.

Increase the writing feedback loop
Instead, you should aim to increase your feedback loop. This means experimenting, seeing how your audience reacts, and evolving your content based on their responses. For example, start with a tweet, expand it into a thread if it’s well-received, and then develop it into an essay. This approach helps align your work with what your audience wants.

Good writing habits include writing regularly and giving yourself the freedom to experiment with different topics and styles. Discover what resonates with your audience and yourself. This way, you can build a diverse portfolio and find your unique voice or niche. It took years to figure out that people like when I write about charts and graphs

Remember, writing should be fun and conversational. Treat it as if you’re talking to friends. Don’t fret over a piece that doesn’t hit the mark; you can always try again. This philosophy of frequent, enjoyable content creation is what I’ve adopted in my creative process.

Remember you can always delete a stupid tweet!

(above: Me in Sep 2023, a happy author, finding the Japanese translated version of my book at the wonderful Daikanyama Tsutaya Books in Tokyo)

Dear readers,

As many of you know, 2 years ago I published my first book THE COLD START PROBLEM. It aims to tell the story of why some products — YouTube, Instagram, Uber, Slack, Dropbox, and others — end up with hundreds of millions (and sometimes billions!) of users, and to provide the definitive theory of network effects which are often referenced in the tech industry, but only superficially understood. It’s been a success, now in a dozen markets, translated into many languages (including Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, etc).

Here’s a screenshot of some of the wonderful pictures that readers took during launch week:

This was an awesome experience. Nevertheless, I swear I will never write another book again . (I guess never say never, ha)

The creative process was a long, meandering path, and folks ping me from time to time because they want to take on a masochistic journey of their own. So this post will be about the messy, annoying, behind the scenes leading up to writing a book like this — it describes a bit the creative process, but also some of the major milestones and lessons learned.

Hopefully it will be useful for someone in the future who is thinking of a big writing project of their own.

A brief summary of what I’ll cover:

• Month 0: At first, writing a book seems like a fun idea (until you figure out it’s not)
• Month 1-6: Finding an agent, writing a proposal, and opening up your Christmas presents early
• Month 6-12: Collecting and organizing the ideas — lots of fun chats, reconnecting with colleagues, talking to great people
• Month 12: How to write the initial the outline, then the mega-outline — finding the formula
• Month 12-24: The very messy middle, the trough of sorrow, the hard slog, followed by trench warfare (yes, it’s 3-5 years to write a book)
• Month 24-36: Why you’ll feel insecure about the creative process
• Final months: Just ship it already

I’m also going to link to various copies of intermediate content along the way — unfortunately I can’t share everything (like interview notes, etc) since some stuff will have to be confidential, but here’s a few interesting bits anyway

• Initial book proposal (then called MOONSHOT). First thing I wrote!
• First book outline. Very very rough set of topics set across 3 pages
• Mega outline. 30 pages that needed to be expanded to 300 pages

OK — so let’s get started on the journey.

Month 0: At first, writing a book seems like a fun idea (until you figure out it’s not)
I joined Andreessen Horowitz in mid-2018, I had already been writing on my blog for 10 years and I was kind of having some creative boredom over it. At that time, Elad Gil had just published his book and we had a nice convo at MKT’s lounge about a week after his book was out — he had amazing things to say about the process (he writes faster/better than me, in the back of Ubers it turns out), and he said it helped him a lot professionally. At a16z, as you all know, Ben and Scott have both written fantastic books as well, and it seemed to really be great for them professionally, so I thought it might be a fun challenge to do the same. So think of the motivation as 50% a creative challenge, and 50% seeing what it had done for other people.

I had two lines of thinking in terms of picking the book topic. First, I’ve had good luck taking ubiquitous jargon and writing the definitive blog post on the topic — something I did with growth hacking, CAC/LTV, viral loops, and concepts like that. I had a few ideas bouncing around in my head that felt like good candidates. “Power users” was one — a term we use willy nilly, but without a strong theoretic underpinning. “Network effects” was another, since we were talking about it at a16z all the time, but when it came time to look at the metrics and answer the question — OK so does this product have it!?? — then it got a little mushier. Another was “Product/market fit” or “MVP” and expanding those concepts much further.

The other line of thinking revolves around answering the big question — why? I decided my focus would be on something targeting a very small group of nerdy founders and executives, rather than a wide topic that might be more mainstream. I could write about, say, career advice or how to start a business (in a general sense), but felt like those would be too broad.

In the end, I picked the topic of network effects because it’s a genuinely important topic, I felt like I had something to say, and I also felt like it could fold in a lot of concepts from my prior work on growth. Once I started down the path of picking, I started to talk to people at a16z about it — they recommended I start with writing a book proposal.

Month 1-6: Finding an agent, writing a proposal, and opening up your Christmas presents early
The team at a16z was very helpful, and in the first few weeks I worked with Hanne Winarsky (now at Substack!) and others to start meeting agents, which is how I ultimately met Chris Parris-Lamb from Gernert who also represented Peter Thiel for Zero to One, and Pete Buttigieg for his book. I sent him the following book proposal with a placeholder name, MOONSHOT. The proposal usually kinda reads like a business plan:

• Overview
• Chapter summaries
• The market
• Author bio
• Competitive books

We quickly agreed to work together, and that we would approach various publishers to solicit offers. The actual approach was kind of fun, honestly a more efficient version of what we do in venture capital. Chris ran the whole thing, and the process looked like the following:

• Chris approached publishers and sent along the book proposal
• They read the proposal (thank you!) and asked for 30 minutes of time
• We got on the call and they asked me detailed questions, showing they had actually read the proposals — UNLIKE a typical startup/VC process where the founder uses the time to present
• Later, they submitted an offer (I think 7 did?)
• Chris then took the top half of the offers, and gave them a second chance to bid again
• The top 2 bids were close, but I chose to work with Hollis Heimbouch at Harper Business

I chose Hollis because she’s legend in the industry, and worked with Jim Collins, Clay Christensen, Satya Nadella, and others on their most famous books — a16z had also worked with her for Ben’s previous book and it went well. My advance was high mid six figures, which I was told was very good for a first-time author, and would be paid out in parts as the book progressed (one part at signing, the next on the draft, the next at publishing, etc).

The entire process of doing this was maybe 3-4 months? I’ve described the early days of this as “opening up your Christmas gifts early” because you get all the good vibes up front of selling the book, without the work of actually writing anything. But soon I was going to pay the price!

Month 6-12: Collecting and organizing the ideas — lots of fun chats, reconnecting with colleagues, talking to great people
The rest of the first year was pretty fun as well — I realized I needed to do a lot of primary research, so I started reaching out to people I respected, asking them for short interviews. Thank you to Li Jin who tag teamed with me on many of these interviews, where I asked open-ended questions, heard stories, and tried to write as much of it down as possible.

Readers want to hear opinions. The sharper and funnier, the better, and I had a theory that if I could collect all of it, then that in itself could be the bones of a book. Thus, I wrote down pithy, opinionated statements whenever I heard them — anything that might be a good tweet would also be a good title or a good opening paragraph. Opinions like, “launching with Techcrunch is stupid” or “never build a social network, it’s just too hard” — those are gold.

All the interviews went into a spreadsheet tracker like this, which linked to individual notes for each, plus a little summary.

In the end, I ended up with 200+ interviews from people in the industry, and pages and pages of opinions and thoughts. It was absolute chaos. But I could also tell there was something interesting in there. I eventually interviewed some senior folks in the industry — the founders/CEOs of Slack, YouTube, Twitch, Tinder, Dropbox, Zoom, Linkedin, and may others — those all ended up being super fun, and were the showcase stories in the book. Getting time with these folks ended up being some of the most memorable moments while writing the book.

Month 12: How to write the initial the outline, then the mega-outline — finding the formula
If you have hundreds of pages of random notes from interviews, plus pages of research, and a jumble of ideas in your own head — what do you do? You need some kind of organizing principle that makes all these ideas readable. I figured there was probably a formula in some of the best business books out there, and so I re-read Lean Startup, Crossing the Chasm, Innovator’s Dilemma, and many others.

What you find it that the bones of the book often look something like this:

• Opening story
• Describe a big problem/dilemma/question
• Present a framework
• Go through one part of the framework
  • Start with an anecdote
  • Then describe the theory
• Go through another part
• Then another part
• Then again…
• Conclusion

This isn’t all business books, but look, it’s pretty ubiquitous. And so I thought I’d start by structuring my initial outline kind of like this, which is how I ended up with the following short version of the outline. The first book outline.

Btw, Ryan Holiday has a great discussion of how he wrote his book, with tons of photos, and I want to link that here. He has a photo of a box representing every topic/idea in this book, each one in a note card, categorized into sections:

I sort of ended up doing the digital version of this, where I created a document that I called my “Mega Outline” — where I took every opinion/point that I wanted to make in the book, and built out the first 2-3 levels of bullets in a much larger version.

Here’s the first page, so you can get a sense:

I’ve linked the entire Mega outline here if you want to peruse — it’s 30 pages where each page needed to probably be 10x’d. That is, 1 page of outline = 10 pages of written prose, which I quickly figured out as I began to write the first few chapters. There’s a funny George RR Martin discussion (he’s the Game of Thrones guy) where he talks about how some writers are Architects, and some are Gardeners. The architects do what Ryan Holiday and I both do — we have some chaos at the beginning, which we try to ruthlessly suppress, and use some organizing principles to put it together. Once there’s a structure, then that’s like a foundation of a building — the architects then write, floor by floor, and build the whole thing. Plus some polish at the end. It turns out that GRRM describes himself as the other archetype, the gardener, where you sort of plant some interesting points here and there, then revisit them as you write. But that’s why his books are amazing and take 10 years to write.

Month 12-24: The very messy middle, the trough of sorrow, the hard slog, followed by trench warfare (yes, it’s 3-5 years to write a book)
This whole middle section after the first year gives me PTSD so I won’t dwell too much on it, and just cover the lessons learned. The mechanics of this phase are pretty simple — you really just need to translate the mega outline bullet by bullet into pages of written prose. But here are all the problems you’ll face:

• Your normal tools are not good for writing a book. Most writing that you do on a daily basis, like email, might be composed of a few paragraphs. That’s easy. If you need a longer document, then you might have multiple sections that contain multiple paragraphs each, and you’ll use Microsoft Word or GDocs. But what if you have a book with 7-10 parts that contain 5-10 chapters each, that contain 3-4 major sections that themselves contain a large number of paragraphs? And what if halfway through, you realize all the stuff you’re writing in one section should actually belong as a chapter in another section? Also what if you want to do a word count of different chapters or sections? It’s all a pain. In the end, I used Ulysses which at least has the concept of nested folders, and then each chapter would be a folder that would then contain files containing each part. The app then sync’d it all to a bunch of Markdown files in a Dropbox, so that I could work on it from multiple locations
• You write on a computer, and your computer is very distracting. You need a browser to do research, but your browser is also where you can check what’s happening on social media. You can’t fully turn off the internet, since you need to do research. And sometimes you need to go to YouTube to watch an interview, but right next to the video you’re supposed to be watching is a gadget review for something you might want to to buy. So what do you do?
• Distraction free devices and treating yourself like a kid. Eventually I started to try and buy a bunch of different tools to keep myself focused. I bought a plexiglass timer safe thing and I’d lock my personal phone away for an hour or two at a time. I bought a separate laptop, and put it in a different location, and turned on all the child-safe filters so that I couldn’t go to Reddit, Twitter, etc. If I needed to look up research, I would often just print out pages and pages of it, so that I would stay analog and not mess around. I bought a series of e-ink Android tablets called the BOOX that could run a Markdown editor, connect to Dropbox, and could pair a nice keyboard.
• Say goodbye to vacations, weekends, and evening time. To hit the deadlines I had set for myself, I ended up converting a lot of my holidays and weekends into writing time. It’s hard to write for more than, 3-4 hours in a row, so you still can go somewhere nice and sunny — but I found that I needed to wake up, work out, and get writing before noon, in order to make progress. You get your evenings, but it’s tough. And weekends are like that too.

Here’s a funny photo of one of these kSafe timers I’d hide my phone into during my writing times — by the end, I had 5 (!!!) of these in various writing spots, so that if I was feeling in the mood I would throw my phone in:

I have to admit, it was a grind. Not easy at all. If there was a point where I could have gotten stuck and quit, this would have been it.

Month 24-36: Why you’ll feel insecure about the creative process
One of the craziest things about writing a book is that it’s such an incredibly solitary experience, and there’s eventually a point where you’ve written enough that you feel sorta okay about where it’s going, but no one else has seen it yet. And so it might suck. But you’re honestly not sure. I got got to this about 2 years into writing the book. I had written the first ~10 chapters (out of 35), and I had a lot of questions for myself:

• Is this book any good?
• Am I saying stuff people already know?
• Or is this book too nerdy, and going into details that are unnecessary?
• Are the stories actually interesting, or too obvious? Have people heard them already?

And to be honest, you kind of don’t know until you take a half completed version of the book and ask a few trusted friends to read it. I got a bunch of very very good feedback — thanks in particular to Lenny Rachitsky, Sachin Rekhi, and many folks at a16z for taking the first crack — and it was also the first time my publisher and agent were reading it. I got a bunch of useful conceptual feedback, for example that the first few chapters felt a little slow to get into the action. It felt too theoretical at parts. There were certain specific topics that felt trite. Some sections felt repetitive. And so on. Brutal honesty is what you need here. In the end I also felt like, underneath the scruff, was a book that I would really enjoy reading myself, and that it just needed to be tightened.

I will say, the most painful refactoring happening in this period. As I neared completion of rough versions of all the various chapters, I ended up with a roughly 100,000 word book (which is normal, turns out). Sometimes it takes 3-5 years to fully get to this, and the fact I had a demanding day job and was able to finish in ~3 years — that’s great. But if my worry was that if I had to significantly rewrite portions part way through, it would become a 5 years process, which I’ve learned is not uncommon. This kind of refactoring particularly comes when you have a full length book and then you decide to combine a chapter or two. Or to take a theme that’s appearing in a few spots, and make it into its own section. And then you have to update everything in the book so that it flows properly. It’s easiest to do with a blog post, or a document, or something like that, but with a 35 chapter book — that becomes a heavy lift. But so it goes.

Final months: Just ship it already
By the end of the writing process, I was dead tired. Honestly, I got to a point where I was both simultaneously feeling good about the materials, particularly the first few chapters that I had polished up. But also the process was long and arduous and I was ready to just ship it. The problem with books, however, is that they are really developed in a waterfall process for good reason — once you submit the book, and it’s printed, that’s that!

One fun back and forth happened as I started to work on picking the final cover. I worked with a designer who had done a lot of work on Stripe Press books, which I always loved — however, they are boutique operation which gives them a lot of latitude on what can be done, and the designs often had very small text on the cover (after all, the title will be somewhere on the web page in a digital-first experience, right?), or prescribed weird materials. It was a negotiation to figure out what was actually possible.

I also learned that almost all the US hardcover books are printed at one company (crazy???) and here’s an excerpt about that from a Vox article:

Most book printing happens in the US. Books with heavy color printing, like picture books, are sent to China, but in order to keep the cost of shipping low, most publishers do the rest of their printing domestically. That’s getting more and more difficult to manage.

Until 2018, there were three major printing presses in the US. Then one of them, the 125-year-old company Edwards Brothers Malloy, closed. The remaining big two, Quad and LSC, attempted to merge in 2020, but then the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit. Quad responded by getting out of the book business entirely; LSC filed for bankruptcy and sold off a number of its presses. Smaller printers have continued to operate, but the infrastructure to keep up with the demand for printed books in North America is in shambles.

Crazy right? Couple other interesting things I learned at the end:

• You only need ~10,000 preorders to be a bestseller — far below what it used to be
• There are tons of books that become best-sellers because people buy many, many copies of their own books — often via anonymous networks of buyers to obscure what’s happening (I did not do this, btw)
• The US is not actually the primary market for business books, at least by units — it’s China. There’s usually 3:1 ratio of books sold there versus the US
• The average book has 250-500 books sold in its lifetime (!!!) — and maybe the median is more like a few thousand. But either way it’s quite low

Anyway, as the final months approached, I traded a bunch of revisions with Hollis and her team at Harper Business. Even though I was very tired at this point, I had the incredible help of Olivia Moore at a16z who did a once over at the end, that really polished things up, as well as my agent Chris, and many others. There are way too many people to thank, so I encourage you to look at the acknowledgements :)

It was only in the final months that I started to think about marketing the book. I also have a ton of notes there :) Will share more later. In the meantime, hopefully y’all found this interesting! It was a good 3+ years of my life and there’s finally enough distance to reflect now.

Hey readers,

This is a small deviation from my usual topics, but wanted to share. This is one of the most important graphs that I saw in 2023 that has led to behavioral change for me. This is in Peter Attia’s book Outlive.

Here’s the graph:

tldr:
if you want to be able to briskly climb stairs when you are 75, you need to be in the top 95th percentile of cardiovascular fitness. Even at 95th percentile, it’ll be hard to jog up steep hills, etc — you’d have to be an elite athlete.

But if you are average/low, you may not even be able to do any of that. And it seems unlikely you’ll be avg/low now (I’m in my early 40s) and then somehow go from 50th percentile to 95th. So basically it’s better to get started

Thus, after reading his book, I reluctantly started running again even though I hate it. And am also doing some peloton / cycling outdoors when time/weather allows

I enjoyed his book, and I posted a bunch of my other book recommendations from the past year over here.

Dear readers,

I was recently interviewed by the great Brian Balfour (CEO/cofounder of Reforge) and Fareed Mosavat (ex-Reforge/Slack/Zynga) which turned into a lively discussion — I think we could have gone longer! — which we just published in two parts. You can listen to both parts below, and the kind folks at Reforge also typed up some notes summarizing some of the major points made in the interview discussion.

Hope you enjoy!

Andrew

Part 1 — 2024 Predictions: The Future of Product, Growth, and AI with Andrew Chen

Part 2 — New Marketing Channels and Trends for 2024: The Power of Organic Traction and the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs

Some thoughts and notes from the podcast:

• 2024 Predictions: the future of product, growth, and AI What’s in store for 2024? Andrew Chen, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, joined us on the Season Finale of Unsolicited Feedback to share his insights.
  • High Growth, high churn? Many AI experiences are currently seeing high growth and high churn due to their novelty factor. The question remains: can they sustain growth after the novelty wears off?
  • MVPs Have power, for now… AI is in the early stage of its S-curve, similar to the early days of the App Store. This period is characterized by rapid innovation and experimentation.
  • To Predict the future, look at the past The MVP strategy works well in the early stages of technology, but as it matures, the standards rise. The Apple approach of perfection might be the key in the long term.
  • More IPOs in 2024 Expectations of more IPOs in 2024 are high, given the maturation of businesses and the market’s readiness for fresh players.
  • More M&A in 2024 An increase in mergers and acquisitions is anticipated in the startup market, primarily involving startups themselves.
  • Big Breakthrough in AI in 2024? While major breakthroughs aren’t guaranteed, wider capabilities and integration of AI in everyday tools are expected.
  • More Product managers in 2024 The demand for product managers is predicted to rise as companies continue to grow and evolve.
  • The Law of shitty clickthroughs This law dictates that the performance of any marketing channel degrades over time due to increased usage and saturation.
• If You’re reading about it, it’s probably too late By the time a marketing channel becomes mainstream, it’s often already fully utilized.
  • Phone Calls? don’t even get me started Over-saturation has led to the decline of channels like phone calls and SMS marketing.
  • The Running start Success in big channels requires initial momentum, typically from non-scalable, unique marketing approaches.
  • Defensible Growth channels often mean going niche Focusing on niche markets can help make growth channels more defensible and sustainable.
  • The Power of organic traction Organic traction is crucial for crossing over to higher volume channels and creating a loyal base.
  • Building a brand Developing a compelling narrative or brand is essential in overcoming the challenges of saturated channels.
• Lessons from Gaming: the power of community, creativity, and storytelling The gaming industry offers insights into growth and product development, emphasizing community building, storytelling, and technology.
  • The Anti-MVP approach In gaming, extensive development and testing before launch are common, contrasting with the tech industry’s MVP approach.
  • Launching is a community effort Gaming studios excel at building anticipation and community engagement before a game’s launch.
  • The Intersection of culture and technology Gaming combines culture and technology, creating engaging experiences that resonate with players.
  • Storytelling is as important as technology Storytelling in gaming emphasizes the importance of narrative in product development and marketing.

Hi readers,

Doing a short round up on various links, books, a quick life update, and other stuff going on. First, I did not write much in 2023 (I was busy!!) but am proud of what I published…

Blog posts from 2023

• How to design a referral program. I headed up Uber’s driver and rider referral programs at various points of my time there — I provide a framework to think about referrals as an ask/target/incentive/payback, and break down the components of each one. Maybe most importantly, there’s a question of how often you ask for the referral — this is what people sometimes forget. I also discuss the weaknesses of referral programs rather than products that are intrinsically viral.
• The pitch deck for a16z GAMES FUND ONE. My main thing these days is starting up and leading the new Games fund at Andreessen Horowitz. It’s what I’ll blame for not writing as often as I’d like :) But I was able to get the vast majority of our pitch deck for the fund — launched in mid 2022 — published. You’ve seen a lot of startup pitch decks, but this is an interesting example of one for a fund.
• What to do when product growth stalls. A lot of companies are dealing with reduced spending on marketing and growth, and many of their users/customers are less likely these days to engage with products. Sometimes the founders (and their marketing/growth teams) come to me, and I lay out a framework to try to diagnose the core issue and figure out next steps.
• The Next Next Job, a framework for making big career decisions. I often talk to folks about their next career move, and here I lay out a framework stolen from one of my best friends, Bubba Murarka, on thinking about the next next job rather than just what’s in front of you. I used this to consider my hop to Uber, which led me to a16z (yes, VC was my next next job, and I planned 5+ years ahead!)
• Creator Economy 2.0: What we’ve learned, why it’s hard, and what’s next. Creators are without a doubt one of the most important players in the new social media landscape. Many startups were formed specifically to cater to their needs. However, we’ve learned a lot from the first generation or two of Creator Economy companies — why creators are so hard to work with, why the revenue is so concentrated, why things are more fragile than they often look from the outside.
• How I use AI when blogging and writing. I’ve been experimenting (along with all of you!) on using ChatGPT, Oasis AI, and other tools as part of my writing. It’s OK at some things, and terrible at others. I have some thoughts on this which I’ll share here.
• Lessons from launching SPEEDRUN, the Games x Tech startup accelerator. As another part of my “building in public” writeups about the a16z Games Fund, we kicked off a new program in 2023 called SPEEDRUN which is meant to be a startup accelerator focused on the intersection of games and tech. It’s been a super interesting experence — and we’re doubling down — and thought I’d share some lessons and thoughts here.
• When AI is too verbose, full of repetition and says sorry for being an AI. I often hate the replies from ChatGPT so I added some instructions to it, and now it’s much better :)

Separately, I also have a ton of random X posts — tbh I’ve been more active there. Sometimes I cross pollinate posts between there and here, but if you want things in real time, here’s a list of some of my more highly favorited posts:

• Highly faved posts on X for @andrewchen

Life update
I also wanted to share a brief life update, which I posted to X, but will repeat here:

2023 has been an incredible and eventful year.

some personal highlights:

• I’ve married Emma Waldron!
• Spent tons of time with family (both mine and Emma’s), more than usual – always good as my folks are getting older
• year two in LA and loving it, though we’re still in SF every month or so
• first time in the middle east, morocco, ireland, several other places
• was in my/our first serious car accident (no injuries, but our RV + the other car was totaled)
• honeymoon in Japan, and yes, Naoshima is very special and everyone should go

work wise, so so much has happened:

• built out the Games Fund team at a16z, making a dozen hires this year in Marketing, Investing, Talent, etc
• we launched SPEEDRUN, our new accelerator, garnering 1000s of startups applying and we’ve already invested $20M+ via the program
• a16z repeated Tech Week in SF, NYC, LA with 1000+ events and tens of thousands of people
• big wins (and challenges) across our portfolio, but lots of mark ups and key saves in tricky situations
• tons of energy and excitement in AI — we went from being curious on what’s out there to doing over a dozen investments in Games x AI startups
• happy new year everyone, particularly to all the wonderful people around me — my family, my new extended family, the lovely team I get to work with every day

And appreciate y’all following and listening to my thoughts from time to time!

Books and other stuff
Finally, I wanted to list some of my favorite (mostly non-work) reads from the past year, in case folks are interested:

• The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles. Nice history of Los Angeles starting from 100+ years back, focusing on getting water from eastern California into an arid desert, some of the early religious movements in town, and the formation of what would become Hollywood
• Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry that Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East. Part of a Middle East deep dive that I did after visiting the region, and this was before all the recent tragedy. This reframes a lot of the conflict over the past decades as a rivalry between Iran/KSA — they are two oil powers, different religious sects, lots of proxy wars, etc.
• Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. This book has gotten a lot of attention as the Decel/Doomer Bible — the first half is an interesting thought experiment and worth reading, and it defines the AI safety language that is part of modern discourse. On the downside, the back half I think it goes off the rails and makes a ton of assumptions (why will AGI come suddenly? Why just one?) and makes much weaker arguments.
• The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China. I’ve started to do a China history deep dive and this was on the list — interesting to contrast this to Japan’s Meiji restoration which was happening ~concurrently and it reflects from the dangers from not embracing progress and technology.
• Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity. Lots of folks have read this — tldr; you should exercise an hour a day, and alternate between Zone 2 cardio and strength training. Sadly this book convinced me to start running again, and to begin amateurishly cycling when I have time.
• Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan. The TV show was great so I read the book — it’s fun but I think a lot of it probably made up. Still fun. Read it as sort of as true-ish story about a foreigner turned journalist turned yakuza expert. This was part of our deep dive on Japan before heading there for our honeymoon.
• Elon Musk. The man of the moment. First half is great, particularly some of the details about his childhood, how much he poured into SpaceX, etc. The back half is kind of a hit piece on his Twitter acquisition in way way too much detail, and is overtly negative when we don’t know how it’ll all turn out? I think the real definitive biography is yet to be written, given that Elon is in his prime.
• Chip War: The Quest to Dominate the World’s Most Critical Technology. Great history of the semiconductor industry, starting in Silicon Valley and ending in Asia. The book covers the topic cohesively – for a very complex industry – and discusses a lot of the modern geopolitics between the US, China, and Taiwan
• Solaris: The Definitive Edition. Classic scifi. Guy shows up on a research station above a planet with a strange (alive??) ocean, people are dead, he needs to figure out what’s going on.
• The Cold War: A New History. Concise summary of the Cold War from the end of WW2 to the fall of the USSR. I was a kid through most of the final years, and the book touches on some of the modern scholarship on what was going on inside the Soviet Union, which is only now available.

Hopefully some of the above are new and interesting to y’all! I hope to read more next year — I think the cheat code might be to stop watching Netflix/Max/whatever (making it weekends only). And instead take the last 1-2 hours of the day and get back into a reading routine, and take notes, to help inspire more writing too. Hard, but I will try :)

We are also planning to spend more time in SF for 2024 so I hope I get to see some of you that I’ve missed in the past year as I’ve mostly relocated to LA. With SPEEDRUN 2 and 3 happening next year in SF, I’ll be around for at least a third of the year just working in person with all of our new Games x Tech companies.

Happy 2024! Leaving you with a final internet meme that I thought was funny.

(Let’s not take ourselves too seriously next year)

sincerely,
Andrew
writing from Venice Beach, CA