hockey-stick growth Concepts

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following

by Gabrielle Bluestone · 5 Apr 2021 · 329pp · 100,162 words

McFarland presented in 2011 seemed to confirm Huffman’s suspicions: “Numbers don’t lie,” McFarland claimed, gesturing to a slide with four vague graphs. “[These] hockey-shaped growth charts prove our product and execution.” In his typical hyperbolic fashion, he even claimed the numbers would have been even better had the

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new data in here, but the curves would be even more tremendous,” he said. What he didn’t mention in the pitch was that those “hockey-shaped charts” reflected mostly paid teenagers who had signed on to the site precisely once, never to return again. “It seemed like this guy was

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of work by dozens of unpaid interns, there still wasn’t much to Spling beyond a few thousand dubious registered accounts. But between Spling’s hockey-stick growth charts, the connections provided by Billy’s wealthy friends serving on the executive board, and the legitimacy bestowed on the start-up by the accelerator

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn

by Chris Hughes · 20 Feb 2018 · 173pp · 53,564 words

zero mobile advertising revenue at the time of its initial public offering in 2012 to $22 billion a year by 2016. This kind of hockey stick revenue growth is indicative of what happens when a company has already cornered a market so clearly that nearly all it has to do is flip a

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix

by Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski · 18 Apr 2022 · 414pp · 117,581 words

evolved into Cablevision, the Dolan empire eventually grew to include Madison Square Garden and its anchor tenants, the New York Knicks and Rangers basketball and hockey teams. Charles Dolan’s son James began overseeing the clubs in 1999, ushering in a period of drift—and no championships—for both franchises. MSG

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bar of San Francisco’s Four Seasons Hotel at the end of 2005, the year the online video site launched. After Hurley described a hockey-stick pattern of growth for uploaded videos on the site, Miller scrambled into action, gauging the price range (roughly $550 million) and preparing an offer. In January 2006

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, which helped determine who was allowed to watch what) to other companies. Streams of the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament, pro wrestling matches, and NHL hockey games were all powered by BAM. Entertainment proved a logical next step, with clients including Hulu and HBO, whose direct-to-consumer service HBO Now

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, has not pulled the trigger. NBCUniversal’s Peacock and Disney’s ESPN+ have live sports at their core, and WarnerMedia’s HBO Max added NHL hockey rights in 2021. Paramount+, which ViacomCBS has positioned as a next-tier streaming contender, has made soccer, college sports, and the NFL a central part

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DNA was decades old, would shut down in 2022 and much of its programming would shift to Peacock. When Disney won most rights to NHL hockey, the league decided to phase out its own channel, the NHL Network. What no one knows—even the great and powerful Amazon, Khan agreed—is

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, 249, 293, 296 New York Yankees, 94, 134 NFL (National Football League), 135, 141–42, 298. See also Super Bowl Ng, Celeste, 152 NHL (National Hockey League), 95, 136, 142 NHL Network, 142 Nickelodeon, 67, 136, 144 Night Stalker, 80 9 to 5, 213 90 Day Fiancée, 306 Nintendo Wii, 48

From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry

by Martin Campbell-Kelly · 15 Jan 2003

series gives a real insight into the growth of the industry. This is demonstrated visually in figure 1.2, which shows the classic “hockey stick” growth of the industry—growth that has not yet begun to flatten. Figure 1.3 reveals some interesting subplots. It shows that software products became the dominant mode of

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-Tech, 1981) Final Fantasy (Square, 1987) Flight Simulator (SubLOGIC, 1978) SimCity (Maxis, 1989) Gran Turismo (Sony Computer Entertainment, 1998) PGA Tour Golf (Intellivision, 1983) NHL Hockey (Intellivision, 1983) Populous (Electronic Arts, 1989) Railroad Tycoon (Microprose, 1990) Civilization (Microprose, 1991) Quotations and classification from pp. 24–31 of Herz, Joystick Nation; data

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy

by Leigh Gallagher · 14 Feb 2017 · 290pp · 87,549 words

Gebbia decided to team up. They already knew each other well, having first met through a shared interest in sports. Chesky ran the RISD ice hockey team, and Gebbia had started the basketball team. To say sports was an afterthought among the RISD student body was an understatement, but, determined to

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and even drew neighboring Brown University students and the city’s colorful then-mayor, Buddy Cianci, who agreed to be an “honorary coach” of the hockey team. “I think it was one of the hardest marketing challenges you could ever face,” Gebbia later told Fast Company. “How do you get art

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last day they didn’t get funding, they would go their separate ways. After Graham’s introductory lecture, they made their own version of the hockey-stick revenue chart he had showed them and taped it to their bathroom mirror so it was the first thing they saw when they woke

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large company. Airbnb is now in its ninth year of so-called hypergrowth, that vertical phase in the middle of the stick part of the hockey-stick growth chart when revenues essentially double, or come close to it, every year. Such a burst typically lasts a year, two, maybe three. Airbnb basically entered

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, was the editorial director of teen-content publisher Tiger Beat Media and recently left to start her own company). Chesky’s first passion was ice hockey; he started skating at age three and soon decided he would be the next Wayne Gretzky. When he got

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hockey equipment for Christmas one year, he insisted on going to sleep in it, pads, skates, stick, helmet, and all (“We said he looked like a

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clear he wasn’t destined to be the next Gretzky (as Chesky puts it, “Sports is the only thing where you learn your limitations quickly”), hockey gave way to art. An early hobby drawing and redesigning Nike sneakers revealed a serious talent as an illustrator, and after he was in high

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and he was just going to do it.” It was at RISD that he began to show early potential as a leader, first through the hockey team, where he’d gotten up to his antics with Gebbia promoting RISD’s sports leagues, and then when he gave his memorable commencement speech

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. Notes * * * * * * Unless otherwise noted, all quotes in the text are from my own direct interviews. Chapter 1: The Hustle 2 cheeky bathroom humor: The RISD hockey team was called the Nads (preferred cheer: “go-NADS!”); the basketball team was called the Balls (slogan: “When the heat’s on, the Balls stick

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street

by Jeff John Roberts · 15 Dec 2020 · 226pp · 65,516 words

accelerate intimacy. Meanwhile, the startup’s monthly numbers, ever up and to the right, began to resemble another sacred Silicon Valley invocation—the hockey stick. The phrase “hockey stick growth” implies a sudden lurch upward, and this is what Coinbase had toward the end of 2013, as the company rapidly approached a customer count

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the Nevada desert every August. All of the merchant sign-ups, combined with the roaring consumer market, meant 2014 should have seen Coinbase post-growth results resembling a hockey stick worthy of Wayne Gretzky. It didn’t happen. • • • In early February, a young Frenchman named Mark Karpelès sat in a Tokyo apartment with

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on Earn.com, 187 on the future of crypto, 216–217 Srinivasan and, 193–200 style and personality of, 190–193 Hirschman, Albert, 48, 185 “hockey stick growth,” 51–52 hodlers, 83–84 HoweyCoin, 168–169 IBM, 90, 216 ICOs (initial coin offerings), 135–138 Binance and, 179 HoweyCoin and, 168–170 SEC

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

by Douglas Rushkoff · 7 Sep 2022 · 205pp · 61,903 words

a venture fund meant “pivoting” from whatever a founder may have intended to do with technology toward doing whatever would be most likely to generate “hockey stick” growth curves and 1000x returns for investors on exiting. The Mindset had arrived. For example, Google began as a project by two Stanford University students looking

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lose money for years, as long as its user base is rising—preferably at an exponential rate. But it’s not all abstract. Hockey stick user growth leads to hockey stick stock growth. Then, with the increased capital at their disposal, tech companies build “war chests” with which to lobby for policy changes in the real

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creator, pushing confidently toward his clear vision of how things should be, persists as an essential com ponent of The Mindset. You don’t get hockey stick stock charts without such totalized, dominion thinking. For Thiel, this means being what he calls a “definite optimist.” Most entrepreneurs, he writes in his

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups

by Randall Stross · 4 Sep 2013 · 332pp · 97,325 words

. “Don’t show projected revenue,” he says. “If you don’t have any revenues yet, don’t lie. You don’t have to have a hockey stick. Only show it if you have one. Don’t make one up.” • Forty-two companies down, twenty-one more to go. After another break

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first things I want to say in the first fifteen seconds of my presentation are: we built a great lyrics site and we have incredible hockey stick growth.” Mahbod Moghadam says, “The hard part is, when we say that, what we’ve noticed before is, as soon as they hear ‘lyrics site,’ they

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for tablets and runs through a demonstration, showing a visit to the New York Times Web site on his iPad. He does not have a hockey stick graph to show for TapEngage’s nascent service, but he has one that compares the iPad’s growth immediately after its launch to that

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise

by Eric Ries · 15 Mar 2017 · 406pp · 105,602 words

IMVU, a company I started in 2004, and a presentation we made in which our revenue was quite small, even though we had the classic hockey-stick growth pattern. We were embarrassed, but we shouldn’t have been. The investor saw our presentation as a window into the way we thought—and the

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Eisenhower: “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”13 So what kind of metrics can we look at during the inevitable “flat part of the hockey stick,” before the gross numbers tick up? In The Lean Startup, I give many examples from the software industry, including one of my own failures

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for GE as far into the future as thirty years hence. Beth Comstock recalls: “It was like all the business plans we see, with a hockey stick that is going to grow to the moon in five years, and everything is going to be perfect.” I remember thinking to myself, “I

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team was gearing up for a big launch at a trade show, where they planned to debut this new product and start generating the hockey-stick-shaped revenue growth curve outlined in their business plan. You can probably guess where this story is headed. Although their plan was extremely sensitive to a number

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-customer metrics were actually very promising,1 and (2) the change in metrics over time indicated that something important had happened that was causing the hockey stick to take off. It wasn’t definitive proof that we had found product/market fit, but it was a promising leading indicator. It meant

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spreadsheet with new numbers learned from experiments and see how things change. In all likelihood, when we do this with our very first MVP, the hockey stick will become a flat line (a depressing but necessary first step). From that point on, every new experiment means a new set of inputs

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GM (General Motors) Groupon growth, itr.1, itr.2, p01.1, 1.1, 1.2 engines of entrepreneurship and failure and, 1.1, 6.1 hockey-stick pattern, 3.1, 3.2, 6.1, 7.1, 9.1, 9.2 law of sustainable growth long-term, itr.1, 1.1, 6

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

by Clive Thompson · 26 Mar 2019 · 499pp · 144,278 words

young companies show off their products for a room of handpicked venture capitalists. The start-ups are inevitably desperate to include in their presentation a hockey-stick chart—the one that shows their user base suddenly blasting off into the sky. One evening, I visited the hackerhouse of People.ai, a

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exhaustedly described how they’d spent the three months in Y Combinator frantically registering new clients for their service, in an attempt to produce that hockey stick. “You think about it, the three months it’s all about building the numbers—but you’re going to show them off for only

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,” Oleg Rogynskyy, the cofounder, said. Kevin Yang, the lead programmer and cofounder, laughed while remembering the investors sitting there, arms crossed, awaiting the growth figures. “Is that hockey stick not hockey stick enough?” he joked. “The X axis has to be half the page,” Rogynskyy said. Scale, of course, brings enormous benefits. It’s certainly

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with start-up ideas should consider avoiding venture capital—or take as little of it as they can. That’s because investors will insist on hockey-stick growth, and that pushes the firm down the slippery slope to terrible design. It deforms nearly every young techie Dash meets. “We have to grow!” they

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

by Brad Stone · 30 Jan 2017 · 373pp · 112,822 words

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

by Howard Rheingold · 24 Dec 2011

Computer: A History of the Information Machine

by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger · 29 Jul 2013 · 528pp · 146,459 words

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment

by Sangeet Paul Choudary · 14 Sep 2015 · 302pp · 73,581 words

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

by Eric Ries · 13 Sep 2011 · 278pp · 83,468 words

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be

by Diane Coyle · 11 Oct 2021 · 305pp · 75,697 words

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac · 2 Sep 2019 · 444pp · 127,259 words

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

by Margaret O'Mara · 8 Jul 2019

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo

by Rebecca Walker · 15 Mar 2022 · 322pp · 106,663 words

Gambling Man

by Lionel Barber · 3 Oct 2024 · 424pp · 123,730 words

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech

by Sara Wachter-Boettcher · 9 Oct 2017 · 223pp · 60,909 words

Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

by Brad Feld and David Cohen · 18 Oct 2010 · 326pp · 74,433 words

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster

by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz · 1 Mar 2013 · 567pp · 122,311 words

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs

by John Doerr · 23 Apr 2018 · 280pp · 71,268 words

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy

by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson · 30 May 2016 · 324pp · 89,875 words

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion

by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell · 19 Jul 2021 · 460pp · 130,820 words

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism

by Wendy Liu · 22 Mar 2020 · 223pp · 71,414 words

Makers

by Chris Anderson · 1 Oct 2012 · 238pp · 73,824 words

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein · 6 Sep 2021

Team Human

by Douglas Rushkoff · 22 Jan 2019 · 196pp · 54,339 words

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard

by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel · 3 Oct 2016 · 504pp · 126,835 words

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · 12 Jul 2021 · 372pp · 100,947 words

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet

by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers and Josh Levy · 30 Apr 2013 · 452pp · 134,502 words