I’ve written three posts on this subject, though the term I used was “virality” vs. “network effect”. The latter term is perhaps better.
How Snapchat succeeded without built-in virality
Everyone talks about virality but no one knows how to create it
B2C – build in virality or bust
What’s really interesting in the article by Alexei Oreskovic The founder of real estate website Trulia has a new twist on startup investing – and it involves building his own products is not so much the fact that they are hiring their own engineers, it’s what those engineers will be doing.
Flint, and the other cofounders of venture capital firm NFX, are on the hunt for “network effects” – products that increase in value as more people use it. That’s what propelled Microsoft’s Windows operating system to become the dominant computing platform , years before the internet was a factor. And more recently, it’s the secret to the success of giants like Facebook, Airbnb and Uber among others.
NFX recently closed a $150 million fund to invest in early-stage startups that fit the bill. The firm says it has identified 13 types of network effects, in industries ranging from synthetic biology to machine learning and blockchain .
Mentorphile 