20VC: Greylock's Josh Elman on Why We Are Not In A Consumer Downturn, The Next Wave Of Social and What Twitter Should Do Next

Josh Elman is a Partner at Greylock Partners, which he joined the team in 2011 and invests in entrepreneurs building new consumer products and services. Josh specializes in designing, building, and scaling consumer products, having been part of multiple companies that have grown to more than 100 million users. Before joining Greylock, Josh was the product lead for growth and relevance at Twitter, growing Twitter’s active user base by nearly 10x. Prior to Twitter, Josh worked on the platform at Facebook and was an early employee at LinkedIn helping establish models for user growth and launched v1 of LinkedIn Jobs. Josh currently serves on the boards of Medium, Meerkat, Operator, Discord, and Jelly.

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In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Josh made his move into the VC world from Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook?

2.) What were the biggest takeaways of watching fb, Linkedin and Twitter to hyper growth mode?

3.) Question from Jeff Seibert: What would Josh do with the Twitter product today??

4.) How would Josh apply his principles of the on boarding process to Twitter? What does he mean when he refers to the ladder of engagement?

5.) How does Josh respond to Fred Wilson’s out on the consumer downturn? Is consumer really as hard as Fred makes it out to be? What sort of metrics really get Josh excited when viewing consumer startups?

6.) How has Josh’s own investment decision making process been honed and refined since joining Greylock?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:

Josh’s Fave Book:Built To Last: Successful Habits Of Visionary Companies

Josh’s Most Recent Investment:

• Discord: Free Voice and Text Chat For Gamers

As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Josh on Twitter here!

If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!

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