Gustaf Alströmer
46 statements across 5 episodes · 14 bullish · 10 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Jun 23, 2017 by Gustaf Alströmer · said 12 times in 6 episodes since 2018 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Gustaf Alströmer's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Suhail Doshi (4), Craig Cannon (4), Paul Graham (2)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 2 mentions in 1 episode
2018 10 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- Suhail Doshi - How to Measure Your Product · Y Combinator
- PR + Content for Growth by Kat Mañalac and Craig Cannon · Y Combinator
- Brian Donohue on Operating Instapaper Through an Acquisition · Y Combinator
- David Rusenko - How To Find Product Market Fit · Y Combinator
- The Number One Goal is Getting Started - Avni Patel Thompson of Poppy · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
Everything said about Gustaf Alströmer, oldest first
Jun 23, 2017 positive
Jun 23, 2017 neutral
Alströmer: Most companies achieve massive scale by mastering just one platform
“Most companies that go really, really large, they do it on figuring out one platform. So they are really good at online marketing, they're really good at SEO, they're really good at reality, or the Facebook platform, or something like that. It's rare that you …”
Jun 23, 2017 positive
Alströmer: Growth disciplines become vital when new platforms emerge
“Growth kind of becomes important when they have new platforms. So you have Facebook platform, you have the mobile platform, you have Google, SEO, there's a bunch of larger platforms that makes people actually care about investing in them.”
Jun 23, 2017 neutral
Alströmer: Airbnb Held Bi-Weekly Experiment Reviews Where Teams Guessed A/B Test Winners
“Every two weeks, the growth team gets into a room, and we show experiments that we've shipped and gotten significant results on in the last, last month, say. And the engineer will go on stage, show the experiments, show the control and the experiment. Before t…”
Jun 23, 2017 neutral
Elman: Airbnb's growth team expanded from 3 to over 100 people
“Ed joined Uber to start the growth team when it was five people, and then over the three and a half years became kind of VP of both product and growth for kind of all of Uber, and Gustav joined, and the Airbnb growth team was him and two other people when he g…”
Jun 23, 2017 positive
Alströmer: Growth Teams Not Seeing Counterintuitive A/B Results Aren't Taking Big Risks
“Predicting product decisions are really, it's really tricky. So I would say this happens all the time, and if it doesn't happen, then you're not taking big enough risks. You should be seeing things that are counterintuitive.”
Jun 23, 2017 negative
Alströmer: Websites Should Never Automatically Log Users Out For Better Growth
“If you have a website, and you have people come to your website, and you have accounts, don't log them out. Just like, keep people logging for as long as you can. There's really no benefit in automatically logging people out after, after a couple of months, af…”
Jun 26, 2019 neutral
Alströmer: Only 10% of Airbnb homepage visitors had booking intent
“We actually made the mistake of going all focusing on the onboarding for the homepage, because they're like, well, that has the biggest scale by a long shot, but it turned out that only like, 10% of the people that come to the homepage actually have a booking …”
Jun 26, 2019 neutral
Alströmer: Airbnb scaled its online marketing team to up to 20 engineers
“If you look at the evolution of the online marketing team at Airbnb, it went from like one or two engineers to when I left, I think we were a 15 or 20 engineers on online marketing. And they were building everything from attribution system to automated bidding…”
Jun 26, 2019 positive
Alströmer: Early growth wins come from high-intent flows, not homepages
“The early wins are often in the high intent flows. So like where people actually thinking about booking or actually about to book. So search conversion is important one. Signup conversion is important one. Sort of like online marketing traffic was an important…”
Jun 26, 2019 neutral
Alströmer: Word of mouth drove over 50% of Airbnb guests and 70% of hosts
“But if you look at the composition of growth of Airbnb word of mouth is by far the biggest driver. So I think it was, like, way over 50% on the guest side, and way over, like, 70% on the host side of people that heard about me for the first time through a frie…”
Jun 26, 2019 negative
Alströmer: Ad-driven monetization inherently misaligns growth optimization against users
“I think there is a fundamental problem sort of like with the driving the attention and then sort of like having advertising as a monetization engine. If you change that, and you say, actually, I am the, I'm the customer, I'm paying for the product, then you ge…”
Aug 15, 2019
Alströmer: Referral emails should name the inviter as sender to drive opens
“First, who's the sender of the email? If it's just Airbnb, I probably have never heard of Airbnb the first time I get this email. If it's Gustav that sent the email, and I sent it to my friends, they have heard of me, that's the reason to open the email.”
Aug 15, 2019
Alströmer: Airbnb founders posed as hired photographers to hide small team size
“They claimed to be hired photographers for Airbnb, Airbnb and breakfast. So when they met with all the hosts, they said, we want to come by your home and take photos. They didn't say that they were the founders because that made the company sound much smaller.”
Aug 15, 2019
Aug 15, 2019
Alströmer: Lyft's key PMF metric is active riders, not ride count
“And finally, Lyft. You might want to think it's rides here. The rides is the best metric here. It's actually riders. Like, the people that are taking the rides are the ones that matter. Because it's the individuals that we want to measure here, and we not nece…”
Aug 15, 2019 positive
Alströmer: Early-stage founders must prioritize non-scalable tactics
“And if you went to school and you learned they should only work on things that really scale, you're gonna have to unlearn that skill. Because when you start your company, the most important thing is going to do things that don't scale.”
Aug 15, 2019
Alströmer: 'Accept invitation' CTA outperforms generic 'sign up' in referrals
“Well, I could sign up, which is a undefined thing that you can do sometime in the future, or I can do what we did here, was accept my invitation. This sounds more exclusive. It sounds like something that is just for me. It doesn't sound like something I can do…”
Aug 15, 2019
Alströmer: SEO-driven startups must eventually match Pinterest and TripAdvisor
“If you are going to rely on search engine optimization to grow you're going to have to Be as good as a Pinterest or a TripAdvisor. Eventually. Not right away, but eventually. Because, ah, it's so competitive to win in this, like, large world of SEO.”
Aug 15, 2019
Aug 15, 2019 negative
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Dec 1, 2022 negative
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Dec 1, 2022 neutral
Dec 1, 2022 neutral
Never guide users when testing interactive product prototypes
“The key thing, if you're doing this tactic, is to not tell them what to do. Do not tell them what to do. Just watch them play around with it. You can tell them a specific goal, like try to make a booking at Airbnb, or try to do a search with dates on Airbnb, o…”
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Dec 1, 2022 negative
Dec 1, 2022 negative
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Airbnb tested unbuilt features by handing phone prototypes to lobby visitors
“We used to do this at Airbnb all the time. We'd go downstairs in our office, and we'd find some people that were waiting for an interview or waiting for getting a coffee or something, and we'd just show them the latest version of the app. This would be an InVi…”
Dec 1, 2022
Early Airbnb guests demanded host phone numbers because they lacked trust
“In early Airbnb, a lot of guests wanted to have the phone numbers of the host, so they can call them. And we were like, why do you need that? It just turned out that they didn't fully trust the platform. Like, we had not displayed enough trust in Airbnb, so th…”
Dec 1, 2022 negative
Dec 1, 2022
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Dec 29, 2022 negative
Dec 29, 2022
Alströmer: High outbound volume is necessary because most people are not early adopters
“Most people are not early adopters, and I keep saying this to the YC companies I work with all the time. The reason you have to sell, send hundreds of emails is not that Most of those people get really upset and be like, I can't believe you emailed me, like, I…”
Dec 29, 2022 negative
Dec 29, 2022 positive
Alströmer: Startups are the easiest initial customer segment for software companies
“Selling to startups is the easiest category. And I've learned this on and on again. With YC companies, specifically the ones that sell software, it just turns out that bigger companies have more bureaucracy, more processes. They even have a specific department…”
Dec 29, 2022
Dec 29, 2022 positive
Dec 29, 2022 neutral
Dec 29, 2022 negative
Dec 29, 2022 neutral
Alströmer: Outsourcing prospecting works only if founders know exactly what to outsource
“And I've seen a lot of YC founders that when they are getting to a thousand of these, they're like, oh, this is a very simple task. I can actually outsource this. And I think that can work if you know exactly what it is you're outsourcing.”
Dec 29, 2022 positive