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Venture Capital and The Superstitious Investor

Nir’s Note: This guest post comes from my friend Jules Maltz, a General Partner at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), a late-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park. In this article, Jules admits something few people are brave enough to say here in Silicon Valley — that luck plays a huge role in success.

Luck plays a role in venture capital

I now understand why baseball players are superstitious. During a hitting streak, “hot” players rarely shower. They wear the same clothes and eat the same food. They follow the same routine to an exactness that would make someone with obsessive compulsive disorder proud. They’re trying to keep the magic alive.

But why?

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How Investment Drives Engagement (Slides)

This week, focused on the science behind how consumers make decisions.

During the class, we walked through my Hooked Model, a four-step cycle that creates preferences and usage habits. Readers of my blog will be familiar with the Hooked Model but I wanted to share some slides regarding one particular part of the Hooked Model, the “investment phase”.

The investment phase involves customers doing a bit of “work”, which commits them to the usage of the product. Investment makes re-engaging with the product more likely, and with the slides below, I try to explain why.

Slides from the Investment Phase discussion are below and I apologize for not having a voiceover to go with them yet. I’ll be writing more on the investment phase in the coming weeks but wanted to share some of the research into the topic.

Also, more slides from the class are available on my Scribd page here.

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Designing User Habits Video

Video from my recent talk about designing user habits, at the Designers + Geeks Meetup in San Francisco on August 1st, 2012.

Note: This Designing User Habits talk is similar to my “Behavior by Design” talk but has approximately 20% new material.

If you’re reading this over email and the video does not appear, click the link below:

https://www.nirandfar.com/designing-user-habits-video/

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This is Your Brain On Boarding: How to Turn Visitors Into Users

User onboarding is a crucial four-step process to master in order to see more effective user adoption

Before you can change the world, before your company can IPO, before getting millions of loyal users to wonder how they ever lived without your service, people need to onboard through an effective user onboarding process. Building the on-ramp to using your product is critical in every industry, but few more so than in the ADD world of web and mobile apps. Distractions are everywhere, vying for user mindshare and threatening to pull them off the road (more…)