I'm starting a new company to go all in on Social Intelligence. This is a deeply personal mission to me, one that feels like the inevitable culmination of everything I've ever worked on. I wrote a manifesto about why:

Building products should be fun. And it can be! Last week, @joulee stopped by SPC to chat about all things data & design with @soleio.

so we raised a new round, but haven't told anyone yet our investors are like, hey put our money to use how come burn isn't going up i gotchu fam introducing burn rate by runway an award winning, blind taste-tested (by me!) hot sauce, wrapped in a genuine $100 bill for $13.99

tell me how rich u are without actually telling me.

Most companies are *vastly* overcomplicating their analytics. Everything is tracked clicks, scrolls, impressions, events. Which is fine. Logging is cheap. We also need them when we need to understand rare phenomena. But attention isn’t cheap. Most of what we track never helps us make better decisions. The truth is, only about 100 metrics really matter. These 100 metrics explain 90% of what’s happening in your business and product. And the same principle holds elsewhere too: Only 50 events truly matter for understanding user and system behavior. Only 150 entity characteristics — the key attributes of your users, products, or content — explain most outcomes. Everything else lives in the long tail: useful for special cases, but not essential for running the business on a daily basis. This is because everybusiness can be represented as a system, and these systems can be written as a set of equations. When you express your business as equations, you expose its levers. These levers are potentially actionable and can actually move results. Take Facebook’s revenue model. It can be simplified into four components: 1. Revenue = Users × Impressions per User × Ad Impressions per Impression × Revenue per Ad That’s it. Four levers at the highest level. To grow revenue, you can: 1. Increase users (growth) 2. Increase engagement (more impressions per user) 3. Raise ad load (more ads per impression) 4. Improve monetization (revenue per ad) Each of these can be broken down further. Let’s choose Monthly Active Users (MAU) as a proxy for growth. You can decompose MAU by an equation. MAU = New Users + Retained Users + Resurrected Users You can also grow your active users by getting new users, resurrecting churned users and keeping the existing users from churning. Now, let’s go one layer deeper. New Users = Visitors × (Downloads / Visitors) × (App Opens / Downloads) × (Registrations / App Opens) × (New Users / Registrations) If we define a new user as someone who registers and then takes an action, growth comes from improving each step of that journey. We can bring in more visitors at the top of the funnel, get more of them to download the app, increase the share who open it, raise the percentage who register, and finally help more of them take their first action. Each step is measurable. Each can be improved. Each has a story behind it. And if you want, you can keep peeling — looking at funnel drop-offs, activation, or engagement drivers. This is the beauty of decomposition. When you break the system into equations, you can see what drives what. After you do this for the key levers of your business, add all your metrics up. I'd be surprised if what *truly* matters is more than 100 metrics. More on our latest post in Opinionated Intelligence dot substak.

Good news: This Thursday I’m sitting down with @joulee to do a deep dive on the intersection of data and design. She’s going to walk us through her product and leadership insights as cofounder @TeamSundial Live from @southpkcommons SF at 2pm Pacific. Request an invite below.