 Thank you for having me. Super excited to be here. So today I'm going to talk a little bit about how we grew Branch and how we started to scale internationally and how we build products that scale for billions of users that are now using our links. So a little bit about me. I'm Mada. I started first. So before Branch, I actually built an app. It was a mobile app called Kindre. There was a photo book printing app. And I'll tell you a little bit about the story of that and how we failed. And then I started Branch in June of 2014. So that was less than four years ago. And today we grew to have over 30,000 apps around the world using us. We're about 160 people in seven different offices around the world. And we raised over 100 million, which is not a good thing. It's better to make your own money than raise it. And these are some of the brands using us. You probably recognize some of them, like Airbnb and Pinterest and Tinder and Slack and many others. And we are the linking infrastructure for these brands. So we help them create a seamless experience on mobile to grade links. So I'm going to go to four different lessons that I hope apply to those of you in the audience who are thinking of starting companies, who are in the early stages, who are thinking of building companies that will eventually go global. So lesson number one. And this is whenever I go and I talk to founders and start up entrepreneurs, I'm asked, what's the one lesson you would give? And this is number one, my lesson that I give all the time. It's basically don't become too attached to an idea. Either a company or a product. As founders, we fall in love with our ideas. We need to do that to be able to propel them against all odds, right? We go and we start something and the world tells us, no, you can't do that. And it's so hard to start something new. So we become really attached to our ideas. And I, you know, we failed three times and I was very attached to each of them. So I'll tell you a story. The story of Kindred, our photo book printing app that almost made it. We were almost famous. So, you know, you started with an idea and for us, we sat in a room. I remember we were in business school at Stanford and we were in a room and we're like, man, we're gonna find the best idea ever. And we stayed in this room and we were thinking about everything and we had this big sheet, big backboard and we're like, what are the pros and cons and what's gonna make it really big? And we're like, well, how about photo books? You know, we take photos on our phones and our parents and grandparents really like to get printed stuff. So what if we build an app that bridged that? So that's how Kindred was born. We had this great idea and we said we were gonna be a rocket ship. The printing market is enormous and we were going to go international and it was gonna be great. So these are some of the ads that I designed. I did marketing then as well. So these are our photo books. This is how they looked and we had an Android and an iPhone app and these were the books and they only cost five dollars. So, you know, after four months of development, we were like, we have this idea, we're gonna launch it and it's gonna be great. And we launched it and we got 10 installs. We were like, man, we thought we were gonna be famous. But then something happened. Actually, both Android and Apple featured us in Best New Apps and this was Android featuring the best apps of 2013. And, you know, they changed everything. We were a rocket ship. We woke up one morning and we didn't know that we were gonna be featured. So we woke up and we're like, oh my God, thousands of downloads overnight. What is happening? And, you know, it was amazing. We really felt that we were on top of the world and being an entrepreneur was amazing and we were gonna take over the world with photo books. And then the features ended and we stopped getting installs. I mean, Apple still featured us in some list they had, but we were no longer in Best New Apps. And if any of you have had your app featured, you know that being on the front page of the App Store is very different than not being on the front page of the App Store. So this was, you know, the trough of despair. What do we do with our lives? So then we had these investors that came and said, we'll give you $50,000 and you can, you know, buy installs. And just in time for Christmas, this was Christmas of 2013. And we're like, yeah, let's do it. So I learned how to buy install ads and I spent all the $50,000 on buying a shit ton of installs. They were cheaper then than they are now. And we were like, we were killing it. People were buying photo books and we had this idea that these people are gonna buy photo books once and they were gonna love it so much that they were gonna keep coming back and it was gonna be a subscription business and it really wasn't. So we ran all our numbers and we really were ROI negative if we continued to buy and spent so much money on advertising. So we said, okay, let's try to do something viral but we were never able to quite figure it out. And we ended up slowly dying. This was us dying. We know we kept it going for a long time, pretty much right before we started a branch and we tried everything. We were never able to really make it big. And the idea is that in the very early days, like we really became very attached that we sold 15,000 books, which is a lot. We made real money. And it's hard to say, you know, we were a failure. We should try to do something else because you see people using it and they love your product but it wasn't really a product market fit and we didn't have enough people doing it so we had to try something else. And you know, the idea of branch came from our problem so we felt our choices were limited. Either we were gonna go after the app stores or we were gonna buy installs and we didn't feel we had anything else that we could do. So we tried and tried and when we started branch, we really like got into a room and we said, okay, what was our biggest problem? What was the one thing that we struggled with so much and it became this linking and mobile growth and being able to grow the app and that's how we started branch out of a real problem while Kindred was very much reset in a room and brainstorm. So we realized it was an industry problem and it's actually very hard. There's something called the power law. Fortune favors already discovered in the app stores. They have the money, they're getting revenue so they can invest more money and they can get more people in. While an independent app and someone trying to start from the very beginning has a very, very hard time starting over and we started branch to changes and really help apps kind of be able to do viral programs and sharing and things that like actually help them grow. So lesson number one, if you have something that's kind of working but not really be okay giving it up and try to start something else if we had continued doing Kindred we would have never been where we are today with probably still been four founders in the garage and the ability to actually let go of something and try something better was really what made us successful. The second lesson, find the changing wave and write it. So I heard someone talk about how the biggest companies are made when there's a big platform shift. So when something changes the old incumbent companies because they're so big they have a really hard time adapting to the new platform, to the new change and that's when a startup can come in and actually grow and take over and you can see this with Bitcoin we can see this with a lot of changing trends and how large companies even Google and Facebook are having sometimes a hard time adapting and the newer companies can kind of come in and take over and that's where for us that big wave was mobile and it slowly became the dominant platform but unfortunately what actually ended up happening it wasn't a unified platform. So the large companies started understanding that this is a platform that they should follow. If you look at places like Starbucks they really started understanding that by allowing people to order online it really boosted the sales in the US and I think it's something like 40% of all their orders come on mobile in the US people just instead of going and saying in line they're ordering in advance and they're doing really interesting things like if you want to see here is like they're doing Instagram ads and they're using those ads to actually re-engage and be people into the app and get them to actually order the thing that was in the Instagram ad. McDonald's doing the same thing the McDonald's up here in Japan it's really just the coupon app but they're trying to change that and they're adding a mobile ordering app that will give faster service on the menu with mobile orders. The problem with mobile is what happened was on desktop everything was simple you have the HTTP protocol they brought everything together and all the websites were the same but on mobile things are different you have all these different OSes and they all behave differently and we have a lot of different types of hardware and devices and you have app and web and they don't really intermingle and they behave differently and then you have different platforms actually trying to own the users you have like Facebook and Google and WeChat and Snapchat and all of these large platforms are actually trying to keep the user in so when you think about the experience on mobile it could be someone the Facebook browser on iOS they might be getting a very different experience clicking on a link for example that someone on Android on one specific type of device was like on a different browser so we basically realized that this was the wave and that was a change and there was a real need in the market in the mobile market for unification so we came in with these links that work no matter where you click on it if you click on it on desktop or if you have a app if you don't have a app if you click on any type of device we always take people to the content and that was kind of the big need and the big shift that we saw in the market and that's what really helped us grow really fast and I think my challenge to you when you try to build your own company is to think like what is the shift in your market what is the one thing that's changing that you can actually take advantage of and kind of ride that wave to build your own startup this is just an example of Airbnb using our links and there's a lot of different people at the company using it because you have to use the links in all the different platforms to be able to unify all the different channels together across web app and all the different platforms the other, you know, the fourth lesson is to follow your customer needs and adapt so if you heard about our story in the very early days we started with the problem that you couldn't pass parameters through install on the app store so you didn't know where someone was coming from when they opened an app for the first time and our links basically solved that and you called that for deep linking and it was great, right? But that was our need we were a tiny app building something for the first time and then when we started to understand how larger companies like Pinterest or Airbnb are using and then doing marketing was very different they had emails and they sent, you know, Sephora uses us to send billions of emails and they were very different we never thought that deep link email was a thing because we were a tiny startup and we didn't ever send email to our customers but as we started learning about the market we understood that we had to adapt we had to adapt to what other customers needed from our solution and we, while initially we built, you know we built branch for us as startup entrepreneurs building an app we had to adapt and build it for like large enterprises that needed some things that were very different so I guess the lesson would be in the early days you might have a need and start a company that solves your problem but as you grow you need to like adapt and be in the market and really understand what other much larger customers need and the fourth lesson and the last one and this is, you know, when people ask for one advice to give to entrepreneurs I always say keep building because I think it's just something that, you know before Kindred we actually tried a different company called it was a Fitbit for dogs so we really failed three times before branch it was the same team so we're the same founders we worked for like almost a year and a half before starting branch and we kept failing and we're like we just kept trying to build something new and even the idea at branch started because we built something that didn't work and we needed something and we saw this need in the market so you know the advice would be even if you don't know where to start just start somewhere it doesn't have to be the ultimate idea trying to build something you might learn something new that will help you build the next best business I think this was the idea Slack Slack's founding story is probably very similar to ours they were trying to do a gaming company and then they realized that they needed a better way to communicate to each other and that's how Slack was born so as long as you keep building you'll keep learning and you will keep adapting and you'll be able to actually start something important for us I'll give you an example of a way that we kept building a branch this is this is my co-founders in the very early days when we moved into our first office from an incubator and you know I still look at that office we didn't have a board yet and we had stuff everywhere but we were always like working and building and in those days when we were just I think we're six people total we had two employees I decided that I wanted to build a community and I wanted to build events and I wanted to start doing marketing so I was like okay what is one thing I could bring people together and learn from them and it was like our big need was mobile growth though let's build something around mobile growth so we decided to create a meetup so we I put it on meetup.com and I went and called I think like seven different pizza places and one of them had half off on that day so we ordered a half off pizza and we went and bought our own beer and this was our first meetup in the end and the incubator we were in gave us free space so we did our first meetup and you know we realized that people are interested in our product and you know we could bring people in talk about mobile growth but we could also tell them about branch and we decided to scale it and kept building it and I ended up hiring someone and then we ended up doing hundreds of meetups and we have like now if you go to events.branch.io is this awesome you know page with all our different mobile growth events and these are all the places where we did meetups so we started small and we tested and we iterated and then we actually kept growing and growing and we got to like 26,000 members and it was just something that you know we started small it didn't take that long to call the pizza places and get some people in but we learned from it and just kept building so I think when someone tells you oh you can go and build a community it might sound daunting but everything is like one step you just start really small you start with like a local event and then do another one and another one and then maybe you had money and you hire someone else so don't you know when you well I remember going to someone else's site I think it was Meteor and they had something like that and I was like oh my god I'm never gonna be able to create a community that big look at those guys and those three years ago and now we have the community so don't don't don't be scared of you know what the future could bring you can do it you just have to do it one step at a time and this was you know the events that we did last year so we started so small and then we ended up doing our own conference and did like 77 meet-ups and like 21 dinners and you just you can do it you just start with one and then another one and then another one and you just it's everything is actually possible if you just start small and then you just go one at a time and you just keep trying and keep building and you can do things might not work you know we try doing lunch and learns and realize they don't work and we cut them completely we tried sponsoring big events didn't work for us stop doing that so just test thank you building and don't be scared if you fail it's okay to fail don't get to attach to your ideas and that's it thank you thank you for having me and I'm gonna I think be in a Q&A if you have any questions I can help in any way I'm madadbrej.io thank you so much