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The story of Instagram’s explosive rise reads like a Silicon Valley fairy tale, with the company gaining staggering momentum within a few short months. The app itself took only eight weeks to develop before launching on the iPhone, and within a year and a half Facebook had acquired the company for $1 billion in cash and stock. But like all good tales, the process involved many twists and turns, failures and successes, conflicts and synergies, and a dose of fortuitous happenstance.  Want an ad free experience? Subscribe today at glow.fm/rocketship and get a private feed you listen to where ever you listen to podcasts. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Participate builds and hosts online learning communities that inspire learning, connection and growth. Head to participate.com/rocketship for a free virtual learning workshop,

Founded in 2008 by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Google-and-Facebook engineer Justin Rosenstein, who both worked on improving the productivity of employees at Facebook. They took their internal Facebook tool and commercialized it, launching publically in 2011. Since they, they've been trying to simplify the "work about work in Moskovitz's own words. Asana’s mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling the world’s teams to work together effortlessly. Follow along as Anna Marie Clifton takes us through how Asana built their new Automation product, in an attempt to "Automate away the work about work".  Want an ad free experience? Subscribe today at glow.fm/rocketship and get a private feed you listen to where ever you listen to podcasts. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Participate builds and hosts online learn

Square was founded to solve the pain point of a well known glass blower in San Francisco who lost a sale because he couldn't accept a credit card transaction. The prototype was built in a month, and Jack raised $600 just by charging VC's to hear his pitch. Today we walk you through the Product Journey that is Square with their Hardware Lead, Jesse Dorogusker, who left Apple to join the team in 2011. Want an ad free experience? Subscribe today at glow.fm/rocketship and get a private feed you listen to where ever you listen to podcasts. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. LinkedIn Jobs will match the right talent with your open roll, fast. Head to Linkedin.com/rocketship to get $50 off your first job post. Participate builds and hosts online learning communities that inspire learning, connection and growth. Head to participate.c

The stock was tanking, and the company kept hemorrhaging cash. Investors sued. Some users even filed a suit. It was a losing battle from the start but what really went wrong at the beloved startup MoviePass. Today we tell the story of MoviePass's rise and ultimate fall on the season finale of Rocketship.fm's Product Failures. We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitu

Today we discuss another type of failure that is all too common, especially in young companies - team failure. We talk with Latif Nanji, the founder and CEO of Roadmonk, about his first startup Pokerspace.com and the many mistakes they made trying to move in the same direction as a team, but often failing miserably. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Logi Analytics is the leading platform for embedded analytics. Take your dashboard and reports to the next level. Rocketship listeners get free access to the Logi Analytics library of product demos

The Exit. Liquidity. Acquihire. Merger. No matter the name, it’s a milestone in any entrepreneurs life. Today we take a look at the real stories behind acquisitions, when the outcome isn’t quite what you read about in Techcrunch with stories from Andy Sparks, former COO of Mattermark, Courtland Alves VP of Product & Mentorship at Bloc and Morris Wheeler, DrummondRoad Capital founder and principal. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. LinkedIn Jobs will match the right talent with your open roll, fast. Head to Linkedin.com/rocketship to get $50 off

Path was created in 2010 by former Facebook employee Dave Morin as a sort of anti-Facebook. It stood out with one good idea: limits for friends. You couldn’t add more than 50 people to your network when it first launched. As Facebook ballooned in size and our friend lists grew with it, Path sought to be the place where you chatted with only the people you were closest to. And for a little while, the idea seemed to work. Quickly, Google reportedly tried to gobble it up. By mid-2013, Morin proclaimed that people were checking the app “over 1 billion times per month.” But after years of irrelevance, it decided to finally shut its doors in 2018. What went wrong and what could have been? We explore that and more on today's episode. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. T

In 2000, Reed Hastings, the founder of a fledgling company called Netflix, flew to Dallas to propose a partnership to Blockbuster CEO John Antioco and his team. The idea was that Netflix would run Blockbuster’s brand online and Antioco’s firm would promote Netflix in its stores. Hastings got laughed out of the room. Blockbuster went bankrupt in 2010 and Netflix is now a $28 billion dollar company, about ten times what Blockbuster was worth. So what happened that led Blockbuster's demise? We explore that and more today on the show. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 of

From creating unsafe driving conditions to aggravating spouses across the globe, todays failure is a lesson in what happens when your team lacks diversity, especially of lived experiences that help build empathy for your customers. Today, we take you behind the scenes of Audibles iOS7 redesign that overhauled the design of the app, but forgot to take several key use-cases into consideration. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Logi Analytics is the leading platform for embedded analytics. Take your dashboard and reports to the next level. Rockets

On September 11, 2001 two American Airlines airplanes were hijacked. One was flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center and the other crashed into a field on it's way to the White House killing everyone onboard. As people scrambled to find out what happened to their loved ones, the American Airlines automated phone systems failed as they refused to included what is known as the Mayday codes. Today we talk with Blade Kotelly, who built the automated phone system for several Airlines, including some affected by the September 11 hijackings. His systems didn't fail that morning - so what happened at American Airlines? BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product manag

We've been talking a lot about well known product failures, but at this point in the series, we're going to take a little pause. Today, we remember that there are very real people behind these failures. These people have feelings and the failures they’ve experienced, they’ve probably affected them in different ways. Today we sit down with Jerry Colonna. Jerry is an American venture capitalist and professional coach who played a prominent part in the early development of Silicon Valley. He is known as the CEO whisperer and is famous for being Alex Blumbergs executive coach at Gimlet captured for the Startup podcast. Jerry get's personal with Mike Belsito about his own failures and helps to put our work accomplishments and our personal worth into perspective. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check i

Raising $41 million dollars before launch, Color should have been an instant hit, but instead met a swift demise. When it launched, the application had around 1 million downloads. By September 2011, the service had a little under 100,000 active users. Founded by serial entrepreneur Bill Nguyen and successful operator, Peter Pham, Color had one of the best teams in the business. However, in the weeks following Color's initial launch, controversy surrounded the startup's $41 million funding and mixed reviews on the product. The initial launch left users confused with the application's user interface and purpose. Its initial rating in the App Store was 2 out of 5 stars. In an interview with Robert Scoble in April 2011, Pham and Nguyen admitted that Color's launch was a wasted opportunity. But it wasn't just the launch that would sink the company. Today we take you behind the scenes of Color's rise and fall. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 ann

Google+ was an ambitious project to take down the social networking giant Facebook, unfortunately we all know how it ended. What went wrong along the way that prevented a company like Google, with seemingly endless resources and internet reach, fail to create a product users actually wanted to use? BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Augusto Digital. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that create

In the early 2000's eBay was in direct competition with Amazon but they had very different methodologies when approaching the market. Today we dive into some of the mistakes eBay made in this time where they caught themselves focusing on the wrong metrics and ultimately the wrong side of the market. These mistakes ultimately led to the huge differences in the trajectory of where these companies are today. We talk with Ben Foster, the CPO at GoCanvas, about his time at eBay from 2001-2005 where he lead the "findings" team internally. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. Product Institute is a

It was November of 2014 and Brian Crofts was preparing for a meeting with two senior executives at Intuit. One was his boss, CeCe Morken, who ran Intuit’s Professional Tax (ProTax) business line, the $422 million business that sold tax preparation software to professional accountants. The other was Sasan Goodarzi, who ran Intuit’s $1.8 billion TurboTax business (TurboTax) that sold software to consumers.  Crofts had devoted three years to a new product-- TurboTax PersonalPro -- that was a stepping stone in between these two business lines. The company’s leadership had decided it was an appropriate time for a major roll-out of the product and the purpose of the November meeting was to discuss and decide upon a go-to-market plan for PersonalPro.  But not all launches create hockey stick growth. Find out what happened behind the scenes when Intuit rolled out TurboTax PersonalPro the led to its initial failure. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40

Business schools around the nation study Webvan’s overly ambitious rush to the biggest IPO to date in Silicon Valley, as a prime example of what to avoid doing while scaling.While it’s true that the impatience to go public helped steer Webvan off a cliff, the once darling company made three critical, but often overlooked mistakes when it came to revolutionizing home grocery deliveries. We'll talk with Ben Foster about his experience leading product teams at Webvan. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. App & Flow. If you're a startup founder, App

Everyone fails at some point in their career. Small failures, big failures. We're going to cover them all on this season of Rocketship. Today Michael Sacca and Mike Belsito are going to discuss some of their own product failures - from eFunneral, to Crew to Brandisty they've learned a lot from these mistakes. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. App & Flow. If you're a startup founder, App & Flow will help

Right before we kick off Season 8 of Rocketship, we wanted to go back and look at some of our favorite episodes of the past 6 years. From relationships to product love, the history of the baseball cap to the first ever e-commerce website on the internet today we have something for in this episode. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. Listen to the full episodes: Relationships http://rocketship.fm/episodes/chapter_7_relationships/ Twitter Confessionals http://rocketship.fm/episodes/twitter_confessionals/ The Evolution of the Baseball Cap http://rocketship.fm/episodes/the_evolution_of_the_baseball_cap_product_ep_1/ The Untold Story Of Books.Com http://rocketship.fm/episodes/the_untold_story_of_books_com_part_1/ http://rocketship.fm/episodes/the_untold_story_of_b

With companies such as Google and Facebook we are trading our data in exchange for the benefits of their product, is the solution to stop giving big companies our information, or is it about recognizing how companies are using our data and making a conscience decision of what information we give away? We tackle these questions and more on this week's episode. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. App & Flow

In the second part of our series on data we talk about the origins of Hadoop, the technology that formed the very foundation of what we know as “big data”. The emergence of Hadoop represents perhaps the single most important development in our lifetimes for storing, processing, and retrieving big data. And not only is this technology behind just about everything you touch on the web, it’s now even being used in the medical field to save lives. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. Including interviews with Vas Natarajan of Accel Ventures and Amr Awadallah of Cloudera. *** This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage you to visit the website and sign up for our newsletter for more informa