Andrew Chen

Andrew Chen is an American venture capitalist and growth practitioner whose book The Cold Start Problem offers a rigorous framework for understanding how networked products gain traction.

Andrew Chen spent years at Uber running rider and driver growth before joining Andreessen Horowitz as a general partner, and The Cold Start Problem draws on both experiences as well as on his decade of writing about growth on his widely-read blog. The book is a serious attempt to explain why network effects are so powerful and, crucially, why they are so hard to create.

The Cold Start Problem is one of the more rigorous business books aimed at technology practitioners. Chen’s central framework — the idea that networked products must cross a series of thresholds, from atomic networks to the critical mass that allows the network effect to kick in — is clearly articulated and illustrated with examples from Uber, Airbnb, Slack, Zoom, and others. The book is long, and it covers a wide range of network-effect businesses, which means some chapters are more directly useful than others depending on a reader’s context.

The audience is primarily people building or investing in technology companies, and the book does not pretend otherwise. Readers outside that world may find the case studies feel repetitive, and the writing, while clear, prioritizes completeness over elegance. But for founders, product managers, and investors thinking about networked businesses, The Cold Start Problem is a substantive, practice-informed resource that takes the subject seriously rather than reducing it to a series of memorable mantras.