Honored to have written a guest post for Cornell’s alumni magazine Cornellians — and I ended up telling a story I don’t share often enough.
It’s about how I majored in computer science, survived some genuinely brutal engineering courses, and somehow ended up writing a national bestselling book on behavioral science — despite never once getting into Psych 101. The irony isn’t lost on me.
What actually shaped my career wasn’t listed on any syllabus. It was the campus newspaper where I built storytelling muscles. It was soccer, which turned out to be early training for managing startup teams. It was the social side of college life, which sparked a genuine curiosity about why people behave the way they do and what makes some things spread while others don’t.
As I wrote in the piece:
“A key part of my education wasn’t listed on any syllabus — it was the intertwining of my formal and informal education that led me down my particularly ridiculous career path.”
That curiosity led to my first dating startup. It failed. From the wreckage came something better — a second startup with an outrageous brand that survived a lawsuit, a banning, and two acquisitions, before becoming Down, a top-10 U.S. dating app.
Almost 20 years after Cornell, and over 100 million users later, the common thread finally became clear:
“Almost 20 years after Cornell — and over 100 million users later on myriad products — the common thread finally became visible. It’s why some startups go viral, while most go splat.”
That common thread is user psychology. When my teams dove deeply into understanding the mindset of our users and built products around their success, we found sustainable growth. When we didn’t — well, we didn’t.
That’s what Outrageous Startup Growth is about. And apparently, it’s what I was studying all along — just not in any classroom.