“A key element of leveraging network effects is the aggressive pursuit of network growth and adoption. Because the impact of network effects increases in a superlinear fashion, at lower levels of scale, network effects actually exert downward pressure on user adoption. Once all your friends are on Facebook, you have to be on Facebook too. But conversely, why would you join Facebook if none of your friends had joined yet? The same is true for the first user of marketplaces like eBay and Airbnb. With network effects businesses, you can’t start small and hope to grow slowly; until your product is widely adopted in a particular market, it offers little value to potential users.”