To achieve a higher ROI in advertising, Lyft launched a marketing automation platform, which consists of three main components: lifetime value forecaster, budget allocator, and bidders.

For guests and hosts, we store data with a relational database and build indexes to search by location, metadata, and availability. We can use external vendors for payment and remind the reservations with a priority queue.

Memcached = rich client + distributed servers + hash table + LRU. It features a simple server and pushes complexity to the client) and hence reliable and easy to deploy.

How can advertising campaigns achieve higher returns with less money and fewer people? Lyft's answer is automation, which includes an LTV prediction module, a budget allocation module, and a delivery module. When people are freed from tedious delivery tasks and can focus on understanding users, channels, and the messages they need to convey to their audience, they can achieve better campaign results.

Empathy plays the most important role in writing solid code. Besides, you need to choose a sustainable architecture to decrease human resource costs in total as the project scales. Then, adopt patterns and best practices; avoid anti-patterns. Finally, refactor if necessary.

There are many metrics to measure the quality of a product: the number of active users, profit, transaction volume, retention rate, and more. To ensure better product development, it is essential to focus on the following metrics: improve retention rate, as high retention means high valuation; assess weekly growth rate, maintaining its level will lead to exponential growth; prioritize iteration speed. When it comes to metrics, we must approach them correctly.

Four main reasons why smart people have bad ideas: bad ideas are products of intuition; bad ideas prioritize being impressive over making money; bad ideas yield to fear of competition; bad ideas are too superficial. Therefore, smart people must clearly understand user needs and conduct user research to unleash endless potential and truly do smart things.

If you want to manage money in a better way, what you need is more understanding of your financial status. Beancount.io is such a tool that assists you by recording your financial transactions in text files and visualizing them into financial statements.

The quadrant diagram of market and technology determines the company's market position. With the inflation of technology, excellent technologies tend to become mediocre, and mediocre companies adopt excellent technologies; companies with a market will have a larger market, while those without a market will have a smaller one.