Pinwheel raised $7.5 million in fresh money from Redpoint, the venture capital firm that funded Path, Chill, Pulse, Scribd, Branch Out, Gogobot, and Posterous.

Caterina says in her interview with Liz Gannes in February:

“My perspective is it takes a while to grow this stuff,” she said. “It takes time for the culture to grow. You need time to develop antibodies to spammers and trolls.”

The worst thing a social network can do is force growth, she said, pointing to Google’s work on Google+.

Adding user registrations at such a fast pace doesn’t leave enough time for a dedicated, engaged user community to organically create itself and establish norms, Fake argued.

Fake added emphatically that the worst thing a start-up social network can do is to buy advertising to attract users. Growth should happen because users find value in a site, and then get their friends to join, she said.

And if users don’t come? Start-ups should try harder to make a better product.

So, social apps should grow slowly at first.

Dave Morin of Path said the same thing when he talked about the slow product movement.

How long does it take a service to get users?

See: http://pandawhale.com/convo/112/how-many-users-can-a-new-product-get-in-three-months

“You shouldn’t get attached to a feature set. You should get attached to a problem you’re solving.”

Brilliant. Eliminates the please-your-user-base vs innovation duality.

100% correct. If you're not allowing a culture to form and then adapting to that, you're not really very "social."

Love the antibodies metaphor. It's the difference between "5 city blocks" vs "our neighborhood."