“True simplicity takes a lot of time. And in mobile that’s especially true.”

Morin told the thousand or so attendees that the biggest lesson they learned over a year spent redeveloping Path from 1.0 to 2.0 was that people really only use one screen.

So Path looked at the quantitative data — features used, daily active users, monthly active users — and correlated it with extensive ethnographic observations of what people were actually doing. Then the company made Path essentially single-screen.

Path 1.0 had very few users.

Path 2.0 has millions of users.

He was lucky enough to have the time to stay in the game.