Is Addiction Healthy?

The word that comes up the most in Sequoia Capital’s definition of “Product Health” is “stickiness”. What does that mean?

“When a product or service is sticky, the customer becomes tied to it and cannot easily leave. For example, Facebook’s stickiness is a direct result of users’ urge to share, and of their curiosity about other people’s lives.”

A good synonym for “sticky” could be “addictive”. One could then claim: “A product should be addictive in order to be healthy”.

This is a great illustration of the values that are promoted within the digital “ecosystem” – in which large VCs such as Sequoia play a great role – and how central human beings are to some leaders of this industry.

From a pure business perspective, stickiness (or addiction) might work, judging by the size and success of companies that have mastered the psychological or biological tricks in order to make it hard for customers to untie themselves from their products.

This is what made tobacco companies or the casino industry so wealthy for decades.

But there’s something funny (or sad) considering addiction as one of the key elements in a product’s HEALTH equation, especially now that we know how this so-called “stickiness” is causing what’s probably the worst mental health epidemics ever observed.