Bangali Kaba

“I think it's, I'd say red flags to me tend to be just a lot of platitudes and not, they can't really give specifics as to why. So when you ask like, okay, you said this, you said our business is, is weak in this area. Why? Like what makes you think about that?…”

“I think it's like a listening tour, plus a little bit of a data tour, I'd call it, plus like customer conversations. You've got to learn the business, right, and learn really what makes the business tick, and understand what your cross-functional stakeholders …”

“This is about spring of 20 14. And when I joined Facebook, you know, I was, I think, one of a hundred PMs at that point. The company was only 6000 employees and they were still hiring in these kind of generalist pools.”

“The earlier you are, the less data you have, and the more you need to lean on, like kind of qualitative stuff that you're seeing in the product or from customers or, you know, kind of the vision of the founders, because they will help to inform what you invest…”

“It really works best when the founder understands one of their own primary flywheels and have figured it out. And so what I mean is like, it's really hard to outsource growth and say like, hey, head of growth, come like make us grow. If the founder doesn't rea…”

“One was that, like, every job that I was Talking to was in some ways a turnaround, right? It was a turnaround because it was either there was an investment that needed to be made that hadn't been made, or you were replacing someone who couldn't scale, or they …”

“Growth is always cross-functional, right? It should never be on an island, and this is a big, I think, mistake that founders make.”

“Career Karma is a company that I've invested in, and I passed, so this is one of the companies I passed on a seed, and I was like, yo, let me get in the A, I was wrong.”

“When I helped build the growth team and Instagram, we were engineers, data science, product managers, growth marketers is like full stack, basically product group, but the engineers were growth focused engineers.”

“I've never done it where it was less than once a week conversation, even if it's like 30 minutes here and there, because growth numbers change so much so quickly.”

“Bengali led the product growth and consumer product orgs at Instacart, and before Instacart, was head of growth at Instagram, where he built and led the product team that helped grow Instagram from four hundred and forty million to one billion monthly actives …”

“So for at Instagram, for example, you know, what we found was that people, after they join, after they see some amount of really interesting, visually distinct content in their feed from people they know, they want more.”

“The goal isn't for them to get it right, right? Like if you hear the feedback and they get it wrong, that's like, you're not doing it right. Like it's, that's not the goal. The goal is to understand how they think and how they critically reason about your busi…”

“Yeah, I usually actually tell people to start junior. The reason why is a couple things. One is, you know, when you hire people who are more senior, they tend to be really, really good at, like, understanding systems, building for scale, like, helping to enabl…”

“I think we improved our retention from about 20% to maybe over 50% while I”

“It really works best when the founder understands one of their own Primary flywheels. And I figured it out. And so what I mean is like, it's really hard to outsource growth and say like, Hey, how do growth come like make us grow. If the founder doesn't really …”

“I happened to have the fortune of working with the discord founders last summer. And it was incredible how well they knew their own kind of, like, network and fly rule. Stan, the CTO, was, like, drawing diagrams for me on paper of, like, you know, how, you kno…”

“I usually actually tell people to start junior. The reason why is a couple things. One is, you know, when you hire people who are more senior, they tend to be really, really good at, like, understanding systems, building for scale, Like helping to enable teams…”