Elena Verna
49 statements across 4 episodes · 13 bullish · 28 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Oct 28, 2021 by Elena Verna · said 16 times in 11 episodes since 2021 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Elena Verna's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (13), Ely Lerner (1), Alex Schultz (1), Adam Grenier (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- Lovable CEO, Anton Osika: The State of Foundation Models, Grok vs OpenAI, and Replit vs Bolt · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20Growth: How to Build a Paid Marketing Machine: ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) 101 | The Rise of User Generated Content and How to Use It | TikTok Ads: Expectations vs. Reality | Hiring for Growth: When and Who with Sandy Diao
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 2 mentions in 1 episode
2023 9 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- Ely Lerner: Should Startups Hire Advisors & How much should they be paid? | E1075 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Guillaume Cabane: Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder | E1088 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jeff Seibert: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play | E1085 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Adam Grenier: The Inside Story to Uber’s Hypergrowth; How We Spent $1B/mo in China | E989 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Hila Qu: The Ultimate Guide to Product Growth at Your Startup | 20VC #967 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Elena Verna, oldest first
Oct 28, 2021 negative
Elena Verna: Growth teams fail without top-down CEO buy-in
“CEO or the leadership team do not understand the value that growth team is meant to provide and what their Success looks like and what their goals are. It's going to get rejected by the system. There has to be buy-in top-down if you're creating growth team. Ot…”
Oct 28, 2021 negative
Oct 28, 2021
Elena Verna: Growth models rely on acquisition, monetization, and retention
“There's three main levers that fall into growth model, which is how do you acquire customers? How do you monetize your customers? And how do you retain those customers? Those three levers uniformly apply across any given product to achieve maximum distribution…”
Oct 28, 2021 negative
Elena Verna: Startups under 50 employees should not outsource growth
“On the other side, I also think that not putting any pressure of growth on your original founding team of those First, 30, 50 people is a mistake. If you immediately hire head of growth or growth team and say, Hey, none of my PMs, none of my marketers are resp…”
Oct 28, 2021 negative
Elena Verna: Candidates seeking stability and full ownership fail in growth
“So if you see somebody that has ownership desires, that they want stability, they want ability to finish something from very start to the very end, probably not going to be great on your growth team. Your growth team has to be flexible.”
Oct 28, 2021 negative
Elena Verna: Conflating marketing with growth shows a fundamental industry misunderstanding
“And the fact that people just fully don't differentiate the two and think marketing equals growth blows my mind that we're still almost 10 years into growth as a discipline, and we still, as an industry, cannot differentiate between different motions that you …”
Oct 28, 2021 negative
Elena Verna: Founders should hire growth settlers first, not Heads of Growth
“I believe, for example, that it's founders responsibility to come up with original hypothesis for growth model. And then everybody immediately goes into, I need to hire head of growth. Wrong. Because you need to hire a settler. You need to hire a settler that'…”
Oct 28, 2021 negative
Oct 28, 2021 positive
Oct 28, 2021 negative
Elena Verna: Growth hires fail without pre-existing data infrastructure and analysts
“I'll tell you number one mistake, not having data team ready for growth team. So hiring growth team even before you have data analysts or data literacy in your company before you were data informed or hiring growth and not attaching any data analysts into thei…”
Oct 28, 2021 negative
Elena Verna: Hiring growth roles without targeting specific friction is a mistake
“Going after just saying, oh, everybody's hiring growth PMs, or everybody's hiring growth marketer, without actually understanding where the friction is lying within your growth system, to hire for the role that will be able to unlock that friction based on the…”
Oct 28, 2021 negative
Oct 28, 2021 negative
Elena Verna: Expecting metrics lift within three months undermines growth onboarding
“Expecting wins right away. You hire your growth person, your growth team, and then the three months you expect the forecast lift. It's the worst thing that you can do to a growth team in terms of really messing up their onboarding, in terms of them creating th…”
Oct 28, 2021 positive
Oct 28, 2021 negative
Elena Verna: WalkMe product tours are an outdated, unsustainable growth tactic
“Also, the one that has completely died down is walk me tours. Before we would fix the problems in the product UI by creating elaborate walk me tours. I see those dying down quickly, less and less. You need to focus on fixing your UX as opposed to just slapping…”
Oct 28, 2021
Elena Verna pursued SurveyMonkey for eight months before getting hired
“I applied for SurveyMonkey position off Craigslist, and they didn't want to hire me. I pursued them for eight months, trying to get them to make a decision on me, after which I finally convinced them to take a chance on me and give me a job.”
Oct 28, 2021 negative
Elena Verna: Hiring external Heads of Growth early risks cultural rejection
“I think the biggest mistake that I seen in the companies hiring is they chase after that head of growth position from the beginning without understanding who internally can create that growth evolution as opposed to creating growth revolution with an external …”
Oct 28, 2021 positive
Oct 28, 2021 positive
Elena Verna: Growth leaders should advise outside companies to build strategic perspective
“The way I think through ability to unlock your strategic thinking and to really learn more from the market Is to do advising for other companies as well. It helps you look at your problems in your full-time role a lot more strategically. It helps you understan…”
Oct 28, 2021 positive
Elena Verna: Terrible products with great growth models can become unicorns
“And by the way, there is incredible products that have never seen the light of day. And died of slow death because they never had a growth model. And there's also a lot of really terrible products that have incredible growth models and the multi-billion dollar…”
Oct 28, 2021 neutral
Mar 25, 2022 negative
Mar 25, 2022
Verna: Terrible products with incredible growth models become multi-billion-dollar companies
“There is incredible products that have never seen the light of day and died of slow death because they never had a growth model. And there's also a lot of really terrible products that have incredible growth models and the multi-billion dollar businesses right…”
Nov 25, 2022 negative
Verna: Hiring a growth team before establishing data infrastructure is a mistake
“Not having data team ready for growth team. So hiring growth teaming before you have data analysts or data literacy in your company before you're data informed or hiring growth and not attaching any data analysts into their for you. Because if you do that, wha…”
Nov 25, 2022 negative
Verna: Expecting growth wins within three months ruins onboarding
“And then there's number two, expecting wins right away. You hire your growth person, your growth team, and then the three months you expect the forecast lift where you put assumptions that they didn't drive forecast lifts. It's the worst thing that you can do …”
Nov 25, 2022 negative
Verna: Early startups shouldn't outsource growth entirely to a growth team
“On the other side, I also think that not putting any pressure of growth on your original founding team of those first 30 50 people is a mistake. If you immediately hire head of growth or growth team and say, hey, none of my PMs, none of my marketers are respon…”
Mar 14, 2026 positive
Verna: Turn early super users into community managers and brand ambassadors
“I actually think that what you need to find is your early super users and your early super adopters. Those people that are really excited about your products and you should pull them in to be your community managers. You should pull them in to be your communit…”
Mar 14, 2026 bearish
Mar 14, 2026
Verna: Modern software is judged by emotional resonance over core functionality
“It's no longer about the software functionality that you're trying to grow. You're really trying to create what I call minimum lovable product out of every single little thing that you touch because software is now almost being judged by the emotion that it ca…”
Mar 14, 2026
Verna: Waiting for revenue decline to react is already too late
“Knowing the key predictive indicators that will lead you into the decline, not just looking at revenue, because when moment revenue starts declining, it's already too fucking late. So like, you need to know like beforehand, what will I see? What will lead? Wha…”
Mar 14, 2026 negative
Mar 14, 2026 negative
Verna: Fearing employee poaching over personal brands signals deep cultural flaws
“If you think that your employees are so easily, easily sway to go somewhere else, just if they get reached out by the right company, what are you doing? Like there is some really bad cultural issues in your company where, whether it's motivation based, whether…”
Mar 14, 2026 bearish
Verna: Compliance-heavy enterprises face a major disadvantage against AI-native startups
“I do think that the world of very large complexity, compliance, security driven enterprises will be at major disadvantage in this future. Now, how long does that gonna really Take to materialize for us to feel. I have no idea, but maybe I'm in my bubble too. I…”
Mar 14, 2026 positive
Verna: Segment closed enterprise deals using billboards outside target offices
“The, when they wanted to close an enterprise contract, they would buy a billboard right in front of that office and they would put their ad on that billboard addressing that company specifically. And it would be like the cheapest way to close a six, seven digi…”
Mar 14, 2026 negative
Mar 14, 2026 bullish
Verna: Product will replace traditional marketing as the primary growth channel
“What becomes more important is your product as a channel, where you actually earn that trust that drives that word of mouth, that drives that likability, and what becomes less important is something across marketing, sales, like more old traditional techniques…”
Mar 14, 2026 positive
Verna: Ad-hoc purchases alongside subscriptions drive incremental ARR and retention
“Allowing flexibility in your monetization model for ad hoc purchases can mean the world of incrementality for your overall monetization capture potential. We just introduced top ups at lovable and it's been absolutely wild because in every other job I've ever …”
Mar 14, 2026
Verna: Startups can no longer win by simply copying competitors
“I think that when the functionality was very expensive to produce, we could afford to obsess about competitors a little bit more. With the functionality and the speed of development happening so much faster now, it almost paves the way for you to just have a v…”
Mar 14, 2026 bullish
Mar 14, 2026 positive
Verna: Employee personal brands are a company's most effective marketing channel
“If you can use your company to help people build a better social presence that they can use to do marketing for your company, then who cares if they build a personal brand in the meantime, they become your biggest marketing agent, the most powerful marketing a…”
Mar 14, 2026 bearish
Mar 14, 2026 positive
Verna: AI startups need both legacy veterans and unburdened newcomers
“Both of us together, it's almost like old guard of Sarah's and new guard of like truly employees that don't have that context, that don't have that baggage is what creates a perfect harmony that pushes the company forward. Because you can prevent stupid mistak…”
Mar 14, 2026 bullish
Verna: Outcome-based monetization will win as LLM costs inevitably collapse
“But when LLM costs will collapse and they will collapse eventually, every LLM themselves are betting on it. Our monetization models will have to evolve and whoever evolves their monetization model To be more outcome based first is going to be the winner on the…”
Mar 14, 2026 bearish
Mar 14, 2026 neutral
Mar 14, 2026 negative
Verna: Former large tech employers penalized her for LinkedIn activity
“I have a reasonable LinkedIn following and I've been penalized for it in the larger companies. Like they were like, absolutely no, don't post. Delete the post. This is not good. I, we want to we want to prove anything that you post on social.”
Mar 14, 2026 negative
Verna: Avoid paid marketing if your user conversion takes over three months
“Unless your conversion window is under three months, I would say don't start with paid marketing as your growth lever, because you will never be able to make it spin fast enough, because you don't, you have such a long conversion windows.”
Mar 14, 2026 bearish
Verna: SEO is a necessary baseline, not a competitive differentiator
“Like, you still have to invest in SEO if you want to have the baseline of growth. But is SEO gonna be the reason that you're gonna win in your business? I don't think so. It's just something that you have to do. This is not gonna be the reason why you're gonna…”
Mar 14, 2026 negative