Ely Lerner
25 statements across 1 episodes · 5 bullish · 4 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Oct 25, 2023 by Ely Lerner · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Ely Lerner's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Everything said about Ely Lerner, oldest first
Oct 25, 2023 positive
Oct 25, 2023
Lerner: Company advising grows the business; executive coaching develops the leader
“And so company level advising is really that, like, I'm helping you do your job at that highest level with the goal of Growing this company. Whereas coaching is, I'm helping you become a better version of yourself.”
Oct 25, 2023
Lerner: Founders must own strategy for primary growth levers
“As a founder, you should be owning the strategy for your primary growth lever. If that's product marketing sales, right? Like whatever the primary growth lever for your business is, you should not delegate that thing. I think a lot of founders are like, Hey, I…”
Oct 25, 2023 bullish
Lerner: Cashflow Portal is building AngelList for real estate investing
“I know a founder of this company called cashflow portal that is essentially building the angel list for real estate investing in a way that it's just never been done before. And I think this is a place where there are potential for network effects where there …”
Oct 25, 2023
Lerner: Internal corporate startups need P&L control and staged funding
“It's like the leader of that doesn't have P and L you're not a startup within a big company. Right. I think that is the important piece, which is like, you need to fund this as an independent unit that is looking at a business line holistically and is autonomo…”
Oct 25, 2023
Lerner: Early horizontal startups must focus narrowly on a specific acute problem
“So you shouldn't try to be everything to everyone. You, again, actually like when you're first starting a product, the general wisdom, and this holds true for horizontal as well, is that you should probably be pretty narrow. It's just in horizontal, you're nar…”
Oct 25, 2023 negative
Ely Lerner: Growth hacks are dead; growth requires finding specific leverage
“I mean, honestly, the concept of growth tactics has died to death. Like, this whole idea of growth hacks, and there's a set of growth hacks that everybody can throw on to get quick wins. Growth is not about growth hacks, right? Growth is about intentionally fi…”
Oct 25, 2023 positive
Ely Lerner structures startup advisory deals on a month-to-month flexible basis
“My advising is month to month, week to week. Like the way that I'm doing my engagements is we just work together. And if any given time, either of us feels like we're not getting enough value out of the relationship, we just stop. And there's, you're not, ther…”
Oct 25, 2023
Lerner: Optimizing overall conversion without ICP tracking wastes growth resources
“One of the biggest things I see people do wrong is they see they have a conversion problem. They point a team at conversion and they look at the conversion metric overall. The problem is a bunch of those people are not ICP and they're never going to convert an…”
Oct 25, 2023
Lerner: Startups must focus on one or two bets to succeed
“The whole point of strategy is to say no to most things and focus in on a small number of really high leverage things. Like you have to make that bet. When you see companies with nine company level OKRs at the top level or whatever, right? They're just trying …”
Oct 25, 2023 negative
Ely Lerner: Push notifications and paid marketing only work in specific niches
“Paid is oversaturated in a lot of ways. I would say, though, that they're not, these things are not dead. They're dead as broad brush tools. Paid has channel, like, has specific niches where it works well. Push notifications have specific niches where they wor…”
Oct 25, 2023 neutral
Oct 25, 2023
Lerner: Consolidate defensive engineering into a dedicated core experience team
“One of the things that I've seen be really effective is when you have a core experience org that owns every piece Of the defense. All of the defenses within that org and no non-defense is in that org. That really lets them prioritize apples to apples defense a…”
Oct 25, 2023
Lerner: Startups must cycle advisors as business problems evolve
“And as your business progresses, if you move into things that they are not as good at, you're going to pretty quickly know that you're not getting the same level of value from that relationship. And you need to start looking for somebody who is really good at …”
Oct 25, 2023
Lerner: Non-founders will not take necessary risks on growth levers
“If it's the primary growth lever for your business, it is the most important piece of your business, and at the end of the day, the person you hire will not have the full company perspective that you do. They will not have the right level of skin in the game, …”
Oct 25, 2023
Oct 25, 2023 negative
Oct 25, 2023
Lerner: Startups must celebrate resource efficiency over pure metric growth
“I think this is another thing that people do wrong is they tend to celebrate offense. They tend to celebrate metrics movers. Right. In their org. And that makes people working on defensive things feel crappy because they never get celebrated. But really you ne…”
Oct 25, 2023 positive
Ely Lerner uses a freemium model before formalizing startup advisory agreements
“My model is I meet as many founders as I can, and I help them as much as I can for free. And we work together. And if at some point we feel like I have capacity and there's a good fit and I'm bringing a lot of value, then we formalize the relationship.”
Oct 25, 2023
Lerner: Startup advising spans company-level, functional, and domain expertise
“I see kind of like three top level shapes of advising today. The first one is company level advising or founder level advising, where the perspective is across the whole company, the whole business. You're really like a partner to that founder. This is the kin…”
Oct 25, 2023 positive
Lerner: Startups should ultimately integrate growth into all product teams
“So if it is, if you are a company that is at the first stage, it may well be the right step for you to go to having a separate growth org, but you should think that your end goal is to integrate growth into everything that you're doing.”
Oct 25, 2023
Ely Lerner: Startup advisors fail when pushing playbooks without contextual fit
“When you get a kind of advisor who has done a bunch of things before, and essentially their advice is do the things I did because they worked for me. That happens a lot. And what ha what the challenge is if their situation was meaningfully different from yours…”
Oct 25, 2023
Lerner: Startups should not spend engineering resources pushing downside risk to zero
“A key aspect of defense is that there's almost always a diminishing returns curve. There's a point on that curve where you have reduced the risk of the downside to a significant amount, not to zero, because if you try, like, if you try to move the risk to zero…”
Oct 25, 2023 negative
Ely Lerner: Feature-owned engineering teams fail to drive business outcomes
“The old style was we have teams that own features, right? Which like is very nice from a, we touch this piece of the code base. Nobody else touches this piece of the code base, but isn't very good for driving business outcomes.”
Oct 25, 2023
Lerner: Defensive engineering is as critical as offensive growth for startups
“The one thing to remember here is defense is equally important to offense, if not more important, right? Like the whole point is that these are existential. If you do not do these things, you're not going to have a company to invest in offense.”