Mar 25, 2022 · 28m · 20vc
20VC The Memo: Inside the Growth Engines of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Instacart with the Growth Leaders Who Built Them; How Instagram Went from 440M to 1BN, How Twitter Changing Their Signup Flow was a Needlemover and How Removing Card Payment Requ
compilation · excluded from per-person scoring
Harry Stebbings · 7m spoken Ed Baker · 4m spoken Elena Verna · 4m spoken Bangaly Kaba · 3m spoken Andy Johns · 3m spoken Casey Winters · 2m spoken Rob Schutz · 1m spoken
0:00 / 0:00
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this special 'The Memo' episode of The 20VC Podcast, host Harry Stebbings curates actionable growth and scaling strategies from executive leaders who built platforms like Facebook, Uber, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Ro. The guests share practical case studies on removing product friction, balancing data with strategic conviction, structuring growth teams, and executing high-impact international expansions.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 26.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 1.3 Guest teaching 6.0 Guest disagreement 2.5 Harry pushing back 0.2
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 21:34 Elena Verna forcefully condemning pre-PMF growth hires
Elena aggressively rejects common founder practices, declaring that hiring a head of growth before achieving product-market fit is an absolute waste of money and resources.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 7:01 Harry interrupting to ask for international growth examplesHarry interrupts Ed Baker mid-transition to press for concrete, specific tactical examples regarding international market expansion.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 19:18 Elena Verna breaking down Product vs Growth Model mechanicsElena provides a definitive, highly structured framework sharply delineating product-market fit from growth distribution levers.
Harry holds his own ▶ 21:23 Harry synthesizing product versus growth distinctionHarry demonstrates active engagement by cleanly synthesizing Elena's conceptual breakdown before pivoting into actionable founder mistakes.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Casey Winters on Growth Engines and Product Adoption Curves | 1 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Harry asks a standard question about making decisions without data. Casey Winters responds with high intellectual honesty, detailing past growth failures at Grubhub and Pinterest when relying on gut feeling rather than data. | |
| Ed Baker on Facebook Internationalization and Uber Payments | 2 | 6 | 2 | 1 | Harry interjects with a targeted follow-up on international growth expansion examples. Ed Baker delivers deep practical lessons on localization nuances in Japan and secretly running cash payment tests at Uber despite CEO Travis Kalanick's opposition. | |
| Andy Johns on Growth Team Structure and Twitter Signups | 1 | 6 | 3 | 0 | Harry prompts for early Twitter growth stories. Andy Johns critiques companies that rely overly on A/B testing optimization over product innovation and details how a small hacky team bypassed internal ideological debates to fix username friction. | |
| Bangali Kaba on Instagram Magic and Multi-Account Features | 1 | 6 | 2 | 0 | Harry asks for an unexpected growth story. Bangali Kaba explains why qualitative understanding of product magic must precede quantitative North Star metrics and outlines how discovering alt-account behaviors shaped Instagram's multi-account features. | |
| Elena Verna on Product-Market Fit vs Growth Models | 2 | 8 | 4 | 0 | Elena Verna provides a masterclass on separating Product-Market Fit from Growth Models. She forcefully rejects common founder habits like hiring a Head of Growth pre-PMF or outsourcing growth responsibility away from core PMs. | |
| Rob Schutz on Channel Focus and Ro's MLB Partnership | 1 | 5 | 3 | 0 | Rob Schutz offers deliberately controversial advice against early channel diversification when one channel works well. He shares how Ro trusted demographic gut feelings over immediate hard attribution to partner with Major League Baseball. |
Statements from this episode (13)
Casey Winters: Product growth connects users to existing core value
“Growth is about connecting people to the value that's already been created by the business, you know, either through product or services or whatever. So growth is not about building totally new features, totally new products. It's about once we have those and …”
Winters: Intuition-based growth experiments failed at every new job he took
“Every growth experiment I've recommended when I've joined a company, I'm fundamentally using more of my gut from previous experience. Every time that has not worked.”
Winters: Pinterest signed up over half the US via Google preview walls
“When people came in from Google, we would let you see a preview of the content, and then we would ask you to sign up to see more of it... As we did that, that was really successful. And we ended up signing up, you know, like over half of the U S up to Pinteres…”
Baker: Defying CEO to test credit-card-free signups doubled Uber's Hyderabad conversions
“We decided to run a test in Hyderabad, India, where we said, let's let riders request their first ride without putting a credit card number in. In fact, we were told by our CEO not to run that test because he felt so strongly against it, but we had so much con…”
Andy Johns: Startups over-rely on growth optimization over product innovation
“A company quickly assumes that the answer to more growth is an optimization-based approach where they start running a bunch of experiments and looking at data, A-B testing their way towards the future, and it overwhelms the company's ability to then start taki…”
Johns: Auto-generating usernames increased Twitter signups by 20% to 30% weekly
“And at the time, that meant, gosh, 20, 30% more signups per week, just from a small team of four people implementing a really hacky solution.”
Kaba: Instagram improved its user retention rate from 20% to over 50%
“I think we improved our retention from about 20% to maybe over 50% while I”
Kaba: North Star metrics should be derived from qualitative product magic
“Metrics are always a representation of your strategy, right? And so you shouldn't just choose a metric. I talked to founders about is like, let's talk qualitatively about what is the magic of the product? What makes this product really tick? And how do we know…”
Kaba: Hundreds of thousands of Instagram users failed to log in daily
“We had a team that was responsible for what I call access churn. Access churn was basically you, Harry, are in Instagram. You sign out for whatever reason, right? Like you just don't want background data. You want privacy. And we started seeing that just a ton…”
Kaba: Productizing multiple accounts boosts overall platform engagement
“The people who were getting back in and driving this incremental behavior were people who had a second or a third account who were losing access to that account. And so, that actually helped us to understand that there was actually a mindset around, I, Harry, …”
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…”
Verna: Hiring a growth team pre-product-market fit is a major mistake
“So I think hiring pre-product market fit, big, big mistake. Hiring right after product market fit without actually figuring out how to create some of the traction is a big mistake as well.”
Rob Schutz: Early-stage startups should not diversify channels prematurely
“Don't worry about diversifying. This is maybe controversial this day and age, but like, if Facebook is working for you, and your LTV to CAC is good, and your payback is good, crank it. Do it as much as you can, because That might not be available to you next w…”