The Exchanges

Q may not be like a role or a function. It could be, but it may not be. If we think about hiring processes, Adam, you've hired many, many people and many great people. How do you structure hiring processes today? And if you were advising me a hypothetical angel investment of yours, how would you advise me on how to structure a hiring process for someone with a growth mindset?

A Yeah. So I, I think scoping it is the first stage, right? So let's look at what, what team do you have right now? And let's say, what, what do we want the team to be, uh, say a year from now? What do we, if, if we grow the way we think we're going to grow by hiring this person, like what team and functions do we think we, we actually need? Um, so one of the, the challenges I see a lot of people do is they'll hire one growth person. And like, as I mentioned, like when we built growth at Uber, like we infused an entire team In one fell swoop, right? Like, and Ed was hired, and he hired myself, a head of product, a head of engineering, a head of design, uh, head of analytics. And like, so we each were like operating our own individual functions and able to grow as a group, not just, hey, Ed now has to go and like barter and trade to get resources from the rest of the organization. So I think that mapping of saying like, okay, let's say this like really works. And this is, we're making the investment in growth, uh, as a standalone thing, like w what does it look like a year from now? And in that process, I think that's where people really often realize that like, oh, it's what we actually need is someone to really think about our acquisition and activation funnel. And maybe that is really just a growth product person that sits within the product organization that is thinking about …

AI assessment note: “scoping it is the first stage, right? So let's look at what team you have”

Q of people being that metric. I guess my question next is, like, when we think about growth models aligned to North Star metrics, how do you define, because growth models is kind of thrown around quite a lot, how do you define what really is a growth model? And whose job is it to make it? Um, and what does, How do you think about advising founders on constructing theirs?

A I think this is another one that can be a trap for some people in the sense of I have to have a really, really crazy, well-defined model and everything, uh, structured around it. Primarily because like everything changes so quickly, especially for early stage founders. That being said, like what I typically like to do with my founders is create what I think of as like a vanilla model of just like, Hey, are you going to grow here? Here's like the four step process that you're going to grow. You're going to get more customers. They're gonna create a piece of content. That content is something they're gonna share with a friend. Uh, that friend, like, loves the content so much that they want to become a customer, so they share. So it's like, right, I've, I've created some, like, four-step loop, and I, I like using that then as an anchor for two major things. So one is, do you actually connect the dots, right? Do they come back full circle? Do the things that your customers do on your platform give a reason For the next person to actually come, become a customer. If not, then like you're actually, you're, you're growing a linear business, which is fine. And like, there are a lot of very successful linear businesses. Uh, but like know that, like that you actually are going to have to probably do more paid or do more like really traditional top of funnel, just getting customer sales m…

AI assessment note: “what I typically like to do with my founders is create what I think of as like a vanilla model”

Q Clubhouse. How do you evaluate what happened? Like, what did, what was the magic, and what went wrong?

A So it product market fit on both answers. So I think they had just killer, killer product market fit that, you know, the, the vision initially was how do we create this feeling of like a dinner party and those types of conversations in that moment, everybody needed that, but very quickly, like most people don't need that ever. You know, we talked about frequency. Most people want that like once a month, not every single day, but they opened it up so quickly to that. And then the product shifted or the market shifted where that product market fit. Doesn't quite fit there. And this is what a lot of consumer companies are going through right now, where, like, they think that, like, oh, they got to keep trying new things, but really, like, they don't have product market fit the way they used to in the middle of, like, a bear market or a bull market.

AI assessment note: “So it product market fit on both answers.”

Q shake off schedule, but, and I was having this conversation with the founder the other day. The truth is they are unicorns. Those that get the brand, the story, the resonating with consumers versus the data centric, very analytical. They're very rare to come together. So is it even possible to have that growth CMO? And for founders, like, should they not just go for one or the other bluntly?

A I, I think so. I think it's a matter of knowing where your strengths are and how you operationalize it, right? So I, I think having the value of a, uh, like a killer brand person on your team is, is incredibly high. Like, I don't disvalue brand. If anything, I, I, like, I'm a marketer, right? I, I studied marketing. I've been in advertising and marketing my whole life. And so, like, the idea of brand and the value of comms, content, all of those things is very high. But I think they are still operated in a very traditional model that was happening 20 years ago and should be operated more like a brand team is operating things where you're driving with experimentation and data and building product to build your brand. And so to me, just like with any, you know, any role, whether it's product or marketing or engineering, you tend to have a T. And I think, you know, finding that person that has, is going to have either a brand base, But can start to learn the breadth of growth or a performance base and understand how growth and performance can be applied to brand. They're never going to be, to your point, both of those things in one. And so, yes, I agree that you're going to have to hire somebody that has a base, but I believe that there's this fundamental, like, shift in mindset of that doesn't mean you have to operate those sides of the business wildly different from one another.

AI assessment note: “They're never going to be, to your point, both of those things in one.”

Q In terms of, like, packages, how do growth, like, minded packages for people with growth, but it's, it's a weird, I'm gonna use this, fuck it, I'm British. Uh, anyway, uh, it's a great excuse for anything, you're like, fuck it, I'm British. But, like, do packages vary for these growth-centric roles?

A Yeah, uh, I mean, I think your product bans are usually a really good place to start. They, unlike the performance growth marketing side of things, you tend to have, like, the good people in that market have a lot more leverage, um, and so I think product bands tend to be more appropriate. The, and, and then it just becomes, like, how unique and how important is it to that business, and, uh, you know, like, I, I've talked a lot about marketplaces, and, you know, there aren't that many people that have the, hey, I've actually dealt with highly complex marketplaces, Uh, things like that. Same with B to B, right? Like, you've got, I think you talked to Elena, right? Like, she's got, like, honed in the B to B, like, like, growth stack down. It's like, okay, I know I can bring this person on and, like, move twice as fast as anybody else on this, like, very specific thing. And so I think then, then that just, you know, becomes part of your equation of, do you put a multiple on that core kind of product bands that you're, you're looking at?

AI assessment note: “Yeah, uh, I mean, I think your product bans are usually a really good place to start.”

Q of people being that metric. I guess my question next is, like, when we think about growth models aligned to North Star metrics, how do you define, because growth models is kind of thrown around quite a lot, how do you define what really is a growth model? And whose job is it to make it? Um, and what does, How do you think about advising founders on constructing theirs?

A I think this is another one that can be a trap for some people in the sense of I have to have a really, really crazy, well-defined model and everything, uh, structured around it. Primarily because like everything changes so quickly, especially for early stage founders. That being said, like what I typically like to do with my founders is create what I think of as like a vanilla model of just like, Hey, are you going to grow here? Here's like the four step process that you're going to grow. You're going to get more customers. They're gonna create a piece of content. That content is something they're gonna share with a friend. Uh, that friend, like, loves the content so much that they want to become a customer, so they share. So it's like, right, I've, I've created some, like, four-step loop, and I, I like using that then as an anchor for two major things. So one is, do you actually connect the dots, right? Do they come back full circle? Do the things that your customers do on your platform give a reason For the next person to actually come, become a customer. If not, then like you're actually, you're, you're growing a linear business, which is fine. And like, there are a lot of very successful linear businesses. Uh, but like know that, like that you actually are going to have to probably do more paid or do more like really traditional top of funnel, just getting customer sales m…

AI assessment note: “create what I think of as like a vanilla model of just like”

Q Adam, you mentioned a word there, insight, and, ah, I often hear about postmortems, and I think, well, no one really talks about, like, how often to do them and, and everything around it, so, do you do postmortems? How often? Who's invited? Who sets the agenda? Can you help me understand the right way to do postmortems?

A Yeah. So the right way and the way I've done it are probably two different things. So the right way is, you know, you're ideally doing them with every sprint and there's some type of just like regularity to them. My, you know, the nature of a lot of, you know, the business, I, I tend to be, I've worked with a lot of early stage companies. And it tends to be that postmortems happen when something breaks, right? It's actually like, hey, we should probably figure out what just happened there because something went terribly wrong. But again, good, good, like, uh, postmortem health would say that you're actually doing it every time. So you're also identifying the things that are working and all of those types of things. And so, but you know, a, hey, something went wrong. Let's do a postmortem. Um, typically like there's some really great, like, Um, Miro and, uh, Coda. There's, there's some good, just basic templates that you can use. Um, and I think, uh, it, it, you know, typically it's figuring out who the right stakeholders are. So one example, um, is at Lambda School, we implemented a new, like, chat opportunity for our students, and we, we didn't loop in customer service, and customer service had, like, an entirely different chat element. And, and so it just, like, caused a ton of backlash, like, across the company, because it was like, hey, we got good data out of this, but, li…

AI assessment note: “the right way is, you know, you're ideally doing them with every sprint”

Q can isolate what is the single most important metric that defines their business. Like for me, it's the supply of high quality guests that I have on the show. It drives everything else. For you at Lambda there, it was, you know, placements in jobs. I think so few founders can actually articulate that. Final one. Biggest challenge in the role at Masterclass, and how did that impact your mindset?

A Yeah. So I was at Masterclass, you know, right after a couple big things hit. So one, uh, Apple really kind of cut Facebook's knees off and made, you know, hyper targeting ads really difficult suddenly. And that was really the bread and butter of how Masterclass grew for a long time. People started going outside again post COVID and Masterclass kind of hit this inflection point where a single instructor was no longer this like, oh, wow, that's crazy. You've got that instructor on there anymore because All of the instructors they had were that. And so we had to shift from, hey, how do we take a single instructor and market them and leverage them to get somebody in and using our product to really thinking about the value of the portfolio of masterclass and the entire subscription. And so masterclass just became this like hardcore element of how do we think about engagement and how do we think of like the portfolio value of our product and really shifting that awareness of our product to the customer that we're working with.

AI assessment note: “we had to shift from, hey, how do we take a single instructor”

Q you have marketing, when you have product, when you have all the different functions, their sole priority isn't always growth, or net new users, or whatever we want to decide is our growth model, and it's actually a lot of other things, and so it actually gets deprioritized. I guess my question to you is, how do you infuse growth as a priority when you don't have a growth team?

A I've never actually been on a product or a marketing team that didn't care about growing their business, even if it didn't have the title growth. So I think this idea that there are teams and companies that don't like within companies that don't care about growing their business is a fallacy. I think the real risk is it being de-prioritized for, um, like noise, right? Or, or whatever the hottest thing in the market is right now, or, uh, something's broken. So we have to fix that. To me, I think that, like, building a growth, so if you do build a growth team, right, I think there's this, the element of having a, like a strike team nature to it, a full stack team with product, with marketing, with design, with data, with engineering, that can go and dive deep into, like, whatever the core point of leverage for your business to grow right now. Maybe that's acquisition, but it's like, once you're done with that, like, it's not like you stop doing acquisition. Uh, or maybe it's activation, or maybe it's a referral program, or maybe it's whatever it could be, like, anything that's good and worth it has to keep getting worked on, and the way you build a growth team is typically not the right DNA of people to just keep working on those things. And so I think that, like, this idea that, like, you have to have a piece of the business carved out, and that's only thinking about growth, to …

AI assessment note: “I've never actually been on a product or a marketing team that didn't care”

Q Bo? No, the rider. The rider. The driver's doing many, many trips, right? So they have a higher LTV, right?

A Exactly. So we, we could probably spend another 30 minutes going back and forth on this, but this, it just becomes a very complicated answer, because it is both, right? Like, you at the, ultimately, you have to decide when, when you're marketing to both of those customers, when I have to pay to go get a rider, and I have to pay to go get a driver, I have to calculate both of their LTV, so I can't just give it to one side of the market. But then you have a dynamic where like some markets, you need more riders, some markets, you need more drivers. So you may be willing to pull more of the value over to the rider or more of the value over to the driver. Uh, and so it just gets like really complex. And there's like, this is one of those challenges that like we've had, we had like dozens of data scientists working with it and we never got a great answer to it. Uh, but like just hearing how people think through that and like challenge and push. Oh, okay. I see that. I think, to me, like, really highlights the ability, again, to wield data, to be able to think through, like, the complexities of it, not just take another model that you heard somewhere else and apply it to something you've never, like, most people haven't thought about that specific problem.

AI assessment note: “it just becomes a very complicated answer, because it is both, right?”

Q Next we have Uber and I am being clinical on this. Normally I converse in some manner, but we've been clinical. Next we have Uber. What was the biggest challenge and how did that impact your mindset towards growth?

A Yeah, so, you know, I joined Uber, we had about a dozen cities, and when I left, we had probably a thousand plus cities, or, you know, the idea of cities kind of disappeared at some point. Really thinking about and driving growth, where growth really impacted both sides of the marketplace, and having to do it where the marketplace is hyper local and changes immediately, like every moment, like the marketplace has a different dynamic. Uh, I, I think that just became like a master class. Like an MBA in marketplaces and really understanding the dynamics of like, okay, we're not just thinking about like customer acquisition. We have to think about how the relationship between the rider and driver or the, the restaurant and the, the rider or the trucker and the shipping company, and like really thinking about marketplaces, like was just a hardcore element of, of helping to grow Uber.

AI assessment note: “became like a master class. Like an MBA in marketplaces and really understanding the dynamics”

Q may not be like a role or a function. It could be, but it may not be. If we think about hiring processes, Adam, you've hired many, many people and many great people. How do you structure hiring processes today? And if you were advising me a hypothetical angel investment of yours, how would you advise me on how to structure a hiring process for someone with a growth mindset?

A Yeah. So I, I think scoping it is the first stage, right? So let's look at what, what team do you have right now? And let's say, what, what do we want the team to be, uh, say a year from now? What do we, if, if we grow the way we think we're going to grow by hiring this person, like what team and functions do we think we, we actually need? Um, so one of the, the challenges I see a lot of people do is they'll hire one growth person. And like, as I mentioned, like when we built growth at Uber, like we infused an entire team In one fell swoop, right? Like, and Ed was hired, and he hired myself, a head of product, a head of engineering, a head of design, uh, head of analytics. And like, so we each were like operating our own individual functions and able to grow as a group, not just, hey, Ed now has to go and like barter and trade to get resources from the rest of the organization. So I think that mapping of saying like, okay, let's say this like really works. And this is, we're making the investment in growth, uh, as a standalone thing, like w what does it look like a year from now? And in that process, I think that's where people really often realize that like, oh, it's what we actually need is someone to really think about our acquisition and activation funnel. And maybe that is really just a growth product person that sits within the product organization that is thinking about …

AI assessment note: “I think scoping it is the first stage, right? So let's look at what”