The Exchanges

Q Yeah, I get you totally. Ok, so we have that North Star metric. We know when to change it. How do we align teams around it?

A I'm a big fan of questions, because, you know, if you tell people things, you don't have children yet, but if you tell people things, they, they may or may not listen, but if you ask them questions, it forces them to think. So once I have it, explain the North Star to the whole team, I have each manager go around and ask each person, explain to me how your work impacts the North Star, and they're gonna, because they have to think at that point, and then they're gonna tell you something, and they may tell you something you didn't know about them, or their job function, or their business, Or you may realize they're missing an important piece of context about their business. So that usually leads to a really productive discussion. Yeah, it's just, and then after that, I'm like, okay, given that string of connections of you to the North Star, which could be two, three, four orders removed, what's the most impactful work you can be doing this quarter to move that number?

AI assessment note: “I have each manager go around and ask each person, explain to me how your work impacts”

Q Core functions, be it marketing, be it a product, should it be separate completely?

A So in an early stage startup, I think there just comes a point where your company becomes the growth team, right? Like you go through fundraising, you go through building your product, and sort of the eye of Sauron turns, and it's like time to do growth, because the startup can't really do two things at once. Um, and that means your founder is very involved in it, and you know, all the king's horses and men are on deck. When you have a larger company, it needs to stand outside. It needs to be cross-functional and diverse, because growth people have a fundamentally different orientation, different approach to life than other groups, but they need to have really good relationships, because they're going to need to pull resources. Like, you know, when I was hiring these brilliant scientists, the other trait I was screening for was, was sociability. And people who could just go make friends with the engineers, and the data scientists, and everybody, and just get stuff from people who didn't report into us.

AI assessment note: “When you have a larger company, it needs to stand outside.”

Q Incredibly challenging. Uh, so now you've had 11 years, you've also seen so many preventable mistakes from the side of the investor. When you sit here today, what do you know now that you wish you'd known when you entered the world of growth?

A I think the biggest thing Is how much of growth is actually figuring stuff out? Is actually information discovery rather than running playbooks, doing best practices, copying what other companies did? You know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out you can do SEO, you can do ads, you can optimize your funnel, but figuring out the details of, you know, Google has a 100,000 search results for any query. You know, how are you going to be in one of the top three? Results, which are the only ones anyone's going to click on when you've got companies with way more money than you and 10 years of Head Start who are locked into those top three positions. Ads are sold at auction, right? So, which means you've got to be able to outbid companies, and right now the ones who are winning those auctions have the best unit economics, the smoothest funnels, the most creative testing behind them. So, so much of growth is just trying to figure stuff out as quickly as possible.

AI assessment note: “how much of growth is actually figuring stuff out? Is actually information discovery”

Q What's the hardest thing about figuring stuff out in growth?

A The hardest thing about figuring stuff out Is, honestly, I think it's hubris. I think it's that people come in and they don't realize they need to figure stuff out. They have their best practices, they have what worked in their last job, they have what they heard on your podcast, and they're like, all right, let's do this, and like, turn on the tap. And so, I mean, you see so many startups make this mistake where they overinvest in time and money and energy and building a product and launching some massive campaign, and it doesn't survive first contact with the customer. And they did that because they were sure they were right. But they weren't. And so just having that humility and that curiosity going in can save you so many ways to cycle, so much time and resource.

AI assessment note: “The hardest thing about figuring stuff out Is, honestly, I think it's hubris.”

Q There's so many questions that I want to dig in straight on, but I want to set the foundations of, like, what growth is and what it isn't, because it is so widely and bastardized as a term. Like, what is growth to you and what is it not?

A The simple definition I use for growth is you've got some value that you deliver, you help customers do something they're trying to do, they're struggling. And growth is the ability to find customers and help them understand the value that you're going to deliver to them and get them to use and love your product or service. And the way that's sort of different from traditional job functions like marketing or product or sales is kind of different in three ways. First of all, most of the time with growth, there's no playbook. So, you know, if you're marketing dish soap at Unilever and you hire someone from Procter & Gamble, like they're going to walk in, they're going to know 90% of the job. But you're creating a product that no one's ever sold before. Maybe even a new category. So there isn't a playbook to do that. And that brings me to the second thing, which is that you're trying to sell a product that nobody's looking for. And again, maybe a category no one's even looking for. So you've got to figure out who is this customer? What is it they're struggling to do? What do they think they're looking for? Where are they looking for it? And so you can turn up there and look like that thing and answer those questions that they're gonna have. And the third piece that's really different is it cuts across disciplines. You know, if you're in finance or sales, you can mostly just, like,…

AI assessment note: “The simple definition I use for growth is you've got some value that you deliver”

Q Okay, so science without, uh, doesn't. When we think about data versus intuition there, that kind of gut feel, can you take me to how you think about how the best growth leaders act on data versus intuition? And what's worked for you?

A The best growth leaders understand if they possess a knowledge base to start to be intuitive. So it's easy to walk into a room, you know, and the highest paid opinion, the alpha in the room is going to spout all their intuition, all their opinions, and they could be right or they could be wrong. You know, chat GPT will just very confidently tell me things that are patently scientifically false, right? So you get to a point to have good intuition when you understand the growth, growth as a system in your business, and that has a few parts. You need to understand the customer's context. Who are we selling this to? Where are they stuck? What are they trying to do? What do they think they're looking for? Where are they looking for it? And then you understand sort of your growth model mathematically, and you know where are the biggest points of leverage where you should be focusing for the maximum impact. And once you have, and then you know your, your business and your capabilities and what you're good at and can be great at and what you can.

AI assessment note: “The best growth leaders understand if they possess a knowledge base to start to be intuitive.”

Q the process. I'm an angel investment of yours, and you're going to advise me. Okay, so I've got that person who kind of knows 50% of the core skills, and then they can learn and adapt fast enough. Um, how do I find these candidates, Matt? I don't have a growth network to pull from. What is the right way to start the process and start getting candidates in Pipe?

A I've actually found, even when I worked for kind of unknown startups, the general broad inbound Tends to work. I find the mistake people make is that they apply too many filters to the search, right? You know, you write the job spec, and the recruiter's like, well, what do you want? And you're like, six years of experience in a Series B, high growth, FinTech, in London, went to a good university, former management consultant, and it's like, okay, but she already has a job. Like, what about the rest of the world? And so if you just remove filters like geography, or like a certain university degree, or certain work experience, often you can find these bright generalists I mean, the best, I'll say categorically, the best growth people I hired and managed in my time at PayPal had no marketing experience, had no product experience at all. I mean, they were coming into an organization where they were surrounded and supported, but they were both former scientists, and they were really good at figuring things out.

AI assessment note: “general broad inbound Tends to work. I find the mistake people make is that they apply too many filters”

Q Do you need to be in person for growth teams? I think a lot of it is creative, it's testing, as you said, it's multi-function. Do you need to be in person?

A I think there needs to be a part of it that's in person. A lot of it is really solitary, a lot of it is almost like coding, like spending time with data, Talking to customers, making sense of interviews, refining and designing creative, setting up experiments. So a lot of the execution is solitary, but a lot of the knowledge sharing and ideation process is coming together. So my rhythm is I'll have typically, you know, a day, a week at least, or two days where you're together, and always a weekly growth meeting. And that point of that weekly growth meeting is which work have we, that we say we were, what's the most impactful work? How's it going so far? What did we do last week? What did we learn from that? Win, lose, or draw? How are the numbers trending? And therefore, what should we do this week? So you're going to look at the results of all your experiments, the stuff you tried, your customer conversations, your data analysis. You're going to take everything you learned, and you're going to share it with the whole team. And they're all going to be a little smarter, and they're all going to have some new ideas, and then you can have a really productive conversation about, you know, ideas they didn't have coming into the meeting that suddenly make sense. And so at once, that's like an information sharing pump, And on the other hand, because it's a weekly cadence, it pushes th…

AI assessment note: “I think there needs to be a part of it that's in person.”

Q Now we've decided we want to hire this person. Uh, they're joining. I have no idea how to do onboarding. I think every startup does onboarding terribly for any role. For growth is even harder. Uh, and it is hard. What is the right onboarding process for a new growth hire at a startup?

A So every company is kind of different in how much they like process and organization, so I'm gonna just give you the core principles and people can adapt it to their systems. But there's basically two steps here. The first one is they need to become an information sponge. And they, fundamentally, there's like three or four buckets they need to get to learn everything they can about your customers. So it'd be some listening to customers and a lot of digesting customer research and looking at old experiments and what worked and what didn't and talking to sales and customer service people. They need to understand the business, the growth model, mathematically, you know, where do customers come, how much do they cost us, where are the conversions, drop-offs, which cohorts retain, all that stuff. And then they need to understand, like, your team and capabilities, and who are the other people here, and what can we do, and how do I work with them. Once you've got all that, then step two is prioritization. So remember, early on, I said, 90% of your results come from 10% of the stuff you do. So which work do we do in our limited runway is actually a super important question. So I'm gonna have this conversation with this person about, okay, given all that, you know, after 30 days, what should we be doing, and what should we not be doing, and why? And I'm gonna, even if I completely agree…

AI assessment note: “there's basically two steps here. The first one is they need to become an information sponge.”

Q Core functions, be it marketing, be it a product, should it be separate completely?

A So in an early stage startup, I think there just comes a point where your company becomes the growth team, right? Like you go through fundraising, you go through building your product, and sort of the eye of Sauron turns, and it's like time to do growth, because the startup can't really do two things at once. Um, and that means your founder is very involved in it, and you know, all the king's horses and men are on deck. When you have a larger company, it needs to stand outside. It needs to be cross-functional and diverse, because growth people have a fundamentally different orientation, different approach to life than other groups, but they need to have really good relationships, because they're going to need to pull resources. Like, you know, when I was hiring these brilliant scientists, the other trait I was screening for was, was sociability. And people who could just go make friends with the engineers, and the data scientists, and everybody, and just get stuff from people who didn't report into us.

AI assessment note: “When you have a larger company, it needs to stand outside.”

Q Yeah. Can you double down on more than one or two at once?

A It's hard because the doubling down is really down in the trenches of a really tweaking and optimizing, you know, going from . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

AI assessment note: “It's hard because the doubling down is really down in the trenches”

Q Okay, so science without, uh, doesn't. When we think about data versus intuition there, that kind of gut feel, can you take me to how you think about how the best growth leaders act on data versus intuition? And what's worked for you?

A The best growth leaders understand if they possess a knowledge base to start to be intuitive. So it's easy to walk into a room, you know, and the highest paid opinion, the alpha in the room is going to spout all their intuition, all their opinions, and they could be right or they could be wrong. You know, chat GPT will just very confidently tell me things that are patently scientifically false, right? So you get to a point to have good intuition when you understand the growth, growth as a system in your business, and that has a few parts. You need to understand the customer's context. Who are we selling this to? Where are they stuck? What are they trying to do? What do they think they're looking for? Where are they looking for it? And then you understand sort of your growth model mathematically, and you know where are the biggest points of leverage where you should be focusing for the maximum impact. And once you have, and then you know your, your business and your capabilities and what you're good at and can be great at and what you can.

AI assessment note: “growth leaders understand if they possess a knowledge base to start to be intuitive”

Q Yeah. Can you double down on more than one or two at once?

A It's hard because the doubling down is really down in the trenches of a really tweaking and optimizing, you know, going from . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

AI assessment note: “It's hard because the doubling down is really down in the trenches”

Q Can I ask, what growth experiment did you have the most conviction in that then turned out to be wrong?

A LinkedIn, actually. For my business now, um, someone who I really respect gave me advice to start posting on LinkedIn, uh, as like a way to build my list, and I was really dismissive of it. Don't remember why, but I just didn't like the idea at first, but I respected this person enough, and I was like, you know what, I'm writing these weekly emails anyways, I might as well turn them into LinkedIn posts, and I started doing it, and just like you said, like nothing, nothing, nothing, and eventually like one started to get some traction, and then nothing, nothing, and then one got a lot of traction, and it really snowballed, and it turned into, you know, kind of my main source of new subscribers to my list now, but I was completely dismissive of that.

AI assessment note: “I was really dismissive of it... it turned into kind of my main source”

Q Can I ask, what growth experiment did you have the most conviction in that then turned out to be wrong?

A LinkedIn, actually. For my business now, um, someone who I really respect gave me advice to start posting on LinkedIn, uh, as like a way to build my list, and I was really dismissive of it. Don't remember why, but I just didn't like the idea at first, but I respected this person enough, and I was like, you know what, I'm writing these weekly emails anyways, I might as well turn them into LinkedIn posts, and I started doing it, and just like you said, like nothing, nothing, nothing, and eventually like one started to get some traction, and then nothing, nothing, and then one got a lot of traction, and it really snowballed, and it turned into, you know, kind of my main source of new subscribers to my list now, but I was completely dismissive of that.

AI assessment note: “turned into, you know, kind of my main source of new subscribers”