The Exchanges

Q Can I ask salary range? Just hit me with some, I tweeted today, so I'm going to be direct with you. I tweeted today, founders, when, when you are asked for your revenue, if you start with anything but a number, you are wrong.

A Yeah. I'm trying to not get myself in trouble here too, but yeah, sure. I mean, I don't, um, Uh, all right. Series B company, um, someone who's kind of, you know, probably mid-career, right? Because you actually don't want to hire execs too early on, but it's also not someone who's, you know, a few years out of school. Probably You could go between one 52 50, um, in salary, uh, and then maybe like a sliding scale, uh, you know, between cash and, and kind of equity. Um, and I think equity could go up to, I mean, I don't know, for a series B company, I mean, at the high end, these people could be getting, you know, north of a point. Um, I think, uh, if you're already series B and you've taken some dilution ready, it might be, it might be shy of that, call it, you know, but, but you should be willing to part with, you know, Half a point to a point.

AI assessment note: “You could go between one 52 50, um, in salary”

Q Can I ask, what makes, sorry, fine, I'm interested. What makes a good spec? I never see good specs.

A Yeah, I, yeah, you're right. I mean, I think there's two goals. Like one is you are marketing the opportunity to people and getting them interested, right? Including marketing them to your investor network and people that are going to want to go and circulate them. And so Half of it's probably just, uh, you know, underscoring what a unique opportunity and moment in time this is for the business, and then explaining why there's a set of growth challenges that are really interesting to work on there. The second piece is actually forcing some, like, I do believe that there is still some, um, benefit to articulating, like, what, what a good kind of fit for the company in that particular role looks like, and so maybe the different facets of it could be a specific experience that you want one to have, I think, uh, this gets a little bit tactical, but like if you're hiring someone, if you know that you're going to be a performance marketing heavy company and you're actually starting to hire someone who's like seen, who's been operating at scale, there's probably certain filters where like you don't want someone who's just been doing, uh, sales or product to be your, your head of performance marketing, right? So there are different filtering mechanisms there. I think, uh, defining what success looks like, this could actually be, uh, written in a way that's specific to your company. And…

AI assessment note: “one is you are marketing the opportunity to people... The second piece is”

Q So if I'm a founder, I've got Google Analytics set up, Is that enough for you?

A So that's the problem. A lot, a lot of people go to, uh, visualization tools as, and Google Analytics is a little bit different, but say, you know, Looker, Mixpanel, whatever, like they go to, um, visualization tools and say, hey, we have dashboards, like that's, we have our problem solved. The reality is, is, you know, garbage in, garbage out. I think poor instrumentation of, of a product is actually a very common problem here. And so what I mean by instrumentation is like, if you're not actually capturing key user events in the product, it's maybe simplest to understand this in e-commerce, right? Like, Add to cart, check out, you know, revisit site, et cetera. But for like social products, it's much more challenging. Uh, if, if you're not actually logging the right events there, then you, you have no idea what's happening inside your product and you can't start working on growth until, until you have that lens.

AI assessment note: “if you're not actually logging the right events there, then you have no idea”

Q Can I ask, what makes, sorry, fine, I'm interested. What makes a good spec? I never see good specs.

A Yeah, I, yeah, you're right. I mean, I think there's two goals. Like one is you are marketing the opportunity to people and getting them interested, right? Including marketing them to your investor network and people that are going to want to go and circulate them. And so Half of it's probably just, uh, you know, underscoring what a unique opportunity and moment in time this is for the business, and then explaining why there's a set of growth challenges that are really interesting to work on there. The second piece is actually forcing some, like, I do believe that there is still some, um, benefit to articulating, like, what, what a good kind of fit for the company in that particular role looks like, and so maybe the different facets of it could be a specific experience that you want one to have, I think, uh, this gets a little bit tactical, but like if you're hiring someone, if you know that you're going to be a performance marketing heavy company and you're actually starting to hire someone who's like seen, who's been operating at scale, there's probably certain filters where like you don't want someone who's just been doing, uh, sales or product to be your, your head of performance marketing, right? So there are different filtering mechanisms there. I think, uh, defining what success looks like, this could actually be, uh, written in a way that's specific to your company. And…

AI assessment note: “I think there's two goals. Like one is you are marketing the opportunity”

Q Can I ask salary range? Just hit me with some, I tweeted today, so I'm going to be direct with you. I tweeted today, founders, when, when you are asked for your revenue, if you start with anything but a number, you are wrong.

A Yeah. I'm trying to not get myself in trouble here too, but yeah, sure. I mean, I don't, um, Uh, all right. Series B company, um, someone who's kind of, you know, probably mid-career, right? Because you actually don't want to hire execs too early on, but it's also not someone who's, you know, a few years out of school. Probably You could go between one 52 50, um, in salary, uh, and then maybe like a sliding scale, uh, you know, between cash and, and kind of equity. Um, and I think equity could go up to, I mean, I don't know, for a series B company, I mean, at the high end, these people could be getting, you know, north of a point. Um, I think, uh, if you're already series B and you've taken some dilution ready, it might be, it might be shy of that, call it, you know, but, but you should be willing to part with, you know, Half a point to a point.

AI assessment note: “You could go between one 52 50, um, in salary”

Q Can I ask you work with many different companies now, and this is unfair as off schedule, but when you think about who's done analytics the best and why, who's done it the best and what did they do to be so good at it?

A Hmm. That's a good question. You know, I'm tempted to give the answer. Like, I won't give the answer Facebook because like, I think, you know, late state, they have a fantastic analytics team and actually their, their VP growth, Alex Schultz, who was an advisor at tilt was lucky to learn from him was VP analytics there as well. And so the, these two functions are often cousins. Uh, one of the businesses that I'm a huge fan of that I was involved, like I knew max early on, like fair is a great business. And I think like they had Again, it's maybe a little bit easier for a marketplace business where you're ultimately looking at transaction data versus, you know, social actions, which become a lot harder. I'm not close to as many like modern consumer social companies have a good answer for that now, but I think if I look at FAIR and think about what were the indicators early on when we were talking that, that showed me they were really healthy on analytics. It was, you know, if you look at the dashboards and kind of what they're reporting out on, it's just very high signal and noise. And so they are Rather than going and tracking everything and reporting on everything, it was, here's actually the three things that matter to our business. And this is what we're going to like have written on reporting on every month. And I think like, you know, looking at, I'm not an investor in the…

AI assessment note: “Rather than going and tracking everything and reporting on everything, it was, here's actually the three things”

Q Do you know what? I really needed that ego inflation. So thank you for that. But I would love to dive in. You know, growth is a weird and a wonderful world. And so how did you make your way into the world of growth? And how did you come to lead the growth team at Stitch Fix?

A Yeah, so I'll go back and I'll start with my undergrad. So I studied engineering undergrad. I finished up University of Michigan in 2007. Most folks at that time out of engineering school were either going to work in the auto industry in Detroit or moved to Chicago or New York to work in business. I'm using air quotes. Uh, Google was just kind of opening up their Ann Arbor office at the time. And, you know, my, my objective when I was thinking about what I wanted to go do was really to go avoid routine. Uh, so avoid getting bored and then go optimize for learning, which is a theme that's held true throughout most of my career. I felt Like in general, I was most stimulated by starting the base of a new learning curve, working my way up and moving to the next, kind of like engineering problem sets. And so right out of school, I joined Bain because of this pattern. I think from a distance, it felt like the breadth of problems and clients would kind of offer that. Um, I actually had a great time and, and if anything, it trained my brain to be a structured thinker, but I always wished I could have been better aligned. I could have better aligned how I spent my time with What I actually cared about or had some passion for. And so at the time, uh, one of my colleagues at Bain Um, had, went to go work for Danny Meyer, and then Grant Ackitts and Nick Kakones, who were running this big r…

AI assessment note: “I'll go back and I'll start with my undergrad.”

Q Oof, you dropped in a little pile there in terms of your preference being a cross-functional team, because this was my other big question. I have a lot of founders be like, Where does it fit into my org? Is it a standalone? Is it in product? Is it in marketing? Why do you prefer cross-functional? Why is that better? And what's the right structure?

A Yeah. You know, so it's interesting. There's one meta point we talk about at Reforge, uh, which is a great, you know, uh, education program instead of content around growth. But one point that I very much agree with is like, if the practice of growth is successful, it should eventually abstract itself away and just be how product and marketing are run. So this is a discipline That I think can be instilled into other functions, but sometimes, you know, having a standalone growth team might not be the best wrong, like long-term answer. So I just want to caveat all this stuff with that upfront, but yes, there is a role in, in many companies journeys where it's really important and it might be the most pragmatic solution. So I think, you know, there's typically two structures. Um, there's like single function, which is actually how we had it at stitch fix, which is, you know, some VP of acquisition with different channel directors reporting to that. This is more common for e-commerce companies or, Ones where it's a pretty straightforward or linear conversion funnel. The second model, which I kind of just referenced is a cross-functional pod where you have a PM, an engineer, marketing, analytics, design, user research, working on shared business problems. Typically the PM might be kind of like the most accountable person on that pod, but, but in general, those are like, everyone's, …

AI assessment note: “cross-functional pod where you have a PM, an engineer, marketing, analytics, design”

Q Can I just interrupt you? Analytics debt. What is it? And for me, with you advising me as an early stage founder, what can I do to make sure that I have the right data foundations or analytics foundations for you to come in and do your job properly? What should I set up for you?

A Yeah. I mean, a good, um, indicator of analytics debt is if I come in and ask, uh, a very basic question, say, show me, you know, Last month's cohort of users, um, and kind of, you know, how they're retaining a D-thirty, uh, for instance, not being able to answer that question in a simple way, or a series of questions that one should be able to answer, or there being a really high cost to go answer those questions, like someone needs to go do a custom query of the database, and it takes a few days, like that's a good indicator that you have analytics debt. In general, it's being way too hard or costly to answer questions about how the business is performing.

AI assessment note: “In general, it's being way too hard or costly to answer questions”

Q Sorry. I'm just too interested. You've got so many things I want to pick up on, but like what's too heavy just for founders listening. What's too heavy and what's the right mix early of like organic to paid?

A Yeah, man. I mean, it's going to vary a lot by business, right? Like if you're, if you're a business that's like an e-commerce, you know, uh, store, I mean, you're probably gonna be, I don't know, 30 to 50% like paid marketing, right? And so like getting, if you see business that's north of 50, for any type of business, that's, that's probably like a flag. But again, this answer itself, this question itself is flawed, right? Because I think this goes back to the point on incrementality. Attributing a single source of acquisition to a given user, like, is usually like a fallacy, right? And so, um, I'm not dodging the question here, but I just think it's, it's like even this line of thinking actually Um, is part of the problem.

AI assessment note: “if you see business that's north of 50, for any type of business, that's, that's probably like a flag”