The Exchanges

Q That's my point though. Actually, I'm intrigued. Is that not the responsibility of the CEO or the head of products to take that innovate versus optimize or actually should it be the head of growth who has the ability to determine the two?

A It absolutely is the responsibility of CEO or founder to be thinking at that level. But I would argue that for any executive, they should have the ability to take a step back and say, you know what, should I be willing to cannibalize or reduce the prominence of my function within the company if I believe that that is in the best interest of the business? And so eventually what we did at the Wealthfront in the early days of Wealthfront is I was the VP of growth, but at one point we said, you know what, the best thing for our business at this point is to shut down growth. And in its wake, Replace it with another product team focused on building big new product lines, like our banking division. And so that's what we did. We shut down growth and eventually I became the head of product instead of running just growth.

AI assessment note: “It absolutely is the responsibility of CEO or founder to be thinking at that level.”

Q That's my point though. Actually, I'm intrigued. Is that not the responsibility of the CEO or the head of products to take that innovate versus optimize or actually should it be the head of growth who has the ability to determine the two?

A It absolutely is the responsibility of CEO or founder to be thinking at that level. But I would argue that for any executive, they should have the ability to take a step back and say, you know what, should I be willing to cannibalize or reduce the prominence of my function within the company if I believe that that is in the best interest of the business? And so eventually what we did at the Wealthfront in the early days of Wealthfront is I was the VP of growth, but at one point we said, you know what, the best thing for our business at this point is to shut down growth. And in its wake, Replace it with another product team focused on building big new product lines, like our banking division. And so that's what we did. We shut down growth and eventually I became the head of product instead of running just growth.

AI assessment note: “It absolutely is the responsibility of CEO or founder to be thinking at that level.”

Q Andy, can you talk to me about a story from the early days of Twitter, what you did, and maybe how it moved the needle in an unexpected way?

A Early days of Twitter, one of the first things we did on growth, we looked at the sign-up flow, and it's growth one-on-one, right? Start with the top of the funnel, look at the data, try and diagnose any issues that are clear. We saw in the data there was one major hurdle in the sign-up flow that was getting worse over time. Picking your usernames, One in the signup flow before you could proceed. Now, the challenge is as your product gets bigger, the namespace shrinks because people have picked the username you want before you. And so we saw in the data that someone would sign up, they'd go to pick a username and it'd throw them an error saying names taken. And then they try again and it'd throw them another error and they try again and throw them another error. And then they just say, ah, screw it. And they'd leave. So we said, well, clearly that's not serving a valuable function early on. Let's reduce Produced that friction. So we had some data there, but in terms of what the precise implementation should be, there was all sorts of ideological conflict within the company because we said, hey, let's remove username selection. And everyone said, but that's what Twitter is known for They. I said, if you're Kanye West, let's make sure Kanye gets his handle. But if I'm Andy Johns, just give me anything and let me change it later. And so when it came to the solution and how to reso…

AI assessment note: “one of the first things we did on growth, we looked at the sign-up flow”

Q execute and those different variables, fundamentally, you need to have your North Star metric that you're driving, whether that's GMV, whether that's take, whether that's number of transactions, whatever that is. How do you advise founders on discovering what their true North Star metric is and what they really need to be focused on optimizing or, or kind of pushing forward? Because you can't be a slave to, to everything.

A Yeah, that's a great question. The approach I usually begin with is, hey, let's start with identifying the input metrics versus the output metrics. Output metric, for example, at something like Wealthfront would be assets under management. How much money have customers invested on the platform? Because that's sort of a North Star metric that is highly associated with revenue. And so you can look at that and say, okay, more money from customers equals more money for the business in the form of revenue. And then what are the inputs to that? And the inputs could be, well, there's sign up conversion rate. There's invites that are sent to other people. There's the average amount of money that a customer deposits upon their first visit. So there's all these different inputs, and then you lay out your outputs, and then you look at the two. And then through that process, you can tweak it and refine it a little bit more to then say, like, this is the ultimate metric where everything sort of funnels into that. So that's usually the process I start with. Like, let's talk about inputs versus outputs and make that distinction first.

AI assessment note: “let's start with identifying the input metrics versus the output metrics”

Q So if we think about kind of those different profiles, The process that goes alongside it is another very challenging element. How do you structure the right process to hire that first growth individual?

A Well, for the community-based products, again, something like a Quora, the right process usually looks like hiring somebody who's one of your first passionate users of the product. So in the early days of Quora, the fifth employee who eventually came in and ran all of community and moderation was one of the first, I think, hundred users of the product. And so you tended to recruit from within the product itself. You found those really passionate users. But in most cases where you're not just pulling somebody out of your user base and making them the head of a growth function, the process is fairly straightforward in the sense that you now have a growing pool of people that over the last, call it, 12 years where growth has really become a normal function. You have this growing pool of people that you can tap into that have relevant growth experience. So if I'm building another network-driven product, I'm going to look for the heads of growth at Pinterest and at Reddit and at Quora and at Twitter and at Facebook and at LinkedIn. If I'm building a new marketplace, I'm going to be looking at the heads of growth from the Ubers and the Airbnbs. Based on your business type, you can now start tapping into a pool of candidates that know how to grow that type of business. And then from there, you run your standard process, to be honest with you.

AI assessment note: “Based on your business type, you can now start tapping into a pool of candidates”

Q Got you. Okay. So meeting one, we have that conceptual framework. Here's the whiteboard. Show me broad strokes, how you think about my business. What does meeting two and three and close look like?

A Meeting two is the deep dive. So then I want to see, can they think at a strategic level in the first one and conceptualize our business in a broadened up sense where I know they can think strategically. Meeting two is about the deep dive on show me examples or talk to me about things that have been successful. And then I'm picking apart how deep can they actually go? Were they bullshitting around their level of involvement on prior growth projects? So I'm going to check for depth in the second meeting. And then the third meeting is usually an opportunity for me to then focus on less specifics around growth, but more around their, their leadership potential. How do they think about building a team? How do they think about managing people? How do they think about their role as an executive at a company? And one of the big things I'm really checking for is can they sell? Can they recruit? Those two things go hand in hand. And are they a size of the pie thinker or are they a size of my slice thinker? I think the great risk is you get an executive who comes in who's willing to optimize their division because it makes them look good over optimizing the results for the business as a whole. And so I'm looking for a size of pie thinker, not a size of slice.

AI assessment note: “Meeting two is the deep dive... And then the third meeting is usually an opportunity”

Q Not at all, but I do want to start with a little bit on you, because you've been in some of the most powerful growth talks in the world. I mean, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Wealthfront. What was the entry into growth for you? Let's start there.

A Yeah, good question. It was mostly serendipitous, as was my entry into the tech world as a whole. I got into tech because I randomly started emailing CEOs of companies, That's how I wanted to get my career started. One of them responded out of the dozens that I reached out to. That one happened to be building a technology company. He brought me into that company and gave me an opportunity from the bottom to be a part of it. A couple of years later, I decided to move to the Silicon Valley to pursue the tech industry more intentionally. During the early days of my time hunting for jobs and getting random consulting opportunities in the Silicon Valley, I happened to apply for a role at Facebook. And I was told very directly actually by Chamath, who was the head hiring manager at the time. I was told I was the least qualified profile of everyone that had applied for this position, but that he appreciated the scrappy approach that I took to getting my career started. That's what Facebook wanted was somebody who was scrappy. So I guess he hired me based on raw talent and ability. And so when I came into, to Facebook, it happened to be as one of the early members of the growth And that's how it got started.

AI assessment note: “when I came into, to Facebook, it happened to be as one of the early members”

Q So post PMF, let's say I'm a startup founder and you're my hypothetical advisor. Poor you. I'm so sorry for this, but you're advising me. I've reached product market fit. We've got that exponential growth. Do I hire growth engineers? Do I hire a growth leader? What do I do now?

A That's a great question. The first hire can vary quite a bit. You don't want the person to be so senior that they're just thinking about strategy and orchestrating, you know, a large team. You don't want to hire the person who's a nation builder who just wants to come in and hire lots of folks. I think that first hire from what I've seen that is incredibly successful is somebody that straddles both product and some technical proficiency. For example, one of the best early growth leaders at Facebook was a physicist. He was trained as an experimental physicist. And as a physicist, he knew an awful lot about how to look at data, how to set up experiments in a controlled environment, and then how to measure the outcome of those experiments. And so he was technical enough from a quantitative standpoint to be very efficient with looking at the data and making drafting hypotheses and then running experiments to see what the results were. But he was still of another brain where he can think about a product and a customer experience and wasn't so technical that he Sort of threw those other parts of it out.

AI assessment note: “first hire from what I've seen that is incredibly successful is somebody that straddles”

Q execute and those different variables, fundamentally, you need to have your North Star metric that you're driving, whether that's GMV, whether that's take, whether that's number of transactions, whatever that is. How do you advise founders on discovering what their true North Star metric is and what they really need to be focused on optimizing or, or kind of pushing forward? Because you can't be a slave to, to everything.

A Yeah, that's a great question. The approach I usually begin with is, hey, let's start with identifying the input metrics versus the output metrics. Output metric, for example, at something like Wealthfront would be assets under management. How much money have customers invested on the platform? Because that's sort of a North Star metric that is highly associated with revenue. And so you can look at that and say, okay, more money from customers equals more money for the business in the form of revenue. And then what are the inputs to that? And the inputs could be, well, there's sign up conversion rate. There's invites that are sent to other people. There's the average amount of money that a customer deposits upon their first visit. So there's all these different inputs, and then you lay out your outputs, and then you look at the two. And then through that process, you can tweak it and refine it a little bit more to then say, like, this is the ultimate metric where everything sort of funnels into that. So that's usually the process I start with. Like, let's talk about inputs versus outputs and make that distinction first.

AI assessment note: “let's start with identifying the input metrics versus the output metrics.”

Q missing before the quickfire round, and it's we haven't spoken that much about you, and I wanted to kind of nicely fit this in, but I couldn't figure out a way, so I just called it Andy Johns. So not that seamless, but I want to talk about, you know, a growth decision that you've made without data to back it up. What was it, and how did it go?

A Fun story. Early days of Twitter. One of the first things we did on growth was we looked at the signup flow and it's growth one-on-one, right? Start with the top of the funnel, look at the data, try and diagnose any issues that are clear. We saw in the data, there was one major hurdle in the signup flow that was getting worse over time. And that was picking your username. Twitter used to require that you pick it and that you had a unique one in the signup flow before you could proceed. Now, the challenge is as your product gets bigger, the namespace shrinks. Because people have picked the username you want before you. And so we saw in the data that someone would sign up. They'd go to pick a username and it'd throw them an error saying names taken. And then they'd try again and then throw them another error. And they'd try again and throw them another error. And then they'd just say, ah, screw it. And they'd leave. So we said, well, clearly that's not serving a valuable function early on. Let's reduce that friction. So we had some data there, but in terms of what the precise implementation should be, there was all sorts of ideological conflict within the company because we said, Hey, let's remove username selection. And everyone said, but that's what Twitter is known for. I said, well, if you're Kanye West, let's make sure Kanye gets his handle. But if I'm Andy Johns, just give …

AI assessment note: “we said, Hey, let's remove username selection.”

Q What does the optional onboarding process look like for this gross role? How should I think about that as a Faramim CEO?

A You know, some optimal onboarding, from my perspective, is that those first few weeks are spent building out that intellectual framework for growth. That sort of A times B times C equals growth. Because often one of the challenges and growth within a startup, especially as it gets bigger, is that you see growth team running experiments and trying to optimize these individual metrics. And some employees at the company may think, okay, that makes sense. Let's get a higher signup grade. Often you're faced with this broader question of, wait, why is the growth team touching that part of the product and this part of the product? And this, it feels like this disheveled mess of just random metrics that they're going after. So what is the cohesive story? What is the coherent backdrop to which we could make sense around what this growth team is doing as a whole? And so for me, it's all about that thing I brought up in the first interview, which is what is your strategic framework? How do you think about the growth of this as a business? My preferred starting point, if I go into any company is I'd like to begin with This background of assessing market times core product value times moments of delight times ability to acquire customers, and so I'm looking at growth not just from an A-B testing perspective. I'm looking at it holistically. What are the opportunities in our market for growth…

AI assessment note: “those first few weeks are spent building out that intellectual framework for growth”

Q What does the optional onboarding process look like for this gross role? How should I think about that as a Faramim CEO?

A You know, some optimal onboarding, from my perspective, is that those first few weeks are spent building out that intellectual framework for growth. That sort of A times B times C equals growth. Because often one of the challenges and growth within a startup, especially as it gets bigger, is that you see growth team running experiments and trying to optimize these individual metrics. And some employees at the company may think, okay, that makes sense. Let's get a higher signup grade. Often you're faced with this broader question of, wait, why is the growth team touching that part of the product and this part of the product? And this, it feels like this disheveled mess of just random metrics that they're going after. So what is the cohesive story? What is the coherent backdrop to which we could make sense around what this growth team is doing as a whole? And so for me, it's all about that thing I brought up in the first interview, which is what is your strategic framework? How do you think about the growth of this as a business? My preferred starting point, if I go into any company is I'd like to begin with This background of assessing market times core product value times moments of delight times ability to acquire customers, and so I'm looking at growth not just from an A-B testing perspective. I'm looking at it holistically. What are the opportunities in our market for growth…

AI assessment note: “those first few weeks are spent building out that intellectual framework for growth.”

Q Not at all, but I do want to start with a little bit on you, because you've been in some of the most powerful growth talks in the world. I mean, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Wealthfront. What was the entry into growth for you? Let's start there.

A Yeah, good question. It was mostly serendipitous, as was my entry into the tech world as a whole. I got into tech because I randomly started emailing CEOs of companies, That's how I wanted to get my career started. One of them responded out of the dozens that I reached out to. That one happened to be building a technology company. He brought me into that company and gave me an opportunity from the bottom to be a part of it. A couple of years later, I decided to move to the Silicon Valley to pursue the tech industry more intentionally. During the early days of my time hunting for jobs and getting random consulting opportunities in the Silicon Valley, I happened to apply for a role at Facebook. And I was told very directly actually by Chamath, who was the head hiring manager at the time. I was told I was the least qualified profile of everyone that had applied for this position, but that he appreciated the scrappy approach that I took to getting my career started. That's what Facebook wanted was somebody who was scrappy. So I guess he hired me based on raw talent and ability. And so when I came into, to Facebook, it happened to be as one of the early members of the growth And that's how it got started.

AI assessment note: “came into, to Facebook, it happened to be as one of the early members of the growth”

Q So post PMF, let's say I'm a startup founder and you're my hypothetical advisor. Poor you. I'm so sorry for this, but you're advising me. I've reached product market fit. We've got that exponential growth. Do I hire growth engineers? Do I hire a growth leader? What do I do now?

A That's a great question. The first hire can vary quite a bit. You don't want the person to be so senior that they're just thinking about strategy and orchestrating, you know, a large team. You don't want to hire the person who's a nation builder who just wants to come in and hire lots of folks. I think that first hire from what I've seen that is incredibly successful is somebody that straddles both product and some technical proficiency. For example, one of the best early growth leaders at Facebook was a physicist. He was trained as an experimental physicist. And as a physicist, he knew an awful lot about how to look at data, how to set up experiments in a controlled environment, and then how to measure the outcome of those experiments. And so he was technical enough from a quantitative standpoint to be very efficient with looking at the data and making drafting hypotheses and then running experiments to see what the results were. But he was still of another brain where he can think about a product and a customer experience and wasn't so technical that he Sort of threw those other parts of it out.

AI assessment note: “first hire from what I've seen that is incredibly successful is somebody that straddles”

Q But I do want to ask, you know, when we think about the definition of, like, growth roles, growth teams, and in particular, VP slash head of growth, what does growth mean to you, and then what is, like, head of growth?

A Yeah, I love this question, and I've thought about it for a long time. It's been over a decade, and so the highest level of abstraction where I think about it is as follows. I think of growth like One may think about finance at a startup. And what I mean is finance as a startup is responsible for measuring the flow of capital in and out of the business and hopefully contributing ideas to optimizing the flow of that capital, earning less money, making more money. A growth team is the same. Their job is to measure the flow of users or customers in and out of a product and then make optimizations to that flow. That is the highest level of abstraction. And if you just start there and you said, okay, I'm at this company, and my job is to measure and understand the flow of customers or users in and out of my product, and if I begin there, then I can usually tailor make an approach to growth within that company that then makes sense for me.

AI assessment note: “Their job is to measure the flow of users or customers in and out”

Q Say we hire this person, so we've done that. Three great meetings. Andy, you're hired. Poor you. You now work with me. But say we're now working together. I'm CEO. You're my new head of growth. What does the optimal onboarding process look like for this growth role? How should I think about that as a founder and CEO?

A Yeah, so the optimal onboarding, from my perspective, is that those first few weeks are spent building out that intellectual framework for growth. That sort of A times B times C equals growth. Because often one of the challenges on growth within a startup, especially as it gets bigger, is that you see a growth team running experiments and trying to optimize these individual metrics, and some employees at the company may think, like, okay, that makes sense. Let's get a higher sign-up rate. But often you're faced with this broader question of like, wait, why is the growth team touching that part of the product and this part of the product? And this, it sort of feels like this disheveled mess of just random metrics that they're going after. So what is the cohesive story? What is the coherent backdrop to which we can make sense around what this growth team is doing as a whole? And so for me, it's all about that thing I brought up in the first interview, which is what is your strategic framework? How do you think about the growth of this as a business? My preferred starting point, if I go into any company, is I like to begin with this background of assessing market times core product value times moments of delight times ability to acquire customers. And so I'm looking at growth, not just from an A-B testing perspective. I'm looking at it holistically. What are the opportunities in o…

AI assessment note: “first few weeks are spent building out that intellectual framework for growth”

Q But I do want to ask, you know, when we think about the definition of, like, growth roles, growth teams, and in particular, VP slash head of growth, what does growth mean to you, and then what is, like, head of growth?

A Yeah, I love this question, and I've thought about it for a long time. It's been over a decade, and so the highest level of abstraction where I think about it is as follows. I think of growth like One may think about finance at a startup. And what I mean is finance as a startup is responsible for measuring the flow of capital in and out of the business and hopefully contributing ideas to optimizing the flow of that capital, earning less money, making more money. A growth team is the same. Their job is to measure the flow of users or customers in and out of a product and then make optimizations to that flow. That is the highest level of abstraction. And if you just start there and you said, okay, I'm at this company, and my job is to measure and understand the flow of customers or users in and out of my product, and if I begin there, then I can usually tailor make an approach to growth within that company that then makes sense for me.

AI assessment note: “Their job is to measure the flow of users or customers in and out”

Q Say we hire this person, so we've done that. Three great meetings. Andy, you're hired. Poor you. You now work with me. But say we're now working together. I'm CEO. You're my new head of growth. What does the optimal onboarding process look like for this growth role? How should I think about that as a founder and CEO?

A Yeah, so the optimal onboarding, from my perspective, is that those first few weeks are spent building out that intellectual framework for growth. That sort of A times B times C equals growth. Because often one of the challenges on growth within a startup, especially as it gets bigger, is that you see a growth team running experiments and trying to optimize these individual metrics, and some employees at the company may think, like, okay, that makes sense. Let's get a higher sign-up rate. But often you're faced with this broader question of like, wait, why is the growth team touching that part of the product and this part of the product? And this, it sort of feels like this disheveled mess of just random metrics that they're going after. So what is the cohesive story? What is the coherent backdrop to which we can make sense around what this growth team is doing as a whole? And so for me, it's all about that thing I brought up in the first interview, which is what is your strategic framework? How do you think about the growth of this as a business? My preferred starting point, if I go into any company, is I like to begin with this background of assessing market times core product value times moments of delight times ability to acquire customers. And so I'm looking at growth, not just from an A-B testing perspective. I'm looking at it holistically. What are the opportunities in o…

AI assessment note: “optimal onboarding, from my perspective, is that those first few weeks are spent building out”

Q Can I ask on the post-mortem side, we've said a lot about optimization, iteration. In terms of post-mortems, like, how do the best growth teams structure post-mortems? How often do they do them? How central are they? How do you think about advising growth teams on post-mortems?

A It changes quite a bit depending on the size. If you're a twenty-person startup and you have a three-person growth team, the reality is you're going to be running experiments and making changes at a pretty slow pace and conducting very rigorous, call it academic postmortems, where, for example, you're trying to do really deep statistical analysis to prove causation as opposed to some flimsy correlation. That's why I call it academic. I think you're just wasting your time in the early days of a startup and trying to do that. But if you're, you know, this is 2010 and you're a 50% growth team at Facebook, all of a sudden you have the resources to be more thorough and more academic and kind of doing this sort of growth research that a smaller company doesn't typically have the time or the resources for. So again, my answer is it varies, but the guidance that I generally give, especially for the early stage startups, is move fast, be comfortable with correlation, because correlation just provides Quality hypotheses, and that's all you care about at that point. You're not looking for something that's perfectly causal, because chances are you won't find it.

AI assessment note: “guidance that I generally give, especially for the early stage startups, is move fast”

Q So if we think about kind of those different profiles, The process that goes alongside it is another very challenging element. How do you structure the right process to hire that first growth individual?

A Well, for the community-based products, again, something like a Quora, the right process usually looks like hiring somebody who's one of your first passionate users of the product. So in the early days of Quora, the fifth employee who eventually came in and ran all of community and moderation was one of the first, I think, hundred users of the product. And so you tended to recruit from within the product itself. You found those really passionate users. But in most cases where you're not just pulling somebody out of your user base and making them the head of a growth function, the process is fairly straightforward in the sense that you now have a growing pool of people that over the last, call it, 12 years where growth has really become a normal function. You have this growing pool of people that you can tap into that have relevant growth experience. So if I'm building another network-driven product, I'm going to look for the heads of growth at Pinterest and at Reddit and at Quora and at Twitter and at Facebook and at LinkedIn. If I'm building a new marketplace, I'm going to be looking at the heads of growth from the Ubers and the Airbnbs. Based on your business type, you can now start tapping into a pool of candidates that know how to grow that type of business. And then from there, you run your standard process, to be honest with you.

AI assessment note: “Based on your business type, you can now start tapping into a pool of candidates”

Q Got you. Okay. So meeting one, we have that conceptual framework. Here's the whiteboard. Show me broad strokes, how you think about my business. What does meeting two and three and close look like?

A Meeting two is the deep dive. So then I want to see, can they think at a strategic level in the first one and conceptualize our business in a broadened up sense where I know they can think strategically. Meeting two is about the deep dive on show me examples or talk to me about things that have been successful. And then I'm picking apart how deep can they actually go? Were they bullshitting around their level of involvement on prior growth projects? So I'm going to check for depth in the second meeting. And then the third meeting is usually an opportunity for me to then focus on less specifics around growth, but more around their, their leadership potential. How do they think about building a team? How do they think about managing people? How do they think about their role as an executive at a company? And one of the big things I'm really checking for is can they sell? Can they recruit? Those two things go hand in hand. And are they a size of the pie thinker or are they a size of my slice thinker? I think the great risk is you get an executive who comes in who's willing to optimize their division because it makes them look good over optimizing the results for the business as a whole. And so I'm looking for a size of pie thinker, not a size of slice.

AI assessment note: “Meeting two is the deep dive... And then the third meeting is usually an opportunity”

Q Can I ask on the post-mortem side, we've said a lot about optimization, iteration. In terms of post-mortems, like, how do the best growth teams structure post-mortems? How often do they do them? How central are they? How do you think about advising growth teams on post-mortems?

A It changes quite a bit depending on the size. If you're a twenty-person startup and you have a three-person growth team, the reality is you're going to be running experiments and making changes at a pretty slow pace and conducting very rigorous, call it academic postmortems, where, for example, you're trying to do really deep statistical analysis to prove causation as opposed to some flimsy correlation. That's why I call it academic. I think you're just wasting your time in the early days of a startup and trying to do that. But if you're, you know, this is 2010 and you're a 50% growth team at Facebook, all of a sudden you have the resources to be more thorough and more academic and kind of doing this sort of growth research that a smaller company doesn't typically have the time or the resources for. So again, my answer is it varies, but the guidance that I generally give, especially for the early stage startups, is move fast, be comfortable with correlation, because correlation just provides Quality hypotheses, and that's all you care about at that point. You're not looking for something that's perfectly causal, because chances are you won't find it.

AI assessment note: “the guidance that I generally give, especially for the early stage startups, is move fast”

Q terms of that distinction between inputs and outputs. If we go back to this first month, you know, you've done that framework, you've been through the different variables, what should your communication, and what should the communication moving forwards look like with your CEO? If you were to advise me on how to have the best relationship with you, the head of growth moving forwards, what would you advise me?

A The first thing that I would advise you, related to your last question, which is, what is the North Star metric? Second, What I would advise you is what are the pros and cons associated with that approach? Because no matter what approach you take, whether it's the type of team you build, the type of leaders you put in place, the type of A-B tests you run, the metrics you pick, there's strengths and weaknesses to both approaches. There's no perfect metric. There's no perfect org design. They all come at it at a certain cost. And the thing that's important is to understand the way in which the approach you're choosing today is broken so that when it breaks, you're not surprised by it. So I'll give an example. Let's take Facebook. The growth team there had a very big imprint in terms of the org structure and the overall impact on the business. And that's because we were doing an amazing job. And so as the results and the metrics continued to improve, the growth team gained more and more influence. And as we gained more influence within the business, naturally, we started to have our fingerprints on more parts of the product. We were running experiments on profiles and on pages and on newsfeed. These other parts of the product that teams owned And so you might have a team come over and say, hey, we own Newsfeed. Why are you running an experiment with Newsfeed? Stay off my lawn. Tha…

AI assessment note: “The first thing that I would advise you, related to your last question”

Q Is it tough for CEOs with the growth leader that they have in place? Because I want you to try things like that, Andy. So I want you to be ambitious. I want you to try things. But there's a line of, that's too far. How do leaders instill that ambition risk without the fear of going too far, but also realizing accountability?

A I don't know. I really don't know. I don't know if I have an answer for that question, because I've worked with some CEOs where they have zero appetite for risk, and it's kind of shocking. You know, they become very conservative after their initial sort of breakout rate of growth, and they go and raise the Series A and the Series B, and then they get And so we're like, okay, you know, let's not mess with the golden goose. I don't want to mess with the product too much because what if we break it? And I don't know how to change that. I just noticed that in some founders, they intuitively recognize and are comfortable with the fact that they have to take risk all the time because a startup is just a massive bundle of risk that evolves over time. It's a common misunderstanding to think like, oh, let's not mess with the golden goose as if there's no more risk there. To be taking a startup is just a bundle of risk to begin with. So I don't know how to change that. Instead, I don't try and change the CEOs or the founders. I just try and look those that demonstrate a very clear, intuitive sense for taking risk over and over again.

AI assessment note: “I don't know. I really don't know... Instead, I don't try and change”

Q On the flip side, are there any way you would just say, oh my god, what were you doing?

A What What were you doing? One, one tactic that I thought was hilarious. It was smart. I don't know if it actually worked, but this was with, oh gosh, what's the startup that has like hygiene products for men, like shape razors for men and, uh, you know, like groom, but they just created a custom landing page, like their website.com slash Quora. And if you went to it, you know, core employees would get a discount on buying like men's grooming products. I want to say it was Manscapes, but that might have been it. I think it was Manscaped, and I thought it was hilarious. And of course, with Dollar Shave Club, the YouTube video that he first created was hilarious. One of the most successful marketing campaigns ever run by a startup.

AI assessment note: “One, one tactic that I thought was hilarious. It was smart.”

Q terms of that distinction between inputs and outputs. If we go back to this first month, you know, you've done that framework, you've been through the different variables, what should your communication, and what should the communication moving forwards look like with your CEO? If you were to advise me on how to have the best relationship with you, the head of growth moving forwards, what would you advise me?

A The first thing that I would advise you, related to your last question, which is, what is the North Star metric? Second, What I would advise you is what are the pros and cons associated with that approach? Because no matter what approach you take, whether it's the type of team you build, the type of leaders you put in place, the type of A-B tests you run, the metrics you pick, there's strengths and weaknesses to both approaches. There's no perfect metric. There's no perfect org design. They all come at it at a certain cost. And the thing that's important is to understand the way in which the approach you're choosing today is broken so that when it breaks, you're not surprised by it. So I'll give an example. Let's take Facebook. The growth team there had a very big imprint in terms of the org structure and the overall impact on the business. And that's because we were doing an amazing job. And so as the results and the metrics continued to improve, the growth team gained more and more influence. And as we gained more influence within the business, naturally, we started to have our fingerprints on more parts of the product. We were running experiments on profiles and on pages and on newsfeed. These other parts of the product that teams owned And so you might have a team come over and say, hey, we own Newsfeed. Why are you running an experiment with Newsfeed? Stay off my lawn. Tha…

AI assessment note: “The first thing that I would advise you... Second, What I would advise you is”

Q Is it tough for CEOs with the growth leader that they have in place? Because I want you to try things like that, Andy. So I want you to be ambitious. I want you to try things. But there's a line of, that's too far. How do leaders instill that ambition risk without the fear of going too far, but also realizing accountability?

A I don't know. I really don't know. I don't know if I have an answer for that question, because I've worked with some CEOs where they have zero appetite for risk, and it's kind of shocking. You know, they become very conservative after their initial sort of breakout rate of growth, and they go and raise the Series A and the Series B, and then they get And so we're like, okay, you know, let's not mess with the golden goose. I don't want to mess with the product too much because what if we break it? And I don't know how to change that. I just noticed that in some founders, they intuitively recognize and are comfortable with the fact that they have to take risk all the time because a startup is just a massive bundle of risk that evolves over time. It's a common misunderstanding to think like, oh, let's not mess with the golden goose as if there's no more risk there. To be taking a startup is just a bundle of risk to begin with. So I don't know how to change that. Instead, I don't try and change the CEOs or the founders. I just try and look those that demonstrate a very clear, intuitive sense for taking risk over and over again.

AI assessment note: “I don't try and change the CEOs or the founders. I just try and look”

Q Can I ask you, going back to that interview process, I love the drilling deep and spending a lot of time on that. What does the structure look like in your mind? I know you said it's kind of the same as your normal, but what does that actually look like? Like first meeting, intro meeting, second meeting, Digging really deep third meeting case study. How would you structure it?

A Yeah, so for me, the first meeting, when I talk with the head of growth, I want to get their perspective on what is their conceptual framework for how my business grows. So for example, to interview me for a growth role at Amazon, and you said, Andy, here's a pen, and here's a whiteboard. I want you to just give me a simple framework that you think is a good expression for how Amazon grows. What I would probably do is write something to the effect of, you know, A times B times C times D equals growth, where A equals the growth rate of new product inventory, meaning as Amazon adds new products to its library, it has more potential to grow. B equals the average amount of traffic earned per week per product in their library. So for example, they have a landing page for a pair of running shoes that gets five visitors per week, but you increase that to 10 visitors per week on average. Amazon's overall growth rate is going to accelerate. So you've got how many products in its library times the average amount of traffic that each product receives each week. And then you've got another variable, which is the conversion rate. So you get all these visitors, but how many of those convert into a paying customer? So that would be another variable in the equation. And then another I would add on would be, let's assume a customer makes a purchase. What is the average size of the purchase per …

AI assessment note: “for me, the first meeting, when I talk with the head of growth”