The Exchanges

Q So why do you paid period? Why do people do paid?

A Well, okay, let's, let's flip that Lyft scenario. So then you have the passenger side, not incremental at all. The supply side, it's really hard to get drivers in a ride sharing network. And guess what? You're a marketplace. You need to balance supply and demand. You need to acquire the drivers. And so I think this is where we did run a lot of paid at Lyft to acquire the supply side. And part of that is Well, if we acquire the supply side, we can balance the marketplace. Balanced marketplace is going to be much more efficient. Lyft will grow because of it. And that spend will pay back much faster. So I think it makes sense as like a very intense balancing lever for marketplaces. And then if your unit economics support it, I do think there are advantages to using paid acquisition to go after audiences that you're under indexed in. So right now, like the only paid acquisition we've ever touched and it's so lightweight are some just like simple TikTok ads testing different value propositions with 18 to 24 year olds. Very specific marketing.

AI assessment note: “advantages to using paid acquisition to go after audiences that you're under indexed in.”

Q We said about optimizations, about kind of squeezing as much value out as we could. A cool way to do that is in A-B testing, determining what works, what doesn't, and then doubling down. What is the role of A-B tests today in your mind and growth? How do you think about that?

A You know, I'm coming from a data science background. I'm pretty biased here. Uh, there's a good, a bad, and an ugly. The, the good is we, we are using A-B tests to understand impact, to understand how every metric changes. Are we accidentally bringing down certain metrics? Do we really understand what is incremental and what is not incremental? That is like a well-scoped AB test teaches you what you should work on next. It adjusts your direction. It adjusts your cadence. A bad AB test is poorly scoped. You're not going to get any information out of it. It's, it's a messy thing with a low minimum detectable effect. You're going to run it and you're not going to get anything out of it. You just wasted a week of your time. And then the ugly, the ugly is I'm running an AB test. So that I can put something in my performance review about a number I moved, or I can like say something to my manager. And you see that as companies get bigger, right? We're running A-B tests just to like be able to say, oh, I increased activations by 12%.

AI assessment note: “The, the good is we, we are using A-B tests to understand impact”

Q So we identify that retention is the problem then. We've got amazing acquisition. We've got these partnership teams that's driving top of funnel. What do we do then when we know retention is the problem?

A There are finite, there are finite ways to move retention. Um, one, you are setting up your milestone metrics. Okay. What correlates with deeper retention earlier in the funnel, right? So that three queries in your first session, and now how am I really trying to move that, but at a higher level, mostly playing with mix shift, right? So One, you can optimize channel distribution. So organic and referrals is always going to have higher retention than paid acquisition and partnerships. Okay. That's, you know, because of so much of our growth is word of mouth and partnerships led, like we don't have much channel distribution optimization to make. Two is you can target different audiences. Perplexity is incredibly horizontal. My grandmother uses it. My doctor uses it. Everyone uses it. So can I find different segments? Different audience segments that have really high retention. And then can I specifically go after them? So I'm changing the mix shift of new cohorts to that new audience, which increases that retention for those cohorts.

AI assessment note: “There are finite ways to move retention. Um, one, you are setting up your milestone metrics.”

Q Listen, dude, I want to discuss like building the team before we do a quick fire. It's really hard by hiring for growth. What is the right first hire in a growth team?

A It depends what you need. Do you want a marketer that can juice the top of the funnel, but can still get in the weeds, run experiments, think about onboarding flows, or do you want a product person that can run marketing campaigns? I, I obviously fall into more of the latter, right? I want to like spend time in the data. I want to be turning over stones. I want to be holding onto that data. It depends on the makeup of the current team and the founders. If you're feeling good from a top of funnel perspective and you have a complex funnel that is cross device, go for the product person that has built these funnels before.

AI assessment note: “go for the product person that has built these funnels before.”

Q So we identify that retention is the problem then. We've got amazing acquisition. We've got these partnership teams that's driving top of funnel. What do we do then when we know retention is the problem?

A There are finite, there are finite ways to move retention. Um, one, you are setting up your milestone metrics. Okay. What correlates with deeper retention earlier in the funnel, right? So that three queries in your first session, and now how am I really trying to move that, but at a higher level, mostly playing with mix shift, right? So One, you can optimize channel distribution. So organic and referrals is always going to have higher retention than paid acquisition and partnerships. Okay. That's, you know, because of so much of our growth is word of mouth and partnerships led, like we don't have much channel distribution optimization to make. Two is you can target different audiences. Perplexity is incredibly horizontal. My grandmother uses it. My doctor uses it. Everyone uses it. So can I find different segments? Different audience segments that have really high retention. And then can I specifically go after them? So I'm changing the mix shift of new cohorts to that new audience, which increases that retention for those cohorts.

AI assessment note: “There are finite, there are finite ways to move retention.”

Q Is growth a game of micro optimizations where you are moving from 30 to 35% retention on D-ninety? Or is it big swings on a new product that could change the game?

A I think micro optimizations are seriously underrated. I think anyone that has, like, built a growth model for their company, So, you know, you, you imagine you, you open up an Excel sheet. Okay. You have new users, you've retained users, you have resurrections and you've turned users, right? New users plus retained users plus resurrections minus turn users. That's your weekly actives or monthly actives, right? And then if you assume like a new user growth rate or a retention curve, you can now play around with, well, if I increase retention by 10%, what happens to my weekly actives? What happens to my monthly actives? That 10% small change in retention or in new user activation, you see the entire water level of your active user base just increase. Like that small micro optimization just raised the entire water level of the company. And so that's huge. Like I'm going to go after that if the opportunity is there to hedge that though, Micro optimizations have diminishing returns. At some point, I'm not going to get to be able to squeeze out an incremental 10, 15% without a lot of wasted experimentation time. And that's why, like, my rule of thumb is once a quarter, we have to be taking at least a couple massive swings, right? A big new feature, a big marketing campaign. It has to be high risk. It has to be high reward. I have to be able to stand in front of the company and say, I…

AI assessment note: “I think micro optimizations are seriously underrated.”

Q Can I ask, what have been your biggest mistakes in acquisition that you've learned from as a result?

A I mean, there's so many. If we're not making mistakes, we're not learning fast enough. The, I think I came in really interested in influencer marketing, and in really wanting to test this channel. Creators, how do we work with creators to share perplexity? And I Totally underestimated the amount of effort it is to work individually with creators on specific content and making sure they get the right messaging and perplexity is not a simple concept to explain. Like me saying AI search engine means nothing. And so to manage a bunch of these creators creating content, long tail creators, It ended up a falling flat and b taking up a ton of time, ton of time. And so I think we're, we're moving very quickly as we'd rather work with fewer creators and just develop a really good relationship with them.

AI assessment note: “I Totally underestimated the amount of effort it is to work individually with creators”

Q Why do you do any paid? I know you do adverts and you do some paid, but you just have such a good acquisition flywheel. Jensen says your, like, his favorite search tool. Like, why bother doing adverts?

A We, I mean, we don't really. We barely touch paid. Paid acquisition is a total drug. It makes everyone feel good because top of funnel numbers move up, and once you see those, you know, weekly activation rates, well, no one wants to see that go down. But it's going to underperform on retention, and maybe most importantly, it's most likely not going to be incremental. You know, I, um, I basically started my career on the paid acquisition team at Lyft, right? Spending millions and millions of dollars on these channels. And I'll never forget this. Our head of growth at the time was basically just like, go turn off every single paid channel for new passengers. Okay. And like we're spending like channel was like paid acquisition was driving a good amount of passenger acquisition. And so the growth marketing team turns off every single paid channel and installs and signups barely move. They go down by like maybe five, 10%. I don't remember what it was and what did go down. It was all Low quality. So every marketing dollar that was being spent to acquire these new passengers was just cannibalizing organic traffic. None of it was incremental. So maybe it pulled those users forward by a few weeks, but overall it was just Lyft had enough organic word of mouth traction where once you factored in the incrementality of the channel, it, which wasn't efficient. It made no sense.

AI assessment note: “We barely touch paid. Paid acquisition is a total drug.”

Q Dude, when we spoke before, you said to me, be first to a growth channel, or just be better. Which I liked a lot as a hedging strategy, to be honest, because it's not like, you know, first always wins. But can you just unpack that for me? I just want to understand that.

A Yeah, I mean, there's no middle ground. So everyone, everyone in growth is looking for alpha, right? Find the untapped channel, beat everyone to it, right? Dropbox, Dropbox, like with the referral program, Groupon and email, Pinterest and SEO, Duolingo, and just like a totally unhinged social media, right? All of them were kind of first to this concept and it really, really worked. And so as a growth person, you're constantly looking for like, where is this opportunity? What are the channels right now that are kind of greenfield? Now, the problem right now is like channels are a little bit quiet right now. Facebook and Instagram are really expensive. Apple updates have made paid hard organic social. It's really, really hard. Notifications are so crowded. Everything feels really crowded right now. There's no middle ground. If you're not first, it literally just means your only other option is to just be a lot better than everyone else. And that's like where we need to hold ourselves to.

AI assessment note: “If you're not first, it literally just means your only other option is to just be a lot better”

Q Is growth a game of micro optimizations where you are moving from 30 to 35% retention on D-ninety? Or is it big swings on a new product that could change the game?

A I think micro optimizations are seriously underrated. I think anyone that has, like, built a growth model for their company, So, you know, you, you imagine you, you open up an Excel sheet. Okay. You have new users, you've retained users, you have resurrections and you've turned users, right? New users plus retained users plus resurrections minus turn users. That's your weekly actives or monthly actives, right? And then if you assume like a new user growth rate or a retention curve, you can now play around with, well, if I increase retention by 10%, what happens to my weekly actives? What happens to my monthly actives? That 10% small change in retention or in new user activation, you see the entire water level of your active user base just increase. Like that small micro optimization just raised the entire water level of the company. And so that's huge. Like I'm going to go after that if the opportunity is there to hedge that though, Micro optimizations have diminishing returns. At some point, I'm not going to get to be able to squeeze out an incremental 10, 15% without a lot of wasted experimentation time. And that's why, like, my rule of thumb is once a quarter, we have to be taking at least a couple massive swings, right? A big new feature, a big marketing campaign. It has to be high risk. It has to be high reward. I have to be able to stand in front of the company and say, I…

AI assessment note: “I think micro optimizations are seriously underrated... my rule of thumb is once a quarter”

Q Can I ask, what have been your biggest mistakes in acquisition that you've learned from as a result?

A I mean, there's so many. If we're not making mistakes, we're not learning fast enough. The, I think I came in really interested in influencer marketing, and in really wanting to test this channel. Creators, how do we work with creators to share perplexity? And I Totally underestimated the amount of effort it is to work individually with creators on specific content and making sure they get the right messaging and perplexity is not a simple concept to explain. Like me saying AI search engine means nothing. And so to manage a bunch of these creators creating content, long tail creators, It ended up a falling flat and b taking up a ton of time, ton of time. And so I think we're, we're moving very quickly as we'd rather work with fewer creators and just develop a really good relationship with them.

AI assessment note: “I Totally underestimated the amount of effort it is to work individually with creators”

Q Can I ask you, when you came into perplexity, um, I spoke to Aravind before the show and he said that actually you very quickly diagnosed this is not an acquisition problem. This is a retention problem. Can you just take me to what you saw and set the landscape there?

A So if you come in, you turn over all the stones, you're trying to get a sense of through this end to end funnel from acquisition down to monetization, like where should I spend my time? Where is there the biggest opportunity to drive growth? And, you know, we had Dimitri and the business team running these big partnerships. We had tons of traffic coming in from the top of the funnel. My, my eyes went straight to that early activation rate, that week one, week two retention. None of it was bad. It was actually like pretty healthy consumer retention, but that was where, if we can move that number early on at the top of the funnel, we're increasing the water level of all activated users and weekly actives. That's where I need to hang out.

AI assessment note: “My eyes went straight to that early activation rate, that week one, week two retention.”

Q So why do you paid period? Why do people do paid?

A Well, okay, let's, let's flip that Lyft scenario. So then you have the passenger side, not incremental at all. The supply side, it's really hard to get drivers in a ride sharing network. And guess what? You're a marketplace. You need to balance supply and demand. You need to acquire the drivers. And so I think this is where we did run a lot of paid at Lyft to acquire the supply side. And part of that is Well, if we acquire the supply side, we can balance the marketplace. Balanced marketplace is going to be much more efficient. Lyft will grow because of it. And that spend will pay back much faster. So I think it makes sense as like a very intense balancing lever for marketplaces. And then if your unit economics support it, I do think there are advantages to using paid acquisition to go after audiences that you're under indexed in. So right now, like the only paid acquisition we've ever touched and it's so lightweight are some just like simple TikTok ads testing different value propositions with 18 to 24 year olds. Very specific marketing.

AI assessment note: “I think it makes sense as like a very intense balancing lever for marketplaces.”

Q What has been the single biggest needle mover? Aaron said that you drove the numbers up by 10 to 15%. What has been the single biggest needle mover in doing that?

A I think there have been a couple. We've worked on a lot of different things. One is, can you makeshift audience? So we've done a lot of audience targeting. Around specific high quality cohorts. Two is, can you mix shift platform? I don't want you just on the web app, or I don't want you just on the mobile app. Can I get you across multiple devices? And that cross device conversion is really, really strong for retention because now you're using it on weekends. You're using it during the day. We're everywhere. We're integrating into your life. Those are the two really big ones. And then you never can just underestimate driving product improvements is always going to drive retention.

AI assessment note: “Those are the two really big ones.”

Q We said about optimizations, about kind of squeezing as much value out as we could. A cool way to do that is in A-B testing, determining what works, what doesn't, and then doubling down. What is the role of A-B tests today in your mind and growth? How do you think about that?

A You know, I'm coming from a data science background. I'm pretty biased here. Uh, there's a good, a bad, and an ugly. The, the good is we, we are using A-B tests to understand impact, to understand how every metric changes. Are we accidentally bringing down certain metrics? Do we really understand what is incremental and what is not incremental? That is like a well-scoped AB test teaches you what you should work on next. It adjusts your direction. It adjusts your cadence. A bad AB test is poorly scoped. You're not going to get any information out of it. It's, it's a messy thing with a low minimum detectable effect. You're going to run it and you're not going to get anything out of it. You just wasted a week of your time. And then the ugly, the ugly is I'm running an AB test. So that I can put something in my performance review about a number I moved, or I can like say something to my manager. And you see that as companies get bigger, right? We're running A-B tests just to like be able to say, oh, I increased activations by 12%.

AI assessment note: “there's a good, a bad, and an ugly”

Q You've got a friend and they've just been given a head of growth role and they start tomorrow. What advice do you have for them pre their starting this new role?

A Obsess about every single number in the dashboard. Get your hands in on as much data as possible. You know, when I started at Lyft, I was literally like entry level, nobody role, but like my one thing was like, I'm just going to know the numbers better than everyone else. And like, you start to learn how the machine works when you see how all these numbers start to correlate with each other. And then when you start knowing the numbers better than everyone else, you get pulled into all these incredible meetings. Cause you're just the numbers guy. Like we have to have him in the meeting. Cause he knows these numbers better than anyone. And, and I think that is the ultimate way to just build intuition of how your growth machine works, where the friction points in it, and that is what's going to help you make the better decisions in terms of what you should be working on.

AI assessment note: “Obsess about every single number in the dashboard. Get your hands in on as much”

Q Totally is a very valuable journey. It's, The other kind of difficult journey that you make is from founder to perplexity. That's a different thing when you run your own shop to when you join a team. Can you just talk to me? How did that happen? Does Aravind come and say, Hey, like we need a head of growth. You want to come? Like, just take me to that.

A You know, I go to business school. I go take a swing for three years and just grinding up against startup life. And there's nothing easy about it, right? Like when you're, when you're a founder that You know, month after month, pivot after pivot, nothing is moving. There is nothing more demoralizing than, than those moments. And, you know, when we, when it came down to the final straw, we end up shutting down. I'm chatting with different companies. I'm chatting with Arvin, Dennis, Johnny, Dimitri, everyone. And it became very clear, like, this is a company that is moving crazy fast, is having so much fun. I'm going to go do that. But it's different when you're going from The founders see, right? You know, you, one, you are now well aware of how freaking hard startups are. Your ego is bruised, right? You just got your ass kicked. So it's a total adjustment in terms of framing. And then you're basically de-scoping yourself, right? I, I was, I'm brought on to just drive growth. So, you know, founders enjoy the variety of, I got to go work on a hundred things and I got to steer the ship, but now you're hyper-focused on, okay, I'm here to drive growth. I am de-scoping myself just to go do an excellent job at this, and that's an adjustment as well.

AI assessment note: “I'm chatting with Arvin, Dennis, Johnny, Dimitri, everyone. And it became very clear”

Q My question to you is, is that fair? And do you think actually good PMs need A-B tests? Because it is very clear when it's working and when it's not.

A Yeah. I think if your goal as a PM Is to optimize direction. Are we working on the right thing? Are we poking at the right part of this product that can drive impact? And AB tests give you a quick response to it. I think, and I think that is like core to understanding, are we working on the right thing? Are we moving fast enough? Are we really moving the needle on this? That being said, you should go into an AB test with a pretty strong confidence of what's going to happen. And this is where like intuition comes in of like, We're running this, and here's what I think is going to happen. I think we're really going to move this metric, but we might see that other metric go down a bit, and that's what we need to watch out for. If you don't have that intuition, then you're just flying blind.

AI assessment note: “AB tests give you a quick response to it.”

Q Can I ask you, when you came into perplexity, um, I spoke to Aravind before the show and he said that actually you very quickly diagnosed this is not an acquisition problem. This is a retention problem. Can you just take me to what you saw and set the landscape there?

A So if you come in, you turn over all the stones, you're trying to get a sense of through this end to end funnel from acquisition down to monetization, like where should I spend my time? Where is there the biggest opportunity to drive growth? And, you know, we had Dimitri and the business team running these big partnerships. We had tons of traffic coming in from the top of the funnel. My, my eyes went straight to that early activation rate, that week one, week two retention. None of it was bad. It was actually like pretty healthy consumer retention, but that was where, if we can move that number early on at the top of the funnel, we're increasing the water level of all activated users and weekly actives. That's where I need to hang out.

AI assessment note: “My, my eyes went straight to that early activation rate, that week one, week two retention.”

Q bad idea. You know, I'm a VC for a reason. Uh, so, I, I, Arvind also said, uh, usual growth PMs would ask for marketing budgets that slam ads on TikTok and Instagram. He said that you first wanted to ensure that you had good CAT to LTVs before throwing money at acquiring users. What did you want to see in the CAT to LTVs that was important to you?

A I think there are a couple of pieces here. One is like, should we even be focusing on monetization right now? Right? Do we, do we want to think about paid acquisition as a lever that, that needs to bring in users and then we see that payback happen immediately? And my answer early on was no. I think we just need to go focus on top of funnel, new user growth and getting incredible sticky retention. And if we do that, guess what? We're going to be able to figure out how to monetize these users, whether it's through a consumer subscription, whether it's through ads, whatever it is, we're going to be able to figure out that monetization. So let's put down cocktail TV for now. And let's the only metric I'm going to just yell about all day is our activation rate and our retention rate and hold me to moving that.

AI assessment note: “So let's put down cocktail TV for now. And let's the only metric”

Q What's been the hardest thing about doing paid for you at Poplasty?

A There's so many different channels to test, and I don't want to, I don't want to lose my focus spending on channels where I'm not going to learn much. And I think I got burned, like a good example of another area I got burned was newsletter sponsorships. It's like, okay, like there, there's some interesting audiences here. I want to try this out, but I think it's really hard unless you have a really crisp product that you can put into a really simple ad placement. That is like two sentences of text and that's it. Right. Newsletter placements are really hard. And so like, again, that's another one where we came up flat and I don't know how many learnings I walked away with there. So I kind of just spun my wheels for no reason.

AI assessment note: “There's so many different channels to test, and I don't want to lose my focus”

Q Listen, dude, I want to discuss like building the team before we do a quick fire. It's really hard by hiring for growth. What is the right first hire in a growth team?

A It depends what you need. Do you want a marketer that can juice the top of the funnel, but can still get in the weeds, run experiments, think about onboarding flows, or do you want a product person that can run marketing campaigns? I, I obviously fall into more of the latter, right? I want to like spend time in the data. I want to be turning over stones. I want to be holding onto that data. It depends on the makeup of the current team and the founders. If you're feeling good from a top of funnel perspective and you have a complex funnel that is cross device, go for the product person that has built these funnels before.

AI assessment note: “It depends what you need. Do you want a marketer that can juice the top”

Q Do you have to manage them in a different way? Maybe they're a little bit more larger egos. They like to feel like they're in control. Is there any different elements in how you manage them?

A Yeah, I mean, I think you have to let them cook. I mean, you, you want to give them enough band. If you, if you hired them and you trust them and they can execute, get out of their way, let them go experiment, right? I mean, you don't want to put guardrails over their ability to experiment and try different things. Guardrails is going to hurt everyone. It's going to make everyone think a little bit smaller. You remove those guardrails. Everyone's thinking big. One person at the company goes, takes a big swings, runs a TV ad with Jim Harbaugh. Everyone's now thinking at that level of, okay, how do I, how do we go bigger? And that's the kind of culture you want to create.

AI assessment note: “get out of their way, let them go experiment”

Q Do founders make good hires? You obviously were a founder before. Rippling, another obviously very successful company, has a huge amount of founder hires. Do founders make good hires, and what are your lessons from that?

A We have a lot of founders here, and I think the best part about hiring founders is that They are much more comfortable at taking very big swings and being willing to fail. Like it is by nature. If you're going down the founder path, you have to be a little bit more comfortable in that world than the average. And the average person is not willing to fail. They're not willing to go stand up in front of the company and be like, we're going to try this out. And it might not work. And so the more people you can get like that, you know, Mike Maples at Fluggit has this incredible analogy that early startup teams need to be like a jazz band. Right? Like throw out the sheet music. This is not what it's about. It's like, no, you are here to just riff off of each other and make it work. And that's where founders I think are great. It can go sour, I guess, as things scale, and you start to need that cheap music. You start to need a lot more coordination as the company grows, and some founders just don't want to, they, they miss the jazz band, and they're going to jump quick to the next jazz band.

AI assessment note: “I think the best part about hiring founders is that They are much more comfortable”

Q Totally is a very valuable journey. It's, The other kind of difficult journey that you make is from founder to perplexity. That's a different thing when you run your own shop to when you join a team. Can you just talk to me? How did that happen? Does Aravind come and say, Hey, like we need a head of growth. You want to come? Like, just take me to that.

A You know, I go to business school. I go take a swing for three years and just grinding up against startup life. And there's nothing easy about it, right? Like when you're, when you're a founder that You know, month after month, pivot after pivot, nothing is moving. There is nothing more demoralizing than, than those moments. And, you know, when we, when it came down to the final straw, we end up shutting down. I'm chatting with different companies. I'm chatting with Arvin, Dennis, Johnny, Dimitri, everyone. And it became very clear, like, this is a company that is moving crazy fast, is having so much fun. I'm going to go do that. But it's different when you're going from The founders see, right? You know, you, one, you are now well aware of how freaking hard startups are. Your ego is bruised, right? You just got your ass kicked. So it's a total adjustment in terms of framing. And then you're basically de-scoping yourself, right? I, I was, I'm brought on to just drive growth. So, you know, founders enjoy the variety of, I got to go work on a hundred things and I got to steer the ship, but now you're hyper-focused on, okay, I'm here to drive growth. I am de-scoping myself just to go do an excellent job at this, and that's an adjustment as well.

AI assessment note: “I'm chatting with Arvin, Dennis, Johnny, Dimitri, everyone. And it became very clear”

Q My question to you is, is that fair? And do you think actually good PMs need A-B tests? Because it is very clear when it's working and when it's not.

A Yeah. I think if your goal as a PM Is to optimize direction. Are we working on the right thing? Are we poking at the right part of this product that can drive impact? And AB tests give you a quick response to it. I think, and I think that is like core to understanding, are we working on the right thing? Are we moving fast enough? Are we really moving the needle on this? That being said, you should go into an AB test with a pretty strong confidence of what's going to happen. And this is where like intuition comes in of like, We're running this, and here's what I think is going to happen. I think we're really going to move this metric, but we might see that other metric go down a bit, and that's what we need to watch out for. If you don't have that intuition, then you're just flying blind.

AI assessment note: “AB tests give you a quick response to it. I think, and I think that is like core”

Q You've got a friend and they've just been given a head of growth role and they start tomorrow. What advice do you have for them pre their starting this new role?

A Obsess about every single number in the dashboard. Get your hands in on as much data as possible. You know, when I started at Lyft, I was literally like entry level, nobody role, but like my one thing was like, I'm just going to know the numbers better than everyone else. And like, you start to learn how the machine works when you see how all these numbers start to correlate with each other. And then when you start knowing the numbers better than everyone else, you get pulled into all these incredible meetings. Cause you're just the numbers guy. Like we have to have him in the meeting. Cause he knows these numbers better than anyone. And, and I think that is the ultimate way to just build intuition of how your growth machine works, where the friction points in it, and that is what's going to help you make the better decisions in terms of what you should be working on.

AI assessment note: “Obsess about every single number in the dashboard. Get your hands in on as much”

Q So when you were brought in, did you have this team built out or did they say, hey, we want you to build it out yourself?

A It's a very flat organization. So there was nothing built out, but there were resources to pull from, right? You, you know, there, there are engineers that are ready to jump in on, okay, let's go hack onboarding or let's go really iterate on deeper retention or, or anything like that. But And it depends on when you are starting, but a lot of times it's, well, what even exists today? And your first few weeks stepping into growth is you're just turning over stones. You're trying to build the map of the world. Okay. What's happening in acquisition, what's happening in engagement, what's happening in monetization. And usually when you ask those questions, you don't get any answers and you just get a hundred more questions that you have to now go figure out. So then your job becomes, let me build the right infrastructure. So we can actually measure and understand the world. And that's where you start getting into engineering, logging, attribution. Do we have first party cookies? All of that.

AI assessment note: “It's a very flat organization. So there was nothing built out”

Q What's been the hardest thing about doing paid for you at Poplasty?

A There's so many different channels to test, and I don't want to, I don't want to lose my focus spending on channels where I'm not going to learn much. And I think I got burned, like a good example of another area I got burned was newsletter sponsorships. It's like, okay, like there, there's some interesting audiences here. I want to try this out, but I think it's really hard unless you have a really crisp product that you can put into a really simple ad placement. That is like two sentences of text and that's it. Right. Newsletter placements are really hard. And so like, again, that's another one where we came up flat and I don't know how many learnings I walked away with there. So I kind of just spun my wheels for no reason.

AI assessment note: “There's so many different channels to test, and I don't want to lose my focus”

Q Do founders make good hires? You obviously were a founder before. Rippling, another obviously very successful company, has a huge amount of founder hires. Do founders make good hires, and what are your lessons from that?

A We have a lot of founders here, and I think the best part about hiring founders is that They are much more comfortable at taking very big swings and being willing to fail. Like it is by nature. If you're going down the founder path, you have to be a little bit more comfortable in that world than the average. And the average person is not willing to fail. They're not willing to go stand up in front of the company and be like, we're going to try this out. And it might not work. And so the more people you can get like that, you know, Mike Maples at Fluggit has this incredible analogy that early startup teams need to be like a jazz band. Right? Like throw out the sheet music. This is not what it's about. It's like, no, you are here to just riff off of each other and make it work. And that's where founders I think are great. It can go sour, I guess, as things scale, and you start to need that cheap music. You start to need a lot more coordination as the company grows, and some founders just don't want to, they, they miss the jazz band, and they're going to jump quick to the next jazz band.

AI assessment note: “the best part about hiring founders is that They are much more comfortable”