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Darius Contractor

Chief Growth Officer, Otter.ai · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

operatorexecutiveengineerinvestor@dariusmc ↗LinkedIn ↗otter.ai ↗

Darius Contractor is an executive and growth specialist who previously served as Chief Product and Technology Officer at Vendr, VP of Growth at Airtable, and Head of Growth Engineering at Dropbox. He developed the User Psych framework and actively advises and invests in tech startups.

19statements → 4claims → 1claims resolved → 3.58/5average certainty → 2.26/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 5said about them ↓

0 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 3 assertions · 2 opinions · 13 insights · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Darius argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

303 words/min while actually speaking · 0.2 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Darius Contractor: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 29 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 9,348 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Darius Contractor is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10
pushed back at the host 1/10
setup questions received 45%

Everything Darius Contractor said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Recent Facebook growth veterans often lack zero-to-one startup scaling experience
“Like if you were at Facebook in the last five years, you might not have learned how to do zero to one growth. You might've learned how to do a hundred to a million growth, much higher level.”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 28:41 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Insight
Competent VP of Growth candidates will not join pre-product-market fit startups
“That VP growth is usually not going to want to join, like, kind of an empty team, or definitely not, like, a pre-product market fit product, if they know what they're doing.”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 12:24 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Insight
Growth teams should sit inside the product organization under the CPO
“If you put growth outside a product, You kind of set up a potential conflict between the two. Really at the end of the day, growth is often effectively a product team. They have product people, engineers, data scientists. They work more with like the code that…”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 15:41 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Insight
B2B SaaS startups should not hire consumer growth experts
“I wouldn't hire like a consumer expert for like a B to B SaaS business, because it's just such a different world.”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 18:40 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Opinion
Pinterest and Facebook possess the tech industry's best growth tracking infrastructure
“I think Pinterest has one of the best, like, systems of growth. A list of all the current growth experiments, you automatically run reports on it, etc. I think the only other company that really has that system is Facebook”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 29:09 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Insight
Growth teams should directly own core onboarding and monetization flows
“Ideally, growth owns the product areas, and it's not just kind of a layer on top of core products. So usually growth would have ownership over the core onboarding flow and the monetization flow and maybe the logged out pages, or those might be owned by marketi…”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 30:29 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Insight
Growth teams should ask for forgiveness 40% of the time
“Forgiveness, 40% of the time, and then permission 60%. So mostly you should be on board with the team, but occasionally, yeah, you want to be a little bit that loose cannon who delivers amazing results.”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 39:27 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Insight
High-volume A/B testing is becoming less effective for modern startups
“So I think this high volume A-B testing growth is a little less focal. Optimizing for the users on a lower volume basis is incredibly important for a lot of the successful startups today.”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 44:40 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Insight
Optimizing solely for top-of-funnel signups degrades downstream user quality
“So to make that real, oftentimes people will pick one metric, just like signups, and they'll pull really hard on it, like more, more, more, more signups. But then we've all seen stories of like these unintended consequences, where they're like, they make the s…”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 8:02 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Insight
Growth teams should use six-month macro planning cycles instead of quarters
“I'm kind of a big fan of six-month macro planning cycles, because one year is very hard to, like, plan ahead, and then one quarter is just too short to really get a tremendous amount done.”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 9:39 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Insight
A startup's first growth team needs one PM, two engineers, half designer
“I think the first hire, first it goes to founder, then it goes to like a small growth team. One PM, two engineers, like half a designer or something like that.”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 12:07 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Insight
Paid user research participants default to giving biased, pleasing feedback
“Oftentimes people are trying to look good and trying to say the right thing, partly because you're probably paying them. You're probably giving them a 50, a hundred dollar gift certificate to like participate. So they want to kind of try to make you happy. It'…”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 22:06 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Opinion
Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are the premier tech growth talent pools
“In general, I think people at Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, a few other companies maybe, like, really do know growth. They know how to run these successive experiments. So all those companies, I think, have, like, really great growth culture where people have…”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 29:32 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Insight
Founders should evaluate new growth leaders at six months, not two
“I'd have different thresholds at six months and one year. I wouldn't have very strong thresholds after like one or two months. So really after one or two months, you're expecting them to get some good context and understand what the org needs and to start sett…”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 32:51 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Approximately 70% of growth experiments and 50% of startup investments fail
“About 70% of growth experiments fail, and people say about 50% of company investments fail.”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 39:56 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hype-driven startup growth almost certainly will not last multiple years
“And the other tough thing about hype is it's often short lived as quick as a week these days, or as long as like six months, but it's almost certainly not going to be multiple years.”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 45:30 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Insight
Calendar invites represent an underappreciated viral growth vector in B2B SaaS
“It really is like a fundamental viral mechanism of like meeting people through calendar entries and one-to-one meetings, especially in this remote work world. So I think it's kind of under reflected on viral opportunity that's still really prescient today.”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 48:58 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Deep experiment tuning can double or triple product conversion rates
“I've just seen conversion rates double or triple or even more sometimes, and you can get a tremendous amount out of it.”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 4:47 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Assertion Partly supported
Pinterest evolved its North Star metric from visitors to active board creators
“And one of my favorite stories of a metric changing is from Pinterest and from Casey. They actually changed the metric to go down the funnel. Like first it was just people arriving at the site, like kind of weekly active users and then weekly active pinners an…”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 9:16 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt

The other half of the tape: Darius Contractor's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 2 episodes on 20VC. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 1Guillaume Cabane 1Brian Balfour 1

Statements about Darius Contractor, by other people (2)

Opinion
Balfour names Winters, Contractor, and Cabane as top growth practitioners
“Strategically would be Casey winners. The best person that has thinks about the psychological elements of growth would easily be Darius contractor. The person like a very specialty who I consider like a mad scientist is I call him G, but it's Guillaume Cabane.”
Brian Balfour Aug 16, 2023 ▶ 59:23 Brian Balfour: Startup Growth Secrets from HubSpot; Distribution Stratagies; Impact of AI | E1049 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Contractor helped drive Dropbox Business to $100M in net new revenue
“Darius helped drive Dropbox to a hundred million dollars in net new revenue through Dropbox business”
Harry Stebbings May 18, 2022 ▶ 0:33 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
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2023 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Con May 18, 2022 35m
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