Insight
Lerner: Internal corporate startups need P&L control and staged funding
“It's like the leader of that doesn't have P and L you're not a startup within a big company. Right. I think that is the important piece, which is like, you need to fund this as an independent unit that is looking at a business line holistically and is autonomo…”
Insight
Lerner: Building totally adjacent products inside large corporations is a mistake
“If you are trying to build a totally adjacent business inside of a large company, don't do that. The company shouldn't do it. You shouldn't do it. It's not a good idea.”
Insight
Lerner: Founders must own strategy for primary growth levers
“As a founder, you should be owning the strategy for your primary growth lever. If that's product marketing sales, right? Like whatever the primary growth lever for your business is, you should not delegate that thing. I think a lot of founders are like, Hey, I…”
Insight
Lerner: Non-founders will not take necessary risks on growth levers
“If it's the primary growth lever for your business, it is the most important piece of your business, and at the end of the day, the person you hire will not have the full company perspective that you do. They will not have the right level of skin in the game, …”
Opinion
Lerner: High-level monthly advising fails to provide real thought partnership
“Which is something you don't get to do when you're doing the high level advising. You're just not close enough to the ground to really be a thought partner.”
Insight
Lerner: Performance marketing advisors cannot effectively advise virality-driven startups
“On the growth side, like if your primary lever is virality, definitely get somebody that did virality stuff, right? If they come from a performance world, they're gonna not have, they're gonna struggle to help you with the core virality stuff and vice versa, r…”
Disclosure
Ely Lerner structures startup advisory deals on a month-to-month flexible basis
“My advising is month to month, week to week. Like the way that I'm doing my engagements is we just work together. And if any given time, either of us feels like we're not getting enough value out of the relationship, we just stop. And there's, you're not, ther…”
Insight
Lerner: Startups must celebrate resource efficiency over pure metric growth
“I think this is another thing that people do wrong is they tend to celebrate offense. They tend to celebrate metrics movers. Right. In their org. And that makes people working on defensive things feel crappy because they never get celebrated. But really you ne…”
Insight
Lerner: Building product teams focused on churn is a mistake
“People tend to build teams focused on churn, and I think that's a mistake. I don't think you want to focus teams on churn.”
Insight
Ely Lerner: Growth hacks are dead; growth requires finding specific leverage
“I mean, honestly, the concept of growth tactics has died to death. Like, this whole idea of growth hacks, and there's a set of growth hacks that everybody can throw on to get quick wins. Growth is not about growth hacks, right? Growth is about intentionally fi…”
Insight
Ely Lerner: Push notifications and paid marketing only work in specific niches
“Paid is oversaturated in a lot of ways. I would say, though, that they're not, these things are not dead. They're dead as broad brush tools. Paid has channel, like, has specific niches where it works well. Push notifications have specific niches where they wor…”
Insight
Lerner: Startups must focus on one or two bets to succeed
“The whole point of strategy is to say no to most things and focus in on a small number of really high leverage things. Like you have to make that bet. When you see companies with nine company level OKRs at the top level or whatever, right? They're just trying …”
Insight
Lerner: Incubating zero-to-one products in legacy orgs reduces success
“One of the things that I have seen myself and with companies that I advise is if you're trying to do true zero to one inside of a later stage company and like find your next horizon, trying to do it inside of the sort of legacy product product org vastly reduc…”
Insight
Lerner: Corporate product development accelerates learning speed via controllable distribution
“In terms of speed of learning, right, I actually think it's a fantastic sort of like, as you said, accelerant to the speed of learning in a bunch of these areas because you can turn on distribution however you want overnight when you're ready to do it.”
Opinion
Lerner: Chime is fundamentally a consumer product company, not fintech
“Chime is actually much more of a consumer product company than it is a fintech at the end of the day.”
Insight
Lerner: Incentive alignment is the most powerful lever in business
“Incentive alignment is the most powerful lever you have in a business, definitely in a marketplace.”
Insight
Lerner: Company advising grows the business; executive coaching develops the leader
“And so company level advising is really that, like, I'm helping you do your job at that highest level with the goal of Growing this company. Whereas coaching is, I'm helping you become a better version of yourself.”
Insight
Lerner: Fractional executives bridge the gap before startups justify full-time hires
“There tends to be a gap Period for most startups where they are not yet big enough. It doesn't yet make sense to hire a full head of growth, head of marketing, head of product, but it's getting big enough that it's taking too much of that founder's time, or it…”
Insight
Lerner: Match advisor hiring to playbook creation versus playbook scaling
“I think the things that matter most are one is like, did they develop the playbook or did they scale the playbook? I think you see a lot of split between somebody who scaled the playbook that was developed prior to them, or they developed the playbook from scr…”
Insight
Lerner: Performance marketing translates globally while brand and fintech stay local
“Brand people need to know that the culture of the place that they are doing branding too. Performance works pretty similarly in a lot of different places, right? And then like maybe fintech is a good example where just like the core business models and the inf…”
Disclosure
Ely Lerner uses a freemium model before formalizing startup advisory agreements
“My model is I meet as many founders as I can, and I help them as much as I can for free. And we work together. And if at some point we feel like I have capacity and there's a good fit and I'm bringing a lot of value, then we formalize the relationship.”
Insight
Lerner: Fractional executive pay should scale without equity cliffs
“Usually what you would do is you would look at what you would hire a full-time C-level in that position for, and then you would just scale it back by the fraction. So usually it's like two days a week or three days a week. Those tend to be the most common vers…”
Insight
Ely Lerner: Outcome ownership drives high-functioning engineering teams
“I think that, like, the strongest lever that you can pull to really drive high-functioning engineering teams is engineering ownership of outcomes.”
Insight
Lerner: Startups should not spend engineering resources pushing downside risk to zero
“A key aspect of defense is that there's almost always a diminishing returns curve. There's a point on that curve where you have reduced the risk of the downside to a significant amount, not to zero, because if you try, like, if you try to move the risk to zero…”
