Opinion
Batchu: Hiring from portfolio companies is not a conflict for angels
“I, I'm pretty ruthless about that. I think that there's absolutely no conflict. I think it's extremely anti-competitive from a labor market perspective for you to think that I won't hire the best people from your company. And so you, it's your job to retain yo…”
Insight
Batchu: Bad corporate operators can make better founders than top operators
“And I think what's actually interesting is there's some operators that are very good at their operating job that I think would be worse founders than some bad operators. Right. And I've like found this. So let me explain that a little bit further. There are pe…”
Insight
Batchu: An investor's operating experience has a two-to-four-year half-life
“There's also this notion of, like, a half-life to operating experience. Something like two to four years, which is, like, You know, every whatever X number of years you're away from operating and become a specialized or full-time investor, your ability to real…”
Disclosure
Batchu: Lead VCs share pre-diligenced deal flow with operators, not rival funds
“So I get deal flow from other investors all the time, especially ones that are like, you know, if Sequoia or craft or whoever are like, you know, we're leading this round. We're really excited about it. Do you want to be a part of it? That's great. Like a lot …”
Insight
Batchu: Founders unable to get warm intros lack basic hustle
“My theory is if you can't even succeed in getting a warm intro, how are you going to hustle and building a company? I only take conversations that are very high reputation, warm intros, where the person is, like, typically, like, already spoken to the person, …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Batchu: Future growth leaders will increasingly come from finance and analytics
“And I think you'll see more people like me because I think increasingly growth is a discipline of making a portfolio of bets, thinking about ROI, and thinking about data and experimentation in a rigorous way, which I think my background speaks to.”
Assertion Partly supported
Batchu: Opendoor was consistently profitable on every cohort of home purchases
“Our overall goal was to be, and we were consistently profitable on every cohort of homes that we were buying, so our goal was, even if they were, you know, outstripping us in volume, we would be able to survive for a long period of time because our, we were un…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Batchu: Opendoor's listed-home bidding experiment failed due to adverse selection
“These homes, you know, we did this program for a few months, and we learned that they were tremendously unprofitable for Opendoor because of the adverse selection element and we had to shut down the program.”
Insight
Sri Batchu: Finding product-market fit is the founder's primary job
“Finding product market fit, in my opinion, is the founder's primary job. It is not something that you outsource to a growth team.”
Insight
Sri Batchu: Biz ops generalists outperform specialists in early startup growth
“The early days of growth can be managed by In my opinion, a lot of different types of people. I actually really liked the biz ops profile for the early days until you're like ready to really put some gas on the fire and, you know, hire a VP. But I think what's…”
Insight
Batchu: Case study interviews should be required for growth roles at all levels
“I'm a big believer in doing a little bit of homework or a case study type of thing. And it works at, I think fundamentally you should do it for all levels. People often think about it as like something that you do for potentially a more junior candidate.”
Opinion
Sri Batchu: There is no inherently wrong motivation for employees
“And then I don't, I actually don't think there's necessarily a wrong motivation.”
Insight
Batchu: Excessively resourced software teams suffer a 'resource curse'
“I think teams get materially slower as they get bigger. It's really like the equivalent of a resource curse for companies rather than countries, right? When you have too many resources, you get bad at prioritizing and you get bad at accountability, and you act…”
Disclosure
Batchu: Ramp is pivoting growth strategy to customer segment-oriented teams
“The big short-term pain that we're taking is We're moving towards a larger company segment-oriented strategy, where we have cross-functional teams that are going after a customer segment and, you know, budgeting, goaling, everything based on this segment, whic…”
Opinion
Sri Batchu: Active operators have a key edge over professional VCs
“I think operators have a distinct advantage especially with their smaller checks in earlier stages, across all four of those than a lot of professional investors.”
Opinion
Batchu: Tech employees should be allowed side projects if job performance stays high
“As I mentioned before, I think as long as you're not, you know, distracted during work hours and getting your day job done, I think what you do outside of work is, is your prerogative.”
Insight
Batchu: Context switching through angel investing sharpens operator intuition
“I tend to find that the context switching and learning about different spaces actually builds more intuition and creativity for ideas. So I think in, in moderation, I actually think it's a good idea to do that.”
Insight
Batchu: Founding teams should split storytelling and execution roles
“I've definitely seen people that can do both, but it's rare that people can wear both hats. So I often tend to like founding teams where one person is the storyteller and the other person is like the, you know, operator and executor.”
Insight
Sri Batchu: Cold outbound email remains an effective growth tactic
“I think cold outbound and email still works surprisingly well, despite all of the changes in that space.”
Insight
Batchu: Leaders must intentionally allow lower-priority problems to go unaddressed
“You have to let some fires burn. If you think you have to fight every fire on your team, you're going to burn yourself out. So you just have to realize that, like, some things are just not going to be worked on for a bit, and they're going to be broken, and be…”
Assertion Supported
Batchu: Opendoor never price-matched or negotiated with home sellers
“We never did a price match and we never negotiated on price with sellers of homes.”
Insight
Sri Batchu: The best executives reject distracting initiatives regardless of impact
“Simplification is a superpower, and it's actually very difficult and a lot of executives, you know, when they're faced with two potentially high-impact initiatives, are often tempted to say, let's do both. Let's figure out how we can do both. The good ones can…”
Insight
Sri Batchu: Growth functions should only be built post-product-market fit
“Personally, to me, a growth function is something that you build post product market fit and is the home for all high volume data and experimentation oriented customer acquisition, retention, engagement strategies.”
Insight
Batchu: Dollars of SQL pipeline is the ideal B2B growth metric
“So typically for B to B you know, where I land at is like dollars of like SQL pipeline. Which kind of controls for that quality element and controls for the size of the lead element as an art.”
