Insight
Batchu: Unstructured growth experimentation devolves into undiagnosable chaos
“In the early days of growth, you've got kind of a small ragtag team that's throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and seeing what works, right? This works for a bit but it often tends to devolve into undiagnosable chaos. If things aren't working, you have n…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Batchu: Growth experiments historically have a 30% success rate
“In my experience, and I've seen this to be pretty consistent actually across the various companies that I've worked on these types of projects growth has just a typically high failure rate. And my historical success rate that I've seen at various companies is …”
Insight
Batchu: Reserve pre-mortems for major strategy departures and high-risk investments
“So I typically think of like pre-mortems as something that feels like a big departure from current strategy or something that's a lot of investment or that you believe has a lot of high potential in terms of visibility or risk or pipeline generation. For thing…”
Insight
Sri Batchu: Early growth leaders don't need prior Head of Growth titles
“I don't think so. I think what you want to look for is people that have, you know, the T-shaped classic thing where they have like a deep spike in one area or one discipline of growth in some way. And that, whether that spike is product, some function of marke…”
Insight
Batchu: Case study interviews should avoid asymmetric information
“You either pick something that, you know, is about a third company or you pick a problem at your company that's relatively new to you that you haven't worked out yet. And give them the context to see how they think about it.”
Insight
Batchu: Candidate defensiveness during case presentations is a major red flag
“I think if you see a lot of defensiveness during the case presentation, for me, that's like a big red flag.”
Insight
Batchu: VC strategy changes fundamentally with every 5x increase in check size
“I think the strategy only works up to a certain size. And, you know, my general understanding with venture is the job is like materially different every five X or so the check size. So and it's a completely different job. What can help you win in the previous …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Batchu: Ramp team members must refuse meetings with potential competitors
“Obviously anything that could be competitive, perceived as competitive, or looks like it's down the line competitive, I don't even take the meeting and I strongly advise against anybody at the company taking meetings as well, if they're considering them.”
Insight
Batchu: Early investors must shift mindset to optimism on how startups succeed
“There's a mindset switch that you have to make, which is like, how can this succeed? And not about how it can fail. Like, it's very easy to think about all of the ways something can fail. And so the question that you have to ask yourself is like, how can this …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sri Batchu: Indiscriminate paid marketing spending is permanently dead
“Pouring, you know, money indiscriminately into paid marketing, I think is gone for two reasons. One is, of course, like the efficiency environment, and I don't think we're going to be in a completely zerp environment again. And the other reason being, I think …”
Insight
Batchu: Do not hire VP-level growth leaders for small teams
“Either too senior or too junior for the given problem that they have. Too senior being like, you know, if you've got a three person growth team, like don't hire a VP level person because you actually need somebody that can really coach people and get into the …”
Opinion
Sri Batchu: Notion built a rare, impressive community-led growth strategy
“One I'll pick is is, is Notion. I think they've done an incredible job of building a very large multi-pronged community based growth strategy, which I haven't seen a lot of companies do that. I think they're, it's very impressive.”
Assertion Supported
Sri Batchu: Instacart was more complex than Opendoor as a four-sided marketplace
“Instacart was in some ways an even more complicated business than Opendoor because it's a four sided marketplace. We have shoppers, we have buyers, we have advertisers, and we have the retailers that are on the platform as well with various different incentive…”
Disclosure
Sri Batchu: Ramp unifies paid marketing, SEO, and PLG under one team
“And at RAMP they're all under one roof which is great and have the same kind of north stars and goals.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Batchu: Ramp announces days since founding at every all-hands meeting
“And at Ramp, the other thing that we've done culturally as a company as well, is to just really drill that in, into the teams by talking about days actually. So we talk about what day it is since the founding of Ramp at every all hands, at every board meeting,…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Batchu: Instacart's growth and consumer team was over 300 people
“Instacart, the growth and consumer team was over 300 people, right?”
Disclosure
Sri Batchu: Ramp historically underinvested in field and event marketing
“A fire that we have let burn for some time is you know, we just, at, Ramp, we have not historically invested a lot in, in field and event marketing because, you know, we've got a very large TAM, and it requires us to be thoughtful about our field and event str…”
Insight
Batchu: Backed founders are an angel investor's top source of deal flow
“I think one is just how important the founders that you work with and invest in become as a source of leads for you. And I didn't fully imagine that when I started being an angel investor, I was like, oh, where am I going to find, you know, great deals to work…”
Disclosure
Batchu: Ramp tracks and scores all growth experiments monthly using Airtable
“Yeah, so we do monthly post-mortems. They're somewhat structured. We actually have a, you know, air table system where we track all of our experiments. We score them, et cetera, in terms of impact.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Batchu: Ramp operates product and non-product growth teams on two-week sprints
“We at ramp still, for example, run the growth team, whether it's product or non-product teams as well on a two week sprint cadence.”
Insight
Batchu: Involving others in problem-solving yields better results than asking for resources
“Ask for money, get advice. Ask for advice, get money twice. And to me, it's like super, super helpful framing for, like, almost any, like, difficult situation that you're dealing with, not just fundraising which is, like, the more you bring people into what yo…”
