Startups Must Centralize Growth Teams Before Decentralizing Into Product Teams
Chandra Narayanan · Chandra Narayanan: Top 5 Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook | E1126 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mar 13, 2024 · at 36:53
Chandra Narayanan, founder of Sundial and former Facebook analytics leader, advises Harry Stebbings on how startups should structure growth teams as they scale.
0:00 / 1:01exact quote · 61.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I think the answer at an earliest stage of your growth, I think they should be a standalone team. I think it's for two reasons. One is I think it's the, is for the best practices, meaning that they can learn from each other and then they can go solve problems across the company. Suddenly you separate this team and Put them into the different parts. I don't know if they'll be able to build the same culture of the noob. A lot of it is knowing how to do this really, really well. And all of this transfer, if you went from, let's say I worked on many parts of this from pages growth to games growth, to address the growth to, you know, and then when you have all of these types of growth, what ends up happening is that these sort of knowledge does translate and imagine that all this was not part of one single team and they were separated all over. I actually don't think the learnings will be there. So My feeling at the earliest stage, you should all, I mean, it should be centralized. Now, once you get a large enough team, if you get to a large enough team, I actually think that it can start to be decentralized and work, go into product teams, but I actually think that early on it should be centralized.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Chandra Narayanan
Zuckerberg Spent 80% of His Time at Facebook Outside Comfort Zone
“Mark once said in a Q and A in internal to Facebook that he said that he, and a lot of the reasons why we do that is because of how secure we are as people. And he would basically say that Something like, I don't know what exact number, but he said like, 80% o…”
Sequoia's Data Team Stopped the Firm From Making Bad Investments
“Many of this, by the way, that, that we stopped Sequoia from investing where I think they would have otherwise invested. It was so close to investment.”
Fast Hiring Dilutes Talent Density From A-Plus to A Players
“One thing, if you add more people, what happened is you, the A plus players becomes A and so on. And very fast, you need to get to grow very slowly so you can reach equilibriums very slowly and then keep The value of the entire team high. So do not hire very f…”
High Growth Rate Beats High Initial Capability Over Time Due to Compounding
“People with a slower asymptote, the faster growth is, are going to overtake. And I generally tend to invest in people over a very long period of time, but within reason, within two people, Within slope and this, I know that basically the effect of compounding …”