Sri Batchu: Early growth leaders don't need prior Head of Growth titles
Sri Batchu · Sri Batchu: Biggest Growth Lesson from Instacart & Opendoor; 70% of Experiments Should Fail | E1040 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 26, 2023 · at 20:06
Sri Batchu, Head of Growth at Ramp, shares advice on candidate profiles for hiring early growth leadership.
0:00 / 0:30exact quote · 30.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 marketing or, you know, analytics and data and you can invest in somebody to try to scale into the other areas and really build out a growth function. And you're right there. It's not like the function has been around for so long that there are so many, you know people that you can hire from that are good.”
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 Sri Batchu
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…”
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…”
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…”
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 …”
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, …”
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.”