Sri Batchu, Head of Growth at Ramp, explains why growth leadership is shifting toward quantitative, finance, and experimentation disciplines.
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, …”
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…”