Elena Verna: Founders should hire growth settlers first, not Heads of Growth
Elena Verna · 20 Growth: The 3 Levers to Successful Growth Models, The 3 Types of Growth Hires Startups Need To Know, The 3 Stages All Successful Growth Teams Need To Go Through with Elena Verna, Advisor @ MongoDB and HP · Oct 28, 2021 · at 18:01
Elena Verna, growth executive and advisor at MongoDB and HP, discusses startup growth team hiring models with 20 Growth host Harry Stebbings.
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“I believe, for example, that it's founders responsibility to come up with original hypothesis for growth model. And then everybody immediately goes into, I need to hire head of growth. Wrong. Because you need to hire a settler. You need to hire a settler that's going to go and prove out whether your hypothesis is correct or not by actually implementing that growth model and exploiting it.”
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More from Elena Verna
Verna: Paid marketing in year one is a death trap for founders
“For any founder in the first year, investing in paid as the means of growth is a death trap.”
Verna: Startups under five years old cannot accurately calculate their LTV
“Unless you've been in the business for five years plus, You do not know your LTV. Period.”
Verna: Paid marketing is the most expensive and defenseless growth path
“Paid marketing to me is Is a cheap way out, and it's not competitively defensible. I should say cheap. It's actually the most expensive way out, and it's not competitively defensible at all, and it's not sustainable.”
Verna: Meta ads deliver very little incremental growth for startups
“Meta... Just very little incrementality. Just a bunch of pass through views that don't materialize into anything.”