Insight certainty 3/5 debate potential 3/5

Candidates Refusing Case Studies Lack Early-Stage Startup Execution Mindset

Andy Johns · 20Growth: Top Growth Lessons from the Early Facebook, Twitter and Quora Days, The Most Important Question to Ask When Building Your Growth Team, How To Test For True Candidate Depth and Quality When Hiring for Growth with Andy Johns, Venture Partner @ Unu · Nov 17, 2021 · at 20:47

Andy Johns, former growth executive at Facebook and Wealthfront, advises startup founders on how to screen executive candidates who resist interview case studies.

0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.6s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So I think if somebody's unwilling to do a case study, you probably have somebody who wants to be running growth at a large established business like Airbnb, and they just want to come over and take over a team of 50 or a hundred people and not be at that level of execution.”

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 Andy Johns

Insight
Breakout Growth Comes From Major Product Initiatives, Not A/B Testing
“I have yet to come across a company that has been a big breakout that's progressed from, say, Series B, C, D, E, And go on to these massive growth rounds, predominantly on the back of baby testing. I've never seen it. I see it happen when the startup takes thr…”
Andy Johns Nov 17, 2021 ▶ 35:03 20Growth: Top Growth Lessons from the Early Facebook, Twitter and Quora Days, The Most Important Question to Ask When Building Your Growth Team, How To Test For True Candidate Depth and Quality When Hiring for Growth with Andy Johns, Venture Partner @ Unu
Insight
Andy Johns: Startups over-rely on growth optimization over product innovation
“A company quickly assumes that the answer to more growth is an optimization-based approach where they start running a bunch of experiments and looking at data, A-B testing their way towards the future, and it overwhelms the company's ability to then start taki…”
Andy Johns Mar 25, 2022 ▶ 11:46 20VC The Memo: Inside the Growth Engines of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Instacart with the Growth Leaders Who Built Them; How Instagram Went from 440M to 1BN, How Twitter Changing Their Signup Flow was a Needlemover and How Removing Card Payment Requ
Insight
Andy Johns: Do not hire growth roles before product-market fit
“I wouldn't even consider hiring a head of growth or building a growth team until you have a clear indicator of product market fit, which is some amount of exponential organic growth.”
Andy Johns Nov 25, 2022 ▶ 19:59 20VC: When to Make Your First Growth Hire? Senior or Junior? How To Onboard Them? How To Monitor Their Progress? from Growth Leaders @ Facebook, Instagram, Lyft, Instacart, Miro and more
Disclosure
Wealthfront Shut Down Its Growth Team to Focus on New Products
“And so eventually what we did at the Wealthfront in the early days of Wealthfront is I was the VP of growth, but at one point we said, you know what, the best thing for our business at this point is to shut down growth. And in its wake, Replace it with another…”
Andy Johns Nov 17, 2021 ▶ 16:07 20Growth: Top Growth Lessons from the Early Facebook, Twitter and Quora Days, The Most Important Question to Ask When Building Your Growth Team, How To Test For True Candidate Depth and Quality When Hiring for Growth with Andy Johns, Venture Partner @ Unu
Insight
Growth Is Market, Product, Delight, and Acquisition Multiplied
“My preferred starting point, if I go into any company, is I like to begin with this background of assessing market times core product value times moments of delight times ability to acquire customers.”
Andy Johns Nov 17, 2021 ▶ 22:15 20Growth: Top Growth Lessons from the Early Facebook, Twitter and Quora Days, The Most Important Question to Ask When Building Your Growth Team, How To Test For True Candidate Depth and Quality When Hiring for Growth with Andy Johns, Venture Partner @ Unu
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Twitter Auto-Generated Username Test Increased Weekly Signups by 70,000
“And what ended up happening is we started to get 70,000 more signups per week because the solution we implemented was a good enough solution to work. And at the time that meant like, gosh, 20, 30% more signups per week, just from a small team of four people im…”
Andy Johns Nov 17, 2021 ▶ 32:52 20Growth: Top Growth Lessons from the Early Facebook, Twitter and Quora Days, The Most Important Question to Ask When Building Your Growth Team, How To Test For True Candidate Depth and Quality When Hiring for Growth with Andy Johns, Venture Partner @ Unu
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.