The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 20 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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: 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…”
Candidates Refusing Case Studies Lack Early-Stage Startup Execution Mindset
“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 leve…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
Viral Invite Flows Rarely Work Outside Novel Network-Effect Products
“Everyone trying to have this perfectly viral invitation flow that so rarely actually works, and it usually only works with network effects businesses that have a novel, fascinating product. Everything else, it just doesn't work, so thankfully that's dying.”
Andy Johns: First growth hire must bridge product and technical skills
“You don't want the person to be so senior that they're just thinking about Strategy and orchestrating, you know, a large team. You don't want to hire the person who's a nation builder who just wants to come in and hire lots of folks. I think that first hire fr…”
Johns: Auto-generating usernames increased Twitter signups by 20% to 30% weekly
“And at the time, that meant, gosh, 20, 30% more signups per week, just from a small team of four people implementing a really hacky solution.”
Chamath Palihapitiya Hired Andy Johns at Facebook Despite Being "Least Qualified"
“I was told I was the least qualified profile of everyone that had applied for this position, but that he appreciated the scrappy approach that I took to getting my career started.”
Growth Teams Function Like Finance for User Flow, Says Andy Johns
“I think of growth like One may think about finance at a startup. And what I mean is finance as a startup is responsible for measuring the flow of capital in and out of the business and hopefully contributing ideas to optimizing the flow of that capital, earnin…”
Growth Teams Matter Far More in Network Effects Businesses
“I think the most important distinction that a startup has to make as it relates to this question, and really any growth-related question, is are we a network effects business, or are we not a network effects business? And the reason why I think that is critica…”
Startups Should Delay Growth Hires Until Post-Product-Market Fit
“I wouldn't even consider hiring ahead 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.”
Drilling Into Low-Level Project Details Exposes Pretenders in Growth Hiring
“One of the easiest tools to test for depth is to ask them to point out a couple examples in which a growth project or a growth experiment was run at One of the prior companies that was successful and then spend the entire interview just drilling in on every fa…”
Executive Hiring Risk Is Picking Division Optimizers Over Business Optimizers
“I think the great risk is you get an executive who comes in who's willing to optimize their division because it makes them look good over optimizing the results for the business as a whole.”
High-Impact Growth Teams Inherently Cause Territorial Friction With Product Owners
“The stay off my lawn thing is a distinct characteristic of a growth team that has huge impact within a network effects business.”
Fast Growth Experimentation Clashes With Traditional Software Engineering Standards
“Yeah, and it gets to a fundamental question around the DNA of the engineering team and of the specific engineers, because growth by its nature is about experimentation. And so often you're writing throwaway code, something that isn't really like robust and pro…”
Early-Stage Growth Teams Should Value Correlation Over Causality
“The guidance that I generally give, especially for the early stage startups, is move fast, be comfortable with correlation, because correlation just provides Quality hypotheses, and that's all you care about at that point. You're not looking for something that…”