Gokul Rajaram

Founding Partner, Marathon Management Partners · 1 appearance on the record.

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investoroperatorexecutive@gokulr ↗LinkedIn ↗

He built Google's AdSense product and served as Product Director of Ads at Facebook before taking executive leadership roles at Block and DoorDash. A prolific angel investor and venture capitalist, he serves on the boards of Coinbase, Pinterest, and The Trade Desk.

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5 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. none of them is a claim the record can settle: opinions, insights and disclosures never carry an assessment.

What they said6 Episodes1

Everything Gokul Rajaram said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

Founders often fail to articulate a clear product strategy

“Turns out that many cases, founders or CEOs, they've never actually articulated a clear product strategy.”

Gokul Rajaram Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:22 a16z Podcast | How Founders Hire a VP of Product

Insight

Pre-product-market fit startups should not hire product leaders

“Pre-PMF, a product market fit, at which point you don't hire any leaders, it's just you, your co-founder, and then a bunch of builders.”

Gokul Rajaram Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:50 a16z Podcast | How Founders Hire a VP of Product

Insight

Every employee and senior leader must act as a data analyst

“Every single person in the company needs to be an analyst for a company to work effectively. This includes every senior leader of the company.”

Gokul Rajaram Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 8:09 a16z Podcast | How Founders Hire a VP of Product

Insight

New executives have a 60-day window to make organizational changes

“You have 60 days to make org changes. After 60 days, you become an insider. It's very hard to make org changes.”

Gokul Rajaram Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 14:36 a16z Podcast | How Founders Hire a VP of Product

Insight

Startups need their first product leadership at 23 to 30 engineers

“About 23 to 30 engineers is when you see the first evolution of leadership in the product function, because, A, there's enough engineers that there's many different things that you could organize them in many different ways, so there's need for more explicit s…”

Gokul Rajaram Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:22 a16z Podcast | How Founders Hire a VP of Product

Disclosure

Gokul Rajaram spent five hours with Square's CEO before interviewing

“I spent essentially five hours before I even agreed to interview at Square with our CEO, just getting to know him and understanding what his vision is for the company, what he cares about, what he doesn't, what his philosophy is, how he works, because you can …”

Gokul Rajaram Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 25:19 a16z Podcast | How Founders Hire a VP of Product

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
a16z Podcast \| How Founders Hire a VP of Product	Jan 2, 2019	8m

Gokul Rajaram

Appearances (1)

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