Andy Johns

“As my career sort of reached its pinnacle, that from a professional, from a financial perspective, I was at my highest, but when it came to other aspects of my life, I was arguably at my lowest or close to my lowest.”

“From some of the surveys I've put out from my own anecdotal experience and from some proper research that's been conducted by experts who focus on entrepreneur and high performer wellbeing, you know, I, I'd say that it's a fair estimate to say that at least 50…”

“Suddenly I found myself in a position where I was making, you know, high six figures per year into early seven figures.”

“I became president and was next in line to be CEO before I had a health scare with my heart that led to me stepping away from the company because I knew I couldn't take on the CEO position.”

“I ended up actually spending 45 days in a mental health institute myself, and it was something that was extremely difficult to do. It was something that certainly contributed or was really the tip of the sphere of me stepping away from my career.”

“You're going to want a therapist that is at least as intelligent, if not more intelligent than you, because I think part of that openness to learning from them and to feeling somewhat comfortable, but also feeling inspired and kind of looking forward to it as …”

“It is possible for somebody to do that entirely on their own with just pen and paper and a quiet room. I know people that have arrived at a deep place of self-love and self-understanding through those methods.”

“If the goal is to understand oneself, then one of the quickest ways of doing that is to quickly write down a list of simple bullet points of The most recent situations you can think of where you became most acutely reactionary and emotional.”

“And you'll know what the truth is because it always feels either deeply uncomfortable or it feels like an epiphany.”

“When their fundamental functions, when their core behaviors of diet, exercise, playfulness, socialization, sleep, when those things get disrupted, Like it's a sign that there is something going on here that you need to take a look at. And so the same is true w…”

“I almost had a heart attack at 35 and I got the classic talk from a Stanford cardiologist saying, like, you're just going to gonna be another 40 something year old CEO with a broken heart. The years of really poor sleep, the number of teeth that I had broken t…”

“There are many other examples I can pull up like that, including Siddhartha Gautama, Lord Buddha himself. That wasn't a couple weeks or a couple of months, his journey towards liberation from his own mind. If I can recall, that was also a seven or eight year j…”

“90, 95% of the time, pretty confidently I can say that those changes are more of the micro transitions. It's okay. Let me change my job. Let me downsize my house. Let me break up with my partner. Still hard things. And for them, that may be all that is needed …”

“I would say that that is the number one reason why transformation doesn't take place is because a long time ago, we made that exchange to forego our individuality in order to be accepted by others because of that deep primal need for love and acceptance.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”