Ed Baker

“Uber was really the first place that we called it growth, right? I was hired by Ed Baker. He brought over the kind of Facebook structure that they had built at Facebook.”

“When we built growth at Uber, like we infused an entire team In one fell swoop, right? Like, and Ed was hired, and he hired myself, a head of product, a head of engineering, a head of design head of analytics.”

“I don't think you necessarily have to have an amazing onboarding set up for this new head of growth that you're hiring. And again, if it's an experienced person, they'll be able to figure out a lot of it on their own.”

“I'd say it's almost a red flag if the person you've just hired is not asking you for help as founder or CEO.”

“Well, so at Facebook, when I was there, the North Star metric was monthly active users.”

“Similarly at Uber, our North Star metric, in fact, one of the first things I did when I started the growth team at Uber was said to the team, we've got to come up with our North Star metric. We decided on, instead of something like monthly active riders, We sa…”

“I think you want to find product market fit before you start to work on growth. Sometimes startups will say, oh, we need to hire a growth leader in order to find product market fit. But I actually think they're two different things.”

“And in both of those cases, they had separate growth teams where the growth leader reported directly to the CEO. And these teams were structured cross-functionally.”

“There's no one right way to do it. I don't think you necessarily need a separate growth team and a separate product team, and I've seen companies that sometimes build the growth team within product.”

“I think if you're going to hire someone externally to start up a new growth team within the company, it's really important. I think that that person has had experience on a growth team at one of these leading companies so they know what they're doing. Whereas …”

“So when Travis, the CEO of Uber was interviewing me, he actually gave me a challenge problem about Uber promo cards. And he just said, we have these promo cards. We haven't really figured out exactly how we're going to use these yet. Tell me how you would make…”

“So when I think back to my onboarding experience at Uber, for example, there wasn't much to it. I was basically told by our CEO, who was my manager, here are five people for you to start the growth team with. Go.”

“I'd say it's almost a red flag if the person you've just hired is not asking you for help as founder or CEO.”

“And so we would have growth team meetings with him every Friday morning. We'd usually pull all nighters every Thursday night, preparing for our meeting with him on Friday morning.”

“One nice thing about a needle mover, it actually takes very little data to see that this is a needle mover. You need more data for the smaller Improvements. Maybe changing the color of this button, and you want to see, does that improve conversion by a fractio…”

“The basic framework of virality is the same today as it was even 20 years ago when I first started working on it, in terms of how you calculate your K-factor and how you draw out the viral loop. The framework is the same, but the channels themselves have chang…”

“Ed joined Uber to start the growth team when it was five people, and then over the three and a half years became kind of VP of both product and growth for kind of all of Uber, and Gustav joined, and the Airbnb growth team was him and two other people when he g…”

“Facebook was already at a size where retention and engagement were bigger drivers of the North Star metric MAUs than new user acquisition.”

“Most of the growth team at Facebook at the time was actually focused on friending, because we discovered at Facebook that friending was the number one driver of retention and engagement.”

“And when I was at Facebook, I think the growth team was about, around 500 people or so.”

“So, Facebook, we didn't really do very much paid acquisition, but at Uber, we had an entire performance marketing team. Well, initially it was a one-person team, but ultimately became a team where we would actually spend money to acquire both riders and driver…”

“And Japan went from like our least viral country to our most viral country. But it was literally just a copy tweak to make people more comfortable with sharing what the product they were using with their friends.”

“We also experimented with are there ways we can get potentially existing drivers or other people to, like, get on the phone with a driver and talk them through that, that first that first trip.”