Reforge

“When you go to the leaders in Slack and LinkedIn at those times, they will tell you they will not, they were not implementing growth loops. They didn't know what a growth loop was. They were trying to find creative ways to get other users and other people to c…”

“It's like the leader of that doesn't have P and L you're not a startup within a big company. Right. I think that is the important piece, which is like, you need to fund this as an independent unit that is looking at a business line holistically and is autonomo…”

“Even in our hiring combos, 80 to 90% of the decision is based on Either some type of portfolio review or some type of what we call a simulation.”

“As the team grows, a lot more of the initiatives and ideas obviously come bottoms up from the organization. But oftentimes by the time it would get to me, the person would have taken an approach or all of these filters would have gotten put in place. They woul…”

“Through a lot of the macroeconomic changes, we massively flattened the org. We converted a lot of managers back into what we call Captain IC roles... We changed our entire compensation structure so that there is zero compensation trade-off, whether you just wa…”

“All of this AI tooling is going to give these like super ICs, these captain level ICs, even more leverage in solving problems and their creation abilities as part of that. And so I think in the future, what we're going to see, and I'm not the first one to say …”

“If you want to gain traction around something, you often should be looking at what everybody is doing, and then try, and the purpose of looking at what everybody is doing is not to necessarily understand Those best practices so that you can repeat them. Your g…”

“I actually think most of the meat that is actionable, that helps you define not only what to build from a product perspective, but how your growth motion and growth model should work is actually defined in the use case that you're going after and the different…”

“It's not about being specific about who you're solving for. It's about being specific about who you aren't solving for. I've found like that is the thing that ends up being the one that helps being the better guardrail for a team.”

“Culture is really about being super opinionated and actually acknowledging this is not a place for everybody. And you've got to encode those values that actually say, this is a place for who as well as for who it's not.”

“That's their first mistake. Yeah. I mean, I would have just not raised money.”

“Chaos is actually good for growth people, because within that chaos lives these arbitrage opportunities, these new things that nobody else has figured out, and those sparks are what give new companies and new things life and hope.”

“There's not an infinite world of growth options. It's actually it's fairly well defined and constrained, and that's something that I've, like, I've learned pretty dramatically, especially through Reforge, where I get to see inside, you know, the growth of thou…”

“When you look at a lot of the highest flying growth strategies, right, what is underneath them is what we call every forge growth loops, where other people call flywheels, but they're basically systems that work like compound interest, right? They're things th…”

“Once you figure out kind of that core, that thing that's working, it's almost always in a venture scale company, the better thing to do Is to focus your firepower, your limited attention, your limited capital, your limited talent on fueling that thing as fast …”

“I think the tendency is to actually think something is going to saturate much more quickly than it actually does.”

“And look, we made this mistake at reforge with one of our new product bets. And last year I had to kill it, fully reset it, handpick a team of three people and we re and go forward with it.”

“Growth boils down to four things, which is you find an arbitrage opportunity. You use that to spark some type of compounding system, some type of growth loop. You optimize the crap out of that system, and then you repeat that, but don't wait too late, right? L…”

“We transitioned from a transactional to a subscription model, a membership model, and that had huge growth initially like just massive growth. And that kind of put the blinders on us to whether or not we were also doing the things to make a subscription produc…”

“I believe we are at just around a 150 total employees across the whole company right now. That doesn't include our executives and residents, subject matter experts, and the partners we work with. That's full-time employees working on the business.”

“Of our executives in residence, I would say most Now we're exploring this kind of like advisory, fractional, or otherwise portfolio-based approach to their futures. Whereas most of them came from full-time roles beforehand.”