Sri Batchu

“Spearheading ramps, journey to 300 milliliter is the fastest company, I think to that milestone.”

“It turns out that that's not the most differentiating element for investors. Like, you know, because of the parallel dynamics of the portfolio of VC investment, you just have to have a handful of really good companies. Right. And there's the founders, the 10, …”

“Because of the power law dynamic, unless you're A winner, a clear winner. They're actually not incentivized to work with you, which is the irony is like, okay, the person that needs the most help, they're least incentivized to help.”

“I I've usually found, and this is consistent. If you talk to a lot of founders with that regularly use angels is the operators that are kind of more mid career actually are the ones that are most helpful to you on your cap table.”

“You have to let some fires burn. If you think you have to fight every fire on your team, you're going to burn yourself out. So you just have to realize that, like, some things are just not going to be worked on for a bit, and they're going to be broken, and be…”

“Instacart was in some ways an even more complicated business than Opendoor because it's a four sided marketplace. We have shoppers, we have buyers, we have advertisers, and we have the retailers that are on the platform as well with various different incentive…”

“Simplification is a superpower, and it's actually very difficult and a lot of executives, you know, when they're faced with two potentially high-impact initiatives, are often tempted to say, let's do both. Let's figure out how we can do both. The good ones can…”

“Personally, to me, a growth function is something that you build post product market fit and is the home for all high volume data and experimentation oriented customer acquisition, retention, engagement strategies.”

“In my experience, and I've seen this to be pretty consistent actually across the various companies that I've worked on these types of projects growth has just a typically high failure rate. And my historical success rate that I've seen at various companies is …”

“These homes, you know, we did this program for a few months, and we learned that they were tremendously unprofitable for Opendoor because of the adverse selection element and we had to shut down the program.”

“So I typically think of like pre-mortems as something that feels like a big departure from current strategy or something that's a lot of investment or that you believe has a lot of high potential in terms of visibility or risk or pipeline generation. For thing…”

“Finding product market fit, in my opinion, is the founder's primary job. It is not something that you outsource to a growth team.”

“The early days of growth can be managed by In my opinion, a lot of different types of people. I actually really liked the biz ops profile for the early days until you're like ready to really put some gas on the fire and, you know, hire a VP. But I think what's…”

“I don't think so. I think what you want to look for is people that have, you know, the T-shaped classic thing where they have like a deep spike in one area or one discipline of growth in some way. And that, whether that spike is product, some function of marke…”

“And then I don't, I actually don't think there's necessarily a wrong motivation.”

“I think teams get materially slower as they get bigger. It's really like the equivalent of a resource curse for companies rather than countries, right? When you have too many resources, you get bad at prioritizing and you get bad at accountability, and you act…”

“A fire that we have let burn for some time is you know, we just, at, Ramp, we have not historically invested a lot in, in field and event marketing because, you know, we've got a very large TAM, and it requires us to be thoughtful about our field and event str…”

“The big short-term pain that we're taking is We're moving towards a larger company segment-oriented strategy, where we have cross-functional teams that are going after a customer segment and, you know, budgeting, goaling, everything based on this segment, whic…”

“I think operators have a distinct advantage especially with their smaller checks in earlier stages, across all four of those than a lot of professional investors.”

“There's also this notion of, like, a half-life to operating experience. Something like two to four years, which is, like, You know, every whatever X number of years you're away from operating and become a specialized or full-time investor, your ability to real…”

“So I get deal flow from other investors all the time, especially ones that are like, you know, if Sequoia or craft or whoever are like, you know, we're leading this round. We're really excited about it. Do you want to be a part of it? That's great. Like a lot …”

“I think the strategy only works up to a certain size. And, you know, my general understanding with venture is the job is like materially different every five X or so the check size. So and it's a completely different job. What can help you win in the previous …”

“My theory is if you can't even succeed in getting a warm intro, how are you going to hustle and building a company? I only take conversations that are very high reputation, warm intros, where the person is, like, typically, like, already spoken to the person, …”

“As I mentioned before, I think as long as you're not, you know, distracted during work hours and getting your day job done, I think what you do outside of work is, is your prerogative.”

“I tend to find that the context switching and learning about different spaces actually builds more intuition and creativity for ideas. So I think in, in moderation, I actually think it's a good idea to do that.”

“Obviously anything that could be competitive, perceived as competitive, or looks like it's down the line competitive, I don't even take the meeting and I strongly advise against anybody at the company taking meetings as well, if they're considering them.”

“I, I'm pretty ruthless about that. I think that there's absolutely no conflict. I think it's extremely anti-competitive from a labor market perspective for you to think that I won't hire the best people from your company. And so you, it's your job to retain yo…”

“I think one is just how important the founders that you work with and invest in become as a source of leads for you. And I didn't fully imagine that when I started being an angel investor, I was like, oh, where am I going to find, you know, great deals to work…”

“And I think what's actually interesting is there's some operators that are very good at their operating job that I think would be worse founders than some bad operators. Right. And I've like found this. So let me explain that a little bit further. There are pe…”

“I've definitely seen people that can do both, but it's rare that people can wear both hats. So I often tend to like founding teams where one person is the storyteller and the other person is like the, you know, operator and executor.”

“There's a mindset switch that you have to make, which is like, how can this succeed? And not about how it can fail. Like, it's very easy to think about all of the ways something can fail. And so the question that you have to ask yourself is like, how can this …”

“Either too senior or too junior for the given problem that they have. Too senior being like, you know, if you've got a three person growth team, like don't hire a VP level person because you actually need somebody that can really coach people and get into the …”

“Yeah, so we do monthly post-mortems. They're somewhat structured. We actually have a, you know, air table system where we track all of our experiments. We score them, et cetera, in terms of impact.”

“Ask for money, get advice. Ask for advice, get money twice. And to me, it's like super, super helpful framing for, like, almost any, like, difficult situation that you're dealing with, not just fundraising which is, like, the more you bring people into what yo…”

“One I'll pick is is, is Notion. I think they've done an incredible job of building a very large multi-pronged community based growth strategy, which I haven't seen a lot of companies do that. I think they're, it's very impressive.”

“Having said all of that, what's interesting is that the vast majority of our growth back then, and even to this day is via new customer acquisition.”

“We actually have a growth engineering team that's dedicated to supporting that that efficiency, but including, you know, adjusting third party data and using AI to automate much of their workflow, et cetera. We've been doing this Well before AI has become, you…”

“Cause in many ways you ship your calendar. And so thinking about how are you spending your time and blocking your time?”

“Like one thing that's kind of interesting about the world of growth today is I think historically people that used to run growth were folks that had a marketing or kind of a product background. And what you're seeing these days, I think are more folks like me …”

“Revenue is for better or worse, more important for the company, but also much further down the, you know, line whether or not the growth team can impact that.”

“In the recent past, it was for the growth team, the North star was dollars of SQL pipeline. So anything, anybody did, we would try to estimate the impact into what would be the dollars of you know, sales qualified lead pipeline generated for RAM.”

“The reason we don't allow personal emails is because it's just typically very low intent users that are coming to the website that are putting in personal emails.”

“Finding the right success metric is that there's usually should be two. There should be one on volume and another one on efficiency”

“And at ramp for our activation, we've got like, I mean, it's like very specific to ramp, but we've got like four events that the customer needs to do in the first 30 days. And if they do that, they have a high likelihood of being activated and successful. So o…”

“The way I think about the growth team's journey is, like, step one is, like, build a system that can move fast, And then like work on improving the quality and then work on, you know, optimization of costs after. So similarly, you pick which phase you're on be…”

“When you focus on CAC and reducing CAC, what tends to happen is you actually might be doing something very damaging where you're succeeding in reducing CAC, but you're actually bringing in customers that are less valuable because those are the ones that you're…”

“My view is you start off with like founder led sales, like the early team needs to know how to actually sell. Then you hire your first couple of salespeople and you start some very kind of low cost targeted marketing efforts. So when there's like content commu…”

“Growth experiments in my history are typically, like, 30 percent-ish success rate. So the vast majority of things that you try don't work.”

“At the end of the day, there's only two, two ways to, you know, make an experiment successful. Either you have a very large N or you have a very significant treatment, which is like, you know, what you're doing in the experiment itself. And, you know, in B to …”

“You typically want to limit it to companies that are one to two stages of growth after you. So you want somebody that has seen, you know, your stage of growth and beyond at a company that has a reputation for craft in the field that you're looking for.”

“If you're looking for great email marketing folks, like CRM marketing lead or something like that, you can actually look up on similar web, like what percentage of traffic shows up via email to company's websites. So you've got your target list of companies th…”

“A lot of people actually struggle with that question and can't answer anything that they do that they're bad at which is a little bit of a yellow flag, which means that they're only used to doing things that they're successful at, and they haven't cultivated i…”