Darius Contractor
Chief Growth Officer, Otter.ai. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
operatorexecutiveengineerinvestor@dariusmc ↗LinkedIn ↗otter.ai ↗
Darius Contractor is an executive and growth specialist who previously served as Chief Product and Technology Officer at Vendr, VP of Growth at Airtable, and Head of Growth Engineering at Dropbox. He developed the User Psych framework and actively advises and invests in tech startups.
1shows
1appearances
19statements
1resolved
0supported
0contradicted
0%fully supported
5said about them ↓ Everything Darius Contractor said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Recent Facebook growth veterans often lack zero-to-one startup scaling experience
“Like if you were at Facebook in the last five years, you might not have learned how to do zero to one growth. You might've learned how to do a hundred to a million growth, much higher level.”
Competent VP of Growth candidates will not join pre-product-market fit startups
“That VP growth is usually not going to want to join, like, kind of an empty team, or definitely not, like, a pre-product market fit product, if they know what they're doing.”
Growth teams should sit inside the product organization under the CPO
“If you put growth outside a product, You kind of set up a potential conflict between the two. Really at the end of the day, growth is often effectively a product team. They have product people, engineers, data scientists. They work more with like the code that…”
B2B SaaS startups should not hire consumer growth experts
“I wouldn't hire like a consumer expert for like a B to B SaaS business, because it's just such a different world.”
Pinterest and Facebook possess the tech industry's best growth tracking infrastructure
“I think Pinterest has one of the best, like, systems of growth. A list of all the current growth experiments, you automatically run reports on it, etc. I think the only other company that really has that system is Facebook”
Growth teams should directly own core onboarding and monetization flows
“Ideally, growth owns the product areas, and it's not just kind of a layer on top of core products. So usually growth would have ownership over the core onboarding flow and the monetization flow and maybe the logged out pages, or those might be owned by marketi…”
Growth teams should ask for forgiveness 40% of the time
“Forgiveness, 40% of the time, and then permission 60%. So mostly you should be on board with the team, but occasionally, yeah, you want to be a little bit that loose cannon who delivers amazing results.”
High-volume A/B testing is becoming less effective for modern startups
“So I think this high volume A-B testing growth is a little less focal. Optimizing for the users on a lower volume basis is incredibly important for a lot of the successful startups today.”
Optimizing solely for top-of-funnel signups degrades downstream user quality
“So to make that real, oftentimes people will pick one metric, just like signups, and they'll pull really hard on it, like more, more, more, more signups. But then we've all seen stories of like these unintended consequences, where they're like, they make the s…”
Growth teams should use six-month macro planning cycles instead of quarters
“I'm kind of a big fan of six-month macro planning cycles, because one year is very hard to, like, plan ahead, and then one quarter is just too short to really get a tremendous amount done.”
A startup's first growth team needs one PM, two engineers, half designer
“I think the first hire, first it goes to founder, then it goes to like a small growth team. One PM, two engineers, like half a designer or something like that.”
Paid user research participants default to giving biased, pleasing feedback
“Oftentimes people are trying to look good and trying to say the right thing, partly because you're probably paying them. You're probably giving them a 50, a hundred dollar gift certificate to like participate. So they want to kind of try to make you happy. It'…”
Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are the premier tech growth talent pools
“In general, I think people at Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, a few other companies maybe, like, really do know growth. They know how to run these successive experiments. So all those companies, I think, have, like, really great growth culture where people have…”
Founders should evaluate new growth leaders at six months, not two
“I'd have different thresholds at six months and one year. I wouldn't have very strong thresholds after like one or two months. So really after one or two months, you're expecting them to get some good context and understand what the org needs and to start sett…”
Approximately 70% of growth experiments and 50% of startup investments fail
“About 70% of growth experiments fail, and people say about 50% of company investments fail.”
Hype-driven startup growth almost certainly will not last multiple years
“And the other tough thing about hype is it's often short lived as quick as a week these days, or as long as like six months, but it's almost certainly not going to be multiple years.”
Calendar invites represent an underappreciated viral growth vector in B2B SaaS
“It really is like a fundamental viral mechanism of like meeting people through calendar entries and one-to-one meetings, especially in this remote work world. So I think it's kind of under reflected on viral opportunity that's still really prescient today.”
Deep experiment tuning can double or triple product conversion rates
“I've just seen conversion rates double or triple or even more sometimes, and you can get a tremendous amount out of it.”
Pinterest evolved its North Star metric from visitors to active board creators
“And one of my favorite stories of a metric changing is from Pinterest and from Casey. They actually changed the metric to go down the funnel. Like first it was just people arriving at the site, like kind of weekly active users and then weekly active pinners an…”
The other half of the tape: Darius Contractor's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 2 episodes across the shows. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 1Guillaume Cabane 1Brian Balfour 1
Statements about Darius Contractor, by other people (2)
Balfour names Winters, Contractor, and Cabane as top growth practitioners
“Strategically would be Casey winners. The best person that has thinks about the psychological elements of growth would easily be Darius contractor. The person like a very specialty who I consider like a mad scientist is I call him G, but it's Guillaume Cabane.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 3
2023 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Darius's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Chief Growth Officer, Otter.ai | 1 | 19 | 0% 0/1 | full record on 20VC → |