Ed Baker
Former Head of Growth, Uber · Angel Investor & Growth Advisor. On 2 shows, 2 appearances, plus 2 compilation re-airs not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
Ed Baker is an angel investor and growth advisor to startups including Lime, Zwift, and Whoop. He previously served as VP of Product and Growth at Uber and Head of International Growth at Facebook.
2shows
2appearances
39statements
7resolved
6supported
0contradicted
86%fully supported
8said about them ↓ Everything Ed Baker said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Ed Baker: Uber secretly ran India test against CEO orders, doubling conversion
“We decided to run a test In Hyderabad, India, where we said, let's let riders request their first ride without putting a credit card number in. In fact, we were told by our CEO not to run that test because he felt so strongly against it, but we had so much con…”
Baker: Defying CEO to test credit-card-free signups doubled Uber's Hyderabad conversions
“We decided to run a test in Hyderabad, India, where we said, let's let riders request their first ride without putting a credit card number in. In fact, we were told by our CEO not to run that test because he felt so strongly against it, but we had so much con…”
Baker: Uber growth team pulled weekly Thursday all-nighters for Kalanick
“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.”
Baker: Very few products maintain a K-factor above 1 today
“I think very few products have K-Factors above one these days. It's just a lot harder to get things to go viral these days.”
Ed Baker: Experienced growth hires do not require elaborate onboarding setups
“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.”
Major initiatives drive more growth than hundreds of A/B tests combined
“When I look back at my time at Uber, every year we maybe had one or two things like that that accounted for more growth than everything else combined.”
Ed Baker: Startups must achieve product-market fit before hiring for growth
“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.”
Testing minor UI tweaks like button colors is a waste of time
“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…”
Ed Baker: Growth Hacking Has Become Overly Quantitative and Metric-Focused
“I think growth has become almost too quantitative and analytical, and when people talk about growth hacking, they're almost like focused too much on the metrics. For me, the most exciting part is the creative side of growth, coming up with super creative ways …”
Baker: Zodiac app tagged tens of millions in 24 hours before shutdown
“Within I think within 24 hours, we had tagged tens of millions of people in photos. I think including Zuck, and then I heard the platform team shut it down shortly after that.”
Baker: Friending Was Facebook's Number One Driver of User Retention
“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.”
Baker: Uber used a WeChat bot to onboard Chinese drivers until blocked
“One of the engineers on our China growth team built a WeChat bot. WeChat's, you know, like a mess, the messaging app, or the Facebook of, sorry, the Facebook, and also the Internet of China, really. And so we built this WeChat bot, Where, as a driver, you coul…”
Ed Baker: Growth hires who do not ask founders for help are a red flag
“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.”
Ed Baker: Retention and engagement drive growth more than acquisition as companies scale
“Basically as you get
Bigger.
Those two metrics of retention and engagement actually become a lot more important to maintaining growth than new user acquisition.”
Reframing invites as announcements enabled Facebook to surpass Mixi in Japan
“Japan went from one of our slowest growing countries to one of our fastest growing countries. Shortly after that, we surpassed our local competitor in Japan.”
Uber's rider app driver button matched all paid marketing driver signups
“By adding that little button in the rider app that said become a driver, suddenly we had as many new drivers signing up from that button as we did from all of our paid marketing efforts combined.”
Ed Baker: Facebook and Uber growth leaders reported directly to CEO
“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.”
Baker: Companies do not necessarily need standalone growth teams
“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.”
Baker: External growth leads must have prior leading-company growth experience
“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 …”
Travis Kalanick tested Ed Baker with an Uber promo card case study
“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…”
Baker: Senior executive hires require less pre-defined role scope
“I think the more senior the leader is that you're recruiting, the less defined the role needs to be.”
Ed Baker: Executive hires not asking CEOs for help is a red flag
“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.”
Ed Baker: Core Virality Frameworks Have Remained Unchanged Over Decades
“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…”
The other half of the tape: Ed Baker's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 1 episode across the shows. 3 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Adam Grenier 4Harry Stebbings 1
Statements about Ed Baker, by other people (3)
Uber Built Its Growth Team by Hiring Cross-Functional Leaders Simultaneously
“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.”
Ed Baker Imported Facebook's Growth Organizational Structure to Uber
“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.”
Elman: Airbnb's growth team expanded from 3 to over 100 people
“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…”
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20VC 5
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ed's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Angel Investor & Growth Advisor | 1 +2 | 27 | 83% 5/6 | full record on 20VC → |
 Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Former Head of Growth, Uber | 1 | 12 | 100% 1/1 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |