Ely Lerner
Startup Advisor & Mentor, Techstars. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
operatorexecutive@elylerner ↗
Ely Lerner previously served as Head of Consumer Product at Chime and spent eight years at Yelp, including as Head of Product at Eat24. He also serves as a startup advisor and an instructor at Reforge.
1shows
1appearances
46statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Ely Lerner said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Lerner: Consolidate defensive engineering into a dedicated core experience team
“One of the things that I've seen be really effective is when you have a core experience org that owns every piece Of the defense. All of the defenses within that org and no non-defense is in that org. That really lets them prioritize apples to apples defense a…”
Lerner: Maturing growth loops transition from offensive bets to defensive maintenance
“Once it starts topping out, you still need to invest in it. Like you still need to be right. Like if it's a virality loop, like you can't just be like, okay, it's, we're starting to get lower returns. We're just going to ignore it from now on. It starts turnin…”
Lerner: Airbnb turned trust and safety into an offensive growth driver
“Airbnb is a good example, actually, where trust and safety becomes offense because like a core barrier for Airbnb is this idea that like, I mean, somebody else's home, right? Like that's a core barrier to value delivery for your product. And so that's a place …”
Lerner: Defensive engineering is as critical as offensive growth for startups
“The one thing to remember here is defense is equally important to offense, if not more important, right? Like the whole point is that these are existential. If you do not do these things, you're not going to have a company to invest in offense.”
Ely Lerner: Feature-owned engineering teams fail to drive business outcomes
“The old style was we have teams that own features, right? Which like is very nice from a, we touch this piece of the code base. Nobody else touches this piece of the code base, but isn't very good for driving business outcomes.”
Ely Lerner: Startup offensive strategy must focus on leverage points, not solutions
“Offense should not be about the solution. Your offense is not the solution. The offense is the leverage point that you are trying to move.”
Lerner: New user activation is the strongest lever for retention
“Generally new user activation and getting people to the place where they experience the core value of your product and then build a habit around that value is your strongest lever to retention, which is the thing that is going to impact your churn metric.”
Ely Lerner: Startup advisors fail when pushing playbooks without contextual fit
“When you get a kind of advisor who has done a bunch of things before, and essentially their advice is do the things I did because they worked for me. That happens a lot. And what ha what the challenge is if their situation was meaningfully different from yours…”
Lerner: Startups must cycle advisors as business problems evolve
“And as your business progresses, if you move into things that they are not as good at, you're going to pretty quickly know that you're not getting the same level of value from that relationship. And you need to start looking for somebody who is really good at …”
Lerner: Startups should ultimately integrate growth into all product teams
“So if it is, if you are a company that is at the first stage, it may well be the right step for you to go to having a separate growth org, but you should think that your end goal is to integrate growth into everything that you're doing.”
Ely Lerner: Retention compounds business growth by driving engagement and virality
“And again, this is back to the, like retention is king, right? Like retention stacks your business. Retention drives engagement, which drives virality. Like it's just all the things.”
Lerner: Optimizing overall conversion without ICP tracking wastes growth resources
“One of the biggest things I see people do wrong is they see they have a conversion problem. They point a team at conversion and they look at the conversion metric overall. The problem is a bunch of those people are not ICP and they're never going to convert an…”
Lerner: Horizontal product ICPs are defined by attributes, not personas
“Horizontal products also have an ICP. This is, I love this one. I'm going to call this out even though you didn't ask. I think it's an important one for so many people. Horizontal products have an ICP because the true ICP should be defined in terms of attribut…”
Lerner: Early horizontal startups must focus narrowly on a specific acute problem
“So you shouldn't try to be everything to everyone. You, again, actually like when you're first starting a product, the general wisdom, and this holds true for horizontal as well, is that you should probably be pretty narrow. It's just in horizontal, you're nar…”
Lerner: Growth leaders must vet founding team mindset before joining
“I'd say the most important things are understand that business. Like, is there opportunity Is there leverage to be had in the business? I think this is something like they're hiring you because they need to help to grow, but you want to figure out if they're a…”
Lerner: Early startups need data agility over perfect data
“I don't think it needs to be clean and structured, but they need to be able to iterate towards the things they need to learn. And so they need to have some data and they need to have the ability to say, hey, we need to be able to measure X because X is really …”
Lerner: Middle zone for marketplace network effect startups is empty
“You've got your Instacart, your Uber, your Lyft. They've kind of, like, gotten to where they need to be. There isn't actually very many people in that middle zone in terms of Marketplace network effects today.”
Lerner: Cashflow Portal is building AngelList for real estate investing
“I know a founder of this company called cashflow portal that is essentially building the angel list for real estate investing in a way that it's just never been done before. And I think this is a place where there are potential for network effects where there …”
Yelp sold Eat24 to Grubhub for double its acquisition price
“Now we bought a company called eat 24 is a food delivery startup. And so I kind of got dropped in to be had a product for that subsidiary helped grow that business. This wasn't our original intent, but we actually sold it to Grubhub just about two years later …”
Lerner: Startup advising spans company-level, functional, and domain expertise
“I see kind of like three top level shapes of advising today. The first one is company level advising or founder level advising, where the perspective is across the whole company, the whole business. You're really like a partner to that founder. This is the kin…”
Ely Lerner structures startup advisor compensation as 80% cash and 20% equity
“The package that I do is, let's call it, eighty-twenty cash and equity, right? And, but again, on a month-to-month basis for this hands-on advising.”
Lerner: Zero-to-one product roles force leaders to own full business outcomes
“When you start out your product career or growth career working on a more mature product, it's easy to not really see the forest for the trees, right? Like you've got a lot going on and there's a lot of things already there. You're sort of a small piece. When …”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ely's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 20VCLEDGER | Startup Advisor & Mentor, Techstars | 1 | 46 | 100% 1/1 | full record on 20VC → |