Sri Batchu
Chief Marketing Officer, The RealReal. On 3 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
operatorexecutiveinvestor@sri_batchu ↗LinkedIn ↗
Sri Batchu is a growth executive and investor who has led growth and operations at companies including Ramp, Instacart, and Opendoor. He serves as Chief Marketing Officer at The RealReal and advises early-stage startups.
3shows
4appearances
98statements
8resolved
4supported
2contradicted
50%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Sri Batchu said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Batchu: Hiring from portfolio companies is not a conflict for angels
“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…”
Batchu: Bad corporate operators can make better founders than top operators
“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…”
Sri Batchu: Angel investing consistently underperforms index funds
“It's really important to know that it's a consistently underperforming asset class. Like you will make less money doing angel investing than putting your money in an index fund or almost any other kind of equity investment by and large.”
Sri Batchu: Prominent angel investors likely have poor returns under fund-style accounting
“Angel investors often tend to like overestimate their performance because when you see people that are like great angel investors, they're very selective in their disclosure of what deals they've done right on their. LinkedIn or Twitter, they'll have like, oh,…”
Sri Batchu: Power law dynamics disincentivize VCs from helping struggling startups
“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.”
Batchu: Enterprise AI is sustaining innovation favoring incumbents with distribution
“The way we're seeing AI being incorporated into a lot of businesses is that it's more of a sustaining innovation and not a disruptive innovation, if you were to use kind of Clay Christensen's framework. In, for example, in BtoB, it hasn't become a big enough w…”
B2B growth teams should maximize treatment effects to overcome low sample sizes
“In B to B, you don't usually have the luxury of large N, which you do in consumer, right? You know, Facebook can get stats in two hours. You know, a B to B company could take two years to get to get to the same number of, you know, touch points. And so to coun…”
Batchu: An investor's operating experience has a two-to-four-year half-life
“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…”
Batchu: Lead VCs share pre-diligenced deal flow with operators, not rival funds
“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 …”
Batchu: Founders unable to get warm intros lack basic hustle
“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, …”
Sri Batchu: Companies must reward 10x operators with 10x compensation
“I strongly, strongly believe that small teams of successful people can drive a lot more impact. Than larger teams of mediocre people. And so I strongly believe you have to design a system where you're able to reward 10 X operators with 10 X the comp.”
Batchu: Winning allocations, not finding top founders, differentiates VC firms
“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, …”
Batchu: People pursue VC for status and power, not helping founders
“It's a high status job. That's why they seek it. Right. And I think it's a lot of, Extrinsic motivation and reason as to why people want to be VCs not necessarily intrinsic motivation. I think they tell themselves, oh, like I want to help founders. But I think…”
Batchu: Investing requires a new skill set at each larger check size
“Investing is it's a completely different job at roughly each half order to order of magnitude. What I mean by that is you know, writing a 25,000 dollar check is a different job than a two 50 K check versus a 2.5 versus a twenty five million versus a two fifty …”
Batchu: Top VC outperformance comes from deal selection, not founder molding
“Maybe there is something about these firms that are molding founders into better founders, and that's what's maybe generating better returns. There's maybe some component of that. I'm skeptical personally. I think if you'll permit me like an analogy, it's does…”
Batchu: Future growth leaders will increasingly come from finance and analytics
“And I think you'll see more people like me because I think increasingly growth is a discipline of making a portfolio of bets, thinking about ROI, and thinking about data and experimentation in a rigorous way, which I think my background speaks to.”
Batchu: Opendoor was consistently profitable on every cohort of home purchases
“Our overall goal was to be, and we were consistently profitable on every cohort of homes that we were buying, so our goal was, even if they were, you know, outstripping us in volume, we would be able to survive for a long period of time because our, we were un…”
Batchu: Opendoor's listed-home bidding experiment failed due to adverse selection
“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.”
Sri Batchu: Finding product-market fit is the founder's primary job
“Finding product market fit, in my opinion, is the founder's primary job. It is not something that you outsource to a growth team.”
Sri Batchu: Biz ops generalists outperform specialists in early startup growth
“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…”
Batchu: Case study interviews should be required for growth roles at all levels
“I'm a big believer in doing a little bit of homework or a case study type of thing. And it works at, I think fundamentally you should do it for all levels. People often think about it as like something that you do for potentially a more junior candidate.”
Sri Batchu: There is no inherently wrong motivation for employees
“And then I don't, I actually don't think there's necessarily a wrong motivation.”
Batchu: Excessively resourced software teams suffer a 'resource curse'
“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…”
Batchu: Ramp is pivoting growth strategy to customer segment-oriented teams
“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…”
The other half of the tape: Sri Batchu's own voice is left out of every number here. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Statements about Sri Batchu, by other people (1)
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Sri'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 Marketing Officer, The RealReal | 1 | 45 | 67% 2/3 | full record on 20VC → |
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Chief Marketing Officer, The RealReal | 2 | 36 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
 NEON SHOWLEDGER | Chief Marketing Officer, The RealReal | 1 | 17 | 33% 1/3 | full record on the Neon Show → |