The Ledger, every show

“I think ChatGPT at this point has Like at least a 10 X difference on MAU.”

“When they started their rev share to creators was something like. 80% to creators. They started very high and that would, that brought on all the course creators, got their whole marketplace going, like so on and so forth. I believe it was about a year ago. Th…”

“Cursor is very clear, like cursor's on the path to also probably create some type of agent platform, right? For developers. So that'll be like a smaller ecosystem to play in for some products.”

“Users struggle with horizontal tools. They can do everything, and that's exactly why they Struggle to adopt. And so they typically need more specific entry points, but also the more specific use case you get, sometimes you need specific UI, specific data, like…”

“What I would expect to see play out next is that they will They will either launch, they will announce the platform or what they're going to announce with preferred partners, or what they're going to announce versus is basically a set of preferred partners, th…”

“There's multiple ways to hit that escape velocity, but this is gonna be one of, this is one of the major ways to do it, is to basically hit yourself To a new platform.”

“The better signal is retention and depth of engagement of the users on this platform. Then it is like, Pure kind of user level like Mao or some other like number of signups or, you know, one of those vanity metrics.”

“If you just accelerate one part of the system, you're just gonna move to the bottleneck to another part and your actual product output, the output of the system doesn't accelerate either.”

“Even in our hiring combos, 80 to 90% of the decision is based on Either some type of portfolio review or some type of what we call a simulation.”

“As the team grows, a lot more of the initiatives and ideas obviously come bottoms up from the organization. But oftentimes by the time it would get to me, the person would have taken an approach or all of these filters would have gotten put in place. They woul…”

“Through a lot of the macroeconomic changes, we massively flattened the org. We converted a lot of managers back into what we call Captain IC roles... We changed our entire compensation structure so that there is zero compensation trade-off, whether you just wa…”

“To make your year, it's really about the first six months and the things you accomplish in those first six months. And the reason is, is for quite a few products. Most products, this isn't true for all products, is that the buying cycle or the decision window …”

“For most SaaS products, your persona, your target customer, it's actually only in market for that once every fewish years or so. And as a result, what most people end up focusing on is just trying to capture that small sliver of those that are in market. And t…”

“It's not about being specific about who you're solving for. It's about being specific about who you aren't solving for. I've found like that is the thing that ends up being the one that helps being the better guardrail for a team.”

“Culture is really about being super opinionated and actually acknowledging this is not a place for everybody. And you've got to encode those values that actually say, this is a place for who as well as for who it's not.”

“Well, for that new thing to actually make a meaningful impact and help you drive the whole thing forward, it has to be growing at a multiple Of 50% year over year in order for it to like catch up and actually start to show up in the numbers, start to show up f…”

“Chaos is actually good for growth people, because within that chaos lives these arbitrage opportunities, these new things that nobody else has figured out, and those sparks are what give new companies and new things life and hope.”

“I made my way into growth where I would say, like, 70% of, like, the growth OGs made into growth, which was the early Facebook platform social gaming. Days. If you look at like some of the top people in growth, there's like a lineage. It's like almost like a c…”

“There's not an infinite world of growth options. It's actually it's fairly well defined and constrained, and that's something that I've, like, I've learned pretty dramatically, especially through Reforge, where I get to see inside, you know, the growth of thou…”

“When you look at a lot of the highest flying growth strategies, right, what is underneath them is what we call every forge growth loops, where other people call flywheels, but they're basically systems that work like compound interest, right? They're things th…”

“The mistake that most people look at and the reason they kill things too early is that they're looking at the output and not the inputs and seeing like how those things are improving.”

“Very commonly with the product we were talking about, Loom, which is like a horizontal product the constraint is activation, and the reason the constraint is activation is that the biggest strength of horizontal products is also its biggest weakness, is that i…”

“You can't use viral loops for a product that you're charging 10,000 dollars up front for. It just doesn't work when you do the math.”

“Like awareness and these other pieces, but that alone is not going to drive customers for an enterprise product. And even if you were doing it, if you looked at the overall mix of like, you know, at scale of what's driving customers, it's going to be a pretty …”

“I can try, I can do a bunch of these, I can do a bunch of these things, but it's actually pulling attention away in the early days from actually understanding and getting that, that core machine working.”

“They have not missed a earnings since they went public, which was like eight years ago. I don't know if most people that they have never missed in earnings, the perfect record as far as I know.”

“And look, we made this mistake at reforge with one of our new product bets. And last year I had to kill it, fully reset it, handpick a team of three people and we re and go forward with it.”

“Honestly, with limited time, limited resources, like, you gotta kill it, right? Because what you're doing is you're stealing time and attention away from finding that core machine that does contribute. You're focused on the icing, not the cake, and you need to…”

“Your metrics are there to help answer the question, is your strategy working? Right. And so they are not there to determine your strategy.”

“Usage is what creates revenue. Revenue does not create usage, right? So you have to understand the usage of your product first.”

“I think the surface level tactics and systems will definitely change a lot. So I would say like a lot of these analyses that, you know, seven years ago, eight years ago were sort of leading edge things like Finding what your habit and aha moment are, for examp…”

“We transitioned from a transactional to a subscription model, a membership model, and that had huge growth initially like just massive growth. And that kind of put the blinders on us to whether or not we were also doing the things to make a subscription produc…”

“Like in some parts of the world, like WhatsApp, for example, is just a massive growth factor for folks. I've looked at companies that are like complete, their entire growth strategy is on WhatsApp. So like that, that type of direct messaging, I think still, st…”

“Look, just taking something as taking something as simple as like importing somebody's address book, as an example, that doesn't really work anymore because the There's been so much misuse of that, that people are skeptical and fatigue and like all that kind o…”

“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.”

“Growth does not mean one thing. As we've talked through, you have to understand the different types of growth systems out there, the ones that work with what types of businesses, and then how do you map talent metrics in other things to those systems. And so I…”

“So I think this is a little topic du jour, but I think you got to go Facebook for a few reasons. One is that they still have the OG growth talent that, that they did from. 15 years ago Javier, Alex Schultz, right? Like those people are still There, right? Like…”

“Yeah, I chose, they're flat. I think Twitter's flat, two fifty million.”

“And so at the time they launched their platform, I think they were maybe like one fourth, one fifth the size of, you know, something like my space or even friends or orchid, like some of these are some of the names.”

“When we went from one product to multi product at HubSpot, we seeded multiple bets at once. And only like a couple of them ended up making it through the filter, which ended up being the CRM and the sales tool as part of that. And then there was projects we en…”

“We got to, I don't remember, it was like maybe like a 100,000 weekly active users or something, and then we looked at the user base, and there was a huge mismatch between the types of used, a lot of the types of users that were being, that were showing up in t…”

“Like HubSpot, we had a customer, but we had multiple users on that, like customers account and to understand how to move, grow the business and how to grow the product. It actually wasn't about a usage metric at the customer level. It was about a usage metric …”

“It's either due to a change in the distribution channel due or due to like some form of user, user fatigue.”