When to invest in new acquisition channels | Adam Grenier (Uber, MasterClass)

Adam Grenier is the former Head of Growth Marketing and Innovation at Uber, where he helped build Uber’s growth infrastructure from the ground up. He is also the former VP of Product and Marketing at Lambda School, and former VP of Marketing at MasterClass. These days, Adam is a growth and marketing advisor to many companies, as well as a teacher through Reforge. In today’s episode, Adam shares how to determine whether a new channel is worth exploring, the rise of the growth CMO, and how improv classes can improve team bonding and create a more positive, “yes” culture. He also speaks candidly about his own struggles with burnout and depression and shares some incredible tools that have helped him along the way. Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/when-to-invest-in-new-acquisition — Where to find Adam Grenier: • Twitter: https://twitter.com/AKGrenier • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akgrenier/ — Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ — Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible: • Whimsical: https://whimsical.com/lenny • Coda: http://coda.io/lenny • Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/ — Referenced: • OOT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-top_media_service • Grin: https://grin.co/ • Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers: https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-Marketing-High-Tech-Mainstream/dp/0060517123 •Hacking Marketing: Agile Practices to Make Marketing Smarter, Faster, and More Innovative: https://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Marketing-Practices-Smarter-Innovative/dp/1119183170 • Adam’s twitter thread about burnout: https://twitter.com/akgrenier/status/1285275433282359296 •Why Buddhism is True: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Buddhism-True-Philosophy-Enlightenment/dp/1439195455 — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Adam’s background (05:34) How improv can improve creativity and collaboration (13:09) What we’ll cover in this episode (13:52) Determining when an acquisition channel is a good match (25:38) Advice for how long to test a new channel (30:11) Emerging platforms that are worth exploring (36:53) Influencer marketing tools (37:55) When to broaden your audience (41:22) What is a Growth CMO? (49:36) Why marketing leaders should learn product development (51:32) Red flags that your CMO isn’t a good fit (55:33) Dealing with depression and burnout (1:03:00) Tools to help you through difficult times (1:05:20) Signs you’re facing burnout (1:07:15) What’s next for Adam — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  One of the biggest pieces of advice I'm giving to people that are like, how should we adjust our marketing with the economic changes and things like that is like, start by assuming you no longer have product market fit.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Because you had product market fit in a different market. It's a different market now, so you have to start over. And hopefully you do, or it's pretty close to it and you just have to adjust a couple of things. And you can be right back on track, but like if you just assume like you need to launch a new channel to fix this problem, like you're gonna be wrong. Because like your entire customer base changed, not just the next 10% of customers that you're looking for.

• 0:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  Welcome to Lenny's podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Adam Grenier. Adam was head of growth, marketing and innovation at Uber, where he basically built their growth marketing infrastructure and the team from the ground up. Then he went on to VP of Product and Marketing at Lambda School. And most recently, he was VP of Marketing at MasterClass. These days, Adam advises companies, large and small, on growth and marketing strategy. In our conversation, we cover how to decide when to try new and emerging acquisition channels

• 1:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  like TikTok, VR, newsletter ads, and how to go about testing them out. We get into the growth CMO role, which is an emerging role that Adam has helped pioneer. And we get into some real talk about burnout and depression and mental health issues that often come with working in tech. This was a really powerful and insightful conversation and I learned a lot from Adam, both as an operator and as a human. I can't wait for you to hear this episode. And so with that, I bring you Adam Grenier.

• 1:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  This episode is brought to you by whimsical. When I ask product managers and designers on Twitter, what software they use most? Whimsical is always one of the most mentioned products and the users are fanatical. Whimsical is built for collaborative thinking combining visual, text, and data canvases into one fluid medium. Distributed teams use Whimsical for workshops, whiteboarding, wireframes, user flows, and even feature specs. And it includes thousands of built-in icons and a rich library of templates. See why product teams at leading companies call Whimsical a game changer. Visit whimsical.com/leni to have my own templates added to your account when you sign up.

• 2:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's whimsical.com/leni. This episode is brought to you by Coda. Coda is an all-in-one doc that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps in one place. I actually use Coda every single day. It's my home base for organizing my newsletter writing. It's where I plan my content calendar, capture my research, and write the first drafts of each and every post. It's also where I curate my private knowledge repository for paid newsletter subscribers. And it's also how I manage the workflow for this very podcast. Over the years, I've seen Coda evolve from being a tool that makes teams more productive to one that also helps bring the best practices across the tech industry to life with an incredibly

• 3:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  rich collection of templates and guides in the Coda doc gallery, including resources from many guests on this podcast, including Shreyas, Gokul, and Shashir, the CEO of Coda. Some of the best teams out there, like Pinterest, Spotify, Square, and Uber, use Coda to run effectively and have published their templates for anyone to use. If you're ping-ponging between lots of documents and spreadsheets, make your life better and start using Coda. You can take advantage of a special, limited-time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/leni to sign up and get $1,000 credit on your first statement. That's C-O-D-A dot I-O slash leni to sign up and get $1,000 in credit on your account.

• 4:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  Adam, welcome to the podcast.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 4:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's my pleasure. I'm really excited to chat. So I'm going to give a very brief overview of your very impressive career and just let me know if I missed anything.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  All right.

• 4:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  Sound good? Okay, so you're most recently VP of Marketing at MasterClass, which I'm actually a happy subscriber of and have watched many, many a video. Before that, you were VP of Product and Marketing at Lambda School. I don't know if that's right before, but that was something you did. Also, you're Head of Growth and Marketing and Marketing and Innovation at Uber, which is a really cool title. And I think you spent four years there and you basically built their growth marketing infrastructure and the team. And currently, you're doing a bunch of advising and kind of exploring to see what you kind of want to do next. Is that about right?

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, you hit most of the key points. I think pre Uber, the first kind of chunk of my career was on the advertising side. So worked in like agency world. So I kind of think of this as phase three of my life. That ads world was phase one, kind of startup and growth world, phase two, and now really just spending time helping entrepreneurs and founders and built companies and that type of stuff. So, yeah.

• 5:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  What's been your favorite phase so far?

• 5:17Speaker 00

  I mean, kind of all of them. I'm like, I just embrace what gets thrown at me and allow it to organically happen. So each kind of phases had its pros and cons and ups and downs. And so I think they've all fit pretty well into where I was in my career.

• 5:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  Speaking of moving and adjusting and iterating, I know you're big into improv. And how like, how serious are you about improv?

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, good question. Serious in the sense that I've like done it for a very long time and I still do it and I try to do it regularly. Serious is in like, am I aiming to, you know, make money off of it and like have a career out of it? Unfortunately, not. There was a point in my life that that is what I wanted to do. I lived in Chicago, did Second City. Improv Olympic, a variety of different places, did quite a bit of performing, but also got into corporate paychecks early as well. And so kind of built a lifestyle that made doing improv full time probably not the best path for me at the time. And so made a pretty conscious choice early on that it was more of a hobby. And if something ever came of it, cool, but if not, that's okay. It's still, it's something I keep coming back to because it's very grounding and like

• 6:29Speaker 00

  fulfilling in ways that work and family life and things like that don't quite hit for me.

• 6:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  Actually, at Airbnb, we had an improv teacher come and work with the PM team. It was like for months, we did like improv games every once a week and played all these fun things. And I'm curious what, what you've taken away from improv that has helped you become better at your work?

• 6:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think like generally the whole suite of skills that you develop in improv are pretty applicable, right? Cause you're getting comfortable on your feet with change, with teamwork, building off of each other, experimenting, trying new things, like a little bit of everything. I think a couple of the, the key like rules or themes of improv that I, I like really try to hammer home with people are like, obviously the yes and side of improv, which everyone's probably heard, which is, you know, in a scene, the worst thing you could do is deny somebody because you're actually just like stopping progress and you're not building off of anything. So the, the appropriate approach is to say like, yes, that is true. And, and add to it. So if someone's like, hey, you have a chicken on your head, like

• 7:34Speaker 00

  not saying, no, I don't just kind of ruins that scene versus saying like, yes, I do. And it's, uh, name is Sally. Like what's your chicken's name? Like builds on that and like gives it more opportunity. And so like, I, I think that in, in growth in business is super important to be able to say like, yes, I do see, you know, your idea, or yes, we did accomplish this and like this is what we want to do next. And this is how it's going to build on it, I think is, is super important. The other one that I, I think is less known or talked about is, is the gift of details. And so in, in a scene, if you give somebody like really specific details about something, like it gives like so much more meat to be able to work off of in terms of like what's coming next. So if.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  Uh, if someone's starting a scene and they're clearly like watching television and like clicking through the channels and I walk up and just say like, oh, you're watching TV. Cool. Like, that's a yes statement. I'm not denying what they did. But if I come up and say like, oh, cool. You're watching TV. Is that an Alf episode? I haven't seen Alf since I was a kid. It reminds me this one time I actually ate my own cat. Like, just giving those specific details of Alf and me as a kid and I ate a cat, like, which if people don't know Alf, like, he ate cats. The, uh,

• 8:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  I don't remember that. I remember Alf, but I don't remember.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  He was always trying to get the family cat. Um, so those kinds of details like add a ton of value and you take that into the business world. So use masterclass, for instance, if I say like, yeah, masterclass, we've got this way to build content that is both entertainment and education. Like, that's interesting, right? But if I say, we, we create content that is both education and entertainment to solve people's like deep curiosities in the way that maybe a biography would. Like, that just like opens up like the exact problem that you're trying to solve. Like, what are other alternatives to that problem? Like, how are people consuming that? So I think the gift of details in like good improv and learning

• 9:33Speaker 00

  those skills is something that I, I really value and, and look for kind of in every aspect of my business life as well.

• 9:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  It sounds like it's really helpful. One, in like marketing creativity and positioning and things like that you just described. Have you found it also to be helpful in collaboration? Like this yes and piece, I'm curious, is there an example or story where you like, yes, and it's someone? Do you actually say yes and in a meeting? How do you actually find that?

• 9:57Speaker 00

  I hear it every now and then. I don't usually literally say it. I think one of the areas that I've found it to be valuable is when you've got like cross-functional work. So obviously at Uber, we dealt with city teams a lot. And so a lot of the times, the way that the central team would scope a problem versus a, a local team would scope a problem would almost feel at odds with each other. And if you approach it with that yes and, it's often still true, right? It's like, oh, both of these things can be true at once. You could have a different goal than I have, or you have a, a system problem local to you that is important to you, and it's not important to me. Like, that's okay. That's the- The both things can exist. So now that we accept both and can work off of each other,

• 10:42Speaker 00

  like, we're more likely to build both a better rapport and energy among ourselves because we're not just saying like, no, no, no, you're wrong. Like, like, that's not true. That's not important to the business. Why are you doing that? Like, that type of energy, when cross-functional work, like, it just kills the scene, right? It kills that progress. And then you just, you don't build relationships, you don't build the right solutions, all that type of stuff.

• 11:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  It sounds really good. Like, everyone, in theory, wants to be really good at this. And I imagine just doing a bunch of improv is a really good way to get better at, like, not getting defensive and being like, yes, and how do we make this idea better? Is there something you can advise folks to work on this skill? Or is it just, like, do a bunch of improv classes and it'll kind of help?

• 11:24Speaker 00

  I mean, that's one. I would say that, like, I'll say that all the time to people, like, do some improv classes. And I get a lot of people like, no, I'm not funny, or I don't want to do improv. And I think it's still a really great class to take, even if you have zero interest in doing improv, or public speaking, or any of that kind of stuff. Because, again, like, improv 101 is taught everywhere. Like, every city has it somewhere. And it's rarely ever, like, people that are trying to do improv professionally, right? It's just, like, it's all games. Like you said, like, the classes that you all did at Airbnb is what improv 101 is, right? It's just like, hey, let's just have fun. Let's just get out of our skin and things like that. So I do think everybody should

• 12:06Speaker 00

  take improv classes. I think it's also something with a lot of goals or skills that you want to develop, I think, being really public and open about you wanting to develop that. So if you're managing a team and you want to sharpen the skills, like, make it a team goal, or, you know, have accountability and just say, like, hey, guys, I know that I've been pushing back on things lately. I want to really try to embrace and grow off of ideas better. Hold me accountable. Like, call me out and be like, Adam, yes, and this, please. Or, you know, like, we can, like, you know, giving people permission to push back on that when it doesn't happen, I think also just opens the door for more, like, productive conversations with people and the ability to, like, hold yourself accountable and keep trying it.

• 12:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love that. And such a good team bonding activity. There's like all these reasons to do this as a team. My wife, actually, she's a designer, artist, writer, illustrator kind of person, and she's been taking a lot of these sorts of classes to help kind of inspire her creativity. She didn't never wants to be an improv person. She didn't like stand up classes.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  That's awesome.

• 13:05Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, as you said, it just helps you kind of like get the juices flowing along these lines.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 13:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, so we're not going to talk about improv the whole time. There's kind of

• 13:13Speaker 00

  We could if you want to.

• 13:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  We could. Let's just go. Throw me a word. Let's, let's, let's go. No, we don't want to do that. So there's basically three things I really wanted to chat about with you. One is how to decide when to invest in an emerging acquisition channel, like TikTok, VR, Clubhouse was a big thing. You have some really interesting thoughts on how to decide and approach this thing. To the growth C M R role, which is kind of this, I think, emerging role, something you're, you're really good at. And I just want to get your thoughts on what's happening there. And then three, some real talk on burnout and depression that often comes with working in tech and stuff that we go through. Does that sound good?

• 13:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:51Lenny Rachitsky?

  Great. So to start with, in the first topic, if you think about just every company essentially goes through this kind of S curve of growth, they start slow, they find something that's kind of working, then hopefully it works out and things start to grow, grow, grow. And then eventually it kind of flattens out and you kind of see this S curve that happens. And every company is always trying to find the next S curve to add this layer on the cake that keeps overall growth up while this first growth channel slows. And so people are always looking for like, what's the next thing? They're, oh, man, Clubhouse is coming out. We should get on Clubhouse. Oh, TikTok's so hot. We gotta run some TikTok ads. And there's all these, there's always something new, like newsletter ads. I don't know, podcast ads, if that's new.

• 14:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  And you have a really interesting framework for how to think about this and make decisions and experiments. So I'd love to hear insights there.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the like exploring emerging channels framework that I'll take either my teams or companies that I'm advising through.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Has kind of core, three core ingredients that I like to spend time with. So the first is really understanding if there is a, an overlap between what the customer's need is, what your company's goals are, and what the channel actually does like really well. So the example I've used in the past is, you know, Spotify in the moment of like things like Clubhouse and paparazzi and stuff like that becoming really popular. Well, for Spotify, you know, they are, you know, they're, they're trying to get more people to consume music and be entertained by music and things like that. And it's all audio driven, right? And, and so their, their growth goals are probably around new customers or, or deeper engagement with, with audio.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  The, the customers' needs are, you know, like, like discovery and, you know, more ways to maybe have deeper relationships with their music. If, if you're a jazz fan, like, like, can you learn, you know, new jazz artists or more about the artists that you love, things like that? And then take those two channels. If you take something like Clubhouse, it's audio first. It's almost like live podcast radio type feel to it. You can get into these rooms with just like people with really amazing esoteric knowledge about something. And so its strengths have like a really clean overlap to me with the goals of Spotify, the, the, the needs of the customer and the, the strengths of that. And so that to me is like, great.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  That is probably a, a green light in terms of, is it even worth our time, right? Versus like paparazzi is like very photo driven and like nothing really to do with music or anything like that. And so it's like, yeah, even though paparazzi might've like become the best, biggest channel ever, like, is that the thing you should be putting your time into? It, it would be like a yellow light for me at best, right?

• 16:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  How would you, how would you describe that again? That's like the medium matches?

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the medium, like the, the strengths of the medium, right? So let's take like influencer right now. Actually, like to the channels that a lot of people are talking about right now are like streaming TV or OTT and influencer marketing, right? And so to me, like one of the strengths of influencer marketing is hyper targeted contextual marketing, right? And so I can go find the five influencers that are like hardcore Alf fans, right? And if I'm, you know, marketing Alf something like, great, I can go find that specific thing. Whereas OTT is a lot harder to get like that specific. OTT's strength is like broad reach and video storytelling and that type of stuff, right?

• 17:20Speaker 00

  So it's like, okay, well, maybe my medium is if I'm masterclass and I have a ton of video content and storytelling and things like that, like that channel actually like makes a ton of sense, probably, right? So it's kind of like, what are the strengths of that channel is something that I, that is actually probably the piece I see people ignore the most, which is they just want to know if a channel is hot or not. And it, and this gets especially hairy, like in this world of a lot of B two B doing like more consumer-esque marketing and like, but like, there's so many B two B companies that like just don't apply to emerging channels, right? Emerging consumer channels, right? And it's just like, please just stop.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  I don't, you know, I, I, I don't need a, a notion clubhouse channel this week. Like there just isn't like, and maybe there is, maybe there's a world to do that. But I think that's, that's kind of number one is making sure that there's like even a reason that you should be there to put it on your radar right now.

• 18:19Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. What does OTT stand for, by the way?

• 18:22Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh, you're putting me on the spot.

• 18:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  I know, it's all good.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  Drawing a blank on it.

• 18:25Lenny Rachitsky?

  But essentially it's streaming, streaming platforms.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  Above the, over the top, over the top. So it's instead of it being like cable TV, it's, sorry, it's coming from a box or, so it's primarily if you think of like ads on Amazon or Hulu or, or even if you go to like CNN.com and you start streaming and you get an ad first. It's basically like video ads, but a lot of them now are happening on televisions and on streaming services rather than just on, on websites.

• 18:55Lenny Rachitsky?

  Got it. Okay, cool. So the first is kind of the strength of the channel. You should look at that.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  Yep, yep. And, and how that overlaps with your customer and your business needs. The the second is the channel DNA. And so this is looking at things like where, you know, where are they in their their trajectory? So Clubhouse is actually a perfect example, because in a weird way, so Clubhouse got hot before Facebook got cold. And I was pretty amazed how many more people were trying to crack Clubhouse than TikTok. Like, because TikTok hadn't really released their ads solution yet, but neither had Clubhouse. But everybody was talking about Clubhouse, like TikTok is very clearly like not going away anytime soon. Where Clubhouse hopefully won't. Like, this is an amazing product. I really enjoyed it and loved it.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  But it was like clearly like very early, very quickly at that point of hotness, where everyone was just kind of like, that's the reason I should be there. And part of this reason is to accept like the risks of going into that channel, right? So if I go and dedicate two quarters to of work to Clubhouse, I need to accept that like they are so early in this curve that there's a good chance this is like a once in a lifetime opportunity and it'll be over next. It's not a repeatable action. It also is important because if you get something to work on a channel that's earlier in their growth curve, the likelihood that they will change is very high. You're going to need to commit a lot of cycles to keep it going, right?

• 20:27Speaker 00

  Because it's like, okay, well, the their product is going to evolve drastically, very quickly over the next two years. And so the thing that's working right now, and so a really good example is like Facebook early company. I was at ZUSK and so like ZUSK and companies like Zynga got tons of their early growth because of notifications on Facebook, which was one of their early like features, which allowed basically anybody that took any action on Zynga, it would post on everybody else's page that like you got 10 carrots. And that was like a huge growth lever, right? But then Facebook just pulled the plug on that. And so it's like, well, if you put all of your energy into that and that's it, like, it was pretty clear that that was still an area that's like, this may not last forever, right?

• 21:11Speaker 00

  The last thing on the channel DNA that I like to look at that's a little bit more. I don't know if it's if odd or unusual is the right term is I like to spend a lot of time thinking about how they monetize like what is the monetization strategy of the channel and the reason is because if you as a business can match or support their monetization strategy it actually gives you like a really interesting leg up with that channel because the likelihood of you being able to like call them up and like go do custom stuff with them or partner with them or that your solutions will actually like stick around for a while go up pretty drastically and so this is like my key example of this was with when Facebook

• 21:53Speaker 00

  started exploring mobile ads Hotel Tonight we were one of the like alpha testers of of mobile ads because I'd been sitting here buying you know ad inventory on networks for you know the last five or six years and just waiting for Facebook to work because it just wasn't really working for mobile installs and it's like I know this is a huge channel because I can use it on my like online marketing like my my web marketing but as a mobile acquisition it's nowhere near as efficient as a lot of these other networks and so as soon as they were doing that I was able to basically position and say like look it you want to work with us like let me in your alpha because I have five years of experience like already buying mobile

• 22:35Speaker 00

  ads I know the space I know what'll work and if you get us to work we're a killer case study because we are a non game and like a lot of money is spent on gaming but there's these whole other major categories that you're gonna need other than gaming like examples within that that group so like you're gonna be able to use me as a case study and like a lot of different scenarios than the gaming players and so I was spending a lot less than the gaming players but because of that understanding that like your goal at Facebook is to make ads work for all of travel and for all of leisure and all you know those kinds of things like that's the value of working with me so that's another piece of the kind of the channel DNA I like people to to focus on.

• 23:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome that's such a good one because to your point if your goals are aligned they're gonna be like yes we want let's make this happen and they're always like always feels like it's this behemoth that doesn't want to talk to any new startups but if you can make the case of this is gonna help you and the way you laid out so clear such a good idea.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  And especially with emerging channels, right? Cause their whole thing is that like, they want to make this work for a long time. Not just, you know, it's, it's part of the challenge you see with some new channels flipping to the other side of like, growing an ads business will gravitate towards like, oh, I want to get Disney on here. But like Disney is like very campaign driven, or they have been traditionally where it's like, yeah, you may get one big paycheck from them. But that doesn't like, the way that like UA driven gaming works is like, you get that to work. That's like a gift that keeps on giving forever, right? Cause it's like, there's not one of those companies, there's thousands of them and they all do the same thing. So being able to, to drive that conversation is really helpful. Cool. And then the third main ingredient is just your own company DNA.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  And so I think like risk profile is a big one, like, do you actually have comfort in being like a first mover? Like a true first mover, like nobody knows anything, tracking's not going to work. Like it's not going to be programmatic. It's not like, you're probably going to show up on content that's offensive. You're probably like going to ask for refunds that won't happen. Like there, there's going to be really painful to be a true first mover. Do you have that appetite? Do you have the staff to actually be able to like, put someone on that and then not distract from everything else? And then the other piece on the company side is just your, your current channel mix. There's very few companies that I recommend saying like, yes, go put energy on this brand new channel that you don't know how to scale yet.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  Before you've figured out some type of like volume on Google and Facebook. If you're trying to do it, like every now and then there may be like a perfect fit where it's like, absolutely. You should be the person doing this, but like, if, if you're not at least getting something out of the basic channels that everybody else is using. It's probably not the thing you should be putting your first energy into. It should be like, great, I've got a good foundation. Like you said, like now we're at that stage of trying to add things tends to be a better, a better stage to do more risky exploration in the new channels.

• 25:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  What advice do you have or can you give to founders, teams that are trying to test one of these in terms of just like how to, how to run these tests? Like, how much time should they spend, would you say? What do they look for? I know that's a hard question and super dependent on the situation, but any advice there?

• 25:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think the going through those three ingredients should help shape that answer, right? Because if you're like, okay, well, the first one is super strong. The channel DNA is maybe like really early and I've got a small to mid-sized team and maybe only one channel working, then it may be like, great, put like half of one person into this because it's maybe interesting, but like, don't put any more than that into it, right? Versus if it's like, man, this is a killer fit. The channel's like a little further along. It seems pretty sp- and I have a 20-person team, so I'm going to put like three dedicated people to this because we are in prime position to be the leaders in this new channel and like really push it. So I think it really, it's figuring those pieces out because it is a very like, it

• 26:40Speaker 00

  depends answer. But rarely ever is it like, hey, this should be your entire team's focus for the next three sprints or five sprints. Like, I think that, you know, if you've got that half person working on it for a while and there starts to be some magic happening, sure, put a sprint or two against it, like as a whole team. But generally speaking, I think keeping it minimum at first is my like typical recommendation.

• 27:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  I had another guest, Yuri, who I think you know from, uh, former Grammarly. And he made a really good point that it's often better not to try something than to do it badly and then take away the wrong lessons. I guess, like in your experience, what's like a timeframe you think people should put into this stuff? Like, is it, you said two sprints, maybe like a couple of weeks? Like, I don't know, what's like the range of just like, maybe don't spend more than X months on something new if it's not like clearly working, just based on your experience?

• 27:33Speaker 00

  Generally, like, I wouldn't let anything bleed past a quarter. Like, you can probably get some good signal in a month or less. Like, like what I would call fishing. Like, it wouldn't be, like, you're just, you know, putting bait in the water to figure out where the fish are, not necessarily getting statistically significant, repeatable solutions. The big- Variables that can change that timing. So like, you know, if I'm exploring a new video channel, like the content I need to create is if I'm gonna have to create something that takes three weeks to produce and $20,000 to make, I may want to give it a little more time because I gave it a more of an upfront investment, right? Versus if it's like, oh,

• 28:18Speaker 00

  I want to put text ads in podcasts, like listings or something like that. It's like, great, I can like, I can do that by myself at midnight and it's not distracting anybody or anything. And if it doesn't work in three weeks, let's move on. But yeah, generally, like I'm ideally what you're working through and we'll talk, you touch a little bit more on this with like the growth CMO is that like, this should all be part of a roadmap, right? Like it shouldn't just be like randomly chosen and thrown at is this should be part of your like sprint process and you should have a backlog of other things that you want to try. And so you're actually weighing that decision of how long, based on like what other opportunities you're missing out on by investing in that. But I would say like, most channels, especially new ones are going to take more than a couple of cycles to kind

• 29:02Speaker 00

  of suss out because there's no rules. There's no, there's no playbooks yet on how to do them well. So give it a little bit of time. But yeah, if you're going over a quarter and you don't feel like directionally, it's getting better or it's interesting, like I would, you know, put it back on ice for a while.

• 29:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  Cool. And to your point, you're not going to see any like statistically significant answers is the thing you look for just like, is it like, you know, and you see it like, oh, wow, qualitatively feels like it's working kind of thing. Is that what you kind of look for?

• 29:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think the I define that going into it, like, what am I looking for for this? So something like Clubhouse, I'm probably not going to see clicks, right? It's, it's more about like, okay, are we able to start a room and increase the size of that room by 10% every time that we run it? Okay, great. That means that we're at least getting better at this and there's more reach like available to us. But if we're getting 20 people every time we start a room and then it goes down to 15, then like, we're either not doing this well, the channel's not doing well, or like, There's just not enough reach for us to actually like expand versus like TikTok. You might be able to say like, great, this is all about like, I can actually track clicks and conversions. So let's look at it the way we would any other channel.

• 30:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  Got it. So kind of look for momentum and that you're getting better and that it's moving somewhere. Awesome.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yep.

• 30:16Lenny Rachitsky?

  Cool. So a question that I'm sure is on many people's minds that they would want to ask is, Adam, what are emerging platforms that are interesting right now that we should experiment with? What do you, what do you?

• 30:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I mean, I mentioned OTT or like, basically the key thing with OTT is that it's way more trackable than traditional television, but it has similar value that traditional TV does in terms of the ability to do more long form storytelling type content. And a lot of it's not skippable if you buy it, right? And so you can actually like,

• 30:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh my God.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so, so those are reasons to be exploring that right now. It's hard for me to call that an emerging channel because it's been around forever. It's just, there's more of it and there's the tools and services around it are way better now than they were four years ago. And so I think the sophistication and ability to scale OTT is much higher down than ever before. Influencer is probably the one that I'm most intrigued by because similar to OTT, like the, the scale and services and the ability to go do it is still there. It's also got that hyper granularity that like, when I get into influencer tools, it feels to me like early Facebook, when I used to go be able to target Lenny.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Right? Or 10 people that have exactly the same likes as Lenny, right? And that type of stuff where it's like, you can get so specific and like, find exactly who you need. It's incredibly tedious and manual and it's a lot of like, like relationship management. So I'm also, I'm also keeping an eye on like the technology being built around influencer because I think that's a huge area of, of opportunity for entrepreneurs right now. But generally speaking, like the scope and opportunity there is huge and it's not going away. But it's very, it feels very new and different right now and the ability, and it supplements the ability to do some hyper level targeting that you've not been able to do, like that Facebook and Google are getting less open about at the same time.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  I think VR is really interesting in the way that mobile was interesting before like iPhone three, right? Where it was like, if you've got a VR app, like it's a really interesting space. But if you don't, I it's not that interesting to me yet. Any that have come up for you that you're like,

• 32:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  No, these are great. Like, all I think of TikTok.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  I feel like TikTok's across the chasm, whereas they actually have a formalized ad platform now. People are finding scale. There's still a ton to do there. And it, you know, influencers is also weird because it crosses all of these other worlds as well. But I think TikTok's actually hyper interesting. And everyone should be doing that. Like, but I think of that less as you should be doing it as this like, should I do it? Should I not? It's more, I need to figure out how to do Facebook if I'm at least mildly appropriately should be there. The like, podcast ads, I think are great. I think that I bought podcast ads like 15 years ago. So it's not, it doesn't feel like an emerging channel to me. I think there's way more volume now than there's ever been before. The one of the guys that was on my team at Uber has a company that's doing like programmatic buying and that type

• 33:23Speaker 00

  of stuff. And so I think there's more opportunities on podcasts. I think podcasts, people want to treat it like Facebook ads, or like, like, direct response ads, like immediate response ads. And actually, what I keep seeing as the effective, like, strategy with podcast ads is treating it more like radio, where it's more about getting on the right program, making it personal and feel like it should be part of that program, and then repeating over and over and over again. And so, yeah, so I think podcasts is super interesting. I think it's just hard to scale. Like, it's likely not going to get people the same volumes as the Googles and Facebooks of the world.

• 34:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  Cue our mid-broad ad. I'm excited to chat with my friend John Cutler from podcast sponsor Amplitude. Hey, John.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  Hey, Lenny. Excited to be here.

• 34:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  John, give us a behind the scenes at Amplitude. When most people think of Amplitude, they think of product analytics. But now you're getting into experimentation and even just launch a CDP. What's the thought process there?

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Well, we've always thought of Amplitude as being about supporting the full product loop. Think, collect data, inform bets, ship experiments, and learn. That's the heart of growth to us. So the big aha was seeing how many customers were using Amplitude to analyze experiments, use segments for outreach, and send data to other destinations. Experimenting CDP came out of listening to and observing our customers.

• 34:42Lenny Rachitsky?

  And supporting growth and learning has always been Amplitude's core focus, right?

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Amplitude tries to meet customers where they are. We just launched starter templates and have a great scholarship program for startups. There's never been a more important time for growth.

• 34:55Lenny Rachitsky?

  Absolutely agree. Thanks for joining us, John, and head to amplitude.com to get started.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  I also come from a very consumer perspective. I would, I'm actually stronger on like B2B companies using podcasting because it has that exact same value I just described, but each one of their customers is substantially more valuable. So they don't need the scale that a consumer like application or product would need.

• 35:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yep. That's exactly who I work with usually. One last question on this topic.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 35:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  What percentage of the time do you find that an emerging channel kind of works? Is it like 20% of the time, 10%, 5%? Like what's kind of like, what should people estimate of like, okay, it's probably not going to work, but when it does, it's going to be game changing.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  Like 5% of the time, like, like there was new things popping up all the time. I think the, the area that I think of is emerging that I've found more success in is taking things that exist already and make them like, like, so the two slices of it are either it's existed for a long, like podcasting's existed for a long time. And now we're finally getting to a spot where like, it's like, like it's, it feels scalable. The other is like existing channels that introduce something brand new. So like the mobile ads I described on, on Facebook, right? Like pre-mobile install ads and posts, like those first 18 months of mobile install were very like, it felt like an emerging channel, right?

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Cause they were changing the product every week and like tracking didn't work. And like, there were all these kind of funky problems with it, even though Facebook had been around forever. But brand spanking new channels, like I, like, I don't know. They, they rarely work or are worth the effort early that you hope that they will be.

• 36:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  Cool. But when they work, it's, it's a game changing, I imagine. Reminds me Airbnb, Apple's coming out with Apple TV, I think it was. And they're just like, Airbnb, if you're making that for Apple TV, it'll be huge. And there's a team put on it. I don't know. They spent a month building this app and did not, a bunch of nothing as far as I understand.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 36:51Lenny Rachitsky?

  But it felt, it felt good. It felt good to be part of the launch. One question I wanted to come back to, are there tools that you recommend for influencer marketing that you want to plug or, or point out? Or is there nothing?

• 37:01Speaker 00

  We were using Grin at a masterclass. We onboarded them. I looked, so there's probably like half a dozen companies in that same zone where they're. They're they're building tools that allow you to do the discovery of influencers, the CRM of those influencers, and also often like the like the measurement and payments and all that kind of. So it's like an all in one type of management platform. That being said, though, like I said, it's still super manual. Like, it's nice to be able to go and like find this list of like 50 influencers that are the exact right influencer for this class launch, or whatever it might be, but it's still then I have to go like wait till they all respond to me. And there's still a lot of manual back and forth. So that's probably one of them. Yeah, I'm trying to think of there.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  There's a few other in that same category that are competitive with Grant that are they all seem equally pretty good. I can't even remember the reason we chose Grant over some of the other ones. Like, it was all pretty close. Yep.

• 37:55Lenny Rachitsky?

  Sweet. Okay. If any other comes to mind, we'll throw in the show notes. Before we get to the growth CMO discussion, there's kind of this tangential area that I wanted to spend a little time on, which is this idea of as a startup, you initially should and often do start with a very narrow audience. Kind of your like early adopters, I call I wrote this post about calling your super specific who. And eventually you want to cross the chasm and go broader. And you have some interesting insights on how to think about that and when to do that. Can you talk about that?

• 38:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think the book Cross the Chasm is like a great place to start in terms of like thinking about the broader topic of that. What I see missed a lot of the time that I like to spend time with people on is to really understand that those early adapters are actually like or adopters are are often just drastically different than the the broad audience. And spending time to actually like figure that out and like and and map out like what you need to see with those early adopters to have confidence that the product is actually going to have product market fit beyond them.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that that's I don't have anything like hyper specific to add to that necessarily or happy to dig in deeper to it. But it's it's probably the biggest challenge that I've seen with a lot of companies that I've worked with. And then as I do more investing and things like that, like it's it's probably the biggest flag that I see with a lot of companies that claim to have product market fit, which is like you've got you have very your TAM and your product market fit are not using the same definition. Right, like in that problem, I think is is often a yeah, just a red flag for a lot of companies that I meet.

• 39:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  Got it. So essentially, you often underestimate how challenging it'll be to grow from your initial kind of early adopter crowd. Do you have any, is there like an example of that happening where a company just like got screwed because they didn't think about that enough? Or there's something someone can do early on. Is it like test a little bit more broadly early? What do you recommend there?

• 39:59Speaker 00

  I mean, Clubhouse might have been, might be a good example in the sense that they leaned into the broader audience maybe quicker than they should have. Right? Like if they'd given it more time to really understand like the like their product market fit seemed to fit the moment in time. And like, could they have built some experiments or tools or features that maybe stress test? Will this work like in an ongoing fashion? That's, you know, if they were on such tear, that's pretty hard decision to make, I'm sure.

• 40:29Lenny Rachitsky?

  So easy in hindsight.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  That product, I think that's another piece of it is that like the, the audience changes like aren't always just like literal people. Right? Like, like even right now, like one of the biggest pieces of advice I'm giving to people that are like, how should we adjust our marketing with the economic changes and things like that? I was like, start by assuming you no longer have product market fit.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Because you had product market fit in a different market. It's a different market now, so you have to start over and hopefully you do, or it's pretty close to it. And you just have to adjust a couple of things and you can be right back on track. But like, if you just assume like you need to launch a new channel to fix this problem, like you're going to be wrong. Because like your entire customer base changed, not just the next 10% of customers that you're looking for.

• 41:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's just a reminder of how freaking hard startups are, man. Man, we have more product market fit. Hmm. Okay, we've done, we're done. Let's move on.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  Not anymore.

• 41:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  Not anymore. Oh, man. Okay, sweet. So on to this next topic around the growth CMO. So you're this really interesting combination of marketing brain and also like very analytical growth person. And I think you refer to this as kind of this growth CMO, which I don't actually hear the term much. So I'm curious, what is a growth CMO? How do you define it? And why is it important?

• 41:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's something I've just spent a lot of the last few years thinking about. Specifically because now I've been at a handful of companies where we've brought in CMOs that in all ways are like absolute world-class CMOs.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  And they don't last, they don't fit and like they don't succeed. Right. And so I've spent a lot of time figuring like, well, why not? Some of it coming because of spending time with those people being like, why are you doing it this way? That's not how a company at our stage operates. Trying to do it the way that like a traditional CMO would have done, you know, marketing for a company, et cetera. Like one of the key examples I like to use is brand in that like everybody, when they think about brand, they think of it as an action, not as like a consistent, ongoing investment. Or they think about it as like campaigns and things like that. And from like, from planning to execution to learnings, a traditional CMO like will drive learnings and identify learnings.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  And in my mind, I think a growth CMO is looking at each brand investment is how do you then immediately follow that up with the next one? Like, how do you shift to this kind of like fast product iteration mindset with even things like brand? It's very possible, but it's so like counter to a lot of traditional marketing DNA that it to me means that we have a lot of mismatch, marketing leadership. And that quickly eliminates trust with the marketing organization. It means that we rename everything marketing to product-led growth or growth or like referral programs.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  And like, like everything that it, to me, it actually like dilutes the value of like marketing should be playing in the company. And it doesn't mean that like the traditional marketing CMO isn't a good fit for some companies. Like I think like direct to consumer products are still like very well suited to have a more traditional CMO. But I think product-driven companies, product-led companies, if your CMO and your product leader aren't married at the hip, you're just missing out on just tons of opportunity and the likelihood of things actually working like very well consistently. And like compounding on each other.

• 44:05Lenny Rachitsky?

  So what are the attributes of this person of what you call a growth CMO? Sounds like partly it's being much more performance-driven. Sounds like a big part of it is being very product, understanding product and not kind of creating these silos. We're going to market the thing, you guys go build this thing. But also as a person that's a growth CMO, what else do you look for?

• 44:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I would say so data driven generally like it doesn't have to be like to me, performance is like a very loaded word in our world because people think especially in marketing think that means not brand, but they're very data driven. And so when we take things like like retention and and even brand and like the consideration funnel. And yes, you can't, you can't measure those exactly like you can measure landing page clicks and sales, but you absolutely can measure them. And like making that part of the DNA of everything that's happening, like data being part of that, I think, is is pretty quintessential of being a growth driven CMO. The the second, I think, is the iteration process is not thinking about things and like, hey, we need to plan for the next 24

• 45:06Speaker 00

  months. But like, you can still do that and you can still have a vision and everything. But having that more of like a agile type approach to everything, whether like, and again, this could be like the storytelling that your salespeople are doing to, you know, what are your landing pages look like to like, what is the design of your logo to the brand itself, like all of those things, like being more open to everything being like possibly iterated on on a regular basis, using data to like validate that and like challenge what has worked for you a week. Like, we live in such a real time world now, especially with product driven companies, that things change so quickly. If you as a marketing leader aren't being iterative and thoughtful about things with it, like

• 45:48Speaker 00

  you'll get eaten alive. And then I think experimentation is just a huge piece of it and something that I see a lot of more traditional marketing leaders, like that it's just, it's the idea of experimentation is like trying a new channel. It's not like, how do we experiment with our brand? How do we experiment with our like the funnel, like every like the whole picture, not just the top of the funnel or the external elements of it. But one of the things that I've I haven't quite figured out the right like language to put against this, but the traditional model of marketing is the the four Ps, product,

• 46:27Speaker 00

  placement, promotion, pricing. And in my mind, like the world that we live in now, like, like, product is no longer a part of marketing, but it's actually like they're married at the hip. It's actually they're all they're one in the same. And most companies aren't operating that way. They're still operating as if they're two wildly different things, even if they say they're working together. It's still like, Like, there's not. And to me, it's just like, no, no, no. Like, the product is like the company now. And the marketing like is integrated with literally every single piece of it. And it's not just a, like, a lot of traditional marketing got established in like the 1920s and the 1950s

• 47:12Speaker 00

  around like products that took, you know, years to develop or try or then like, or like a product team was like a science group trying new flavors of cereal. Not necessarily, and like, so the marketing team owned the box, the like where it went on the shelf. And, you know, like what the price was and like all of those kinds of things was marketing, right? Because product was such a wildly different part of the organization. And I, I think still there's just like a lot of fundamental things that marketers think about that are stuck in that world. Because most haven't had to grow through the like true growth of, of a business that's just being established today.

• 47:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  And the assumption is every software company should be hiring a CMO that is of this sort of a growth CMO, right?

• 48:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I would say that like my sense is that there's very few marketing leaders that can't be a growth CMO. So I don't think you have to have come up as like a, a performance driven experimentation. It's, it's more about like adapting and growing and like, like, again, like the fundamentals are all the same, right? Like one of my like, like pet projects that I haven't done anything with yet is that every time like something new comes out in the growth world, I go back in history as far as I can to try to find like the earliest example of that. Just to be able to say like, look, this isn't new, but we can learn from the way that like, like Coca-Cola invented the coupon. Like the first known coupon was Coca-Cola giving away Coke for free. But it was actually a marketplace because what they would do is they would actually give like,

• 48:45Speaker 00

  they would go to a town and they would go to like the soda fountain and they would give like a, like free Coke, like syrup to that side of the market. And then we give coupons to the other side of the market to like, spark it to like, get it going. And then it's like, well, now all the customers want Coke. Now you need to supply it. You'll pay for it. And that's what we use this like, like learning that and understanding that is like really cool. And it's just interesting to me because I'm a huge nerd. But that to me is like, All of the things that great marketing leaders have learned are right. It's the operating aspect of those insights and those skills and understanding your customer and their psychology, like all of those things have stayed the same. It's the operating of it in the way a growth like organization, like a product driven

• 49:30Speaker 00

  growth organization operates is very fundamentally different than the way a traditional marketing run organization had run.

• 49:37Lenny Rachitsky?

  I was gonna ask you what a marketing leader can do to evolve into this where you think things are going and your point about you're capable of it, you can iterate and adapt is really great and empowering. Is there anything specific they can do to learn how to do this better other than, is it like mentorship, is there classes, courses, just do the job, figure it out? Do you have anything you can suggest there? So folks listening, they're like, oh shit, I'm in trouble.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I honestly, I think like learn product development, right? Like go learn agile product development. And there's, there's actually a book called hacking marketing, I think. I'll, I'll confirm that, but it's essentially like how to run a marketing team on agile. That to me is just like, again, any great marketing leader should be able to go and consume how to do product development, how to run a product like, like sprints and those types of things in their mind. If they're a great marketing CMO or CMO, like will be like, oh my gosh, I could do this with this big like event that we want to host. I could do this with, you know, everything, like there's nothing off the table when, when

• 50:45Speaker 00

  you actually like learn those fundamentals. But you know, as well as I know, like smart people can learn that stuff. Like there's lots of resources out there. Reforge has some classes on it. There's a bunch of new product led growth classes out in the wild, like Maven, I think has a couple. And yeah, there, there's a variety of those types of things that just going and doing it, you don't have to go and like operate it yourself. Like you don't have to go become a product manager, but understanding those skills and those systems will one, I think, make you think differently about how to run your marketing team and two, make you exponentially better at working with your product organization.

• 51:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. I'm actually hearing from folks listening to this podcast, not live right now, but broadly that this is a good way to learn how product works and how product leaders think. So that's interesting. So if you're listening to this, good job. You also mentioned that a lot of marketing leaders don't work out at a company. They join, they leave, things go wrong. As a hiring founder or leader, what, what do you look for to kind of tell you this person's probably not what we need? And not what you'd call a growth CMO? Like, what are flags that are like, they're probably not going to adapt and evolve to the way we want to operate?

• 51:53Speaker 00

  So I think first and foremost, it obviously depends on the stage. Anything like, let's say, C or below, like comfortable with chaos? And willingness to go do something they have not done for probably 15 years are like two huge signals for me. Because like the, every company I've been part of at every scale now, which is all of them, basically is, that's the thing that a lot of people coming from more traditional marketing environments into startup worlds.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  They, they're like, it's a, it's like a pace and the, just the unpredictability and change and those kinds of things are just at such a higher rate than they've seen for a long time, that it can be really jarring for people. And I think it's totally reasonable. Like, it's crazy, right? If anybody that's had the exposure on both sides. And then the, the willingness to go do the work is just that like, you know, like people are churning constantly and the challenges are different every week and those types of things. And so it's like every now and then you gotta go write an email or you gotta go like, you know, open up Facebook and get into the weeds with it with your team. Like into the data of it and that type of stuff. And that's stuff that like, I don't want to do personally, me, I'm past the point where I should be in Facebook. But like, man, when I need to, I'm willing to and I'll go get in the weeds with it.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  And I'll like, I'll use my time to just be like, look, we have to figure this out now. And like, I'm gonna go do the things that I thought I was done with in my career. So those are, those are pretty big ones. I think then generally speaking, one of the exercises I like to take founders through when they're hiring a marketing leader is, you know, every marketer is gonna have a T shaped career, right? Everybody came from like something they probably became awesome at. And then over time, just expanded their purview. And so like, for me, it was, you know, mobile. My, I got into mobile. My first client ever was on microsystems, like early 2000s, getting Java developers to make apps for flip phones. So I just like new digital mobile world, like really, really well before a lot of people did.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  But then eventually I'm like, great. Now I'm running an entire digital marketing team. Now I'm running an entire marketing team. Now I'm getting into growth. Now I want to learn product and like I've expanded. And so typically it's like going through that exercise of like, find out their T, like find out their strength and then spend time figuring out how they make up for those other things. Right? So for me, I've, Lambda School, I ran our PR team for a while. I am not a PR person, but I'm like, I make it a goal in my life to get to the like, the valley of despair of the Dunning Kruger effect. To be like, great. I just need to know how bad I am at PR before like, cause if I still think I'm good at it, that's not a good place for me to be. But once I know how bad it is, I now know I need to go hire the right person to come in and I'm gonna listen to them.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  I'm not gonna assume that I'm smarter than them and those types of things. And so like, uh, I think same thing with like product questions and data questions and experimentation questions for this, this concept of a growth CMO is like, well, if somebody's coming from a, a world where they've not had to work really closely with the product team, spend time with them to figure out how they plan on adapting to that. My guess is most won't have thought of that. The good ones will be able to figure it out together with you in that interview or afterwards, or whatever it might be.

• 55:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. Maybe one day we'll do a follow-up chat just to dive into hiring a marketing person. I know that's like a whole, a whole deep topic.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, lots of thoughts.

• 55:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, okay, we gotta book that. But, okay, so you mentioned the valley of despair and that's a good segue to our next topic. So I found this old tweet of yours where you talk about burnout and depression. And you kind of make this point that a lot of times you feel like it's burnout and it's actually depression. And just broadly, mental health is just this topic that's not really spoken a lot about in tech and in business. And so I'd love to just spend a little time on this. I know you're very, you're a big proponent of talking about these sorts of things. So I'm curious, I know you've been through both these things and I'm curious just to hear your journey, what that's been like, what you've learned about how to get through it.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I, um, kind of the two biggest inputs for me in terms of like really taking the time to understand my, my mental health. Like one is my wife, who's been a very strong proponent of like mental health resources for everybody, like since I met her. And so like just being able to learn from her and, you know, get exposure to like, well, why is this important? Like, what are the values of it? And seeing it pretty regularly of like, you know, family members or coworkers or it's like, oh, man. Like I bet there's something deeper here that like maybe is important for them to figure out.

• 56:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is that just something she's good at or is she like trained in this stuff?

• 56:49Speaker 00

  No, she's good at it and she's, you know, she's had therapy and stuff like that and, and just, she's like one of the most like empathetic, passionate people I've ever met in my life. And so she just feels like poor people so much that I think it's, it's something like really important to her. And then at Uber, I got like to a spot where I was like incredibly exhausted and tired and just down, not excited about work and things like that. And so I started going to therapy and with this assumption that I was just working too hard. Right? That was kind of my like, man, I need to go to therapy to figure out the tools that I need to deal with me working too hard.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  And I just uncovered so many interesting things that I wouldn't have expected. So like, you know, one was that like, I'm the youngest child in my family. And I did something pretty different than a lot of my like relatives and things like that. So like recognition is something I, I long for. And it turns out I get that at work and I just hadn't gotten that like in other parts of my life. And so this thing that I'm like, this is my problem was actually like a solution to my real problem. And knowing that just helped me like totally just change my perspective of how hard I work. And it made me less like, like I was, I was getting judgmental about myself around like, man, I'm working too hard. I shouldn't be doing this, but I have to.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  And then I got in the spot where I'm like, I'm working hard because I love it, because I like it. I'm, I'm having an impact and I, I'm working with people I like and people respect the work that I do. And that helped me identify that like, oh, I can work just as hard, but I can work smarter. I can work more on the things I have impact on. I can work more with people that actually respect the type of work that I'm doing. And that actually just like, like started to like, relax me, right? And get me to the spot of like, oh, okay, that like, I, I still had some burnout in there. And like, that's part of the innovation, part of my, my title was that I got to a spot where I'm like, I, I was traveling constantly. I had teams all over

• 58:51Speaker 00

  the world and I was, the, the structure of Uber was working where every city had a GM and I was like, the person they called when their spend was too high. And so 500 GMs.

• 59:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  Uber GMs.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  Dealing with. So, yeah, exactly. And so I, I was working in a world where I was dealing with a lot of politics and a lot of, and I love mentoring people and I had this massive team of like 150 people that I'm like, I barely know any of them. And so I'm not mentoring people either anymore. And I just got to, so I'm like, I'm working so hard on things that I actually don't enjoy. And so I'm like, I'm gonna go work on flying cars and, uh, which is a whole other podcast. Okay. So that was kind of my like, okay, there was burnout in there. I, I know that was a fact, but like, some of those feelings are things that I've felt my entire life that I uncovered that I thought was just burnout. I was like, oh, actually like, that this point in my life, this point in my life, and this point in my life, I felt this way too.

• 59:46Speaker 00

  And at those points, I wasn't burnt out. And so I actually have deeper work to do here and deeper understanding of myself so that I can actually like maximize my life and enjoy it, right? And because I'm gonna keep working to some degree this hard. And yeah, I want to just like make the most of that.

• 1:00:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  I don't know if you mentioned this, but I imagine parts of those points were depression, not burnout. What's, what have you found to be that line of just like, oh, wow, this is a lot more serious than I'm just working way too hard?

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  For me, it's almost the like, it's kind of, it's hard to describe. But like, I, I personally now can pretty cleanly like tell the difference between exhaustion and depression. And it tends to tie to my, my broader motivations, not just my motivation to work. Right? So like the, like when I'm exhausted, I will, I'll still show up to work. I'll still execute. I'll still do those types of things. But like, I'm gonna go and like, if I, if I can take an improv class, it's gonna be a blast. I'm gonna enjoy it and I'm gonna love it. Right? If I'm depressed, I won't go to that improv class. Like, I'll just like cancel it.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  You know, I won't go to it. I won't. Or if I go to it, I'll go home immediately. Like, one of the things I love about actual improv classes is the like, is the community. Right? Is the like, hey, let's all go grab a drink now. And this is like a totally different group of people. It's not my family. It's not my, you know, it's not my work people. It's just me. Right? And I wouldn't do that. Right? And so it's kind of noticing like, where else is this impacting? And to what degree and why? Like, it helped me understand like, oh, there's, like, what's going on in my life is more often than not, I can then take those feelings. And it'll be like, oh, I've felt this way for like three weeks now. I should think about this and like dissect it a little bit.

• 1:01:37Speaker 00

  And so again, I'll spend time with my therapist and like, or work with my, one of the, one of the tools that my therapist has given me is to like, open up with my friends and have these conversations with my friends. And so now I went from five, six years ago, really just having my therapist or my wife to talk about this kind of stuff to, I don't know, I have five or six different friends that were massively transparent with each other about this stuff. Because the second I shared any of this with them, they shared it with me. And now we've become like safe places to have those conversations. Where I can be like, hey, there's this thing going on, you know, like my, my dad has ALS. And so like, he's been really sick. And, you know, I've got three kids and I've got jobs and work and money and the market crash.

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  And like, there's so many different things. It's like, okay, let me actually figure out which one of these things. Is causing this energy right now and having many years of therapy now and those resources can help me get to that solution to get to that answer so that I can figure out, okay, what do I need to do right now? Is it, do I need to actually like take time for myself and dig deeper into these personal things? Do I actually need to change something with the shape of my career? Like those types of things.

• 1:02:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. And it sounds like the things that have been most helpful and I'm curious what else you'd recommend to folks that are maybe feeling some of this. So it sounds like therapy is really powerful, your partner and being open to your partner, finding a group of friends where you could be transparent about these sorts of things. Is there anything else?

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:03:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  You suggest folks look into?

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think the like meditation's a good one, like the startup people love to talk about meditation. And so you can find lots of ways to do that. It's kind of evolved for me. So there is the, it's in that tweet thread and I can't remember it now. There was a meditation thing that was the first, it almost felt like Noom for me for meditation.

• 1:03:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  Uh, wake up.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  Where it wasn't just.

• 1:03:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  Sam Harris's.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, waking up, right? Where it's like, oh, I'm actually learning about meditation, not just learning how to meditate. And that's how my brain likes to do things. I'm like a lifetime learner. I love digging into things. And so that was the first time I actually like, I learned breathing techniques and things like that. But going through that program of waking up was the first time I actually like really appreciated when and how and where to do it. I'm still not a everyday meditate person. I now use, I'm an investor, so I'm biased, but Aura, A U R A, which is like a marketplace app for, it's like some of the other meditation apps, but it's a marketplace. So it's actually like coaches and stuff adding content. So I use that now as needed, which I really enjoy. The like

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  exercise and diet and those types of things definitely tie to it. It's like, like eating is like a pretty clean signal for me, or snacking is a really clean signal, at least for me of like, okay, this is like, I'm snacking more than I should be. And like eating healthy can both like, help me identify that I'm in those spots, but also just like make me feel better. One thing I would say is that like the therapist that I found, I found through a service that we had at Uber. And I think I was surprised how much stuff is covered by companies in terms of the ability to get, find a therapist. Pay for a therapist or other tools. And so that's one thing is I would suggest like,

• 1:04:49Speaker 00

  go look through your, your benefits, your, your healthcare provider offers a lot of that stuff too. Yeah. So there are a handful. Listen to, to Len's podcast.

• 1:04:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  I hope, I hope that to be true. I don't know if that's anywhere near as powerful as these other things. One thing I'll mention is on the meditation front, there's this amazing book that kind of does exactly what you also describe where it teaches you why this works. It's called, it's got like a bad title. It's called, Why Buddhism is True. And it's not trying to convince you to be a Buddhist, but it has a lot of incredible insights on why meditation is so powerful and, and how to think about it. So I'll put that in the show notes too.

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  Awesome.

• 1:05:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  I'm gonna check for that.

• 1:05:25Lenny Rachitsky?

  I wanted to come back to the burnout piece. I imagine some folks are listening to this and they're like, am I burned out? I don't know. What are, what are signs that you're burnt out versus just like working a lot and tired?

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  The one that I see the most is, is like adaptability goes down really fast. And this is more me noticing, like I, I've managed a lot of people and coached a lot of people. And so like, when I see that from people that I'm working with, I like, I usually immediately bring up, I'm like, look, like, your openness to change in the business or trying new things, or going back and trying things that maybe we tried before and didn't work, like has shifted from, oh, here are the flags that we should be aware of, but let's give it a shot to, why are we wasting our time? Let's not do this. Like this, just like energy around, like let's just do the thing we're supposed to do. It's that to me is just, and, and I think that's maybe specifically applicable to our environment to like,

• 1:06:22Speaker 00

  high growth and marketing and product where it's just like, that's just a key ingredient to doing this job well, is adaptability and flexibility and, you know, exploration. And if you're losing that, it's probably not because you've gotten mad at it. Right? It's probably because you're just over it. Right? Like where you're like, I just don't want to deal with the BS around this. I want to go do the thing that makes my job easier, which again, most of the people that have chosen this career path want their jobs to be harder because it's more fun. It's more interesting. It's more rewarding. And so when you're looking for ways to like minimize the challenge or the opportunity, I think that's like a pretty good signal that like there may be more burnout than just exhaustion.

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  Because if anything, I see the opposite for people that are exhausted where like they get re motivated by new stuff, by opportunities to go do something different and that kind of stuff.

• 1:07:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  Really good insight. Second to last question, I know you have to run. Where are you on this journey today? And then just what's next for Adam Green here?

• 1:07:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you. Good question. I'm constantly optimizing this matrix of like, what am I good at versus what do I love doing? And so what I've found is that I just, I really love like entrepreneurs and working really closely with entrepreneurs and helping them, you know, figure out all of these like funky things that I've been able to see over the last 20 years and maneuver. And, and, and I've, I've worked at a lot of places and so I'm, I'm really good at context changing and, and helping connect the dots for people. And, and so a couple of ways I've found to be able to do that is advising companies. So working with founders and growth leaders and things like that, and investing. And so I'm actually right now, I've been investing now for kind of six, seven years.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  I recently joined Andreessen Scout Fund, so I'm doing a bit more volume now, but I, I would say if I had to make a bet right now, I think a full time or closer to full time investing world is what I'd like to lean more towards. But I'm very much a, let's just open up opportunities. And once the right one is in front of me, I'm going to tackle it. And so who knows, I may go back full time somewhere or whatnot. But right now, like the advising, investing, coaching kind of hybrid is the, uh, the, the term, I think it was Bezos at Reforged used was me as a service.

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  Is my, my current world, but I, I'd be shocked if I eventually don't gravitate towards some kind of foundation because I, I thrive when I've got a little bit of an anchor.

• 1:08:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. A mass. Me as a service. Okay. Well, for folks that may want to reach out to you about invest, taking your money in their startup or asking whatever questions, maybe advising questions, where can folks reach you and learn more?

• 1:08:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, just Twitter, AKA Grinear and LinkedIn as well as AKA Grinear. So yeah, look me up, connect. I'm always open to connecting and chatting with people and just love digging into problems. So happy to, happy to abide.

• 1:09:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. Adam, this was such an action packed chat. So many levels and layers. I can't wait for folks to listen to this. Thank you so much for joining me and being here.

• 1:09:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:09:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  My pleasure. Thanks, man.

• 1:09:24Speaker 00

  Good stuff. Take care.

• 1:09:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.