20VC: When to Make Your First Growth Hire? Senior or Junior? How To Onboard Them? How To Monitor Their Progress? from Growth Leaders @ Facebook, Instagram, Lyft, Instacart, Miro and more

Casey Winters is the Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite. Prior to Eventbrite, Casey led the growth product team at Pinterest. Before Pinterest, Casey started the marketing team at Grubhub and scaled Grubhub’s demand-side acquisition and retention strategies. Elena Verna is the Interim Head of Growth at Amplitude. Former exec @ Miro, Netlify, SurveyMonkey. Growth Advisor to companies including Krisp, MongoDB, Ledgy, Builder.io and SimilarWeb. Kieran Flanagan is SVP Marketing at HubSpot, where he has helped the business grow internationally, move to a product-led business, quadrupled its marketing demand, and built out its media team, including the acquisition of ‘The Hustle.’ Andy Johns career started in growth at Facebook when the company scaled from 100M-500M active users. Since he has worked in some of the leading growth orgs at companies like Twitter, Quora and more recently at Wealthfront as Head of Growth and President. Bangaly Kaba is the Director of Product Management @ Youtube. Prior to Youtube, Bangaly led the product growth and consumer product orgs at Instacart and before Instacart was Head of Growth @ Instagram, helping grow Instagram from 440M to > 1B monthly actives in 2.5yrs. Ed Baker is a growth advisor to various startups including Lime, Zwift, Whoop, Crimson Education, GoPeer, and Playbook. Ed was the VP of Product and Growth at Uber from 2013-2017. Prior to Uber, Ed was the Head of International Growth at Facebook. Adam Fishman was the Chief Product and Growth Offer @ Imperfect Foods. Before Imperfect, Adam was VP of Product and Growth @ Patreon, Before Patreon, Adam was the Head of Growth @ Lyft, Adam was the first growth and marketing employee hired and grew the team to 18 people. In Today's Discussion on When To Hire a Head of Growth: 1.) When is the right time to hear your first growth hire? 2.) Is this hire a senior growth leader or a more junior growth engineer? 3.) What can early-stage startups do to entice senior growth leaders to their early-stage company? 4.) What data infrastructure should be in place prior to hiring your first growth hire? 5.) What does the optimal onboarding process look like for all growth hires? 6.) What can founders and CEOs do to set their growth hires up for success?

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back. You are listening to 20 Growth, the monthly episode where we sit down with the world's best growth leaders to unpack their tips, tactics and strategies when it comes to starting and scaling the best growth teams today. And today, we're answering the holy grail of questions for founders. When is the right time to make my first growth hire? Should that hire be senior or junior? And how do we onboard growth teams? And we're joined by seven of the best growth leaders from the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Uber and many more incredible hypergrowth companies. But before we dive into the show today, have you ever met an employee that likes company travel booking tools or even worse, expense reports? I mean, it is a nightmare. Tripactions was born out of the realisation that business travel should be easy.

• 0:44Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:29Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:11Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:22Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:25Harry Stebbings?

  And we're kicking off today with Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer at Evanbright, and prior to that led the product team at Pinterest.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  As soon as possible after product market fit. That's when growth becomes the number one concern of most startups. And that's where you need to be building out that capability. That doesn't mean you necessarily are starting a team. I talked to a lot of founders, they're like, oh, I have product market fit idea, head of growth. My response is like, well, good luck with that because there are perhaps 50 people that are capable, that have shown previous like head of growth experience. And they're not going to join your company until they've seen that you've already prioritized growth and shown that you value it inside an organization. So when you actually look at how most growth teams are formed, it's usually like an engineer or a PM or designer getting frustrated that something's been utterly left behind by their roadmap and then just going and making it better. It could be onboarding, it could be the logged out experience, it could be their sharing flows.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  And then by having some really big success at doing that, they build a team around it. So a lot of the people that you look at that were head of growth were just really early employees that took an interest in that area and then scaled a team around it.

• 3:29Harry Stebbings?

  So if you were a founder then, and you want to show an incredible hire that you do value growth, what could founders do to show an external candidate that growth is front and center for me now and moving forwards?

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Basically, all you do is you show an existing team that's gotten to work and had success and been rewarded for that success. If you've found product market fit, you're starting to scale, you're worried about growth, you've actually put engineers on growth, you've put PMs on growth. And look, it could be one engineer, one designer, one PM, whatever, it doesn't need to be a huge team, but don't wait for me to come in as a growth leader to put resources toward it, put resources toward it now, show that they're being successful inside your organization and then say, hey, they need to get to the next level, they'd be excited to bring in a leader that they can learn from. And then, you know, ideally you get to talk to them through that process, right? And they can confirm that the company's really excited about growth, about this approach, and that you're not going to face any huge structural hurdles to success.

• 4:24Harry Stebbings?

  How do I make onboarding as effective as possible?

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say in general, onboarding is not great inside startups. You know, when I think about starting This at Grubhub and Pinterest, I spent so much of my time in the data, you know, writing SQL queries, trying to understand where does traffic come from? What does conversion look like? What do our core retention curves look like? Are there any differences, you know, in different types of users? You want to carve out a decent amount of time where, you know, this person can understand the data model, like what data you're capturing, how you're capturing it, and that they can just go nuts in trying to build, you know, usually their own process of understanding the business through, you know, certain dashboards or, you know, Google Sheets or whatever. So that's a material part of it. And the more that you have someone already at the company that can walk them through that

• 5:10Speaker 02

  or kind of show the dashboards, et cetera, that already exist, you obviously the better. I joined early enough at Grubhub and Pinterest where usually that stuff just didn't exist and I had to go build it myself. But startups are better at this now, you know, they're more sophisticated. They might already have, you know, segments set up or mode or whatever, and are looking at some of the right metrics already. So that's usually a big part of it. Another big part of it is setting this person up to actually meet like real customers so that they can truly understand the core value that customers find in it. Because if our job as like a growth leader is to connect people to the core value of the product, we need to understand that core value almost better than anyone at the company. We need to know how to talk about it. We need to know the steps that get them introduced to it most effectively. That is a key element that I think a lot of growth teams miss, right?

• 5:55Speaker 02

  They just think it's a data game and it's an experimentation game. And then it's like, well, when's the last time you talked to an actual user? And they can't tell you, like, that's a big problem. Growth leaders need to be talking to users all the time. You know, and back to this thing we talked about earlier, building relationships with the broader team is super important because there still is this default skepticism of growth work inside a lot of companies because people don't understand it. We've all experienced like spammy stuff from other companies in the past. So you want to go be starting to build that trust with all of these other leaders. Let's say I came in as a head of growth and there is a separate head of product because, and usually the reasons you would do this is that, especially in non-network effects business, a lot of times you might find product where to fit, but there's still a whole lot of product that needs to be built out, which means your head of product will never spend an ounce of time thinking about growth.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  And then you'll hire a Instead of hire, you know, instead of build that cross-functional team approach I talked about earlier. In that case, even so, you've got to have a very close relationship with that head of product, right? You need to be aligned and it basically needs to feel like, oh, this head of growth is making sure more people use my stuff. That's amazing. I want to set him up for success instead of this head of growth is building things that sacrifice the quality of the overall product experience or, you know, spams people or whatnot. So building a lot of those relationships with, you know, other executives, peers, individuals is super important.

• 7:10Harry Stebbings?

  But now we're going to move to the world of B2B and we've got a growth leader that is incredible. Elena Werner, interim head of growth at Amplitude, former exec at Miro, Netlify and SurveyMonkey, growth advisor at Crisp, MongoDB, Legi and more.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  I believe that starting a growth team too early is a problem. If you don't have a product market fit, what are you growing? So with people that are wanting to have a head of growth as one of their first hires or one of the leadership first hires, let's say the company under 30 people and you want to have a head of growth, my question to be with you, what are you growing? If you don't actually have even necessarily product market fit and the ability to show that you have traction in the market and that you have really satisfied customers that are retaining with you, I think it's money wasted and it's an effort and resources wasted. On the other side, I also think that not putting any pressure of growth on your original founding team of those first 30, 50 people is a mistake.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  If you immediately hire head of growth or growth team and say, hey, none of my PMs, none of my marketers are responsible for growth at all because I'm immediately outsourcing it to another team where I'm putting all of the growth pressure on is an absolute mistake because then you're going to have teams that are just releasing stuff as a most immediate impact to your business. And then you have the team that carries the entire weight of the revenue goals for your company and it's not shared and it's not being a collaborative effort. So I think hiring pre-product market fit, big, big mistake. Hiring right after product market fit without actually figuring out how to create some of the traction is a big mistake as well. I also think that the company has to be ready internally to Create a growth team.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  You need to be able to be at the place where people understand that there is a value of the growth team to be created. Where there is lack of understanding how to create that growth mindset, of how to be data accountable, of how to implement scientific method. And really not investing in the home growth talent. I think the biggest mistake that I see in the company's hiring is they chase after that head of growth position from the beginning, without understanding who internally can create that growth evolution, as opposed to creating growth revolution with an external talent that can potentially just be rejected out of the ecosystem right away. So doing it too early and only looking externally, I think the two biggest mistakes that people make.

• 9:34Harry Stebbings?

  Why do most families go raw on the onboarding process for very teams? And I'm sure you've got some thoughts on this one.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  I'll tell you number one mistake, not having data team ready for growth team. So hiring growth team before you have data analyst or data literacy in your company, before you're data informed, or hiring growth and attaching any data analysts into their for you. Because if you do that, what is growth person or growth hire supposed to do? Use their intuition, then that's not really a growth mindset. They're just gonna pick an area and most likely have a strikeout versus creating something that is more sustainable. So data, even though it's a different department, a lot of times that does fall into growth and because that's the most department that uses data the most.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  But not equipping them with data team and data analysts is the biggest problem that you can create. And then there's number two, expecting wins right away. You hire your growth, your growth person, your growth team, and in the three months, you expect a forecast lift. We put assumptions that they're gonna drive forecast lift. It's the worst thing that you can do to growth team in terms of really messing up their onboarding, in terms of them creating that predictable, sustainable system.

• 10:45Harry Stebbings?

  I love that episode with Elena where we focused on all the what not to do's, all the mistakes. If you haven't checked that one out, then it is a must. But I'm so excited now for Ed Baker, growth advisor to startups like Lime, Zwift, Whoop. Before that, Ed was VP of Product and Growth at Uber from 2013 to 2017. Before Uber, he was head of international growth at Facebook. This was our first ever 20 growth episode. When is the right time for founding teams to start thinking about instilling this cross-functional disciplinary team? How do you advise founders to bail on the right time?

• 11:16Speaker 04

  I think one mistake startups sometimes make, and I've made this mistake myself as well, trying to focus on growth too early. I think you want to find product market fit before you start to work on growth. Sometimes startups will say, oh, we need to hire a growth leader in order to find product market fit. But I actually think they're two different things. To me, product market fit is just building a product that people love to use. I think that's actually the hardest thing for any entrepreneur to do is to find that product market fit. I think there's often a lot of luck involved with that. An analogy I like to use is like drilling for oil. No matter how good your drill is, if you're drilling in the wrong place, you'll never hit it. I feel like every entrepreneur is building their startup, they're building their drill and they're drilling somewhere, but they might be drilling in the wrong place.

• 12:00Speaker 04

  You don't want to start growing if you're drilling in the wrong place. You want to make sure you've hit that oil first, then you add the growth expertise. So I'd say the right time to build out that growth team is once you really feel like, all right, we're on to something big, we've got the product market fit, people that are using this love it. Now we just need to add some fuel to the fire to make it grow faster. And that's actually why I decided to go to both Facebook and Uber, was I felt like those companies clearly had found product market fit. They had built products that their users love. I remember with Uber, my first Uber trip, and a lot of people can probably also talk about their first Uber trip. It was a magical experience. And when I talked with the drivers, they said, this is amazing. I can now make money in a flexible way.

• 12:44Speaker 04

  I'm making more than I've ever made before. So for them, it was magical as well. To me, that's the product market fit. And then I wanted to go help Uber grow that thing that worked.

• 12:52Harry Stebbings?

  What does the optimal onboarding process look like in your mind?

• 12:56Speaker 04

  When I think back to my onboarding experience at Uber, for example, there wasn't much to it. I was basically told by our CEO, who was my manager, here are five people for you to start the growth team with, go. That was my onboarding. And then the good news was that Those five people on my team had been at the company and I actually had a lot of help from those people on my team to get on boarded. One of them in particular, really, he basically on boarded me and took me through all the dashboards they had, all the, how everything worked, drew up an org chart and went through how the company was currently structured. It's funny because we didn't actually have a formal org chart at the time and, and a lot of the reporting lines, no one even knew like who reported to who, but we at least had some sense of, of how things were structured.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  So I guess that's a long way of saying, I don't think you necessarily have to have an amazing onboarding setup for this new head of growth that you're hiring. And again, if it's an experienced person, they'll be able to figure out a lot of it on their own. But I do think one of the most important things is to at least think about, well, who can be on their team on day one? I think that's probably one of the most important things. It's like, think about who are the initial people that can be on that growth team with this new leader? Ideally, having some people on that team who have been at the company for a while, who can really help them understand how the company works.

• 14:16Harry Stebbings?

  And so me then as a CEO, if we've thrown you in the deep end and you know, you have the five people and they're great. They're helping you onboard with all the traditional elements. Me and you have a like check in at the end of the month. What should I as a CEO expect or be really happy about that you've stabilized the foundations on? You've gained knowledge on in the first month. When you think back to your times of, say, Uber, what did you want to achieve in that first month and really understand with Claracy?

• 14:42Speaker 04

  Let's figure out what our North Star metric is, where are we today and where do we want to be in the future? One of the first things that needs to happen for any growth leader is to just figure out what is the goal? Once you figure out, okay, this is our goal, then the next step is what are some of the things we're going to do to get there? So within that first month, you probably haven't yet found a needle mover. Maybe you have if you've been lucky, but usually things take a bit longer than that. But at least have a plan in terms of, okay, this is our North Star metric. This is where we are today. This is where we want to be by the end of the year. Or maybe you don't even have by the end of the year, this is where we want to be within the next six months. And then say, and here are some of the bigger swings we want to take to.

• 15:21Speaker 05

  Try to find step changes to get there. And then I'd say the next step from there is saying, and here's what I need from you, the CEO, to help me get there. I'd say it's almost a red flag if the person you've just hired is not asking you for help as founder or CEO. You want someone who's going to come in and say, all right, I figured out where I want to be and how I'm going to get there, but here are the things I need from you to help me get there.

• 15:44Harry Stebbings?

  And now we're hearing a hot take, a contrarian take from Kieran Flanagan, SVP of Marketing at HubSpot, on when is the right time to hire your first growth hire?

• 15:54Speaker 05

  That is a great question. I've talked to great companies who have started growth with a single engineer. If you really define a core metric that you want that engineer to move. And so I talked to some founders who were trying to move retention and they had a single engineer obsess over how do I get people to retain better within my product? I think when you need a leader is when you need the bandwidth, because for the most part, when you have engineers or you have these kind of dotted group people, they're reporting up to the founder or maybe they're reporting up to someone else. And then over time, that team grows and you actually need a core leader to start to manage that function. And when you have a meaningful amount of work for them to do. And so we can actually discuss what that means, because I think growth could be applicable pre-product market fit, right?

• 16:36Speaker 05

  When you actually are trying to figure out, how do I instill these mechanisms within my product to better acquire people, to better onboard people, to better retain people? It's built into your product roadmap. That kind of comes back to centralized, decentralized. If it's decentralized, it's just how the PMs work. If it's centralized, there's a single engineer who obsesses over that.

• 16:53Harry Stebbings?

  I wanted to ask, I've done now seven growth shows and every single person has said about growth post-product market fit. There has not been one discussion about growth in any form pre-product market fit, almost that it doesn't exist. How would you think about, actually, is there a role for growth pre-product market fit? And what does that look like in terms of tasks and activities?

• 17:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I think this is an interesting place. I'm not surprised, when I was actually thinking about this, I had like, oh, like proper growth function is Series A and beyond, right? And that's like typically the advice you would give, like Series A, beyond. You have things that you want to start to actually grow. Why would you want to do that pre-product market fit? Well, actually, growth can be instilled in. Your product roadmap, rather than being an afterthought, I can build my product in such a way where I can think about how does this product going to require users. One of my favorite examples is genius.com, right? It used to be Rap Genius back in the day when there were large lyric sites. Now, when you were building another lyric site, there was already well-established lyric sites. Like, how do you differentiate in that? But they built inbuilt this really creative feature that allowed you to annotate the rap lyrics. Why was that so ingenious?

• 17:55Speaker 05

  Well, now it made their pages much more rich in content, and so they just outranked everyone else. Everyone else had lyrics, they had lyrics plus annotations. That's an example of a feature that you could build pre-product market fit to say, hey, we're gonna build in this feature because we believe that's how we're going to outcompete all these other brands. So I think that's an interesting way to think about growth and why there's something there in the pre-product market fit stage. But again, it could just be built into the way engineers and PMs think about build-in their tools.

• 18:20Harry Stebbings?

  I think onboarding is just universally done terribly badly. When you think about onboarding for the new growth and marketing hires, what does good look like to you? And what standard do you hold yourself accountable to as this is what we need to do to make them successful?

• 18:35Speaker 05

  I think one of the things we do that is really good, it's our people ops team, it's not me, is we build 100-day plans for people. Because when you come into a new role, you're like, oh wow, what do I do, right? And especially in remote, actually, remote onboarding is a whole other topic, like remote work onboarding. So we do a 100-day plan, we're like, here's all the different people you should meet, and we make sure that we get them into your calendar. Here's what we would love for you to do on month one, here's what we would love for you to do month two. Every two weeks, we check in and ask how you're doing across that 100-day plan. Ask how the meetings went, ask, is there other questions you have, so we can pair you with other people? And that 100-day plan isn't actually about, at the end of this, we need you to have achieved A, B, and C. It's at the end of this, we hope that you understand your role, understand your team, and understand the kind of path to success.

• 19:18Speaker 05

  So it's just making sure that you feel set up for success versus like you have to have achieved these things within 100 days. Like, there are things that we want you to do along the way, but it's much more set up for you to be successful and make sure that we are setting you up to be successful within your role.

• 19:33Harry Stebbings?

  I love that episode with Kieran. We really went deep into content creation as well there. But now we're gonna move to Andy Johns, who started his career in growth at Facebook, helping them From a hundred million to five hundred million actives. He then went on to lead growth orgs at companies like Twitter, Quora and most recently Wealthfront as Head of Growth and President. When is the right time to think about adding a head of growth or starting your growth team? What's that catalytic moment?

• 19:58Speaker 06

  I wouldn't even consider hiring a head of growth or building a growth team until you have a clear indicator of product market fit, which is some amount of exponential organic growth. Once you have some amount of exponential organic growth, it's clear that you've built a product that resonates with customers and users such that they're telling other people about it. And then that's when you layer it on. So I wouldn't even consider it until that takes place.

• 20:22Harry Stebbings?

  So post PMF, let's say I'm a startup founder and you're my hypothetical advisor, Paul, you, I'm so sorry for this. But you're advising me, I've reached product market fit, we've got that exponential growth. Do I hire growth engineers? Do I hire a growth leader? What do I do now?

• 20:38Speaker 06

  That's a great question. The first hire can bury quite a bit. You don't want the person to be so senior that they're just thinking about strategy and orchestrating, you know, a large team. You don't want to hire the person who's a nation builder, who just wants to come in and hire lots of folks. I think that first hire, from what I've seen, that is incredibly successful is somebody that straddles both product and some technical proficiency. For example, one of the best early growth leaders at Facebook was a physicist. He was trained as an experimental physicist and as a physicist, he knew an awful lot about how to look at data, how to set up experiments in a controlled environment and then how to measure the outcome of those experiments. And so he was technical enough from a quantitative standpoint to be very efficient with looking at the data

• 21:23Speaker 06

  and making drafting hypotheses and then running experiments to see what the results were. But he was still of another brain where he can think about a product and a customer experience and wasn't so technical that he threw those other parts of it out.

• 21:37Harry Stebbings?

  What does the optimal onboarding process look like for this growth role? How should I think about that as a founder and CEO?

• 21:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the optimal onboarding from my perspective is that those first few weeks are spent building out that intellectual framework. For growth, that sort of A times B times C equals growth. Because often, one of the challenges and growth within a startup, especially as it gets bigger, is that you see growth team running experiments and trying to optimize these individual metrics. And some employees at the company may think, okay, that makes sense. Let's get a higher signup rate. But often, you're faced with this broader question of, wait, why is the growth team touching that part of the product, this part of the product? And this, it feels like this disheveled mess of just random metrics that they're going after. So what is the cohesive story? What is the coherent backdrop to which we can make sense around what this growth team is doing as a whole?

• 22:28Speaker 06

  And so for me, it's all about that thing I brought up in the first interview, which is what is your strategic framework? How do you think about the growth of this as a business? My preferred starting point, if I go into any company, is I like to begin with this background of assessing market times core product value, times moments of delight, times ability to acquire customers. And so I'm looking at growth, not just from an A B testing perspective. I'm looking at it holistically. What are the opportunities in our market for growth? How do we enter that market? What is the beachhead that we can establish to begin with? What are the core product values that we offer relative to our competition? And how do we enhance those? And how do we make sure that those are clear to the customer that we're specifically targeting?

• 23:12Speaker 06

  What are the moments of delight in our product? That once a user experiences them, they say, whoa, holy shit, this is an amazing product, I have to use this more. And then what are the channels and the methods that we can use to acquire customers? I look at those four variables within my first couple of weeks or first month. I do a lay of the land effort within the startup to really understand what we're doing that contributes to those four variables. And then from there, I can say, okay, Mr. and Mrs. CEO, here's my understanding of how we've grown so far. And here's my sort of 20,000 foot view of how we should think about growth as a business moving forward. And these indelible variables will be a part of our growth story today and even a decade from now. And so I want to get people bought into that.

• 23:56Speaker 06

  And then once that is established, then you just come up with your plan to execute.

• 24:00Harry Stebbings?

  Moving to our penultimate guest now. And we've got Bangali Kabba, Director of Product Management at YouTube. Before that, he's led product growth and consumer product orgs at Instacart, at Instagram, where he helped Instagram grow from 440 million to a billion actives in just two and a half years. This was such a fun one to do.

• 24:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, we definitely ask the product market fit. I think that's kind of commonly known. But what I've seen, it really works best when the founder understands one of their own primary flywheels and has figured it out. And so what I mean is like, it's really hard to outsource growth and say like, hey, head of growth, come like, make us grow. If the founder doesn't really know what makes the product move the needle to start. And what you want is you want the founders to kind of like figure out the core mechanic, the one core mechanic that like is accelerating the business, and then find someone who's better at them at achieving more scale and layering on more kind of accelerants, more growth loops to make this work. An example of this is like, you know, I happened to have the fortune of working with the Discord founders last summer. And it was incredible how well they knew their own kind of like network and flywheel.

• 24:59Speaker 07

  Stan, the CTO, was like drawing diagrams for me on paper of like, you know, how Discord's growth got started and how it moves and like what all of his hypotheses were. And most were still right. Like there was stuff that I was like telling them as a consultant of like, here's where I think you should go. But it was really incredible how well they knew their own business. And so I think most founders need to have that muscle because then it like informs their relationship with the head of growth. Like they understand what the head of growth is talking about and why they're investing in those things.

• 25:25Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of that relationship, how do you know whether to hire a growth engineer and either maybe someone more junior or bro-ish? Or bluntly, are you Casey Winters, Elena, and have a growth leader? How do you know whether to start senior or start junior?

• 25:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, I usually actually tell people to start junior. The reason why is a couple of things. One is, you know, when you hire people who are more senior, they tend to be really, really good at like understanding systems, building for scale, like helping to enable teams in order to really like kind of get you through crazy scales of growth. But if you're starting, if you're early stage, what you tend to need is like one person who's really good at your core mechanic. If you are a, for example, an SEO-led business and that's going to be your flow, like hire a world-class SEO person who also understands Enter market, right? So they have a little bit of like growth and they can also like room to grow. But you want someone who can really execute on the top like thing that's going to move your business and move into adjacencies relatively easily.

• 26:22Speaker 07

  And then see if you could help them to scale themselves to being that kind of big growth leader over time.

• 26:26Harry Stebbings?

  What is the optimal onboarding process look like for a growth rep or a growth leader? How should we structure it and what is it done well?

• 26:34Speaker 07

  I think it's like a listening tour plus a little bit of a data tour, I'd call it, plus like customer conversations. You've got to learn the business, right? And learn really what makes the business tick and understand what your cross functional stakeholders are saying, especially in marketplaces, because you know, you need to understand like what's happening on both sides of business. And then also, you know, does the data really support this or not? Or do you even have enough data? Do you even have clear enough data to actually make any informed decisions? And then talking to customers and understanding like what they're saying and, you know, is their feedback makes sense. Ultimately, what you're looking for is you're looking at what to like push the team forward and say, here are the bets that we need to start making. And, you know, what you're trying to do is just get context as fast as possible.

• 27:12Harry Stebbings?

  And finally, in this masterclass, we have the one and only Adam Fishman. Most recently, Adam was Chief Product and Growth Officer at Imperfect Foods. Before that, he was VP of Product and Growth at Patreon. And finally, before Patreon, Adam was Head of Growth at Lyft, where he was one of the first growth and marketing employees and grew the team to 18 people. Do you hire a tenured head of growth who can then build out their own team first? Or do you hire younger growth reps, growth engineers, growth product people? What's the right decision?

• 27:42Speaker 08

  It depends on a few factors. So the first thing I'd say is, do you have a growth model as a company? Has leadership team as the founder CEO done the work of understanding? How does this business grow? What do our loops look like? What brings new people to the product? What keeps them around? What monetizes them? So that's like the starting point. Secondly, you have to ask yourself, based on this model, do we know what org functions and skills are necessary to iterate on this model and to test out our hypotheses? And then finally, my next question is sort of how involved does the founder want to be in running the team? Ideally, they want to stay very close, but sometimes they really don't. They want to be very hands off. If those three things are True. Then I recommend hiring someone around like the director level or a touch below that.

• 28:26Speaker 08

  Someone who wants to be a player coach. You can build processes for testing and iterating on the model. They can create a baseline of data if it doesn't exist. They're really good at communicating, so they can share knowledge across the org and kind of start to build out that team. There's really is like a sweet spot here. Two junior and you just have a bunch of order takers that can't prioritize their way out of a wet paper bag and figure out what they should be doing. Or they've maybe only seen it done one way before. They just sort of like want to rubber stamp it and say, well, this worked here, so therefore it must work here. Two senior and then you don't have a doer. You have somebody who's like, well, I'm here. My first job is to hire 10 people. And that's not very helpful either, because growth is about making progress. You need to be making that tangible progress.

• 29:07Speaker 08

  You've got to kind of find someone in that sweet spot, mid-level, maybe punching above their weight a little bit.

• 29:13Harry Stebbings?

  When we think about that positioning within the org, how can I as a founder and as a leader make the onboarding process as smooth as possible for my mid-level growth first hire?

• 29:24Speaker 08

  Yeah, you're right. Onboarding sucks in the vast majority of companies. And I don't know why. It's not that hard to get right. So the way that I think about this is you've got a new hire coming in. They have a ton of momentum and a ton of political capital because they've just made it through your hiring gauntlet. And you're super excited to have them there. Everyone is like, great, our savior. We're pumped. Those first few months are critical to their success. Think about it like onboarding a customer. This is your activation experience. This is going to drive long-term retention and success of your customer. Except now your customer is an employee. I think about it that way and you've really got to focus on setting up this person for success, helping them achieve their first few wins and kind of continue that momentum and capital. I think everyone should read the book, The First 90 Days.

• 30:07Speaker 08

  Student of that book, I recommend it to everyone. So I make sure that we have a really clear and agreed upon 30, 60 and 90 day plan and that other people in the org know what this plan is. Not only just me and the person I've just hired, but other people that they're going to interact with. So they know how they're spending their time. Month one is basically learning, building relationships, evaluation of the team, if there is a team. Month two is iteration and improvement on the growth strategy or creation of one if it doesn't exist. And then month three is really like longer term planning and alignment. Set up people with expectations of plans and deliverables at each one of those months.

• 30:48Speaker 08

  Typically, the plans have decreasing fidelity the farther out you go because it's hard to be certain about six and 12 months into the future. But I spend a ton of time with this person at the beginning, talking many hours a week, like side by side. It's crazy to me that some founders don't spend much time with new hires. They're just sort of like, "Good luck. Here you go. This is your job now." And you just spent countless hours interviewing this person. Now is when the real work starts. So that's how I do it. I break it down in a 90 day plan with clear milestones at each of the 30, 60, 90. So yeah, that's how we get the people started.

• 31:24Harry Stebbings?

  You now know when to hire your first growth hire, what that profile should look like, and how to onboard them effectively. If you have founders that you're invested in, friends with, that are contemplating this, do send them the episode. I'd love your thoughts on our compilation episodes. You can check out more at 20vc.com. But before we leave you today, have you ever met an employee that likes company travel booking tools or even worse, expense reports? I mean, it is a nightmare. Tripactions was born out of the realization that business travel should be easy. Tripactions puts travelers' needs first through the best technology connecting travel, corporate cards, and expense management, and combining them into this single, beautiful streamlined platform to serve travelers and companies of all sizes.

• 32:07Harry Stebbings?

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• 32:52Harry Stebbings?

  Again, that's Tripactions.com/VC20. And we mentioned the move back to hybrid with Tripactions there. Did you know that 68% of workers say a hybrid workplace is their preference? So it's time to make hybrid work for everyone with Robin. Robin is the industry-leading flexible workplace platform for connecting people with rooms, desks and each other. Robin have helped companies like Peloton, Toyota and Hulu build better workplace experiences. Plus, Robin integrates with tools that you already know and love. To learn more about how Robin makes flexible work a reality, visit robinpowered.com. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I cannot wait to bring you an incredible episode on Monday with a founder that sold their company last year for $7 billion. This is a special episode.