20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP

Vaibhav Sahgal is VP of Consumer Product @ Reddit where he has been for close to 5 years. Prior to his leading consumer product, Vaibhav spent 3 years as Head of Growth at Reddit. Before Reddit, Vaibhav spent an incredible 8 years at Zynga across different roles including Director of Product and GM for "Words with Friends". In Today's Episode with Vaibhav Sahgal We Discuss: 1.) Entry into Product + Growth: How did Vaibhav come to lead some of the best growth orgs in the world at both Reddit and Zynga? What are 1-2 of Vaibhav's biggest takeaways from working with Mark Pincus @ Zynga? What is the most painful growth lesson that Vaibhav learned that he is also pleased to have learned? 2.) WTF Really is "Growth": How does Vaibhav define growth today? What is it not? How does Vaibhav fundamentally differentiate between value connection and value creation? Is growth an art or a science? What tactics have died a death? What remains stronger than ever? 3.) Hiring Your Growth Team: How does Vaibhav advise founders on when is the right time to hire their first growth professionals? Where should they sit within the org? In product? In marketing? Standalone growth team? What are the biggest mistakes Vaibhav sees founders make when hiring their first growth hires? 4.) The Interview Process: How does Vaibhav structure the interview process for all new growth hires? What are the steps? What are the must-ask questions when hiring for growth? What are good answers? How can founders use case studies and data to determine the quality of a growth candidate? 5.) The Onboarding and Integration: What is the optimal onboarding process for all new growth hires? What are signs in the first 3 days that a growth hire will vs will not work out? What can leaders do to ensure growth hires are integrated with the rest of the teams? What are the biggest mistakes founders make when onboarding growth hires? Items Mentioned in Today's Episode: Vaibhav's Favourite Book: Andrew Chen: The Cold Start Problem

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back. This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, in this monthly show, we sit down with the world's best growth leaders to discuss why, when, and how you may need to start and scale your growth team, taking lessons from their immense experiences scaling some of the best. And I'm so thrilled today to be joined by V Sahgal, VP of Consumer Product at Reddit, where he's been for close to five years. Prior to his leading consumer product, V spent three years as head of growth at Reddit. And before Reddit, V spent an incredible eight years at Zynga, across different roles, including Director of Product and GM for the very famous words with friends. I also want to say a huge thank you. This show would not have happened without Casey Winters, an incredible leader in the growth world, and so appreciate all you did to make this one happen, my friend.

• 0:41Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:24Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:51Harry Stebbings?

  If you're ready to onboard millions of rows of customer data in minutes, visit flatfile.com. And we mentioned the move back to hybrid with trip actions 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. But that's enough from me, so now I'm so excited to hand over to the one and only V Sahgal, VP of Consumer Product at Reddit.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:42Harry Stebbings?

  V, this is such a joy to do. I had so many great things from the wonderful Casey Winters before, but thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you for having me. And Casey's the true wonderful person here. Learned a lot from that guy. So thank you, Casey, for the introduction.

• 3:56Harry Stebbings?

  But I want to start today with a little bit on you because you have this incredible duration at some of the most fantastic companies, both in growth and product roles. So how did you make your way into some of the most powerful growth walks with Zynga and Reddit today? What was that entry for you?

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, mostly by accident, to be honest. I'll start with in the beginning, I was a software engineer who just moved to the valley. I worked for a company called HiFi. Older social network than Facebook, nearly as successful as you can tell. So I started as a software engineer for this little startup no one's ever heard of. I took a big chance, came to the valley and I was working for this product manager. His name was Mike Starbird, best name ever, even better guy. And he was my PM, I was the engineer and we were sending a lot of these emails. Some would say kind of spammy emails. We were basically sending these emails to users, like telling them who they might know. And so this email was just full of a lot of different pictures and people's names and like, hey, Harry, you might know these 20 people or whatever.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  And the way the email was designed and I was the one coding it up, it was, the pictures were huge. And so we could only fit so many people in there and so many pictures in the email. And I had an idea one night, I was like, hey, what if we just like reduce the size of the pictures? We put more people in there. So I ran what is obviously now known as an A B test, but back then I didn't really know what it was called. And I did that one night and then the next morning I came back, I looked at the data and the click through rate had gone up 20% and I was so excited. And then from that point on, I just kind of became a junkie for that process. The idea that you can have some idea, whether it might be a lousy idea or whatever, test it against real people, have them tell you if it's good or not and read in the data if it's good or not.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  To me, it's just romantic, it's just really amazing. From that day on, I was just a junkie for it and I just kept going deeper and deeper into it. So Hi5 doesn't exist anymore, moved over to Zynga, switched to product management, which was essentially Zynga at that time was basically this school for product management. And of course, some bad habits as well, which took a while to shake off, but went through that university essentially, which was amazing to get to do that. And then just, yeah, kept going deeper and deeper.

• 6:03Harry Stebbings?

  Let's pause there. I never went to university. I did, but it was so brief that I didn't really count it. You said Zynga was like a university. What was your one biggest takeaway from your time at Zynga? And then I have to ask, what's the biggest bad habit you think that you had to shed there?

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Very easy to answer. I'd start with the biggest one that I learned, and I learned this maybe too late, was really get to know your user in and out. Who are they? What are their motivations? Why do they use your product? And I mean like really. Get to know them, not just like, oh yeah, it's this person, this is why they use it. I mean, like, you should be in their shoes. Try to be living in their life somehow.

• 6:38Harry Stebbings?

  Sorry, let's double down on that because I think the most important thing with episodes like this is granularity. Okay, we should live in their shoes. I'm a founder today, listening to this on the metro in New York. What does that mean? Do I go to individual users and ask them for video calls to understand usage? What does that actually look like in practice?

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, let me give you an example. So for us, it was Words With Friends, which was the product I've worked at for about four years, my term at Zynga. And our users were not me. They were fifty to sixty year old women in the Midwest. And they were looked to use this product because they thought it was fit for their brain. And that was just a massive, massive insight for us. And so in the beginning, when I worked on Words With Friends, I was just littered with all of my biases. And I was trying to figure out, I really love sports, can we do something with sports and Words With Friends? And that's not helpful. What worked for us is putting a picture of this person. Let's call her Mary from Ohio, who is in her fifties and has grandkids.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Putting that picture in your office with, here's what she likes doing, here's why she uses your product. And every time you're making a decision, think about Mary and would Mary want this? Would Mary like this? And that was such an important exercise that I learned very little.

• 7:52Harry Stebbings?

  And if we're drilling deeper, V, how did you know what Mary, what you're like, respectfully, you're a dude in SF.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:59Harry Stebbings?

  Do you know what Mary wanted in Ohio? Did you call her up? Did you video call her? Did it come through on support tickets?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:07Harry Stebbings?

  How can founders know the words to use, the customer personas to build around?

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, in the beginning, it was just like this cookie cutter research that we did. And we found, here's our personas, here's the type of people who use the products. But then I personally knew a lot of Marys and I found them in the product. And I would talk to them every day and I would ask them questions about their lives. How this started to get to know Words With Friends, why they use it, why they still use it up to years and years. Deep and making friendships and talking to these people every single day, that actually gave me.

• 8:40Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, what were the bad habits?

• 8:42Speaker 02

  The worst habit I would say is we burnt out so many fucking channels. And what I mean by that is Facebook in the early days opened up notifications for the first time for developers. As a developer, just send literally hundreds of push notifications every day to each user. We did that. We spammed the hell out of our users. We didn't have any guardrails set up and we essentially burned that channel out. And not only did we burn that channel out, we made Facebook change their platform. So people like us wouldn't spam it, which was ultimately a really bad thing.

• 9:10Harry Stebbings?

  How do you think about channel diverse? I know this is where I love the show because we just go off. But how do you think about channel diversification? Because if you've got a channel that's working, you don't want to be spread too thin. Just go for it. So how do you think about the blend between going for it when something works? But also being cognizant that you do need diversification built into your channel expansion?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, we did this at Reddit when I joined. I was very cognizant of we burned every channel we got, and I did not want to do that again. So one of the rules actually, before I talk about diversification, that we did with push notifications, which is a massive lever for Reddit, is we said you're only allowed to send push notifications if it hits a minimum CTR. And if it doesn't hit that CTR, it's spam. So unless you're hitting 10% CTR, you cannot send more PNs. You have to first fix your CTR, which means you need to make it more valuable for the users. You need to target it better and only then are you allowed to send more. So that was the first thing we did. We set up these guardrail metrics and we use CTR as the guardrail metric and actually worked really well. That's number one. I mean, number two, everyone is different.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Every single user is different. Some will prefer push notifications, some will prefer emails, some will prefer both. And their tolerance is going to be very different. So you have to be able to diversify and have an arsenal of channels at your disposal. So you can ultimately personalize it for each and every user, both on frequency level and which channels you use for each user.

• 10:34Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, listen to you, the one striking thing for me is that when you first tried that first A B test and then hearing you there, it's this kind of balance between art and science for growth.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 10:45Harry Stebbings?

  I'd love to understand how you define growth, given the usage today being so overused. So what does growth really mean to you and what does it not mean?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I stole this from our common friend Casey. But growth really should be renamed to something like value connection. And while value connection isn't exactly a very sexy term, I do think it defines what growth teams do way better than the term growth does. And what I mean by that is there is value that exists in your product and you need to make sure that value gets connected to each and every single user so that they may retain, they may engage, they may use the product for a really long time. It's why tactics like push notifications or tactics like new user onboarding typically sit with growth teams. Because what is new user onboarding? You didn't create anything new in the product. There's no new value being created. What you're doing is you're trying to organize your product

• 11:38Speaker 02

  to better connect it to the user coming in so that they retain, engage, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really about value connection, not about value creation. It's not core product, which is much more about creating new value in the product, which by the way, you have to do to grow a product. There's this common misconception that growth teams are the only teams that really care about traffic growth. That's not true. It's a value connection team, it's as important as a value creation. It's just a different way to grow your product. So I think that's one big misconception. It's also not growth hacking, which is a term I absolutely hate because it makes it seem like it's this kind of short-term hacky thing people do to get a little spike. It's absolutely not true. Growth is really about the long term

• 12:21Speaker 02

  and it's about months and then years of outcomes and impact. So that's also super important.

• 12:26Harry Stebbings?

  I just want to make sure, sorry, I understand. Creation versus connection. What is the difference really between value creation versus value connection when comparing product to growth?

• 12:35Speaker 02

  Let me take Reddit as an example. As I mentioned, sending a push notification from a subreddit that you're really into or something happens in that subreddit. I didn't create that content. I didn't create the subreddit. All I'm doing is connecting that content to the user who cares about it. Value connection. Value creation would be something like, we think that Reddit is really missing real-time communication on the platform. And if we add real-time communication on the platform, it will attract all sorts of users who will use it for that purpose or get existing users to use it more. And so therefore, let's add like a really cool chat component to our subreddit. That would be value creation. Push notifications, getting the content connected to the right person, value connection.

• 13:16Harry Stebbings?

  I want to kind of really discuss this, like, we're sitting in a cafe, I'm an early-stage founder, you're my angel and advisor. When do I actually do my first growth hire? How do you advise on timing? In terms of profile, do I get, like, young growth engineers? Or do I get, like, seasoned growth exec like you or Casey?

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when to hire? I think ideally you want to do it post-product market fit. In the beginning, you're trying to create value in your product. It's not so much about connection. I mean, there's a minimum amount of connection, obviously, that's important, but that's not what's going to make or break your product. Having the great email or having great new user onboarding is probably not what's going to make the big difference. Now, that being said, I do think it's important to be intentional about how you're going to grow and how you're going to connect the dots. Do you know what your distribution strategy is going to be? Do you know what your growth loop is? Do you know how network effects will start to play in? You do have to be very intentional and deliberate from day one about laying this down and then working towards it. Does that need a head of growth?

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Maybe. I would say if you have an advisor who has the expertise or you have that expertise, that's probably good enough. But if you don't have that expertise, you could get ahead of growth. But again, you need to avoid the temptation of optimizing way too early when really the priority should be, let's first figure out what the product is going to be and what value it will add to users. So really think ideally post-product market fit, but you do need to be intentional about your growth strategy from day one.

• 14:45Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, and so post-product market fit, I agree. Once it is post then, do I get growth reps and put them in isolation? Do I get a head of growth and put them under a CPO? Talk to me about the profile that's right and where it sits in the org.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  First and foremost, be a product leader. Head of growth is really a title that has shown up in the last few years. But really, all it is is a director of product or VP of product who works on value connection. So you need to look for someone who is a really great product leader and has an eye for for value connection. I would strongly recommend, of course, this is going to be about your budget, to hire someone really senior, really experienced. I think that's super important. Think about what that person needs to do upfront in the beginning. You need someone who can analyze your data. You need someone who can form a really quick strategy. While they are actually writing specs and operating, they also need to start hiring, building a team, scaling and doing all sorts of hats.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Not something that I think a junior person really would be able to do.

• 15:47Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think so? Or do you think actually like the senior growth people are so finely tuned in their very high roles? Then actually they're not used to doing everything and being that jack of all trades for a head of growth like you and Casey is like, what the fuck? Really? I'm starting again like this?

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:03Harry Stebbings?

  Sorry, I'm just intrigued. I thought the young jack of all trades would be like, oh, getting their hands dirty. Fine. Versus a more seasoned.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  I think you at least want someone who's been along for the ride. So yeah, it might be really difficult to get someone like Casey to join your startup and go back into an operator role and start from scratch. But it would be good to get someone who did it early on in Casey's team and who kind of wants to take that next step. So yeah, there's some money ball in there and you define the diamonds in the rough. But you do need someone, I think, who is senior enough and who has some experience wearing all those different hats. Cause it is pretty challenging.

• 16:39Harry Stebbings?

  I do wanna ask, you think about actually building the bench out itself. And we chatted before, I love to honesty, but you said building a team from scratch is one of the hardest things you've ever done. Are you married? Just kidding.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  I am married.

• 16:52Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, wow. I mean, well, then let's dive into this. What are the biggest mistakes you made in building your team?

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I made so many mistakes. There's so much I would do differently. I think there are three main things. One is I just didn't hire fast enough. I didn't spend as much of my time hiring as I should have. Probably thirty to forty percent of my time in those early years should have just been hiring. And what happened because I didn't hire fast enough? I was the one who had to fill the gap, which makes the situation even harder. You kind of go into this spiral because I'm the one writing the specs, doing the analysis. I don't have time for hiring and therefore you can't scale and really have the big impact that you're there for. That was one. We also didn't fire or move people off fast enough. We wanted to move at a breakneck speed and there are only certain types of people who are okay with that. And in the beginning, we didn't really have that.

• 17:39Harry Stebbings?

  V, on that one, how long do you give someone? How do you give them enough time to prove themselves, but also cut it within a reasonable timeframe?

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, for someone who you're bringing in, who is fairly senior at that level, and this is like a VP level higher, almost. You should know within three to six months where the wind is blowing. And so I think you want to make a decision pretty quickly. Three to six months for someone who you've hired, who's hopefully of the right caliber, should be more than enough to make a decision. But of course, you need to ask why it's not working out.

• 18:10Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so you didn't hire fast enough, naughtier. You didn't let go fast enough, even naughtier. What's the third one?

• 18:16Speaker 02

  The third one, I just didn't really care as much to harmonize with the rest of the company, right? I was coming into an existing organization, an existing culture. And I just, from day one, Harry, I just went guns blazing. This is the kind of team I want. This is the kind of culture I want to build. This is how we want to run product. Go, go, go. And I was very, very aggressive with it. And what I didn't do is sit down with people from across the table, form a relationship with them. I didn't do any of that. And what that led to is a lot of stress and strife and a lot of us versus them that built up over the first year. And that's not great for anyone. And ultimately, in the long term, it's going to hurt you.

• 18:53Harry Stebbings?

  So what would you do differently now to avoid that us versus them conflict and communication challenge?

• 19:00Speaker 02

  I mean, form those relationships early, but more importantly, really bring people along for the ride. Make them understand what you're trying to do, why it's valuable, why it's going to be impactful. I think I just didn't prioritize that on my side and got hurt by it.

• 19:14Harry Stebbings?

  So now we have those three, like, where you fucked up, bluntly. If we think about me structuring my hiring process for this, I've never done this before, V. What do the stages look like? Help me out here. Literally, what does that interview process look like?

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's pretty difficult to find the right person. In the early hiring that I did, I only hired within my network. Or I only hired when I have a very clear back channel. And here's why. The number one thing you're trying to figure out is this person can execute. Can they actually get their hands dirty and get chipped and make an?

• 19:50Speaker 02

  That is also incredibly hard to find out in interviews, incredibly difficult. How do you even ask that? How do you figure out if someone has those chops to make shit happen? You can figure out how intelligent they are. You can figure out what they've done, but it still doesn't give you the full picture. So for me, it was about digging into my network, which I did, or finding friends who I really trust and really asking them, do you know someone who fits my profile? At least I would start there because execution is so important and so hard to figure out in an interview process.

• 20:19Harry Stebbings?

  Got you, but now we have the actual process in the interviews and sales for the growth hires. What can you ask to determine the quality of candidate in those growth interviews?

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So my friend Jamie Quinn, who you might or might not have heard of, I had an interview with him. He was the director of product for ads back then. This is almost five years ago now. Interview was very simple. He asked me one question. It was a forty minute interview. How would you think about driving growth for Reddit? That literally was the interview. And what you're looking for in that question is someone who has the ability to be able to go like, okay, first, what does growth mean? Start off by looking at what your funnel is, where the breakpoints are, what the opportunities is. Here's how I would prioritize. Here's how I would go from prioritization to setting goals. Now start getting ideas. This is how I would form a roadmap. This is how I would assess every three months.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  And then one year down the line, we'd reassess, blah, blah, blah. You want someone who can actually walk you through that end to end process with a lot of clarity. And that was it. So thirty minutes, I walked him through what my process would be, how I would go about it. I didn't give him answers, but I just walked him through like, here's what I would look at. Here's my process. Here's how I would go about it. That was the entire interview. So you really need someone who more than comes with really bright ideas, knows, has a very clear process that they can walk you through and explain to you in thirty minutes, hopefully that.

• 21:45Harry Stebbings?

  So post this first meeting where we say, hey, V, what does growth look like for you? And how do you think about that at Reddit? What are we doing in the second meeting? Do we get them to meet other members of the team? Do we get them to do a practical case study? What's the next step post being impressed with that first answer?

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, if this is really an early hire, you want someone who can attract talent. That is super important. Because ultimately, you want someone who can build a team and pretty low ego. That's really important. And obviously, you want someone who's a culture fit, who will have high integrity, et cetera, et cetera. So, execution, ability to hire and build a team, of course, creativity and imagination and being able to judge that.

• 22:23Harry Stebbings?

  How do you test this? Do you say, V, who are the three people that you'll bring with you right now? Here's my laptop. Show me their LinkedIn's.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  I would do a lot of back-channeling there. So, I've done this for people where a lot of times when you back-channeling, you only talk to folks who were their previous managers. But I think it's actually equally important to talk to people who are on their team. And you ask them, would you follow them? Would you work with them again? And people lie to you, people will embellish, but you've got to kind of read between the lines and figure that out. So for me, it comes down to back-channeling and people who've worked for them, not just who they've worked for.

• 22:56Harry Stebbings?

  Do we give case studies at all? Do we open up the data and say, V, this is a problem that we have. This is a bottleneck in the funnel. Figure it out. Come back next week. Do we use case studies?

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. The question Jamie asked me essentially was a case study. It's pretty straightforward. And those are the case studies that I like. You want someone who can take a high-level ambiguous problem and just break it down for you and be really articulate about what exactly their process is and how they're going to solve the problem. You look for these sort of questions. How do you think about growth at Reddit? Very much a case study problem. One that I like asking is you are a head of product for hosts or guests at Airbnb. What are the three top metrics you care about? How would you set goals for those three metrics? How do you prioritize between those metrics? Same thing. You're trying to see if this is a person who understands what the process is and how they're walking through that.

• 23:50Harry Stebbings?

  Okay. No, I think that makes total sense. And so then we get to the offer stage. When we think about the offer, I think the other thing I see is just this complete lack of awareness around equity comp. How do you think about how much I should give equity-wise to this early but senior growth hire?

• 24:06Speaker 02

  This is going to be a critical hire for you. So for Reddit, for example. Our North Star metric is DAUQ, DAU Uniques, probably the most important metric for the company. Leading indicator of revenue. This person is going to be a massive impact driver for the most important metric in your company. You should pay them accordingly. This is a person who you're putting in a position that could make or break the company. You want them to feel like they have skin in the game. You want them to feel like this is their company, that they have ownership. And that they could have a material impact on their lives if they do a great job. But you want to pay them enough to where you are setting them up to succeed. And if they do succeed, it's a great financial outcome for them. That's very, very important.

• 24:48Harry Stebbings?

  How often do you change your North Star metric?

• 24:51Speaker 02

  At Reddit, we've never changed it. Back at Zynga, we rarely changed it. But it's a very downstream metric. Daily active users is so, so downstream. And by itself, it really does not mean anything. So really, you don't want to focus on daily active users. You want to focus on way more upstream metrics, like retention, or even more upstream than that, what drives retention. So in some ways, yeah, your North Star metric doesn't really change, but your leading indicators, they probably change a lot. Depending upon what you've tested, what you've learned.

• 25:23Harry Stebbings?

  So we've made this hire. I've done this. I've listened to you on the equity package. They're very happy and now they're going to join. I've never had a head of a growth hire join before. I have no idea how to do onboarding. Help me, I'm CEO. What does the onboarding process look like for this first growth hire slash head?

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, for the right person, it should be very minimal. You want someone who can figure it out mostly on their own. Give them access to data, give them a laptop. Hopefully they have a team that they can work with. In the beginning, all you need is a few engineers. That's all you need to get started. You were going to say something.

• 25:59Harry Stebbings?

  No, I was just going to ask, do I need to have extremely clean structured data for them to come in ready on day one? Or you know how startups are, shit's all over the place. Can I just say, V, here's login access, you go? Or do I need to actually be a little bit more disciplined around my data structure?

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Yes, it would be very good to be disciplined around. You don't want this person to be your head of. Data and to actually fix whatever is happening with your data. That is not their job. What you want is for them to be able to actually get the data, analyze it and form a strategy really quickly. So as much as you can, make that part easy for them so that they have the tools that they need to actually do their jobs. If you're relying on them to be your head of data, you're not setting them up to succeed.

• 26:42Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of like the first month, what are the biggest red flags and also green lights when looking at candidates? What would you be like, holy shit, V did this? Amazing. And ooh, V did this? That's bad.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  In the first month, the red flags have got to be people who are doing a lot of talking and a lot of listening and not a lot of action. The right candidate just wants to get going. They want to launch something their second week there. They should just be itching to execute and launching things. That is the right candidate. One of the worst answers that I hear in interviews sometimes, like when I ask, what are your first 60 days like? A lot of like listening and learning and talking to people and forming relationship. No, you should have the drive to get going now. In the first month, for someone who's a really senior hire, they should have looked at your data. They should have formed some sort of strategy. It doesn't need to be a 10-page thing, but even just a one-pager.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  And they should have actually started to work with engineers to get shit going. That's super, super key.

• 27:41Harry Stebbings?

  How do I as a CEO resource them properly? Do I give them two engineers full time? Do I say, hey, bring in Ange when you need them, but I'm not giving you dedicated engineers? How can I equip that new head of growth efficiently so they can do this?

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, as I mentioned in the beginning, you just need a few engineers who can collaborate, who can work with this person. Full time, much better than contractors or part-time. Again, you want people who have skin in the game. This is a high leverage area for your company and you don't want someone phoning it in.

• 28:12Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, what's the most painful experience you've been through that you were really glad that you went through?

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Okay, I used to work with Mark Tinkus. I don't know if you've heard of him.

• 28:21Harry Stebbings?

  I have interviewed him.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Oh, awesome. I've learned a lot from Mark. He's a tough cookie to work with. When Mark came back to Zynga the second time, I was the general manager of works with. And we had gone through a really great period and then we were kind of floundering. And so when he came back, we were not doing so hot. And he comes in and he looks at our roadmap. And at that time, we had funded and just launched this feature called Fast Play. And it was a faster version of Words with Friends. It was based on this pretty loose insight that Words with Friends was like too slow. The people wanted something fast, something shorter. And so we built a board and it was actually hundreds and hundreds of hours of engineering time. And we had launched this thing and five percent of DAU used it. So I had no value. So it was a complete waste. Mark came in and just kicked my ass for weeks on end.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  And for weeks on end, I mostly defended myself. I'm trying to just be like, no, it's actually not such a huge failure. Five percent DAU use it, we grow over time. Here's why we did it, blah, blah, blah. Here's what we learned, here's how we use the tech, et cetera, et cetera. Really, I was just making excuses. Mark was exactly right. And he asked me this one question that stuck with me. He's like, how did you test this idea before you decided to invest hundreds of hours of engineering time in it? We were like, we didn't. We just were convicted in the idea and we spent hundreds of hours in it and we did it. Why did you not put up a dialogue in front of users, asking them, hey, do you want a faster board to play on? Yes or no? Like, we never did that. When I thought about it, I remember the exact moment I was like, that is so obvious. Why did we not do that?

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Would have been hours of engineering work, would have saved us hundreds of hours of engineering time. We could have deployed on, on something else. So that was a very painful but valuable lesson for me.

• 30:00Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me, you mentioned the growth and then the floundering. How do you maintain morale in an organization and a functional unit? When you're floundering respectfully and it's not going well? How do you maintain morale?

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, on Words with Friends, it came back down to culture. And it was a culture where everyone felt ownership of what they were doing. And not in a way that, oh, I have equity in the company. In a way that we're floundering and this is my job. As much as it is the person sitting next to me or the GM or the VP of Product. It is our job to get us out of this. It was about building a culture where everyone felt ownership and everyone had a voice. And everyone had power to be able to come up with the idea that. Take us out of it. And that's exactly what happened. The idea that took us out of the mess was actually from an individual contributor. It was not for me. It was not for product manager. It was from an engineer and a designer who came up with it in a brainstorming meeting.

• 30:53Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, he came up with an in brainstorming meeting. How do you idea validate? We spoke about this before the show.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:59Harry Stebbings?

  What's our idea validation process?

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, coming back to that fast play example that I gave, all we needed to do was put up a fake dialogue that asked users, is this something that they want? Yes or no? Ninety eight percent of users would have told us right then they don't want that. They just want to play the game, keep doing that. We didn't do that. So after that lesson that we learned, we basically built this repertoire of validating ideas. You could validate ideas by putting up those dialogues and asking questions. You could validate ideas by sending a push notification and asking a question, getting users to give you input. You could validate an idea by doing user research, talking to real users. Or sometimes, you know what? You can't validate an idea. And sometimes it is about having conviction and vision and you have to do it to find out.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Or you can do a very slim version of it, an MVP of it and find out. For me, it was about, we have ten different ways of validating ideas. For each idea, we chose one of those ten. And the key was that each of those would be just really fast, simple, easy, and ultimately would save us a lot of engineering time. This is about converting engineering time into value for your users and for your company.

• 32:06Harry Stebbings?

  So that's kind of idea validation pre-product creation there. Do we bother committing resources to it? Post committing resources to it and post-product creation or iteration, we have the product reviews. How do you approach product reviews? Who's invited? Who sets the agenda? How do you structure them?

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think this is a really important instrument because there are a couple of things happening here. One, there's accountability. So we did a bunch of stuff. What happened with a bunch of stuff? What did we learn? Two, it's about sharing learning. And then three, it's about how does this inform what you are doing next? So if you take those three priorities, who needs to be in there? Well, all the lead absolutely need to be in a product review. They all are stakeholders in what we did. And I don't mean just your product lead. Your engineering leads need to be there, your design lead needs to be there, your QA lead, your research lead. Every single discipline needs to have a seat at the table because they have shared accountability to the results. And this is an instrument for accountability.

• 33:03Harry Stebbings?

  How often do you do them? And also, sorry, very granular. What sort of documentation do you take to enable data capture so the rest of the org can also see it?

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, how often? So when I was at Zynga, we did them weekly. It was just a weekly product cadence. I mean, gaming is brutal. It is a daily business and you only have so much of a shelf life. For gaming, that was the right cadence. For Reddit, it's actually more like once a month. It's not like a content treadmill that a lot of games at Zynga were. And so the cadence doesn't need to be as high. So find the right cadence for you that makes sense for your product. At Zynga, we had this elaborate, you would do slides and people would spend hours and full all-nighters doing it. We got rid of all of that at Reddit and it was very informal. So honestly, just what did we do? What did we learn? What were something surprising or counterintuitive? And what does it mean?

• 33:56Speaker 02

  And then we just have a discussion about it. So it's just a one-page document that just lists this very quick and it's really more about the discussion. And then hopefully you have these one-pagers going in a repository somewhere that people can refer to and new employees can look at and ramp up on.

• 34:11Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask final one? You've been an angel investor now also in some great companies. How has angel investing also impacted your mindset towards growth and company building?

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it sounds pretty obvious, but ultimately talent is everything. So for me, when I do angel investing, I'm not so much interested in what exactly is the product, what exactly is the market. But if I really believe in the person and the talent, I know they'll figure it out and I'm investing more in them and less in the product. And it's the same thing when it comes to my teams internally.

• 34:42Harry Stebbings?

  When you made a bad angel investment, what has been the reason and what have you learned?

• 34:47Speaker 02

  I invested in a hotel in San Francisco, which is a horrible investment. I don't know what's happening.

• 34:53Harry Stebbings?

  What are you doing? Why would you invest in that?

• 34:55Speaker 02

  I've ruined all credibility with you now, Harry. But yeah, I invested in this hotel. And what's funny about it is through all of what I just told you out the window, right? To me, it was just like, oh, I've never invested in a hotel before. It sounds kind of sexy to be a part owner in a hotel. That's what got me to do it. Ultimately, if I was going by my rubric of like, who am I investing in? What's the value of the product? I would not have invested. So yeah, that was easily the worst investment I've ever made.

• 35:21Harry Stebbings?

  Man, you clearly do not pass this with your wife because she would have stopped you.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  She tried to, she tried to.

• 35:28Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, listen to your wife, baby. That's a steep learning curve. Anyway, have I told you I'm starting a new hotel? I'm looking for investors.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  I'm game, I'm game.

• 35:37Harry Stebbings?

  I'm game, I'm in, I'm in. Listen, I want to move into a quick fire round. So I'm going to say a short statement. You're going to give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it sounds great.

• 35:45Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, future of social, you sit at the front of it, hit me.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  It's all converging, all right? I mean, back in two thousand eight, two thousand nine, it was all about friends and the friend graph. And Reddit was alive back then. It was way ahead of its time. It was about communities and interests and not about people. And what you're seeing now is the broad social networks are becoming all about communities and all about interests. And they just have a different take on it. Like, that's what TikTok is, that's what Instagram is becoming, that's what Reddit obviously is, that's what Discord is. It's just inevitability. And all the friend stuff is becoming much more private. It's becoming much more in messaging. And Mark Zuckerberg knew this five years ago, six years ago, whenever, when he wrote that community manifesto. He could see this, that broad social network, it's just going to be about interests and it's going to be less about identity more and more.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  Maybe just some famous people, of course, Twitter, Instagram, there it's going to be important. But broadly, it's going to be organized by interests, organized by communities. So Reddit way ahead of its time in that sense. And then messaging just takes a kick on friends. Probably already happened.

• 36:46Harry Stebbings?

  This is really unfair, but it's my show. So Reddit is on this kind of spectacular trajectory. How could it go wrong? What do you guys identify as the pre-mortem for how you could fuck up?

• 36:56Speaker 02

  How we fuck up is instead of doubling down where we are strong, we try to cover our weaknesses. So we look at what's happening with other social networks and we try to follow. We have a pretty unique thing going. When you think about where Reddit is strong, we are deep. You can get content about stranger things anywhere. You can get content about it in TikTok, on YouTube, wherever. But like, that great discussion is only happening on Reddit and nowhere else. So if we chose instead of just going deep on that and doubling down on that, which is our strength, which is depth, we instead... Try to follow what's happening elsewhere. I think that's how we fuck up.

• 37:34Harry Stebbings?

  Can you have depth and breadth?

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Yes, but depth is our differentiation. So you need to have breadth and we do. You can talk about the NBA, you can talk about knitting, you can talk about TV shows, movies, et cetera. And you can do that anywhere. But the difference is Reddit is the deepest, most thoughtful discussion. That's not happening anywhere else.

• 37:54Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think that brand is what people know?

• 37:56Speaker 02

  No, I think we have a perception problem, right? When you ask the average person what it think about Reddit, like, oh, is that thing happened with Wall Street Bets? Or, oh, it's where like weird people I know hang out.

• 38:08Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me, on the growth side, what tactics have not changed over the last five years?

• 38:13Speaker 02

  I mean, just serving your customer a great experience has not changed. And the channels being really key, stuff like news onboarding really being super key. I mean, it sounds too obvious for me to even talk about here. Those things have not changed. But the most important things we still do to this day, new user onboarding and our push notifications and email.

• 38:33Harry Stebbings?

  What tactics have totally died to death? Well, like five, 10 years ago, super central. Now you're like, oh my gosh.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  I think a lot of SEO stuff is just dying a pretty quick death. There's good SEO stuff, right? Like structuring your website well, getting great content, telling Google where your great content is. We do a lot of that. That's great. But a lot of the black hat SEO stuff, I think at this point is just dead or almost dead. But some people still do it. Some companies still do it.

• 38:58Harry Stebbings?

  What is the biggest mistake that founders make when hiring growth teams?

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Look, there are lots of smart people out there. There are lots of people who'd be great for a job. You need to find people who are right for what you need exactly. And what I mean by that is I am probably not a great head of growth for a B two B company. I just never worked in the space. I don't get it. That's not where my expertise is. I wouldn't know what to do with it at all. So you need to find not just smart people, but the kind of person that you need for this exact job. And it's not just about the industry you're in, the kind of company you're at. It's also about the stage, the personality of the person, whether you need someone to come in and. Actually form a strategy and that's really hard and you're struggling with it.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Or you just need, you know what to do, the pieces are there and you just need someone to execute. All sorts of different slices. The number one mistake is just not going through that process and just being like, oh, this person was the head of growth at X, Y and Z. Yeah, they will know what to do. Let's just hire them. No, it's very different. Every single situation, every single company is very different. You just have to be deliberate about who's right for this particular job.

• 40:07Harry Stebbings?

  Final one, what one company growth strategy have you been most impressed by recently?

• 40:13Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm a huge fan of the bottoms up SaaS model. I just read Andrew Chen's book Cold Start Problem.

• 40:20Harry Stebbings?

  The Cold Start.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, and one of my favorite stories was about Slack and it was just really cool how this product grew. And first, like how they pivoted, talk about investing in teams, right? I think a gaming startup of some sort and then pivoted to this B two B software. And then took this bottoms up approach, which I think mostly happened accidentally, but then they really like leaned into it. And how that grew the network effects and how ultimately like companies took notice and paid them both loads of money. And now it's everywhere, right? So I think the bottoms up SaaS model for me is really, really impressive. Cause there's a really cool merge of what happens in social consumer companies and in B two B companies. And I think it's just really cool. Both of those are kind of coming together in this way. So for me, it's probably Slack.

• 41:04Harry Stebbings?

  So unfair of me. Final, final one. What was the last first mile experience you had which really blew your mind?

• 41:09Speaker 02

  This is kind of too obvious of an answer, but I think TikTok, they just get it. Tech is just so good, right? And they just understand value connection better than anyone else. The first time I used TikTok, they drop you straight onto a video, no sign up, nothing. I think it's probably changed now, drop you onto a video, that's it. Tell you to swipe up, they're taking note of your signals, probably stealing your data. And then on the fly, personalizing the experience to where five minutes later, they know me better than I know myself. Just amazing. So for me, it's definitely TikTok.

• 41:41Harry Stebbings?

  The, I've really enjoyed this fun. I love the natural conversations. I love the fly on the wall vibe. I thank you for putting up with my more and more opinionated stances. You've been a star, so thank you so much.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  Hey, thanks a lot, Harry. It's been really, really a blast.

• 41:56Harry Stebbings?

  I just love that discussion. If you'd like to see more from us, of course you can on 20vc.com, that's 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 realisation that business travel should be easy. Tripactions puts travellers' needs first, through the best technology connecting travel, corporate cards and expense management, and combining them into this single, beautiful, streamlined platform to serve travellers and companies of all sizes. Travelling employees can easily book or change travel directly on the app. Employees are empowered to make their own bookings and manage their spend within policy. They swipe a corporate card

• 42:39Harry Stebbings?

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• 43:24Harry Stebbings?

  day in the studio and I lost my shit, because guess what? Like always, it did not work. But there is a solution out there. Enter Flatfile, the data onboarding platform built to take the acute pain out of importing customer data into your product. With Flatfile, your product's experience is world-class on day one. It's built to handle everything from data mapping, field validation, and it's meticulously designed to blend right into your platform. Flatfile turns a frustrating process for everyone into this delightful first-touch experience for your customers. And Flatfile is SOC 2, Type 1 and 2 certified, GDPR compliant and even HIPAA compliant, ensuring your customer, no matter where they are in the world, is sharing their data securely and in compliance

• 44:05Harry Stebbings?

  Every step of the way, no more emailing files back and forth, no more help articles that just don't land, just clean data on day one. If you're ready to onboard millions of rows of customer data in minutes, visit flatfile.com. And we mentioned the move back to hybrid with trip actions 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.

• 44:49Harry Stebbings?

  As always, I so appreciate all your support and I can't wait to bring you an incredible episode this coming Friday.