20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Instacart and Opendoor, Why 70% of Growth Experiments Should Fail and How to Fail Fast, How to Hire a Growth Team; Secrets and Tips & Why Operator Investors WIll be the Best Investors in 10 Years with Sri Batchu @ Ram

Sri Batchu currently leads Growth at Ramp. He previously led Growth Strategy and Operations at Instacart where he also helped grow their Ads business. Prior to that, he was one of the first 50 employees at Opendoor where he built, scaled, and managed a variety of business teams including Analytics, Sales, and Pricing. During his time, the company grew from $100M to $5B+ revenue and to 1500+ people. He started his career in management consulting at McKinsey and also held various investing roles including in private equity at Bain Capital. In Today's Episode with Sri Batchu We Discuss: 1. From Harvard to Private Equity to Leading the Best Growth Teams: How did Sri make his way into the world of growth with Instacart and Opendoor? What are 1-2 of his biggest takeaways from his time at Instacart? How did it change his approach and mindset towards growth? How did Zilllow burn themselves by buying homes? What did that teach Sri about hitting metrics and goal setting in growth teams? 2. Growth Teams Should Fail and Fail Fast: What is the right ratio of success to failure within growth teams? What are specific ways that growth teams can increase the speed with which they fail? How are the best post-mortems run? Who joins them? Who leads the agenda? What are Sri's biggest lessons on how to set the right goals? Where do so many growth teams go wrong with the North Star that they set for themselves? 3. Building the Bench: Hiring a Growth Team: When is the right time to make your first growth hires? What profile should your first growth hires be? How should one structure the interview process when hiring growth teams? What is the first question Sri asks all new hires? Why does Sri believe you have to hire slowly? Should candidates do case studies as part of the process, if so, on a new company or on the company they are interviewing for? 4. When Operators Become Investors: Why does Sri believe the best investors of the next 10 years will be operators? Why does Sri believe that operators can do due diligence to a higher level than traditional VCs? Why does Sri believe that investors should not take cold emails? Why does Sri believe that it is not wrong for an investor to hire from their portfolio companies? What does Sri believe the future of venture holds over the next 10 years?

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Growth has just a typically high failure rate. So two thirds of your projects are likely to fail. What's important is that you fail quickly and conclusively. Startups should have time periods of planning that are much, much shorter on a two week sprint cadence. So you really reduce the cycle time to output.

• 0:16Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, the amount of granular tactical advice in this show is just incredible. Welcome back to 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, this is the monthly show where we sit down with the leading growth experts to unpack how they start, scale and manage growth teams today. And we're joined by one of the fastest growing companies in tech in the form of Ramp, with their Head of Growth, Sri Batshu, joining us in the hot seat today. Prior to Ramp, Sri led growth strategy at Instacart, where he also helped grow their ads business. Before Instacart, he was one of the first 50 employees at Open Door. And during his time at Open Door, the company grew from 100 million to $5 billion plus in revenue and up to 1,500 people. But before we dive into the show today, I need your help.

• 0:56Harry Stebbings?

  I need your input on the 20 VC Miro board as I'm booking new guests that we should feature on the show in 2023. Head on over to miro.com/20vc and leave your suggestions with digital sticky notes or comments. That's miro.com/20vc. Miro actually sponsored this episode. For those of you that haven't used it before, it's a tool that I think is really powerful and game changing. Just ask the 1 million plus people who sign up for Miro every month. It's a visual collaboration platform packed with the right tools, tech and templates to grow your product, vision, idea, org at scale. Miro acts as a single source of truth across teams.

• 1:38Harry Stebbings?

  That means getting buy-in much faster from teams like marketing, engineering, sales, product, basically anyone who needs to have a say to make growth projects grow. And even though it seems like a simple digital whiteboard, it's much more. Hashing out a sound acquisition strategy, brainstorming Miro, rethinking your signup flow. Use Miro's user research templates. However you need to grow, Miro can help. We use Miro all the time to brainstorm future shows, vote on potential guests and leave notes for the rest of the team in our own time. Check it out today again at miro.com/20vc. And I'm really excited about this next sponsor because a few of my portfolio companies love and use it. The question, do you know the impact of your marketing efforts?

• 2:23Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:08Harry Stebbings?

  That's funnel.io/20vc.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:20Harry Stebbings?

  Sri, I am so excited for this. I spoke to Apurva, I spoke to Edwin, I spoke to Jason Child. They all said terrible things. And I'm joking, they said fantastic things. But thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course, I'm very excited. Huge fan of your show, so excited about the conversation.

• 3:35Harry Stebbings?

  That is very, very kind of you. I want to start, and growth is this kind of weird, new-ish discipline, really. So how did you first make your way into the world of growth? And what was that first entry point for you?

• 3:45Speaker 00

  As you mentioned, growth is a relatively new field. That's at the intersection of product, marketing and data and analytics, right? I've come here in a slightly different path than most, probably. I've been thinking about growth as a consultant and an investor prior to becoming an operator. And I joined Open Door when it was 40 people in hyper growth phase, got to see it grow to 2,000 people nearly and 5 billion of revenue. And being an early business journalist, worked on anything that needed help. So sales, analytics, pricing, et cetera. And then subsequently went to Instacart, where the key problem that they had at the time was building out the ads business. And so I kind of leveraged my analytics and investment background into a growth role that way, spent time working on growth at Instacart, primarily in the ads business first,

• 4:29Speaker 00

  and then the overall business, and now lead growth at Ramp. So I kind of came to it via an investment and analytics background versus a product or marketing background, which is often how you see a lot of growth leaders. And I think you'll see more people like me because I think increasingly, growth is a discipline of making a portfolio of bets, thinking about ROI, and I'm thinking about data and experimentation in a rigorous way.

• 4:50Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you in terms of the portfolio bets. I think the best growth and marketing leaders are actually very much like VCs. Plays many bets, analyzes what works, doubles down efficiently. So I totally agree with you there. You mentioned Open Door, you mentioned Instacart, two incredible companies. If you were to think about one or two big takeaways and how they impacted your mindset from each, what would you say they would be, Shri?

• 5:11Speaker 00

  One lesson and experience that I remember vividly from my time at Open Door, for those of folks that know the market, is Open Door was the leader in the space called iBuying, buying and selling homes. And Zillow, the largest player in real estate, had entered our market in 2017. And as you can imagine, that had some impact on our growth because they entered the exact same markets that we were in. And we at Open Door had a choice to make. Do we price compete? Do we price match Zillow to acquire customers if Zillow is bidding higher on homes or not? And it was a really tough decision. And something I learned from that process is sticking to your conviction, if you've arrived at it on a first principles basis, even if it gets tough. So what we decided at Open Door is our biggest asset in competitive mode is the ability

• 5:53Speaker 00

  to price accurately, and we're not going to compromise that for short-term growth. And we stuck to our guns. We never did a price match, and we never negotiated on price with sellers of homes. And lo and behold, we were right longer term in the sense that Zillow eventually lost their shirt and exited the market before the market crashed, right? So they left while still in a peak real estate market. So I'm proud of that decision, but it was painful for a while while we were in that competitive situation.

• 6:18Harry Stebbings?

  How do you analyze the statement, the market can stay irrational longer than your company can stay solvent? Because you may be right, but if they had enough cash, if they kept our barns Forever.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  That's certainly true, and that was a risk that we took. And I think our mitigating factor there is our overall goal was to be, and we were consistently profitable on every cohort of homes that we were buying. So our goal was, even if they were outstripping us in volume, we would be able to survive for a long period of time because we were unit economic positive as long as we were doing our business right.

• 6:51Harry Stebbings?

  So stick to convictions, stick to first principles. This is Open Door. What about Instacart?

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Instacart was in some ways an even more complicated business than Open Door because it's a four-sided marketplace. We have shoppers, we have buyers, we have advertisers, and we have the retailers that are on the platform as well with various different incentives and revenue streams. And so, as you can imagine, it was a lot of stuff to juggle. And one thing I learned from Apurva and Instacart is simplification is a superpower, and it's actually very difficult. And a lot of executives, when they're faced with two potentially high-impact initiatives, are often tempted to say, let's do both. The good ones can pick one and make a clear decision. I think the best ones will just say, actually, we're doing neither because they don't fit in our overall strategy and are distracting. And Apurva was particularly good at this, and that was something that I picked up from my time at Instacart.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  And there were a few of us that we had a joke that we would call ourselves the VPs of no, who would be the people that would tell people, no, we are not doing that because we were focusing on the things that matter most.

• 7:48Harry Stebbings?

  I want to start with, this show fundamentally is a benchmark for what great growth and great growth leaders look like. What does growth or VP of growth mean to you and how do you define it?

• 7:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a good question. As you mentioned, like if you were to poll 10 different people on what their growth team looks like, you would get 10 different answers. And it's often determined ad hoc based on who's in the seat, who was hired first, what the org structure is, rather than a principled decision. Personally, to me, a growth function is something that you build post-product market fit and is the home for all high-volume data and experimentation-oriented customer acquisition retention engagement strategies. So what does that mean? Typically, things like paid marketing, SEO, as well as product-led growth, website. I would recommend working as closely together as possible structurally and at ramp, they're all under one roof, which is great, and have the same kind of north stars and goals. I think you've got to put everything that drives acquisition. Retention that's high volume and experimentation oriented under one roof.

• 8:42Harry Stebbings?

  When you say under one roof, what do you mean by that? Do you mean like it's integrated into product and engineering? Do you mean it's a standalone team? How do you think about that? And what does under one roof mean?

• 8:53Speaker 00

  I think there's a couple of different ways to do it. I think you could do it structurally as a different team and have like the growth product leader report to the growth leader as well as the high volume marketing channel leaders also reporting into the same leaders. That would be under one roof in a very literal sense in terms of reporting lines and structure, which works. I think the other way that you can do it is even if you don't have solid line reporting into one place is clear accountability. All three or whatever of these teams are driving towards the same North Star goals and are jointly accountable. The problem with a lot of joint accountability I tend to find in org structures is when more than one person is responsible, no person is responsible. And so that's a balance that you have to strike culturally.

• 9:30Harry Stebbings?

  You also said about North Star metric that I think one of the biggest problems that I see on the C3 is that people have the wrong North Star metric. Often it's revenue and revenue for me is an output, it's not an in.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 9:41Harry Stebbings?

  How do you advise founders today on choosing the right North Star metric? And how do you approach it?

• 9:46Speaker 00

  I personally think there's never be a perfect North Star metric for growth. It'll obviously depend on your business and there's always multiple pushes and pulls that you're trying to optimize for one of them. You're into that. I think one is like, obviously one North Star metric can be simple and intuitive for people to understand. You want it to be, as you mentioned, something that the teams can actually directly impact. So something that is much closely related to their inputs, but something that's also very aligned with the ultimate value creation of the company. And I typically like to have like a volume goal and efficiency or ROI goal for growth teams. On the volume goal, take the B2B example, right? You could have the growth team's goal be some sort of qualified leads like MQLs or PQLs or something like that. But as you know, businesses are ultimately valued on long-term dollars of profit and cash flow generation.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  And then humans are very good at intentionally or unintentionally optimizing for the targets and metrics that they're given. So in this particular example, how could it go wrong? If you give a team qualified lead goal, they can hit that goal by bringing a bunch of small leads or lower quality leads that don't end up driving much profit, right? And there's a lot of temptation, as you mentioned, for a lot of teams. To go the other extreme in that case and be like, okay, well, what is that I'm really trying to measure? Okay, why don't we hold the team accountable for contribution profit dollars? Because that's actually very correlated to long term value. Then you have the opposite problem where the results are so far away from the sphere of influence of the team, both in terms of the time it takes as well as their own actions, that the feedback loop is slow and the teams become demotivated. And it becomes almost like an irrelevant target metric because they're like, we can't really move it.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Or if we move it, we won't see it for a really long time. So I think you have to kind of strike the right balance there and have some guardrails. So typically for B two B, where I land at is like dollars of like SQL pipeline, which kind of controls for that quality element and controls for the size of the lead element as an art. So that's just one example, but obviously depending on your business model, you want to find something somewhere in between where it's highly correlated with the actual business outcomes that you're trying to drive, but close enough to the actions of the team that they can directly impact it and have a feedback loop.

• 11:45Harry Stebbings?

  You said there about the speed of the feedback loop being so important. You said before, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Could be a line from Kama Sutra. Some things get editors out, some don't. We'll see what the editors decide on that one. What did you mean by slow is smooth and smooth is fast?

• 12:02Speaker 00

  I think this one's actually repurposed from the Marines. But basically the concept is in the early days of growth, you've got a small ragtag team that's throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and seeing what works, right? This works for a bit, but often tends to devolve into undiagnosable chaos. If things aren't working, you have no idea why. And then if things are working, you still have no idea why and don't know where to double down. So what I tend to do, which is to slow down a bit, like reset the basic structures of a team. So what do you do during this quote unquote slowdown period is one thing is what we just talked about is set the right North Star metrics, create a framework for how do you prioritize projects? How do you measure success and ROI? And I think once you have that clear process of this is how we select projects, prioritize them,

• 12:46Speaker 00

  promote experiments is clean and understood and aligned. I think it helps the team move a lot faster. So I don't want to slow down teams with a lot of process, but I think some sort of lightweight process and aligned framework on how we select projects. Projects and scale them to general availability or what have you as they succeed is I think really important.

• 13:04Harry Stebbings?

  If we select a project and we decide to focus on it, what is the success versus failure rate that we should expect within growth? What does that look like to you?

• 13:14Speaker 00

  In my experience, and I've seen this to be pretty consistent actually across the various companies that I've worked on these types of projects. Growth has just a typically high failure rate and my historical success rate that I've seen at various companies is around thirty percent. So two thirds of your projects are likely to fail. So what's important is that you fail quickly and conclusively, right? And happy to talk more about what that looks like, but.

• 13:37Harry Stebbings?

  Can we actually, how do you increase the speed to failure?

• 13:40Speaker 00

  I think on speed point, it's really around reducing cycle times. I think there's a bunch of cultural baggage that you get, which is the unit of planning time that you work with. The larger that is, the slower you are as a company. Google has OKRs that are one year based, right? Startups should have time periods of planning that are much, much shorter. And so we at Ramp still, for example, run the growth team, whether it's product or non-product teams as well, on a two-week sprint cadence. So you really reduce the cycle time to output at least. I mean, obviously some projects are going to take longer than that, but you have the two-week accountability mark on like, what have you shipped so far? That really pushes the the speed point.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  And at Ramp, the other thing that we've done culturally as a company as well, is to just really drill that into the teams by talking about days, actually. So we talk about what day it is since the founding of Ramp at every all hands, at every board meeting, et cetera. So people start thinking about the smallest unit of time as days, like what have you shipped today? It's an implicit kind of mental model that we have at Ramp. And something that's funny to see is it's something that's spreading via the Ramp alumni, you know, some of whom I've invested in, where they in their investor updates. Say day number X since founding of my company, and this is what we've shipped or accomplished over the last month or quarter or whatever.

• 14:54Harry Stebbings?

  Speaking of successes and failures, you said seventy percent fail. What's been the biggest failed growth experiment you've done and how did it change your mindset?

• 15:03Speaker 00

  So things can fail in two ways, right? One is the you don't grow with the experiment or you grow in the wrong way. Hurts the business in a different way. So I'll pick an example of the of the second kind, which is when we were at Open Door, competitive situation and growth was slowing. And we were like, OK, we should try to figure out other ways of driving scalable growth that are not paid advertising or what have you. So one idea, which seemed obvious to be had, was there's a bunch of people that are listing their homes on the market. Rather than trying to get buyers that are not agent represented, why don't we just put bids on homes that are listed on the market based on whatever our pricing model to drive acquisition volume. At Open Door, I don't know if you see why this didn't work coming already. But as you can imagine,

• 15:47Speaker 00

  when you're buying a listed home, there's a few things happening. If the person is willing to sell to you after they've listed, it means there's probably some asymmetric information. They know something about the home that you don't because it hasn't sold and they've gotten a bunch of buyer feedback. And they're willing to now take it off the market and sell it to you. There's also more costs involved for the seller when it's a listed home because they still have to pay their agent commission and they have to pay Open Door, et cetera. So the kind of buyer that's willing to make that decision, there's a ton of adverse selection on the property that our diligence process couldn't catch. And so we did this program for a few months and we learned that they were tremendously unprofitable for Open Door because of the adverse selection element. And we had to shut down the program.

• 16:25Harry Stebbings?

  So what did you learn as a result of that?

• 16:27Speaker 00

  Great question. I think a lot of growth teams, especially when push comes to shove, think about, OK, let's hit our goals of top line North Star metric goals that we've talked about. And don't think about pre-mortem, what might happen, what can go wrong? As well as like really keep in mind that paired metric that we talked about. So actually, I don't know if I mentioned earlier when we talked about North Stars, we want a volume goal and an efficiency goal. So you want something that you track even as you're hitting volumes to make sure that you're driving growth profitably or efficiently, right? And so for something like this, we probably should have had a, what is the specific profitability of this program? And should we track it early to make sure that it doesn't go off the rails? Would have been one way to solve for this.

• 17:08Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you, when you think about pre-mortems, does that inhibit your ability to move fast and experiment quickly?

• 17:14Speaker 00

  I think you have to be selective on any process, right? And try to shy away from process as much as possible. In my opinion, so I typically think of like pre-mortems as something that feels like a big departure from current strategy, or something that's a lot of investment, or that you believe has a lot of high potential in terms of visibility, or risk, or pipeline generation. For things like that is where I would recommend doing a pre-mortem.

• 17:38Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned throwing spaghetti at walls, brilliant analogy, but it is the early days of a growth team that are sometimes most important in setting the foundations. When's the right time to start thinking about a growth team?

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Finding product market fit, in my opinion, is the founder's primary job. It is not something that you outsource to a growth team. In my view, like a growth team in the beginning days is honestly like, sales team, the founder, and maybe one early career generalist that has like an analytical background that can run some experiments and tests. I think once you have clear product market fit and you have some escape velocity and you're actually like growing, is when I would actually staff a growth team that's more than like one person, right?

• 18:14Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so to say we find that tipping point where we need it, do we hire a junior analyst who is super analytical and smart and hustles and experiments, or do we hire a growth leader? Which role is the right to hire for?

• 18:26Speaker 00

  A growth leader is helpful when you have multiple programs that are starting to show work. So when I say programs, I mean, you've spent a little bit on paid marketing. It seems like it's working. You've got potentially somebody full-time working on paid marketing or thinking about it. You've got some initial traction on product led growth or what have you, is when I would say you start looking for that like, director plus level of person. The early days of growth can be managed by a lot of different types of people. I actually really like the biz ops profile until you're like ready to really put some gas on the fire and, you know, hire a VP. But I think what's great about growth is that it's truly a cross-disciplinary field.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  And so I actually think people that are generalists do a lot better than hiring a specialist early on.

• 19:13Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think you need to hire someone who's been ahead of growth before? It's such a small field.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't think so. I think what you want to look for is people that have, you know, the T-shaped classic thing, where they have like a deep spike in one area or one discipline of growth in some way, and whether that spike is product. Some function of marketing or analytics and data. And you can invest in somebody to try to scale into the other areas and really build out a growth function. And you're right, it's not like the function has been around for so long that there are so many people that you can hire from that are good.

• 19:45Harry Stebbings?

  So it's be even investing in someone, I need to fricking hire them. And you're my angel investors, Sri, so you get to help me. How do I structure the process for hiring the first growth hire? And what do the stages look like?

• 19:57Speaker 00

  I could probably speak to like a more senior growth hire, how you kind of think about it. And so I think in terms of sourcing, Google has actually done a good job of summarizing on Twitter what people actually do, which is use your network and of your investors and executives to identify companies and people that you think are one to two stages ahead of you that are exceptional at the function, mainly growth here. And you use those companies and people to find more people and you kind of validate reputations, et cetera. And depending on how advanced the company is, you target people that are actually at the head of the role at that company, or you target one level below that. And as you know, the best candidates are often passive and the role, as we've talked about before, can be very nebulous. Get ready for a long process because you'll have to like iron out the scope and think

• 20:41Speaker 00

  about your own org structure as you bring that person in. You know, once you actually get, you know, mutual fit and feel like there's something with a few candidates, the next step is actually having them do something that simulates the actual job. I'm a big believer in doing a little bit of homework or case study type of thing. And it works at, I think fundamentally, you should do it for all levels. People often think about it as like something that you do for potentially a more junior candidate.

• 21:04Harry Stebbings?

  Do we make them do a case study on our company, on that old company, on a neutral company? Which one?

• 21:10Speaker 00

  You want a space where neither you nor the candidate has asymmetric information because then that can cloud your judgment on their performance. And so you either pick something that, you know, is about a third company, or you pick a problem at your company that's relatively new to you that you haven't worked out yet and give them the context to see how they think about it. So you're jamming on it together, so to speak.

• 21:31Harry Stebbings?

  Do we bring other disciplines in? So they do the case study, they impress. Do we bring head of product engineering? How does that work in terms of who we? Bring in.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. And what I actually have done in the past is have a panel. So not just have them like, you know, write out a case or whatever, but have a small panel where they actually present their work. And where you bring the cross functional leaders in, you can ask them, you know, questions, see how they react to, you know, on the spot thinking as well as how they react to feedback. And you learn a lot about how this person works. And I think we use the term, probably overuse it, growth mindset in the tech world. But I think it's like especially critical for for somebody in in growth to be nimble in their thinking and be open to new information and creative. So.

• 22:13Harry Stebbings?

  Sri, what questions do we ask in the interview process? What determines the growth mindset? There's some that we love to go back to. I have mine. I always love my favorite is how did you first make money?

• 22:23Speaker 00

  So my favorite interview question that I ask that tests that, which is a very simple one, is what's something that you are bad at? That you enjoy doing? And I think one thing that it shows is like, how interested are you in learning versus only doing things that you are good at? And how afraid are you of failure? I think there are two data points that you get when people struggle to answer that question. If they can't name a single thing that they're bad at that they like doing.

• 22:45Harry Stebbings?

  There's so many things I suck at, so I stopped doing them.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  But I'm sure there's something that you're bad at that you like doing.

• 22:52Harry Stebbings?

  What if I told you as a response to that, I believe in focusing on your strengths and really honing in on your superpower? Because I'll only ever be mediocre at what I'm bad at.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  That's fair from a skill set perspective, but I think from a knowledge perspective, because this is such an interdisciplinary field, like you want somebody that is interested in going places where they necessarily don't have the expertise or or knowledge and have that intellectual curiosity and not just staying in their own lane where they are knowledgeable and they're good at something.

• 23:23Harry Stebbings?

  Are there other massive red flags that you see in this process that worry you when you see them?

• 23:28Speaker 00

  If you see a lot of defensiveness during the the case presentation, for me, that's like a big red flag. I think people that are very open to feedback and and respond thoughtfully versus feeling like they have to quote unquote defend their work. Because look, you worked on it for whatever, a day on a problem space that you don't know a lot about. So if you come in with like humility and an open mindset. Obviously, green flag, but there are some people that come in pretty defensive.

• 23:53Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, it slightly goes back to culture in terms of making them feel safe enough to feel like they can be challenged and that they are safe. And you said before on culture, culture matters more than org structure when it comes to growth. What did you mean by this? And how does that impact how you lead and operate today?

• 24:10Speaker 00

  I think a lot of companies, and we've had some of this conversation earlier here as well, having a bit on like, what should the structure of growth be? Like, which functions should report in there? Should it be solid? Should it be dotted? Where should product go? Where should light cycle marketing go? Where should analytics go? But to me, what matters more culturally is that all of these functions are actually driving towards the same outcome and have the same culture of speed, comfort with failure, and same mechanisms of working. I think if you have that, I think the reporting structure becomes less important.

• 24:42Harry Stebbings?

  Why do people go wrong with those, do you think?

• 24:45Speaker 00

  Where this stuff breaks apart is when each team feels like, oh, actually, our team works in a very different way. So our North Star shouldn't be SQL pipeline or whatever you guys agree, but it should be this other thing that we have the ability to micro prioritize or micro have an impact on. And I think this is where a lot of stuff devolves when you don't have the same common currency for projects and translation layer. So one example that I'll give is that like Instacart, the growth and consumer team was over 300 people, right? Like, it was a massive team. With a team that big, obviously, it's broken into many, many smaller teams, and each team has their own little corner that they're working on, right? Like, there's a team that's working on just like making search faster, making the app load faster and all those things, right? And so you tell those teams, okay, your goal is profit

• 25:30Speaker 00

  or your goal is monthly active users. They're gonna be like, okay, like, how much am I gonna really impact that with this small area that I'm working on? And how do I know I'm actually making progress? And so what we actually did is we would have translation factors for each team on like what they did, how that would impact the monthly active users, based on historical data that we would reevaluate.

• 25:48Harry Stebbings?

  Can you give me an example of a translation factor? Sorry, you're much smarter than me, so.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  I don't know about that then. So let's say like the load time team's goal was like six seconds or whatever. What just bring it down from six seconds to two seconds or whatever. And so it's like, okay, they're going to work on that. But you know, should we have a 10 person engineering team working on this? Like, what is the impact of this for the overall business? It's hard to know, right? And so what we would do is try to use historical information as well as holdouts to get a sense for, okay, like, if we actually accomplish this, we think the propensity to order increases by like 1.2% or whatever. And that translates into X amount. So we give them a way to cross prioritize, which says that like, for each second you deliver, you deliver like 100,000 active users on the platform.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  And we have that sort of translation for every engineering and other teams at the company. And then when we do the planning of like, okay, we're trying to go from just making up some numbers, like 5 million active users to 10 million active users this year. Okay, like, what is the bridge? And what are all the various teams contributing to help us get there?

• 26:53Harry Stebbings?

  I spoke to Evan Moore, and he said specifically, you're one of the best managers he's ever seen. When you reflect on that statement, what do you think makes you such a good manager? And what have been your biggest lessons on great management?

• 27:04Speaker 00

  I think management, like a lot of things, is actually pretty easy to learn and hard to master. It's not rocket science. The rules on what makes a good manager, what's hard is actually remembering it and, you know, putting it in practice every day. I think it requires intention. And I think what a lot of executives forget, especially as they get more senior, is that they're still a manager. The really great managers remember that they're working with people, not like coworkers and COGS. And so what does it mean that you're caring about the person and the human? Hey, like, what motivates you? What drives impact for you? What are you trying to optimize for personally? And seeing how you can help each person achieve their goals in the framework of driving value for the company as well.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  So one, like, very tactical thing that I do actually is I've got like a two-page template of questions. That's like your first one-on-one that I walk through with every new person that I manage. And it goes through a lot of these questions, understanding them a little bit deeper. And maybe do both ways so they get to understand me better as well.

• 28:00Harry Stebbings?

  I'm fascinated by that. So first day, you and me sit down and we go through this like two-page one-to-one questions. What are some examples of those questions again? And then what do we do on the back of them? Why do we do them?

• 28:13Speaker 00

  I tend to find that it really builds a like a relationship and an understanding of each other, which when things aren't working, I think it's very rarely because someone is a bad actor. It's usually because they're not a right fit for this role because either they lack the skills or they lack the motivation, right? The skill gap is an easy one to have the conversation about and move somebody out into a different role or, you know, talk about their transition out. I think the motivation gap is one that's a little bit harder to solve. And you solve it by actually understanding what motivates the person and finding ways of motivating them before taking more drastic action. And so to have a high-performing team, I think you really need to understand what drives the individuals. And what drives everybody is probably not profit for the company. Maybe it is for some,

• 28:58Speaker 00

  but every person has their individual motivations that they work through. And that's the main thing that I try to get out of in the first one-on-one.

• 29:06Harry Stebbings?

  Is there a role motivation? If I say I'm inherently insecure and actually title and view in the organization drives me to be fucking great, would you be worried about that?

• 29:17Speaker 00

  I actually don't think there's necessarily a wrong motivation. I know that might be a controversial thing to say. I pulled up this one-on-one template while we were talking and wanted to see what the wording of the question was. What motivates you? There's no right or wrong answer here. Some typical motivating factors can be customer impact, compensation, praise and recognition from peers, exposure to senior leaders, title or position, functional learning, intellectually challenging problems, external validation and recognition outside the company, et cetera, et cetera. I start off with that. I frame it in a very non-judgmental way because I'd love to just start from a position of honesty and work with the incentives that are in people's heads, then try to create different incentives for them.

• 29:55Harry Stebbings?

  Do you find, this is the first day, you find people open up though. It is quite personal.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. It's not the first question that I ask, obviously.

• 30:04Harry Stebbings?

  What's the first question?

• 30:06Speaker 00

  The first question I ask is how do you want to be recognized at the company? How do you like to receive feedback? And then I go into the motivations and then what are your career goals, et cetera, et cetera.

• 30:18Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask a slightly stoic statement? I don't think people know themselves very well, especially the younger they are. I think, I don't think they know how they like to receive feedback. I don't think they know what motivates them.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  I agree. And so this is not always the most productive conversation. And so you learn through that conversation where they are in their self-awareness journey as well. And that's an important data point because that can be challenging to to work with people that don't have clear goals. And you can have that as your back of mind notes for like, where do I want to work on with this person? In terms of, you know, skills that are outside of their core craft, in terms of what will make them a better coworker or manager, what have you.

• 30:55Harry Stebbings?

  Which one-to-one questions do you find most revealing? And is there one that people find hardest?

• 31:00Speaker 00

  I find the motivation one, obviously, very revealing, as well as the career goals. And I ask them to give me like the time horizons, like, where do you see yourself in three, five, 10 plus years? A lot of people haven't really given it thought on like, okay, what does it take for me to get to the 10-year mark? What does my three-year outcome look like, you know, five-year outcome look like, et cetera? And it actually gets people to start thinking about stuff like that. The thing that people have a hard time also answering, which especially early career people, which they should be better at and more aware of, is I ask them, what can I do to help you succeed? And people are often like, I don't think people are often asked that. So they're like stopped when when somebody asks them what their manager can do to help them succeed at the job.

• 31:39Harry Stebbings?

  What've been your biggest hiring fuck-ups on reflection? I'm enjoying this. This is like, turns out they say why I do this show.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  A good question. For better or worse, have had to separate with a lot of people, but typically they've been inherited teams. And one of the things that I get a lot of feedback on is that I hire very slow. My hiring bar is very, very high.

• 31:59Harry Stebbings?

  That's interesting. If you're in a startup where speed is everything, is it better to hire now and get it done versus be really slow?

• 32:07Speaker 00

  So I'm a big believer in hiring slow, obviously, because I still do it despite getting the feedback that I'm hiring too slow. And the reason being, I'm also a huge believer in diseconomies of scale for teams. I think teams get materially slower as they get bigger. It's really like the equivalent of a resource curse for companies rather than countries, right? When you have too many resources, you get bad at prioritizing and you get bad at accountability. And you actually end up moving slower. So it is painful in the short term where, you know, some things might not get done. But I think the right things get done and they get done. Done better on small teams and think one thing that you learn to get comfortable with as a more experienced manager. Somebody told me a while ago is you have to let some fires burn. If you think you have to fight every fire on your team, you're going to burn yourself out.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  So you just have to realize that like some things are just not going to be worked on for a bit. And they're going to be broken and be comfortable with that because they're less important and try to be intentional about that. So whenever we do planning, it's like, what are you not doing? So like, name the fire that you're letting burn.

• 33:06Harry Stebbings?

  What fire are you letting burn now?

• 33:10Speaker 00

  This is a great question. Fire that we have let burn for for some time is at Ramp, we have not historically invested a lot in field and event marketing. Because we've got a very large TAM and it requires us to be thoughtful about our field and event strategy. And it's not something that we've staffed adequately. And so we decided this is not staffed. We will take our time to staff and invest here. And so it's okay in the short term for us to not be worried about that. Whereas other SaaS companies have made a much bigger push into that already.

• 33:42Harry Stebbings?

  Management wise, what do you think are the biggest fuckups you see young managers make?

• 33:46Speaker 00

  When people get their first, you know, report or what have you, and they find out that for whatever reason, the person is not up to snuff in terms of the work product that they're creating. Temptation for a lot of early managers is to just do the work for the person. So they will like spend an extra three hours in the evening, like reviewing the work product of this person that they've hired recently. And just like fix it rather than spend the time coaching. Cause their view is like, oh my God, it would take me so much longer to teach them how to do this. I just do it myself. Let me just do that. And obviously they do themselves and the person a huge disservice by by doing that. And I think most people's mistakes come about when there's a trade off of short term versus long term. Right?

• 34:27Speaker 00

  And so people are willing to give up some long term gain to avoid some short term pain. So they're finding it more painful and slower to coach somebody. So they'll just do the work themselves or find another way to get it done rather than investing the time in coaching this person up to stuff or making the separation decision, if that's the right decision.

• 34:45Harry Stebbings?

  What right now are you willing to have short term pain for long term gain?

• 34:51Speaker 00

  We have historically been very much as a company channel oriented for driving growth. So we would have each channel, they would have their goals, they would have their budget, and they would drive outcomes based on that. And that's how we've organized the company. And the big short-term pain that we're taking is we're moving towards a larger company segment oriented strategy, where we have cross-functional teams that are going after a customer segment, budgeting, going, everything based on the segment, which is a very difficult way of working versus deploying budget across channels. And this is going to be a difficult, painful transition for the company. But I think it will be great

• 35:32Speaker 00

  long-term gain because the segment oriented teams presumably have a deeper understanding for the customers. And having all the cross-functional teams work on the same segment will drive better conversion, better results.

• 35:45Harry Stebbings?

  Is there anything you have short-term gain for long-term pain?

• 35:48Speaker 00

  One area that I can think of is we do have parallel processes of acquisition that are going after the same clients that are automated versus manual. And there's some challenges in performance at different steps of like how the automated system performs versus how humans do the same, you know, prospecting and customer acquisition, sales process, right? The short-term gain, of course, is that humans are better at certain steps because there's just a lot of intangibles that we haven't been able to productize, automate yet. So we hire a lot of, you know, we have a sales team that runs sales because they're good at certain things that are better than automating them. So that is the short-term gain. But I think the long-term pain, if we don't focus and pivot more and more things towards self-serve and automation, is that we're going to end up having a massive sales

• 36:31Speaker 00

  team that is hard to scale and manage and potentially expensive, although that's not the case today, but an example on the other side.

• 36:38Harry Stebbings?

  What are the first things to break in a scaling org? You've been in some of the best, Insta got open door now ramp. What are the like that, oh, fuck, it broke again?

• 36:47Speaker 00

  I think the thing that breaks is really just culture and engagement, actually. This company's grow, right? So let's imagine that you're not successful as you're scaling. Obviously, people are going to be demotivated and whatever. So that one's obvious. But I think the thing That people miss is if you are successful, I think a lot of founders and executives can take the growth engine and the team for granted. And I think if you're not continuing to provide guidance, feedback, gratitude, a team will get burned out and disengaged and you'll see departures. So that's the one thing that I tend to find is like the danger of success is that the teams that drove that get taken for granted often because people want to focus on problems, not the things that are working. So that can create its own challenges.

• 37:29Harry Stebbings?

  Shree, you mentioned the importance of engagement there. Engagement often relies on focus. You are also a very, very prolific but successful angel investor. I'd first love to start, and I hope it's okay. When you're an angel investor today, do you invest through a fund? Do you invest personal money? How do you structure your investing?

• 37:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I do personal as well as I'm a scout for a VC fund. So I do investments through both of those.

• 37:53Harry Stebbings?

  You said to me before, full-time operators who are part-time fund managers will make some of the best early-stage investors. Why do you think this?

• 38:01Speaker 00

  If you look at the investing process, right, there's four components. There's deal flow, there's diligence, there's winning the allocation and then supporting your portfolio, right? I think operators have a distinct advantage, especially with their smaller checks in earlier stages, across all four of those than a lot of professional investors. There's also this notion of like a half-life to operating experience, something like two to four years, which is like every whatever X number of years you're away from operating and then become a specialized or full-time investor. Your ability to really help and empathize with the current state of operations decreases by half. The reason I mention that is because there are also, of course, a lot of former operators that are investors that are successful. But speaking of operators that are currently working, I would say, okay, like, what are the advantages

• 38:45Speaker 00

  across the four stages, right? So operators get a lot of early deal flow with the companies that they've worked in. Folks that are leaving, they get to know first who's leaving, especially if you're working at great companies, you know, alums of Ramp, Open Door, Instacart, obviously, reach out to me when they're thinking about, you know, starting their companies, which is a great way of getting that deal flow. I think that's one. You get a lot more inbound because of your reputation, right? But then you also have to sort through that inbound. So one thing that I find it as an operator, I have much less conflict, right? With other investors. So I get deal flow from other investors all the time, especially ones that are like, if Sequoia or Kraft or whoever are like, we're leading this round, we're really excited about it. Do you want to be a part of it?

• 39:28Speaker 00

  That's great. Like, a lot of the work on the sourcing diligence, everything is done for me as an operator. You know, they're not going to do that for another fund typically, right?

• 39:35Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you that it's a beautiful position to be in. Does it scale? So say you have, you know, a $5 million micro fund, 100% free, I'm bringing you in for every 100K check.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:46Harry Stebbings?

  But you don't scale as a fund manager.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:49Harry Stebbings?

  It doesn't scale.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  That I agree with. So I don't think we're in disagreement. I think the strategy only works up to a certain size. And, you know, my general understanding with venture is the job is like materially different every 5X or so, the check size. And it's a completely different job. What can help you win in the previous stage is probably not what's going to help you win in the next stage, right?

• 40:09Harry Stebbings?

  That's second pillar, or the third.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  So deal flow, we talked about diligence. You often get a lot more information about the competence or strengths and weaknesses of founders that you work with, because you've literally worked with them in the past. And you have a lot more exposure to this person and how they work in a real operating environment. Whereas people are trying to suss this out in other ways as outside in investors. There's some benefit to that again, right? Because these are folks that are in your network. And then similarly, on the products, when you're working with them, typically as an operator, you're often a buyer of these products, right? I have a differential insight in being able to diligence products because I'm like, would I buy this? Would I approve the budget for this product if they came to Ramp or Instacart or wherever? And it helps you cut through the BS of like, are they making something that people will buy?

• 40:54Speaker 00

  Because I'm a buyer, so I can make that decision. This is very helpful for B2B stuff, because I think a lot of people have intuition on this, on consumer, less so on B2B stuff. And so I think there is an advantage there as well on the diligence part. And yeah, on allocation, we've talked about it. It's much easier to get an allocation as an operator investor than it is as a larger investor.

• 41:13Harry Stebbings?

  Does it not distract you from your operational role? I get it that it helps you pick better, but on the flip side, does it make you distracted?

• 41:20Speaker 00

  No, it's a It's a great question. You have to be doing well at your core job before you're doing stuff outside of work. Having said that, the other great thing too is I get a lot of high quality deal flow. I know I'm actually very anti cold outreach. I know it's a lot of investors go out there and say, cold outreach is great. You send me, you know, a message on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever, and I'll look at everything. My theory is if you can't even succeed in getting a warm intro, how are you going to hustle in building a company? I only take conversations that are very high reputation, warm intros, where the person is like typically like already spoken to the person, likes them or has a relationship with them and I have a deck. So I take very few meetings, but I tend to find that they're very high quality because I do a lot of that filtering before.

• 42:04Harry Stebbings?

  What if it's someone who doesn't know anyone in your ecosystem?

• 42:07Speaker 00

  I think it's a fair question, but fortunately I think there are a lot more systems available now to help with that that are not as gatekeeping, right? Like OnDeck is here. There's a few other networks like that. I don't think it's actually like for the entrepreneurial person, it's that hard to find a path to meeting the right set of investors. And it just depends on how friendly people are, right? Like if somebody messages me with a tenuous connection, I'm typically willing to help them. Like if they're like, hey, like I went to the same college as you, blah, blah, blah, like, will you take a meeting? Maybe, but if they're like, hey, I really want to get to know this person, will you intro me? And obviously I do a dual opt-in. I'll message them being like, hey, like I don't really know this person.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  Their profile seems interesting. I haven't really evaluated. Let me know if you'd be open to taking a convo. And even if they spray and pray with that tactic, they will get some meetings via a warm intro. So you gotta hustle somewhat. And I think there's a way to get the warm intro. And if you can't even do that, I struggle to find how you're going to fundraise, find customers, et cetera.

• 43:07Harry Stebbings?

  If I'm on your team, Sri, I'm going to do a scout program. I'm going to raise a micro fund even better. I'm going to raise a micro fund. What do you say?

• 43:15Speaker 00

  As long as you're not distracted during work hours and getting your day job done. I think what you do outside of work is your prerogative.

• 43:21Harry Stebbings?

  But do you, the best people go home and sales reps, they get more leads. They want more converted sales. They work out of hours to make it work. They don't go off and do something else.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, so what we didn't talk about are like the potential benefits, right? Of like, what's the value add of investing outside of your job? I think especially for growth, there's no playbook for necessarily how you grow. That's why it's a very experimentation-driven culture, right? And a lot of experiments fail. And so you have to find your own growth path. And the more creative ideas, strategies, tactics that you can come up with, the better chance you have at hitting your growth goals. And so I tend to find that the context switching and learning about different spaces actually builds more intuition and creativity for ideas. In moderation, I actually think it's a good idea to do that. And I also think like, yes, there's like parts of the job that are like keeping the trains running on time.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  And there's parts of the job that are like taking a beat, thinking about strategy, thinking about creative ideas. And I think that stuff is not measured in hours in and hours out. And in fact, like being on a treadmill of like doing that, I think has diseconomies of scale again. Get out of your rabbit hole and recontextualize and get perspective to generate the best ideas.

• 44:36Harry Stebbings?

  What about conflicts with your company? So say I'm in Expanse Management, or I'm not in Expanse Management, but then I pivot to it. Now I'm potentially competing with you.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:47Harry Stebbings?

  So you see what I mean? How do you think?

• 44:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously, anything that could be competitive, perceived as competitive, or looks like it's down the line competitive, I don't even take the meeting. And then I think the conflict that's like a little bit trickier is if Ramp is in the market to buy the software or something like that, and you've invested in the company or you're investing in the company. There, it's like you want to be extra, extra above board. Make it clear to the company that you're not going to influence the purchasing process.

• 45:15Harry Stebbings?

  What about talent? You're an investor in my company and is an angel, and then you nick one of my key people. I'll be like, Sri. And it may not have been you, it may have been Ramp who's nicked one of my key people. Is that a conflict?

• 45:28Speaker 00

  I'm pretty ruthless about that. I think that there's absolutely no conflict. I think it's extremely anti-competitive from a labor market perspective for you to think that I won't hire the best people from your company. It's your job to retain your best talent. And even if I'm an investor in you, it doesn't matter. If you're doing your job of retaining your talent, this wouldn't be a question.

• 45:45Harry Stebbings?

  What have been some of the biggest lessons for you on what it takes to be a good angel? You invest, I'm sure, today very differently than you did. What are some of those big lessons?

• 45:53Speaker 00

  I think one is how important the founders that you work with and invest in become as a source of leads for you. And I didn't fully imagine that when I started being an angel investor. I was like, oh, where am I going to find great deals to work? And like, one of the best sources, of course, is like a founder that you've worked with. It's like, hey, I've worked with this person before. They're fantastic. I'm going to invest. You've been a helpful investor. I'd love for you to chat with them. Like, that is primo lead, right?

• 46:16Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so it was really interesting. Sorry, I'm just loving this. Primo lead, brilliant attribute, brilliant tagging. Often, they haven't been founders before. I find being an operator and being a founder is so different. I place a huge premium on serial entrepreneurship. Operators, massive difference.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  I agree. And I think what's actually interesting is there's some operators that are very good at their operating job, that I think will be worse founders than some bad operators. So let me explain that a little bit further. There are people I would never want to hire again, but that I would invest in because they are not suited to the operating job. But what makes them bad at the operating job could make them very good at being a founder.

• 46:57Harry Stebbings?

  I agree with you there. How do you determine?

• 46:59Speaker 00

  The founders that I invest in, do they have a secret about what they're trying to build? That is uniquely built based on, you know, work and research or whatever that they have done? And how relentless are they in terms of wanting to build their vision? And how good are they at telling their story at the end of the day? I think storytelling is such an important skill, and I think the best founders are excellent storytellers.

• 47:24Harry Stebbings?

  So it's so interesting you say that because you've said before that storytelling founders are rarely the best operators.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:31Harry Stebbings?

  What was your view about this and what you just said there?

• 47:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So I know that's like cognitively dissonant a bit, so let me explain further. There's a few different jobs of being a founder, right, and leaders of a company. I think a super important job is being able to fundraise, being able to close customers, early customers, and being able to close, you know, executive hires. I think all three of those, people that are great storytellers. Do a very good job at. And what I tend to find that are part of good storytelling, and I'm curious if you have a different view, is folks that are good at that are really good at reading the room and being likeable, talking like with enough detail, but with enough abstraction that they sound great. Those are great skills to have. As I

• 48:13Speaker 00

  said, they're great for fundraising, hiring and early customers. It's not super scalable, right? Like, you can't have the CEO doing every hire. Eventually, you have to build a business, you have to operationalize, you have to scale, you have to be comfortable not being liked, you have to make difficult decisions. The people that can do that are typically like serial operators that work in a different way, right? I've definitely seen people that can do both, but it's rare that people can wear both hats. So I often tend to like founding teams where one person is the storyteller and the other person is like the operator and executor.

• 48:46Harry Stebbings?

  Do you ever feel like someone's too good at sales? When you meet those founders and you're like, oh, you're just saying everything's so right?

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have definitely seen some founders that are too slick by a half. That's where, you know, some of the personal diligence works too, right? Where you try to find out, you know, how real are they?

• 49:05Harry Stebbings?

  How do you do that? Do you ask the one-to-one questions ever?

• 49:07Speaker 00

  So it's funny, actually, this is one of the most valuable things that I do for my founders, and that's helpful for me as well, which is founders are trying to hire. And they are like, okay, like between the companies that I've worked at, I've worked with hundreds, possibly thousands of people at this point, right? And so they're like, okay, I'm looking to hire this person. I have no idea if they're good or not. Their LinkedIn and their resume seems reasonable. We've done the interview process, which is always imperfect. And so they're like, have you worked with this person? Or can you get me to somebody that's worked closely with them that'll give me an honest read because of the relationships or what have you? That's like incredibly valuable. And I think like having that reputation of somebody that's direct, keeps things confidential and is available is helpful in a variety of different ways.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  And I use that to try to find people where I have questions on getting some more comfort on the diligence.

• 49:53Harry Stebbings?

  What are the biggest mistakes you see operator angels make? So like for me, I think like, number one, they have varying check sizes. Lesson one, you don't have conviction at the early stage. Just do 25K, 10K, 50K, I don't care, but same check size. Number two, you need 25. This idea that you're a genius picker, you're not. No one is. Five is not enough. You need 25. Those would be two of the biggest that I see often.

• 50:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think those are both good ones. I also think actually like, this is why it gets hard later too, is they have a hard time saying no. They want to be liked. And it's like usually your initial conversations that you're having are with a friend or a friend of a friend. And so I think people go one or the other extreme early on in their angel investing, which is like, they never get over the risk bar. And they just think everything is a bad idea. And yes, of course, like most things are not great ideas because most startups fail for a variety of reasons. And it's not about idea, it's about execution, right? There's a mindset switch that you have to make, which is like, how can this succeed? And not about how it can fail. Like, it's very easy to think about all of the ways something can fail. And so the question that you have to ask yourself is like, how can this succeed? And how big is it if it succeeds?

• 50:58Speaker 00

  That like switch to like optimism from like rational evaluation is a challenge for a lot of early investors. And there's the flip side, them wanting to just like not be a bad guy and just say yes, because it's a friend or a friend of a friend, even if they don't have like high conviction in the idea. So I've seen both of those mistakes happen.

• 51:16Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you. I think the other one I see also is when they choose founders that need their specific help. So they're a B two B sales leader and they're like, oh, I could really help in their B two B sales engine. Doesn't mean it's a good investment. Do you know what I mean?

• 51:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:32Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so I'm gonna do a quick fire with you, my friend. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Sound okay?

• 51:38Speaker 00

  Okay, sounds great.

• 51:38Harry Stebbings?

  What tactics have not changed over the last five years?

• 51:42Speaker 00

  I think the the PLG playbook has actually stabilized and it's pretty similar. I mean, the specific tactics will change, but like the core of it, I think, is the same. I think cold outbound and email still works surprisingly well despite all of the changes in that space.

• 51:55Harry Stebbings?

  Does PLG die in a world of segregation between user and buyer again? Tightening budgets, CFOs manage everything?

• 52:03Speaker 00

  I don't think so necessarily. I think these are economic cycles companies go through. I think there's challenges in the short term. And then as the economic cycle moves forward, like it just eases. It's like a little bit of contraction and a little bit of easing in terms of like headwinds versus tailwinds.

• 52:16Harry Stebbings?

  What tactics have totally died a death?

• 52:18Speaker 00

  This is an obvious one, but pouring money indiscriminately into paid marketing, I think, is gone. For two reasons. One is, of course, like the efficiency environment. And I don't think we're going to be in a completely zerp environment again. And the other reason being, I think attribution has become a lot harder. And so I think people will be hesitating for a long time to come in terms of how they deploy paid marketing.

• 52:38Harry Stebbings?

  What would you say is the biggest mistake founders make when hiring growth teams?

• 52:42Speaker 00

  I think they hire either too senior or too junior. Too senior being like, you know, if you've got a three-person growth team, like, don't hire a VP-level person because you actually need somebody that can really coach people and get into the weeds. And other times, while I'm a big fan of hiring for slope versus intercept, sometimes I think people underappreciate the scope of the problems. I think that basically it's just like matching the skill set to the stage of growth in the company. I think it's one they have a challenge with.

• 53:09Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned pre-mortems earlier. How do you do post-mortems?

• 53:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we do monthly post-mortems. They're somewhat structured. We actually have a airtable system where we track all of our experiments. We score them, et cetera, in terms of impact. And so we share like aggregate statistics of the team on like what's been shipped and then what the impact has been. It's like an opportunity for us to like celebrate team members as well as like encourage the notion of like velocity in a more subtle way. And then outside of that, we have teams come back with one to two wins or losses over the previous month that they present and get feedback and just share the learnings. So it's not super structured, but there is like a regular cadence of it every month. So it's not just when like something great or something horrible happens is when we do post-mortems. We actually do them in a systematic way.

• 53:55Harry Stebbings?

  What would you most like to change about the world of growth?

• 53:58Speaker 00

  What I would love to change about the world of growth is just breaking the walls between the disciplines of marketing and product and growth and really have it be like one cross-functional discipline. Companies and people and teams struggle with it a lot because it's a newer function and folks come from different backgrounds.

• 54:16Harry Stebbings?

  From a purva, what's your favorite Pitbull lyric?

• 54:19Speaker 00

  I knew this one would come back. My favorite one is, there's probably plenty, but this one is my favorite. It's ask for money, get advice, ask for advice, get money twice. And to me, it's like super helpful framing for like almost any like difficult situation that you're dealing with, not just fundraising. The more you bring people in to what you're solving for, the more value you'll get, rather than like directly asking for resources or solutions.

• 54:43Harry Stebbings?

  Final one, what one company growth strategy that you've seen recently, have you been most impressed by?

• 54:49Speaker 00

  There's a lot to pick from, but one I'll pick is Notion. I think they've done an incredible job of building a very large, multi-pronged, community-based growth strategy, which I haven't seen a lot of companies do that. I think they're, it's very impressive. And they actually also recently hired my friend Lauren to do product growth there. So I'm excited to see how they supercharge their growth.

• 55:10Harry Stebbings?

  I'm totally with you. I think Canva Talk as well, Aligned is fantastic. So the two together. Sri, I've loved doing this. Thank you so much for putting up with my pit bull-like approach today.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  I loved it. Appreciate you taking the time. This is a fun conversation.

• 55:25Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, that was such a fantastic discussion with Sri. If you want to see more from us behind the scenes, of course you can on YouTube by searching for 20VC. We always love to see you there. But before we leave you today, I need your help. I need your input on the 20VC Miro board as I'm booking new guests that we should feature on the show in 2023. Head on over to miro.com/20vc and leave your suggestions with digital sticky notes or comments. That's miro.com/20vc. Miro actually sponsored this episode. For those of you that haven't used it before, it's a tool that I think is really powerful and game changing. Just ask the 1 million plus people who sign up for Miro every month.

• 56:06Harry Stebbings?

  It's a visual collaboration platform packed with the right tools, tech and templates to grow your product, vision, idea, org at scale. Miro acts as a single source of truth across teams. That means getting buy-in much faster from teams like marketing, engineering, sales, product, basically anyone who needs to have a say to make growth projects grow.

• 56:29Harry Stebbings?

  It seems like a simple digital whiteboard. It's much more. hashing out a sound acquisition strategy, brainstorming Miro, rethinking your signup flow. Use Miro's user research templates. However you need to grow, Miro can help. We use Miro all the time to brainstorm future shows, vote on potential guests and leave notes for the rest of the team in our own time. Check it out today again at miro.com/20vc. And I'm really excited about this next sponsor because a few of my portfolio companies love and use it. The question, do you know the impact of your marketing efforts? Or how much you've spent so far this month and what you got as a result? Funnel is the world's first and only marketing data hub that takes all the manual effort out of data collection

• 57:14Harry Stebbings?

  and lets you blend data from different platforms to unlock new, deeper insights. And the best part is this can all be achieved without writing a single line of code. That's why it's used by more than 2,000 of the world's top brands and media agencies, including Samsung, Adidas, Sony and Havas Media. And now you can start for free with a plan that is not time bounded and allows you to see the full power of the platform without any time constraints. Simply head on over to funnel.io/20vc. That's funnel.io/20vc. As always, I so appreciate your support and I cannot wait to bring you an incredible episode this coming Friday.