20Growth: The Inside Story to Uber's Hypergrowth Scaling; What Worked, What Did Not? | Spending a $1BN Budget at Uber and Why China was the Wild West for Uber | Why You Do Not Need a Growth Team with Adam Grenier

Adam Grenier is an OG of the growth world. His first role in growth, was none other than Uber where he was Head of Growth Marketing and Innovation building the global marketing growth infrastructure and team from the ground up. He then enjoyed successful spells at Lambda School and Masterclass as VP Growth and VP of Marketing, respectively. If that was not enough, Adam is also a prolific angel having made investments in Superhuman, Table22, and FitXR to name a few. In Today's Episode with Adam Grenier We Discuss: 1.) Entry into the World of Growth with Uber: How did Adam make his way into the world of growth with Uber and Ed Baker? What are the single biggest takeaways from his time at Uber, Lambda and Masterclass? What does Adam know now that he wishes he had known when he started in growth? 2.) Growth: What it is? Why You Do Not Need a Team for it? How does Adam define the term "growth" today? What is the role of "Head of Growth"? Why does Adam believe that you do not need a growth team? How can leaders infuse growth principles, mindsets and metrics into existing teams? WHat are the single biggest mistakes founders make when thinking about growth? 3.) Hiring Growth Mindsets: How to Ask the Right Question: What are the clearest signs to Adam that someone has a growth mindset? What are the right questions to ask to see how they think? How does Adam use tests and case studies to determine the growth mindset of a person? What did Uber teach Adam about the best practices to hire for growth? 4.) Uber: Scaling a Monster and Spending $1BN on Ads: What are some of Adam's biggest lessons from spending $1BN on advertising at Uber? Why at anytime were there 200 people paying for ads with their personal credit cards? Why does Adam believe China was "the wild-west"? How did all of their competitors in China have Uber data? How do growth mechanics, channels and disciplines compare between US vs China?

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  At Uber, we were spending a billion dollars a year at one point. That included China, and that was more than 50%. Paid drove a ton of our growth in China. It was just wild. It became very clear that DD knew everything we were doing. Definitely had our data. The Chinese government has it. DD has it. Everybody that wants to compete with us has it. It feels like the Wild West here at times.

• 0:19Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back to 20 Growth with me, Harry Stubbings. And this episode is filled with so many incredible growth stories from Uber. And I'm so thrilled to welcome Adam Granier, OG of the growth world, having led growth and marketing teams across the likes of Uber, MasterClass, Hotel Tonight, and Lambda School. Adam is also one of the industry's leading growth advisors today. And this episode is packed with lessons learned from real world experiences. But before we dive into the show today, I need your help. 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. Now, this is the only way to make suggestions. Head on over to miro.com/20vc and leave your suggestions with digital sticky notes or comments. That's miro.com/20vc.

• 1:03Harry Stebbings?

  And Miro actually sponsored this episode. For those of you that have not used it before, it's this incredible tool that I think is truly game changing. Just over 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 idea, your product, your vision at scale. Miro answers a single source of truth across teams. That means you can get 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 so much more. Hashing out a sound acquisition strategy, brainstorm in Miro, rethinking your sign-up flow, using Miro's user research templates,

• 1:47Harry Stebbings?

  quickly visualize team structures on a Miro board. 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 again at miro.com/20vc to submit your guest suggestions. And I'm really excited about this next sponsor because a few of my portfolio companies use it and love it. So do you know the impact of your marketing efforts? It's more important this year than ever to know the impact. Or how much you've spent so far this month and what you got as a result? You're not alone in not knowing these answers. Even though marketing is now all about the data, most companies still use manual spreadsheets for reporting and analysis. But if you want to supercharge growth, spreadsheets just won't cut it.

• 2:32Harry Stebbings?

  Funnel is the world's first and only marketing data hub that takes all the manual effort out of data collection 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. I can hear your sigh of relief. 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. Start your own free trial by visiting funnel.io/20vc. That's funnel.io/20vc. And finally, we've all been there, but nothing is quite so depleting as the blinking cursor on an empty page. Reminds me of law school. You're sitting there trying to come up with ad copy

• 3:15Harry Stebbings?

  or hypothetically a set of interview questions for a podcast you run, obviously personal, and it's just staring back at you like a brick wall. This moment of frustration amid growing content demands is probably why I'm hearing about Jasper non-stop these days. Jasper is an AI assistant for business that helps marketers, sales reps and other creators accelerate their writing process and repackage content into different formats, languages and tones. Unlike broad-use AI tools, Jasper was built for business, and this makes a big difference. It incorporates SEO, a plagiarism checker and a browser extension. So you can call up Jasper in pretty much any text box or platform you use online. Visit jasper.ai/20vc for a demo. Your burnt-out team will thank you.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 4:09Harry Stebbings?

  Adam, I am so excited for this. I heard so many good things from our wonderful mutual friend, Josh Alman, who said you'd be the best guest. So first, thank you so much for joining me today.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Excited to be here.

• 4:19Harry Stebbings?

  I would love to start. Growth is this new discipline and you've been in growth orgs in some incredible companies. We have Uber, Hotel Tonight, Masterclass. What was the entry into growth for you, Adam?

• 4:30Speaker 00

  I was in digital marketing very early on, so almost 20 years ago. My first client ever was Sun Microsystems. We were acquiring Java developers to make apps for phones that looked like candy bars at the time, not iPhones and things like that. And really grew up in this world of very data-centric marketing, where everything that we did could be measured and thought about. Inevitably, my kind of path became this emerging media path, where I'd helped clients understand how do you leverage new technologies, social and mobile and video? And for a lot of those traditional clients, so Budweiser, JCPenney, et cetera, it was not just thinking about marketing, it was also thinking about the product. How does the product need to evolve and be different? You can't just take what you had on your website and throw it on a mobile device, or put it on Facebook, or things like that. And so, that

• 5:15Speaker 00

  to me is feels a lot like what I do as Growth Now, or a precursor of it. But Uber was the first place that we called it Growth. I was hired by Ed Baker. He brought over the kind of Facebook structure that they had built at Facebook. And so, that was the first time I had a title and thought of myself as part of a growth team, instead of just a marketing team or a part of the business.

• 5:35Harry Stebbings?

  Incredibly unfair start to the show, but I'm too interested. Growth, is it an art or is it a science? You said there about data. I'm constantly airing between the two. How do you sit?

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's absolutely a mix of the two. The core of Growth really dives into user psychology and understanding customers, making sure that you're actually connecting with people when the perceived value of your product or your offering is at its ultimate highest. And then, building technology and building systems around that to soak it up and actually be able to manipulate it and do it over and over and over and over again. So to me, that's the art, is the people, and the science is the data and machines and systems.

• 6:12Harry Stebbings?

  So we normally finish with a quick fire, but you have this incredible array of experiences from so many different companies that I was like, fuck it, let's start at the beginning with a quick fire too. Why not?

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Let's do it.

• 6:22Harry Stebbings?

  Let's be wild. So if we start chronologically, your first growth org was Hotel Tonight. What was the biggest challenge and how did that experience impact your mindset?

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Hotel Tonight was a mobile-only travel app. And the relationship that we had with our hotels was one that the rates that we were marketing could only be done on mobile devices. It was a kind of a rule left out of a lot of the early paperwork with Expedia and the big traditional players. And that meant that we couldn't leverage SEO. And that's really how like most travel companies had grown up into that point. And so that really forced us to be at the forefront of anything mobile growth. We were doing a lot of incentivized ads to jump up into the App Store. We were doing a lot of the early versions of mobile referral programs with contact lists. It really just honed in my ability to understand and think about new channels. One of my like happy moments to look back on is that I was working with the Facebook product team and was the first customer to use mobile ads on Facebook.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  And so actually being at that forefront, and the only reason we were able to do it is because we had a good brand and we weren't a mobile game. And so Facebook wanted a different example other than games in that mix. That kind of new channel ability and thinking outside of the SEO box for hotels was a really big opportunity for us.

• 7:32Harry Stebbings?

  And now as we have Uber, what was the biggest challenge? And how did that impact your mindset towards growth?

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Really thinking about and driving growth where growth really impacted both sides of the marketplace, having to do it where the marketplace is hyper-local and changes immediately, like every moment. The marketplace has a different dynamic. I think that just became a master class, an MBA in marketplaces and really understanding the dynamics of, okay, we're not just thinking about customer acquisition. We have to think about how the relationship between the rider and driver, or the restaurant and the rider, or the trucker and the shipping company, and really thinking about marketplaces was just a hardcore element of helping to grow Uber.

• 8:11Harry Stebbings?

  Lambda is an interesting one. Biggest challenge in the growth role at Lambda? And how did that change your mindset?

• 8:17Speaker 00

  So actually, similar to Uber, where I started and like literally halfway through my interview, it was about how do we get more riders? Travis came in and was like, wait a minute, what about drivers? I had to shift and think about it very differently. Lambda School was similar, where it was like, hey, how do we get more students into our school? And then we quickly realized that Lambda lives and breathes on getting people jobs, not getting people into a school. And so we shifted all of our product and marketing work to the Job placement side. And that was just this unique moment where you've got all of these different customers using the exact same product. You have students, you have teachers, getting them into that point. You have student coaches, you have salespeople, and you have the hiring managers. And so that building product and growth around just a hugely instrumental part of the company's success

• 9:01Speaker 00

  and the complex moment was really enjoyable.

• 9:03Harry Stebbings?

  I think it's so important, actually, as you said that, I think so few people can isolate what is the single most important metric that defines their business. For me, it's the supply of high-quality guests. Final one, biggest challenge in the role at MasterClass? And how did that impact your mindset?

• 9:18Speaker 00

  So one, Apple really cut Facebook's knees off and made hyper-targeting ads really difficult suddenly. And that was really the bread and butter of how MasterClass grew for a long time. People started going outside again post-COVID. And MasterClass hit this inflection point where a single instructor was no longer this, oh, wow, that's crazy. You've got that instructor on there anymore because all of the instructors they had were that. And so we had to shift from, hey, how do we take a single instructor and market them and leverage them to get somebody in and using our product to really thinking about the value of the portfolio of MasterClass and the entire subscription. And so MasterClass just became this hardcore element of how do we think about engagement? And how do we think of the portfolio value of our product?

• 10:01Speaker 00

  And really shifting that awareness of our product to the customer that we're working with.

• 10:05Harry Stebbings?

  I'm too interested. I always think with MasterClass, they must just grow insanely because of the distribution channels of the talent, whether it's Serena Williams or Gordon Ramsay. To what extent do new customers come, or from when you were there, from those distribution channels of the talent versus the company and the product?

• 10:22Speaker 00

  It was pretty mixed. I would say the majority still comes from MasterClass first. I think a lot about launching a class, a MasterClass, similar to trying to get on the New York Times Bestseller List, where use the leverage of that talent to hit that spark right out of the gate to get the biggest audience in one fell swoop. That's where that talent network would really come in handy. We also had the ability to do like white labeling and things like that, where we're able to leverage Gordon Ramsay's Facebook page to do marketing and that type of stuff, which was definitely an advantage. That a lot of companies don't have, but I would say that burst at the beginning was valuable, but you still got a lot more value over the course of time from an individual class than just that moment at lunch.

• 11:00Harry Stebbings?

  Fascinating. Perception and reality, baby. I want to dive into a definition because growth is such an overused term and so confused. What does the role of head of growth and growth CMO mean to you, Adam?

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so two very different things in my mind. I'm on a bit of a high horse right now about this idea of a growth CMO. And let's just talk marketing for a second. When we think about marketing and building marketing teams, I find so many companies get stuck in this trap of do I want like a performance driven CMO? Or do I want a brand driven CMO? And what I believe that does is infuses this idea that you actually have to think about those two things wildly different. Where when I think about growth, whether it's a head of growth or a growth CMO or whatever, it's more about the art of understanding how to leverage all of the data, all of the flexibility of the real world economics of our world that we live in now and technology, and actually be able to implement that. And to me, that's not only valuable for paid ads or SEO.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  It's also valuable for how you think about the design of your business and your brand and the story you're telling and the content you're creating. To me, a growth CMO is actually like a full stack CMO, but actually leverages the idea of, hey, let's bring in data experimentation and product and engineering to help us drive the entire system, everything from your performance media to brand and PR on the other end of the spectrum.

• 12:20Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you. And in terms of the structure itself, how do you think about where a growth team sits within an org? Especially given that kind of holistic view of a CMO growth.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  Generally speaking, I actually don't think most companies need a growth team. Growth, again, should be infused throughout the business. So quick story in terms of Uber, right? It was hired by Ed. We formed the growth team and we just got funding from Google. We're already a $2 billion company. We had 300 employees. Most of those were ops people at the city level. But so let's say it was a 75 to 100 person kind of centralized engineering driven organization. But we had massive product market fit. It was very obvious at that point. We built this growth team. Because the core product team was knee deep in trying to figure out how to grow our product. The core product, we needed someone to be able to focus on growth. That quickly evolved into two different growth teams with writer and driver, and then an international growth team, a China growth team. And then eventually it disappeared.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  All of those functions within the growth team eventually actually merged back into the core business to where by the time I left, we actually didn't have a centralized growth team anymore. I think people assumed that Uber succeeded because they had a growth team, pre-seed, and built it out, and they still have it, and it's working magic and all this kind of stuff. It's no, most of the functions within growth for a normal growing company can actually just be built appropriately within their associated teams, within marketing, having performance marketing within product, having people owning the top of the funnel acquisition or activation, retention, engagement. So most companies actually don't think need a standalone growth team.

• 13:55Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, I'm just, do you not think, so I totally get you, but when you have marketing, when you have product, when you have all the different functions, their sole priority isn't always growth or net new users or whatever we want to decide is our growth model. And it's actually a lot of other things, and so it actually gets deprioritized. I guess my question to you is, how do you infuse growth as a priority when you don't have a growth?

• 14:19Speaker 00

  I've never actually been on a product or a marketing team that didn't care about growing their business, even if it didn't have the title growth. So I think this idea that there are teams and companies that don't, within companies that don't care about growing their business is a fallacy. I think the real risk is it being deprioritized for noise or whatever the hottest thing in the market is right now, or something's broken, so we have to fix that. So if you do build a growth team, right? I think there is this element of having a strike team nature to it, a full stack team with product, with marketing, with design, with data, with engineering, that can go and dive deep into the core point of leverage for your business to grow right now. Maybe that's acquisition. But once you're done with that, it's not you stop doing acquisition.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Or maybe it's activation, or maybe it's a referral program, or maybe it's whatever it could be. Anything that's good and worth it has to keep getting worked on. With the way you build a growth Team is typically not the right DNA of people to just keep working on those things. This idea that you have to have a piece of the business carved out and that's only thinking about growth. I think that's where a lot of people get stuck and have trouble churning through heads of growth. Or being like, oh my gosh, where should this sit? While the core product leader and marketing leader are like, we're doing the work right now. Why do you think we need another person? It feels very reactive to thinking you need growth. Rather than I think the best growth teams, standard around growth teams come from when you have hypergrowth and you need to control it and contain it and understand it. That's when I think focused growth team is like, hey, figure out what's happening here and how we can productize this

• 15:48Speaker 00

  and keep it growing and make sure it's not just like a flash in the pan.

• 15:52Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, you've thrown my schedule into complete may.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  It still works. I think there's still value there, but I'll probably come back to that a couple of times. That I think especially early stage companies thinking, oh my God, I need a head of growth. I think is a very risky proposition.

• 16:06Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think hiring heads of growth too early is the biggest mistake founders make?

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, I would say so. Because again, I think that founders are like, we're not growing fast enough. I should hire a head of growth. And if you're not growing fast enough, it's usually because you don't have product market fit. You actually need to improve your product first. And yeah, still grow, but you're looking for hacky ways to grow your business that actually isn't working in the marketplace yet.

• 16:26Harry Stebbings?

  So let's take this growth is a mindset. It may not be like a role or a function. It could be, but it may not. If we think about hiring processes, Adam, you've hired many people and many great people. How do you structure hiring processes today? And if you were advising me a hypothetical angel investment of yours, how would you advise me on how to structure a hiring process for someone with a growth mindset?

• 16:49Speaker 00

  I think scoping it is the first stage. So let's look at what team do you have right now? And let's say, what do we want the team to be a year from now? If we grow the way we think we're going to grow by hiring this person, what team and functions do we think we actually need? So one of the challenges I see a lot of people do is they'll hire one growth person. And as I mentioned, when we built growth at Uber, we infused entire team in one fell swoop. Ed was hired and he hired myself, a head of product, a head of engineering, a head of design, head of analytics. And so we each were operating our own. Individual functions and able to grow as a group, not just, hey, Ed now has to go and barter and trade to get resources from the rest of the organization.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  So I think that mapping of saying, okay, let's say this really works and this is we're making the investment in growth as a standalone thing. What does it look like a year from now? And in that process, I think that's where people really often realize, oh, what we actually need is someone to really think about our acquisition and activation funnel. And maybe that is really just a growth product person that sits within the product organization that is thinking about those elements of the team. But I think that exercise of like thinking through a year and scoping it out can help you really understand of, do you really actually want this third party team? Operating independently of your growth and marketing teams a year from now? And what does that even look like? And that's where most people are like, oh, I'd actually rather this be embedded here and here.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  So maybe you still hire a growth person, but hire them be like, hey, do this hacked together growth team for six months. But the goal is actually for you to land as one of our senior product managers on the product organization where you're going to run this. And then by the time that happens, we're also going to have a head of marketing. And so maybe that's where performance marketing will sit. And again, all that could change in those six months. But those exercises to me help you actually, one, have a realistic conversation with yourself of what growth needs to do for your organization. And then scope it and have the right conversations with people when you actually go to market and start recruiting.

• 18:43Harry Stebbings?

  What are your favorite questions to ask to tease out whether I have that growth mindset? What questions really reveal that ability?

• 18:51Speaker 00

  So probably the two most common. So one is I have an exercise that came from Uber, which is how do you determine what you're willing to pay for a rider or a driver in any given market? Which is like a very complex marketplace. Yeah, go ahead, answer it.

• 19:06Harry Stebbings?

  I would, I would answer, I would look at the existing cohorts and then I would look at the LTVs on a per rider basis. And that will tell me how much I'm willing to pay on a customer acquisition basis.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  So the challenge is that the LTV is usually based on the value of a trip. But that value of a trip has a shared relationship between the rider and the driver. And so you have to decide like the revenue that you get from that trip, if you're getting 20% revenue from a $10 trip. Giving that $2 to calculate the lifetime value of the rider or the lifetime value of the driver?

• 19:36Harry Stebbings?

  Both? No, the rider, the rider. The driver's doing many trips, so they have a higher LTV.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  Exactly. So we could probably spend another 30 minutes going back and forth on this. But this, it just becomes a very complicated answer because it is both. You ultimately have to decide when you're marketing to both of those customers. When I have to pay to go get a rider and I have to pay to go get a driver, I have to calculate both of their LTV, so I can't just give it to one side of the marketplace. But then you have a dynamic where like some markets you need more riders, some markets you need more drivers, so you may be willing to pull more of the value over to the rider or more of the value over to the driver. It just gets really complex and there is, this is one of those challenges that like we've had. We have dozens of data scientists working with it and we never got a great answer to it. But just hearing how people think through that and challenge a push, oh, okay, I see that.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  I think to me like really highlights the ability again to wield data, to be able to think through the complexities of it, not just take another model that you heard somewhere else and apply it to something you've never, most people haven't thought about that specific problem.

• 20:35Harry Stebbings?

  What was the other question?

• 20:36Speaker 00

  So the other question is like to dive into engagement because a lot of people in growth to think about acquisition. And so I typically give some type of product where I'm like, look, we've actually got really good, consistent engagement, but now we want to grow engagement of these users. So I want you to think through examples of how could we get new customers engaged? How can we get more frequent engagement? And how can we get more quality engagement? Come up with examples or how you would test each of those. And then usually I go through a, let's think of this like a product manager. How would you prioritize those? How would you pull in the resources to test? How would you test those? And how would you pull in those resources? Again, I find that gets the double hit of how do you think about the real customer need? Down funnel, not just at the top of the funnel.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  And how do you think about the operating these types of experiments that aren't just running ads or running landing page tests?

• 21:25Harry Stebbings?

  With both of those questions, I think it's often for founders listening, it's quite helpful to know like the red flags of like glaring, oh shit, they shouldn't have said that. Because there's not always a particular right answer, but there is sometimes a wrong. What are the red flags that come with those?

• 21:39Speaker 00

  So the biggest one for me, and this is very much My marketing hat showing is people that just don't talk about the customer and what is the actual customer problem and how are we solving it and what's the value of it when they just are like, all we're going to think about is the data or again, just pulling in, oh, here is how I did it exactly at this company where it's copying and pasting what you did at a previous company is to me, just like a red flag of someone taught you how to do this rather than you actually having the framework in your head to go apply it to the unique nature of my business and my customer. And so those to me are just big red flags that I see. I run into a lot with people that I find to be, it could be really great talent to have on a team, but are often more suited for a very specific role that has a very actionable, go get this thing done. It's very directed to you

• 22:22Speaker 00

  versus a growth role, which I think is like a very like pioneer exploratory role.

• 22:26Harry Stebbings?

  We mentioned the question around Uber there and how do you price what you would be willing to pay for that rider? I think we mentioned North Star earlier and the importance of it. When you speak with founders and advise your founders today, how do you determine what North Star metric that a founder should choose? How do you advise them on what to choose and how they should decide it?

• 22:44Speaker 00

  I like to look for a couple of things. So one is what is something that can rally as much of the company as humanly possible? So you can say something like new customer is our North Star. There's huge chunks of the business that really or whatever, we're going to do our job, whether we get 10x the same number of people or we slow down, the job is exactly the same in front of us. I also think that when you're dealing with marketplaces, having a metric that actually forces you to think through which side of the market needs more growth or more effort. So at Uber, I think you and I had talked about this around the trips was our metric because it's okay, a trip can't happen without a rider and a driver. And so if trips slow down, it forces us to go into the weeds and say, why aren't they happening? Is it pricing? Is it the amount of

• 23:28Speaker 00

  riders in the market? Is it the amount of drivers in the market? Is it where they're going? Like it just forces you to ask more thoughtful questions. And then the last thing I like to think of is actually rooting it to the customer problem. A lot of Silicon Valley uses like DAUs or MAUs or things like that, but most people don't actually use those products. The problem that their product solve doesn't happen daily or weekly or monthly. It actually has a once every three Weeks or two times every six months. Master class isn't when you're in a class. It's maybe a daily active, but then you're maybe going to take three classes a year. You're not going to take another class. The second you're done with the first class and then the third class and the fourth class. And so actually rooting it to like, what are they coming here to solve? To me, that as a North Star metric, make sure that you're thinking about the actual engagement

• 24:11Speaker 00

  and retention elements of your business appropriately as well.

• 24:14Harry Stebbings?

  I guess my question next is when we think about growth models aligned to North Star metrics, how do you define, because growth models are thrown around quite a lot. How do you define what really is a growth model? And whose job is it to make it? And how do you think about advising founders on constructing theirs?

• 24:29Speaker 00

  This is another one that can be a trap for some people in the sense of, hey, I have to have a really, really crazy, well-defined model and everything, primarily because everything changes so quickly, especially for early-stage founders. That being said, what I typically like to do with my founders is create what I think of as a vanilla model. Here's like the four-step process that you're going to grow. You're going to get more customers. They're going to create a piece of content. That content is something they're going to share with a friend. That friend loves the content so much that they want to become a customer. So they share, I've created some four-step loop and like using that then as an anchor for two major things. So one is, do you actually connect the dots? Do they come back full circle?

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Do the things that your customers do on your platform give a reason for the next person to actually become a customer? If not, then like you're actually, you're growing a linear business, which is fine. And there are a lot of very successful linear businesses, but know that you actually are going to have to probably do more paid or do more really traditional top of funnel, just getting custom sales motions, things like that. The other piece is it gives you four elements that like every planning meeting you go into, every prioritization meeting you have, you'd be like, is this actually impacting one of those four things? And if it's not, this probably isn't helping our business right now. But I think just a simple loop of your business to start is a really great, healthy way to anchor all of the efforts that you're doing and to make sure you actually know

• 25:57Speaker 00

  whether or not your business has a K factor or not.

• 26:00Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I have to ask. I've been dying to ask it since the beginning. You're the master of marketplaces, having worked in some of the best. I had Jeff Jordan on the show recently. He obviously was at OpenTable. And the truth is, he was like, we look for fragmented supply sides and how brilliant fragmented supply sides are. And then I hear a lot of VCs be like, it's super hard to acquire. It's super hard to retain. It takes a long time with lots of little suppliers. But then if we flip it and you have a concentrated supply base, you have concentration risk. That's very dangerous. You could lose 20% of your supply with one customer. And so my question to you is, I guess you've seen both with Uber and Masterclass. Guess supply is more concentrated than, say, in Uber. What's easier to run, the concentrated supply base or the fragmented?

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Easier to run is the concentrated. I find it incredibly more fun to run the distributed long tail supply. That's my one short answer that you get today.

• 26:52Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, I like that. I just have to ask, driver growth is really hard. What do you think you did so well at Uber to accommodate the demand on the supply side? Like, how did you acquire drivers so efficiently, do you think?

• 27:04Speaker 00

  It wasn't one thing. It was dozens and dozens of things, just a couple of quick ones. So one was a new channel discovery. The idea of onboarding and acquiring hundreds of thousands, millions of drivers is something no one's ever done before. There's no case study. Literally, like, every other week, we'd be like, okay, we were just spending time with our ops team and they post stuff on Craigslist to get drivers to show up at our office to sign up. Could we automate that? Could we actually take that into our growth team and make it a scalable channel? Oh, Craigslist works. Wouldn't all job boards work? We had to go into Indeed and Monster. And actually, they're used to posting two jobs at a time. We're like, no, we want hundreds of jobs for every category. We want to treat it like Google, not like a job classified. So just only iterating and thinking through, hey, we actually have to just be the snowplow

• 27:48Speaker 00

  here and go and find and create and identify ways to get drivers on board. I think the second thing was just really understanding, taking the time to do just tons of customer research. Driver is such a broad array of people. You have people that are professional drivers already, taxi drivers, things like that, just shifted their work effort over to Uber. You had people that were like, hey, I'm doing odds and ends jobs as it is. I'll just add. Add this to my mix. You have people that weren't working. They're maybe a stay at home moms or had a schedule that they just are like, oh, man, having one more thing to plug the hole in. You have retirees that are like, I just want to talk to people. I want to hang out with people. And really understanding those because initially we were able to just go market the heck out of, hey, you can make a thousand dollars a week. Okay, everybody wants that.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  But eventually that's not enough to build trust for someone to be comfortable with someone in the back of their car. Or for for that retiree, a thousand dollars a month isn't that interesting. It's actually the communicating, the engaging with people, getting to know your city, things like that. And so having this, just we brought on customer research onto our growth team really early on. And it was how do we unlock that new fragmented piece of our marketplace?

• 28:53Harry Stebbings?

  On the flip side, I'm just too interested. Did you ever do a growth experiment which just totally flopped on the driver acquisitions supply side at Uber?

• 29:00Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm sure, like 75% of them.

• 29:03Harry Stebbings?

  Those memorable words.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so when you would interview drivers who've been on the platform for a while, the thing that they would always say was that they don't actually drive for the money, they drive for the flexibility. Flexibility, when Stack ranked, money was like number three. The flexibility, the ability to just literally turn on my phone and I can go make money right now. I've never had anything that easy, that accessible. And so we took that insight and just went, we need to shift all of our messaging away from dollars to flexibility. And we spent a ton of money on that type of messaging and then it just burnt. It was just like no one clicked, right? And so what we learned is that the messaging, the point of time for the messaging really mattered. The money was the thing that got people to be like, oh, that's interesting. I'll go click on that.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  Whereas the flexibility became more of an engagement strategy. And so taking an insight from your active customer and applying it to new customers was just a big mess for us on like the marketing and messaging side of things. So that's one example.

• 30:02Harry Stebbings?

  What would that teach you for founders? That's really confusing. If you do research groups, if you're a founder and they say, oh, I love the flexibility. Totally right. You would market the flexibility. So should you not do the research group? Should you not?

• 30:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you should. I think you should just, you have to be really thoughtful about who you're researching and who you're researching and where do you want to. Apply that research. If I'm researching and I'm interviewing people that are active customers and I'm going to go apply that research to inactive customers, I can't assume that the same insight is going to stand and work to the same degree.

• 30:35Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned the variant of drivers there, and I'm applying this more broadly now across just horizontal customer bases. How do you market to horizontal customer basis? When there's old people wanting to chat, mothers wanting more money or fathers wanting more money on the side of life, and then full-time drivers, they're so different. Do you choose one and message for one? Or do you try catch all and message for many?

• 30:58Speaker 00

  Both. So I typically try to build some type of pyramid messaging structure that on the bottom of the pyramid, the broad stuff is you can make money. Okay, that might still apply to that retiree, that might still apply to both men and women. And that I can put into mass mediums. I could put that on Uber.com, I could put that in TV ads, things like that. Then the next tier up might be something more specific. So let's take safety and targeting female audiences. And so it's, okay, we know that women, another very large group, but gets a bit more specific. Safety really resonates there. So now I may take those channels and put that message in. I may still be on TV, but now I may not target sports. I may negative target things that I know are going to be very male skewed.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Or I'm going to put the right talent in there that actually speaks to my customer. I'm going to put that on, it may not be on Uber.com, but maybe there's a new badge on Uber.com that says, learn about safety. And like it goes down that path. Then it may be, what about safety in Chicago? Or it's, oh, we're seeing that safety matters more in Chicago than any other market. I lived in Chicago for a long time, so I'm picking it not because I think of it as a inherently dangerous city. But let's just say that's a thing. So it's again, you may build content around that. But now you're going to find channels that are very specific to Chicago and that message hitting there. Ideally, you want to build a structure that allows you to put the right message at the right place. And the better that targeting can be, the more refined the messaging can be. Ultimately, you just have to figure out, okay, safety is a pillar that we can tackle.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  But safety for retirees in Boca Raton is probably, there's just not enough market. There for us to build an entire creative flow for that.

• 32:34Harry Stebbings?

  How long do you leave a message out before you know whether it's worked or not? Is it instantaneous? We're like, oh, this isn't working. Or does it actually take some time where you need more data to understand the true effectiveness?

• 32:45Speaker 00

  The data matters. So at Uber, we could learn pretty quickly. We were spending a billion dollars a year at one point. For me to test something in the ads layer, I could get learnings within minutes.

• 32:55Harry Stebbings?

  Whereas you pull it then in minutes if it's all nothing.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Potentially. Most of the time, we were, again, building like creative systems. It was just like, hey, we're going to actually test 50 different messages now within this creative system within a week. Rather than just testing one thing for a week, then having to test the next thing. We had the volume that we could test a ton of different things at once. Rather than putting all those impressions against one message, we could separate it and actually get a lot more insight and learnings into the direction we were going. Whereas like Lambda School, you think of the funnel for Lambda School starts with acquiring a student. Then they go through an admissions process. Then they're a student for nine to 12 months. Then you're interviewing for a couple of months, then they get a job. So it's literally a year long funnel before you know if something really genuinely worked. And the volumes we were talking about are like 100 people in a class, a couple of hundred people in a class, right?

• 33:43Speaker 00

  But we were spending maybe like 100 grand a month and up, just tons and tons of money. And so that that cycle became, okay, let's try to find signals. Let's pull in a lot more qualitative research. Let's talk to the students, see how do they reflect with that messaging? Do they think it's going to work? And that just naturally would be more that environment where we're going to test one thing for the next three weeks. See if we can get enough signal in it to keep investing in it. So it can range pretty drastically.

• 34:05Harry Stebbings?

  I think a big thing that founders often struggle with is understanding what is a retained user and what is true retention. When you think back to Uber, it's probably easier than say like a Lambda. But looking back to Uber, how did you define a retained user? And how do you advise founders on what they should define a retained user as?

• 34:21Speaker 00

  I think cohorting is really important when thinking about retention. I think a lot of times people get stuck in just looking at our monthly actives going up and things like that. And really looking at different cohorts, either on a weekly or monthly basis. And then again, going back to what is the problem that you are solving? And what is the natural use case of that problem? And so at Uber, if I I took a segment that I knew were commuters where I'm like, I would expect this cohort in this segment to use our product three times a week. Maybe not every single trip, but they're going to use it three times a week. We'll pull in enough data to do that analysis. We'll do some like histograms to understand what is the normal, the average. And then using that against that cohort to see, okay, does that three trips a week? Is it happening regularly month over month or week over week?

• 35:06Speaker 00

  And then that gives you both, okay, this is a retained user and it gives you the anchor to say, oh, if they drop down to two or drop down to one a week, then that's someone I could actually start engaging with. You don't want to have to recapture a user that's totally churned. You want to see someone, okay, they're looking like they're going to churn. So what's our strategy for those people? Or are they now using it 10 times a week? Okay, they're now in a totally different segment. So I can move them somewhere else.

• 35:27Harry Stebbings?

  Whose responsibility is that capturing someone who is potentially churning? Is that products? Is that marketing's within this growth minded person within the org where we don't have a growth team thanks to your.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  I'm a growth team. I think that's where your data team is really responsible for understanding. You should have a suite of metrics that are your growth metrics that can be leveraged by a variety of different teams. And so that to me typically is a data owner or your BP of data, something like that, to be able to provide. Ideally, you want data to not be a reactive part of your team. You want it to be a proactive part of your team. So every week data should be bringing insights to your product and marketing org. Say there's a strategy on how we can get more engagement, more value out of each of our customers. Or the opposite being like, hey, I want to work on engagement data team. Let's work together to build out a model to help us understand who are the audiences that we should be tackling. Because I as a marketing team might want to do that with email right now, or I might want to do that with messaging in the app. Or I might want to do that with an event for our customers.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  Whereas product might be, hey, we're going in and we're going to be working on the discovery element of our website. So or our app or ETAs, just think it'll impact engagement and work into that. So that's where I feel like data becomes a really great anchor for growth to be infused throughout the organization.

• 36:39Harry Stebbings?

  Adam, you mentioned a word that insight and I often hear about postmortems. And I think no one really talks about how often to do them and everything around it. So do you do postmortems? How often? Who's invited? Who sets the agenda? Can you help me understand the right way to do postmortems?

• 36:56Speaker 00

  The right way? And the way I've done it are probably two different things. So the right way is you're ideally doing them with every sprint. And there's some type of regularity to them. I've worked with a lot of early-stage companies. It tends to be that postmortems happen when something breaks. It's actually a, hey, we should probably figure out what just happened there because something went terribly wrong. But again, good postmortem health would say that you're actually doing it every time. So you're also identifying the things that are working and all of those types of things. And a, hey, something went wrong, let's do a postmortem. Typically, there's some really great Miro and Coda. There are some good just basic templates that you can use. And typically, it's figuring out who the right stakeholders are.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  So one example is at Lambda School, we implemented a new chat opportunity for our students. And we didn't loop in customer service. And customer service had an entirely different chat element. It just caused a ton of backlash like across the company because it was like, hey, we got good data out of this, but we totally. I like to call it owning your collateral damage. Everything you do is probably going to have collateral damage. Go find out what it is. Go embrace those teams. Ideally, you tell them ahead of time. You get their buy-in ahead of time and things like that. But sometimes I think that's where postmortems come in handy and say, hey, we misstepped. We're owning that. We would like you to come in and help us break this down. But doing it with one of those templates and coming in with a, hey, we're going to all share in an honest fashion here.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  And the goal isn't to point fingers, but is actually it'll allow us to do that same thing again, not prevent us from doing that thing again. I think that mindset can really help a postmortem be more effective.

• 38:28Harry Stebbings?

  I thought about it when you said about Ed Baker hiring you and then having like individual functions within a growth team. I'm like, wow, I bet the other functions within the org loved you guys.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  All the range, my biggest challenge were the operations teams because you had a, every city team would build a small operations team, including marketing. At any given time, there were probably 200 personal credit cards buying ads on Facebook. And it used to drive me mad. And initially, I went out with a very firm grip on you can't do that. Stop doing that. We have it structured over here. It's tagged appropriately. You're bidding against ourselves, a very just authoritarian kind of view on it. And it just never stopped. Eventually, I shifted that into a, I need to actually build for those teams. Otherwise, they're going to keep doing this. And I actually need them. They understand their cities and these dynamics way better than I do because they're on the ground. And we actually built a function within our team to work directly with cities and that type of stuff. And then I know product and data had those same challenges as well.

• 39:22Harry Stebbings?

  And why are they using personal credit cards?

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Autonomy and go fight to win was very much part of our culture at Uber. If you're a GM for market and you hire a marketer and you're like, man, this central team's doing marketing that's not quite what we need. A good example are Outside Lands or Lollapalooza or Coachella where I, as a global marketer, I'm not really building content for Coachella. I don't really care. That's not for me. That's one week. I can buy more efficiently when I think much broader Bay area. Whereas like for the SF areas, like our entire marketplace is going to be screwed for a week. I want to go do specific marketing for that. To me, as a global buyer, my initial view on that is you're going to spend $10,000 of our billion dollar budget and putting three people full time on that. That is a waste of our time. That is not a good use of our time.

• 40:07Speaker 00

  That was the culture was to go do that because their goal was to get San Francisco to work, to win San Francisco. Eventually, we had to come to terms. It's just like, okay, maybe I could build things that allow you to do Coachella. Hey, it looks like every city does a major concert. Maybe we build our own internal templates on how to buy that. So I reduce the noise hitting my team and I improve the effectiveness of what they're doing at the local level. That's net good for the business.

• 40:30Harry Stebbings?

  That's a hard problem.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  It's very hard.

• 40:33Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned that a billion dollar aspect.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  A lot of gray hair from that, from that problem.

• 40:38Harry Stebbings?

  You look wonderfully young. You mentioned the billion dollar spend there. I think paid is really hard. When you think about the ratio between paid and organic, how do you think about advising founders?

• 40:47Speaker 00

  So ultimately, you want to make paid a tool, not a crutch. You want it to be something that you can add fuel when you need that fuel. Whether that's because you're Zoom and there was a pandemic and you're like, oh crap, we need to go win the market right now. Move as fast as possible. Just dump all of our money into the next six weeks because it will be more effective now than ever before. In that moment, you should probably be willing to make it 90%. To have a refined tool, you also don't want it to be 0% necessarily because you're going to miss those moments if you're not operating it at all. I usually tell people. Thirty percent tells me that you're not dependent on paid and it tells me that you're doing it enough to have a need to keep refining and improving it, being relevant in the moment and those types of things.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  And by giving that anchor of thirty percent, it starts to allow people to be uncomfortable when it's above thirty percent. It doesn't mean you shouldn't go there, but you should start to get uncomfortable. If it's like, man, we're spending way too much money. When you've put that anchor at thirty, it allows you to at least say how much is too much, rather than just saying, oh, this feels off.

• 41:45Harry Stebbings?

  What did this play look like at Uber? Because you've got product-like growth tactics, like referrals, especially within Uber and discount codes. You've got paid, you've got word of mouth, natural. Uber in the early days, your amazing car showed up outside and everyone was, oh, how did that get there? What did the mix look like in terms of those different acquisition strategies?

• 42:03Speaker 00

  So we probably floated around fifty percent when we were hitting that. So when we were doing a billion dollars, that included China and that was more than fifty percent. Paid drove a ton of our growth in China. It was nonsense. It was just wild. Let's say six, seven hundred million dollars, like the rest of the world to market Uber. That was probably accounting for forty to fifty percent of our growth at any given time. Now it's probably way more efficient than that. They pulled back significantly. We started to there, my fourth year at Uber, we started pulling back quite a bit.

• 42:32Harry Stebbings?

  Sorry, I've never been to China. What was so wild about it?

• 42:35Speaker 00

  None of the channels that we've used are there. So, oh, we've been using Facebook and Google and all these job boards and none of them exist in China. You literally had to take like everything you know about media buying and planning and marketing and throw it out the window, go understand and learn that market and then figure out how to do all of the different channels there. For instance, the app store is a much more distributed world there. It's not just, hey, drive everything to Apple. It's, oh, you actually need to go buy relationships with various different app stores to be able to be there and to be discovered there. When we load higher like agencies and things like that, it became very clear that one had all our data. So Didi knew everything we were doing, whereas Lyft and Uber always knew what each other were doing because we were watching each other. We're friends, things like that, but we never had each other's data. China, they definitely had our data, like a hundred percent.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  The Chinese government has it, Didi has it, everybody that wants to compete with us has it. It's like available readily in the market. For us.

• 43:28Harry Stebbings?

  Did you have bad data?

• 43:29Speaker 00

  We didn't. As far as I know, we didn't. I didn't have their data. We didn't have Zoom calls and then just random phone numbers would just show up on our Zoom calls. And we'd be like, oh, gotta hang up, get into a new Zoom room, things like that. Whereas this, oh man, there's so much. It feels like the Wild West here at times. But there's still a corporate structure there that means that you're not going to get away with fraud for very long. Or that Google and Facebook can't allow that stuff too much because if they do, it's going to hurt their entire business model. And all of that just goes out the window. And then even from the cultural differences with the types of rides, the type, we had to do a lot of just different, creative, much more loud, crazy characters, that type of stuff worked way better and differently there, a lot more out of home, those types of things.

• 44:12Harry Stebbings?

  Final one for a quick fire. Is CAC not totally bullshit? And what I mean by that is you have no idea if my mother signed up to Uber because I told her about it five times, or she saw it on a billboard five times, or she got my discount code. It may have been any of those that caused her. How do you think about the effectiveness, honestly, of CAC to LTV and CAC when measuring effectiveness of channels?

• 44:34Speaker 00

  I don't. I agree. I think it's bullshit. The expectation it's going to be a consistent metric across channels and having a full view of everything that could be included in that is impossible. It's not unlikely, it's impossible. It's impossible to fully attribute all of your channels, let alone like one of your channels, especially with the walled gardens of Google and Facebook and Apple and all this stuff now. I do still think CAC is a very efficient input and tool for a media buyer. But ideally, that CAC is informed by a media mix model that's constantly, you're basically just trying to optimize for your confidence in your model, not for perfection. Pulling in more data, pulling in more models, pulling in the information from your partners, all of that stuff, being fed back into the buyers with a, we believe that on Facebook, a customer's value is 20 bucks.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Go get as many as possible is the best way to let that team operate, instead of asking them to decipher all of the magic behind the CAC to LTV.

• 45:26Harry Stebbings?

  The way I always describe it, actually, with partners for our media companies is very bluntly, what's your LTV? We mostly work with large B2B companies and they say $50,000. And I go, great, okay, so it's $15,000 a month. To work with us. So we do a three month campaign. It's $45,000. Do we think in three months, being exposed to 3.5 million people, say, across those months, we will get one conversion as one X bag? Highly likely, yes. Then it's probably a good deal. Like, you should do it. But if we are doing a dollar per user, do we think that we're going to get actually 50,000? Tougher. We probably shouldn't do it. I always think about it as like LTV to audience and probability.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, the one thing you just highlighted is that your B2B larger corporate audience, enterprise is a lot easier of a puzzle to solve from a CAC to LTV perspective, whereas a consumer, especially mass consumer marketplace, et cetera, just adds all of this noise and complexity and things like that into it. From your perspective, from a media perspective, makes perfect sense. But from a buying perspective, if I'm a mobile game, yeah, you're right. It's going to be hard to attribute it, but I still need those users. I still need to go buy as many $1 users as humanly possible. Where am I going to do it? So they still have to make that decision. Generally, I think you're right. Using CAC and just spreading it evenly across the business, CAC to LTV, I think is our third trap.

• 46:40Harry Stebbings?

  Final one, I promise. You're also an active angel investor. You've invested in some fantastic companies. I think we've even got a few together. But how has investing changed your mindset towards growth now working with many different companies and founders?

• 46:52Speaker 00

  The thing I love about investing is that I, because I'm working with the founder with an expectation of how to scale this, a venture scale to this, I get pulled into what I think of as existential problems of the business, not the day-to-day operational problems. Whereas when I go and I'm consulting or advising, I inevitably get pulled into, hey, what's the next channel we should be doing and things like that? More often than not, I find that most of the company's problems aren't that they haven't found the channel that's going to work for them. It's actually that they don't have product market fit, or that they're pointing in the wrong direction, or they're too narrow in how they've solved their problem. And so being able to both tie that existential opportunity with the, what are the operational asks that they're giving to their teams right now?

• 47:34Speaker 00

  Has just been really rewarding for me and I think helps me think those big picture thoughts and ground them to like, okay, here's what to go hand your team to go find what they're looking for right now. That's how it shifted my ability to do both kind of ends of that spectrum.

• 47:48Harry Stebbings?

  Adam, I could talk to you all day, but sadly you're busy. So I've got a quick fire round for you. So I said, okay, what did you believe about growth five years ago that you no longer believe?

• 47:59Speaker 00

  That everybody needs a growth team.

• 48:01Harry Stebbings?

  Honestly, when you said that at the beginning, I was like, fuck, that's scheduled. Good. Why is explore on Twitter so bad? And what would you do if you were CMO growth at Twitter?

• 48:10Speaker 00

  For me, it's just become all sports and I have lots of interests. I like sports, but it just keeps showing me the one thing. I think they have over indexed on what they think ads will like versus indexing towards time relevance, which I think is the superpower of Twitter is it's exactly what's happening in this moment. And so if I was a growth leader at Twitter, I would be, how do we really capture that magic of this is special right now? More than this is special because it's the generic thing that person likes.

• 48:36Harry Stebbings?

  Clubhouse, how do you evaluate what happened? What was the magic and what went wrong?

• 48:40Speaker 00

  Product market fit on both answers. So I think they had just killer product market fit. The vision initially was how do we create this feeling of a dinner party? Those types of conversations in that moment, everybody needed that. But very quickly, most people don't need that ever. We talked about frequency. Most people want that once a month, not every single day, but they opened it up so quickly to that. And then the product shifted or the market shifted where that product market fit doesn't quite fit there. And this is what a lot of consumer companies are going through right now, where they think that, oh, they got to keep trying new things. But really they don't have product market fit the way they used to in the middle of a bear market or bull market.

• 49:15Harry Stebbings?

  Does TikTok die? And how do you think about that in terms of what it does? Cause I'm seeing so much diversification of channel spend from Facebook, Google to TikTok from brands. Does TikTok die?

• 49:25Speaker 00

  I don't think TikTok dies. I think it like.

• 49:27Harry Stebbings?

  Banned.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I think they've carved their customers out. I think you're going to still people ebb and flow between them, but just like Snapchat before it, I think.

• 49:34Harry Stebbings?

  But you don't think, you don't think they'll get banned?

• 49:36Speaker 00

  I don't think so. I think that there's too much of a single generation that uses that app that would go crazy if it disappeared.

• 49:44Harry Stebbings?

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

• 49:48Speaker 00

  It's hiring because they need growth rather than hiring because they have growth.

• 49:52Harry Stebbings?

  Penultimate one, you're great at choose your skill. Why do other people fail at said skill?

• 49:57Speaker 00

  I'm great at connecting the dots. I've had a lot of exposure. We talked about I study improv and comedy my whole life. And so I love this idea of the yes and connecting pieces. And I find that really effective in the weeds with founders because I'm able to not just think about their singular vision, but really connect it to different consumer experiences, different products. And I think a lot of people get way too pigeonholed into I have to solve this. It's a new problem. I can't learn anything from anyone else. I gotta go do it myself.

• 50:23Harry Stebbings?

  Final one. What one company growth strategy have you been most impressed by recently?

• 50:28Speaker 00

  I love Epic Games. I think that they're both building a platform with Unreal Engine and building the best games to be on that platform. Just reminds me a lot of Apple with the App Store early on. And I think we're starting to see some versions of that with the AI companies hitting the market right now as well. And that to me is the closest to like winner take all opportunities is you building both the platform and some of the best products on it. I've actually been like really geeking out about some of their strategies within that.

• 50:54Harry Stebbings?

  Adam, I've absolutely loved this. Thank you so much for ruining my schedule, but then being so flight at shit schedule. And I love this discussion. So thank you so much.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  Dito. Absolutely. It's a pleasure, Harry. We'll chat soon.

• 51:07Harry Stebbings?

  I just love some of those growth stories from Uber days. And if you want to see more from us, of course you can on 20vc.com or by heading over to YouTube and searching for 20vc. 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. Now, this is the only way to make suggestions. Head on over to miro.com/20vc and leave your suggestions with digital sticky notes or comments. That's miro.com/20vc. And Miro actually sponsored this episode. For those of you that have not used it before, it's this incredible tool. The lighting is truly game changing. Just ask the 1 million plus people who sign up for Miro every month.

• 51:49Harry Stebbings?

  It's a visual collaboration platform packed with the right tools, tech and templates to grow your idea, your product, your vision at scale. Miro acts as a single source of truth across teams. That means you can get 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 so much more. Hashing out a sound acquisition strategy, brainstorm in Miro. Rethinking your sign up flow, using Miro's user research templates. Quickly visualize team structures on a Miro board. 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.

• 52:33Harry Stebbings?

  Check it out again at miro.com/20vc to submit your guest suggestions. And I'm really excited about this next sponsor because a few of my portfolio companies use it and love it. So do you know the impact of your marketing efforts? It's more important this year than ever to know the impact. Or how much you've spent so far this month and what you got as a result? You're not alone in not knowing these answers. Even though marketing is now all about the data, most companies still use manual spreadsheets for reporting and analysis. But if you want to supercharge growth, spreadsheets just won't cut it. Funnel is the world's first and only marketing data hub that takes all the manual effort out of data collection and lets you blend data from different platforms to unlock new, deeper insights.

• 53:17Harry Stebbings?

  And the best part is this can all be achieved without writing a single line of code. I can hear your sigh of relief. 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. Start your own free trial by visiting funnel.io/20vc. That's funnel.io/20vc. And finally, we've all been there, but nothing is quite so depleting as the blinking cursor on an empty page. Reminds me of law school. You're sitting there trying to come up with ad copy or hypothetically a set of interview questions for a podcast you run. Obviously, personal, and it's just staring back at you like a brick wall. This moment of frustration amid growing content demands

• 53:59Harry Stebbings?

  is probably why I'm hearing about Jasper non-stop these days. Jasper is an AI assistant for business that helps marketers, sales reps, and other creators accelerate their writing process and repackage content into different formats, languages, and tones. Unlike broad-use AI tools, Jasper was built For business, and this makes a big difference. It incorporates SEO, a plagiarism checker, and a browser extension. So you can call up Jasper in pretty much any text box or platform you use online. Visit jasper.ai/20vc for a demo. Your burnt out team will thank you. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I can't wait to bring you an incredible set of episodes, starting on Monday with Dara, CEO at Uber.