20Growth: Top Growth Lessons from the Early Facebook, Twitter and Quora Days, The Most Important Question to Ask When Building Your Growth Team, How To Test For True Candidate Depth and Quality When Hiring for Growth with Andy Johns, Venture Partner @ Unu

Andy Johns is one of the pre-eminent growth leaders of the last decade. Andy's career started in growth at Facebook when the company scaled from 100M-500M active users. Since he has worked in some of the leading growth orgs at companies like Twitter, Quora and more recently at Wealthfront as Head of Growth and President. Andy is also an active angel investor and advisor with companies such as Poshmark, Robinhood, Webflow, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Opendoor. If that was not enough, Andy is currently a Venture Partner @ Unusual Ventures where he focuses on consumer social and network-driven startups. In Today’s Episode with Andy Johns You Will Learn: 1.) How Andy made his way into the world of startups and growth with his joining the Facebook growth team? What were the biggest takeaways from his time with Facebook, Twitter and Quora? How did that impact his mindset today? 2.) How does Andy define "VP and Head of Growth"? When is the right time to start hiring for your growth team? How should founders determine whether they need a growth leader or growth engineers in the early days? What is the core question founders need to ask on network effects to answer this question? Should the growth team be incorporated into the product team? 3.) How does Andy structure the hiring process for growth hires? What does the structure of the interviews look like? How does Andy test for real depth with candidates? What case studies does he do to really understand their quality? Where do many go wrong with the interview process? What are Andy's biggest suggestions for how to optimise the process? 4.) What does the optimal onboarding process for new hires look like? What takes and processes should they complete in their first month? What are early signs of a poor candidate? How long should one give them if they are not performing? How does Andy approach structure post-mortems within the team? What is the ideal relationship between CEO and Head of Growth?

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome to 20 Growth. This is a show that takes you inside the minds of some of the world's best growth leaders, providing you with a benchmark for how the best operate, execute, and most importantly, hire. In this series, they are your personal advisor to scaling growth themes. And today, I'm so thrilled to be joined by Andy Johns. Andy is one of the preeminent growth leaders of the last decade. His career in growth started at Facebook, when the company scaled from 100 million to 500 million active users. Since, he has worked in some of the leading growth orgs at companies like Twitter, Cora, and more recently at Wealthfront as Head of Growth and President. Andy's also an active angel investor and advisor with companies such as Poshmark, Robinhood, Webflow, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Open Door. And if that wasn't enough, Andy's also currently a venture partner at Unusual Ventures,

• 0:43Harry Stebbings?

  where he focuses on consumer social and network-driven startups. But before we move into the episode today, if you're a founder or running a startup, I want to tell you about Brex. Brex combines high-limit credit cards, expensive software, and payments into one platform to help you scale smarter and faster. Go to brex.com/growthpodcast to get a corporate card with 10 to 20 times higher limits, great rewards, and expense tracking, plus a business account with no transaction fees. And there's no personal guarantee or credit check. Apply 100% online at brex.com/growthpodcast today, and you'll get up to 50,000 rewards points. And if you're a startup founder, you know that early decisions can be the difference between success and failure. Or one decision that thousands of successful founders have made is choosing Stripe as their payments platform.

• 1:28Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  Is a must have though for growth minded founders and PMs such as you lovely listeners. With powerful no code product analytics and in app guides, Pendo Free is a complete platform that will help you deliver better digital experiences for happier and more productive users. Plus it's free forever for up to a thousand monthly active users and takes literally minutes to install. Get started today at bit.ly/pendofree. Again, that's bit.ly/pendofree. But that's enough from me. So now I'm very, very excited to hand over to the one and only Andy Johns.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:48Harry Stebbings?

  Andy, this is such a joy for me to do. I've been really looking forward to this one. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you, Harry. I appreciate you having me.

• 2:56Harry Stebbings?

  Not at all. But I do want to start with a little bit on you because you put in some of the most powerful growth thoughts in the world. I mean, Facebook, Twitter, Cora, Wealthfront. What was the entry into growth for you? Let's start there.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, good question. It was mostly serendipitous, as was my entry into the tech world as a whole. I got into tech because I randomly started emailing CEOs of companies. That's how I wanted to get my career started. One of them responded out of the dozens that I reached out to. That one happened to be building a technology company. He brought me into that company and gave me an opportunity from the bottom to be a part of it. Couple of years later, I decided to move to the Silicon Valley to pursue the tech industry more intentionally. During the early days of my time hunting for jobs and getting random consulting opportunities in the Silicon Valley, I happened to apply for a role at Facebook and I was told very directly, actually by Chamath, who was the head hiring manager

• 3:49Speaker 02

  at the time, I was told I was the least qualified profile of everyone that had applied for this position, but that he appreciated the scrappy approach that I took to getting my career started. That's what Facebook wanted was somebody who was scrappy. So I guess he hired me based on raw talent and ability. And so when I came into to Facebook, it happened to be as one of the early members of the growth team. And that's how it got started.

• 4:12Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, I absolutely love it. And at least Chamath respected the hustle that you showed. I do want to ask you, you know, when we look back at those. Companies and those experiences. If you were to isolate one or two takeaways from those experiences that really impacted your mindset today, what would you say a couple of those takeaways have been?

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Sure, I think the number one takeaway as it relates to growth is that you can't think of hiring and building out growth teams as one size fits all. You have to contemplate the type of business you're building, the industry that you're building in, the sort of competition that you're facing. Whether you're a network effects business or a non-network effects business, you have to contemplate all those things as it relates to the type of growth team and the type of growth people that you need to instill at that company. So that's the number one takeaway, and I see this time and time again with startups. When you try that one size fits all approach, it usually fails and it fails pretty quickly.

• 5:09Harry Stebbings?

  So that's number one. What's one more?

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Number two, this is the one that's most prominent. A company quickly assumes that the answer to more growth is an optimization based approach, where they start running a bunch of experiments and looking at data, A B testing their way towards the future. And it overwhelms the company's ability to then start taking big risks and think from an innovation standpoint. And so the big takeaway there is far too many startups lean on the growth methodology for future growth when they should be leaning on more innovation from a product standpoint.

• 5:44Harry Stebbings?

  But I do want to ask you, when we think about the definition of like growth roles, growth teams, and in particular VP slash head of growth, what does growth mean to you? And then what is that head of growth?

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I love this question and I've thought about it for a long time. It's been over a decade. And so the highest level of abstraction where I think about it is as follows. I think of growth like one may think about finance at a startup. And what I mean is finance as a startup is responsible for measuring the flow of capital in and out of the business and hopefully contributing ideas to optimizing the flow of that capital, earning less money, making more money. A growth team is the same. Their job is to measure the flow of users or customers in and out of a product. And then make optimizations to that flow. That is the highest level of abstraction. And if you just start there and you said, okay, I'm at this company and my job is to measure and understand

• 6:39Speaker 02

  the flow of customers or users in and out of my product. And if I begin there, then I can usually tailor make an approach to growth within that company that then makes sense for me.

• 6:49Harry Stebbings?

  And then tell me, like, when we think about growth teams, I think the biggest question also is fundamentally, should your growth team be within your product team? Should it be within the engineering team? Why does it sit within the org before we go into the profiles to hire?

• 7:04Speaker 02

  I think the most important distinction that a startup has to make as it relates to this question and really any growth related question is, are we a network effects business? Or are we not a network effects business? And the reason why I think that is critical, the role of a growth team within a network effects business is substantially more important than the role of a growth team within a non-network effects business. And the reason for that is that a growth team that's optimizing drivers of the network effect can then have a compounding sort of exponential impact on the growth of that business. So for example, if I'm working on growth at Facebook and I find a way to increase the rate at which people are adding new friends, that has this compounding effect on the overall network rate of growth of the product itself.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Now, if I look at a business like Wealthfront, it's not network effects driven. So if I'm on a growth team working on something like Wealthfront, I'm doing something standard along the lines of improving the conversion rate in the signup flow. And although that helps, and I may take a signup rate from 2% and elevate it to 4%, that's going to help the business, but it has more of a linear effect. It doesn't have a compounding effect because it's not network driven. And so I think that the most important distinction that has to be made from day one that determines what type of growth leader you hire and how you implement a focus at the business is, are you network driven or not?

• 8:23Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so I mean, I love this is kind of the core question. Before we get into that profile and the types of people to hire, first, regardless, when's the right time to think about adding a head of growth or starting your growth team? What's that catalytic moment?

• 8:36Speaker 02

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

• 9:00Harry Stebbings?

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

• 9:16Speaker 02

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

• 10:01Speaker 02

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

• 10:15Harry Stebbings?

  Got you. And so we don't go for that kind of experience, like complete growth leader. And we go for, help me understand then, what should we be looking for in these profiles?

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Again, I think it goes back to what type of business you're building. So for example, if I'm trying to build the next Quora, the next Twitter, and I'm trying to build that early flywheel of people coming into the platform and creating content, it's really helpful to have somebody who is capable of building out early-stage communities and answering the question, how do I get my first hundred passionate users who will come into this platform and create content? On a regular basis. So this is somebody who has a lot of community building experience. At the same time, they can almost act like a strategic business development person in that they know how to reach out to the hairy steppings of the world and convince Harry, hey, you should try this new platform and be one of the first creators.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  If I'm building something like a wealth front where it isn't network driven and there isn't a community aspect to it, then I probably want somebody that's straightforward on A B testing. They're familiar with looking at registration flows, the funnels in a product where somebody might churn, the funnels in a product where you may reactivate stale users, and then they can run standard experiments in improving the conversion rates of those funnels. So again, it really matters based on the type of business you're building. And so I can think of half a dozen different profiles of that first growth leader.

• 11:35Harry Stebbings?

  So if we think about kind of those different profiles, the process that goes alongside it is another very challenging element. How do you structure the right process to hire that first growth individual?

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Well, for the community-based products, again, something like a Quora, the right process usually looks like hiring somebody who's one of your first passionate users of the product. So in the early days of Quora, the fifth employee who eventually came in and ran all of community in moderation was one of the first, I think, hundred users of the product. And so you tended to recruit from within the product itself. You found those really passionate users. But in most cases, where you're not just pulling somebody out of your user base and then making them the head of a growth function, the process is fairly straightforward in the sense that you now have a growing pool of people that over the last, call it 12 years, where growth has really become a normal function.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  You have this growing pool of people that you can tap into that have relevant growth experience. So if I'm building another network-driven product, I'm going to look for the heads of growth at Pinterest and at Reddit and at Quora and at Twitter and at Facebook and at LinkedIn. If I'm building a new marketplace, I'm going to be looking at the heads of growth from the Ubers and the Airbnbs. Based on your business type, you can now start tapping into a pool of candidates that know how to grow that type of business. And then from there, you run your standard process, to be honest with you.

• 12:58Harry Stebbings?

  No, I get you totally. The thing I find challenging for a lot of first time founders, especially networks driven businesses. So let's apply that lens. They get the talent in the room, but it's discerning good from great. What questions do you ask? What are signals? What are signs that someone is truly great? And you want to get them on board versus someone who's got a gift of the gab and actually may not be as deep.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the easiest tools to test for depth is to ask them to point out a couple of examples in which a growth project or a growth experiments was run at one of the prior companies that was successful. And then spend the entire interview just drilling in on every facet of that experiment. Now, if this person can't talk about the lowest level details of that experiment, then they weren't truly involved in it. Somebody else was probably running it and then they're taking credit for it. So you can do that for technical interviews, for product interviews, and certainly for growth interviews. It works for everything. So that's the approach I usually take. I think the hallmark for me of somebody that makes the distinction between good at growth and exceptional.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  One of the few top five growth leaders, someone who can make the distinction between when do you optimize for the business versus when do you innovate for the business. And so if I'm talking to a candidate and they have a lot of growth experience and their answer to solving for future growth of the business is always about running an A B test of sorts. Then I think you probably have somebody who's very, very skilled at the A B testing approach to building a business. But you don't have somebody who can take a bigger step back and ask the question, should growth really be the answer here? Or maybe we need to stand up a new product team that's focused on innovating our way into a brand new product segment

• 14:40Speaker 02

  that we don't even serve today in order to expand the business from that perspective. So to give an example of this, in the early days of Wealthfront, we had built a growth team. I was sort of the founding member of that and then we were up and running. What we did at first was a lot of standard A B testing, especially with the signup flow, just removing friction, getting more users into the product. And it worked, but eventually I had a conversation with the CEO and he posed a really interesting question. The question was, you know, if we want to become the next. Morgan, the next Charles Schwab. Are we going to get there by having a more efficient signup flow than they do? Are we going to get there by building, for example, the world's first fully automated mortgage? A product experience that is vastly superior relative to the products that are already in the market?

• 15:25Speaker 02

  And the answer was clear. If we want to be a trillion asset firm, we got to build products that far exceed what's available in the market today.

• 15:31Harry Stebbings?

  That was my point though, actually. I'm intrigued. Is that not the responsibility of the CEO or the head of products? To take that innovate versus optimize? Or actually, should it be the head of growth who has the ability to determine the two?

• 15:44Speaker 02

  It absolutely is the responsibility of CEO or founder to be thinking at that level of strategy. But I would argue that for any executive, they should have the ability to take a step back and say, you know what? Should I be willing to cannibalize or reduce the prominence of my function within the company? If I believe that that is in the best interest of the business? And so eventually what we did at the Wealthfront, in the early days of Wealthfront, is I was the VP of Growth. But at one point, we said, you know what? The best thing for our business at this point is to shut down growth and in its wake, replace it with another product team focused on building big new product lines, like our banking division. And so that's what we did. We shut down growth and eventually I became the head of product instead of running just growth.

• 16:28Harry Stebbings?

  No, I'm totally with you there. Can I ask, going back to that interview process? I love the drilling deep and spending a lot of time on that. What does the structure look like in your mind? I know you said it's kind of the same as your normal. But what does that actually look like? Like first meeting, intro meeting, second meeting, digging really deep, third meeting, case study? How would you structure it?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so for me, the first meeting, when I talk with the head of growth, I want to get their perspective on what is their conceptual framework for how my business grows. So for example, to interview me for a growth role at Amazon. And you said, Andy, here's a pen and here's a whiteboard. I want you to just give me a simple framework that you think is a good expression for how Amazon grows. What I would probably do is write something to the effect of, you know, A times B times C times D equals growth, where A equals the growth rate of new product inventory, meaning as. Amazon adds new products to its library, it has more potential to grow. B equals the average amount of traffic earned per week per product in their library.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  So for example, they have a landing page for a pair of running shoes that gets five visitors per week. But you increase that to ten visitors per week on average. Amazon's overall growth rate is going to accelerate. So you've got how many products in its library times the average amount of traffic that each product receives each week. And then you've got another variable, which is the conversion rate. So you get all these visitors, but how many of those convert into a paying customer? So that would be another variable in the equation. And then another I would add on would be to assume a customer makes a purchase. What is the average size of the purchase per transaction? Is it fifty dollars or is it ten dollars? And so what you can see is I'm starting to line up a series of variables that when you factor all those together, actually produces some rate of growth for the business.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  And my job as I had growth would be able to take a step back and say, what are those high level variables? And then how do I assemble a growth focus around them so that we can execute strategically and tactically?

• 18:24Harry Stebbings?

  Got you. Okay, so meeting one, we have that conceptual framework. Here's the whiteboard. Show me broad strokes, how you think about my business. What does meeting two and three and close look like?

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Meeting two is the deep dive. So then I want to see, can they think at a strategic level in the first one? And conceptualize our business in a broadened up sense where I know they can think strategically. Meeting two is about the deep dive on show me examples or talk to me about things that have been successful. And then I'm picking apart, how deep can they actually go? Were they bullshitting around their level of involvement on prior growth projects? So I'm going to check for depth in the second meeting. And then the third meeting is usually an opportunity for me to then focus on less specifics around growth, but more around their their leadership potential. How do they think about building a team? How do they think about managing people? How do they think about their role as an executive at a company? And one of the big things I'm really checking for is can they sell?

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Can they recruit? Those two things go hand in hand. And are they a size of the pie thinker? Or are they a size of my slice thinker? I think the great risk is you get an executive who comes in who's willing to optimize their division because it makes them look good over optimizing the results for the business as a whole. And so I'm looking for a size of pie thinker, not a size of slice.

• 19:41Harry Stebbings?

  I love that in terms of size of pie versus size of slice. Can I ask, I often get first time founders who say, Harry, we really want to hire Andy. We want to do a case study beforehand, but with like small first time founders and Andy's this growth hero. Like, we feel a bit guilty asking him, how would you respond or advise founders who feel like almost they're offending a potential senior growth leader by giving them a case study to do?

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Well, I think that's a good question. One of the things that I personally like to scream for is ego. If it's a startup, you can't afford to have the sorts of egos that would prevent any employee from doing what is necessary to succeed. And often, especially in the early stages of a startup, it doesn't matter how senior you are. You're going to have to do a lot of grungy elbow work. You know, the sort of stuff that you might have done 10 years ago at the beginning of your career, but is necessary for that startup to succeed right now. So in my first six months at Wealthfront, all I did was build ad campaigns and track and measure them in spreadsheets. And that was something that I had done 10 years prior, but it was actually really important to do for Wealthfront at that time, so I did it.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  So I think if somebody's unwilling to do a case study, you probably have somebody who wants to be running growth at a large established business like Airbnb and they just want to come over and take over a team of 50 or 100 people and not be at that level of execution.

• 21:03Harry Stebbings?

  Say we hire this person, so we've done that, three great meetings, Andy, you're hired. Poor you, you now work with me. But say we're now working together, I'm CEO, you're my new head of growth. What does the optimal onboarding process look like for this growth role? How should I think about that as a founder and CEO?

• 21:21Speaker 02

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

• 22:06Speaker 02

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

• 22:50Speaker 02

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

• 23:34Speaker 02

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

• 23:38Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, when you think about the plan to execute and those different variables, fundamentally, you need to have your North Star metric that you're driving, whether that's GMV, whether that's take, whether that's. Number of transactions, whatever that is. How do you advise founders on discovering what their true North Star metric is? And what they really need to be focused on optimizing or or kind of pushing forward? Cause you can't be a slave to to everything.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a great question. The approach I usually begin with is, hey, let's start with identifying the input metrics versus the output metrics. Output metric, for example, at something like Wealthfront would be assets under management. How much money have customers invested on the platform? Because that's sort of a North Star metric that is highly associated with revenue. And so you could look at that and say, okay, more money from customers equals more money for the business in the form of revenue. And then what are the inputs to that? And the inputs could be, well, there's signup conversion rate, there's invites that are sent to other people. There's the average amount of money that a customer deposits upon their first visit. So there's all these different inputs and then you lay out your outputs and then you look at the two.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  And then through that process, you can tweak it and refine it a little bit more to then say like, this is the ultimate metric. Where everything sort of funnels into that. So that's usually the process I start with, like, let's talk about inputs versus outputs and make that distinction first.

• 24:58Harry Stebbings?

  Totally get you in terms of that distinction between inputs and outputs. If we go back to this first month, you know, you've done that framework, you've been through the different variables. What should your communication and what should the communication moving forwards look like with your CEO? If you were to advise me on how to have the best relationship with you, the head of growth moving forwards, what would you advise me?

• 25:17Speaker 02

  The first thing that I would advise you, related to your last question, which is, what is the North Star metric? Second, what I would advise you is, what are the pros and cons associated with that approach? Because no matter what approach you take, whether it's the type of team you build, the type of leaders you put in place, the type of A B tests you run, the metrics you pick. There's strengths and weaknesses to both approaches. There's no perfect metric, there's no perfect org design. They all come at a certain cost. And the thing that's important is to understand the way in which the approach you're choosing to take is broken. So that when it breaks, you're not surprised by it. So I'll give an example, let's take Facebook. The growth team there had a very big imprint. In terms of the org structure and the overall impact on the business.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  And that's because we were doing an amazing job. And so as the results and the metrics continued to improve, the growth team gained more and more influence. And as we gained more influence within the business, naturally, we started to have our fingerprints on more parts of the product. We were running experiments on profiles and on pages and on newsfeed. These other parts of the product that teams owned. And so you might have a team come over and say, hey, we own newsfeed. Why are you running an experiment with newsfeed? Stay off my lawn. That's effectively what they're saying. And so you get this this natural territorialism that exists within companies. The stay off my lawn thing is a distinct characteristic of a growth team that has huge impact within a network effects business.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  I can imagine that at a business like Uber, there was a lot of this sort of, hey, stay off my lawn conflict between teams. We understood that that was one of the ways in which Facebook's approach to growth was fundamentally broken internally. Is this conflict between product teams and the growth team? And sometimes the design team and the growth team, where they were saying, hey, what you're doing is touching my part of the product. And we don't agree with this approach, or we have questions about why you're doing it. And that doesn't mean that the growth team should stop and shouldn't touch other parts of the product. What it means is that the CEO needs to understand that those conflicts are going to arise. And that they can establish a healthy way of resolving them when they pop up.

• 27:23Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree there in terms of resolving them. I am interested because, you know, often in Casey Winters said about this challenge at Pinterest. He was like, often the engineering team will get super pissed off with us because we come in, fuck around with their code and then sort off.

• 27:39Harry Stebbings?

  And they'd be really pissed. How do you think about that engineering team and growth team harmonization? When they are going to come in, tinker and sort off?

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it gets to a fundamental question around the DNA of the engineering team and and of the specific engineers. Because growth by its nature is about experimentation. And so often you're writing throwaway code, something that isn't really like robust and production ready. In the spirit of moving fast and running experiments as quickly as possible so that you can learn. And that tends to definitely disagree with some engineers whose preference and whose experience is all about writing really high quality, robust production code that meets certain standards, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's it's usually just difference between like the DNA of that person and the DNA of the engineering organization as a whole.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  I worked with some engineers that were phenomenal growth engineers because they were very comfortable hacking together solutions with duct tape and bubble gum. And then throwing that code away after a couple of weeks. And I worked with some engineers that wanted absolutely nothing to do with that because they wanted to be working on the core financial infrastructure for the flow of capital in and out of wealth front. And that was not a part of the technology stack where it paid to be flimsy with the software that you wrote. So for me, I just think about it as like, just be intentional regarding the DNA of the people that are on the different parts of the team. And recognize that both of those styles are important for the success of a company.

• 29:03Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask on the like post-mortem side, we've said a lot about optimization, iteration. In terms of post-mortems, like how do the best growth teams structure post-mortems? How often do they do them? How central are they? How do you think about advising growth teams on post-mortems?

• 29:17Speaker 02

  It changes quite a bit depending on the size. If you're a 20-person startup and you have a three-person growth team. The reality is you're going to be running experiments and making changes at a pretty slow pace. And conducting very rigorous, call it academic, post-mortems. Where, for example, you're trying to do really deep statistical analysis to prove causation as opposed to some flimsy correlation. That's why I call it academic. I think you're just wasting your time in the early days of a startup and trying to do that. But if you're, you know, this is 2010 and you're a 50-person growth team at Facebook. All of a sudden you have the resources to be more thorough and more academic.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  And kind of doing this sort of growth research that a smaller company doesn't typically have the time or the resources for. So again, my answer is it varies, but the guidance that I generally give, especially for the early-stage startups, is move fast. Be comfortable with correlation because correlation just provides quality hypotheses. And that's all you care about at that point. You're not looking for something that's perfectly causal because chances are you won't find it.

• 30:24Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I've loved this chat. There's one element that's missing before the quickfire round is we haven't spoken that much about you. And I wanted to kind of nicely fit this in, but I couldn't figure out a way. So I just called it Andy Johns. So not that it's seamless, but I want to talk about, you know, a growth decision that you've made without data to back it up. What was it and how did it go?

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Fun story. Early days of Twitter. One of the first things we did on growth was we looked at the signup flow. And it's growth one O one, right? Start with the top of the funnel, look at the data, try and diagnose any issues that are clear. We saw in the data, there was one major hurdle in the signup flow that was getting worse over time. And that was picking your username. Twitter used to require that you pick it and that you had a unique one in the signup flow before you could proceed. Now, the challenge is as your product gets bigger, the namespace shrinks because people have picked the username you want before you. And so we saw on the data that someone would sign up, they'd go to pick a username and it'd throw them an error saying name's taken. And then they'd try again and they'd throw them another error and they'd try again and throw them another error. And then they'd just say, ah, screw it, and they'd leave.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  So we said, well, clearly that's not serving a valuable function early on. Let's reduce that friction. So we had some data there, but in terms of what the precise implementation should be, there was all sorts of ideological conflict within the company. Because we said, hey, let's remove username selection. And everyone said, but that's what Twitter is known for. I said, well, if you're Kanye West, let's make sure Kanye gets his handle. But if I'm Andy Johns, just give me anything and let me change it later. And so when it came to the solution and how to resolve that, there was a ton of conflict. And we didn't have any clear data around what was the right approach. And so fun story, I worked with one designer, one engineering intern who I think was nineteen at the time.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  And then one other front end engineer who had been there for several years and was quite experienced. And we weren't making any progress in terms of getting an input, like some new solution implemented because of the ideological battles within the company. So I said, team, like, let's just throw in some hacky solution where we just automatically generate a username for that person. Let's just run it as an A B. Test, let's not ask for permission. If the axe falls because people are unhappy that we ran this A B test, it was my choice, it was my decision, I'll take the fall for it. And so we just implemented a hacky solution. And then a couple of days later, we looked at the data and we realized, oh, boy, we have a winner.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  And what ended up happening is we started to get seventy thousand more signups per week because the solution we implemented was a good enough solution to work. And at the time, that meant like, gosh, twenty, thirty percent more signups per week, just from a small team of four people implementing a really hacky solution.

• 33:08Harry Stebbings?

  Is it tough for CEOs with the growth leader that they have in place? Because I want you to try things like that, Andy. So I want you to be ambitious. I want you to try things, but there's a line of that's too far. How do leaders instill that ambition risk without the fear of going too far, but also realizing accountability?

• 33:29Speaker 02

  I don't know. I really don't know. I don't know if I have an answer for that question because I've worked with some CEOs where they have zero appetite for risk. And it's kind of shocking, you know, they become very conservative after their initial sort of breakout rate of growth. And they go and raise a series A and a series B, and then they get conservative. They're like, okay, you know, let's not mess with the golden goose. I don't want to mess with the product too much because what if we break it? And I don't know how to change that. I just noticed that in some founders, they intuitively recognize and are comfortable with the fact that they have to take risk all the time. Because a startup is just a massive bundle of risk that evolves over time. It's a common misunderstanding to think like, oh, let's not mess with the golden goose as if there's no more risk to be taking.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  A startup is just a bundle of risk to begin with. So I don't know how to change that. Instead, I don't try and change the CEOs or the founders. I just try and look those that demonstrate a very clear intuitive sense for taking risk over and over again.

• 34:24Harry Stebbings?

  Final one for the quick fire, Andy. You've invested now for a number of years, both as an angel and then obviously advising unusual. Tell me, how has putting on the investor hat, how's that changed your mindset and approach to growth and company building?

• 34:38Speaker 02

  It's reinforced my belief that far too many startups.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  Think of building a growth team as a solution in that most startups should be thinking about building out a product organization and a company DNA that sets them up to regularly take big shots on goal. That's just been deeply reinforced by my investing experience. I have yet to come across a company that has been a big breakout that's progressed from say series B, C, D, E, and gone on to these massive growth rounds predominantly on the back of A B testing. I've never seen it. I see it happen when the startup takes three or four major shots on goal with large new strategic or product initiatives every few years. And one out of

• 35:25Speaker 02

  those three or four ends up landing in a big way such that the company grows by another two or 10x because they took a big risk. And that's the name of the game.

• 35:34Harry Stebbings?

  No, listen, I'm totally with you. I think a lot of founders that I work with see it as like this magic pill and suddenly they will solve all problems, which is always quite annoying. I do want to move my favorite though, which is a quick fire round. So I say a short statement, Andy, and then you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Sounds good.

• 35:50Harry Stebbings?

  So what tactics have not changed over the last five years in growth?

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Standard A B testing of poor funnels like signup flows. That stuff continues to play.

• 35:58Harry Stebbings?

  Question for you. What tactics have died to death?

• 36:01Speaker 02

  Oh, I love this. The tactics have died to death? Everyone trying to have this perfectly viral invitation flow that so rarely actually works. And it usually only works with network effects businesses that have a novel fascinating product. Everything else, it just doesn't work. So thankfully that's dying.

• 36:19Harry Stebbings?

  What would you say is the biggest mistake founders make when hiring their first growth team members, employees in the growth team?

• 36:26Speaker 02

  They do it before they've fully committed to an innovation approach to the business and staffing up the product organization such that it can innovate on a regular basis.

• 36:37Harry Stebbings?

  What one piece of advice would you give to a growth leader starting a new role today on the flip side of the table?

• 36:43Speaker 02

  Don't try and force fit the prior tactics that you used into this new business and expect that the way this new business grows will be fundamentally different in at least one or two ways relative to your prior businesses.

• 36:56Harry Stebbings?

  Casey Winters always said that his biggest mistakes were he just uses past learnings and brought them to new businesses and it never worked. Next one, what would you most like to change about the world of growth?

• 37:04Speaker 02

  That there's less fanaticism around it, there's less hype around it and that people recognize that it's useful. But at the end of the day, all of our companies are service businesses and we have to build incredible products that serve our customers in ways which they've never been served before. And that's not what a growth team does.

• 37:23Harry Stebbings?

  Final one, what one company growth strategy has most impressed you over the last two to three years?

• 37:30Speaker 02

  That's a wonderful question. There's not a lot that impressed me.

• 37:33Harry Stebbings?

  So Clubhouse impressed me immensely. I know it was fleeting and short, but the way they did the push notifications, the closed community, I thought it was smart.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was very smart. And I would say there's one specific aspect of it that I think is wonderful if I were to cherry pick there, which is the new user welcomes that other members of the community participate in. And so they'll open a room and it's, hey, let's welcome Andy to Clubhouse. And the users are doing that. That is a beautiful, scalable, delightful way of doing it. That is a phenomenal tactic.

• 38:05Harry Stebbings?

  On the flip side, are there any way you would just say, oh my God, what were you doing?

• 38:10Speaker 02

  What were you doing? One tactic that I thought was hilarious. It was smart. I don't know if it actually worked, but this was with, oh gosh, what's the startup that has like hygiene products for men, like shave razors for men and uh like groom, but they just created a custom landing page, like their website dot com slash Cora. And if you went to it, you know, core employees will get a discount on buying like men's grooming products. I want to say it was Manscapes, but that might have been it. I think it was Manscaped and I thought it was hilarious. And of course with Dollar Shave Club, the YouTube video that he first created was hilarious. One of the most successful marketing campaigns ever run by a startup.

• 38:52Harry Stebbings?

  It was so smart. I'm totally with you. Listen, Andy, I've absolutely loved doing this. This has been so much fun. So thank you so much for joining me today and I really appreciate it.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Thank you, Harry. I appreciate it.

• 39:04Harry Stebbings?

  What a hero and Andy is just such a wonderful person. If you'd like to see more from us behind the scenes, obviously you can on the 20minutevc.com. I always love to see you there, but before we leave you today. If you're a founder or running a startup, I want to tell you about Brex. Brex combines high limit credit cards, expensive software and payments into one platform to help you scale smarter and faster. Go to brex.com/growthpodcast to get a corporate card with 10 to 20 times higher limits, great rewards and expense tracking, plus a business account with no transaction fees and there's no personal guarantee or credit check. Apply 100% online at brex.com/growthpodcast today and you'll get up to 50,000 rewards points. And if you're a startup founder, you know that early decisions can be the difference between success and failure.

• 39:49Harry Stebbings?

  Well, one decision that thousands of successful founders have made is choosing Stripe as their payments platform. Over the past decade, Stripe has supported the growth of the most ambitious businesses. Think Shopify, think Lyft and Kickstarter. In fact, it was Kickstarter who were able to scale to accept payments in 195 countries, all supported by Stripe's payments platform. And you can start using Stripe in minutes, allowing you to accept over 135 different currencies and payment methods. So you can start scaling your business globally from the day you integrate with Stripe. If you want to learn how Stripe can support your business, visit stripe.com today. That's stripe.com to get started. And while we're talking about the best decisions you can make for your stack, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Pendo Free, which aside from having a wonderfully cheeky meta value

• 40:33Harry Stebbings?

  prop, it's software that makes your software better. It's a must have though for growth minded founders and PMs such as you lovely listeners. With powerful no code product analytics and in app guides, Pendo Free is a complete platform that will help you deliver better digital experiences for happier and more productive users. Plus it's free forever for up to 1,000 monthly active users and takes literally minutes to install. Get started today at bit.ly/pendofree. Again, that's bit.ly/pendofree. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I can't wait to bring you a phenomenal episode with Daven at OpenSea this coming Friday.