20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt

Welcome back, this is 20 growth with me Harry Stebbings as a reminder 20 growth pays you inside the minds of the world's best growth leaders to reveal their tips, tactics and strategies when it comes to starting scaling and maintaining growth teams. Today I'm so thrilled to be joined by an OG of growth, Darius Contractor, one of the pre-aminent growth leaders of the last decade, having been VP of growth at AirTable where he led the growth engineering and product teams. Before AirTable, Darius was head of product growth at Facebook Messenger and finally before Facebook, Darius spent an incredible four years as head of growth engineering at Dropbox. Here, Darius helped drive Dropbox to a hundred million dollars in net new revenue through Dropbox Business. And if that wasn't enough, Darius is also an incredible angel investor and fund investor with a portfolio including Com, AirTable, Clump House, Census and then LP checks in Maven, Ventures and Long Journey Ventures. I also want to say huge thank you to Stanchard Novsky, Briank Himal, James Carrier, Ploughed CTO Jean-Dennis for some amazing questions today and then of course a wonderful Casey Winters for a fantastic introduction. But before we dive into the show's day, if you've been listening to 20VC, you've probably heard of Brex, the first corporate card for startups with no personal guarantee or credit check, up to 20 times higher credit limits than traditional cards, plus rewards like 3X on eligible Apple products and 7X points on tools like Zoom and Slack. Brianks has helped thousands of companies scale faster to reach their full potential. This month they're extending their special offer to our listeners, apply for the Brex card with the code 20VC all spelled out to receive a $500 credit after spending $1000. Even better, you can also apply it for Brex Cash, a bank account alternative with unlimited free YNACH transfers with no minimum balance required to create an account. 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So learn more about the number one most active law firm, representing VC backed companies going public, had over to cooley.com and also check them out at cooleygo.com. But it's now time for the show and I could not be more excited to welcome the one and only Darius contractor. You have now arrived at your destination. Darius, this is such a joy to do. As I said to you before, I was chatting to Casey, wondering who I should have on and Casey was like, you've got to have Darius, obviously I jumped to the chance. So thank you so much for joining me today. Cases great, thanks a lot for the opportunity to chat, Harry. But I want to start with a little bit on you because we look at the pro following what Dropbox, Facebook, air table in some of the most powerful growth orgs. How did you make your way into the world of growth originally and what did that entry point look like? Well, I've always loved to use technology to build delight for users even in college. I got a CS degree, but I was always more focused on the product side. Like how can we use this technology to build something interesting and even kind of fun and delightful? And I ended up as a programmer at tickle.com, which is one of the early growth viral houses back in the day. We build viral tests about like yourself and you send them to your friends and you find out like what's your IQ, what kind of dog you are and like more fun things. But we learned a lot about virality and even at tickle, we built social network and we built a matchmaking sign, all these things with these intrinsic viral knowledge. And that really got me hooked on it. Growth, I find, is an interesting combination of like human psychology, technology, and then meeting like business goals. And so that really I found appealed to my brain and I ended up kind of having the thread of that through my career. I do want to discuss though, as we mentioned some of the incredible logos that you've worked out there from Facebook, Dropbox, AirTable. If we think about a learning from each that's really stuck with you, what would you say a learning from each would be that's really impacted the way that you think? One of the quotes that I like from rest of development is there's always money in the banana stand and it's kind of a goofy quote, but the idea is there's very very often, almost always, more you can kind of squeeze from that stone of whatever experience you have. Like there's a really good chance that there's part of the experiments that are kind of leaky or not convincing enough and you can tune those and really to dramatic effect sometimes. I've just seen conversion rates double or triple or even more sometimes and you can get a tremendous amount out of it. So that's one of the kind of key takeaways for me is that if you go to one deeper level of nuance, like look at the data more carefully, look at other sites, look at all the different things you could do with your flow, there's very often an opportunity to massively grow your business that you just haven't seen yet. I'm gonna ask the most unfair question too early on. Is growth an art or a science? You mentioned human psychology, business goals, you mentioned their kind of more analytical approach, art or science? I think it's like 60% science, 40% art. At the end of the day, the only experiments you run are the ones that you come up with. There's not like a list of experiments and so you do have to use kind of your deeper unconscious which ends up being in the art category to come up with like which one seems interesting, but then having made a list of those, which we could talk about in a little bit, you can use science to figure out what the biggest opportunities are and then science to understand like whether it worked or not. And so there's a lot of science to it, but if there wasn't the ardent, I wouldn't love it so much. I thought actually it was Scott Balsky who said it well, which was he said, intuition takes you to the mountain, data gets you up it. I do want to ask that we kind of jump to step that. We mentioned before the show about kind of how many people kind of are in growth and growth is so kind of commonly used now. I find this can kind of lost its meaning in some ways. When you hear the words growth and how do you define them? I really think of growth work as optimization with the goal of improving a metric. And really from a customer lens, it's bringing the value of the product to more people. It's kind of like expanding the people using and/or paying for the product. It's usually incremental, but it can be transformative. It often involves AB testing as long as you have enough traffic in some cases it doesn't. Sometimes I find growth is applied to pretty much anything that makes the metrics go up independent of testing or kind of optimization work. So I've had companies say that like, oh, we have an iPhone app and the Android app is just to like get more people. So that's a growth project. It could be kind of a lower G growth product. Like, yes, it grows the company, but I don't think of it as kind of an uppercase G growth product. Like, you don't need a growth expert to go build an Android app. That's effectively like new product work that relatively clear and doesn't use the growth techniques that we're talking about. Growth often overlaps with product and marketing. Growth can encapsulate paid marketing, SEO, virality, and other like product led growth changes to the product, which ends up overlapping those two categories. So you'll often see growth product or growth marketing as like titles or department labels. And then happy to go in the head of growth job, but I'll pause there. Can I ask say you mentioned just at the beginning there about kind of driving business value and aligning that to a metric. How do you think about determining what is the right metric/naul star that we should be focusing on? If you think about Facebook, is it time spent? Is it friends made? How do you know what's the right one? It's a super interesting one and it's like kind of non-obvious. So I like to use analogies to communicate these new on concepts. The one I think about for picking a metric, it's almost like you're trying to pick up a really large awkward object with a crane. Like how would you do that? You can't just like attach the crane to like anywhere on the object. You can imagine if you attach it to the wrong spot on the object and try to pick it up, you're just going to flip the object over and it's going to like spin out of control. So there's a weird way in which you need to find the center of gravity of the business. Like, where is the kind of heart and soul of the business? It says that if you were to pick it up by that point, the whole business comes with it. There's not too many unintended consequences. And to extend the analogy, sometimes you need like two or three metrics in order to know that you're picking up the business really consistently. So to make that real, oftentimes people will pick one metric just like signups and they'll pull really hard on it like more, more, more, more signups. But then we've all seen stories of like these unintended consequences where they're like they make the signup too easy and they get all these like low quality people or they even like fake the value prop like infinite money for free, free iPod sign up now. And you get all these signups, you've like boosted the metric, but you've created like you mess up your funnel, the downstream is really bad, et cetera, et cetera. So to some degree, the trick is to find a metric or set of metrics that really reflect the core business value that the consumers are getting as well as the company is like trying to like build into this business model. So to be a little more specific about it, instead of signups or revenue, you might pick something a little more kind of usage related that's very tied to that. So for instance, activated signups, people who made it to some milestone in the product or retained revenue, like people who've like joined and then stuck with a product or even retained users and like not focused as much on the money side of it. Having a little more nuance of the metric means that it's less likely to be one of those unintended consequences like genie wish metrics where you like you wish for infinite money and your friends turn into money. How often should you change your North Star metric as a growth team? It can't be the same always throughout the life of the company. How often does it change and what are the signs that it needs to change? It's a great question and one of my favorite stories of metric changing is from Pinterest and from Casey. They actually changed their metric to go down the funnel. Like first it was just people arriving at the site like kind of weekly active users and then weekly active pinners and then weekly active like board creators or something. So it was like a deeper metric over time. And really what it is, it's a little bit like shining the flashlight or grabbing that part of the business and pulling it up with the crane. And over time you want to pull up the whole business so to speak. As far as the timeline, I like to reassess every maybe six months. I'm kind of a big fan of six months macro planning cycles because one year is very hard to like plan ahead and then one quarter is just too short to really get a tremendous amount done. So if you're looking at it six months or maybe yearly, you can get a good sense of like hey is this the right metric focus area for the company? You mentioned the timing that being six months and so with the review, your process in terms of the actual timing of your first growth hires. When do you advise founders that it is the right time to either hire a head of growth or hire your first growth hires and adjacent questions, sorry, how do you advise them on whether to hire a head of growth or more junior growth people? Yeah, for sure. I'll hit both of those. So when a company's first starting out, you want to do something where you look for the kind of white hot center of the market. This is my friend James Courier's approach. Any given market has like a certain group of people who really, really desperately need your product, going to give you great feedback and really kind of be with you during those early stages where you're figuring out like what this product even is and what the important parts of it. So you want to start there and you really as a founder or as an early team, you want to talk to those customers and really get on board with them with the hope that this will lead to like a broader market over time. So what happens is that the first kind of growth effort is really just those first customers that you get relatively manually. You like reach out through your network or maybe some very simple marketing ploys, but you reach get to a few people, make a product that works for them and expand that with time. As you do that, you'll eventually find that you're kind of doing the same things repeatedly. You're like, oh, this is another customer in the space and I'm just doing another onboarding and it's working and you're like, okay, great. Now I've got this kind of engine that works a bit. Maybe now I can get some help with it. There's going to be parts of the engine that are like more obvious. You can maybe delegate to someone else on your team or a new hire even and they can do that part of it for you. As you do that more and more, you end up moving towards a growth team. So I say first, it's effectively founder-led growth, I call it. And I'd say it's founder-led and executed and then founder-led and probably like team-executed where you're kind of figuring out the mechanics of it and making it into a more standardized affair. And as you do that, probably reaching a larger group with like a more and more standardized message. And then eventually you've kind of got your message figured out, you've got your process figured out. But the numbers just aren't big enough to map to the company's long-term vision, but it's kind of a machine. It kind of works. Then I think it's a great time to think about bringing in like a growth leader because that growth leader is going to come in with kind of industry standard techniques and have to learn your business in kind of micro industry. And they're going to be able to really help once there's kind of a standardized set up there. So you say growth leader, not more junior growth wraps is the first hire in growth. I think the first hire, first it goes to founder, then it goes to like a small growth team. One PM, two engineers, like half a designer or something like that. Like that group can actually do a fair amount. Ideally, those are people who've been on your team a little while who are more business and metrics focused and work closely with the founder. And then I think you can start going to someone who's maybe like a growth PM and then you can eventually build up towards like a senior like VP growth. But VP growth is usually not going to want to join like kind of an empty team or definitely not like a pre product market fit product if they know what they're doing. Okay. Question for you. In that second phase where we've got a couple of PMs, couple of designers and it's kind of the next phase post founder like growth. Number one, do they sit in a separate team as a growth team or are they integrated? And two, how do you determine which of the people within your current bench have what it takes to do growth when they've traditionally been in product or in design or in marketing? How do you select them from the existing bench? Okay. Getting all these compound questions. The second part first of identifying growth people. This has always been a fun one for me, like especially interviewing engineers, there'll be either be like hard growth, hard anti growth or be what I call like invincible. So really to get excited about growth, you have to have a business mindset. You have to think yourself, okay, how's this moving the metric for the business and like how's this going to help the business succeed and the business is success and metric success is like my success. There are some people who like this is all they care about and they have a hard time building beautiful things that don't have a very clear business plan attached. They kind of feel maybe insecure that like what am I even doing? Like does this matter? You also have the reverse of people who want to build beautiful things and they feel a little bit uncomfortable when it's too business driven. So you really want to kind of sus that out in the interview or as you're working with them is even easier and the people who are like more business driven or can be invincible into it. You say, hey, this is going to like help us raise our series B and they're like, that sounds amazing. Like how can I be part of an effort like that? Those people are going to be excited to look at the numbers like run SQL queries, figure out how something's converting and maybe most importantly, they're going to be open to making seemingly small changes that have big business effects and feel really good about that. Like sometimes you can literally reroute a flow and like double your metrics and you haven't created anything in an abstract sense. I'm literally here to ask the dumb questions, I do such a good job but I'm a good actor. When you say business driven, what does that actually mean? Is there an example of this and how do you test for business driven people? Business driven people are like worried about to somebody really existential factors of the business. Like when it comes down to it, a business needs to make more money than it spends and it only does that if people show up and spend money or get ad revenue or what have you. Certainly when you talk to CEOs, especially ones of different shapes of the company, they might say yeah, yeah, yeah, but what about that core metric we need? That core metric is often the thing they need to raise the next round of funding. So for an early stage company, it might just be some like successful pilots if you're a B2B SaaS company. Like you might not even need that much revenue, but you do need a few people say yes, this is a great product and like we do want to pay for it someday. That's enough to raise the next round. For a later stage company, it might just be either raw revenue or even some sub-metrics of revenue like the gross margin or other aspects of the business that they need for the public markets. However that metric is, it really makes the business successful, like helps a grow to the next level. That's the metric that I think of as that business goal. And then sorry, I interrupted you on the second one. How do you know whether it should sit within existing teams or stand-alone growth team? I think there's been this kind of excitement about a classic model, but then there's a more standardized model I'll get into. The model that people think about is like Facebook and Uber, where you have this supposedly single brilliant person who leads the company to 10X or 100X. That person is brilliant most of the time, but it isn't an usual model in today's world. Partly because if you put growth outside a product, you kind of set up a potential conflict between the two. Really at the end of the day, growth is often effectively a product team. They have product people, engineers, data scientists. They work more with like the code that builds the stuff that users see than they do with other topics like marketing. And so what I've seen more recently is having something like a VP growth within the product org like under the CPO, and ideally with a close connection to both the CEO and the heads of other departments like very often marketing, but even sometimes like financial or strategy as the growth team contemplates either pricing changes or more strategic shifts for the business. So that's I think a good place for it to sit. That's where I sat at an air table, and I think it speaks to the basic nature of it which is usually a more product focused team. So now we know when we know the structure. We actually need to hire these people and you're my hypothetical angel who's going to advise me on hiring. When we look at the actual process of hiring our first growth reps or head of growth, what does that actually look like? I've never done it before. What are the interview stages? What do we want to get out of each? How would you run it, Darius? Yeah, for sure. Once you get to that scale of growth, we're ready for someone as we talked about. The next thing to figure out is kind of like what type of growth person you need, effectively like what flavor because there's a bunch of different ones. And so first thinking about like what business you're in and then think about what channels you use. And since are you a marketplace that's growing by word of mouth or a direct consumer business D to C growing mostly on the back of paid marketing, whichever one you are, ideally you find a growth leader who knows your kind of sub-discipline or your industry. So for instance, I don't have as much experience with marketplaces, but I do have a lot of experience with like virality and with B2B SaaS. So that's kind of my industry focus. And then you want to think about channels like what channels this person have expertise in optimizing and deep understanding of because they're going to have to go super deep in the data and know almost immediately like what's working and not working. And so that could be paid marketing, that could be virality, other POG techniques, content and SEO. Those are each a little bit different channels. And so once you locate those two, you want to find companies that kind of match and then people in those companies that match and then reach out to your network to find a potential match within there. And that's going to lower the learning curve for whoever you do higher because they already are going to come and know some of this stuff. Okay. So we've chosen a company that's aligned. It may be a couple of stages that had of us and we can get someone who can see the potential that we have. And we reach out to them and we get the intro and we've got three of these candidates. What does the interview process look like? So I'm going to walk you through my like five point system for identifying like top people. Oh, and it speaks to the art and it speaks to the art and science that we talked about earlier. It's really a bit of a combination. So first I'd have specific interviews to gauge their understanding of your business. As I said, for me, I'm like PLG B2B SaaS guy. Something like air table is a good fit for me and other companies, you know, might be different. Just figure out like, okay, does this person understand how people show up on board, the value they're getting, all that kind of stuff? You want to have some resonance there that this person gets my business and even maybe understand some of the non-obvious nuance even before I tell them. They don't need to be as expert as you, but having that quick ability to figure out your business is key. I wouldn't hire like a consumer expert for like a B2B SaaS business because it's just such a different world. Then they need to be expert in one or more key methods of growth. As I was talking about, if your business is viral, ideally this person has optimized viral flows, maybe has worked at some point in the career in like consumer because like a lot of good viral flows there. Then they need to be great at turning data into insight because data is really like the lifeblood of a growth organization. I like to think of data for a growth team as like water for a sports team. A non-obvious but incredibly important capability such that the team can do its job. I just dive in. Do I as the founder need to have the data infrastructure set up before my growth hires come in? Or can they implement it because it's a hodgepodge and I haven't got the data infrastructure set up seamlessly? It's a great question and even like having a CEO like yourself asked that question in a real way is like already a win. So let me just say that. You're already ahead of most CEOs. I'd say if you don't feel like you haven't already set up in a great way, then what you need to do is make the space and the people to set it up. So a great growth person can at least know what good looks like even if they aren't necessarily fully capable of all the mumble jumbo data under the hood. I mean they're not necessarily data engineers. What I would do in that case is pair a great growth person with a great head of data and make sure they have staffing to build that out. Just a deep dive on that for a second. One of my favorite like missing pieces like the gatorade in the water if you will. is really good dimension tables, which are like pre-aggregates of your audit tables and like you're just all you're tracking. And they're aggregated tables that then you can easily query. So for instance, if you Harry said, hey, I wanna know all the forever revenue of each of my customers. Usually that would be a really complex query 'cause you have to query both the people who paid you and the people who refunded and all the other stuff and aggregated up and it's like a huge, just knowing like how much money people paid you total is actually a pretty tough query. Ideally you wanna give a data team a set of data engineers to pre-aggregate that and make that like kind of like a one-line answer on top of that table. That's kind of a deep dive but getting that data layer right is one of the things that often trips the team up. One more analogy for you there is it's a little bit like if you ran a subway restaurant and when someone showed up, you hadn't actually pre-cut the meat or pre-cut the veggies. If they wanted a ham sandwich, you kinda go out back and like have this big ham hawk that you slice a piece of. And then like a cucumber that you're cutting up right there, it's gonna be take a long time to make it a sandwich. It's from like raw ingredients you've got from the store. But if you give a data engineer enough time to show up at 6am, cut everything up, put in little refrigerated boxes. Then when you want your sandwich, I hear like data, he can just assemble it and give it to you in five minutes. And so that's part of the trick of like data engineering that I think a lot of companies just don't know yet. - I love these analogies. I think you're missing a trick when you're a Twitter game with these analogies in your pocket. But okay, so that was number three on the data of stretch being set up. Number four. If you're giving me on the target. Number four is customer development. And so that's really talking to users. It's a key source of insight as to like potential optimization in this understanding. And also it's a window into the true user value that you're bringing. Like oftentimes your customer version of your user value will differ slightly from your own personal perspective on it. It'll often be more specific and have its own kind of flavor. - What questions do you ask for customer discovery? I find a lot of questions can be quite kind of leading the witness. I find a lot of people listen too much. Just like listen to problems, not solutions, I always think. What questions do you ask? What does great customer discovery look like for you? - Yeah, it's true. You don't want to lead the witness too much. Like if you say, are you excited about this particular value prop? Oftentimes people are trying to look good and trying to say the right thing. Partly because you're probably paying them. You're probably giving them a $50 or $100 gift certificate to like participate. So they want to kind of try to make you happy. It's also just a social thing. So what you have to do is kind of show them that you're happy already. And this is great. Thank you for being here. Additionally, give them open and new questions. One of my favorite questions is if you saw this page, what would you think? That doesn't preface them with anything. It gets them ready to like just give you their raw unfiltered perspective. And then what would you think about this? How would you interact with this? What needs would you have to be satisfied by this? Could you see yourself using this relatively high level questions and slowly getting deeper into their perspective and digging into things when they bring them up? So they say, yeah, I think this would be good. But like maybe for my friend, not me. It's like, okay, well, why would your friend use it? What value would they get? And then why wouldn't you use it digging in there? And then maybe more towards the end of the conversation, I find getting into very specific things, double check them even though they're leading. And so it's saying, okay, it sounds like you wouldn't use this for this. But could you see yourself using it for this other thing? Which is maybe the original intent that they missed. They might say, oh, yeah, I could see myself using it for that. But I didn't think it was possible because X. And you're like, oh, we haven't made clear that this is either affordable or like at their level. I get sequentially more specific with the questions so that I get the overall picture. But then I also answer my very specific questions about this experience. - Does this not create conflict when it comes to product marketing and messaging? Growth teams then get a lot of this data from the customer discovery. And then they have their own idea of how it should be messaged and marketed and the words that should be used. And how does that integrate with the marketing team who also have their own way of doing it? Do you see what I mean? - Well, maybe I'll just continue on to number five. Strategic communication is a key trait. So one of the things they need to do is when you're interviewing people now I'm talking about they need to show that they can communicate the goals of the growth team and the operational procedures of the growth team. Like what is this growth team doing and why? Very much because they have overlap with marketing and like how it's messaged how you get to customers that first experience with customers that's marketing often feels ownership over as well as the product flow. Like how you onboard, how you monetize all that stuff which oftentimes the product team feels ownership of. And so really they need to be a great communicator so that they can kind of bridge these gaps. In some ways there's kind of a vent diagram of marketing and product growth is like another circle in the center. Not just the overlap but like a circle that's like overlapping all three of the vent diagram like spaces. And so one question is can they fit their goals into the goals of local partner team? Can they build bridges? And I think of it as like judiciously use their trust in organization to create measurable impact. Saying that hey marketing, you did this research, we did this research, let's combine the research and like go achieve a goal together that's hopefully achieving both of our team metrics which is frankly someone on the CEO to set up metrics in such a way that teams want to collaborate. And then reinvest that kind of local success into bigger and bigger experiments. So to directly answer your question, the whole company should be sharing this user research whether it's led by growth or marketing or some kind of local future team. They should probably format the results in a consumable way and then distribute it broadly to kind of like a product or company and use a research list that everyone can learn from. - So those are the five things that make them great. In terms of the actual process, do I discover these in the first meeting? Do we do four different meetings, one with marketing, one with product, one with sales? How do I, the process itself? What does it look like and who do I bring in? - Yeah, it's a great question and it can be a little bit tough in growth, I feel like. It's maybe not as like standardized as some other fields, like maybe a engineering leadership and such. So first of course you want to get your growth engine going, product market fit, do an initial kind of early growth team yourself as I described. And then once you're like this is like becoming a thing and it's kind of a machine that I want someone else to run and scale and I have some people to put on it because there's not really going to be a growth leader who's going to come in with like zero people usually. Then you'd figure out what kind of growth person you need as I described, probably go out to your network and then go out to the market at large with recruiter, find a list of candidates and then talk to them probably with an initial session hitting on a few of these points. Like how do you get insights that lead to growth? How do you think about strategy and choosing metrics? How do you think about working with other teams? If you get kind of their approach to like metric strategy, collaboration and getting insights that drive growth changes, that'll give you a good feel about whether you're on the right track. And you know, make sure you establish rapport with this person. You're on the right kind of time scale and have the right expectations generally. Then I would deep dive and potentially give them kind of a take on assignment pretty much just like how would you grow my company? Is that a bad one for ahead of growth? And they kind of lay it out. Do I give them the data if so what data? So we want to give them an assignment practical. What do I give them, Darius? Yes, you would want to give them data. You also want to give them your strategy. Like where is the business going? Where has it come so far? A little bit of the product history. And I think for this first engagement, just kind of testing it out, give them high level data. The kind of things you give your investors or advisors. So things you put in a board deck, maybe like plus all the appendix slides. So these are things like where the revenue's gone, how the user growth has been, those high level things. Ideally, if you have them, some of the conversion rates of like the onboarding flow, monetization, retention rates, cohort graphs, like if you have some of that kind of industry standard, growth model stuff, that's really great to give them to. But at some level, kind of give them all the somewhat clearly put together reports you have and then see what they do with them. Darius, in this process, what should we, if we hear, run away from? What are the things where you were like, oh my god, no, I'm out. What are the red flags? Yeah, fair. So red flags would be, if you're not able to really kind of collaborate with this growth leader, if you're not able to kind of get on the same page, one failure mode here is sometimes the people just want to apply their previous playbook. So like if they came from Facebook, they're like, oh yeah, we're just going to run a million experiments and throw stuff on the wall and see what sticks. And you might be like, wait, that doesn't sound like what my business needs. Like maybe we don't have the traffic to run that many experiments. We mean it more nuanced approach. So first off, I just make sure that like, their approach to growth maybe isn't fully what you would do 'cause you're bringing on a new leader with new opinions, but it feels like it meshes with like your business and how you're approaching it. So I think if they don't mesh with you and your approach, that's a red flag. I think they need to be able to confidently tell you about how they go deep and get insights. And they can go deep with users and understand their perspective, go deep with the data, go deep with like the existing company to like learn from the company. And they could also have some good intuition. Some people have a really refined idea of like what this product needs, even just looking at it. Ideally they have all those things, but some idea of how they kind of go deep on some aspect of kind of secret knowledge if you will and get insights is really key. And if you don't find that, I'd say that's a bit of a red flag. Also of course references are always great. You definitely want someone who ideally has done the general type of thing you're looking for before to also be careful of. There's some quote-unquote growth people who just, as I call it, thrown a log on a row of roaring fire. Like if you were at Facebook in the last five years, you might not have learned how to do zero to one growth. You might have learned how to do 100 to a million growth, much higher level. And that might not be what your company's looking for. So also be cautious of people who have learned different lessons at different stages of companies, whether they'll map. - And there are any companies where specifically you find amazing growth people coming out of. They're starting to grow on the founder of What Not, the other day. And he was saying how the people from Pinterest and Takeaver are the best growth leaders. - I think Pinterest has one of the best like systems of growth. A list of all the current growth experiments, you automatically run reports on it, et cetera. I think the only other company that really has that system is Facebook. And Pinterest maybe just being like a newer company, maybe has like a refresh on that that's made a little like simpler. Facebook's system is incredibly detailed and incredibly powerful. But it's also built for like a credibly high volume, very, very metric space environment. In general, I think people at Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, fewer of the companies maybe like really do no growth. They know how to run these successive experiments. So all those companies I think have like really great growth culture where people have metrics come with experiments, execute and kind of everyone on the team knows how to do it. I think those are all great places to dig for people. - So Darius, we've got this incredible individual. They've meshed with us. They align with how we want to approach growth. We need to onboard them. I think this is where everyone fucks it up. I mean, they fuck up the prior process too. But what is the optimal onboarding process that, like, and what can I, as the founder need to do to make these growth highs as successful as possible in the first 30 to 60 90 days? Yeah, when I think about that kind of early, like that first quarter, the ones that come to mind as most important are context and relationship building. So for context, they really need to know the history of the product, all the things you've learned, especially things you've tried in the past, because that shows like maybe obvious directions to go that perhaps you've tried out already, especially in areas now owned by growth. Ideally, growth owns the product areas and is not just kind of a layer on top of core products. So usually growth would have ownership over the core onboarding flow and the monetization flow and maybe the logout pages or those might be owned by marketing, really making clear what growth owns and should be not only evolving, but also responsible for the product surface area in general for is really key. More context is all the current data and dashboards internally at third-party systems. Then the other part is relationships, I think, are really key for a growth team, really just such a collaborative entity. Great connections to the heads of marketing, sales, product, data, also the growth competent advisors and VC firms that the company might have. Should I proactively encourage this cross-functional communication as the leader, or should I expect the head of growth to really make those connections themselves? It's a really great question. I think it is incumbent on the leader of the organization in order to set up growth and frankly all the departments for success to not only have like clear expectation of the org and like the leader of the org, but also clear kind of cross expectations of what support and collaboration is expected from the CEO by those orgs, either to accomplish the goals of the org or the goals of the company. For instance, I think one way to set a growth team up such success is to say, hey, the whole company for this coming year wants to move this metric by 40%. Users could be activated, could be revenue, what have you. As part of that 40% goal, we might even like assign a percent of that to marketing or percent to a growth team and a percent to a core product team and then also say that, look, each one of you need to collaborate with the other, maybe 20% your time, in order to like help unblock each other to achieve these metrics. Because obviously a marketing team needs someone in product and to collaborate with such that they can get the sign of flow right and maybe the in product connections to the marketing landing pages. And then the growth team needs connection to the core product so that the logged in home page, etc, reflects like the need of the growth team, like for instance, if you need some kind of call out linking to the new product teacher in order for it to grow. So the CEO at the end of the day or whoever is running the overall product engineering marketing orgs needs to set up relationships and expectations between the orgs that format collaboration. How long do you give a new growth hire could be out of growth or growth hire when things are not going well, it could be they're not communicating well with the team, it could be they haven't formed the context, it could be that they haven't rooted themselves in the company, whatever it is, how long do you give them to establish themselves in the org? It's probably more time than you might expect, I'd have different thresholds at six months in one year, I wouldn't have very strong thresholds after like one or two months. So really after one or two months are expecting them to get some good context and understand what the org needs and to start setting up like a basic nor star metric that aligns with the strategy and build the relationships and the team plan to get there. So really what you should have I think it's two things after the first say two months is clarity as to what the state of things are and confidence that you're on a road towards improving them. Any head of growth should be able to give you kind of clarity and connect the current metrics on the ground to the business situation like the kind of overall strategy, strategic direction and history. Tell that story at least in a basic way after two months, although depending on the data support, it might be either a very rough story or it might be something where you get more nuanced over time. What few founders are most challenging elements of onboarding for yourself as a growth leader and growth professional in some of the incredible orgs you've been? What's been the shit challenging moments? It's surprisingly hard sometimes to pick that core metric when you back out a little bit. It seems obvious like you want more users to use your product and you'd like them to monetize at some level. But when you zoom in more each metric can kind of be this like a genie wish problem. Yes, we want that metric, but not at the expense of this other metric based on that. Let's not say that we really want that metric. So one classic one is yes, we do want to either monetize or move people towards these deeper experiences. But we also don't want to push them so hard that we lose, like low intent users. And so that can be like a real tradeoff of like, hey, are you willing to push people to give up this lighter way of operating for the deeper way of operating? That's when I've hit it a few companies. Now, in terms of the communication, honestly, this is where I see most go wrong, where they piss off other team members, be it the engineering team, where they just go and fuck up code and then leave or marketing teams. Where have you messed up communications with other cross functional leads? The place that I've historically struggled and I think I've improved this a lot last few years, really getting the strategic approach that's in my head communicated clearly to the org. In my career, I worked with a bunch of people where we just all knew the shared strategic context and without really discussing it in doubts very much. And it was a smaller org and it was a different time, but I didn't actually build the muscle of saying all the list of things in my head that led me to this particular execution strategy and getting people on board sequentially with it, which I call kind of the zipper technique. You have to start at the most basic and like sequentially get it out. And if you get stuck anywhere, you have to go back. Once you do that, everyone understands, okay, this is why we're doing this specific thing and the strategic context of the business and these other trade-offs as far as the executional context and how we build the business. And with all that together, it makes total sense that we start with this lightweight experiment that maybe give us like great learning before going into deeper stuff. So sometimes I wouldn't do that thorough communication, even with the founders, let alone the other heads of department, because it can kind of like take some time. But really, it's a fantastic investment for the long-term success of the growth team and something I've developed more and more over the years. I love your analogies, Darius. These are fantastic. Final one before we discuss a little bit more personal, but in terms of post-mortems, do you do post-mortems? How do you structure them? How do you think about effective post-mortems for growth teams? Maybe I call them like learning, more than post-mortems. One of my refrains is that in life, you can only do one of two things. You can succeed or you can learn. You never quote-unquote fail. One thing that I started up at Dropbox, those kind of is every two or three weeks we get together, and there were multiple growth teams at Dropbox, because it was so big, we'd share all of our learnings by weekly learnings lunch on Fridays. What your ask was is to show up with what you plan to do, ideally some screenshots and some product experience to make it more concrete. And then oftentimes we'd ask people, what do you think, one, A, B or C, and people like, mmm, B, and then we do the reveal and say, actually, C1. Oftentimes, you don't know exactly why. Sometimes we'll run user research and try to figure out, like, from user's mouse, Y1, but even then, that might not be perfect. It was always a really great way for people to understand what other teams are doing, see the kind of exploratory, experimental, what kind of mindset, especially for teams outside growth. There's a great way to learn growth. And then also learn from each other, say, like, oh, someone used that message on this page. It worked really well. I wonder if I could use that same messaging on my experiences, because effectively, it's all the same product, it's all Dropbox. So that was a really great way to, I guess, in a sense, post-mortem, to dig down into experiments, they either failed or succeeded, and learn from that and build kind of a culture that grew stronger as we went over in time. On the personal elements, there's two questions to me here, which is like, can you take me to a moment where you made a growth decision without data? Darius, this was institution-lad. How did it go? Yeah, the one that kind of comes up for me when you ask that, at Dropbox, we were optimizing the onboarding and the initial install of the Dropbox client. We were also optimizing the organization, kind of the whole funnel. One thing we realized that once someone would go over quota, they used up their whole two gigabytes of free-store to Dropbox. That would be a time where there are much more likely to convert to paid, because we tell them, look, you're out of storage, you need to pay in order to keep growing your files. And people would say, okay, it makes sense. Here's my $10 a month. So I thought to myself a little bit, what if they immediately got to that point? This is also based on the user research I've done, even just around the company, where people said, I said, when did you fall in law with Dropbox? And they said, when I moved all my files in, then I paid for it, and I was realized that they're safe now. Like, I could throw my computer out the window, and all my files were in the cloud. If that's kind of an amazing aha moment, which is hard to access for most people. Most people are not going to drag their whole lives into the Dropbox folder. So my kind of realization with that, from a growth perspective, but leading to a long-term strategy change at Dropbox, was that, what if, when you install the Dropbox client, we instantly offered to sync your documents folder and your desktop, which are kind of the main places that people put files outside of the Dropbox folder. And you didn't have to move them, because most people are scared of moving files that they'll break their application by moving the files around under the covers. People were very against it for a while, because the whole point of Dropbox was that it's a folder. It wasn't like a generalized sync, which is some of the competitors back in the day. Where generalized sync and Dropbox did better because of the folder mentality, because you just sunk the files that you wanted to, and you knew exactly where they were, and it made sense at the time. However, today, people just want things to work, and people are used to things being in the cloud. And so it was a strategy shift that was tough, and also there was some technology under the hood that was really tough, based on the entire app being set up to sync this folder. And so really, I had to push for pretty hard without any real data that syncing everything else would be successful. And we ended up doing this crazy hack for a few users putting everything in the cloud. The revenue went through the roof, but it was very unclear whether this hack was a direct mapping to the reality of actually building this product. And anyways, finishing this up, we eventually years later built Dropbox Backup, which is now a plus-figure revenue product, which does exactly this, where it syncs all your folders, immediately gets you over quota, or more specifically shows you the value of Dropbox of syncing all your folders to the cloud, and then monetizes people way more quickly. Which are growth teams asked for permission, or asked for forgiveness? Forgiveness, 40% of the time, and then permission 60%. So mostly you should be on board with the team, but occasionally, yeah, you want to be a little bit that loose cannon, who delivers a major results. You've made some incredible angel investments. Actually, we have quite a few together when I was thinking through them, which was cool. How is investing altered your mindset to growth and to company building? It's really interesting. In some ways, investing and growth are very similar. In both cases, you need to use your head, your heart, and your relationships, to make a frankly likely to fail decision, about 70% of growth experiments fail, and people say about 50% of company investments fail. And so it's one of those things where really it's kind of majority failure and it's a question of finding ones that when they succeed are going to be big enough To make up for all the failures if you will pay for all the failures I actually invested in calm and air table early because I love the product and at the time I didn't actually fully understand how universal they would be and the more growth I've done the better I feel about investing There's this idea of achieving a threshold of knowing well enough that this is worth your time and kind of going for it in growth because you never really know where the growth experiment is going to work until you try it and the same within investment you don't really know whether teams are going to succeed at the early stages when you usually invest when you start investing You really just never know and because of that you need to have some threshold of like knowing well enough before you pull the trigger Over time, I think with both you end up learning when you're wrong You end up learning which of your gut feels are really going to lead you astray and which of them are actually commensurate with real value in the market So for instance, I used to over invest in kind of silly social products or just things that people I know were doing And now I have a little more refining quality of is this person the right match for this company and this company something that's really valuable to the market right now And that really defines my investing more than has in the past It's gross like investing in the way that we always underestimate the size of the market when investing Carter, camp table management, that's not a big market, air table, bread sheets, okay, but it's just spreadsheets Is it the same in the way that you always underestimate the size in growth? It can be, I mean growth experiments can sometimes be a little bit more capped and they're against a backdrop The way in which it's similar I'll say there's an amazing way that growth experiments can multiply each other You might have a growth experiment that just gets you like a 1% win and you're kind of like who cares And then you have another experiment that gets you 1% win and it's a who cares But if you know anything about compound interest, as you add up those percentages and they multiply each other Being on different parts of the flow or somehow additive or multiplicative really It can add up very quickly, 10 plus 10 plus 10 plus 10 isn't just like the sum of it It's the multiply of like 1.1 times that number of things Really, it can get to double class or anything Is it difficult managing morale when you don't have a hit for a while When there's not that massive trajectory moving projects and it's a little bit flat How do you think about managing morale in those times? It's one of those things where you have to look at the bigger picture I mean growth teams do need to deliver win on some cadence And you can use it to say like look we need some more wins in the future and let's keep motor on this It's also the case that oftentimes the first six months of a growth team will really be setting up infrastructure And start to get initial learnings Those learnings will tell you all the wrong directions such that you can find the right directions Kind of like Edison says after his thousands light bulb attempt Like I found a thousand ways that it won't work And that in some ways shrinks search space for finding the ways that will work A little bit you need to come with some kind of like hope of previous stories or previous experiences Where you found a bunch of failure ways that got you to the right way And really what it is is the team is learning how users think about the product And what works for this particular product and each time you fail You effectively get like a reverse vector If you're failing because you went more technical Maybe the next experiment can be less technical And that actually gives you like reverse vectors that you can then test Because you've effectively found a way to move the needle You just moved it the wrong way And so that's the way I got to think about it for teams You also do need to make sure you have like a long enough mandate from leadership That you really have six months or a year to test and learn That's also a failure mode of growth team where they're expected to simply make a few front end tweaks and like double revenue in three months You didn't move the needle just in the wrong way Don't worry it's fine We just need to move the other way we're halfway there Now tell me I want to move into a quick fire round Does that work for you? So I say a short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts Okay so let's start with what gross tactics have not changed over the last five years But it's still the case there's this kind of like viral is one of the best ways to grow SEO is a fantastic way to grow Paid is like a scalable way to grow As kind of like the one two three of like cheap and scalable Until like more expensive and scalable And so still if you can get a product viral that's amazing It's a little bit harder now than it was though Tell me what tactics have died of death? What is no longer in play? I think one interesting thing affecting a lot of growth that I've seen Especially where I sit in growth Is that some of these kind of macro volume growth techniques Don't apply as well to a lot of the hot businesses today So for instance the way you grow Facebook is very different than the way you grow snowflake Even though both are incredibly valuable businesses And a lot of it comes down to two factors Volume like how many people are on the site and how many transactions you have And intent If you have low intent high volume You can very quickly kind of direct the river to another place If you have high intent and low volume You have kind of this job of convincing a small number of people To do a drastically different action and that's quite a bit harder Because high intent people are less easily convinced by like moving a button around You really need to give them a lot more information So I think this high volume A/B testing growth is a little less focal Optimizing for the users on a lower volume basis Is incredibly important for a lot of the successful startups today How do you think about this like hype growth And then another example would be like a sustainable growth Which would be maybe more tempered and slower But maybe more sustainable How do you think about hype growth versus sustainable growth? Yeah I think Andrew China has this interesting blog post or reflection That hype growth the weird thing about it is you really can't control it If you're in a hotter balloon like everything's rising right now And it's not something you did or can't control It's just things are going up And so it's really this kind of updraft that like helps your company And what is to be celebrated But because it's not controllable you're not able to always direct it Not able is to reproduce it when you want So in many ways I see that it's just kind of a tailwind that's moving your business forward You really need to make sure that you optimize your experience within it And the other tough thing about hype is it's often short lived As quick as a week these days or as long as like six months But it's almost certainly not going to be multiple years And so it's a way in which as a growth leader You want to capture as much of that hype driven growth In some kind of basically sustainable engine So get a basic retention system going And make sure as many people get into that as possible Rather than refining like the whole funnel perfectly Because you already have the inbound You just need to make sure that those people stay Even later make sure that those people invite other people etc But just kind of capturing that magic Or if you're in that kind of like box where the money's blowing around You want to capture as much of the money as you can before the air stops Tell me what's the biggest mistake you see founders make When it comes to hiring growth teams I do see founders trying to do this bolt on growth thing Where they say hey the whole company set up just the way I want Everyone says I need growth I'm going to like hire you, put you in a corner And expect you to double revenue That is really hard Because as we talked about earlier growth often overlaps with product team And the marketing team need to collaborate closely with them And as we saw earlier there are data needs to growth They need to have that data infrastructure to understand what's going on And how to optimize it And growth is hard Like it's taking something that was some other person More or less best idea for how something should work And improving upon it in a statistically valid way That's hard and takes time So oftentimes I see people not giving the growth team as much integration Personnel support and time they need to really make an impact I sometimes think of the growth team like a laser Like they can do amazing, very accurate, very powerful work But just like with a laser you need to hold them on a given point for a long time What would you most like to change about the world of growth? There's this perception that growth is separate from product and marketing That it's its own skill that's maybe not completely trusted Or that it's a lot of hacks just like sending more email, no notifications And really as I was saying it's a third circle and event diagram It's really trying to take this mindset of the marketing goals of growing the site And the product and engineering tools and capabilities to change the product itself And having this overlapping merging of marketing, product engineering, data, and user psychology And bringing that all together to really make an amazing delightful experience that serves the user in an even more nuanced way That then leads to results So this idea that growth is like a separate discipline I think doesn't help as much As saying that growth is actually an interesting integration of other disciplines And a refinement of the detail with which they're applied They can really apply to anyone And that's why you see growth product and growth marketing as emerging disciplines in different companies And Facebook especially has a massive growth marketing Final one for you What one company growth strategy have you most recently been super impressed by? Pretty recently I've talked to some interesting companies that actually use the calendar as a growth vector Obviously when you reflect about it, but a lot of these B2B SaaS companies that grow through a PLG like product-led growth motion At the end of the day, one person has to use it, they share it with another person who then uses it Who shares it with another person, et cetera, et cetera And so there's examples like Dropbox and Slack and others who do it And then one of the key examples is Zoom You and I first were introduced to Zoom almost certainly through someone sending us a Zoom link that we kind of hesitantly clicked on And then we had to install some software which was weird and then we fell in love with Zoom And we shared it with our friends in the same way And that's really kind of a calendar or meeting level of virality That's also shared by on a lower level like a company like Warmly Like automatically updates your calendar to have like links to people's LinkedIn's And just some interesting info so you can get to know them a little bit before without doing manual searches And it really is like a fundamental viral mechanism of like meeting people through calendar entries and one-to-one meetings Especially in this remote work world So I think it's kind of under reflected on viral opportunity that's still really prescient today I love that I think Warmly do it brilliantly while you're right Darius, I can't thank you enough for this I told you we've gone off schedule, we always do But I so appreciate you putting up with me for it and I so enjoyed chatting today This is really great, thanks Darius I just love doing that show with Darius It's been such a joy really building that friendship with him through doing this episode If you'd like to see more from Darius which is a must he does some incredible Twitter threads on growth At Darius MC on Twitter But before we leave you today, if you've been listening to 20vc, you've probably heard of Brax The first corporate card for startups with no personal guarantee or credit check Up to 20 times higher credit limits than traditional cards Plus rewards like 3X on eligible Apple products and 7X points on tools like Zoom and Slack Brax has helped thousands of companies scale faster to reach their full potential this month. extending their special offer to our listeners, apply for the Brax card with the code 20VC all spelled out to receive a $500 credit after spending $1000, even better, you can also apply it for Brax Cash, a bank account alternative with unlimited free wire and ACH transfers with no minimum balance required to create an account. You can apply for an account stay at Brax.com and speak of incredible tooling there for the challenges that you face as you scale your startup. Learn more and sign up at aka.ms/20VC, that's aka.ms/20VC, and finally I've always been a big history fan and so I want to talk about Cooley, the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture funds than any other law firm in the world. So learn more about the number one most active law firm representing VC backed companies going public, head over to cooley.com and also check them out at cooleygo.com. As always I so appreciate all your support and I cannot wait to bring you a fantastic episode this coming Friday.