YouSaid · the spoken record

Chandra Narayanan

lines on the record: 75
first: 2024-03-13
most recent: 2024-03-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“His ability to go all the way from highest level being able to up level to the highest level and go to, you know, the ten feet level is incredible. So he would be able to say here, we are going to be a mobile first company. And that's essentially what he wants us to do. And then he will outlay in a five page document on every single widest, and then he'll talk about the strategy. And then why it is that important partner, then he talk about the strategy. Then he'll talk about every single team and the roadmap for each team. He won't get to the level of which person does what, but he gets to the level of roadmap and then even initiatives inside of it. He may not get to the specific tactics and so on, but his ability to go all the way from the top takes a big problem, break it down all the way down to initiatives for such a large problem in a five-page document, which I think he writes in such a short time. I mean, I think he wrote his S1 in one sitting on a mobile phone. It's astonishing.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically say that this is really important or set the wrong goals, which also is a big problem, that you can actually set the wrong goals. All these can be problems.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think growth is much, much harder problem than I initially thought it was, and I think partly because if you want to do growth really, really well, you need a great infra. You need to have great people with high talent density. You need to have people that can identify opportunities and execute and have the right process for it like we had at Facebook. Understand, identify, execute, then you need to have the leadership buying and making sure that you can have the right leadership to be able to evangelize for growth. And if you don't, it's that. The fifth one is the one I talked about, impact. I think if you don't focus on impact, it's hard. And to get all of them right is super hard. And I realized that when I worked at so many companies now is that some of this or one of this fails, either they don't have the great talent density or they don't have the right infrastructure, they don't have an infrastructure in terms of doing AB testing. Or if they don't have the right leadership in place to”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that we don't do enough is countermetrics and I saw that a PayPal landed Facebook where you would grow a metric like at PayPal for example there were two teams one was growing revenue and then one was actually stopping revenue which is fraud and neither team had the other as a countermetric so PayPal's growth team would keep increasing revenue and the fraud team would keep stopping them but neither wanted the other to succeed or they didn't put it as a countermetric and if the two teams can work together at two different metrics which can actually fight with each other you know be in conflict is a big problem so you should have counter metrics”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah so many, but I think the hardest part is it's keeping your customers happy. I think the customers are happy, but if I have such a high bar for them, constantly feel like there's more to do. There's so much more to do with the customers. The hardest part is to build an amazing product that makes our customers so happy”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I try to observe myself and see this stream of thoughts and try to see whether I can see myself as a third person and then while I do that I try to see whether I can take the thought back to its origin and see it as a third person and if I'm able to do that my mind gets less and less cluttered and then at some point goes blank but I don't know that meant blank until I can look at the clock an hour or two later and then see that two hours pass and I didn't sleep I must have meditated.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so a quick story on that. I used to stutter a lot until I was in my ninth grade back in India and I used to stutter a lot and one of my uncles”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Occasionally I meditate a lot. I have different tones to my voice, which basically, for example, the last two months in my company I've consciously told them my tone's going to change. I expect form far more from everyone. My son realized it pretty early and that I have different tones to my voice but I'm still under control. I'm under control but I actually can have a very calm demeanor. I can not necessarily scream but I can amplify my tone to a point of showing sense of urgency.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically looking at a lot of it has got to do with looking at asymptote versus slope. I actually think that not the right person, you have to find the right person for your company. Not look at this amazing profile as someone who's done some amazing stuff in some amazing company that doesn't work for you.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The good to great are, as I mentioned, graded strategy, great at vision, not that great, not necessarily graded execution, great at bringing people along and making people feeling great about it, empowering the next set of leaders to be amazing, all the kinds of thing that you want. The bad to okay is like essentially firing the entire squad, giving very hard messages, saying everything is crazy, having a sort of loyal groups of people that they can bring on, who can completely change everything and then have very strong execution mode. I want to get shit done. I need to go to OK, that's all I care about. They're like a machine and they don't care that much about how do people feel should I make people everyone happy, culture, none of that actually matters. It matters only when you get to OK. But in the process you don't need to be. So you're so much tougher in how you handle it. And you need both. You actually need to go inside a company. You need to do both.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This or do that or do this. And I remember Dan Levy, who was my manager there at Facebook, told me, you know what? You may be right, but need you bring these people along. By the way, you should be listening more. You're just actually talking as though you know everything. The thing there is that obviously took the feedback to heart and have been trying to change that across almost anything in life. But actually, that's what it is. You think you know, and you've done this before, you know what it is. You come in there, you have notions of what works, what doesn't work. That's not reality on the floor”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that at least at the levels at which I have seen newer execs, even cheat product officers, etc., whatever execs you look at, what ends up being is that you just go by resume and say, oh, let's do this. You don't actually ask the question of what is the company actually need. And it ends up being that it's not the same type of person who can do all three or four of these things. And at Facebook, I knew that there were, and I won't name them, but there are execuous, superb at Batok. They were superb at good to gradual like I pointed out. And so, knowing that is a huge thing. So that's one reason I think execs fail is just not. Second, it's just the fact that I think they have very strong opinions of what they think they need to be doing. I mean, for example, when I came to Facebook from PayPal, the first week or two, I mean, I'd worked on risk for so many years and I said, okay, I was an expert. I must know more than these guys. I've done this for so many years. So there's arrogant me went and basically the first week or two went and told them, hey, do this.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll say two different answers to it. One answer is that I think what I've noticed is that this happened even at Facebook and while I worked with over 100 portfolio companies, I think of it as from an exec perspective. I think there are three types of execs. People who know how to take companies from bad to okay and people who know how to go from okay to good and there are people who are good at going from good to great. I mean Chris Cox excellent exec at Facebook Chris Cox is excellent at good to great. I don't think he was good at OK to bad to OK, which means that bad to OK requires a lot of firing. This whole thing is bad. Turn them around. Get a completely new grin. You have to have a different type of mindset to be able to do that. The good to great are people who are superb at being visionaries, who are able to bring everyone along. Everything is already in a decent place. They can know what kind of products you need to be dreaming for the next stage of evolution of the company. They're fantastic at it. What ends up happening?”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% right and it's most times it is that because at the end of it think about it it's a two way thing if I knew what I knew two months later would have done hiring is a terrible process I know you ask a ton of questions of what do you look for what do you look for and all that honestly I can say all I want it's useless at the end of it it's easiest when they work with you or you ask referrals from people you really care about that's the only one that really really works you can do something in the interview judge a few things and even I said this like oh simplicity on all this nonsense but honestly I just don't know until they join there is so many unknowns here they really don't know”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just go help them out. If you can't help them out, make sure that they can see reason. Almost everyone, I would say barring a couple of people who have left my team or company. I'm still very good friends with, and largely because I could make them see reason it's best for us and best for you.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think when you put up someone in a performance plan it's three months too late. Three months before you should have intervened and tried to do the right thing. What happens most of the times is that people put them on their improvement plan when they've already decided there is no chance of success. And that is why it doesn't work. If you think there's a 70% chance if there are 60% chance of them succeeding and you put them on a performance plan, then it might work. But what ends up happening is that we time it so badly. We time it at ten percent or five percent or not even one percent. And I think it's the timing which is a problem. Most managers take too late to intervene and they're not willing to have honest direct conversations. And because they don't have direct conversations, it becomes that much harder, largely because most of us are conflict hours and we won't have those conversations. And it becomes too late. And then what do you do? Try to go into a performance plan. I think it's less about the performance plan is when you time it. But regardless, I don't think you need to call it that. Just why do you call it? The label is not great anyway.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say there are three things I look for. One is I think you look at skill gap, knowledge gap, and value slash culture gap. Those are the three things I expect. If somebody is not doing well, performance not doing well, because somebody is not performing, that can be easily founder. More easily founded if someone is not performing in terms of how they are delivering you can founder. But not all people who are not performing will do badly. It may be that they're in the wrong role, or it may just be that they are deep thinkers, I've seen that too, or they may just not be good at what they are trying to do, and so on. So for that, you need to analyze three things. One is, is the problem that they're trying to do is the skill problem. The graded Python, but this is a C++ problem, they can't do it. Okay, that's why they're slowing down. Second is like knowledge problem. It's a Python problem. They know Python really well, but this pays a security and they don't understand security, so they can't do it really well. Values is like, are they not working hard?”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“SAS, obviously, and so on. So there are these seven or eight different types of companies, eight formulas. And then what tends to happen is that then you don't need to have a lot of data. All you really need to do have is a way of thinking. And for that, you need to have a way of thinking from first principles. And if you can do that really well, you don't need a huge amount of the data. I always have believed every large data problem can be brought down to a small data problem. Every large data problem can be brought down to, I'm being extreme here. Obviously, nothing in Gen AI is like that. But in terms of analytics, I think it's actually true. It's like most large data problem can be reduced to small data problems. And then you're solving small data problems. So essentially, if you think of it that way, you don't need large data to solve problems. You need the right data for solving the right problem and you need to tease it out. That's the art.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so what I've started to develop violet Facebook was creating frameworks to think. So when you start to develop frameworks like formula as a framework, right? At Facebook we used to develop formulas like you have a formula for the entire company which is if you look at revenue as the driving metric that you care about you have number of users and then you have time spent per user and then you have ads per time spent is formula so those are ways actually to think in terms of frameworks so if you think about things in frameworks you don't need that much of data what you really need to think about is in terms of that which is why when i went to sequoia there's so little data compared to phase but there's so little data and then i need to kind of think about abstractions how do you create abstractions and frameworks so then what we realized what all the companies at sequoia for example we classify for the types of companies phase was eight different types of companies e-commerce two-sided marketplaces consumer subscription consumer ads”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think if you look at my career, I am an oceanographer by training. I was a professor and went into a high performance computing, and then I did weather forecasting, then I went to climate change, I was in risk management at Facebook, then I moved to analytics at Facebook and led many of the teams there, went to venture capital and did a bunch of different things, and now I'm doing a startup. I think my journey has been one which has always been like trying to disrupt myself, to be honest with you. The biggest challenge now I have is essentially, I think two things. One is growing the company itself, and I think growing a remote team in India. The remote team in India had its own challenges, partly because of cultural reasons of India and the fact that I think not being able to role model easily because we were in the US and they were in India, the rest of the team was in India. That has been a challenge in itself.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're below a certain age, you're not institutionalized. Let's say you're below 27, 30, whatever those ages are, you're probably not institutionalized. Until that, I think it's very easy to mold anyone. But beyond a certain age, it's so much harder if you are actually in a certain type of company, you're set in your ways, you have certain ways of thinking, it's that much harder for you to change. I don't think it's impossible, that's not hard. But I would say that if you have developed the growth mindset very early on, which means that even if you're 31, 35, and you've developed a growth mindset very early and your mind is nimble and flexible, you can take on almost anything. It's like how early did you develop a growth mindset? And if you did, I think you can continue to challenge yourself on anything. But if you didn't, I think you need to cast them young.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early on the big mistakes that I used to make and I make coalesce of it now, I think I probably still make them, is I think about slope and asymptote. Asymptote is how good are you? Slope is how fast are you growing? And so what I would hire more for is people with asymptote, which basically means that, oh, they have such a good profile, etc. They've done so much, etc. But they wouldn't look at growth. And they may actually flatten out on the growth part. And that is probably much of a mistakes if you go back to it. One big one would be the hiring for asymptote rather than slope. Now I don't mind. You can imagine, it's just a matter of catch-up, right? People with a slower asymptote with a faster growth are going to Vortex. And I generally tend to invest in people over a very long period of time. But within reason, within two people, within slope and this, I know that basically the effect of compounding will just overtake the person. And if you're willing to invest over time, you could.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And that's what I do. I tell them also upfront in the interview. I tell them, look, no answer is the wrong answer. I only care about how you think. If you are on the wrong track, I'll immediately tell you, because some of them are objective. So I say I'll immediately tell you what is by won't judge you on it is fine. All I want to do is that if you're giving me ten ideas and eight of them are good and two are absurd, I won't judge you on it because inside a great company, those two will be weeded out anyway. But I don't want those eight not to be there, so say whatever you want.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So what I do is I actually have a blog, and when I did that series of blogs, I don't run on sustainable growth. And on the sustainable growth, I have them read it. I send them and say go read it. And there are things in there which is not quite right. There are things in there that make sense. And I basically first question I generally ask them is synthesize. What are the primary takeaways? So those are the kinds of things. So I go through every single thing and it's not just that I go deep into retention. I go deep into growth itself. I ask them things like you ask me is like, what is product market fit? And I see how they think. Can I have a dialogue with them? Because it's when you are interviewing for these people, I mean, I know what's on their resume. I mean, it tells you me a bunch of different things about their resume. Like, oh, they can code or they can do this or they can do that. I just take that for granted. On top of that, I'm trying to think in a working environment. When I'm talking to you, when I'm discussing with you, can I actually have a conversation with you? And then in the moment.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, more and more senior you get, the number one and probably the only thing I care about is their ability to simplify. Chris Cox once told me that I asked him what is the one single thing that senior people can do? Is it simplify? And that's the same thing I have. It's like, can you actually simplify? When you look at a very senior person, I look at if they can simplify. Simplify shows clarity of thought. Clarity of thought shows your first principles thinking. So if you have great first principle thinking, you have higher degrees of clarity of thought, which leads to simplification. And so the more senior you are, the kind of skills that I look for is can you actually simplify which”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the sword question that's a problem and what I've realized was the difference between good analytical people who can be good at insights but the ones that are good are actionable insight the muscle is really the soot question it's not the analysis they can be greater coming up with lots of indexing and analysis but coming out they don't ask so what questions enough and that's what I've seen differentiate very very good analytical leaders and not and who can take basically data into action better because they can know how to go from insights to actionable insights”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sword is all asking the question of okay this thing increased by 0.1 person or 0.5 person or one person so what and if you ask a sword question you are basically saying so what yes if i do that it will increase my wow my north star metric or mao my north star metric by hundred thousand users or by two hundred users so if it's two hundred users you're no value to me but if it's hundred thousand users wah that's super cool that's what i want to know so when you look at the so what you have to have a sense of something is material or not and material basically means you have to have a sense of what your overall goal is if you have an overall goal is this the highest opportunity you can have one of the high opportunities that you can so you got it tie whatever you're trying to do back to something into a north star metric even if it's not this goes to the art and science part even if it's not an exact you should have a sense of how much you're going to drive without asking”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They only had a credit card. People would go try, look at bank, there was no bank available, so they would just not convert. And so what I did was I told them, hey guys, go and change that. I did materially change the top line of the companies. I think they told me, I don't know whether it's true, but it's a few percentage increase. Overall, the increase in terms of conversion because Germany was a big country and it was converting at abysmally low rates.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me give you an example. I worked with MongoDB while I was a Koia. So at Mongo, what we basically did was we basically were looking at the payment conversion rates. And I went in there and they had a data science team and they had analytics team and they had worked on it for, I don't know how long, but I went in there, took a quick look, and found out that Germany had a very low conversion rates compared to its neighbors like France or the rest of Western Europe. It had a far lower payment conversion rate. I was like, it shouldn't be. It should be similar to the other European countries. Why is it so low? And that's the benchmark. It doesn't have to be the average. It has to be what you think is a similar country or similar something. And so in this case, what ended up happening was that it turned out that Germany is very different in that it's a very bank country, it's an ACH country. So they use banks a lot. Whereas the rest of the country use credit cards a lot. And it turned out that Mongodubi did not have a way for people to pay using a financial instrument using banks.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Material, and that's the SOWAT question, and that helps you prioritize. So essentially analytics, literally you need to know only how to index and how to ask a SOAT question. If you do that really well, that's really the two skills that you need. But in order for you to even get that, you need technical skills. You need all the other kinds of skills because you need to munch data. And then being able to tell the story, put it together and influence, right? That's the other part that he said. You can actually do the SOAT, do that, but if you don't know how to influence it, it's a problem. That's a slightly different dimension. Technical is a different dimension, but the analysis itself, the core to it, is basically only two things.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The third is analysis skill, and the fourth is basically a lot of it has to do with in terms of synthesis skills and influencing skills that you need to have. And if you did all that, you can do great in terms of analyzing a funnel or analyzing retention or analyzing any sort of problem that you want and identify opportunities, set roadmaps with it, and trying to move the thing forward. I'd also say that In terms of analytics itself, there are literally only two things you need to do. One is indexing. You want to see if things are under index or over-indexed in anything. You're comparing and benchmarking. And the second thing is asking the SOWAT question. The only two things. So, for example, over indexing and under indexing means that if New York is going up, you're asking if Chicago also is going up. You need to benchmark to something. And if Miyork is going much more up, it's overindexed. And so then you want to provide there's an opportunity of some kind. I'm just simplifying it. And then if New York went up about 0.001%, is it?”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are a few things one is I think from an analytical perspective I'll talk about the body of skills and then I'll talk about outcomes the body of the skills would be like are they able to break a problem down that becomes an important thing which if you gave them a complex problem are they able to simplify it and make it convert into a business question into a technical question and then from the technical question can they convert into a data question and then from a data question are they able to do the right type of analysis and then from the analysis can they derive the right type of insights and then from those insights can they convert into the actionable insights from actionable insights can you convert it to opportunities and decisions so there's an entire flow to that the first few skills that you have is breaking it down is more like a consulting skill it's like a mindset that you need to have the second skill is a technical skill which requires some amount of coding etc”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with you that there are reasons why people may stay, but you ask me for the kind of person that I want to hire and what I want to have on the team and what really makes them come every day. The thing about the Morgan Stanley guy, who you're talking about, they're probably working out of fear, or they're working because of some boss. If you ask the same question of are you getting the best out of that person, him or her? I don't think you are. It's hard for me to think over a long period of dream. Maybe over a week or two you can, what a period of a year, I don't think you're going to get the best out of the person. So if you want to get to the best of the person, they really need to enjoy what they do. It's about making sure that they don't come to work with fear, they come with loving what they do and building a bottom of culture that they can be happy and wonderful at.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're going to have people that you feel like you don't love working with and they're all jerks, how are you going to stay? If the company's not doing very well, it's actually a company that was great 50 years back and doing nothing now, are you going to stay? No, the company's got to go up and to the right. Finally, do you love what you do? You come in to do something you came to do design or you came to do growth marketing or you came to do analysis or you do something. Do you actually enjoy your job? And if all four of them fit, you do a great job.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think very dimensionally, which basically means that I don't think about a person as a person, I think of them as a body of skills. So what that basically means is that are they speaking in one or two or three different things and not a liability in the others? That's kind of how I think about every person. So if that's what it is, I would think like say, oh, this person, the exception in A, B, C, they can bring a lot to the table. At the end of it, what you're trying to do is hire a bunch of different people who are excellent what they do that they can learn from each other and become better AJ. So what you're really trying to assemble is if you think about why anyone comes to work, it's for four different reasons. One is they love what they do. Number two, they love the people they work with. Number three, they feel like they can learn from the people that they work with. Four, the company is going up and to the right. If one of these four does not work, they will leave. Essentially what you mean is if you have the people with the same skills, all of them being exactly the same skills, they're not going to learn from each other.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things it's actually making the change. For that, you need to go far more than just saying things in any way you want. So you've got to start to understand people and psychologies and all these things.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest one I used to make and I think most people make is confusing the wat and the hub. What message do you want to deliver and how do you deliver the message? When you deliver the message, we are all human beings. And so if you can do it in a way that is easier for that person to handle, I think it can resonate with them or all the influencing skills I talked to you about, then I think it makes your job much more easier. I've seen many, many people try the influence but they fail. I mean, for example, I knew a very senior leader at Facebook who they'd be so blunt and say, this is it, take it or leave it. And if you never resonate because they didn't try hard to influence, they just wanted to say the facts. I mean, at the end of it, influence is not about just saying. It's about having the impact, making sure you're able to influence into making a change in the direction that you think should be the right way to do it. It's not just about saying.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then how you tell the story, you tell the story to just show data. How much of data do you show? Do you go deep into storytelling and tell them every small thing or just peer layer after layer after layer? And you need to learn that while you're talking to them. And then on the fly be ready to influence. And that's a very hard thing.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“love data and new data and wanted to embrace that's one there are people who love data thought they knew a lot but would not listen to you because they thought they knew more than you and then there was a third who did not know data but said there is something out there come help me and that was fine too and there are people like this is crazy this is so stupid I don't believe in data it's all should be designed this is crazy so you have all of these types of founders and some of them you just can't the people who are like I'm going to be closed have a wall in front of me you just can't influence there's no way to influence but the people who are like I don't know much but I am hungry you can the people that are that no data but they say I want to know more because I want to learn from people around me those you can the people who are adamant and saying I know more than you very difficult and I've had all these four so you got to judge that of who are you talking to”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's pattern recognition, Harry. I actually think that over a period of time you do so much of it because that's all I practiced. At Facebook, if you think about what I did the most was influence over a period of time. And then you have so many different characters. And each of them just becomes a cast of characters. And you start to understand what ticks with them, what does not. And once you do that, there is a way of approaching influence. So I actually think it's an art. You have an idea and say, oh, this type of person, they can be influenced through data. You need to be really good at storytelling. For example, Havi, you go to try to influence Havi, you just throw the data, don't give me anything other than just data. Just tell me the data. Don't tell me the story. You go to Chris Cox. Don't just throw data at me. Tell me the story, please. Both are extremely well-meaning, but there are multiple different spectrum of people that you work with, and you have to understand who they are. I also found that while I worked at Sequoia, I think I found four different types of founders.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See and don't want to see, I think it's very hard. For me, I think in particular in my earlier time at Facebook, I think I struggled with influence largely because of the fact that I actually think that there were specific leaders and this is probably what Alex is talking about who were not receptive to what I was saying. As a result, it became very hard for me to influence them. It both hurt me and I think the company a bit.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. I think influence is a hard problem. So I think influence is obviously an art, not a science. And so if people are very receptive about what you're going to say, it's actually very easy. So people who are very data informed who actually want to embrace data, it's actually very easy. There's also what and how there, which means, what do you want to say and how you say it? If you actually are not doing that very well, so one thing is like I may just not do a good job of influencing. Say if you have the right data and be able to influence, I think there are multiple reasons. One is the person that you're talking to. If they're not receptive, it's very hard for you to influence. Second, if you're not doing a good job, you may not be able to influence. Third is that the answer may be right, but if you don't have the right data to convince people, you may not be able to. And the fourth, I think, is just biases all around. I think if people have strong biases about what they want.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A company like OpenAI. In fact, I did that. And when I talked to OpenAI, they asked me who should be hiring for the head of analytics and head of growth and so on. I said, oh, someone who's looking at a rocket ship, don't worry whether they are statisticians or influences the most important thing for them. But if I were to be at an early stage series A company, I would say hire for someone now because it just has an early part of your product market fit. If you reach certain levels of scale, I think it's a...”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, influence, and what would happen is that you wouldn't have actually taken the journey in the right way. So, what ended up happening was that we build a dashboards, we automated it. A-B testing, we built something called Deltoid, it automated it. And then when we could automate all of this stuff, it became easier for us to move towards what we think was the most valuable thing that analytics teams could do is influence. So again, we would even in the growth team we would actually understand, identify opportunities, influence the roadmap of products, of the roadmap of what we need to build. So my point is that I think it depends on the growth of your company and where you are at. At a later stage, I started to build for much, much longer, eighteen months and so on. But the earliest stages are actually hired for what I needed right now because there's no point in hiring someone who will be so valuable for you in 18 months and who can influence everything but can't build your dashboard. I'd like a bunch of different companies now change my answer based on who I'm talking to. If I think this company is in a rocket ship, for example,”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, this comes back to the product growth, right? So I'll give you an example. When I joined Facebook analytics was all about counting numbers, and then it was creating dashboards, and then it was doing AB testing, and then going towards goals, roadmap, and strategy. So initially, the types of person that we needed to hire were basically people who can just count numbers. And secondly, so it was a bunch of people who can create infra to create dashboards. The third was people who actually were statisticians who could do AB testing. Finally, it was people who could influence. And even now, I think it's Facebook is like the analytics team is largely about influence, even inside the growth team and so on throughout. It's about influence. So the point is that if I actually hired three years earlier and said, I'm going to hire people for influence, what would end up happening was people wouldn't have been able to do the same people who do the AB testing who need stats background are now the ones who”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, at the end of it think about it you're at a series Are you going to do twenty things? Are you going to do two things, three things, four things from the growth team? So there are fewer things that you're actually going to do. And for that, a small team will just suffice. You're doing very, very few things. And for that, those five people that I talked about just do and you'll work on one and you'll go work on the second, you'll work on the third, and you'll actually work on multiple types of problems. At any time you probably don't work on more than two or three because the surface area can't be that large. If you're going to spend that much time on everything, you're probably going to do nothing right. So I think at a smaller phase of your company, you don't need, it's the surface area narrows, so you can actually do it with just a centralized team. But actually when the surface area grows, you can actually start to spread your wings out. So I actually think it works out.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It should be centralized, so the more important thing is that somewhere in the interim, you probably have a role where you embed people into team, but you still have a centralized organization. And then at some point you move completely decentralized.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are two answers to this. I think the answer at an earlier stage of your growth they should be a standalone team. For two reasons. One is I think it's for the best practices, meaning that they can learn from each other and then they can go solve problems across the company. Suddenly you separate the steam and put them into the different parts. I don't know if they'll be able to build the same culture of the know-how. A lot of it is knowing how to do this really, really well. I've worked on many parts of this, from pages growth to games growth to advertiser growth to, and then when you have all of these types of growth, what ends up happening is that these sort of knowledge does translate. And imagine that all this was not part of one single team and they were separated all over. I actually don't think the learnings will be there. So my feeling at an earlier stage, you should all be centralized. Now, once you get a large enough team, if you get to a large enough team, I actually think that it can start to be decentralized and work going to product teams. But I actually think that early on.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the first hire I'm not sure if you just hire one single person is going to be that valuable to you, meaning that what'll that one single person do, it probably is a team that you need to hire. And if you think about the one single person that you're trying to hire, if you are thinking about the one single person you're trying to hire is probably the leader of the team who can then get everyone else, such as getting you the designer and the growth marketing person and the analytics person, the product manager and engineer, all of them on board. So if you don't have that, I'm not sure how you can actually function because you can have someone, they won't have, and of course a marketing spends the dollars too for it. And so if you don't have that, I don't know what they would do if you had just one person. But I would basically say that if you had to hire only one person, it would probably be someone who's relatively senior who can hire everyone else or be part of the team and so that you can actually get a team that can actually work and move a metric.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it's a consumer product, people want to come back. They want to keep using the product. They seem to love the product, and you're not throwing more money at it, which means that's what I mean by sustainable. It's not like you're throwing huge amount of marketing dollars to just keep them on. And they're actually being able to provide a value that other companies don't. And I think with the product market fit, it doesn't mean the product market fit you can actually scale it because the moment you start charging, for example, it's a free product. And maybe just that people are only using it because of the free product. The moment you charge it and charge the same amount as a competitor, it may just go away. So it's not that it's guaranteed that you're going to go from product market fit, scaling product market fit, unit economics, scaling unit economics. I think those are all four different steps, in my opinion. You can get to product market fit, but you may not be able to scale it for several reasons. And if you get to scaling product market fit, you may not get to unit economics. And if you do, we get to unit technology, you'll never be able to scale it.”
2024-03-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source