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Chandra Narayanan

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2024-03-13
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2024-03-13
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  1. “Yeah, you don't want to hire anyone before product market fit because at the end of it, I think, as I mentioned to you, I think growth is about scaling that product market fit in a sustainable way. It basically means that if you're not able to grow, if you're not even reached the point where you can actually scale it, no point getting your first. So product market fit.”

    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

  2. “certain parts of America which had an increase in time spent, and we don't know what happened. And we kept looking and say, what is all this? And we kept digging deep and it ended up being very cold winters. People stay in at home and they use the product a lot more. And the time span went up. And if you look at just time spent across US on extremely cold days, you see an increase in time spent not.”

    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

  3. “Yeah, I think they're at multiple problems here. One is I think when you have the data, it is possible, I mean, you have a hypothesis, you can't even check it. For example, at Facebook, we would have saying that, hey, by the way, we would want to know why advertisers are churning, and there's no easy way to find it. I mean, you actually need to do a survey. It takes a long time, and then they would basically say ROI. When they say ROI, we still won't understand what ROI meant to them because we don't actually know the data behind it to validate the hypothesis many, many times. You can't do it through just data. You need to do it through essentially user experience research. There is a problem of just being able to validate your hypothesis because a lot of times you don't have the data. The flip side is also true. You may not even be able to come up with the right hypothesis. And I've seen that happen too. It's like you don't know what went on and suddenly realize what happened. For example, what happened at Facebook and it happened we came with hypothesis very, very much, much later. It's like we found that there's”

    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

  4. “Okay, is it really true? And when you go into the data, you say, Yeah, many of them actually fraud. So you look at good use cases and a bad use case. The bad use cases are, yeah, many of them are fraudulent. Then you look at the good use case for the same person who is using the same computer. It turned out that a bunch of them were family members or they were using an internet cafe, logging in out of the product. So what you end up doing is that you need to go back from data to hypothesis and back to data and basically solve the problem that way. Now, there may be still things that you don't know that you don't know and your story still may be wrong, but you still want to get to the point of getting from data to hypothesis and back and then be able to tell what the story around it and then hypothesis what story it is. If you can do that you can make great decisions.”

    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

  5. “In terms of how you do the hypothesis, you need to stress test it, which means you come up with hypothesis and then you need to look at data to validate the hypothesis. So you just can't do a hypothesis and say this is it and so on. So the way that you do this, and I'll tell you a quick example that we did, for example, at PayPal in fraud, I mean, we wanted to reduce fraud, which is the most important metric for risk management and probably the most important for even PayPal in terms of the metric that they categor. So what we did was we said, okay, we made a hypothesis and we basically said, hey, people, if they use the same cookie, which is a web cookie, if more than five people use the same cookie on the same day, there's something wrong with it. They were taking over other people's accounts and doing a bunch of different activity on it. And then there is something bad about it. So we basically start with the hypothesis and saying, hey, this is wrong. So then you go into the data and try to validate 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

  6. “Marketing change or competition or things like that, and it's manifested as behavioral change in customers. And that's how it is manifested. And then ultimately you see it in the data. So to me, if you want to deeply understand a phenomena and make great decisions, you need to understand the story behind it really well. If you want to understand the story behind it very well, you have to go into metrics and see how they changed, identify them and then be able to come up with the right hypothesis of why they changed. And then if you do that, you can make red decisions.”

    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

  7. “If you want to make great decisions, you need to understand a phenomena very deeply. That's my thesis. If you want to make a great decision, you need to understand that phenomena that you're trying to make a decision very well. If you want to understand that, you basically need to analyze that problem very well. In order for you to construct the story around the phenomena, it turns out the data has a lot of things. I think of data as a manifestation of you have a story that you care about and then it's manifested in the data that you have. So the data itself is manifested in a ton of different metrics, for example. You understand and say, okay, active users went up or new users went up or you find that ad spend went up and so on and so forth. And what ends up happening is that you need to come up with a bunch of hypothesis of why they went up or down. And generally these types of hypotheses, for example, if you look at active users going up or something, primarily the reasons are either seasonality or it's a product change or it's a sales change or there'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

  8. “I know, man. I think the problem, as you point out, the biggest problem for anything with your intuition led is bias. Is bias and how the world change around you? Those are the ones that you need to guard against. But honestly, that's the best you got at that point. So if you actually have to make a decision, and I actually think that the cost of not making a decision, in my opinion, is far worse than making a wrong one as long as you can iterate fast. But you're right, you're not going to get it. Intuition is not fail-safe for sure. But even data is not fail-safe. Data also works under certain assumptions that you have. And those assumptions can just get ripped off.”

    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

  9. “I think a lot of your North Star metrics changes Instagram as a case, right? When Instagram came along to Facebook, we still had the MEU as our goal. When we had the MEU as a goal, I mean, basically Kevin's system was like, what? We're now on the mobile world. People use the phones all the time. We do DAUs, we don't do MEUs, it makes sense because essentially people are using the product every single day. Why are you still caught up in the MAU?”

    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

  10. “100. So I actually think that at Facebook you could actually move the DAU metric too multiple ways or DAU MAU metrics but for example if you're trying to move let's say the number of friends for example that could be more of an input metric so I actually think that the goal itself that you have the goal that you have needs to be movable and you could move it through multiple different ways in terms of what you can do but I actually think that yes if you choose a metric that can't be moved that's not a good metric for example I'll take the example of advertiser growth in advertiser group that Facebook in the advertisers we decided not to move the revenue metric but decided to move the advertiser growth metric because that's a metric that we actually could tangibly move but as we didn't have the levers to move the revenue metric but I do believe from an active user perspective or DAU or MAU perspective we actually could move the metric in terms of what those metrics were”

    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

  11. “For your specific company there's a mission and it needs to tie to something in your mission. For example at Facebook at that time that we were there it was like making the world open and connected so it naturally was you wanted to get everyone in the world on it so it just naturally meant that you wanted to get the largest number of people to use a product so MAU made a ton of sense in terms of what you're trying to do”

    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

  12. “Yeah, so growth is basically about identifying methods, approaches that scale product market fit in a scalable way. The way you do that is by identifying a North Star metric and moving that metric. In order to move the metric, you need to basically identify and prioritize the most important opportunities that move the 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

  13. “Keep the value of the entire team high, so do not hire very fast. And so that was one thing. I would also say that the way you measure it, yes, it's harder in many things, but you kind of know in many ways you can think about it. You basically say, I can only have X number of engineers, and then essentially peg your engineers to every other part of the team. So it's 20 to 1, let's say engineer to PM ratio, or from PM to data scientists or one-to-one ratio. But essentially if you're saying engineers are building stuff and you have a market cap or some value that you can actually say what the value of everyone should be.”

    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

  14. “I would say when I first joined Facebook, and I remember an engineer, Harry, who worked on the payments team, told me once, the way we think about the impact here is basically take our market cap, which I think was 10 billion then, and they were probably, for the sake of math, I'm just going to say thousand engineers, I think it was far fewer, which just were Matt. I'm just saying it's a thousand engineers, so that would be like 10 million per engineer if I'm doing my math right. So essentially saying every single engineer contributes 10 million to this, or I think it was more like 20 or 50 million. So every new engineer that comes in will have to contribute so much. Otherwise, if you can't find something that they can do that can be of that type of impact, don't hire. And I think it's the same sort of mindset that Alex and Harvey and everyone else had, which is like, do not add more people. One thing if you add more people, what happens is the A plus players becomes A and so on and very fast you need to get to grow very slowly so you can reach equilibriums very slowly.”

    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

  15. “the way he built teams, the way that he would make sure that every single person who came in would be incredible and never try to grow very, very fast. And so it is impact per capita. I think what we get confused a lot of time is total impact. This total impact can be gained by lots of people.”

    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

  16. “I think the second one I would say is I learnt what it meant to build a world class organization or a world class team that was happy. Again, this came a lot from the growth team at Facebook. I think both I would attribute Alexills and Harvey to it. They hit a very, very high bar. First, I think high bar in terms of the people that they have. The high bar in expectations about them. And in the way that they cared. I think it's the impart per capita. So the way think about it is like impact is equal to impact per capita or impact divided by number of people times the number of people. They always cad owed impact per capita. How much can each person do? Then multiply it by the number of people. So as a result, what they would have is the growth marketing team, which Alex Ran had Brian Hale, which who was on this show, and it was like a seven people team or a six people team. And I would think like, how can six or seven or eight people have such enormous output, an enormous cent of this? And this is a cambradery.”

    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

  17. “They talk about this prepared mind. I keep talking about it since to my team and so on. It's like people who go into the room, there's already, if you have a Monday morning meeting, they circulate the entire memo on a Friday. And when people go into the room and make a collective decision, they go with a prepared mind, which basically means you better have read your memo, you come in knowing everything. We're not going to talk to you about the basics. We'll go deep into the investment 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

  18. “I think the quality of investors themselves are exceptional. I actually think that brand for several years, I mean, nobody doesn't talk to them, right? I mean, you have everyone talking to Sequoya, which actually gets them all the leads that they want to. The third is the diversity of the people that are in the group. You have all the way from, you know, during those times, Mike Murritz and Jim Getz and Roloff and Pat and of course so many other people. And they have this diversity people with different types of skills. And I think their collaborative decision making is also excellent in the way that the collaborative decision making, I think the process that they take in terms of how they go from the one pages, from the time that they actually source the deal to going through the due diligence process to getting to the one pages and getting to actually talk about it and then going through the decision making process. I love the way that they do that process. They keep talking about one thing. Everyone going to the room.”

    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

  19. “So two things. I think if you look at it from a funnel perspective and from the time perspective, if you think about it, if you think about the funnel and saying the investors talk to, let's say, 2,000 companies in all per year, probably it's more, but let's say it's 2,000 to 5,000 companies in all. And then you have this bucket of, let's say, there are only fifty great companies in all every year that you can even invest into. Then you want to catch those 50. And the thing is that if you make wrong investments, and many of this, by the way, that we stop Sekai from investing where things they would have otherwise invested, it was so close to investment. So then you're going to spend so much more company. So think about every investor. If you have 10 companies in your portfolio, every investor has 10 companies in the portfolio. If eight of them are not so good and two are great, they spend all the time on that too, but they can't do anything about the eight.”

    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

  20. “What we would find is that there was a company where we would actually find out that they were growing really well, everything was going right to the right, and then we would find out, we asked them for the marketing spends, and we would find the marketing spends the reach of the marketing when we looked at the marketing reach. It was very close to the addressable market. So basically they already talked to everyone, in which case we realized that that one thing is not. Another company, we would find out that the reason why we did not invest was we realize that all the older cohorts were doing really, really well, retaining well and engaging well, but we founded the more recent cohorts were actually starting to decline, and we could see it in the data, and that is the one reason that we did not invest in them. So these are just two examples, but every time that we would look at, we will stress ten and saying, how can I say no to the company?”

    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

  21. “leads that matter I think it makes a material difference to how it is. It's also the due diligence. What we realize on the due diligence part in particular what we realize even through the way we prioritize was how quickly can we say no and that was primarily what we arrived to because that was the fastest way. What is the one signal in every company that would say no rather than say yes?”

    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

  22. “I think at the highest level you know you have so many things in terms of the data team that you are at Sekoya that you can actually do. For example, you could be spending time on sourcing. There are three types of activities that we did. Basically, I would spend time on sourcing, which is trying to identify companies that investors can go talk to. Second is due diligence once the company comes in and they give us the data room. We basically need to make a recommendation on whether this company is doing well or not. And the third is company portfolio building, which is like go to the companies that are trending well and basically try to spend your time and try to see how you can make a good company great. And that's the third thing. Now, if you were to spend the time, it's again come back to how you spend your time. If you were to spend the time that is a company that is likely not going to go up onto the right and you spend all your time on that, you can imagine how much impact the company would have. The same thing would be true with the sourcing if you give an investor 200 different leads rather than a top.”

    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

  23. “Time is just doing that. You can't say I'm getting better and better at it. So I think it's the kind of activity to do whether you are on the growth curve of the activity or you are on the asymptote of the activity. And I think if you maximize that, then you're probably in a much better shape. Mark once said in a Q&A in internal to Facebook that he said that he and a lot of the reasons why we do that is because of how secure we are as people. And he would basically say that something like, I don't remember the exact number, but he said like 80% of his time, he does activity that's outside his comfort zone, which basically means that he's trying to be on this loping growth curve rather than the flat curve. I think most people can't do that because they're not secure enough to do it. But if you are able to do that, I think you'll have the greatest impact you can in the shortest amount of time. And impact also is, if you think about the total amount of impact is impact over time, right? The total amount of impact you can divide by the time that you spend.”

    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

  24. “Yes, so I have a framework for this. In terms of if you take a completely new activity, right, you're actually learning up in a curve and then you start a flat note, right? I mean, if you look at it, you go in a straight line, you keep growing as you go along, and then after point of time, you asymptote. You don't grow anymore. Take, for example, basically this thing brushing your teeth. I mean, brushing your teeth is now second nature. You can't say that if I spend two hours on it, you're going to get that much better. Probably not incremental. There is the opportunity cost to it. So in terms of activity, if every single activity that you do were on the straight line that every single hour that you spend, every single day you spend, it improves or increases you better each day, then I think you should be spending time on all kinds of different types of activity and you'd be okay. But I think if you spend 80% of your time actually saying that all you're trying to do is provide basically your traffic ticket at the New Jersey turnpike and you're handing it out, that can't be if 80%.”

    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

  25. “Yeah, motion is about doing tons of work, and I recall when I used to be younger, I would say I work twenty-four hours, I didn't sleep three nights in a row, and that's just basically saying you did a bunch of different things, lots of activity. But if you ask those three days of activity, what was the impact? What is the value of the activity? And you can't actually say much. Oh, I did two thousand things. And I think it's the writer passage. I think at the earlier phase of life, you liked that you actually work hard and you feel good about it. And working hard is the most important thing. I still think it's the most important thing. By the way, but if you work hard and don't work on the right things and you don't prioritize it, that doesn't lead to impact. And so the idea is that the motion is all about activity. Lots of different activity. It's kind of like a vanity metric. I mean, it's like saying I have these millions of billions of installs where the retention is like one person, right? It's sort of like a vanity 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