YouSaid · the spoken record

Ed Baker

lines on the record: 51
first: 2022-02-16
most recent: 2022-02-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I know I'm biased when I say this because I am an investor and I'm on the board, but I've been really impressed with what Woop has been doing related to growth. One. Well, it really starts with when I first got involved with Woop, one of the first things their founder Will and I talked about was a potential pricing change. I just kind of casually suggested an idea and the next week Will said, we tested that, we have the results, it moved the needle, and we've implemented it. And that was one week later. And I've had so many conversations like that with other founders. Maybe the idea never gets tested, or if it does, it takes months. And just the fact that even back then was able to execute so quickly on something like that, and they're doing that kind of stuff even more so today, that's really impressed me. I think a lot of it is about execution and hustle and just the ability to move really quickly.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think growth has become almost too quantitative and analytical, and when people talk about growth hacking, they're almost like focused too much on the metrics. For me, the most exciting part is the creative side of growth. Coming up with super creative ways to grow in new ways. Almost like taking a minute to just not even look at the data. And I know that that sounds counterintuitive, but the most successful things I've done that have really moved the needle on growth are things where I almost didn't even need to measure them because you implement a new feature and you suddenly see it's growing a lot faster. So it doesn't even really matter what the numbers say because you just know, wow, this made such a big difference. It works.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Focus, focus, focus. What are those big things you can do to move the needle? You don't need to do hundreds or thousands of experiments. A lot of times if you just step back and ask yourself, how can I remove the biggest barriers that my customers are running into today and just figure out one, two, or three big barriers to remove? It's as simple as that. You don't have to do hundreds and hundreds of experiments”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the biggest mistake founders make is hiring for growth teams at the wrong time. We briefly touched on this earlier, but you don't want to grow too early in the company's life cycle. You want to make sure you have product market fit first, and it can actually be a negative thing to try to grow before you have product market fit.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Several of the channels have died to death. And by that, I mean, the first thing I built that went viral was that email-based crush site. That would never go viral today because, well, first of all, if people get an email saying someone has a crush on you, they're probably not going to click on the link. These days, I don't think you get as many clicks on random links like that as you might have in the past. And secondly, spam filters oftentimes not even put it in your inbox versus back in 1999, people didn't have spam filters. People read every email they received. And so that's an example of one channel that used to work a lot better than it did now. There are other examples like Facebook, viral channels that used to be super viral 10 years ago, but don't really work today.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, let's do it. Basic framework of virality is the same today as it was even twenty years ago when I first started working on it in terms of how you calculate your k-factor and how you draw the viral loop. The framework is the same, but the channels themselves have changed.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hadn't really thought much about this hype subsidy, but I think that's a great point. Is it something you can't control? I don't think that means you shouldn't ride that wave if you can get it. But I think of it the same way I think of organic growth, which is just kind of, I mean, they're similar things. Hype or just word of mouth organic growth. It's not something that you can measure, but I look at it as icing on the cake. It's still a great thing to have. But I like to focus on the things I can measure, you know, when I'm calculating the K factor, for example, I'm not calculating how many people are telling their friends about it in person. But again, that's icing on the cake that just makes things grow even faster. So I measure the things I can measure. I still try to get that up to that magic point of going above one to get that exponential tipping point. But what I find is if you also have the hype in the word of mouth stuff, you might actually hit that tipping point before your calculated k factor even gets to one. You know, you're calculating.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think very few products have k factors above one these days. It's just a lot harder to get things to go viral these days. I don't pay too much attention to k-factors these days. I do think that if you have even a k factor below one, it can make a significant difference in things like CAC and LTV and the unit economics of a business. Because even with a k factor of something like 0.5, you're basically able to acquire twice as many customers for the same marketing cost. I do think that kind of stuff matters. I feel like K-factor is something that can be optimized over time and is not the first thing I look for in a company I'm considering investing in.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when I looked for companies to invest in, actually use a lot of the things I've learned from growth to pick companies I want to invest in. And by that I mean one of the first things I look for is does this company have product market fit? We talked about that at the beginning of this podcast. I think that's one of the most important questions to ask. And if the answer is yes, that's much more important to me than is this company already growing really fast? And maybe part of that I feel like, well, I can maybe help them with the growth part if they have product market fit then, you know, the growth will come more easily. But I take that best one thing I look at when I invest in companies.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think in the early days when our growth team was only five people, I was very much in the weeds myself. And I was running product experiments myself and really like deeply in the weeds. When our team got bigger, by the time I left Uber, the growth team was over 500 people. My role became much more one of managing people who were managing people who are managing people. I still like to get into the weeds, but I just wasn't able to do it nearly as much when I had that larger team. For me, that was one of the biggest differences between having a small team versus having a larger team was just my role became much more about helping other people become growth leaders themselves as opposed to doing the work myself.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up and they caught up with the pack and passed them at the end and won the race, and the point is it's okay if you get knocked down. It's okay if things don't work, but get back up and keep going. So I think that's an important cultural value, I think, for any startup to have. You're going to get knocked down over and over again and things aren't going to work, but it's okay as long as you keep going. That's how you ultimately win.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, how do we maintain morale if we're doing experiments that aren't moving the metric? I try to remind people that most of the experiments we do are not going to move the needle. And that's okay. We learn something from every single experiment we do, even the ones that either don't move the needle or that actually result in worse outcomes. The thing I like to do is ask ourselves, well, why? Why didn't that work? Or why don't we think that worked? And as long as we're learning, it's okay if we do a lot of experiments that don't help us grow because we then will be even smarter about the next experiments that we run. So much of growth is about testing things and failing and testing again and failing. Called it the Champion's mindset at Uber. And that was one of our cultural values. The video that we showed as an example of what is meant by this cultural value was someone running in a track meet. I can't remember which race this was, but they fell down on the track, tripped on something. Everyone else kind of ran ahead, but they got back.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think pretty much every AB test that we run, we run the AB test because we don't have the data. In terms of growth decisions being made without data, every test we do is a decision that's being made. I like to do tests that don't take a lot of time. I try to prioritize things that are simple to build. And then looking for things that will have big results.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they don't have credit cards, and even people that do have credit cards often don't like to use it because there's this two-factor authentication thing that's required here and it actually adds more friction. It doesn't remove friction. We decided to run a test in Hyderabad India where we said, let's let riders request their first ride without putting a credit card number in. In fact, we were told by our CEO not to run that test because he felt so strongly against it, but we had so much conviction it would make a big difference that we secretly ran the test just as a small experiment. And when we got the data back, it had doubled conversion rate to paid first trip. This is amazing. And we rolled that out in a lot of other countries as well. But it was, you know, removing that barrier of entering the credit card number and allowing riders to pay in cash.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One nice thing about a needle mover, it actually takes very little data to see that this is a needle mover. You need more data for the smaller improvements, maybe changing the color of this button, and you want to see, does that improve conversion by a fraction of a percent? And then maybe you need to let the test be running for weeks before you get enough data points. But I personally think that's kind of a waste of time. When there are other experiments you could be running, right away see, wow, this doubled conversion rate. Another thing we did at Uber that was a needle mover. I shared the rider to driver thing, but on the rider side, we found that in India in particular, a lot of people don't have credit cards. Uber, since day one, had been an app that required you to put in your credit card before you could use it. Makes sense. And that's part of what made Uber so magical is that you never had to get out your wallet and pay for a ride in cash. However, our team in India was saying, hey, there's so many people in this country that can't use Uber.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Products going to work on here is this stuff growth we'll work on. So you kind of draw those two circles and ideally you don't have overlap there. But even if you draw those ahead of time and it looks like there won't be overlap, inevitably there will be some areas of overlap and that's where just the frequent communication I think can make a big difference.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the most important thing to do when you have a growth team and a product team over communication between the head of product and the head of growth at Uber, I sat right next to Jeff Holden, our chief product officer, and we would try to communicate as frequently as possible about things and that the times we ran into bumps along the road were probably times that we just hadn't communicated well. And it's not just the two leaders communicating, but you really want the teams communicating too. I think setting up just regular weekly meetings where you get all the product leaders and growth leaders in a room discuss here's what we've been working on this past week and here's what we're going to be working on going forward over the next week figuring out are there potential areas of overlap we need to be able to discuss then there's also kind of the more formal roadmap planning that we would do every six months where we would spend more time trying to make sure that we had just said okay here's the stuff”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it made us better, you know, because he was so passionate about it that rubbed off on everyone else, myself Uda. And he cared so much. I think it made everyone else care even more. People saw the things they had worked on that past week. We'd present something to him on that Friday and he'd dig in and be talking to the person who had worked on that. And just he didn't care, like, is this someone who just joined the company last week that it was their first job out of college? Like he would just engage with them and get into the weeds with him. And that was awesome. And I think it just made people see the work I'm doing. It really matters. I think that's a great way for a CEO to be. Like I said, as the company gets bigger, I think it's not possible to do that once a company gets too big, unfortunately. But I think for smaller companies, that's the way it should be.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's important for the CEO to have one on ones with all of his or her direct reports frequently, at least weekly. So I think growth is largely about removing barriers.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want someone who's going to come in and say, All right, I figured out where I want to be and how I'm going to get there. But here are the things I need from you to help me get there.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Figure out what our North Star metric is, where are we today, and where do we want to be in the future? One of the first things that needs to happen for any growth leader is to just figure out what is the goal. Once you figure out, okay, this is our goal, then the next step is what are some of the things we're going to do to get there? So within that first month, you probably haven't yet found a needle mover. Maybe you have, if you've been lucky, but usually things take a bit longer than that, but to at least have a plan in terms of, okay, this is our North Star metric. This is where we are today. This is where we want to be by the end of the year, or maybe you don't even have by the end of the year. This is where we want to be within the next six months. And then say, and here are some of the bigger swings we want to take to try to find step changes to get there. And then I'd say the next step from there is saying, and here's what I need from you, the CEO, to help me get there. I'd say it's almost a red flag if the person you've just hired is not asking you for help as founder or CEO.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it's an experienced person, they'll be able to figure out a lot of it on their own. But I do think one of the most important things is to at least think about, well, who can be on their team on day one? I think that's probably one of the most important things. It's like think about who are the initial people that can be on that growth team with this new leader. Ideally having some people on that team who have been at the company for a while, who can really help them understand how the company works.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when I think back to my onboarding experience at Uber, for example, there wasn't much to it. I was basically told by our CEO, who was my manager, here are five people for you to start the growth team with. Go. That was my onboarding. And then the good news was that those five people on my team had been at the company, and I actually had a lot of help from those people on my team to get on board. One of them in particular really, he basically onboarded me and took me through all the dashboards they had, all the how everything worked, drew up an org chart and went through how the company was currently structured. It's funny because we didn't actually have a formal org chart at the time, and a lot of the reporting lines, no one even knew who reported to who, but we at least had some sense of how things were structured. So I guess that's a long way of saying, I don't think you necessarily have to have an amazing onboarding set up for this new head of growth that you're hiring. And again,”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teams. Not all companies do that 360 feedback, but even if they don't, I'll say, well, if I were to ask one of your direct reports, what are your strengths and what are your weaknesses? What do you think they would tell me? I think by framing it that way, rather than just saying, tell me about your strengths and weaknesses, I like to frame it as if I were to ask one of your reports or if I were to ask your manager, what would they say? And I think sometimes you might get a slightly different answer if you frame the question in that way.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think another thing I think is very important to try to figure out in that interview process is what is this person like as a manager and as a leader? You know, if they're very good at growth on their own, you know, maybe they do have like the creative side and the analytical side and they can come up with exciting things, A-B test and move the needle, but they don't know how to manage people, that would be a red flat. And there are kind of two ways I try to figure out how good of a people manager is this person. One is I just do reference checks. But another question I like to ask, I ask them about the last job they were at, what were some of their strengths and some of their weaknesses. Usually frame that question as could you tell me about the last time you got a performance review? You know, what were some of the strengths that you were told you have and were some of the areas that you need to work on that you were told you have. And ideally, you ask them that question framed as both like feedback from your manager as well as upward feedback from the people that have been on your”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the more senior the leader is that you're recruiting, the less defined the role needs to be. So if you're bringing someone in and saying, look, I need you to basically figure out growth. Come in here, you figure out our North Star metric, you figure out how to structure the team. You know, if you hire someone who has the experience to do that, that's great. And a lot of the more experienced people want to be able to come up with that. They don't want to be told, here's how you need to structure your team and here's the metric you need to grow. You know, maybe someone who doesn't have as much experience would like that guidance, but I think the more experienced leaders, they want to do that on their own. I think as I mentioned to you first week, I was at Uber, it was all about let's figure out what our North Star metric should be. And I was glad I was able to figure that out with my team rather than being told this is what it is. So I think it's perfectly okay not to have all those answers before you hire that growth leader. You just need to make sure you hire. That's why we talked about path one and path two. If you go down path two, just make sure you hire someone who”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if this is someone who's going to be working with you, you only want to hire someone who's willing to do that work. You've got to like feel like both of you are in on this thing and both of you are willing to put the time in on it. So I don't know if that's a good answer, but I'd say like don't be afraid to ask people to do some work. Sometimes you might need to get them excited about the position before you say, hey, come in and answer this challenge problem. So you might have to do a little bit of selling beforehand to get them excited about it. But if they're a true growth leader, they'll probably be excited to answer the challenge probably. You know, and I think if someone doesn't want to do that, that's potentially a red flag.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some other people on the team. I put a few slides together and started talking about all of the different things I would do to make that work. And here are some of the different things I would A-B test and everything from the design of the promo card itself to the landing page and make sure it's mobile optimized, you know, and all of that kind of, just talking through everything I would do and everything I would measure to figure out how to turn that into a needle mover.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me about an A b test you've run that you thought was going to be a huge needle mover, but it actually didn't move the needle. To just have them talk about some of the growth experiments they've done in the past can be one good way to just understand, okay, what have they actually done? At the end of the day, you want someone who's going to move the needle. Ask them how have they moved the needle in the past. That's one of the first things I do. Another way to do that, and I like to do this as well, is to then ask them some sort of challenge problem to solve. Ideally related to your own business. So when Travis, the CEO of Uber, was interviewing me, he actually gave me a challenge problem about Uber promo cards. And he just said, we have these promo cards, we haven't really figured out exactly how we're going to use these yet. Tell me how you would make these promo cards work. And what would you do to turn this into a big source of new writers? It was just a pretty open-ended question. He gave me the question a few days before I came in to present my answer to him.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think the first thing I would look for in any growth leader has to be someone who has both the art and the science. So by that I mean they're very analytical, but they're also very creative. I think growth is something where you just, you have to be able to combine those two things. And especially in the leader of the growth team, it has to be someone who can kind of use both sides of the brain to do that. Of course, as they build out their team, there may be people on the team that are more creative or more analytical, but I think the leader should really be strong in both of those areas. So at a high level, that's one of the first things I'd look for. In order to figure out, does this person have that art and science kind of combination? I think one of the questions I like to ask is to have them tell me about some of the growth experiments they've done in the past that have either worked or that haven't worked. Sometimes I'll say, tell me about an A-B test you did that surprised you that was an even bigger needle mover than you thought it would be. Or on the flip side,”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who's ideally done this at another company like a Facebook, for example, or an Uber? We're going to bring them in and ask them to start up the growth team. And that's what the CEO at Uber did with me when he brought me over from Facebook to Uber. He just said, all right, Ed, start our growth team. Go. So I think either way can work. But I think if you're going to hire someone externally to start up a new growth team within the company, it's really important, I think, that that person has had experience on a growth team at one of these leading companies so they know what they're doing. Whereas if it's someone who doesn't have that experience, it's probably better for them to live within an existing organization and kind of build a team from within.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got it. I think the first step is to decide on where do you want growth to live within the organization. I can share examples with you of companies I've invested in, for example, that have decided growth should live within product. In that case, you know, the company I'm working with right now, that's where growth lives within whoop right now. And we actually had someone on the team is a product manager, but he was very analytical and was actually working on a lot of growth related stuff. He's now driving a lot of the growth efforts within Woop underneath the product team. That's one way to do it. If you have someone on your team already who is really more of like a very quantitative and analytical, ideally all product managers, but if you have someone who's like especially good at that kind of stuff, maybe that could be your growth leader. I'd say alternatively, another way to do it is to say, you know what, we're going to go out and hire someone externally, someone who has a lot of growth expertise already.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way to do it, I don't think you necessarily need a separate growth team and a separate product team. And I've seen companies that sometimes build the growth team within product. I've also seen an example of a company, I remember one of the founders of Booking.com said to me, what's the point of a product team we only had a growth team? And the growth team did product, but we didn't need a product team. There are different ways to talk about it, and ultimately it does largely depend on the leaders you have in terms of how you structure things.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the challenges that remained a challenge throughout the entire time I was at Uber, and I'd say it probably became a bigger challenge over time rather than a smaller one, is that we had a growth team and a product team that, you know, were kind of both operating next to each other. And in the early days, maybe it actually didn't create as much friction because there was just so much stuff to work on that it was easy for the growth team to say, all right, we'll work on this stuff. And the product team said, we'll work on this stuff. But as both teams grew and grew to hundreds of people on each team, there started to be more points of overlap where we'd have sub teams working on similar things. And I think anytime you have areas of overlap in any business that can create some friction, and I think that's also when politics and that kind of stuff appears, I'd say that was one of the challenges of having both a growth team and a product team. And back to your earlier question, like there's one.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at both Facebook and Uber as examples just because I was on both of those teams and I think those companies have done quite well. And in both of those cases, they had separate growth teams where the growth leader reported directly to the CEO and these teams were structured cross-functionally. A lot of the reason Uber was this way is I basically took everything I learned from Facebook and built the Uber growth team in this way. But when I say cross-”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is once you really feel like, all right, we're on to something big, we've got the product market fit, people that are using this love it, now we just need to add some fuel to the fire to make it grow faster. And that's actually why I decided to go to both Facebook and Uber was I felt like those companies clearly had found product market fit. They had built products that their users love. I remember, you know, with Uber, my first Uber trip. And a lot of people can probably also talk about their first Uber trip. It was a magical experience. And when I talked about the drivers, they said this is amazing. I can now make money in a flexible way. I'm making more than I've ever made before. So for them, it was magical as well. To me, that's the product market fit. And then I wanted to go help Uber grow that thing that worked.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think one mistake startups sometimes make, and I've made this mistake myself as well, trying to focus on growth too early. I think you want to find product market fit before you start to work on growth. Sometimes startups will say, oh, we need to hire a growth leader in order to find product market fit, but I actually think they're two different things. So to me, product market fit is just building a product that people love to use. I think that's actually the hardest thing for any entrepreneur to do is to find that product market fit. I think there's often a lot of luck involved with that. An analogy I like to use is like drilling for oil, no matter how good your drill is, if you're drilling in the wrong place, you'll never hit it. I feel like every entrepreneur that's building their startup, they're building their drill and they're drilling somewhere, but they might be drilling in the wrong place. You don't want to start growing if you're drilling in the wrong place. You want to make sure you've hit that oil first. Then you add the growth expertise. So I'd say the right time to build out that growth team.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're inspecting vehicles and making sure drivers pass background checks and all that stuff. So there's also that operations component to growth. So it's really a cross-functional thing. It's not just marketing or not just product. You know, it's everything combined.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think at a high level, it comes back to what I was just talking about, which is moving that North Star metric. So I think of growth as a cross-functional team effort to move the metric that ultimately drives the growth of the business. And usually that North Star metric is correlated with revenue. So ultimately, it's driving more revenue for the business. The reason I don't use revenue, though, is a North Star metric is I think it's helpful to have something that's a bit more tangible, like how many trips are happening every week or how many users are on Facebook every month. I think of growth as just like whatever you have to do to grow that number faster falls under growth. And that can include marketing, that can include product. In fact, a lot of times it is product driven changes. That tends to be what I like to focus on the most at Uber. We found that there's also an operations component to growth, you know, actually onboarding all of these drivers. There's that in-person component to it with all the teams on the ground.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back to your original question The nice to haves versus the needle movers. I think one of the most important things of any product leader or growth leader is prioritization. And it becomes a lot easier to prioritize things when you can ask the question, how much is this likely to move our North Star metric? A lot of times you don't obviously don't know the exact answer, but you can make some assumptions say, well, if we make this tweak and it increases the conversion rate by this much, then our North Star metric will increase by this much. Therefore, that's a pretty big one. Whereas this one, even if it works out great, it's only going to move things this much, even though it's nice to have, you know, it's not going to move the needle as much. So let's not spend resources on that thing.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so at Facebook, when I was there, the North Star metric was monthly active users. So that was the metric that the entire growth team was looking at every single day, and every week we'd have a team meeting where we'd say, how much has MAU grown or not in the past week and why? And by having that North Star metric, we could then say to everyone on the team, if you're not working on something that's moving this metric in a positive way, you're probably not working on the most important thing. Similarly at Uber, our North Star metric, in fact, one of the first things I did when I started the growth team at Uber was said to the team, we've got to come up with our North Star metric. We decided on instead of something like monthly active riders, we said, well, it's a two-sided marketplace. We need a metric that encapsulates both sides of the marketplace. So we did weekly trips because every trip requires a rider and a driver. And so that was the metric that we aligned the entire team around and said, this is the metric we need to move.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question, and I think the way to start, first of all, coming up with what is the North Star metric of this company? What is that one metric that we are trying to grow and setting goals for where you want that metric to be by the end of the first half, by the end of the second half of the year?”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hundreds of other AB tests that we were doing, putting all together, and that didn't drive as much growth as one little thing like that.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Move on from me. Okay, great. You know, as I mentioned, we were supply constrained at Uber. Here's an example of something we did. Again, it was actually a pretty simple thing that we built. It didn't take a lot of time, but it truly was a needle mover that resulted in a step change in growth. And that was when we added in the rider app, we just added a little button that said, want to make some money become a driver. And suddenly we had this whole new source of drivers coming in from our rider base. Before we had that, most of our drivers came from paid marketing and we had a driver referral program. And of course we had some just organic signups that we didn't have to pay for. But by adding that little button in the rider app that said become a driver, suddenly we had as many new drivers signing up from that button as we did from all of our paid marketing efforts combined. That's an example of a needle mover. And when I look back at my time at Uber, every year we maybe had one or two things like that that accounted for more growth than everything else combined.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, at Uber, first of all, I think one of the big takeaways for me was just the importance of focus, especially when you have limited resources. When I had a small team at Uber on day one, it was five people. I just realized how important it is to focus on the needle movers, especially with a two-sided marketplace. The other area that we learned we needed to focus on is focus on the side of the marketplace that's the bottleneck. And in our case at Uber, it tended to be the supply side. We needed to add more drivers in order to grow more so than riders. So kind of focusing on the big needle movers rather than doing like hundreds of A-B tests every week, you can, by just focusing on like the things that”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Japan went from one of our slowest growing countries to one of our fastest growing countries shortly after that we surpassed our local competitor in Japan.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One that comes to mind is actually in Japan we were not as big as the local competitor in Japan at the time. I think they were called Mixi. And when we dug into the metrics in Japan, we noticed that most people were not inviting their friends. And when we compared the conversion rates in Japan versus in other parts of the world, there was a big drop-off occurring in Japan on that invite step. And when we dug into it and talked with our country manager in Japan and the team there, they said, you know, it's just a cultural thing. It's considered rude to invite people to a new thing like this. And that's why everyone's skipping that step. And so what we did, it was actually a fairly minor tweak instead of calling them invites, we called them announcements. And we said, now that you've signed up for Facebook, why don't you let Facebook announce to all of your friends that you're now on Facebook and this is where they find you? And suddenly everyone started saying, sure, I'll let Facebook announce this to all of my friends. And just by changing the wording, it was more culturally.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think my biggest takeaways from Facebook were one, learning how to structure a growth team and focus on a North Star metric and align that whole team around growing that North Star metric. And then I think another one is the importance of internationalization. We did a lot of stuff at Facebook to grow in some of our more competitive international markets. That was an interesting takeaway. Happy to share examples there. And I'd say the third thing, which wasn't obvious to me before going to Facebook, but when I got there, we focused so much more on retention and engagement than acquisition. And basically as you get bigger, those two metrics of retention and engagement actually become a lot more important to maintaining growth than new user acquisition.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maneuver also ended up running the product team my last year there. Before leaving, moving back to the East Coast with my wife and family. And these days, I invest in startups and advise startups on growth”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Launched their app platform, I found that to be a great place to experiment with building viral apps, and I built several silly apps that all grew to millions of users just through this viral loop. And then I ended up starting a company right after going to Stanford Business School called FriendLeaf, Social Question and Answer Site, but it was really just another dating site disguise. You'd ask people questions about themselves, answer questions about yourself. That grew to about 25 million registered users all through viral growth, no marketing spent. Again, using those kind of that same framework that I had started working on back in college, we then sold the company to Facebook. I ended up running the International Growth Team there. And at Facebook, I really learned what it's like to work on a larger growth team. And there were some pretty interesting lessons I learned there. I then left Facebook in 2013 to join Uber. Back when Uber was still a pretty small startup that a lot of people hadn't yet heard of, to start up their growth team. And over the next four years, I ran the growth team.”
2022-02-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source