YouSaid · the spoken record

Ely Lerner

lines on the record: 61
first: 2023-10-25
most recent: 2023-10-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I'm an old school marketplace guy. I'm most excited by network effects. And so I really think the place like network effect things tend to be the things that give me most excited. There isn't actually very many people in that middle zone in terms of marketplace network effects today. So in the really early zone, we all throw out a company that you haven't heard of because it's really, really early. But I know a founder of this company called Cashflow Portal that is essentially building the angel list for real estate investing in a way that it's just never been done before. I think this is a place where there are potential for network effects where they didn't used to be because of a market shift. I mean, this is, you know, the core thing is like, has something changed about technology or something changed about a market that makes something possible that wasn't possible before?”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it needs to be clean and structured, but they need to be able to iterate towards the things they need to learn. And so they need to have some data and they need to have the ability to say, hey, we need to be able to measure X because X is really important and we know how to go get that instrumented quickly.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does the founding team understand the growth mindset, right? This is a point about can we instill growth in everything we're doing? They may not have that yet if they're hiring you, but do they get it at the top level where they're going to be able to make that shift? Because if they're not going to be able to make that shift, you're going to be running uphill the whole time you're there.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they're oversaturated. I mean, lots of things are oversaturated. Paid is oversaturated in a lot of ways. I would say, though, that these things are not dead. They're dead as broad brush tools. Paid has specific niches where it works well. Push notifications have specific niches where they work well. I think the idea that you can just slap push notifications on something and drive up engagement, that's dead.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, the concept of growth tactics has died to death, right? There was a whole like this whole idea of growth hacks, and there's a set of growth hacks that everybody can throw on to get quick wins. Growth is not about growth hacks, right? Growth is about finding leverage and exploiting it. Yeah.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of the sort of like zero to one GM roles that I had push that home. When you start out your product career or growth career working on a more mature product, it's easy to not really see the forest for the trees, right? Like you've got a lot going on and there's a lot of things already there. You're sort of a small piece. When you are doing zero to one, you have to see the forest. You now own the forest, right? You own the full set of outcomes. And so I think that shift maybe helped me make that mental shift.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think early in my career, I did the thing that I think a lot of people do be too focused on solutions, right? Be too focused on the feature and not think about the outcome. You see this in a lot of people is like they think about product as like, we want to build the coolest X. And really, they need to be thinking about the outcomes they are trying to drive for the customer and for the business and where those things overlap.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you shouldn't try to be everything to everyone. When you're first starting a product, the general wisdom this holds true for horizontal as well, is that you should probably be pretty narrow. It's just in horizontal, you're narrow horizontally. Again, it's sort of like there's a core set of people across a number of different functions or business types where they have a really acute problem that is actually structurally similar to that really acute problem in a number of other verticals. And it's just those people that you are focused on and you're focused on that kind of acute problem. Not every dentist because every dentist doesn't have that same acute problem that our table needs actually.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, in the airtable case, it's probably something like they have key problems in their business that require collaboration on sets of data. That is shared by a set of people. There are probably a number of other attributes that are sort of correlated to having that problem also, which you can then use for tracking and targeting and things like that, but they have that need.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A horizontal products also have an ICP. I love this one. I'm going to call this out even though you didn't ask because I think it's an important one for so many people. Horizontal products have an ICP because the true ICP should be defined in terms of attributes, not personas. It's about attributes. And attributes can be horizontal attributes. They are the attributes that the core group of people across a number of verticals or whatever have in common that make your product such a good fit for them.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, one of them is not understanding your ICP. Depending on how good your top of funnel is, you are likely acquiring a lot of people who are not a great fit for your product. And so one of the biggest things I see people do wrong is they see they have a conversion problem. They point a team at conversion and they look at the conversion metric overall. The problem is a bunch of those people are non-ICP and they're never going to convert anyway. And so you're spending a lot of time trying to convert a bunch of people and you're going to get marginal improvements to conversion because it's not all the way to activation. Like you can make the button bigger, like things will happen. You'll move that metric as opposed to really understanding who your ICP is, being able to track your ICP in that activation funnel so you know how well the ICP is doing and then finding the highest leverage gap for those core ICP users and targeting that specifically.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, the growth things that drive the most upside are always in activation. Activation is really that place where it makes the difference between you've got a bunch of people who could have value from your product to getting them to the point where they have an engaged habit long term, getting value from that product. And again, back to the like retention is king, right? Like retention stacks your business, retention drives engagement, which drives virality. Like it's just all the things.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in general, the model now is to have growth be embedded in everything that you're doing. There was a period of time, and there are still maybe companies who need to do this. There was a period of time from nobody thinking about growth. It was necessary to pull those things out into their own orgs to help that org make that maturity step into starting to think about growth and starting to bring together those functions. Honestly, a bunch of those companies have now moved to the third step, which is now integrating that into everything they do. If you are a company that is at the first stage, it may well be the right step for you to go to having a separate growth org, but you should think that your end goal is to integrate growth into everything that you're doing.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're working closely with them, it's going to start getting obvious that you're not getting the right value of that relationship. You're going to know. You're going to get to the point in your business. And this does happen, right? Like advisors will be better at certain types of things than other types of things. And if the things that are important for your business are the things that they are good at, you're going to get lots of value. And as your business progresses, if you move into things that they are not as good at, you're going to pretty quickly know that you're not getting the same level of value from that relationship. And you need to start looking for somebody who is really good at the next set of problems that you have.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, I think have like six people that I'm working with at the same time. I probably can do a couple more than that, but that's about as many as I want to do at any given time. I'm pretty close to the ground, though. Like I'm spending an hour with them every week plus additional time where I'm just diving into their stuff. And so I think depending on the level of advising you're doing, you could do more. At high level advising, you could take tons of clients”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the founder side of that, if the founder is not willing to engage and commit to the relationship, then it doesn't work, right? Like at the end of the day, if the founder's not going to engage, not going to show up, like this happens sometime, especially with high-level advisors. The founder is just too busy, right? Like, it's just not going to work. You need to get to that working relationship where you are aligned and working together on driving outcomes for your business and you're doing that in an engaged period. Again, it's kind of retention. It's kind of activation, right? You got to get the activation for that thing to go so that that founder has a habit of working with this advisor consistently and driving outcomes.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get a kind of advisor who has done a bunch of things before, and essentially their advice is do the things I did because they worked for me. That happens a lot. What the challenge is if their situation was meaningfully different from yours in a way that you may not even totally understand, that you're going to burn a lot of time trying the playbook that worked for them that doesn't actually work for the nuance of your business.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the one contrarian view that you see a lot is people tend to build teams focused on churn. And I think that's a mistake. I don't think you want to focus teams on churn. Retention is actually the thing you want to focus on. And actually, most of that is probably activation. Generally, New Year's for Activation and getting people to the place where they experience the core value of your product and then build a habit around that value is your strongest lever to retention, which is the thing that is going to impact your churn metric. If you try to focus on churn, these people are already lost. One, they maybe aren't even your ICP in the first place. You shouldn't be focusing your effort of trying to prevent people from churn who are not a good fit for your product. Or you've already lost them, even if you're ICP, right? And you really should be moving your focus back probably to activation to really build strong retention. Retention is the most important thing for sure.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. This is a great example where offense should not be about the solution. Your offense is not the solution. The offense is the leverage point that you are trying to move. And so that team's goal is figure out how to move that leverage point, figure out what they need to do to move the metrics in that leverage point and be learning as quickly as possible if that is the wrong bet. This is another mistake you see a lot, which is like, I did some work to try to determine where that leverage is. I made a bet and then I didn't question that bet for a long time. That happens all the time. Really, the thing to know is like, you need to be building confidence over time and you need to pull forward the key riskiest assumptions in that bet, right? I think this is one of the key things. This is again something I hope found all the time, which is how do we identify what the key risk assumptions are? And then how do we do things very quickly to essentially learn if we are wrong about one of those key assumptions that would mean that this is not the bet to be taking? The earlier you can do those things, the better.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a great question. The biggest mistakes I see are not choosing is one, right? On the offensive side of like the whole point of strategy is to say no to most things and focus in on a small number of really high leverage things. Like you have to make that bet. And so when you see companies with nine company level OKRs at the top level or whatever, right? It's like they're just trying to do all the things. Like your chance of success is already low. If you do not focus down on one or two core key bets and do that strategy work to figure out where that leverage is, you're not going to succeed. So that's one. It's just having way too many things that you're calling offense. That's one mistake. The other mistake actually is way too much defense, right? I've seen this in actually like logic books. There's sort of a human fallacy of because X thing is important, I'm just going to assume anything I do in that direction is important, right? And they just forget about this concept or they're not thinking about this concept of diminishing returns. That is very, very common because they're like, well, we have to invest in X. It's like, yes, you do, but you're investing way too much and the opportunity of doing that is way too high.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking about this is really important and how you talk about it is really important. But the one thing to remember here is defense is equally important to offense, if not more important. The whole point is that these are existential. If you do not do these things, you're not going to have a company to invest in offense. They don't exist. You need to be making sure that everybody understands how important these things are. You need to be celebrating it in the right way. I think this is another thing that people do wrong is they tend to celebrate offense. They tend to celebrate metrics movers. And that makes people working on defensive things feel crappy because they never get celebrated. But really, you need to build a culture that's celebrates finding points of diminishing return and giving back resources. Like that's so valuable to the business because the opportunity cost of that, right? And so you should be celebrating this idea that like, hey, we actually think we only need to invest this much in this tech debt and no more. And we figured out a way to cut that in half. Celebrate that all day, right? That's a huge impact to your business because of the opportunity cost of the savings that they have.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trust and safety becomes offense because a core barrier for Airbnb is this idea that like I'm in somebody else's home. Like that's a core barrier to value delivery for your product. And so that's a place where actually like, and they've invested a huge amount in trust and safety overall. And the reason for that is they are getting outside returns by doing that because every sort of incremental point of trust that people have that like I'm going to go to somebody else's home and it's going to be okay. They're driving sort of like net new demand that didn't exist when they didn't have that trust, right? And so that's, again, like in some cases trust and safety is most cases trust and safety defense, but sometimes it can actually be offense.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a great question. You definitely do. The most common place for that is as you top out a growth loop. You know, the first growth loop for your business, at some point is going to kind of start topping out that S-curve and be more in an extraction phase, right? You need to be layering on a second one. You should start before it totally starts topping out. Like that will become the offensive bet. Once it starts topping out, you still need to invest in it. Like you still need to be, right? Like if it's a virality loop, like you can't just be like, okay, we're starting to get lower returns. We're just going to ignore it from now on. It starts turning into a defensive thing where you're like, we need to keep maintaining this, but additional resourcing on it is not producing additional returns, right? We're now in this diminishing returns curve. So then that moves like that virality. Those things move into the defensive sphere. The opposite one also happens. Actually, an example of the opposite one here that I think I see is trust and safety. Trust and safety is usually defense, right? You're avoiding downside risk. But sometimes it becomes offense. And like Airbnb is a good example, actually.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so again, I think the most common version of this is actually you have sometimes this is called a core experience org that really owns all of the defense. Like one of the things that I've seen be really effective is when you have a core experience org that owns every piece of the defense, all of the defenses within that org and no non-defense is in that org, that really lets them prioritize apples to apples defense against defense. You're empowering them in a much stronger way. And then you have an org for probably each of your offensive bets. Again, like you should at most have three core offensive bets and an org that is dedicated to each of those things.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the other piece of this is actually org. Like the core sort of phases of this generally are go in and look at everything you are planning to do right now, like your whole roadmap. And essentially tag all the things as offense and defense and figure out, and neither because you're always going to have a bunch of things that are like, this is actually not offense. It's not really defense. Should we really be doing this right now? Maybe we shouldn't, right? And that's going to help a lot. But once you do that, actually, one of the things can be really high leverage is aligning your org around offensive and defensive bets can also be really powerful. Because then it allows you to have really focused teams on those offensive bets that are not getting distracted by other things. And focus is how you make progress, right?”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're going to be way down the emission returns curve. It's going to take massive amount of investment, and you're still probably not going to get the risk to zero, right? So really, it's about finding that diminishing returns point and not investing past that point. Because every cycle that you're investing past that diminishing returns point, you could be putting into offense, which is people really undervalue the opportunity cost of those cycles, right? Especially because, as we said, offense is compounding. And so things that compound, the time value of money here, right? The sooner you invest in those things, the more that curve is going to bend over time.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, great. Offense and bets, absolutely. So, in earlier stages of companies, they tend to be growth focused, right? It's like, what is your probably one primary growth loop and how do you accelerate that growth loop? Because again, you're looking for offensive bets should be compounded. You want to find things where the more you invest there, you get more and more compounding returns, right? As opposed to these little short-term one-off, you could move a business metric one-off, but it doesn't do it in a compounding way. That's not offense. At later stages, things like product market fit expansion absolutely are your offense, right? To your point, if you're Figma and you're building your co-pilot, that is probably one of your core one to three key strategic bets for the company. On the defensive side, I think the key thing about performance is a good one. Risk and fraud is another one, right? Technical scaling, all of these things are in this space. A key aspect of defense is that there's almost always a diminishing returns curve. There's a point on that curve where you have reduced the risk of the downside to a significant amount, not to zero. Like if you try to move the risk to zero,”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it's 10 things, that's also a problem. And they have to be things that are really focused on pushing your business to the next level. The offense is things you have to do. There are always things that are not moving business metrics that need to happen, mainly because they are protecting against downside risk.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ship the feature. A ticket shows up in my JIRA or whatever. It says we got to build X. I build X. I feel like my job is to build the thing you tell me to build. That is, I think, one of the biggest gaps between really high output engineering teams and engineering teams that struggle to have high output. That's one of them. Two is actually this offense and defense thing. And so I think another very common thing. I have this framework that I've written about that I've used with almost every company that I advise of thinking about everything you're doing as a company, especially things that your product and engineering teams are doing, because that's the highest leverage, highest opportunity cost as either offense or defense. And then there's neither, which you probably shouldn't be doing. You see a lot of companies where a lot of cycles are going to things that are very marginally impactful to the business overall. And to maybe preview the framework a little bit, offense is things that are really like targeted at a small number of bets that are targeted at pushing your business to the next level.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's great. You want to do that grocery? We could do a whole session on that, but lots of different reasons. But the most common ones are engineering ownership of outcomes, like the strongest lever that you can pull to really drive high functioning engineering teams is engineering ownership of outcomes. Very frequently you get teams set up where the engineering team feels like it's owning output and not outcomes. That leads to all kinds of things. So that's one.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a great question. There's sort of three key things I see as signals of successful relationship. Really, especially when you're early on and like trying to figure out strategy, you can ask questions of data. You can ask questions of customers and you can ship small things quickly to learn. Those are the levers that you need to be able to pull. If you cannot pull all three of those levers, that can be a challenge. There have been times where one of those levers people are struggling with. Like I've worked with people where we start working on strategy and then we realize their teams just can't ship. Data is one where like if you just have no data, I probably need to say like come back to me when you have instrumentation.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The package that I do is, let's call it 80 20 cash in equity. But again, on a month to month basis for this hands-on advising, the nice thing about that is it's not a lot of equity up front. If we end up working together for years, and this does happen, I mean, Casey has clients he's done two plus years on. So sometimes you actually find really high value long-term engagements, and then that starts adding up a little bit. But early on, you're not giving away that much equity for the value that you're getting, right? You're actually skewed more towards the cash because it's sort of this like we're exchanging value as we go.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually, what you would do is you would look at what you would hire a full time C level in that position for, and then you would just scale it back by the fraction. So usually it's like two days a week or three days a week. Those tend to be the most common versions of that. And so you're really just scaling that back. So you also generally don't put a cliff on the equity because they, you know, sometimes it's a six month engagement or whatever, but you're really just taking what you have and scale it back down to the three or two.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I think it's more important in the place where we are not going to work together, but I'll also answer your question when we are not going to work together. I'm really trying to set you up with like core frameworks and approaches to maximize your chances of success without me there. And if any given time, either of us feels like we're not getting enough value out of the relationship, we just stop and there's no more equity that you're giving me. There's no more cash that's changing hands. Like we can just stop whenever we want. There's no commitment on either side. You can just start working together and see how it's going. And if you're getting value, you're getting value. And if you're not getting value, you stop.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think usually with the people that I work with after three or four calls together, we are both probably at the place where we're like, we either are super jazzed to work together and we're going to do this or this is probably not the right time or not the right fit and we should, you know, we can check back in in six months or something. So it's usually within that amount of time that you kind of get it.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is, I think, a general problem. I'll tell you my approach to it. I don't try to make claims with founders. My model is I meet as many founders as I can and I help them as much as I can for free. And if at some point we feel like I have capacity and there's a good fit and I'm bringing a lot of value, then we formalize the relationship.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it helps a lot. It doesn't have to be identical because it's identical, you're never going to find the person, right? I think the things that matter most are one is like, did they develop the playbook or did they scale the playbook? I think you see a lot of split between somebody who scaled a playbook that was developed prior to them or they developed the playbook from scratch. And in all of these different areas, you should be thinking about, are we developing the playbook or are we trying to scale the playbook? And you want to match your sort of advising to which stage you're at within the sort of functional places, I think, again, on the growth side, like if your primary lever is virality, definitely get somebody that did virality stuff, right? If they come from a performance world, they're going to struggle to help you with the core virality stuff and vice versa, right? Any of that matters a lot. Geography mostly matters. This is where it depends, right? I think there are things where the geography matters a lot and there are things where the geography matters less. So like brand, brand people need to know the culture of”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much better off focusing on one primary growth lever and ignoring the rest. You need to layer them on later, but you shouldn't be doing it in an early stage. So when you are laying those on, you are now growing the organ. You're actually probably hiring in some of those places to layer those on.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a great point. This is where the teach to fish is really important, right? Because the founder can't rely on me. If they are not able to run the functions of their company, that's going to be a problem. And so it's much higher leverage for me to help them up level in how they execute. This is where, again, at the hands-on level, we work on everything from strategy to then how do I set up my org to execute on this. So we did this last week and here's what we learned. Let's think about that and make new decisions going forward because you're there every week. You're a second brain for that founder all the way through the process and you're helping them up level all the way across. If you tried to embed me in one of your functions, then you're getting too far away from that function if it's a core offensive leverage growth function for your company, which you shouldn't be. And if you need me to do those things, that's going to be a problem because I'm not going to be there the whole time. And I'm only there an hour a week, right? And so like you really need to be able to do it. And I can help you get better at doing that thing. At early stages of startups, you are almost always.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're just not close enough to the ground to really be a thought partner. They're getting value from mining your experience if your experience lines up with what they are doing. This, to maybe to your question about what you should you look for. If you're doing high level, you kind of have to make some bets on what kind of problems do you think you're going to run into and hope you get some people that have seen exactly those kinds of things before. The hands-on thing is nice because you get to combine the experience with those things before with true thought partnership in doing the job week to week. And this is why I love doing this hands-on advising. I feel like I provide way more value in the hands-on advising space. I also learn way more. Like my learning velocity as a hands-on advisor is honestly like exponentially faster even than when I was an operator. Everybody doing high level advising will tell you that they don't learn anything. They get bored doing it.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's this problem we're facing. You're like, oh, yeah, I've seen something like that before. Here's what we did. Here's what we learned. Here's what we tried, and then the founder goes away. That's your typical sort of high level advisor. The newer model, and the model that I'm doing is what I've been calling hands-on advising. And so, you know, back to earlier, we were talking about this line between advising on one side where it's all about teach to fish and then consulting contracting fractional interim full-time on the other where delivery is happening right what i'm doing this hands-on advising thing is on the advising side of the line so i'm there to teach you to fish not to fish for you but i'm about as close to the line as you can get without crossing it right so what that tactically means is my engagements with founders tend to be weekly like i'm sitting down with that founder every week we're diving in and working on whatever is the highest leverage thing for the business at any given time and then i'm spending some of my own time outside of those weekly sessions diving into their data watching their call getting up to speed enough on their product and their business and their customer to be a thought partner in those weekly sessions which is something you don't get to do when you're doing a high level advice”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a functional advisor, let's again use maybe the marketing advisor as an example for a functional advisor, I would say you want to figure out what the lever is, right? To your point about performance or brand or SEO content, you don't want to delegate figuring out what the lever is. You should be figuring out what the lever is. Once you figure out what the lever is, bring in somebody who has done that thing at similar types of companies to yours at similar stage to help you with that lever. That's a fantastic step path for that functional advisor. On the company level advisor side, it is more difficult. The company level advisor thing, this is where you kind of have this depth of engagement spectrum. You have your traditional kind of high-level company advisor on one end, right? This is, I think it was your most common company level advisor historically. When you're a high level advisor, you're doing this thing where essentially you're meeting with the founder once a month, sometimes every other month because they got busy. The founder's coming to you with some problem that they're facing, right? And they're like.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. I think that's exactly right. Yeah. And then at some point, you get to the point where you do need to hire somebody.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of that founder's time, or it's really what it's doing is you're using your cycles in a lower leverage way than you should be as a founder. Again, it's not because you want to step back from product strategy, but it's that you want to be focused on the highest leverage pieces there. That's where fractional can actually be really useful. And so a fractional person can sort of bridge that gap for you where you're not to the point yet where you need to hire, you're not big enough to hire a full-time person. So that's one approach. Functional advisor is the other one. So sometimes you'll have sort of a more junior people manager in one of those functional areas and a functional advisor can be really helpful to sort of bridge the gap between the person who's actually executing the org and kind of like the thought leadership you need in that functional area”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a great question, especially if you think about function, there tends to be sort of a time factor here. Because if, let's say product-led growth is sort of the primary lever that you're using, you need to be owning that. Company level advisor who is sort of leaning into teach you to fish, right? Which is kind of to me the advising side of the line here is fantastic even from the very beginning because that person has got that experience. You're the one actually making the decisions. You're the one actually executing at the end of the day. But they are helping you get better at doing that thing and giving you guidance. That's good early on. At some point, as you scale, you're going to have to start building a function around this as that function grows bigger, you will need leverage in running and managing that function that is executing on your strategy. There tends to be a gap period for most startups where they are not yet big enough. It doesn't yet make sense to hire a full head of growth, head of marketing, head of product, but it's getting big enough that it's taking too much.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're a product led business, the product is a major growth lever for your business. Hiring an experienced product leader and then hoping that they are going to figure out the strategy for you is just not a good path.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it's the primary growth lever for your business, it is the most important piece of your business. And at the end of the day, the person you hire will not have the full company perspective that you do. They will not have the right levels get in the game and they will not be incentivized to take the right level of risk. Only the founder is going to take the right level of risk that is required. You definitely can hire. Hiring is important. You need leverage. You need experts in different areas. But if those are offensive areas, we can talk about offense and defense later on if you want, but if those are offensive areas, which are like primary growth levers for your business, you need to be owning that at the end of the day and leveraging that expertise to help make you do the job better. You need to be owning it. For defensive areas, absolutely, you can hire and delegate. And you should hire and delegate, right? So like customer service, if customer service is not a primary growth lever for your business, which once in a while it is, but usually it is not, you absolutely can hire an experienced CS leader to run that area for you and just take it totally out of mind.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a great question. I think I see founders struggle with this question quite a bit. I think maybe starting with functional advisors, I think there are two things to consider when you think about functional advisors. One mistake I see founders make a lot is trying to delegate the core pieces of their strategy because of their own background. And so I think one sort of like piece of advice I give a lot to people is as a founder, you should be owning the strategy for your primary growth lever. If that's product, marketing, sales, whatever the primary growth lever for your business is, you should not delegate that thing. I think a lot of founders are like, hey, I don't have a lot of background in X. I need to bring in somebody who's super experienced in X. It is okay to bring somebody in to leverage and help you learn and help you through it. But at the end of the day, you need to own that strategy. You cannot delegate that strategy. That, I think, is something to be careful of in general, both for full-time hires and for functional advisors, because I see people do that.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coaching is really about personal and professional leadership development. Company level advising, like the reason founders are talking to me is because they want help growing their business. At the end of the day, that is the purpose of the company. That is the founder's job is to grow the business. The ways they do that span across people, org, culture, and all of their different functions, right? And so, again, company level advising is really that I'm helping you do your job at that highest level with the goal of growing this company. Whereas coaching is I'm helping you become a better version of yourself.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Few different pieces here. I see kind of like three top level shapes of advising. The first one is company level advising or founder level advising, where the perspective is across the whole company, the whole business. You're really like a partner to that founder. This is the kind of advising that I do. And there's some sub areas here. You then see functional advising. So think like a marketing advisor, right? Like that person is really coming in to help bridge a gap within a particular function. And then you have sort of like deeper domain kind of advising. So think like SEO or if you're in a deep domain like international logistics, like people who are deep in that domain, right? These are sort of the three high level shapes of advising that I think you're seeing now.”
2023-10-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Should Startups Hire Advisors? When is the Right Time? How Much Should They Be Paid? How Should Founders Approach the Hiring Process for Advisors? What Should They Expect From Them? What are the Biggest Mistakes Made and more with Ely Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source