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Ely Lerner

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61
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2023-10-25
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2023-10-25
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1
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  1. “Yeah, that's a great question. And I think it's especially appropriate because I think it is changing. I think historically, the word got thrown around and people were doing sort of different levels of things, but nobody, both founders and operators who might be advisors didn't really understand what that looked like or what they should do or how they should do it. We are at sort of the early stages of an evolution of much more targeted ways to exchange value between founders and people that can help them and much more structured ways. And so I think this is what I've been doing and I love it. I think there's a lot of exciting stuff here.”

    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

  2. “Or demand or their PL and like everything is challenging when you find that it's in alignment, everything takes off. So that, I think, was my takeaway from Yelp. And Chime has the same thing, actually. Chime has that same dynamic between their own business model and their customers incentive, which is really what is driven their growth curve.”

    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

  3. “First thing that comes to mind is actually the same takeaway, and it's sort of the reason that I joined Chime. I think a lot of people sort of look at like, hey, you're doing consumer marketplaces and even to a fintech. I mean, one, Chime is actually much more of a consumer product company than it is a FinTech at the end of the day. And so that kind of came, the sort of takeaway for me here is incentive alignment. I think my core learning from every different vertical of marketplace that I worked on at Yelp is incentive alignment is the most powerful lever you have in a business, definitely in a marketplace, but I think chime is actually the example of chime is not a marketplace, but chime has an amazing level of incentive alignment between the business model of the company and value to the customer that has really led to a lot of chime success. And I think that was my learning from marketplaces is like when you have incentive alignment between, you know, you can, if you ship something where it makes it better for the supply side, the demand side, and the company's P&L, that's when you can really accelerate a marketplace. And when marketplaces don't have that, they struggle because they're trying to make these trade-offs between supply.”

    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

  4. “Absolutely. I think that's true. And in terms of speed of learning, right? I actually think it's a fantastic sort of like accelerant to the speed of learning in a bunch of these areas because you can turn on distribution however you want overnight when you're ready to do it turn it on to learn turn it back off right like you have these levers that you don't have when you're in a small startup”

    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

  5. “Yeah, it's a great question. I think the biggest reason is there are some things that only can be built as an extension of a successful business that cannot be built as a standalone business, right? And so I think like if you were trying to build a totally adjacent business inside of a large company, don't do that. The company shouldn't do it. You shouldn't do it. It's not a good idea. The way that you succeed is you build something that leverages some aspect of the success that the business and the legacy product has already had to be able to build something that nobody else could build. That's the thing that you're doing there of like building zero to one inside of a larger org, you are leveraging all of the advantage, all of the customers, all of the data, all of the tech, all of that is at your disposal to build something that in most cases couldn't have been built outside the company. That's the main reason.”

    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

  6. “You should fund them a little bit at first, right? And they should come back and show progress and ask for more funds as if, you know, they're doing their seed, they're doing their A, right? Like that's how you should do that because that's the only way you really succeeded those hard problems. Eli, I'm loving this because we're just rolling. Why on earth would”

    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

  7. “Inside an incumbent? Yeah, that's a great question. I think big companies can do these things quick. I think there are two versions of what you're talking about, actually. One is the like, let's supercharge the things we are already doing with this new tech. That's sort of a fairly unique thing in this new LLM wave that you didn't have particularly often before. And you've actually seen a few companies do a decent job of like the first step of that very quickly, which is impressive for those companies. True zero to one, though, where you're really like, you're serving a new need or a new customer or a new vertical, like you're really expanding like solving a problem you hadn't really solved before. What I have seen is your highest chance of success is if you carve out a startup org and, you know, everyone likes to throw around, we're a startup within a big company. If like the leader of that doesn't have P&L, you're not a startup within a big company. I think that is the important piece, which is like you need to fund this as an independent unit that is looking at a business line holistically and is autonomous within the sort of like spending of that capital and like a start.”

    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

  8. “The model that I've seen most successful is the model that I did at Yelp, where you actually really give somebody P&L responsibility like they are a founder, right? And treat them like a founder. We actually did board of directors meetings with the C-suite for the sort of businesses that we were incubating like 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

  9. “Built new product there also was through acquisition. And so back in 2015 now, we bought a company called E24, it's a food delivery startup. And so I kind of got dropped in to be had a product for that subsidiary. This wasn't our original intent, but we actually sold it to Grubhub just about two years later for almost double what we paid, a little more than double what we paid, plus a fantastic partnership agreement that got us out of the fulfillment game, but let us keep a lot of the much higher margin sort of lead gen revenue in the food delivery business, which was fantastic. And then at my last stint there, brand new product and business line, kind of in a hybrid GM product leader role with P&L. This is, I think, one of the things that I've seen myself and with companies that I advise is if you're trying to do true zero to one inside of a later stage company and like find your next horizon, trying to do it inside of the sort of legacy product product org vastly reduces your chances of success and don't even get me started on kind of like innovation orgs or those kind of things. But the”

    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

  10. “Yeah, great question. So, if you go all the way back, I was an engineer, engineering manager for a while. I think this used to be a more common path into product, right? It used to be one of the most common paths these days, much less, which is like good, I think. But so I was the engineering path. I had a startup of my own for a little while, and then a big chunk of my product career was at Yelp. I was at Yelp for a little over eight years across a whole bunch of different areas of that product and business. One of the cool things about Yelp, it's really like 10 different vertical marketplaces combined into a single product, which was a fantastic place to sort of like up level and grow up as a product and growth professional because you really see like all the different kinds of dynamics in marketplaces. It's also consumer. It has a big SMB play. It also actually has a pretty big enterprise play. And I worked across all of those things. And so it was a really good growing up in this space. I tended to be the person that got tapped to do zero to one stuff there a lot. I think organizationally maybe we didn't have a lot of organizational muscle around doing that. One of the ways that we”

    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

  11. “One mistake I see founders make a lot trying to delegate core pieces of their strategy You should be owning the strategy for your primary growth lever. You cannot delegate that strategy The strongest lever that you can pull to really drive high functioning engineering teams is engineering ownership of 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