YouSaid · the spoken record

George Bonaci

lines on the record: 74
first: 2025-02-28
most recent: 2025-02-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“No, thank you. I'm honestly great questions. I love the conversation. Hopefully, I wasn't too concise. But no, it's been a fun time.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's usually the non traditional stuff. So, like cold calling, I think a lot of people thought cold calling is dead and like cold calling is like a tremendous channel for a lot of companies because it is hard to do. Door to door, I think, is something that's really interesting. And I've been thinking about this for a while now. Medical devices space is interesting because a lot of their sales and a lot of their marketing or sales is door-to-door. And I think there's actually, now that folks are moving more back into the office and working from offices again, I think there's probably an unfair advantage to having a true field sales team that goes door to door and brings like a cake with them or whatever it might be. So that's something I've been thinking about.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. I would say it's very much brand advertising. This is something that, or brand investment in general. I think this is something that Gong did really, really well. They were willing to invest in things that elevated the brand, even if it was completely unmeasurable, even if it was something that we would never be able to measure. But you saw that in the fact that in the inbound numbers and how big of like a channel like inbound was for Gong because they invested in their brand so much. And I think that like it doesn't make sense when you're a very early startup and you don't have that type of resource. But once you reach a certain size or scale, like if you're not investing in brand as part of like your long-term horizon or long-term bucket of bets, then you're going to screw yourself over in the future.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. I think direct mailing gifting was one that we could have actually even attempted even earlier when we were at Samsara. I think that there's probably unfair advantages to be gained in like display advertising. Like display advertising is so inexpensive right now, but it's not measured well. And most people think of it in terms of like direct response. Like if someone, no one clicks these ads to the response and the ROI is not very good. But the reality is figuring out how to the right number of impressions with the right message into an account or into a contact actually does have a halo effect. So there's definitely an advantage there, but solving and solving for that advantage is probably dependent on how you measure it. So I would say display advertising is an opportunity.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And that's why I think it changes depending on size. Like when you're a series A company, most events, depend upon your go-to-market motion, most events are not going to be high R”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man. I think like very, very early on it was event spawn, like at very small companies, it's event sponsorships that go exhibit at Dream Force or something like that. Like it feels like something you have to do because everyone else does it. It's like just a waste of money. You're in a sea of other companies and no one's paying attention to you. That money would be better spent figuring out some gorilla tactic to stand out or honestly probably be better spent on paid outs. We do a lot on events. I think we're at a very different scale though. And we do things a little bit differently. It's not just like go exhibit an event at an event. It's also like get a speaker slot, do some out of home advertising around it, make sure we do like outbound emails immediately after. It's more than just like, let's get a booth in a corner of the conference hall because it was all we could afford and let's hope people come to us.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overrated. Paid search. I think everyone goes to paid search because they have to, but I think like in the very, very early days, you have nothing that works. Sure. It's like table stakes, but it saturates quickly. You're paying a tax to Google. I think paid search is like relatively uninspiring of a growth channel that will scale long term.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the fun problem to solve? I think you can. I think you treat it almost as an outbound funnel. It's like go make a list of the 10,000 micro influencers or folks that could become micro influencers and go do some skilled outbound to them, figure out a process that works. Like you could solve almost any problem in that way. But short answer is yes.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is probably honestly something on the influencer side of things. I don't think most people think of it as a growth channel, but influencers absolutely is, at least on the B2B side.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They got to figure it out. Like, I think that's where the learning comes in. Like, go talk to other people, go determine. Let's, I'm going to make this up. Like, you're trying to figure out how to do cold calling. Maybe this will work for us. Maybe it won't. Go identify 10 companies that do cold calling really well. Go talk to the people that built that infrastructure and built that system, et cetera, et cetera.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It should be like we should actually assess for hey, how do we determine what good looks like and how do we test them for it? And like, could someone figure this out? Could someone on the team figure this out rather than hiring external?”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hiring for experience because they don't know any better. Like, we don't know how to do this. We'll hire someone that does.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely not. No. Like, I'm a marketer at the end of the day and I'm a growth person. That is antithetical to everything we stand for. There are some products, sure, where like, yes, it is so amazing and the word of mouth was so strong that like you could, they did build it and people did come. I think that is so out of the ordinary and leaves your fate so much to chance that that's not a good approach.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's like most things, you just have to have a better product and you have to have some plan for distribution. I think that having a better product probably solves like 80, 90% of the battle. But you also need to think about how you're going to distribute that product and like what your unfair advantages in distribution. And hopefully that's where the growth team comes in and where they can provide value. But I do think it's mostly on the product.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. Or maybe it helps uncreative people more is maybe what I'd say. The number of times that I've had ChatGPT just be like, how do I make this better? How do I add a joke in here? What are some other visuals I can do? What's a good analogy for XYZ? I wouldn't have been able to do that on my own. I would have had to go to someone on product marketing or content and be like, hey, I need some help.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's my bias. I am not super creative at the end of the day. I'm not a creative minded person. So I think it helps me a lot more”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good co pilot for lack of a better term for both of those roles. I think that, like, on the creative side, it can help you think about new ideas and help you brainstorm. On the performance side, it can help you analyze the data and maybe be more efficient or move more quickly.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, 100%. I remember a few years ago, I was such a strong advocate that like everyone on the growth team needs to be technical. They need to learn SQL. They need to learn Python. They need to learn how to work with a growth engineering team very, very closely. I think like AI is upended that. You don't need to be nearly as technical as you used to. Like AI can help you write the code. It can tell you other ways of doing things. Like it's even just like in that element of like who I used to have a bias for hiring, it's totally changed.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could be personalized, but almost by definition, that's just going to give you incremental gains on things you're already doing and things that has data on. I think like to get real advantage, maybe we'll get to this point at some point soon, but I think it's hard. Have the AI go talk to like 50 people in the industry and synthesize what they're doing and apply what they think is going to be relevant to your business model and your ICP and like go apply that. That sounds really difficult to do, at least at the state of AI today, but maybe not in a year. Who knows?”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that example, I think it's hard to find alpha if you're just having an AI go find the opportunities for you. Having said that, I think AI is tremendously changing the role of growth.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think like the number one reason is it was on the manager. It was a mishire. They didn't scope the role effectively or the role changed the needs of the business changed and they hired the wrong person, the wrong profile. I think generally managers try to come up with like a laundry list of skills that they want to hire for and they try to find someone that checks most of those boxes. But that's almost the easy way to do things. I think the much harder way is to get really, really crystal clear on what is the one thing that we need, like what is the one skill or trait or piece of experience, one problem we need to solve. And hiring someone that you have high confidence can do that or fill that gap versus check a bunch of boxes. So not getting clear on that, I think is the number one reason why you would mishire. And that's mostly on the manager, if I'm being honest.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think you generally have inklings the first couple weeks, but you should give some people the benefit of the doubt. Like you should run some sort of structure. And I guess this is why structured onboarding is so important. And this is why making sure people ship things in their first week is so important. So you actually can assess them based on facts versus just vibes or feelings. But you generally have some sort of viber feeling in the first week or two”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see the opportunity, yes. And there should be the opportunity. If you were, you were ideally hired because you have some skill set or some unique perspective or there's some gap in the business that you're filling. So there should be some early points on the board you can put up. Having said that, if someone is not able to put up points on the board, you should understand why. And if they were set up for success. And if they were not, you should move that as quickly as possible. But there are some roles and there are some problems that do just take time to solve. And that's where the, okay, how can we scope this down and run an experiment to validate? Are we at least on the right track is important? But there are some aspects or sometimes where it is difficult to put early points on the board.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think this again goes back to the investing and learning. I think the leader needs to be incredibly detailed in what those first 30, 60, 90 day plans look like, who you're meeting, what you're doing with your time. Like, actually, this was something I learned from Samsara as well. Like, I remember my first 30 days were written out in excruciating detail. I think the first two weeks were completely scheduled out to the minute for me. And as a result, it was also very clear to understand if someone was learning and picking things up. And it was very easy to compare folks if they were given the same structured onboarding. So I firmly believe, like the first 30 days is like you learn the business and you learn the job. Now, beyond those 30 days, like you should be able to start showing some sort of step change impact, start having some ideas, start making things your own. And then by 90 days, you should be starting to actually show the fruits of those new ideas and the fruits of like that new experience that you're bringing or new perspective that you're bringing.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“30 days, it's learn the business, it's learned the team, it's learned like your area of domain. I would expect in the first three days, you know how to do your job. And that's pretty much it. And you understand how the company operates and how the company makes money. I think a strong foundation is actually understanding how the business works. What do I do is...”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. A good leader. I wouldn't even say just manager. I think a good leader needs to know how to do everyone on their team's job, but poorly. And I think the poorly part's important. They should know how to do the job so they can step in if they need to or so that they're dangerous enough to ask the right questions. But if they know how to do the job better than the people they've hired, then they didn't hire the right people. And it's going to lead to micromanagement. It's going to lead to your point filling in gaps that are not the most effective use of their time. So being able to, number one, either learn enough of what your team does so that you can do it poorly. Or number two, hire people that can do what you need them to do better than you know, I think, is kind of the key.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are a lot of things I would just like to get off the ground faster when you're reliant on external parties, either like external vendors or external lead sources or other legal teams to review your terms and services, things just go much more slowly. I wish that there was a way to speed all of that up. I think that RAMP actually does a really good job of saying, like, let's optimize for speed, just accept those legal terms, maybe not necessarily, but let's figure out a way to move as quickly as possible and just like launch it and test it. And then we can figure out the details if we're going to actually scale it up.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest bottleneck is probably the velocity of experimentation. Like, there are so many opportunities. We don't have enough time. We don't have enough resources. That's probably like, if you zoom out far enough, that's probably the constraint for most businesses.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think business has actually changed that much. Tactically, sure. Maybe it has. The channels, TikTok didn't exist 30 years ago, but I don't actually think business and being a good manager in particular has changed that much or the skills necessary to be a good manager have changed that much. A great example is like the book The Goal. I'm a big fan of that book. I have some recency bias because we reread it recently. But one of the key concepts in that is like the theory of constraints. And now this doesn't have anything to do with management. But the concept of the theory of constraints existed 40 years ago and it still exists today. Like every team is operating with some bottleneck in their process and being able to identify that bottleneck and remove it is a very valuable skill for anyone, but it's especially valuable for a manager. That's how you get the most out of people. That's one of the core jobs of being a manager. So that's just one example. Like I would argue that most business books, as long as you're vetting them well and as long as like you are being intentional on what is the principle you want to pull out of this and have your team put into practice, there's probably something that can be learned from”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That took time. That took a lot of investment. That took really it coming from the founders. And I think a lot of companies maybe sometimes get caught up in the day-to-day and they say, hey, we value learning, but go figure it out on your own rather than coming up with a holistic program or holistic mechanism like that.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think Samsara actually had like a great model for this. The CEO and founder was very big on learning and very big on reading. And I remember one time he was hanging out in the cafeteria and we're like, what do you like to do in your free times? Like, I like to read books. And so as a result, you saw how that permeated throughout the culture. So I remember they launched something when I was there called Leadership Principles. And everyone that was a leader within the company got a big box shipped to their home. And it had literally like 15 books in it. And they're all business books. And the expectation was that you read one of these books every single month and then rejoin a conversation with other peers. And this is all organized to discuss like one of the principles in these books that Samsara wanted you to embody. And then there was like an element where you actually then had to go put it into practice and demonstrate you were putting into practice. Like to me, that is a great example of being very intentional about, hey, we value learning and development here and we're going to add a structure and we're going to add accountability to it to make sure that you are not just learning things but putting it into practice.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most companies know I don't. I think that philosophically they're like, yes, we want to invest in people's learning and development. I think they even believe that that's true. But actually doing it is really difficult. Like it takes time, it takes resources. You have to be intentional. It has to be top down.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say they were destined, but I think you can be suited for it. Like if you spend the last five jobs and 15 years in a certain stage of company, I think it's going to be difficult to adapt your way of operating way of thinking to a different stage of company. Having said that, I mean, I don't think anyone in particular is like destined for a certain stage. I think if you're very, very hungry and you're a self-starter and you love just doing a little bit of everything, it's like, okay, you're probably going to do better at like a seed or series A stage company than like a hundred thousand person well established business, but that might change over time and that might change as they gain more experience or do different things.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's generally been hiring a generalist that, hey, this isn't for me. I don't want to do this after all. I've never done this problem or I've never done this job before now that I'm doing it. I really don't enjoy it. I want to go and get back into investing or I want to do like XYZ. Honestly, I think it's difficult to assess for that and you just have to acknowledge that no one, even the best person hiring is still going to make a lot of mistakes. And that's okay. Probably what's most important is just being as transparent as possible, both in terms of the opportunity and then in terms of how you're going to be assessed and also just being transparent. Like if this doesn't work, that's fine. Like we've all had jobs before. We're all going to have jobs again. Like, that's okay.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They should at least meet some other members of the team. Ideally, you want this to be a mutual fit, both culturally but also they want to work with the people on the team. The team wants to work with them. So I think there's still value in doing a panel, but it's almost more culture fit and more team fit more than anything. But ideally, you are scoping that test that you send them so you know if they can do the job.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, make it as real as possible and make it quantitative. And actually, maybe the third thing I'd say is understand what it looks like before you send the test out. So a great example is I like to just take a Salesforce dump or a dump of data and be like, hey, what's the best campaign? What worked best here? What were the best leads? Whatever it might be. And if it's real world data, it's going to be really messy. Like there's going to be a bunch of tricks they have to catch. There's going to be a bunch of mistakes they have to figure out, duplicate leads or the dates don't align or missing data or whatever it might be. So I think like that itself is like, can they work with real world data is I think a really interesting question to answer. Then the other is like how much of this did they think through? What was their thought process? Like how quickly were they able to adapt? How quickly were they able even to like do the tests? Did they ask questions about it? All of those, I think, are signals before you even see the output to understand like are they at least thinking about things in the right way. But the real world is messy. They should work with real world data.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both. So exactly both. If you're like a series A startup, it's probably like finding the best talent and hiring, convincing the best talent to join your company is generally going to be really hard. I assume most people have probably never heard of most Series A startups. And in that case, yeah, the best folks you're going to be able to hire are going to be like referrals, warm intros, that sort of thing. So getting some sort of back channel information from the person that is hopefully connecting you is, I think, like actually the first step of the interview process. I would argue the second should be some sort of case study or some sort of take-home test. You could do the case study live in the conversation with them just to see how they think about things, but I don't think it would be a bad idea to go from warm conversation, get to know you kind of selling you on the opportunity in the business straight till you take home test. So the first call should probably be about selling. And then the second, and hopefully you're selling based on the referral that you just got, the very strong referral you just got. And then the second stage would be, okay, let's assess.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you're able to do some sort of back channel and some sort of test in that first interview, that is going to be like the most valuable, highest signal thing you can do.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you've been at a company, especially a company that's in order of magnitude or larger or bigger for more than a few years, it's just really hard to then change your mindset and go to a smaller startup and think about like how hard you have to how much you have to get your hands dirty and how differently you need to think about things. Like I think if you've been at a much, much larger company, you're going to tend to think more in terms of playbooks and rely more on your past experience than on what you can learn from others or what you can learn from maybe like other geographies, other companies, other peers. So going from playbook to first principle thinking is generally difficult to do. I've personally stayed away from that type of profile.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unless you're trying to solve a very specific problem and you have a really high confidence that this is the right problem to solve, I would not hire a specialist or someone with the traditional marking background. I think hiring someone that has demonstrated they can think logically and they can do math is really, really important in the early days. So that might be engineers, that might be ex-finance folks, that might be an ex-consultant that hated consulting and like really wanted to stick with something long term and get their hands dirty. I think those make generally the best growth hires. But really, you should just be trying to assess for potential, which I think is a combination of like, can they have vision? Can they kind of see areas where they can go? Like, can they acquire new skills really, really rapidly? And are they like internally motivated?”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would always skew more junior. I think hiring for potential, especially early on in the business, is far more important. I actually think it would be a mistake to hire someone more senior. Like if you're Series A, hiring a really smart generalist that can think in terms of first principles and that can think logically in terms of solving problems is probably more important than anything.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think communicating the way growth thinks about things is probably more important than what specifically they're doing. As long as everyone's aligned that like the growth team's job is actually aligned with everyone else's in the company, which is like we need to be successful. Like growth team's job is not to make anyone happy, it's to make the business successful. And that might mean like for a period of time working really closely with product or really working really closely with product marketing or some other element of the business. But really they should recognize and growth should be able to communicate that we're bringing a unique skill set and unique point of view that hopefully is complementary to their skill set and their point of view, but ultimately the same goal of making the business successful”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think the constant, if you're doing things right, the concentration will change. It's almost like when you find something that works, if you do a really good job of saturating it as quickly as possible, you will be by almost definition like really concentrated there, at least for a period of time. It's really how quickly you can diversify and stack different bets and different wins so that you're not concentrated for too long of a period of time. But I think concentration in and of itself is not a bad thing. It means that you're doing a good job maximizing an area.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you're seeing all of your core direct response channels start to saturate, then it's something that you have to start doing. And the assumption is that investing in brand is going to do one of a few things. It's either going to make folks that have a problem and are aware they have a problem, aware of you. And I think that's how probably most companies start thinking about it. But the more interesting aspect is like true demand generation. It's like, hey, there are people out there that don't realize they have a problem. And brand marketing, like instead of being like, hey, try XYZ product or try XYZ company. It's like this problem exists. Like there's actually a better way. And of course, like we're the better way. But that, I think, is like a much more interesting type of brand marketing to open up demand for a new part of the market that you aren't able to reach with traditional channels.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It goes back to the portfolio. I think that you have to be okay with the fact that most brand marketing is a long-term bet. It's high risk. It's high reward. At least that's how a growth person would probably think about it.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if I can give away my secrets, but I think the honest answer is on the B2B side, and I don't think this is super cutting edge, but influencer marketing, maybe like a year or two ago, this would have been a little bit more cutting edge, but everyone's always thought of influencers and user-generated content maybe to get more specific as more of a B2C tactic that worked really well. I would argue that works just as well and maybe even better in the B2B world. Like, especially if you're moving up market and moving to enterprise. Yeah, there's definitely unfair advantage there, but it's a lot of work.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one else was doing it, and it was incredibly scalable. Like, that was pretty much it. Like, the fact that no one else was doing it, it's like, okay, that's interesting. We should try it. But the fact that if it works, it'd be incredibly scalable. And the fact that you can run it with very large sample sizes meant that we could run a lot of experiments in parallel and learn really, really quickly. Like there's very few channels where you can go like, hey, tomorrow, let's go reach like 200,000 people. Direct mail, email, those are like kind of some of the only channels that would allow you to do something at that scale. And that's run a lot of experiments.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it does, but it depends how you look at it. So, yes, there are playbooks that you can just take and copy and paste. There are also playbooks that you can look at and think critically and adapt. And then there are playbooks kind of come up with from scratch. I think a lot of academic learning is taking a past playbook and adapting it. And like the example that always comes to mind for me is in the world of attribution and marketing. So like media mixed marketing. Oh, sorry, media mix modeling or marketing mix modeling, depending upon who you talk to, MMM. Everyone's talking about it now as the best way to do attribution, blah, blah, blah. That's a really old concept. That's like from the old madmen style advertising days in like the 1950s and 60s. So I think that's a good example where, hey, you could actually go and look at how did they measure the impact of ads and literal newspapers before anything was digital back in like the 1950s or 60s and how do you actually adapt that playbook or that methodology to modern day like digital advertising or modern day digital marketing as a whole there's probably a million examples like that actually direct mail”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try like WhatsApp instead of sending emails, it'll probably fail. But again, if you're doing enough of these experiments, you'll find something that works that no one else is doing.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this actually is a good segue into like how do you just learn in general as a member of the growth team or someone in a company in general? I would say that there's three areas. Like you can learn academically. You can go read a book and learn what's worked for other companies or other growth folks or companies in the past even are great aspects of being able to learn. So learning academically is one aspect. I think you can also learn from your peers. So you can go and learn from folks at other companies, growth people at other companies. I think that's a great like area of finding alpha. Granted probably not the best unfair advantage since someone else knows about it. But I actually think the most interesting is to go and learn from other niches. So like other verticals, other geographies, especially if they're tangential to what you're doing. A great example is like WhatsApp. Like WhatsApp is a marketing channel is not huge for most brands or most companies in the United States, but it's massive in a lot of like international regions. And I think like, great. Could we go?”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source