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Matt Lerner

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2024-05-31
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2024-05-31
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  1. “So one thing that is happening new that last couple years that I can't believe more companies are not doing. And this, I mentioned it earlier, but if you go to some of these sites like Calm or Noom, they have these long convoluted onboarding flows that do a really good job of roping people in, getting them through the whole kind of information journey and building intent. And that's a neat thing because it can run you through an entire sales process without actually needing a salesperson. And to me, that just seems like the most obvious thing in the world for B2B companies to do for anything where customers maybe are only thinking about the problem and there's like eight steps to thinking about your solution or we just need to move them like a considered purchase non-impulse buy just seems like the most obvious thing to start to adapt those.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I'm absolutely not negative on the talent. I mean Europe produces incredible talent, but what you see is a lot of the best talent in Europe is going to move to an environment that's more friendly to startups in terms of regulatory, in terms of funding, in terms of pools of labor, in terms of tax rates, especially now that there's remote work. So I think the challenge for Europe is going to be to create reasons for these people to stay, to list on European markets, to raise their later rounds.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So the thing I'm trying to change in my business and the thing that bugs me is back to when I was a VC and I just saw so many people wasting so much money and talent like these entrepreneurs are brilliant talented people on stuff that I just knew wasn't going to work and making these again repeatable mistakes over and over again you know waiting to hire a head of growth hiring a person with a dazzling resume building this big complicated product before validating it with the market so I just love to see people shift from thinking they have all the answers and prematurely moving into an optimization mode and much more into like a discovery and curious and experimentation and learning mode”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “That's a great point, the democratization, the long tail of influence who's opening up programmatically is a new thing. You know, network effects, product-led growth is new in the last 10 years, but a lot of the stuff we've been buying ads since forever. And the fundamentals that make it work, like having the right message, having the right design testing and experimenting haven't changed.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I listed the six channels before sales and advertising and most of those had been around for a long time. Influencers are new, but some of this stuff is new. Network effects.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So I lived through dot com revolution one dot but it's right up there yeah absolutely i mean 2009 mobile apps you know an airbnb and uber and stripe and like so many amazing companies were getting born so that was a huge one and then yeah certainly dot com one dot zero wherever like people were first building these businesses and like netscape was ipo in it”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “LLMs can help you parse large amounts of customer conversation data quickly and pull out the most important themes. And if you know the most important things your customers are talking about, that's a huge advantage. So that's the other big one I'm seeing right now.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “To be humble there because I don't like outbound, and I've been declaring the death of outbound for many years now, and it just kind of works for the few people who really nail it and figure it out. It still kind of worked. I think that, but I'm not going to commit to that answer.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Me right now, it feels like we're still on the ascending curve. Like, suddenly, lots of people are getting good cold outreach in a way that they didn't. They will become inured to that in a year, but at the moment the windows kind of still open.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “In one minute, so what I see right now happening is a few things. First of all, the floor for creative has gone up. AI models can now do design and copy better than 90% of people, so there's just no excuse for doing that badly. Two is they can automate previously hard-to-do tasks like cold outbound. That all becomes a lot more effective.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And that's because it forces you to think about customer intent, right? We talked about like you've got your product, but your customer has this context, this thing they're trying to do, this thing they're looking for, and you literally cannot do SEO unless you spend your whole time thinking, what are people looking for and what are they trying to do?”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “That's why I'm thinking so much about talent and ability and just get them in there and see how they grow. Because every one of these great growth people started as an SEO person or an analyst or a content marketer or an engineer and just learned and grew very quickly.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I love writing and I write emails and LinkedIn posts. I'm used to writing on short form. And then turning that into a full book, I completely underestimated the magnitude. That's like an architect who designs like loft extensions, having to design Terminal 5 of Heathrow. It's just a completely different level of thinking, and I was hopeless. And thankfully, I found really good editors who were able to help me really sort out and sequence my thoughts and in turn that into a concise book.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So in an early stage startup, there just comes a point where your company becomes the growth team. You go through fundraising, you go through building your product, and sort of the eye of Sauron turns and it's like time to do growth because the startup can't really do two things at once. And that means your founder is very involved in it and, you know, all the king's horses and men are on deck. When you have a larger company, it needs to stand outside. It needs to be cross-functional and diverse because growth people have a fundamentally different orientation, different approach to life than other groups, but they need to have really good relationships because they're going to need to pull resources. You know, when I was hiring these brilliant scientists, the other trait I was screening for was sociability. And people who could just go make friends with the engineers and the data scientists and everybody and just get stuff from people who didn't report into us.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “His heart, the doubling down is really down in the trenches of a really tweaking and optimizing. Going from 0.5x return on ad spend to 3 or 4x return on ad spend is 100 experiments or more.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I mean fundamentally it's any positive feedback loop anywhere in your business. Basically it means if you like go to sleep and stop doing it, it keeps running itself. So that could be a classic thing like a referral loop. It could be a financial loop. You know, if your ads are paying back 5x in 30 days, then you have a positive ad spend growth loop. You know, there's these network effect loops where you bring people on your show, they create content that brings you to your listeners, which then increases the desirability of your show, which brings you better guests, you know, virtuous circles. So once you've mapped your growth model, you look around and say, where can we find a positive feedback loop here?”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I think there's something there. Like, you know, if I look at people's most successful LinkedIn or Twitter posts, a lot of times there is some emotion. There's a human story in there, even if there's some data.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Its humbling, because I have all this stuff that I think is amazing, and some of it doesn't perform, and some of it does, and I'm always surprised.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “LinkedIn, actually, for my business now, someone who I really respect gave me advice to start posting on LinkedIn as like a way to build my list. And I was really dismissive of it. I don't remember why, but I just didn't like the idea at first. But I respected this person enough. I was like, you know what? I'm writing these weekly emails anyways. I might as well turn them into LinkedIn posts. And I started doing it. And just like you said, like nothing, nothing, nothing. And eventually one started to get some traction and then nothing, nothing. And then one got a lot of traction. And it really snowballed. And it turned into, you know, kind of my main source of new subscribers to my list now. But I was completely dismissive about that effort.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It's the opposite of what I just said, right? It's coming in and trying to run your playbook from your last job and feeling like you've got all the answers instead of having the humility and curiosity to understand how does this business work.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I think that's a really good approach. Anyway, you can sort of try before you buy it works well. But yeah, I think it's pretty obvious right away. The bad candidates come in, bad with people, you know, all output, no input mentally. It's usually pretty obvious, I think, once you've got some experi”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Every good growth person with some experience has a bag of quick wins that will work, you know, changing a bad headline to a good now you can headline, going back through most people track signups and conversions for their paid stuff, but they don't look at customer value. And you may find that certain channels bring you higher or lower value customers, and you can just shift spend to the ones that bring you high value customers. If you haven't been emailing your database and you've got a good email sequence, you can wake up a bunch of dormant leads really quickly. Then there's a dozens of these quick wins, and you can do them, and especially if you need money or if you have one of those founders who's impatient for traction, fine. But if you think about any of those things I just said, they're kind of one and done. Once your headline's good, you're not going to, you know, if your conversion goes from 1% to 10%, you're not going to 10x that number again.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “This person about okay, give it all that, you know, after 30 days. What should we be doing and what should we not be doing and why? Even if I completely agree with him, I'm going to stress test the shit out of that because why are we doing this and not this? Because it's a very important decision. It is worth spending some time to get that right. Then it becomes a question of like, is that stuff actually happening? How's it going? What are we learning? If this works, how big can it be? And how can I help this go faster?”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So every company is kind of different in how much they like process and organization. So I'm going to just give you the core principles and people can adopt it to their systems. But there's basically two steps here. The first one is they need to become an information sponge. And they fundamentally, there's like three or four buckets. They need to get to learn everything they can about your customers. So to be sublisting to customers in a lot of digesting customer research and looking at old experiments and what worked and what didn't, talking to sales and customer service people. They need to understand the growth model mathematically where customers come, how much should they cost us, where do the conversions, drop-offs, which cohorts retain, all that stuff. And then they need to understand like your team and capabilities and who are the other people here and what can we do and how do I work with them. You've got all that, then step two is prioritization. So remember early on I said 90% of your results come from 10% of the stuff you do. So which work do we do in our limited runway is actually a super important question. So I'm going to have this conversation with”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And on the other hand, because it's a weekly cadence, it pushes the pace. You're like, we have our meeting on Monday. I need to have my experiments done by then. And, you know, the cadence of experimentation and learning is critical.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I think there needs to be a part of it that's in person. A lot of it is really solitary. A lot of it is almost like coding, like spending time with data, talking to customers, making sense of interviews, refining and designing creative, setting up experiments. So a lot of the execution is solitary, but a lot of the knowledge sharing and ideation process is coming together. So my rhythm is I'll have typically a day, a week at least, or two days where you're together and always a weekly growth meeting. And that point of that weekly growth meeting is what's the most impactful work? How's it going so far? What did we do last week? What did we learn from that win-lose or draw? How are the numbers trending? And therefore, what should we do this week? So you're going to look at the results of all your experiments and stuff you tried, your customer conversations, your data analysis. You're going to take everything you're learning. You're going to share it with the whole team. And they're all going to be a little smarter and they're all going to have some new ideas. And then you can have a really productive conversation about ideas they didn't have coming into the meeting that suddenly make sense. And so at once, that's like an information shared.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I had to let those people go after I was in a situation where I was embarrassed, I looked bad, my organization looked bad. It cost us some money where like really nasty things happen”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I've done this more than once, and I'm not proud of this. But there have been people where I interview them and they're brilliant and they're talented and I really like them and I really want to hire them. But something in the interview process suggests that maybe they're dishonest or lack integrity. And if they lie about little stuff, if they don't have integrity, then they lie about big stuff. And so I bring those people in, and they are bright and they're talented and they do cool stuff. And then they do something that really puts me in a bad position.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I don't tangibly test stuff. As far as case studies, I'll just do it informally. You know, tell me about a time when you walk me through it. What did you learn? If you had it to do over. As far as skills, you know, this isn't engineering. I find if people can talk about it well and if I know they have a bias for action, that they're either going to be able to do it or figure out how to do it.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I think the biggest mistake early on in hiring is just being dazzled by the names on a CV and where you've worked in the past and what you've done. And I think I already said I have very little use for experience. And if you worked for a successful company in this space, it doesn't mean you knew how to cause that success. It just means you worked there.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “It may not be a first round interview question, but I don't prep them. And the truth is I don't necessarily need them, you know, like most interviews. I don't need them to have the right answer. I want to know how they got there and what they think. And maybe it's like, well, you're in this industry and your competitors are all doing this. So no, I don't prep them, but I still find they get good answers from good candidates.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “For me, because good growth people are annoyingly curious, like not fun at cocktail parties, but very good. They ask all these sounds obvious, but oh, hold on, kind of questions. And then the other piece I need to figure out there is are they a playbook runner? Are they going to come in with their playbook and execute it, or are they going to try to write a new playbook? Because the way you get promoted in a lot of companies and product and marketing is by doing the stuff you're supposed to do, but doing it faster and doing more of it and making fewer mistakes and managing more people in more budget and making good decks. And none of those things are useful than an early stage startup. You actually don't want to do most of the things. You don't want to spend most of the money and you can't hire the people. So to find the playbook writers, I'll ask things like, what do you see as the big open questions right now in our business?”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Pairs and talk me through it and tell me about a time when who does this well, in your opinion and why, things like who do you follow, who do you copy, things like that. And then the other questions are really around that 90% of what they're going to need to figure out. So I'm trying to figure out literally do they have a growth mindset. And these are the questions I've been using them again and again for years and they just never fail. And it's never close. No one's ever kind of maybe. So the first one is just like, what are you hoping to learn in this role? And good people will already have thought they may not have like a stock answer, but they're going to have thought about where they're at in their life and what they need to learn to get to where they're going. The second one is tell me about a mistake you've made. Some people are comfortable talking about their mistakes and some people think it's like a trick question to find out their weaknesses and have some scripted answer. And then if they tell you about a mistake, like what are their nonverbals? Are they comfortable talking about it? And then do they unprompted? Do they tell you the lessons and what they do differently? Like, had they thought about this mistake before the interview? The third question is just, do you have any questions?”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Neat job She's like So remember I said you want somebody who can do 50% of the hard things he needs to do and figure out the other 90%. So my entire interview process is going to be focused around figuring that out. So I've got my little list of like five hard things and I'm going to start like a funnel, create rapport. I start with really broad questions. What are you great at? What's your favorite work to do? What would you rather delegate? Are there answers to that? I can already start to tick off things on my list where I'm like, okay, it's obvious they can do this. I'm not worried about their ability to do that. I'll end up with one, two, three things where I'm not sure they've got it or not. And then I'll go deeper into questions about that. And those are going to be questions typically that don't have a clear right or wrong answer but are important. So marketing attribution. How do you think about first click versus last click and how to learn and spend your money wisely? How you'd break apart a retention problem or whatever? How do you get resources from a department where you don't have any official authority over them? I usually use questions.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Because you know, you feel great every time you make a check, right? You write a check, you're like, I feel great about this company. And then the data tells you, well, no, you were stupid about 80% of these companies.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Yes, scientists are always aware of what they don't know. Unlike, you know, most people in most jobs, you're just always, you're wrong all the time. You see these big gaps in humanity's understanding of whatever your discipline is. And you've got to come into a startup with this assumption that you only know like 10% of all the stuff you're going to need to know for this to be hugely successful. And scientists come in with that curiosity and humility.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “I mean, one of them was a physicist, the other one was a computer scientist, but in a university doing academic research. And so both of them understood data and they could think from first principles, and they understood this idea of causation and correlation and experimentation.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “I've actually found even when I've worked for kind of unknown startups that general broad inbound tends to work. But I find the mistake people make is that they apply too many filters to the search. You're right that JobSpec and the recruiter is like, well, what do you want? You're like, six years of experience in a series B, high growth, fintech in London went to a good university, former management consultant. It's like, okay, but she already has a job. Like, what about the rest of the world? And so if you just remove filters like geography or like a certain university degree or certain work experience, often you can find these bright generalists. I'll say categorically the best growth people I hired and managed in my time at PayPal had no marketing experience, had no product experience at all. They were coming to an organization where they were surrounded and supported, but they were both former scientists and they were really good at figuring things out.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Bring in the magical growth wizard, and they're going to grow my company. And just goes pear-shaped more often than not. These people bring in their playbook. They rounded their last company or their bag of tricks or whatever, but they don't fundamentally understand your business. And you probably wouldn't let them do if they were good. You wouldn't let them have all the engineering resources and all the product resources and all, like you wouldn't let them do the stuff that they needed to be successful anyways. So first hires for me, once you understand roughly how your business is going to grow, maybe it's content and inbound, maybe it's paid, whatever. I say hire people who can do 50% of the hard things you need and figure out the other 90%.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “And the reason I'm going to do that is because your previous guest eminent as they are, work for companies like Shopify and HubSpot and Segment, and they have gazillions of dollars and they have huge budgets and they have brand appeal. The best growth people in the world would be thrilled to go work for those companies. Little startups don't have the brad recognition. I mean, they're not really great jobs. They don't have a ton of money. The equity is, you know, a bit sus. And so you just, you can't necessarily hire a growth genius at that stage. So part of it is just a level of talent you can hire. And if you think about like growth, this is something that comes across every function. It's the hardest thing your company is going to do. So you want the most talented, smartest person in your company who's closest to the customer, the most impatient, the fastest mover. And that sort of starts to look a lot like a founder. So I really believe very strongly that your first head of growth is your founder. And their first hires, I wouldn't start by hiring somebody senior. So I see this play out badly a lot where people are like,”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Now you can use a large language model to do that. And it's like pull out all the verbs, all the outcomes of what people are trying to do. And then I've got a shorter list. And then sometimes I'll just mock those up as landing pages and show them to people. And like, what do you think that means and what will that enable you to do? Or the other one is just very quickly, like in a week for 500 bucks, you can just test a bunch of ads. So you have one ad design and six different now you can headlines and you show it to like a lookalike audience or highly selected target that looks like your customers. And these ads won't be profitable. That's not the point. But the point is you can test half a dozen, six, twelve messages in the space of a week against your audience and see what gets them to click.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “So, for a very horizontal product like Airtable, I mean, it's really hard, but you're going to find initial use cases and you're going to kind of start there and expand. But if you came to me with your startup and said, we have this product, we need to find our customers. I start by kind of using survivorship bias on our side. So I say, let's find some people who actually did sign up for your product and assume that whatever they think you do for them, that's the thing your customers want. And then I go and start to interview those people. And we use a jobs to be done interview technique, which kind of gets to the core of like, what was their problem and what were they trying to achieve? And what they're trying to achieve, I say like a good headline on a landing page completes the sentence now you can. So I'm trying to do this and oh now you can close out your quarter in minutes, not days or whatever it is that they're trying to do. So then I'm going to do those interviews. I'm going to find out the different now you cans, the different outcomes that people have. And then, you know, if I've got 10 or 50 customer interview transcripts, now what I used to do is just read through them and I'm looking for the”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “So the locksmith idea crossed my mind was early in my time at PayPal and I was living in San Francisco in like a gated apartment complex. One day I walked home and I got to the gate that led to the courtyard to all the apartments and there was a sticker over the lock that said 24 hour emergency locksmith and I had a phone number on it. I thought this is a clever locksmith. She could have bought ads on public transit or pod sponsor podcasts. I wouldn't have remembered, but she figured out where I'm going to be when I suddenly realized I need a locksmith more than anything else, which is locked out of my apartment complex because someone squirted a glue in the lock because it's San Francisco. And I thought, that's the key. So every successful startup finds this kind of exact moment of highest need and figures out a way to insert themselves there.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “So, first of all, I think the exception on paid below $100 million in ARR is it's a good way to get eyeballs quickly for testing. A good way to validate stuff quickly, but it shouldn't obviously be the crux of your growth early on. You know, the channel thing.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Six things like a startup needs to be good at one and a half things tops. You don't know if that's a sales motion or if that's product led or what. And so your resource asks far exceed your ability to deliver. And then all those trade-offs you were trying to make just bubble right back up to the founder.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “There's three patterns one is underthink overthinkers, one is underthinkers. And these people, you know, they have a bias for action, and that's great. So they build something based on their sense of the market. And, you know, of course, 99.9 out of 100 times, it doesn't work. So they build the next thing. They build the next thing. They build the next thing. And the problem is the solution set and the market playing in is so broad, you just can't brute force it. But each time you build something else, you're making the product more complex, you're making the experience more complex, you're making the organization more complex, you're making the sales process more complex. The value proposition is slowing you down at a time where you need nothing more than speed, right? So you got your underthinkers. And then the last type, and I think this is also close to what you're talking about with your VP of product, are these higher and delegate types. So I'm going to hire six heads of my six important functions and they're going to come in and do their best practices. But if you really don't have fundamentally product market fit, a strategy, a sense of who you're selling to, they're each going to give you best practices. But you don't need to be good at it.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Okay, so there's a section in the beginning where you're right in the first page, actually, where he says happy families are all alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy. And as a VC, you're smiling because you know that successful startups are kind of all like they have the market fit, they have the amazing founder, they attract talent, you know, this. and unhappy families like there's just a million ways a startup can go pear shaped and you've seen them all and i sort of boiled it into three patterns i'm curious if this resonates with you and this tends to come back to sort of the founder's dna and their personality style some of them are overthinkers and they just spent too long debating you know measure twice cut once”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “I'm a big fan of questions because, you know, if you tell people things, you don't have children yet, but if you tell people things, they may or may not listen, but if you ask them questions, it forces them to think. So once I have it, explain the North Star to the whole team, I have each manager go around and ask each person, explain to me how your work impacts the North Star because they have to think at that point. And then they're going to tell you something and they may tell you something you didn't know about them or their job function or their business. Or you may realize they're missing an important piece of context about their business. So that usually leads to a really productive discussion. And then after that, I'm like, okay, given that string of connections of you to the North Star, which could be two, three, four orders removed, what's the most impactful work you can be doing this quarter to move that number?”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “First of all, yeah, if you learn something about your customers and it's actually wrong. We think accounting software, we think that they were signing in to log expenses, but in fact it's mostly about filing quarterly VAT returns. And people who log expenses don't retain, but people who file quarterly VAT returns do retain. So that tells you, okay, we're looking at VAT returns filed as our North Star. And that's a much lower frequency, that's a quarterly rather than a weekly active user cadence. The other one is if you just spawn a second business line that's different. Amazon's North Star from 1996 was repeat purchases. Obviously, AWS has a different North Star, right? It's going to be something around server usage or cycles or something.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “But it's going to end up being more granular than that. If you grabbed ten SMBs and said, hey, how can people make managing your finances easier for you? You get 10 different answers. So they're looking for a really specific help, and they may end up using all your features, but they're going to sign up for a thing. There's some specific thing they're trying to do in a specific situation, spreadsheets and zero and whatever is coming up short. And you've got to figure out what that really specific thing is.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source