YouSaid · the spoken record

Mayur Gupta

lines on the record
57
first
2025-04-25
most recent
2025-04-25
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Growth and marketing in product led companies is what is the role of marketing in a product-led company where the first phase of growth was purely product-led, where marketing did not exist. And this is true for Kraken, true for Spotify, true for Google, because the first phase of growth was either virality, network effects, or just a brilliant product in a category and word of mouth. So in marketing parachutes itself or is asked to parachute itself in the second phase of growth, while the company wants it, and the growth has saturated, but as a marketeer, you're coming and on day one you're facing the world because you have to prove yourself. You are a new organ in the body, and in a company like Spotify, where a lot of the growth is product-led, truly, because an incredible product that just moves the inertia was so strong, I had to realize that I was supporting engine to marketing. Whereas I was a type A and I didn't understand how to work very well with product.”

    2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think it was more around my learning how to operate as a player within a growth engine, within a growth stage company. And look, I grew up in India, and when you grew up in an environment like India where we are a billion plus now, almost a billion and a half people. And for every spot, there are thousands of people fighting for that spot. You are trained to come first. And you come second, you don't have a chance. That's just a DNA of how you grow up. So when I came into the US and I started working on these great companies and some great incredible people, I think when I was going inside the room, I still wanted to be the person with all the answers. Even when I was a leader, I wanted to be the person with all the answers versus with all the mistakes I made, I finally realized that as a leader, eventually what's more important is you become the person who has the ability to ask the right question because you surround yourself with people who can get much better answers, much faster. And the second one, which I think is my thesis of growth.”

    2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I have a great idea. Let's do these experiments and test some things. But there's a lot of wasted energy when you operate that way. The magic of a growth engine is in the quality of the inside that feeds it. So for example, when Apple, they came over their own subscription product and we were really trying to figure out what's going to happen, the world's going to change, we started to dig into a lot in the human psyche why is someone coming to Spotify versus why somebody going to Amazon or Apple? And you realize that the black background of Spotify actually resonated a lot more with users, with listeners who were active listeners. They wanted to discover they had the X factor. And that mattered a lot more. It created an experience that gave them a sense of more control. But see the white background, which was more relevant to a passivist. Now, you won't necessarily think about that, but a lot of insights.”

    2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Biggest thing I learned at Spotify was to grow at a scale of a Spotify, to be a growth stage company. You don't try to tame chaos, create a culture environment where you are thriving amidst healthy chaos, where you are running at 100 miles an hour, even when you can see 10 meters ahead, rather. So because you have the confidence that at the 8th meter mark, you'll see the next 10 and next 10 and so on. That was a fundamental learning I had because being a big organization as Spotify was even back then and much bigger now or at Kraken where we had very similar journeys. It's very easy to tend to create structure as you now become a thousand plus and three thousand people to create structure and to kill exactly the reason they got you here. And that was my biggest lessons learned. And second one more directly tied to growth was there's nothing more magical in a growth engine than the quality of the insight that runs that engine because it's so easy to believe.”

    2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Join, to run e commerce or Kimberly Clark, Huggy's Kleenex Cortex globally, and I went on the brand site for the first time. And then after that, I joined Spotify as a VP of growth. Somehow, evolved from engineering to building products to running e-com and really getting into data and ad tech, then growth. And then in one of the best places to work at now, at the intersection of marketing, data growth, and crypto.”

    2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I wish I could say it was a conscious planned journey where it was all accidental and half of it was laid out for me, half of it probably I designed. But I grew up in India, did my major in computer science, Harry, like many Indians would do, other than wanting to play cricket for the country, which I had the passion for until I was in college and I realized the chances of being one of the 16 people out of a billion plus was slightly lower than 50-60%. So did my major in computer science started my career as an engineer there, worked for a company called Sapient, started there as a C++ developer, built all kinds of systems. But there were two pivots in my career. The first one came when one of my mentors asked me to be a product manager for an ad tech product we acquired here in Miami in 2006. So that's when I evolved from pure engineering to building products and that's how I entered marketing advertising for the first time. And then after 12 odd years, I kind of left sapient.”

    2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Make your product your strongest marketing channel, whoever came up with the branding or brand and performance marketing made the biggest mistake and did the biggest injustice. The fundamental learning and experiment is how you think about the engine itself.”

    2025-04-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source