YouSaid · the spoken record

Merci Grace

lines on the record: 59
first: 2022-07-11
most recent: 2022-07-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You would like to block them in the immediate moment, it will make you feel better. It'll make you feel a little more safe. But businesses have an HR function and they should absolutely know. You're first of all sort of brushing it under the rug and letting this person go off and, you know, treat other people in this negative manner. And then the sort of counterpoint that I also provided is that blocking isn't always used by people to protect themselves. It could be used by people who don't like you at work to exclude you from important meetings or discussions. Your performance drops off. You eventually get put on a pip or you have issues continuing to perform your job at work because people singled you out and multiple people blocked you and excluded you from the conversation. And I think like that argument eventually sort of made headway with people.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a tool for work. And that made thousands of small decisions instant and obvious. There was this internal campaign that was very irritating to me at the time from people saying we absolutely need to allow people to block each other on Slack. You know, all these people who are using open source communities, you know, all these different use cases for it. And I went on a bit of a rant, I would call it, in I think it was our culture channel, which was just its own sort of like total shit show. But this channel where people would sort of do this like, you know, meta thinking about Slack. And there was this consistent question about blocking. And so I, you know, went on quite a little tirade about how blocking is a tool. And so, yes, if someone is, you know, you feel harassing you.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. It's funny, especially now, you know, many years later. But that slack internally in 2015 kind of timeframe, it wasn't totally clear to people that the social aspect of Slack wasn't something that was important or meaningful to Slack internally. And so people would, you know, email us or talk to us at party slack, hey, have you seen Discord? you know that are coming for you it's exactly and like it's similar it's not you know going after the same market and people would actually join the company with some very concrete ideas or expectations about the social use case for slack and so one of the best things honestly that the early kind of founding team at slack did and were able to give to you know those of us who followed them was the understanding that this”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is how great pitches always go. So oftentimes, and this is just every sort of like mediocre pitch, mediocre pitch dick that you see will start with, oh, here's the market or something like that, right? Which is like, this isn't a presentation about the market. This is a presentation about you. And so if you are going to say that you're the only founder that could start this company or you have this really unique insight, start there. Even though it feels like you haven't built up to it yet or anything like that, you don't have to. You'll backfill that later. But getting their attention so that, you know, they close the tab, they put down their phone. That's the most important thing. You can, you know, still lose them later in the narrative, but getting attention, just like going to market and getting attention for a startup is the kind of P0 for any of those interactions.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think that's one of the things that people often try to fit whatever the template they think is and often in business it ends up being, oh”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. You know, and you have the opportunity to tell the story, you know, when you have a pitch, when you're writing a blog post, when you're speaking at a conference, really it's your stage. You get to manage the narrative and to say things in a certain way, position things in a certain way. And so that's where writing is really important. So even for pitch or conference talk or something like that, always start with an outline. Always get really clear about what's the arc of the story that you're telling. And honestly, looking at things like movies and TV shows, every pitch should start in the middle of the action like a thriller or like a drama, like a mission impossible movies always start with Tom Cruise doing some crazy shit, you know, in the middle of the job right before the job of that actual movie is about because it gets your attention.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of armchair quarterbacking where people are sort of filling in, oh, that happened because this fundamental shift in the market for an XYZ, like because this research division and blah, blah, blah, a lot of things that seem really objective and really rational, but deals happen or don't happen typically because of interpersonal dynamics. And sometimes even just like personality classes or petty holdouts from years before. And so I think like how personal it is and how it's not always necessarily about the fundamentals of business, it's oftentimes because people just can see you as a founder or CEO or can see you, you know, running something like this. And so it's very subjective, more subjective than I thought it would be.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. So many things. I think one of the things that is quite obvious from the get-go, when you have had, you know, a few months under your belt event seeing a bunch of pitches and seeing the one-on-one pitches and then seeing the partner meeting pitches is how different really great CEOs and startup leaders are at storytelling, at coming up with a pithy answer, at owning the room, and how different, you know, the fundamentals of their businesses might not even look a lot better, but when you're in that room, you feel so differently about it. So I think how much really, you know, the founder matters. And then the other thing, and this is kind of my surprising thing about that venture that I tell people that I didn't expect to learn, which is especially on Twitter and even, you know, in the media and the press, some merger happens or doesn't happen. Some deal happens or doesn't happen.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I got into product accidentally. I was first a game designer and actually started a venture-backed game studio right after college when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I got my first term sheet as a founder before I knew what Venture of Capital was purely accidental. And it's funny because my career art went founder game designer product management, VC, CEO of your own startup, something that people try to do on purpose now. And I was not trying to do it on purpose at all. I was just following my curiosity and my love of how thinking works and how people make decisions. And so that really went from games to product management to venture and then back into product.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source