YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Duboe

lines on the record: 56
first: 2023-02-15
most recent: 2023-02-15
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

“Reference fair another time. I think their B2B referral mechanic was insanely powerful. And early on, that was the only thing that was working for growth and that continued to carry them this far. I think referral systems and referral engines, typically there's always more juice from a referral program to squeeze than companies realize, but they typically are thought of in a consumer context. I think fairs, B2B marketplace, pulling in cross-side referrals, that was huge. I totally admire the way that they built that and scaled it out over time. That's probably the one that I go to.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Taking feedback, I've conditioned my mind to absorb it all as inputs to my own personal growth model that I could use to iterate and improve myself. Others might fail at this because they're afraid to see and hear the truth. They might be closed off, defensive overreact to it. I don't know. And the truth is oftentimes uncomfortable, so people might rather see comfort. That's probably what I would say.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope we see more, and I also hope we see more heads of product and heads of marketing that actually just understand these principles and roll that into their functions. I think this discipline is making its way out there. I don't know whether that shows up in titles, but I do think it will continue to accelerate.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meta lesson a tilt was about focus, but if I go down to growth, I would say the main lesson for me personally was around over incentivizing usage. We knew that we had a product that grew contributor acquisition through organizer retention. And so that was our kind of growth model. We often incentivized organizers to come back. Once someone gets hooked on a promo, even if it's small, it's very hard to go back to non-incentivized behavior. I took this lesson in a stitch fix. We never discounted any product there, which is rare for e-com, actually, and was a core part of the company's discipline. So it would come down to incentivizing kind of usage.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give two, not referencing deeply enough to contextualize what growth means in that hires company, hiring ahead of marketing to go run a product function might not work out. The second is probably assuming that growth is just the growth team's job and setting your org up that way. The person's just destined to fail.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Andy found a way to squeeze in a reference from the best bam in the world outside of reading The Helping Friendly book, I would just say conversations with smart, curious people from a wildly diverse set of backgrounds leads to eternal joy, never-ending splendor. I'll leave it at that.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Towards lifelong learner. I think much of what I say about growth models and my own desire for exploration and discovery, I think this extends in what I hope to model for my two kids, having a growth mindset, desire to learn, evolve, reinvent themselves throughout their lives. I like to think that I'm very receptive to feedback, have a genuine desire to learn and grow because of it. And this extends deep into different pockets in my personal life too, not just the growth stuff that we're talking about here. I'm always trying to find better systems to learn, fail, iterate, et cetera. So yeah, I think lifelong learner would be it.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That growth solves all problems, which is something we used to say back then. But I think growth might mask certain problems, but there's always second order effects and subsequent hills to climb. So it's important to be deliberate.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bill Gurley was on our board at Stitchfix, and I remember he once wrote an article people should read called The Dangerous Seduction of the LTV formula. I remember I first learned about this the night before presenting in my first board meeting there where I was presenting our new paid acquisition strategy as a guy that came into scale up our ad budget and I was just terrified, but he's right. One of the important points he made there is this is a tool and not a strategy. Too many performance marketers use this formula as a way to justify more budget. So many people out there are competing on the size of budgets that they manage and there's these weird kind of power dynamics and stuff. I think at a certain point having a deeper understanding of user psychology and being great at creative provides more of an edge than some of this mechanical LTB optimization. I just think this notion of lifetime is the main one, but also the granularity, you're able to get at that better if you have a payback kind of framework.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there's two primary flaws with it. I think one is just this notion of lifetime, which is the L and LTV. Early in a company's journey, it's rare to have a real idea of what a reasonable customer lifetime is. If you're two years in, how are you going to say you have a five-year lifetime? That's obviously flawed. And then it's also too coarse. I think many companies will look at this on a blended basis and disregard that there's actually a bunch of variants and customer quality by channel, keyword, audience, et cetera. The better method, which I was getting at was payback period, which removes the notion of lifetime, but also it could be calculated on a more granular level. And payback's the however month of growth margin, it costs to pay back the initial incremental CPA. I think you want to make sure you're calculating this paid overpaid. So use paid cak not blended CAC, and then with scale, you could get to more granularity. So not only looking at it on a channel level, but actually a keyword level. It's stitchbix, you should have different basically CAC thresholds for someone who's actually searching for high-priced dresses versus discount shoes. And that's the important thing. One caveat on all this stuff.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almorage. Most teams should actually have some return on ad spend, either ROAS or kind of payback threshold. And you could be tight with paybacks. If you're a subscription business, you're not paying back within a year. That's probably problematic. Ideally, if your e-commerce, you're paying it back on first transaction because a year is making all these conversion and repeat assumptions that you might not have at that point. But I do think ultimately payback periods probably the guiding metric that you want to make that decision at Stitchfix from a contribution margin payback standpoint, a year was our final threshold, but we had enough data on what was repeat where we were able to be relatively tight on that the how much kind of ultimately I think should boil down to whatever payback makes sense for your business. Typically, I say they're going to be first transaction or some period of time.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could actually go back into whatever attribution model you're using, whether it be last click or whatever, and go and apply incrementality multipliers to them. And then you actually are getting the sense of precision that a lot of growth marketers are looking for. But without incrementality testing, you could be drawing very wrong conclusions on how your channels are working.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back from whoever you're buying TV from down to the minute, if you look at, call it a seven minute window around the time of spot errors, the lift and traffic above what their baseline traffic should be at that time gets distributed back to TV and then you could apply conversion assumptions and that's who comes in. That's going to make your TV look very expensive because that's ignoring any halo effect or kind of lift on other channels. And so for us, when we wanted to decide, hey, how much do we want to scale up TV? We ran and we were public when we did this, we were getting a bunch of analysts covering us like, hey, stitch fix on op TV? Are there problems? But we ran an eight week holdout test where we actually paused national TV advertising and we would always buy nationally because it was a lot cheaper from a CPM standpoint to do. We paused national free weeks. We picked five regions and we went and go bought local TV spots and we measured the overall lift in those markets and the interaction between other channels that we were running and came up with awesome insights on actually what was the interplay from TV on our Facebook ads and what was actually the true incremental CPA. And when you understand incremental”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mentality testing as a real North Star. So many marketers just rely on these overly simplistic last click attribution models, which give basically 100% of your credit to one channel, which oftentimes looks like search just because it's the most high intent channel you have in your mix, or like some black box model that you're paying millions of dollars a year for to go and assign fractional credit and try to get your precision on optimizing your channel next down to a T. The reality is impact is rarely that direct. And that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be measuring stuff. And I think a lot of brand marketing gets, it's kind of like, hey, this is marketing that's not measured. I would argue actually brand marketing should be held a performance guidelines just on a longer time horizon. But incrementality testing involves running holdouts across channels that actually incur a cost. I'll take a TV example, right? So this is actually an anecdote. It's TV was an important channel for us over time. We ran it out of our performance marketing group. It wasn't a brand marketing channel. And typically when you're running TV, the measurement method you will use is called spike analysis. So run a spot and you get”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the lessons I had in doing the stuff at scale was I started buying Facebook ads in 2012. And at that time, there was a lot of alpha from just being a savvy media buyer. And people I used to learn from and talk with these basically DG growth types that just continue to try to find arbitrage opportunities. And I'm talking specific to Facebook, but this kind of applies across most channels. That type of alpha gets arbitraged away over time. And ultimately, what makes one great or the only sustainable advantage on channels is having great measurement, being sophisticated measurement, and then having great volume of creative and great creative that performs. And so ultimately the practice of performance marketing gets back down to do you have a unique kind of user hypothesis and are you generating creative that resonates with them at enough scale? Some of the biggest, most impactful changes we made at Stitchfix were lowering the bar to actually creative content we just put out there. So rather than having very high produced TV kind of quality video assets, let people shoot stuff on an iPhone just get a lot more out there and feed it into the algo. I think the biggest lesson I will go back to is increment.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely agree with you. Seeming that you're talking about early stage companies, where I disagree is once your later stage, I'll take a stitch fix anecdote. This was around 2016, 2017.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The caveat on the answer on accelerate not a crutch thing is most businesses don't find their one channel that works. And so if it needs to be paid, that might be okay, just make sure you have enough room in your AOVs or customer value to support that. The payback calculation is very important. And if you have enough buffer, it could be, yeah.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's going to vary a lot by business. If you're a business of an e commerce store, you're probably going to be 30 to 50% like paid marketing. If you see business that's north of 50 for any type of business that's probably like flag, this question itself is flawed because I think this goes back to the point on incrementality. Attributing a single source of acquisition to a given user is usually a fallacy. And I'm not dodging the question here, but I just think it's even this line of thinking actually part of the problem.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the feedback loops here, it's addicting, but I think if you haven't done the hardest stuff up front, you could really just head down a path you don't want.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One measure of product market fit health is what happens when you turn off all non organic acquisition activities. Ideally, you should see some ongoing user base that's retained and ideally generating new users, even if at a much slower clip. If you don't have that, you don't have product market fit. Going too heavily into paid marketing too early can lead to a number of problems. Paid marketing is relatively simple and straightforward to go and acquire new users. And so it gets addicting when you're more likely to design a single disciplined marketing function and miss the opportunity to do more challenging kind of cross-functional initiatives. When you see the magic of being able to put money into Facebook machine and deliver users back. The thing that many people miss early on is that paid to grades would scale. Everyone says you'll get better at it, so you'll fight laws of gravity that might happen in a short term, but a long-term time horizon performance always degrades. That's just how it works. You could really get false signal on early CAX as a business when at low volume and end up with a business maybe a year or two down the line whose economics is straight up don't work. And that could be very problematic given the”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is precisely why, by the way, having a good analytics function in house is really important because, like, they'll keep you honest on experiment design. Sometimes it's going to be hard to isolate all the variables, but if you're running a test, you need to hold other variables constant. And sometimes software is great as your others might be. I'll capture this stuff.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to answer with precision. I think in general, a good learning is specific enough to impact the way you move forward on the next iteration of a product or strategy. And so a bad learning might be one that's not quantified or not specific enough to change your core product strategy. A bad learning also might be one that's just held within a single function and not propagated out to impact other teams. Paid marketing is easy. A learning that you get from spending millions of dollars on Facebook ads on what creative or copy resonates best, that should definitely inform your messaging on the product. If those learnings don't make its way out, it's a missed opportunity.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are actually the last two steps of the process I was going to get out. So we would do weekly experiment reviews as a growth team. Every week we had a meeting on completed experiments or anything that completed over the past week, the PM or whoever was responsible for it would go in and present on that lessons learned implications and suggestions for other functions too that were sitting around the table there. And then we would use that form to go and kick off new experiments. And so anything that was going to go live or that was being processed, we would go and discuss those too. So that's within the growth team. I think company-wide is equally, if not more important. And this is practical at certain company scales like a tilt on. We were 100 people. We did weekly all hands at every all hands. The growth team would get up there and talk about these ideas. Sometimes engaging the company was important. So we would do sometimes like guess which variant one game. It was fun. It actually helps spark curiosity from different corners of the org on, hey, this intuition or kind of belief that I had on certain part of the products was actually wrong and the growth team went and invalidated that. Communicating that out, I think Live is best and weekly growth team meetings and then some presence had written.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in one spreadsheet, anyone in the company could go and look at a prioritized list of experiments and see what's running at any given time, what were the results of ones that ran in the past, and also the head of growth and the growth team should be triaging these. One framework that's used to triage that's common is the ice framework, so impact, confidence, level of effort. You score every idea on these three attributes, and it's a little bit rough, but that kind of prevents the test everything mindset and the stuff that is the right balance between high impact, but maybe not high cost and a reasonable level of confidence that it might work. those will rise to the top.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best ideas could come from anywhere within the org. So reducing friction to bring forth ideas is something that I think the head of growth should think of themselves as responsible for. And the second is the only real failure is not implementing learnings from an experiment. So you need to have a culture where it's actually okay to take risks and fail in the spirit of learning. The process I've introduced in both the companies I led growth for, there's four main components of it. So I think first is experiment one pagers. So anyone could submit an experiment idea. Anyone, even if you're not in the growth team, but we build this very simple one-pager framework that included an objective hypothesis you're testing the design or resources required to execute the experiment timeline. So how long you need the experiment to run, and then what success a quantifiably looks like so you're not actually going and having revisionist history. I'm like, hey, it actually did work even though the data showed this. And then finally, the next steps that one takes if the experiment fails or succeeds. So when you have that one pager, those ultimately fall into a triage list, which is most of the time is just a Google sheet.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I think about the practice of growth, it's about building distribution strategy into your product strategy. And then finding harmony between products, channels, and monetization. And so this is very different than saying, hey, we have a product team that's going building stuff. And then we have a growth team, whether it be marketing or sales or whatever, going and growing stuff. And I think the whole practice of growth is about creating more harmony and actually introducing distribution strategy into your product. And part of getting it, this is org structure, right? So as I mentioned before, structuring org around a funnel.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Traditional way that marketers think is funnels. So one framework, I think this might be David McClure's, but it's the pirate framework, RRR. So top of funnel really starts with awareness and acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and some might add referral to the end. The problem with this is this leads to siloed teams. And typically brand marketing might do the awareness stuff. Then you have performance marketing doing acquisition, and then that might get handed off to some conversion PM that's working on activation. And so you're really missing opportunities to have interplay between these steps and go on reinvest outputs from one step into the other. For some businesses like e-commerce stores, it's just the most practical way to look at a business. So it's not funnels or bad all the time, but I think if you look at your growth this way, you will typically see a degradation of performance with scale. That's the most common framework for funnels.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The definition for loops is like they're closed systems where the inputs through some process generate more of an output that go then reinvested back into the input. And so there's different types of loops. I referenced the content one from Pinterest early on. That's actually a good example. A user onboarding and using the product, the output of that generates more content that goes and feeds back into the search algorithms that is the input into acquiring new users. Basically, usage begets bar usage, new users beget more users. That's really the concept that you're looking for. And so loops are powerful because they lead to compounding growth systems versus typically funnels are more linear growth trajectories that will oftentimes decay with scale. And so the way to engineer loops oftentimes involves kind of product efforts versus just marketing when we talk about growth. That's a concept that's fundamental to it.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got myself in trouble here, too. But yeah, sure. Series B company, I'm someone who's probably mid-career because you actually don't want to hire execs too early on, but it's also not someone who's a few years out of school. Probably you could go between 150 and 250 in salary and then maybe a sliding scale between cash and kind of equity. And I think equity could go up to, I don't know, for a series B company at the high end, these people could be getting north of a point. I think if you're already series B and you've taken some dilution already, it might be shy of that, but you should be willing to part with half a point to a point, I think, for people like this. I would be hesitant if someone were asking for a whole lot more than the height of that range for a company that's not really proven yet.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As publicly talked about, or whatever, but they were the first barrel in that company. And when you find that person, do whatever it takes to keep them around because they'll probably hire other barrels too.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is more of a general kind of comment, but I like being more generous with equity early on. Keith Raboy gave this awesome talk eight years ago at startup school on being a great operator. One point that always resonated was around barrels versus ammunition. I don't know if you've heard this before. He basically states that all companies need high quality people in both ammunition roles and then barrel roles. But no matter how much ammunition you have, if you only have five barrels, you can only do five things simultaneously. As you're hiring people, just keep an eye out for who those barrels are. When you find one, do everything in your power to keep them engaged, throw more responsibility at them, more equity, whatever, et cetera, because that's ultimately determining how much you can get done as a business and how fast you can move. In my experience, and obviously I have some bias here, but great growth people, especially those who join early, can be those barrels that a company really needs. I'll go back to Fair, like Olivia was the first PM there and early on initially led growth and then eventually like most roles in the company over some point in time. A lot of companies have this individual. They're oftentimes not.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is debatable. I always do call it a few days and you could say, hey, don't take more than a few hours on this. If you're testing for ability to produce this stuff on the fly, it's another set of skills you're looking for. I think there's value to that. And maybe like the dashboard question might be relevant on that. But I think for something like this for these last two, I think you should give them time. For a model like this, really, you're looking to make sure they could think holistically that they could think in terms of loops and visualize growth into a spreadsheet and maybe what might be a flag here is if they're just bringing a pure kind of financial model or something that's overly daunting or unwieldy. That's probably problematic. You really want people in this seat who are simplifiers.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think writing the growth model is one, and we talked about this a little bit earlier, but write out a growth model for X product should be relevant to the business that you're running. So if you're running a marketplace company, have it be another marketplace business just so people understand the set of levers in the interplay for that particular type of business.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, I'll go back to Facebook. Greg growth from early on. I know that one of the things they actually put the growth team on was when they spun out Messenger from the core app. I was the growth team that actually ran the product on that early on. Drive a bunch of adoption to it. One question there could be, and actually this is separate from going and writing a whole growth model, although it's probably helpful context to have one in place. But if you actually say, hey, your job is to come in and grow DAUs on Messenger from X to Y, what's your three-month roadmap and how to go and do that?”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One that I like is bring me a prioritized experiment roadmap for X feature. One of the important points of running a growth team is you need to have a system on triaging, different experiment ideas, and really having an ROI mindset. Some people are going to come in and bring a laundry list of everything they want to go test down to button colors without having a system or some higher order context. I think that's a fail case act for kind of a new head of growth. You just come in and say, hey, I want to have an impact. I'm just going to go and test everything and be the AB tester. And if you're doing that without high order context of what's actually going to move the needle on a business, that's problematic. And prioritization of an experiment roadmap is one way of getting at that.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I'm about to say in some ways is a cliche interview question, but I think it's important for growth, which is tell me about the time you failed and what happened from that. I think for growth, one of the important things that you're looking for as somebody who's not afraid to fail. Failure is part of the experimentation process. The worst thing one could do with a growth role is go and try to cover up failures or just not acknowledge that happened because what an opportunity to learn. You were looking for someone's risk appetite, but then kind of appetite to go and just put themselves in the stream of learnings that oftentimes come from failure and then go iterate on that. There's a few that get a step more tactical, which is show me your daily dashboard is one that I like. This maybe gets a little bit deeper. This can be used in an exercise. It can also be used in a live conversation where you just ask.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's not that many people out there that understand this stuff that well. You're either taking a bet on someone that hasn't done growth before and that's all of us were there at some point, or you're probably not running a very high volume process. I think of this as I would much rather be targeted. And I think in getting the spec out there, I skip this, but I don't think of it as, hey, we put on the website and then we see who comes in. It's you're sending it to investors and close friends in your network. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is doing references too late and treating it as a formality. Doing them early on, I think, is a great way to filter. Once you actually do get people in process, there's a role for early filtering questions before broader exercise later. One of the questions I really like to ask people, pick your favorite product and tell me how it grows. That's a really simple question, but it gets it whether someone understands the system and is able to think holistically versus specifying just one case study or one anecdote. And it also covers both left and right brain thinking. Most systems should be grounded in both quantitative and user psychology. That's like one good question to ask for that. You could actually even ask.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of growth hires will ultimately fail, in part because a company doesn't have a clear idea of what they're hiring for. And so the fail case is, hey, we have a great product. Now let's go hire someone to help us grow it. This might be true, but founders need to get a step more specific on what success or failure looks like for the role. What are the outcomes or systems they want to be in place? So defining success is step one. I think step two is calibrating, determine some set of companies with relevant growth patterns to yours. For you, it might be other kind of creator kind of like content-oriented businesses and go have calibration conversations with early growth leaders there. At Tilt, for instance, we knew that our growth playbook was going to be community by community. So we went to talk to early leaders at different products that grew city by city or community by community. So Grubhub, Uber, Postmates, et cetera. The goal is really to build an intuitive sense of what great looks like. And sometimes those people end up being poachable. That's an important step as well. The third, writing a job spec and then the exercise. The spec oftentimes, like the best leads are not cold.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's your growth route, Perry. And there's going to be this actually is a good one to dig into because at a certain point in time, maybe early on, it's getting guests that have over a certain threshold of audience is probably what your North Star metric for the first couple of years. Later, there might actually be a guest retention metric to actually get their next audience on as their own reach is expanding and then eventually converting listeners to guests might actually be like another kind of conversion metric that you care about later. And so probably over your lifetime, there's going to be different North Star metrics. And I think this is actually a good example to illustrate.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a tricky problem, and I think it will evolve over time for a company, but I think it's generally important across companies is actually having a growth model. Oftentimes this starts by getting into a spreadsheet, or actually pre-spreadsheet, write down how your product actually grows and how it should grow. So for Pinterest, and there's a concept called the growth loops that maybe we could talk about later, but new users coming in get brought in by existing content, go and post new content, which feeds the SEO engine and kind of drives more users there. Maybe for a business like that at some point in time, it's probably number of pins or active pinners at any given time. The point is having just a conceptual understanding of what is the mechanic of your business that actually is driving the main metric that you care about. For most businesses, it ultimately ladders up to revenue for some of my B users early on, just writing it down before you actually get into a spreadsheet is important. I think, yeah, go ahead.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. FAIR is a great business. And I think if I look at FAR and think about what were the indicators early on when we were talking that showed me they were really healthy in analytics, it was, if you look at the dashboards and what they're reporting out on, it's just very high signal noise. Rather than going and tracking everything and reporting on everything, it was here's actually the three things that matter to our business. And this is what we're going to have rigor around reporting on every month. I think they clearly had this at early on. And I think that propagated through their dashboards and everything else.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's the problem. A lot of people go to visualization tools, and Google Analytics is a little bit different, but say Looker or Mixan or whatever, they go to visualization tools and say, hey, we have dashboards. Like we have our problem solved. The reality is garbage in, garbage out. Poor instrumentation of a product is actually a very common problem here. And so what I mean by instrumentation is if you're not actually capturing key user events in the product, it's maybe simplest to understand this in e-commerce. Add a card, check out, revisit site, et cetera. But for social products, it's much more challenging. If you're not actually logging the right events there, then you have no idea what's happening inside your product and can't start working on growth until you have that lens.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, a good indicator of analytics debt is if I come in and ask a very basic question, say, show me last month's cohort of users and how they're retaining a D30, for instance, not being able to answer that question in a simple way or a series of questions that one should be able to answer, or there being a really high cost to go answer those questions, someone needs to go do a custom query of the database and it takes a few days. That's a good indicator that you have analytics debt.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data scientist. These are people that actually are analysts, but also are technical enough to be laying a lot of the analytics engineering foundation.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. One principle that for sure is true is never hire a growth person pre product market fit. I do think it's okay to have generalist athletes at this point, but they should really be talking with users and aggressively trying to find product market fit. And sometimes people who might have growthish backgrounds could be helpful on that, but they should not be running a growth team at that stage. I think prematurely scaling top of funnel before you have a cohort of users that's really retained and also understanding who those users are, that could be detrimental to a company. And so for sure, agree with you on that point. The second analytics is a really necessary foundation for this. One question that's related to what you're asking is who's your first gross hire, what should they look like? I think for me, my first growth hire is typically an analytics person. When Silicon Valley, we talk about the concept of tech debt. I think that's widely understood. I think analytics debt is just as common, if not more common. I've had a lot of success hiring people from BizOps teams out of company like LinkedIn or elsewhere who are really SQL proficient, maybe engineering or stats backgrounds or math backgrounds, but they still understand the business context. And so to be clear, this is not a”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was referring to was a growth team there. That would be the way the growth team is structured, and you would have a head of growth in various different PMs, and then those other functions, engineers or whatever, either data lining in or actually sitting within the growth team. And so where it sits, which was your first question, many successful companies have growth reporting into the CEO. And this is important given that you oftentimes need a blessing to just go run really aggressive tactics and dependencies, like I said, could really hinder a growth team. One way to solve that is just have it roll into the CEO. Between marketing and product, because the CEO at a certain scale might not be practical for that to be the case, I typically say this work better under product. I think many sustainable growth programs require with engineering and product discipline, marketing really only makes sense for e-commerce companies where the product is like simple and linear. You're likely going to have a performance marketing team, sit within marketing, and that's fine. Sometimes that's used interchangeably with growth marketing. But if we're talking about growth programs that are going to touch the product, I think it's much more ideal to have it sit under product.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So it's interesting. There's one meta point. We talk about it reforge. But one point that I very much agree with is if the practice of growth is successful, it should eventually abstract itself away and just be how product and marketing are run. So this is a discipline that I think can be instilled into other functions. But sometimes having a standalone growth team might not be the best long-term answer. But yes, there is a role in many companies' journeys where it's really important and it might be the most pragmatic solution. So there's typically two structures. There's like single function, which is actually how we had it at Stitchfix, which is some VP of acquisition with different channel directors reporting to that. This is more common for e-commerce companies or ones where it's a pretty straightforward or linear conversion funnel. The second model, which I just referenced is a cross-functional pod where you have a PM, an engineer, marketing, analytics design, user research working on shared business problems. Typically the PM might be like the most accountable person on that pod, but in general, those are like everyone's taking different disciplines and working towards a shared objective.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, here's a good example. If you look at paid marketing and you think about what a marketing team might be looking to do is set up a set of kind of different landing pages to actually capture different forms of intent and better convert users. One way of actually capturing learnings on conversion would be to just throw up a page, send organic traffic through, and just see what happens. The role of a paid marketing team here or a growth team could actually be, hey, we're actually going to go upfunnel, spend money in the spirit of learning, and actually drive much more traffic through a set of ads that are actually testing different messaging that will eventually roll up into our landing pages. Again, that's a very tactical one, but that's like one example. I think maybe the better answer is for the way most organizations are structured to have some form of dependencies. You have an engineering team, a product team, a marketing team, et cetera. I think part of the magic of cross-functional growth podge, which is generally the structure I prefer, is you can actually be fully autonomous in going and running an experiment to validate or invalidate a hypothesis without actually needing to step in the roadmap of other teams in a company.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're right, it's very inconsistent. I prefer a broad definition, which is someone who's responsible for two things. One is accelerating the company's pace of learning. This is typically done through experiments, but that's a very important piece. Like essentially, the growth team, the head of growth should be operating at a faster drum beat than the company and bring those learnings back into kind of the core product and what's actually happening. And the second description might be engineering systems that help a company build more control over its North Star metrics. And so that's when I look at ahead of growth at Forward, I look for.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be really detrimental if you're not focused on moving the right set of metrics. And that's a really important point that's netched in me since then. The second point, which is a little bit more tactical, and it's really around the importance of understanding incrementality, this is specific to paid marketing, but Stitchfix had a lot of data science DNA from Netflix, and that was instilled in the company. One of the things Netflix uniquely did was they were pretty fancy at running at scale performance marketing. All their measurement was based on these holdout tests. They didn't use any precise attribution models. I think many growth marketers aim for this almost a false sense of precision to give credit to a conversion on any one channel or any fractional set of channels. Oftentimes that's just false precision. Even though we were highly analytical at Stitchfix, we realized that marketing is rarely direct response. And the best way to really quantify efficacy is to measure lift by doing some version of holdout testing. And so that one's more tactical, but I think so many people could actually expect almost false precision out of paid marketing. And that was a really important learning there.”
2023-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source