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

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“The first one's probably about the importance of getting your objective function right. And so when I initially joined, there was a retention team and there was a VP retention who was fantastic. She was my counterpart. And then I was hired to go run acquisition. And our early emphasis on retention meant that we had a strong understanding of our users and really an amazing foundation to add acquisition to. But with a structure like this, teams ended up thinking less holistically. Really, we're focused on tools that they have within their disposal to move one particular metric. If I viewed my metric as new users in CAC, I could have destroyed her retention metric downstream by just letting in shitty quality users and optimizing for an affiliate channel or something like that. And so it's important for teams to have a holistic view of what growth actually means for that business. And for us, redefining our KPI to some downfunnel metric was really impactful. The meta point there is getting your objective function right. I think as a related point to that, many companies today start doing things to grow without really having an understanding of their growth model or a holistic understanding of it. Growth can”
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
“At that point, so our COO there who hired me, Brian Burt Whistle, he was, I think, the first BD person at Amazon, ended up being a close friend and mentor three and a half years later when I was leaving Tilt, which didn't work out the way we wanted it to, he introduced me to his wife, Julie Bornstein, who was the COO at Stitchfix. The story there was they had grown on the heels of organic and strong retention for the first few years, and famously had a hard time raising venture money, so decided to just say, hey, we're going to operate in the constraints of profitability. There's a lot more color on that, but really essentially they never had to invest in building an in-house user acquisition muscle until relatively late in the journey. So iT is a unique opportunity and is also coming off a time where I felt burnt by this high growth, high burn startup failure. And so Julie took the bet that I was sufficiently analytical and competent to operate at that next level of scale. And that's how I ended up 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
“And tracking new restaurant openings. And I was always inspired by that. So when I moved to the Bay Area in 2011, I started looking for interesting opportunities in the food space. We're looking at food startups. Turns out these are really hard businesses, but I ended up working with this chef marketplace called Kitchen that I fell in love with, essentially a marketplace connecting chefs and notable restaurants with diners. And it was really my first experience being the generalist athlete in a room of five to ten people just trying to make stuff work early on. I didn't really know what growth was at the time, but that's kind of what I was doing. One of the things we did there is we launched this group payments product and it was a real needle mover on conversion. Shortly after when I learned about this YC company, Tilt, what they were doing around building this crowdfunding or group payments API, I got really excited and I called emailed James Becerra, who I think you know and ultimately joined shortly after the company finished YC and raised its first round of funding from Andreessen Orwitz. Most of the company at that time was writing code and I was kind of helped to figure out why the company was growing 20% month on month and then help engineer things to help it grow faster. The stepping”
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 I'll go back and I'll start with my undergrad. So I studied engineering undergrad. I finished up University of Michigan in 2007. Most folks at that time out of engineering school were either going to work in the auto industry in Detroit or moved to Chicago or New York to work in business. I'm using air quotes. Google is just opening up their Ann Arbor office at the time. My objective when I was thinking about what I wanted to go do was really to go avoid routine, so avoid getting bored and then go optimize for learning, which is a theme that's held true throughout most of my career. Right out of school, I joined Bane because of this pattern. I think from a distance, it felt the breadth of problems and clients would offer that. I actually had a great time. And if anything, it trained my brain to be a structured thinker. But I always wished I could have better aligned how I spent my time with what I actually cared about or had some passion for. But at the time, one of my colleagues at Bain went to go work for Danny Meyer and then Gran Ackets and Nick Kakonis, who were running this big restaurant group with the Alenia group. Yeah. I think at that time was the best restaurant in the US. And I was a food and restaurant geek. I think Chicago is one of the best food scenes in the country. And I was always deep studying the food block.”
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
“Thanks for having me, Harry. I've been a longtime listener and learned a lot from your show over the years, so thank you.”
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
“First is experiment one pagers. So anyone could submit an experiment idea, but we built this very simple one pager framework that included an objective, a hypothesis you're testing, the design or resources required to execute the experiment timeline, and then what success quantifiably looks like. And then finally, the next steps that one takes if the experiment fails or succeeds.”
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