YouSaid · the spoken record

Vaibhav Sahgal

lines on the record: 49
first: 2022-10-26
most recent: 2022-10-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“This is kind of too obvious of an answer, but I think TikTok, they just get it. Tech is just so good, right? And they just understand value connection better than anyone else. The first time I used TechTalk, they dropped you straight onto a video. No sign up, nothing. I think it's probably changed now. Drop you onto a video, that's it. Tell you to swiping up. They're taking note of your signals, probably stealing your data. And then on the fly, personalizing the experience where five minutes later, they know me better than I know myself. Just amazing. So for me, it's definitely TikTok.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'm a huge fan of the bottoms up SaaS model. I just read Andrew Chen's book, Cold Star From The Cold Star Yeah, and one of my favorite stories was about Slack, and it was just really cool how this product grew and first, like how they pivoted. Talk about investing in teams, right? I think a gaming startup of some sort and then pivoted to this B2B software and then took this bottoms up approach, which I think mostly happened accidentally, but then they really leaned into it. And how that grew the network effects and how ultimately companies took notice and paid them loads of money. And now it's everywhere, right? So I think the bottoms up SaaS model for me is really, really impressive because there's a really cool merge of what happens in social consumer companies and in B2B companies. And I think it's just really cool both of those are kind of coming together in this way. So for me, it's probably slack.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they will know where to be able to just hire them. No, it's very different. Every single situation, every single company is very different. You just have to be delivered about who's right for this particular job.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, there are lots of smart people out there. There are lots of people who would be great for a job. You need to find people who are right for what you need exactly. And what I mean by that is I am probably not a great head of growth for a B2B company. I just never worked in the space. I don't get it. That's not where my expertise is. I wouldn't know what to do with it at all. So you need to find not just smart people, but the kind of person that you need for this exact job. And it's not just about the industry you're in, the kind of company you're at. It's also about the stage, the personality of the person, whether you need someone to come in and actually form a strategy. And that's really hard and you're struggling with it. Or you just need, you know what to do. The pieces are there. You just need someone to execute. All sorts of different slices. The number one mistake is just not going through that process and just being like, oh, this person was ahead of growth that X.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of SEO stuff is dying a pretty quick death. There's good SEO stuff, right? Like structuring your website well, getting great content, telling Google where your great content is. We do a lot of that. That's great. But a lot of the black hat SEO stuff, I think at this point is just dead or almost dead. But some people still do it. Some companies still do it.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean just serving your customer a great experience has not changed and the channel's being really key, stuff like news onboarding really being super key. I mean, it sounds too obvious for me to even talk about here. Those things have not changed. The most important things we still do to this day, new user onboarding and our push notifications and email.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but depth is our differentiation. So you need to have breadth, and we do, you can talk about the NBA, you can talk about knitting, you can talk about TV shows, movies, et cetera. And you can do that anywhere. But the difference is Reddit is the deepest, most thoughtful discussion. That's not happening anywhere else.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We fuck up is instead of doubling down where we are strong, we try to cover our weaknesses or we look at what's happening with other social networks and we try to follow. We have a pretty unique thing going. When you think about where Reddit is strong, we are deep. You can get content about stranger things anywhere. You can get content about it in TikTok, on YouTube, wherever. But like that great discussion is only happening on Reddit and nowhere else. So if we chose instead of just going deep on that and doubling down on that, which is our strength, which is depth, we instead try to follow what's happening elsewhere. I think that's how we fuck up.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all converging. All right. I mean, back in 2008, 2009, it was all about friends and the friend graph. And Reddit was alive back then. It was way ahead of its time. It was about communities and interests and not about people. And what you're seeing now is the broad social networks are becoming all about communities and all about interests. And they just have a different take on it. Like that's what TikTok is. That's what Instagram is becoming. That's what Reddit obviously is. That's what Discord is. It's just inevitability. And all the friends stuff is becoming much more private. It's becoming much more in messaging. And Mark Zuckerberg knew this five years ago, six years ago, whenever when he wrote that community manifesto, he could see this, that broad social network, it's just going to be about interest and it's going to be less about identity more and more. Maybe just some famous people, of course, Twitter, Instagram, there it's going to be important. But broadly, it's going to be organized by interests, organized by communities. So Reddit way ahead of its time in that sense.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I invested in a hotel in San Francisco, which is a horrible investment. I don't know what's happening. I know, I know. I've ruined all credibility with you now, Harry. But yeah, I invested in this hotel. And what's funny about it is through all of what I just told you out the window, right? To me, it was just like, oh, I've never invested in a hotel before. Sounds kind of sexy to be a part owner in a hotel. That's what got me to do it. Ultimately, if I was going by my rubric of like, who am I investing in? What's the value of the product? I would not have invested. So yeah, that was easily the worst investment I've ever made.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it sounds pretty obvious, but ultimately talent is everything. So for me, when I do angel investing, I'm not so much interested in what exactly is a product, what exactly is the market. But if I really believe in the person and the talent, I know they'll figure it out. And I'm investing more in them and less in the product. And it's the same thing when it comes to my teams internally.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, how often? So when I was at Zynga, we did them weekly. It was just a weekly product cadence. I mean, gaming is brutal. It is a daily business and you only have so much of a shelf life. For gaming, that was the right cadence. For Reddit, it's actually more like once a month. It's not like a content treadmill that a lot of games at Zynga were. And so the cadence doesn't need to be as high. So find the right cadence for you that makes sense for your product. At Zynga, we had this elaborate, you would do slides and people would spend hours and pull all nighters doing it. We got rid of all of that at Reddit and it was very informal. So honestly, just what did we do? What did we learn? What were something surprising or counterintuitive? And what does it mean? And then we just have a discussion about it. So it's just a one-page or document that just lists this very quick. And it's really more about the discussion. And then hopefully you have these one pagers going into repository somewhere that people can.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think this is a really important instrument because there are a couple of things happening here. One, there's accountability. So we did a bunch of stuff. What happened with a bunch of stuff? What did we learn? Two, it's about sharing learning. And then three, it's about how does this inform what you are doing next. So if you take those three priorities, who needs to be in there? Well, all the lead absolutely need to be in a product review. They all are stakeholders in what we did. And I don't mean just your product lead. Your engineering leads need to be there. Your design leads to there. Your QA lead, your research lead, every single discipline needs to have a seat at the table because they have shared accountability to the results. And this is an instrument for accountability.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those would be just really fast, simple, easy, and ultimately would save us a lot of engineering time. This is about converting engineering time into value for your users and for your company.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, coming back to that fast play example that I gave, all we needed to do was put up a fake dialog that asked users, is this something that they want yes or no? 98% of users would have told us right then they don't want that. They just want to play the game. Keep doing that. We didn't do that. So after that lesson that we learned, we basically built this repertoire of validating ideas. You could validate ideas by putting up those dialogues and asking questions. You could validate ideas by sending a push notification and asking a question, getting users to give you input. You could validate an idea by doing user research, talking to real users. Or sometimes, you know what? You can't validate an idea. And sometimes it is about having conviction and vision and you have to do it to find out. Or you can do a very slim version of it, an MVP of it, and find out. For me, it was about, we have 10 different ways of validating ideas. For each idea, we chose one of those 10. And the key was that each”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, on words of friends, I came back down to culture. And it was a culture where everyone felt ownership of what they were doing and not in a way that, oh, I have equity in the company. In a way that we're floundering, and this is my job, as much as it is the person sitting next to me or the GM or the VM.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we learned, here's how we'll use the tech, et cetera, et cetera. Really, I was just making excuses. Mark was exactly right. And he asked me this one question that stuck with me. He's like, how did you test this idea before you decided to invest hundreds of hours of engineering time in it? We were like, we didn't. We just were convicted in the idea and we spent hundreds of hours in it and we did it. Why did you not put up a dialogue in front of users asking them, hey, do you want a faster board to play on? Yes or no? Like we never did that. When I thought about it, I remember the exact moment I was like, that is so obvious. Why did we not do that? Would have been hours of engineering work, would have saved us hundreds of hours of engineering time. We could have deployed on something else. So that was a very painful but valuable lesson for me.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, awesome. I've learned a lot from Mark. He's a tough cookie to work with. When Mark came back to Zynga the second time, I was the general manager versus friends. And we had gone through a really great period and then we were kind of floundering. And so when he came back, we were not doing so hard. And he comes in and he looks at our roadmap. And at that time, we had funded and just launched this feature called FastBlade. And it was a faster version over to the friends. It was based on this pretty loose insight that Words of Friends was like too slow. People wanted something fast, something shorter. And so we built a board and it was actually hundreds and hundreds of hours of engineering time. And we had launched this thing and 5% of day you used it to add a no value. So it was a complete waste. Mark came in and just kicked my ass for weeks on it. And for weeks on end, I mostly defended myself. I'm trying to just be like, no, it's actually not such a huge failure. 5% DA use it. It'll grow over time. Here's why we did it. Blah, blah, blah.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, as I mentioned in the beginning, you just need a few engineers who can collaborate, who can work with this person full time, much better than contractors or part-time. Again, you want people who have skin in the game. This is a high leverage area for your company. And you don't want someone phoning it in”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the first month, the red flags have got to be people who are doing a lot of talking and a lot of listening and not a lot of action. The right candidate just wants to get going. They want to launch something their second week there. They should just be itching to execute and launching things. That is the right candidate. One of the worst answers that I hear in interviews sometimes, like when I ask, what are your first 60 days like? Oh, a lot of like listening and learning and talking to people and forming relationship. No, you should have the drive to get going now. In the first month, for someone who's a really senior hire, they should have looked at your data. They should have formed some sort of strategy. It doesn't need to be a 10-page thing, but even just a one-pager. And they should have actually started to work with engineers to get shit going. That's super, super key.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it would be very good to be disciplined around. You don't want this person to be your head of data and to actually fix whatever is happening with your data. That is not their job. What you want is for them to be able to actually get the data, analyze it, and form a strategy really quickly. So as much as you can make that part easy for them so that they have the tools that they need to actually do their job. If you're relying on them to be your head of data, you're not setting them up to succeed.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for the right person, it should be very minimal. You want someone who can figure it out mostly on their own, give them access to data, give them a laptop. Hopefully they have a team that they can work with. And the beginning, all you need is a few engineers. That's all you need to get started. We're going to say something.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd read it, we've never changed it. Back in Zynga, we rarely changed it, but it's a very downstream metric. Daily active users is so, so downstream. And by itself, it really does not mean anything. So really, you don't want to focus on daily active users. You want to focus on way more upstream metrics, like retention or even more upstream than that, what drives retention. So in some ways, yeah, your North Star metric doesn't really change, but you're leading indicators, they probably change a lot depending upon what you've tested, what you've learned.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is going to be a critical hire for you. So, for Reddit, for example, our North Star metric is DAUQ. DAUNIS. Probably the most important metric for the company, leading indicator of revenue. This person is going to be a massive impact driver for the most important metric in your company. You should pay them accordingly. This is a person who you're putting in a position that could make or break the company. You want them to feel like they have skin in the game. You want them to feel like this is their company, that they have ownership and that they could have a material impact on their lives if they do a great job. But you want to pay them enough to where you are setting them up to succeed. And if they do succeed, it's a great financial outcome for them. That's very, very important.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the question Jamie asked me essentially was a case study is pretty straightforward. And those are the case studies that I like. You want someone who can take a high level ambiguous problem and just break it down for you and be really articulate about what exactly their process is and how they're going to solve the problem. You look for these sort of questions. How do you think about growth at Reddit? Very much a case study problem. One that I like asking is you are ahead of product for hosts or guests at Airbnb. What are the three top metrics you care about? How would you set goals for those three metrics? How do you prioritize between those metrics? Same thing. You're trying to see if this is a person who understands what the process is and how they walk you through that.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would do a lot of back channeling there. So I've done this for people where a lot of times when you back channeling, you only talk to folks who were their previous managers. But I think it's actually equally important to talk to people who were on their team. And you ask them, would you follow them? Would you work with them again? And people lie to you. People will embellish, but you got to kind of read between the lines and figure that out. So for me, it comes down to back channeling and people who worked for them, not just who they've worked for.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, if this is really an early hire, you want someone who can track palette, that is super important because ultimately you want someone who can build team and pretty low ego. That's really important. And obviously you want someone who's a culture fit who will have high integrity, et cetera, et cetera. So execution, ability to hire and build a team. Of course, creativity and imagination and being able to judge that.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be how I would go about it. I didn't give him answers, but I just walked in through here's what I would look at, here's my process, here's how I would go about it. That was the entire interview. So you really need someone who more than comes with really bright ideas, knows, has a very clear process that they can walk you through and explain to you in 30 minutes. Hopefully left.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So, my friend Jamie Quinn, who you might or might not have heard of, I had an interview with him. He was the director of product for ads back then. This is almost five years ago now. The interview was very simple. He asked me one question. It was a 40 minute interview. How would you think about driving growth for Reddit? That literally was the interview. And what you're looking for in that question is someone who has the ability to be able to go like, okay, first, what is growth mean? Start off by looking at what your funnel is, where the breakpoints are, what the opportunities is. Here's how I would prioritize. Here's how I would go from prioritization to setting goals, now start getting ideas. This is how I would form a roadmap. This is how I would assess every three months. And then one year down the line, we'd reassess blah, blah, blah. You want someone who can actually walk you through that end-to-end process with a lot of clarity. And that was it. So 30 minutes, I walked him through what my process would be.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's pretty difficult to find the right person. In the early hiring that I did, I only hired within my network or I only hired when I have a very clear back channel. And here's why the number one thing you're trying to figure out is this person can execute. Can they actually get their hands dirty and get shipped and make an impact? That is also incredibly hard to find out in interviews. Incredibly difficult. How do you even ask that? How do you figure out if someone has those chops to make shit happen? You can figure out how intelligent they are. You can figure out what they've done, but it still doesn't give you the full picture. So for me, it was about digging into my network, which I did, or finding friends who I really trust and really asking them, do you know someone who fits my profile? At least I would start there because execution is so important and so hard to figure out in an interview process.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inform those relationships early, but more importantly, really bring people along for the ride, make them understand what you're trying to do, why it's valuable, why it's going to be impactful. I think I just didn't prioritize that on my side and got hurt by it.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The third one, I just didn't really care as much to harmonize with the rest of the company, right? I was coming into an existing organization, an existing culture, and I just from day one, Harry, I just went guns blazing. This is the kind of team I want. This is the kind of culture I want to build. This is how we want to run product. Go, go, go. And I was very, very aggressive with it. And what I didn't do is sit down with people from across the table, former relationship with them. I didn't do any of that. And what that led to is a lot of stress and strife and a lot of us versus them that built up over the first year. And that's not great for anyone. And ultimately in the long term, it's going to hurt you.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for someone who you're bringing in who's fairly senior at that level, and this is like a VP level higher almost, you should know within three to six months where the wind is blowing. And so I think you want to make a decision pretty quickly, three to six months for someone who you've hired who's hopefully of the right caliber should be more than enough to make a decision. But of course, you need to ask why it's not working out.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I made so many mistakes. There's so much I would do differently. I think there are three main things. One is I just didn't hire fast enough. I didn't spend as much of my time hiring as I should have. Probably 30 to 40% of my time in those early years should have just been hiring. And what happened because I didn't hire fast enough? I was the one who had to fill the gap, which makes the situation even harder. You kind of go into this viral because I'm the one writing the specs, doing the analysis. I don't have time for hiring. And therefore, you can't scale and really have the big impact that you're there for. That was one. We also didn't fire or move people off fast enough. We wanted to move at a breakneck speed and there are only certain types of people who are okay with that. And in the beginning, we didn't really have that.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you at least want someone who's been along for the ride. So, yeah, it might be really difficult to get someone like Casey to join your startup and go back into an operator role and start from scratch. But it would be good to get someone who did it early on in Casey's team and who kind of wants to take that next step. So yeah, there's some money ball in there and you define the diamonds in the rough, but you do need someone, I think, who is senior enough and who has some experience wearing all those different hats because it is pretty challenging.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First and foremost, be a product leader. Ahead of growth is really a title that has shown up in the last few years. But really all it is is a director, product, or VP of product who works on value connection. So you need to look for someone who is a really great product leader and has an eye for value connection. I would strongly recommend, of course, this is going to be about your budget to hire someone really senior, really experienced. I think that's super important. Think about what that person needs to do up front in the beginning.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The temptation of optimizing way too early when really the priority should be let's first figure out what the product is going to be and what value it will add to users. So really think ideally post product market fit, but you do need to be intentional about your growth strategy from day one.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so when to hire, I think ideally you want to do it post product market fit. In the beginning, you're trying to create value in your product. It's not so much about connection. I mean, there's a minimum amount of connection, obviously, that's important, but that's not what's going to make or break your product. Having the great email or having great new user onboarding is probably not what's going to make the big difference. Now, that being said, I do think it's important to be intentional about how you're going to grow and how you're going to connect the dots. Do you know what your distribution strategy is going to be? Do you know what your growth loop is? Do you know how network effects will start to play in? You do have to be very intentional and deliberate from day one about laying this down and then working towards it. Does that need a head of growth? Maybe I would say if you have an advisor who has the expertise or you have that expertise, that's probably good enough. But if you don't have that expertise, you could get ahead of growth. But again, you need to avoid.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me take Reddit as an example. As I mentioned, sending a push notification from a subreddit that you're really into or something happens in that subreddit. I didn't create that content. I didn't create the subreddit. All I'm doing is connecting that content to the user who cares about it, value connection. Value creation would be something like, we think that Reddit is really missing real-time communication on the platform. And if we add real-time communication on the platform, it will attract all sorts of users who will use it for that purpose or get existing users to use it more. And so therefore, let's add like a really cool chat component to our subreddit. That would be value creation, push notifications, getting the content connected to the right person, value connection.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product, there's this common misconception that growth teams are the only teams that really care about traffic growth. That's not true. It's a value connection team. It's as important as a value creation. It's just a different way to grow your product. So I think that's one big misconception. It's also not growth hacking, which is a term I absolutely hate because it makes it seem like it's this kind of short-term hacking thing people do to get a little spike. It's absolutely not true. Growth is really about the long term. And it's about months and then years of outcomes and impact. So that's also super important.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Renamed to something like value connection. And while value connection isn't exactly a very sexy term, I do think it defines what growth teams do way better than the term growth does. And what I mean by that is there's value that exists in your product. And you need to make sure that value gets connected to each and every single user so that they may retain, they may engage, they may use the product for a really long time. It's why tactics like push notifications or tactics like news onboarding typically sit with growth teams. Because what is news or onboarding? You didn't create anything new in the product. There's no new value being created. What you're doing is you're trying to organize your product to better connect it to the user coming in so that they retain engage, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really about value connection, not about value creation. It's not core product, which is much more about creating new value in the product, which by the way, you have to do to grow.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better, and only then are you allowed to send more. So that was the first thing we did. We set up these guardrail metrics and we used CTR as the guardrail metric and actually worked really well. That's number one. I mean, number two, everyone is different. Every single user is different. Some will prefer person notifications. Some will prefer emails. Some will prefer both. And their tolerance is going to be very different. So you have to be able to diversify and have an arsenal of channels at your disposal. So you can ultimately personalize it for each and every user, both on frequency level and with channels you use for each user. Can I ask and listen to the one striking thing for me is when you first tried that first A-B test and then hearing you there is this kind of balance between art and science for growth. Absolutely. I'd love to understand how you define growth given the usage today being so overused. So what does growth really mean to you and what does it not mean? Yeah, and I stole this from our common friend Casey. But growth really should be.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like us weren't spam it, which was ultimately a really bad thing. How do you think about channel diverse? I know this is where I love the show because we just go off, but how do you think about channel diversification? Because if you've got a channel that's working, you don't want to be spread too thin. Just go for it. So how do you think about the blend between going for it when something works, but also being cognizant that you do need diversification built into your channel expansion? Yeah, we did this at Reddit when I joined. I was very cognizant of we burnt every channel we got at Zinga and I did not want to do that again. So one of the rules actually before I talk about diversification that we did to push notifications, which is a massive lever for Reddit, is we said you're only allowed to send push notifications if it hits a minimum CTR. And if it doesn't hit that CTR, it's spam. So unless you're hitting 10% CTR, you cannot send more PNs. You have to first fix your CTR, which means you need to make it more valuable for the users. You need to target it.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pers Yeah, I mean, in the beginning, it was just this cookie cutter research that we did and we found here's our personas, here's the type of people who use the products. But then I personally knew a lot of Mary and I found them in the product and I would talk to them every day and I would ask them questions about their lives, how this started to get to nowhere to friends, why they use it, why do they still use it after years and years, deep and making friendships and talking to these people every single day, that actually gave me insight into it. Okay, what were the bad habits? The worst habit I would say is we burnt out so many fucking channels. And what I mean by that is Facebook in the early days opened up notifications for the first time for developers. As a developer, just send literally hundreds of push notifications every day to each user. We did that. We spammed the hell out of our users. We didn't have any guardrails set up. And we essentially burned that channel out. And not only did we burn that channel out, we made Facebook change the platform.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me give you an example. So, for us, it was words with friends, which was the product I've worked at for about four years, my term in Singa. And our users were not me. They were 50 to 60 year old women in the Midwest. And they were looked to use this product because they thought it was Fitbit for the brain. And that was just a massive, massive insight for us. And so in the beginning, when I worked on Words of Friends, I was just littered with all of my biases. And I was trying to figure out, I really love sports, can we do something with sports and words with friends? And that's not helpful. What worked for us is putting a picture of this person. Let's call her Mary from Ohio, who is in her 50s and has grandkids, putting that picture in your office. Here's what she likes doing. Here's why she uses your product. And every time you're making your decision, think about Mary. And would Mary want this? Would Mary like this? And that was such an important exercise that I learned vigilant.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very easy to answer. I'd start with the biggest one that I learned, and I learned this maybe too late, was really get to know your user in and out. Who are they? What are their motivations? Why do they use your product? And I mean like really get to know them, not just like, oh yeah, it's this person, this is why they use it. I mean, like you should be in their shoes, try to be living in their life somehow.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the picture, so we put more people in there. So I ran what is obviously now known as an AB test, but back then I didn't really know what it was called. And I did that one night. And then the next morning, I came back, I looked at the data, and the click-through rate had gone up 20%. And I was so excited. And then from that point on, I just kind of became a junkie for that process. The idea that you can have some idea whether it might be a lousy idea or whatever, test it against real people, have them tell you if it's good or not and read in the data if it's good or not. To me, it's just romantic. It's just really amazing. From that day on, I was just a junkie for it and I just kept going deeper and deeper into it. So high five doesn't exist anymore. Moved over to Zynga, switched to product management, which was essentially Zynga at that time was basically this school for product management. And of course, some bad habits as well, which took a while to shake off. University essentially, which was amazing.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, mostly by accident, to be honest, I'll start win in the beginning. I was a software engineer who just moved to the valley. I worked for a company called High Five, older social network than Facebook, nearly as successful as you can tell. So I started as a software engineer for this little startup no one's ever heard of. I took a big chance, came to the valley, and I was working for this product manager, his name was Mike Starboard, best name ever, even better guy. And he was my PM, I was the engineer, and we were sending a lot of these emails. Some would say kind of spammy emails. We were basically sending these emails to users, like telling them who they might know. And so this email was just full of a lot of different pictures and people's names and like, hey, Harry, you might know these 20 people or whatever. And the way the email was designed, and I was the one coding it up, it was the pictures were huge. And so we could only fit so many people in there and so many pictures in the email. And I had an idea one night, I was like, hey, what if we just like reduce the size?”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, thank you for having me. And Casey's the true wonderful person here. Learned a lot from that guy. So thank you, Casey, for the introduction.”
2022-10-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source