I think the way that you find alpha is either by doing things that no one else knows about.
I think another aspect is probably doing things that everyone is convinced will not work.
I think a good leader needs to know how to do everyone on their team's job, but poorly.
And I think the poorly part's important. askew, more junior.
I think hiring for potential, especially early on in the business, is far, far more important.
This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings.
Now 20.
Growth is the monthly show where we sit down with the best growth leaders in the world to discuss how they scaled their incredible businesses.
Today we have George Bonacci, VP of Growth, at Ramp, where he's helping one of the fastest growing fintech companies scale even faster.
Prior to Ramp, George was VP of Growth at Gong, and before Gong, George was at Samsara, where he helped grow revenue from 100 million to 650 million ARR and played a pivotal role in the company's successful IPO.
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That's M-I-R-O.com.
You have now arrived at your destination.
George, I'm so excited for this, dude.
Ramp is one of my favorite companies to feature.
I've heard so many great things about you.
So thank you so much for joining me today.
No, thank you so much for having me.
Listen, as we just said, I know a show is going to be great when I actually have to do very little work because you give me such great suggestions.
You said to me before, growth is just science and most marketers are bad at science.
What did you mean by that statement?
The goal of growth is to figure out how to grow the business.
And usually early on, that's very top of funnel focused.
How do you figure out how to get more leads?
How do you figure out a channel that works and is repeatable and has predictable outputs, given some inputs?
And the honest answer is no one really knows.
Every business is different.
So even if you understand from past experience something that's worked...
Usually just taking that one playbook or that one tactic and copy and pasting it to a new company generally doesn't work.
And I think that's the tendency of a lot of marketers.
So when I say that growth is mostly just science, I mean that you kind of have to come in with a blank slate, form a hypothesis, and then run a bunch of experiments.
And you'll be surprised about what works.
You'll be surprised at what doesn't work.
But ultimately, if you run enough of those experiments, you'll find something.
That's usually lost on a lot of marketers because they don't think in terms of experiments.
They think in terms of like, what do I know and how can I apply it here?
Is that because of the profile of person that they are that they don't think in that way?
It's probably partly the profile, but it's also partly just like how you think.
Like I think the type of person that would go and become a chemist like me or an engineer is probably very different than someone that's like hey, I want to become a writer or a, I want to get into comms or PR like very valuable skills, but very, very different from the way in thinking or way of thinking that would make someone successful, like scoping an experiment and thinking about like, what my hypothesis is and how I'm going to measure results.
It's just like a different part of your brain.
Like I would be a terrible writer, for example.
You said about running experiments there and running a number of them.
Can I ask in your mind is growth about increasing performance by one or two percent in many different areas?
Or is it about needle moving chapters of a company and being much more pivotal in that respect?
That is a good question.
The short answer is it has to be both.
If you're doing a good job, and it depends on the stage of the company, but in general, if you're doing a good job, you're thinking in terms of different time horizons.
So you have to have some like bucket of bets or experiments that are going to be those like big swing, huge step, changes and impact.
But those are generally high risk, high rewards.
You can't just do that.
Otherwise, you're going to fail and miss your number this quarter.
At the same time you need to have some bets where you have high confidence but probably not going to move the needle a ton.
But it'll help you get the 2%, 3%, 4%, 5% improvement this quarter.
And then you have everything in between.
So ideally, you're being intentional with how you're allocating your resources across everything from the very long term to the very short term.
And how you make those bets and how you allocate those resources is actually a conversation you should probably have with finance, with leadership, and align it to the goals of the company.
But that's my way of thinking about it.
You said there about that.
And I often think about growth very much like venture, which is you place a number of investments, slash bets and you observe, and then you wait to see what works and double down.
Do you agree with that analogy?
How do you think about what is enough bets and failure rate associated?
Oh, yes.
So it's absolutely a portfolio.
But I think like an investment portfolio, it depends what you're optimizing for.
And it depends on the stage of the company.
So your risk tolerance is going to depend on the stage of the company.
It's going to depend on if you're optimizing for growth or profitability or whatever it might be.
So it is a portfolio.
I think that you should assume if you're doing things right, you should assume the majority of your bets are going to fail, which is why I always believe that velocity is probably more important than getting things perfect.
But it is a spectrum.
You could do some really well-controlled, rigorous experiments and it's going to be incredibly academic and you're going to learn something, but it might take you a year to say something conclusive.
Or you can just run a bunch of experiments at an incredibly high velocity and it's kind of sloppy.
And similarly, you might not learn anything because you made a bunch of mistakes or didn't fully think through how you'd measure something.
So you kind of have to balance it.
But in general, I'd probably be biased to run more things faster than run something perfectly.
Does velocity impact quality of conversion?
And what I mean by that is if we're a little bit sloppy but we're very high velocity.
We won't spend so much time on the visuals for that campaign, the graphics for this.
It's velocity, but it's not as good.
How do you think about that trade-off?
Yeah.
I think if you had to choose, velocity is more important.
But there's the other side of that coin, which is, if you're just doing a bunch of sloppy things, it doesn't matter how many things you run, you're not going to actually learn anything.
What did you do that was sloppy that you wish wasn't sloppy?
It's a good question.
So I'm reminded of this one time.
I won't say which company, but we had a web page and the web page's conversion rate was trending down.
And it was trending down for a long time.
It was our number one channel.
And it was like, hey, what are we going to do to solve this?
And there were kind of two paths.
There was one where we could run a bunch of individual, well-controlled experiments and understand hey, changing this button or changing this H1 is like what's going to improve the page, and it worked or it didn't.
Or we could just run everything at once, kind of use our gut, kind of use our past experience and like hope that it worked.
And we ended up going that latter route, which was definitely the sloppier route, the less rigorous experiment.
It did end up working.
It did end up working.
So we did end up like 3x-ing the webpage conversion rate like over the course of a couple weeks and helped us hit our number that quarter.
I say that that was like a mistake because we never actually knew what did or didn't work.
And we had to go back and undo a lot of the changes that we made once we did end up A-B testing them.
But I think that goes back to like the portfolio of bets.
Like we were operating on a very short time horizon.
So we had to like optimize for velocity versus like rigor.
And then, once we were no longer under the gun, we went back and optimized for rigor, to understand what worked and what actually didn't.
How do you think about giving something enough time to know if it works?
We want a high velocity and we need to move on, but also sometimes it takes a little bit of time.
Content in particular, I would say 12 to 18 months.
How do you think about enough time, but not being slow?
It goes back to the portfolio.
Like if you're going to allocate 20, 30% of your time to like longer term bets, that's fine.
Be okay with the fact that you're not going to get results anytime soon.
Having said that, it would be great if you could figure out what some leading indicators are, or scope down the experiment so you could get some signal that like hey, we have confidence.
This will or won't work.
In general, I've always tried to prioritize experiments based on impact and effort.
I think those obvious ones, but also confidence in time to results.
Like if you're really confident something's going to work, you should just do it.
If you're really unconfident that something's going to work.
But the time to results is really fast.
You should do that as well.
And I think usually those two dimensions are lost when people are prioritizing.
They tend to just go for impact and effort and not think about confidence or time to results.
When you think about impact.
You also said that, the word indicator.
I think it's really important to understand what you're actually trying to move, what the core objective is.
What's your biggest advice to founders and growth teams on how to set the right metrics that you want to move?
That's where I think the experimental design and the rigor of experiments comes in.
You'll have a hypothesis.
And I think most marketers tend to jump to, let's go do something.
Let's go launch something.
But the experimental design, like understanding what you're actually able to measure, what you will measure, how long it'll take to get that result, if it's statistically significant or not.
All of that honestly, like you either need to be able to do that math yourself, or go find someone on a data team and go work with them, or acknowledge the fact that hey, we don't actually have a good way to think about this or measure this.
And that's OK.
We're going to go collect some qualitative data.
And it means we might be wrong.
Folks need to be honest about that upfront.
And define that upfront is probably how I would think about it.
We have this portfolio of bets, okay?
And then we see one that starts to work.
Do we immediately double down on it then?
How do we know how much to double down on?
Do we set a benchmark of what good is versus great?
How do we think about that?
Yeah, absolutely.
You should like triple down on that.
I think that another mistake most startups make is they see something that works and they're like okay, great.
Let's increase our spend.
Let's double it.
Let's triple it.
Ideally, if it's working, you take that channel to saturation as quickly as possible.
Like if you, if you graph out what the results are over a long period of time, you're probably going to see it approach an asymptote.
You're going to see the incrementality of those results start to like decay.
If you just burn a shitload of cash though on a channel, super quickly, say you're spending 10K, and you're like shit, it works.
Let's put 200K on it.
The 200K will not be nearly as efficient as that 10K.
Would it not have been better to do 30 50, 70 and gradually get up there than just whack it as hard as possible?
So yes, but it depends.
So if you're able to graph that response curve going from 10K to 200K, obviously you're probably not going to be able to go to 10K to 200K overnight.
If you were, that actually would probably be a good problem to have.
But yes, if you're able to graph that response curve and see when something goes from linear to start to decay in terms of response, that tells you it's like OK, we're no longer getting an expected output, given the input.
And then we have a conversation if the returns are worth it.
So figuring out the asymptote where things start to actually plateau is the most important thing.
And I think most companies, or most startups at least they get to that asymptote too slowly and they should really be scaling much, much faster if they find something that works.
Having said that, I think like most things saturate probably more slowly than people expect.
And so going from 10K to 200K might not be as insane as it sounds, but it depends.
You've got to watch it.
Do CACs get cheaper?
Over time, as brand becomes better known, you become more branded in an ecosystem.
Or do they get more expensive as you saturate the core target market and you have to expand into maybe less directly relevant ICPs?
The only right answer is that yes, CACs become more expensive.
As you get more and more market share, it makes sense that every incremental acquisition is going to cost more than previous.
Having said that, I think the reality is that's usually not true.
Usually you figure out new products to sell that actually make the LTVs improve.
You figure out new geographies to break into.
You figure out new channels that work.
You figure out maybe that hey, actually combining different channels has a halo effect and you're not fully capturing that and what the customer acquisition cost is.
So the reality is that No, it takes a really long time to get to the point where the macro effect of saturation is hitting your CAC, but that's how I think about it.
Do you think early stage founders should look at LTV?
Often CAC to LTV is kind of the hailed metric.
George, you know as well as I do it's so difficult to calculate LTV in any product, let alone early stage products.
How do you think about LTV and its utility value to early stage founders?
I think it's a reasonable framework.
I think you have to have some threshold that you agree on as a business.
Like this is what we're willing to spend and this is what we think a customer is worth.
But the reality is it's like false precision.
Like you're not going to know what your LTV is if you've been in business for a year or six months or whatever it might be.
So I wouldn't over index on that false precision.
I would instead just acknowledge that there's some threshold we're going to be okay with in terms of spending to acquire a customer and what that customer is worth.
And that should change over time as you learn things and run experiments.
When you're running experiments, do you have culture challenges in terms of maintaining morale if you shut off someone's baby?
And what I mean by that is someone's really been working hard on the YouTube, the Instagram, the SEO, and you say George, it's three months.
We're not seeing the returns needed.
Cut it.
But they are very attached to it.
How do you think about that?
No one should be that attached to the experiment that they're running.
I think that is a cultural problem.
I think that they should acknowledge that the vast majority of what they work on is going to fail.
And that if they're not failing, honestly, they're probably not doing their job well.
You need to be running a bunch of stuff.
It needs to be unique.
It needs to be creative.
And that means that most is not going to work.
If you're that attached to something that's working, you should be very, very high on the confidence aspect of how we prioritized it.
And in that case, like maybe we were wrong.
We should have that conversation, but you definitely no one should be that attached to any experiment.
How do you use postmortems to effectively analyze the success rate of different experiments programs?
I would say like you should be doing premortems and postmortems.
I think that's part of like good experimental design, like understanding what are the different failure modes for this and acknowledging like what the probability of those failure modes are.
And so you do a sorry, just so I understand, because so many founders get really granular and I get notebooks out for like pre-mortems.
This is right before we're about to start.
We plot out the three main things that could likely kill this project.
That's one way to do it.
I would actually get more specific than that.
When you're planning the experiments, like why would this fail?
It's like oh, we're not going to have a large enough sample size as we predicted, or like there's a million things, you should probably write out those million things.
And then i think what's more interesting is when you do a post-mortem if the experiment failed for something that you didn't actually anticipate, something that you didn't like factor into your, your experimental design.
That i think is an interesting conversation.
But if it's something that you would kind of anticipated and maybe the probability was wrong or whatever it might be, that is less interesting and i probably wouldn't even do a post-mortem for that.
How often is the pre-mortem the reason why something didn't work?
How often do you get it right?
Oh, that's a good question.
I would say for the high probability, high confidence bets, the things that you're doing to hit a number this quarter, or even this year, I think pretty high.
It's probably like 90% plus.
For the big swings, there's always like some black swan.
There's always something that like you cannot anticipate.
You had no idea.
And that's where the postmortem actually, I think, is valuable.
And trying to figure out what you learned and how it might apply to either other big swings or maybe even like higher confidence bets.
Like that, I think, is actually the much more interesting and more valuable conversation.
I think every growth team is going, well, I couldn't predict COVID.
Yeah.
Yeah, that is very true.
That was a tough one for us all.
Okay, so we have that as the premortem.
For the postmortem, how do we structure that?
Who's invited?
What does that look like?
Yeah.
So I think the person that was ultimately like the DRI for an experiment, the person that also hopefully scopes the experiment, they should write the postmortem.
They really need to be clear on number one, did we run the experiment well?
Or did it fail for some reason that we could have avoided?
I think like outside of did we scope the experiment well?
It's did we learn something that could be generalized to other aspects of the business?
I think that's an important aspect to have.
And then I think like the third most important component is just making sure that the right cross-functional stakeholders are there.
So the folks that can learn from it, the folks that can prevent the failure in the future.
I think that's maybe like the third most important aspect of a postmortem.
But beyond that, like the structure, I don't think actually matters that much.
It's going to be very company dependent.
What do you like to do?
Is it a notion?
Is it a Google Doc?
When do you send it out?
Because you want people to have time with it, but not too much time.
How do you think about that?
Yeah, I'm a Google Doc person.
I think the DRI should write it up.
They should send it out in advance, at least like 24 hours in advance.
People have time to like think about it.
But ideally, like I'm more in favor of a live conversation rather than add some comments, have a conversation in the comments in the doc and then like, have a maybe more boring live conversation.
So I'm big on live.
I really like one of the suggestions which is like are there any learnings that could be generalized to other aspects of the business?
Is there an example of one in the past that you could share just to illustrate that a little bit?
Yeah.
A really tactical example was we were doing some very basic A-B testing on our homepage and we saw that a red button by far outperformed anything else.
Now, red as a button is generally a bad idea.
It has a negative connotation.
It's like something is wrong.
Don't hit the red button.
But we couldn't ever find anything that outperformed on a pure A-B testing basis, like that red button.
Now it turned out when you actually went and looked at the data by segment.
Although it outperformed in general, it severely underperformed for the enterprise segment.
It's like a great example of like Simpson's paradox.
When we took that information and like, removed that from the web team and applied it to the content team and apply it to everyone else that was using the red button as a best practice, that was like, incredibly valuable because most of the content we were generating was for enterprise.
Most of the webinars we were generating were for enterprise.
Like most of the direct mailers we were sending were for enterprise.
So what we were actually doing by saying hey, red is the best button or sorry, the best practice, was actually like decreasing the performance of all of these things we were doing that were specific for the enterprise segment.
Does growth sit in its own team or that?
Are you in the product team?
Are you in the marketing team?
Where do you sit?
That's a good question.
I think my personal opinion is I think growth should be independent.
I think like the growth team's mandate should be to figure out how to grow the business.
And that should be more than just marketing.
It should be more than just product.
It should mean that like you have the mandate to do whatever is the highest leverage.
To me, that means you probably should report to Honestly.
That's one of the reasons why I love Ramp is the growth team reports to one of the co-founders.
I think some companies have chief growth officers.
I think other folks have growth organizations that are more like SWAT teams and kind of roam between different parts of the business.
Ultimately, it does depend on the business, but I think they should be as independent as possible.
You said to me before about seeking alpha in growth.
It was a cliffhanger because I had no idea what you quite meant by it.
What did you mean by seeking alpha in growth?
Yeah, I was stealing alpha from investing terminology.
What's your unfair advantage is maybe a better way to put it.
That is the key to being a good growth team.
You've got to figure out something that is not saturated and that other people ideally, are not doing.
I think the way that you find alpha is either by doing things that no one else knows about, either most likely because it's so new.
Like think about when TikTok first came out.
I don't think any B2B brands were thinking about advertising on TikTok.
I don't think there even was advertising on TikTok when it first came out.
But the folks that were really ahead of the game they're like.
Eventually there'll be advertising on TikTok and it's going to be totally saturated with consumer brands.
But eventually there'll be a B2B opportunity.
And when they were the first ones to run those experiments, they probably had huge returns.
So anyway, doing things that I think folks don't know about is like one aspect.
I think another aspect is probably doing things that everyone is convinced will not work.
I remember first suggesting we try direct mail like years and years ago.
And it was like, why would direct mail work?
Like junk mail to people's homes?
Like that absolutely won't work.
And it became like one of our most successful, like biggest channels after like a few iterations.
So I'm happy to chat about where you find these things, but you've got to remember actually, because it's it's like it totally makes sense.
Like do things that people don't know, do things that people don't believe.
How do you find them?
Yeah, I think this actually is is a good segue into like, how do you just learn in general?
Uh, as a member of the growth team or someone in a company in general, I would say that there's three areas.
Like you can learn academically.
You can go read a book and learn what's worked for other companies or other growth folks or companies in the past even are great aspects of being able to learn.
So learning academically is one aspect.
I think you can also learn from your peers.
So you can go and learn from folks at other companies.
Growth people at other companies.
I think that's a great area of finding alpha.
Granted, probably not the best unfair advantage since someone else knows about it.
But I actually think the most interesting is to go and learn from other niches.
So other verticals, other geographies, especially if they're tangential to what you're doing.
A great example is WhatsApp.
WhatsApp as a marketing channel is not huge for most brands or most companies in the United States, but it's massive in a lot of international regions.
And I think like, great, could we go try like WhatsApp instead of sending emails?
It'll probably fail.
But again, if you're doing enough of these experiments, you'll find something that works, that no one else is doing.
My question to you on the number one academically, is that not just learning playbooks?
And do you worry that then you'll speak to your friend, George, who will tell you what worked at Samsara, but RAMP's a totally different business.
And so respectfully, to your point on playbooks earlier, they're not applicable often.
Does academic learning really work?
I think it does, but it depends how you look at it.
So yes, there are playbooks that you can just take and copy and paste.
There are also playbooks that you can look at and think critically and adapt.
And then there are playbooks kind of come up with from scratch.
I think a lot of academic learning is taking a past playbook and adapting it.
And like the example that always comes to mind for me is in the world of attribution and marketing.
So like media mix marketing, oh sorry, media mix modeling or marketing mix modeling, depending on who you talk to, MMM.
Everyone's talking about it now is the best way to do attribution, blah, blah, blah.
That's a really old concept.
That's like from the old like Mad Men style advertising days in like the 1950s and 60s.
So I think that's a good example where hey, you could actually go and look at how did they measure the impact of ads in literal newspapers before anything was digital, back in like the 1950s or 60s.
And how do you actually adapt that playbook or that methodology to modern day, like digital advertising or modern day digital marketing as a whole?
There's probably a million examples like that.
Actually, direct mail is probably another example of that.
There are so many.
What did you see in direct mail that no one else saw?
Because so many of your friends were like George, crushed it on direct mail and no one thought this was a good idea.
Yeah.
So what did you see that no one else saw?
No one else was doing it and it was incredibly scalable.
Like that was pretty much it.
Like, The fact that no one else was doing it, it's like, okay, that's interesting.
We should try it.
But the fact that if it works, it'd be incredibly scalable.
And the fact that you can run it with very large sample sizes meant that we could run a lot of experiments in parallel and learn really, really quickly.
Like there's very few channels where you can go like hey, tomorrow let's go reach like 200000 people.
Direct mail email, those are like kind of some of the only channels that would allow you to do something at that scale.
And that's run a lot of experiments.
What is no one trying today that you think is interesting?
I don't know if I can give away my secrets, but I think the honest answer is like on the B2B side.
And I don't think this is super cutting edge, but influencer marketing maybe, like a year or two ago, this would have been a little bit more cutting edge.
But everyone's always thought of influencers and user generated content maybe to get more specific as more of a B2C tactic.
That worked really well.
I would argue that works just as well and maybe even better in the B2B world, like especially if you're moving up market, moving to enterprise.
Yeah, there's definitely unfair advantage there, but it's a lot of work.
It's a lot of work.
How do you think about attribution and the challenge of capturing conversion?
You know, I interviewed Nick at Revolut and Antoine, who's the head of growth at Revolut, and their biggest mental shift for both of them was the power of brand marketing, but both being aware of the challenge of having no freaking idea what it does to your revenues actually.
How do you think about the importance of knowing source of revenue versus brand marketing?
Yeah, it goes back to the portfolio.
I think that you have to be okay with the fact that most brand marketing is a long-term bet.
It's high risk, it's high reward.
At least that's how a growth person probably thinks about it.
Is there a stage of company where it becomes interesting?
I think if you're seeing all of your core direct response channels start to saturate, then it's something that you have to start doing.
And the assumption is that investing in brand is going to do one of a few things.
It's either going to make folks that have a problem and are aware they have a problem aware of you.
And I think that's how probably most companies start thinking about it.
But the more interesting aspect is like true demand generation.
It's like, hey, there are people out there that don't realize they have a problem.
And brand marketing, like instead of being like, hey, try XYZ product or try XYZ company.
It's like this problem exists.
Like there's actually a better way.
And of course, like we're the better way.
But that, I think, is like a much more interesting type of brand marketing to open up, like demand for a new part of the market that you aren't able to reach with traditional channels.
Totally agree with you.
Can I ask just on the bets that we continue to go back to?
How much is too much concentration?
When you think about a portfolio it's like hey, traditionally in venture you don't want to be, definitely not more than 10 in one single investment.
How do you think about too much concentration in a growth portfolio?
Yeah, I think if you're doing things right, the concentration will change.
It's almost like when you find something that works, if you do a really good job of saturating it as quickly as possible, you will be, by almost definition, like really concentrated there, at least for a period of time.
It's really how quickly you can diversify and stack different bets and different wins so that you're not concentrated for too long of a period of time.
But I think concentration in and of itself is not a bad thing.
It means that you're doing a good job maximizing an area.
How do you think about communicating growth goals to other elements of the organization?
You're sitting there in your independent growth team say, and you also have to work with product and you also have to work with marketing.
How do you work together most efficiently to communicate this is what I'm going after?
I think communicating the way growth thinks about things is probably like more important than like what specifically they're doing.
As long as everyone's aligned that like the growth team's job is actually aligned with everyone else's in the company, which is like we need to be successful.
Like growth team's job is not to make anyone happy.
It's to make the business successful.
And that might mean like for a period of time, working really closely with product or really working really close with product marketing or some other element of the business.
But really they should recognize and growth should be able to communicate that we're bringing a unique skill set and unique point of view that hopefully is complementary to their skill set and their point of view, but ultimately the same goal of making the business successful.
You're an angel in my company George, and we're sitting down for a coffee and we're going for some advice.
And I'm at about a million in revenue.
I've just raised a Series A. Is now the time to bring in a head of growth?
And how do you advise me on when is the right time to bring in someone for growth, and And what type of person?
Is it senior or junior?
Yeah, I would always skew more junior.
I think hiring for potential, especially early on in the business, is far, far more important.
I actually think it would be a mistake to hire someone more senior, like if you're series A.
Hiring a really smart generalist that can think in terms of first principles and that can think logically in terms of solving problems is probably more important than anything.
What background do you find is best?
Yeah.
Unless you're trying to solve a very specific problem and you have a really high confidence that this is the right problem to solve, I would not hire a specialist or someone with a traditional marketing background.
I think hiring someone that has demonstrated they can think logically and they can do math is really, really important in the early days.
So that might be engineers, that might be ex-finance folks.
It might be an ex-consultant that hated consulting and, like really wanted to stick with something long term and get their hands dirty.
I think those make generally the best first growth hires.
But really you should just be trying to assess for potential, which I think is a combination of like can they have vision?
Can they kind of see areas where they can go?
Like, can they acquire new skills really, really rapidly?
And are they like internally motivated?
Is there any profile before we actually dig into skills and skill detection?
Is there any profile where you're like, I don't love that background.
It's just tough to be good at growth with that background.
Yeah.
If you've been at a company, especially a company that's an order of magnitude or larger bigger for more than a few years, it's just really hard to then change your mindset and go to a smaller startup and think about how much you have to get your hands dirty and how differently you need to think about things.
I think if you've been at a much, much larger company, you're going to tend to think more in terms of playbooks and rely more on your past experience than on what you can learn from others, or what you can learn from maybe, like other geographies, other companies or other peers.
So going from playbook to first principle thinking is generally difficult to do.
I personally like stayed away from that type of profile.
On the skill detection, how do you run an interview process?
And again, you're advising me.
I have a number of applicants and we have a candidate pool.
How should I spend the first meeting?
What questions should I ask?
What should I try and uncover?
I think if you're able to do some sort of back channel and some sort of test in that first interview, that is going to be like the most valuable, highest signal thing you can do.
When you say back channel or test, what do you mean?
Do you mean like references or like physical take home test?
Yeah.
Both.
So exactly both.
If you're like a series, A startup, it's probably like finding the best talent and hiring.
Convincing the best talent to join your company is generally going to be really hard.
I assume most people have probably never heard of most series A startups.
And in that case yeah, the best folks you're going to be able to hire are going to be like referrals, warm intros, that sort of thing.
So getting some sort of back channel information from the person that is hopefully connecting you is, I think, like actually the first step of the interview process.
I would argue the second should be some sort of case study or some sort of take home test.
You can do the case study, live in the conversation with them, just to see how they think about things.
But I don't think it would be a bad idea to go from warm conversation, get to know you kind of selling you on the opportunity in the business straight to a take-home test.
So the first call should probably be about selling.
And hopefully you're selling based on the referral that you just got, the very strong referral you just got.
And then the second stage would be, okay, let's assess.
Okay, let's assess take-home assignment.
What do you like to give as a take-home assignment?
And what advice would you give for me?
Yes, make it as real as possible and make it quantitative.
And actually maybe the third thing I'd say is understand what good looks like before you send the test out.
So a great example is I like to just take a Salesforce dump or a dump of data and be like hey, what's the best campaign?
What worked best here?
What were the best leads?
Whatever it might be.
And if it's real world data, it's going to be really messy.
Like there's going to be a bunch of tricks they have to catch.
There's going to be a bunch of mistakes they have to figure out.
Duplicate leads or the dates don't align or missing data or whatever it might be.
So I think like that itself is like can they work with real world data is, I think, a really interesting question to answer.
Then the other is how much of this did they think through?
What was their thought process?
How quickly were they able to adapt?
How quickly were they able even to do the tests?
Did they ask questions about it?
All of those, I think, are signals, before you even see the output to understand.
Are they at least thinking about things in the right way?
But the real world is messy.
They should work with real world data.
So they work with real world data.
They come back and you're impressed.
What happens next?
Do we go straight to an offer?
Do we have a hiring panel?
Do we do any other steps?
They should at least meet some other members of the team.
Like ideally you want this to be a mutual fit, like both culturally, but also they want to work with the people on the team.
The team wants to work with them.
So I think there's still value in doing a panel, but it's almost more culture fit and more team fit, more than anything.
But ideally, you are scoping that test that you send them so you know if they can do the job.
When you've got growth talent wrong.
What did you not see that you wish you had seen when you hired them?
It's generally been hiring a generalist that, hey, this isn't for me.
I don't want to do this after all.
I've never done this problem, or I've never done this job before.
Now that I'm doing it, I really don't enjoy it.
I want to go and get back into investing or I want to do like X Y, Z.
Honestly, I think it's difficult to assess for that.
And you just have to acknowledge that, like no one, even the best person hiring is still going to make a lot of mistakes.
And that's that's OK.
Probably what's most important is just being as transparent as possible, both in terms of the opportunity and then in terms of how you're being going to be assessed, and also just being transparent.
Like if this doesn't work, that's fine.
Like we've all had jobs before.
We're all going to have jobs again.
Like that's OK.
Do you agree that people are destined slash much better suited for certain phases of a company life?
I wouldn't say they were destined, but I think you can be suited for it.
Like, if you spend the last five jobs and 15 years in a certain stage of company, I think it's going to be difficult to adapt your way of operating, way of thinking, to a different stage of company.
Having said that, I mean, I don't think anyone in particular is like destined for a certain stage.
I think like if you're very, very hungry and you're a self-starter and you love just doing a little bit of everything, it's like OK, you're probably going to do better at like a seed or series, A stage company than like a hundred thousand person well-established business.
But that might change over time and that might change as they gain more experience or do different things.
You need to invest in your people, right?
I mean, that helps them to grow and develop with scale.
And you said to me before, management is a skill that needs to be invested in.
Do you think it's currently invested in by most companies?
By most companies, no, I don't.
I think that, like philosophically, they're like yes, we want to invest in people's learning and development.
I think they even believe that that's true.
But like actually doing it is really difficult.
Like it takes time.
It takes resources.
You have to be intentional.
It has to be top down.
How do you do it then?
Help me.
I think sam sara actually had like a great model for this, the ceo and founder.
Like he was very big on learning and very big on reading, and i remember like one time he was hanging out in like the cafeteria and like, what do you like to do in your free times?
Like i like to read books, and so, as a result, you saw how that permeated throughout the culture.
So i remember they launched something when i was there called leadership principles, and everyone that was a leader within the company got a big box shipped to their home and it had literally like 15 books in it and they're all business books And the expectation was that you read one of these books every single month and then rejoin a conversation with other peers.
And this is all organized to discuss like one of the principles in these books that Samsara wanted you to embody.
And then there was like an element where you actually then have to go put it into practice and demonstrate you're putting into practice.
Like.
To me, that is a great example of being very intentional about hey, we value learning and development here.
And we're going to add a structure and we're going to add accountability to it to make sure that you are not just learning things, but putting it into practice.
That took time.
That took a lot of investment.
That took really it coming from the founders.
And I think, like a lot of companies maybe, sometimes get caught up in the day to day and they say hey, we value learning, but go figure it out on your own, rather than coming up with like a holistic program or holistic mechanism like that.
How do you think about the effectiveness of that?
I read Howard Schultz's book on Starbucks and leadership lessons from Starbucks.
I run a fucking media company in a world of TikTok and deep seek.
It's completely different to the point on playbooks.
The leadership principles... probably don't align.
Most leadership books written 20 years ago do not take account for a post-COVID millennial generation.
How do we think about applicability and actually the lessons we teach being wrong?
I don't think business has actually changed that much.
Tactically, sure, maybe it has.
The channels, TikTok didn't exist 30 years ago.
But I don't actually think business and being a good manager in particular has changed that much or the skills necessary to be a good manager have changed that much.
A great example is like the book, The Goal.
Like I'm a big fan of that book.
I have some recency bias because we read it recently.
But one of the key concepts in that is like the theory of constraints.
And now this this doesn't have anything to do with management.
But the concept of the theory of constraints existed 40 years ago and it still exists today.
Like every team is operating with some bottleneck in their process.
And being able to identify that bottleneck and remove it is a very valuable skill for anyone, but it's especially valuable for a manager.
That's how you get the most out of people.
That's one of the core jobs of being a managers.
So that's just one example.
Like I would argue that most business books, as long as you're vetting them well and as long as, like you, are being intentional on what is the principle you want to pull out of this and have your team put into practice.
There's probably something that can be learned from almost any book, regardless of how old it is.
What is the biggest bottleneck in your role today at Ramp that, if removed, would be the biggest game changer?
The biggest bottleneck is probably the velocity of experimentation.
Like there are so many opportunities.
We don't have enough time.
We don't have enough resources.
That's probably like if you zoom out far enough, that's probably the constraint for most businesses.
What would you like to do?
But because of time or lack of resources, you're not able to do.
There are a lot of things I would just like to get off the ground faster.
When you're reliant on external parties, either like external vendors or external lead sources or other legal teams, to review your terms and services, things just go much more slowly.
I wish that there was a way to speed all of that up.
I think that Ramp actually does a really good job of saying like, let's optimize for speed.
Just accept those legal terms.
Maybe not necessarily, but let's figure out a way to move as quickly as possible and just like, launch it and test it.
And then we can figure out the details if we're going to actually scale it up.
We spoke about investing in people becoming managers and developing.
I spoke to so many of your former colleagues and they all said one of your biggest strengths is the willingness to roll up your sleeves and do the work yourself.
My question to you is, ironically how willing should a manager be to do IC work versus that actually just being a plaster to not having great ICs?
It's a great question.
A good leader.
I won't even say just manager.
I think a good leader needs to know how to do everyone on their team's job, but poorly.
And I think the poorly part is important.
They should know how to do the job so they can step in if they need to, or so that they're dangerous enough to ask the right questions.
But if they know how to do the job better than the people they've hired, then they didn't hire the right people.
And it's going to lead to micromanagement.
It's going to lead to, to your point filling in gaps that are not the most effective use of their time.
So being able to number one either learn enough of what your team does so that you can do it poorly or, number two, hire people that can do what you need them to do better than you know, I think is kind of the key.
Okay.
So you've hired me.
I've joined your team.
I'm a junior.
You hired very junior with this one, George.
Sorry.
But what does that onboarding look like?
What do you expect from your new growth hires in the first 30 days?
First 30 days, it's learn the business.
It's learn the team.
It's learn like your area of domain.
I would expect in the first 30 days, you know how to do your job.
And that's pretty much it.
And you understand how the company operates and how the company makes money.
Like I think a strong foundation is actually understanding how the business works.
What do I do as a leader to give you those best 30 days?
Do I just say, just shadow the shit out of me?
Do I say, go sit in support?
Where do you go?
I think this again goes back to the investing and learning.
I think the leader needs to be incredibly detailed in what those first 30 60, 90 day plans look like who you're meeting, what you're doing with your time.
Actually, this is something I learned from Samsara as well.
I remember my first 30 days were written out in excruciating detail.
I think the first two weeks were completely scheduled out to the minute for me.
And as a result, it was also very clear to understand if someone was learning and picking things up.
And it was very easy to compare folks if they were given the same structured onboarding.
So I firmly believe like the first 30 days is like you learn the business and you learn the job.
Now, beyond those 30 days, like you should be able to start showing like some sort of step change impact, start having some ideas, start making things your own.
And then, by 90 days, you should be starting to actually show the fruits of those new ideas and the fruits of, like that new experience that you're bringing, or new perspective that you're bringing.
Should you always go for early wins just to get points on the board?
If you see the opportunity, yes.
And there should be the opportunity.
You were ideally hired because you have some skill set or some unique perspective, or there's some gap in the business that you're filling.
So there should be some early points on the board you can put up.
Having said that, if someone is not able to put up points on the board, you should understand why and if they were set up for success.
And if they were not, you should move that as quickly as possible.
But there are some roles and there are some problems that do just take time to solve.
And that's where the, okay, how can we scope this down and run an experiment to validate?
Are we at least on the right track is important.
But there are some aspects or sometimes where it is difficult to put early points on the board.
George, how fast do you know if someone you hired isn't good enough?
Oh yeah, i think you generally have inklings in the first couple weeks, but you should give some people the benefit of the doubt, like you should run some sort of str, and i guess this is why structured onboarding is so important.
Um, and this is why making sure people ship things in their first week is so important.
You actually can assess them based on facts versus just vibes or feelings.
But you generally have some sort of vibe or feeling in the first week or two.
Do you know what I find really hard?
It's hard to get rid of someone after a week.
It's like you haven't given it enough time.
Do you know what I mean?
It looks like you're just cutting it prematurely short.
So you know, but you keep them for three months because you're like well, at least now it looks like I can say I've given them fair try.
I think that's true.
What are the most common reasons growth hires don't work?
I think the number one reason is it was on the manager.
It was a mishire.
They didn't scope the role effectively or the role changed, the needs of the business changed and they hired the wrong person, the wrong profile.
I think generally managers try to come up with like a laundry list of skills that they want to hire for and they try to find someone that checks most of those boxes.
But that's almost the easy way to do things.
I think the much harder way is to get really, really crystal clear on what is the one thing that we need.
Like, what is the one skill or trait or piece of experience, one problem we need to solve?
And hiring someone that you have high confidence can do that or fill that gap versus check a bunch of boxes.
So not getting clear on that, I think, is the number one reason why you would miss hire.
And that's mostly on the manager, if I'm being honest.
How does AI change the role of growth?
You know, we see some pretty futuristic things in terms of here's my budget.
Go spend it across five channels and it will do it in the optimal fashion for you.
Is that the future of growth?
And how do you think about how your role changes with an increasing prominence of AI?
In that example.
I think it's hard to find alpha if you're just having AI.
Go find the opportunities for you.
Having said that, I think AI is tremendously changing the role of growth.
Why is it hard to find alpha in that respect?
Because they'd have all of your connected data history and so they could look at all prior performance conversion on every channel.
Compare it like for like, benchmark it against standards and then do what's best for you, not a anonymized data set.
This is what you should do.
It could be incredibly personalized.
It could be personalized, but almost by definition, that's just going to give you incremental gains on things you're already doing and things that has data on.
I think like to get real advantage.
Like maybe we'll get to this point at some point soon, but I think it's hard.
Have the AI go talk to like 50 people in the industry and like synthesize what they're doing and apply what they think is going to be relevant to your business model and your ICP and like go apply that.
That sounds really difficult to do, at least at the state of AI today, but maybe not in a year.
Who knows?
Tooling wise, does it change much?
Yes, 100%.
I remember a few years ago I was such a strong advocate that everyone on the growth team needs to be technical.
They need to learn SQL.
They need to learn Python.
They need to learn how to work with a growth engineering team very, very closely.
I think AI has upended that.
You don't need to be nearly as technical as you used to.
AI can help you write the code.
It can tell you other ways of doing things.
Even just in that element of who I used to have a bias for hiring, it's totally changed.
In my mind, growth people bluntly, are either performance-driven scientific, or they are creative-driven, artistic.
Does a world of AI make one likely to be more successful than the other?
It's a good co-pilot, for lack of a better term, for both of those roles.
I think that on the creative side, it can help you think about new ideas and help you brainstorm.
On the performance side, it can help you analyze the data and maybe be more efficient or move more quickly.
You've got to choose which one helps more.
Here's my bias.
I am not super creative at the end of the day.
I'm not a creative minded person.
So I think it helps me a lot more.
I think you are.
Don't discredit yourself.
Do you think it helps creative people more?
I think so.
Or maybe it helps uncreative people more is maybe what I'd say.
The number of times that I've had chat GPT just be like, how do I make this better?
How do I add a joke in here?
What are some other like visuals I can do?
What's a good analogy for XYZ?
I wouldn't have been able to do that on my own.
I would have had to go to someone on product marketing or content and be like hey, I need some help.
Can I ask you, how do you advise founders competing in incredibly intense competitive markets?
Ramp is in a very competitive market across a number of different products.
What's your biggest advice on competing in very proliferated markets?
Yeah.
I think it's like most things you just have to have a better product and you have to have some plan for distribution.
I think that having a better product probably solves like 80, 90% of the battle.
But you also need to think about how you're going to distribute that product and like what your unfair advantages in distribution.
And hopefully that's where the growth team comes in and where they can provide value.
But I do think it's mostly on the product.
Do you agree with the suggestion, build it and they will come?
Yeah.
Absolutely not.
No.
I'm a marketer at the end of the day and I'm a growth person.
That is antithetical to everything we stand for.
There are some products sure where, like yes, it is so amazing and the word of mouth was so strong that they did build it and people did come.
I think that is so out of the ordinary and leaves your fate so much to chance that that's not a good approach.
Listen george, i've loved this.
You are unbelievably concise with answers.
I call it kind of word economy, which is like value per word and like most people are fluffy and don't say much but it takes a long time.
You're unbelievably concise, with very dense value.
It makes my life a joy, to be quite honest um, i want to do a quick fire with you, so i say a short statement.
You give me your immediate thoughts.
Does that sound okay?
Sure, let's do it, okay.
So number one What's the most common expensive, deadly irreversible mistake you see founders make?
Hiring for experience because they don't know any better.
Like, we don't know how to do this.
We'll hire someone that does.
And it should be we should hire someone who doesn't?
It should be like, we should actually assess for, hey, how do we determine what good looks like?
And how do we test them for it?
And like, could someone figure this out?
Could someone on the team figure this out rather than hiring experts?
Do you think most founders know what good looks like?
That's the hard thing.
They got to figure it out.
Like, I think that's where the learning comes in.
Like go talk to other, go determine, let's, I'm going to make this up.
Like you're trying to figure out how to do cold calling.
Maybe this will work for us.
Maybe it won't.
Go identify 10 companies that do cold calling really well.
Go talk to the people that built that infrastructure and built that system, et cetera, et cetera.
Do you know what, dude?
Do you know why I started these vertical shows?
Why?
Because one of my companies hired someone for growth that was just obviously terrible to me.
And I said, this is clearly a mistake.
And they said, I don't know what good growth looks like.
And I was like well, if I spoke to the 10 that I know and publish them, you'd have an idea that George is top tier.
And that's what I should look for in someone that I work with.
And so this was meant to be a benchmarking of world-class quality in each vertical.
And that's why we started them.
I love it.
I think that's why I'm such a fan.
No, it was very kind.
Tell me, what's the most underappreciated growth channel today?
It is probably honestly something on the influencer side of things.
I don't think most people think of it as a growth channel, but influencers absolutely is, at least on the B2B side.
Can you do influencer at scale?
That's the hard thing.
That is the fun problem to solve.
I think you can.
I think you treat it almost as a outbound funnel.
It's like go make a list of the 10000 micro influencers or folks that could become micro influencers and go do some skilled outbound to them figure out a process that works.
Like you can solve almost any problem in that way.
But short answer is yes.
What's the most polluted channel today or overrated?
Paid search.
I think everyone goes to paid search because they have to.
But I think like in the very, very early days, you have nothing that works.
Sure.
It's like table stakes, but it saturates quickly.
You're paying a tax to Google.
I think paid search is like relatively uninspiring of a growth channel that will scale long term.
What growth tactic have you done that?
With the benefit of hindsight, you're like oh, I wish I hadn't done that.
Oh, man.
I think like very, very early on, it was event sponsor.
Like at very small companies, it's event sponsorships.
Like go exhibit at Dreamforce or something like that.
Like it feels like something you have to do because everyone else doesn't.
It's like just a waste of money.
You're in a sea of other companies and no one's paying attention to you.
Like that money would be better spent figuring out some guerrilla tactic to stand out.
Or honestly, probably be better spent on paid ads.
We do a lot on events.
I think we're at a very different scale though.
And we do things a little bit differently.
It's not just like go exhibit at an event.
It's also like get a speaker slot, do some out of home advertising around it.
Make sure we do like outbound emails immediately after.
It's more than just like let's get a booth in a corner of the conference hall because it was all we could afford.
And let's hope people come to us.
It's one of those ones where it's like if you're in, you need to go all in and have the billboard outside the conference, the key cards for the hotels as well.
Exactly.
The speaker slot and the booth, not just like a small shit booth.
Exactly.
And that's why I think it changes depending on size.
Like when you're a series, A company, like most events, depending upon your go-to-market motion, most events are not going to be high ROI.
What growth channel did you not take advantage of that?
With the benefit of hindsight, you're like oh George, that was in plain sight a good question.
I i think, like direct mailing, gifting was one that we could have actually even attempted even earlier.
Uh, when we were at samsara.
I think that there's probably unfair advantages to be gained in like display advertising.
Like display advertising is so inexpensive right now, but it's not measured well and most people think of it in terms of like direct response, like if someone no one clicks these ads, so like the response and the roi is not very good.
But the reality is like figuring out how to serve the right number of impressions with the right message into an account or into a contact actually does have a halo effect.
So there's definitely an advantage there, but solving for that advantage is probably dependent on how you measure it.
So I would say display advertising is an opportunity.
What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?
That's a good question.
I would say it's very much brand advertising.
This is something, or brand investment in general.
I think this is something that Gong did really, really well.
They were willing to invest in things that elevated the brand, even if it was completely unmeasurable, even if it was something that like, we would never be able to measure.
But you saw that in the fact that, like you saw that in the inbound numbers and how big of like a channel like inbound was for Gong, because they invested in their brand so much.
And I think that it doesn't make sense when you're a very early startup and you don't have that type of resource.
But once you reach a certain size or scale, if you're not investing in brand as part of your long-term horizon or long-term bucket of bets, then you're going to screw yourself over in the future.
Final one for you, George.
What... growth strategy have you been most impressed by in the last 12, 24 recent times?
But which company were you like, that was smart?
It's usually the non-traditional stuff.
So like cold calling, I think a lot of people thought cold calling is dead.
And like cold calling is like a tremendous channel for a lot of companies because it is hard to do.
Door to door, I think is something that's really interesting.
And I've been thinking about this for a while now.
The medical devices space is interesting because a lot of their sales and a lot of their marketing or sales is door to door.
And I think there's actually now that folks are moving more back into the office and working from offices again.
I think there's probably an unfair advantage to having a true field sales team that goes door to door and brings like a cake with them or whatever it might be.
So that's something I've been thinking about.
For any door-to-door salesman that want to bring a cake, I love cake.
All in.
George, as I said, I love it when you get concision with quality.
It's very hard to do, but you've been fantastic.
So thank you so much for this.
I've loved having you and you've been amazing.
No, thank you.
Honestly, great questions.
I love the conversation.
Hopefully I wasn't too concise, but no, it's been a fun time.
I just loved doing that show with George.
That was one of the highest, what would I say, value to word ratios I've ever seen.
What a concise and brilliant speaker George was.
And if you want to watch the full episode, you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC.
That's 20VC on YouTube.
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The company is among Forbes' list of the top 100 startup employers for 2024, G2's best software awards for highest satisfaction products and a recipient of the 2024 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards something I definitely never got in school myself.
Learn more today at secureframe.com.
And speaking of speed, let's talk about something every founder, product leader and CEO is thinking about innovation.
We all know that innovation is the lifeblood of any company, yet more than 80 of innovation projects stall before they even make it to execution.
Why is that?
Because once teams move from discovery to development, outdated processes, endless context switching and misalignment slow everything down.
Don't you hate it when that happens?
Well, that's exactly why Miro built the Innovation Workspace.
God, that's a cool name.
A faster, smarter way to take ideas to execution.
Now, at 20VC, we've worked with countless startup founders who know that speed is everything.
And that's where AI-powered tools like Miro's come in.
From AI sidekicks that act as a designer, analyst or engineer on demand to instant AI summaries that condense meeting notes, product briefs and retrospectives in seconds.
Miro is built for teams that want to move fast.
And one feature I love, the two-way sync with Jira and Azure.
So when something is updated in Miro, it's automatically reflected in your development tools, and vice versa.
No more duplication, no more miscommunication, just seamless execution.
So, whether you're in product UX engineering, agile or IT, Miro's innovation workspace helps teams go from idea to outcome faster.
Try it today at Miro.com.
That's M-I-R-O.com.
As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming with Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger on Monday.
