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George Bonaci_ VP of Growth @Ramp: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever |E1264
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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 is important I would always skew more Junior I think hiring for potential especially early on in the business is far more important ready to go [Music] 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 now 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 I was always terrible at science so you it doesn't bode well for me what did you do you mean by that statement the goal of growth is to figure out how to grow the business and usually like early on that's very top of funnel Focus how do you figure out how to get more leads how do you figure out a channel that works and is repeatable and has uh predictable outputs given some inputs and the honest answer is like no one really knows every business is different so even if you understand from past experience something that's worked usually just taking like that one Playbook or that one tactic and copy and pasting it to a new company like generally doesn't work and I think that's the tendency of of a lot of marketers so when I say that like 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 um but ultimately if you if you run enough of those experiments you'll you'll find something uh and I think 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 partially 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 it's probably very different than someone that's like hey I want to become a writer or 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 1 or 2% in many different areas or is it about needle moving chapters of a company and being much more pivotal in that respect the short answer is it has to be both and what I mean by that is 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 highrisk High rewards you can't just do that otherwise you're going to fail and miss your number this quarter um at the same time like 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 like this quarter and then you have everything in between so like ideally you're being intentional with how you're allocating your resources across like everything from like the very long term to the very short term and how you make those bets and how you allocate those resources is actually like a conversation you should probably have with Finance with leadership and align it to the goals of the company but that that's my way of thinking about it you said there about bets and I often think about growth very much like Venture which is you place a number of Investments SL 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 um 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 uh but it is a spectrum like 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 like a year to like say something conclusive um or you can just run a bunch of experiments at incredibly High Velocity it's kind of sloppy and similarly you might actually you might not learn anything uh 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' probably bias to run thing run more things faster than run something perfectly does philosopy impact quality of conversion and what I mean by that is if we're a little bit sloppy but with 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 tradeoff I think if you had to choose velocity is more important but there's there's a 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 um I'm reminded of this one time I won't say which company uh but we had a web page and the web pages conversion rate was trending down and it was trending down for a long time and it was our number one channel and it was like hey what are we 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 that lad route uh which was definitely the sloppier route the less rigorous experiment um it had ended up work it did end up working uh so we did end up like 3x in 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 um changes that we made once we did end up AB testing them but I think that goes back to like the portfolio that's 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 riger 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 high velocity and we need to move on but also sometimes it takes a little bit of time content in particular honestly I would say 12 to 18 months yeah how do you think about enough time but not being slow it goes back to the portfolio like if 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 um 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 Willer won't work I think in general I've always tried to prioritize experiments based on impact and effort I think those are the obvious ones but also confidence and time to results like if you're really confident something's going to work you should just do it um if you're really unconfident that something is 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 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 there 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 metric that you want to move that's where I think the experimental design and the rigor of experiments comes in uh you'll 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 okay we're going to go collect some qualitative data and it means we might be wrong I think we just need to be hon folks need to be honest about that upfront and Define that upfront is probably how I would think about it so 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 yeah absolutely you should like triple down on that uh 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 um over a long period of time you're probably going to see it approach an ASM toote 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 I'm 10K and you're like 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 I'm naive so 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 um if you were that actually would probably be a good problem to have uh but yes if you're able to like 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 okay we're no longer getting an expected output given the input and then we have a conversation on if the returns are worth it so figuring out the ASM toote where things start to actually Plateau is is the most important thing and I think most companies or most startups at least they get to that ASM ASM toote too slowly and they should really be scaling much much faster if they find something that works um having said that I think like most things saturate probably more slowly Than People expect um and so going from 10K to 200k might not be as insane as it sounds uh but it depends you've got to watch it do CS 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 like yes CS become more expensive like as you get more and more market share it makes sense that it's every incremental acquisition is going to cost more than previous um 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 there's it takes a really long time to get to the point where like the macro effect of saturation is hitting your CAC um but that's how I think about it do you think early stage Founders should look at LTV often C 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 where your LTV is if you've been in business for a year um or 6 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 uh 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 moral 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 3 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 like 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 like honestly they're probably not doing their job well uh 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 post-mortems to effectively analyze the success rate of different experiments programs um I would say like you should be doing premortem and postmortem I think that's part of like good experimental design like understanding what are the different failure modes for this and and acknowledging like what the probability of those failure modes are if when and so you do a sorry just so I understand because so many Founders get really granular and like get notebooks out for like pre morms 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 uh I would actually like 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 postm 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 had 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 postmortem for that how often is the premortem the reason why something didn't work how often do you get it right I would say for the high probability high confidence bets the things that you're doing to hit a number this or even this year I I think pretty high it's probably like 90% plus um 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 um 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 Co yeah that is very true that was a tough one for us all um okay so we have that as the premortem for the postmortem how do we structure that who's invited what does that look like so I think the person that was ultimately like the drri for an experiment the person that also hopefully Scopes the experiment they should write the postmortem and I think they really need to be clear on number one did we run the experiment well um or did it fail for some reason that we could have avoided uh I think like outside of did we exper uh did we did we scope the experiment well it's did 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 um I think that's maybe like the third most important aspect of 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 uh I think the per the drri should write it up they should send it out in advance at least like 24 hours in advance so people have time to like think about it um but ideally like I'm more in favor of 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 I'm I'm big on live I 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 I'll give you a really tactical example um a really tactical example was we were doing some very basic AB testing on our homepage and we saw that a red button by far outperformed anything else now red is like as a button is generally like 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 AB 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's severely underperformed for like the Enterprise segment um it's like a great example of like simpsons's Paradox when we took that information and like removed that from the web team and applied it to the content team and applied 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 uh so what we were actually doing by saying hey red is the best button or 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 can I ask you does grow sit in its own team or there are you in the product team are you in the marketing team where do you sit 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 and to me that means you probably should report report to I honestly that's one of the reasons why I love ramp is the growth team reports to one of the co-founders um 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 on the business but I think they should be as independent as possible youve 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 uh I was that in terms of for I was I was stealing Alpha from from investing terminology like what's your unfair Advantage is maybe a better way to put it and I think like that is the key to being a good growth team like you got to figure out something that is not saturated and that other people ideally like are not doing and 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 uh like think about when Tik Tok first came out I don't think any B2B Brands were thinking about advertising on Tik Tok I don't think there even was advertising on Tik Tok when it first came out but the folks that were really ahead of the game they're like eventually they will be advertising on Tik Tok and it's going to be totally saturated with consumer Brands to begin with but eventually there will be a B2B opportunity and when they were the first ones to run those experiments they probably had huge returns um 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 uh 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 um I'm happy to chat about where you find these things but you've can we can we 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 um I think this actually is is a good segue into like how do you just learn in general uh as a a member of the growth team or someone at in a company in general I would say that there's three areas like you can learn academically you can read a book and learn what's worked for other companies or other growth folks or uh companies in the past even are great like aspects of of being able to learn so learning academically is one aspect um 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 like area of of uh of finding Alpha um granted probably not the 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 like other verticals other geog Ries especially if they're tangential to what you're doing uh a great example is like WhatsApp like WhatsApp as a marketing channel is not huge for most brands uh or most companies in the United States but it's massive uh in a lot of like International regions and I think like great could we go try like WhatsApp instead of sending emails um 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 you on the number one academically is that not just learning playbooks and do you worry that then you'll speak to to your friend George who will tell you what worked at Sam Sara but ramps 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 you 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 of always comes to mind for me is in in the world of attribution in marketing so like media mix marketing oh sorry media mix modeling or marketing mix modeling depending on who you talk to MMM like everyone's talking about it now is the best way to do attribution blah blah blah uh 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 and literal newspapers before anything was digital uh back in like the 1950 s 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 um there's probably a million examples like that actually Direct Mail is probably another example of that there are so much 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 so what did you see that no one else so 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' 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 and parallel and learn really really quickly like there's very few channels where you can go like hey tomorrow let's go reach like 200,000 people uh direct mail email those are like kind of some of the only channels that that would allow you to do something at that scale and th run a lot of experiments what is no one trying today that you think is interesting um I don't know if I can give away my secrets but I think the honest answer is like on the B b side and I don't think this is super Cutting Edge but influencer marketing um 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 and user generated content maybe uh to get more specific as more of a b Toc 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 at Market moving to Enterprise yeah there's definitely unfair Advantage there but it's a lot of work it's a lot of work um how do you think about attribution and challenge of capturing conversion you know I'm interviewed Nick at revolute and Antoine who's the head of growth at revolute 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 uh goes back to the portfolio I I think that you have to be okay with the fact that most brand marketing is a long-term bet it's it's high risk it's high reward uh at least that's how a growth person would probably think about is there a stage of company where it becomes interesting I think if you 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 like 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 that you aren't able to reach with traditional channels can I ask just on the bets that we continuously go back to how much is too much concentration when you think about you know portfolio it's like hey traditionally Adventure 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 a growth portfolio if you're doing things right the concentration will change um 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 um but I I think concentration in 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 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 closely with product marketing or some element 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 a unique point of view that hopefully it's complimentary to their skill set and their point of view But ultimately the same goal of of making the business successful um so I know that's a little bit meta but that's that's how I would describe it you're an angel in my company George and we're sitting down for a coffee and we're we're going for some advice and I'm at about a million in Revenue um 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 what type of person is it senior or Junior 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 like solving problems and that kind of generalist what background do you find is best 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 markeing background I think hiring someone that has demonstrated they can think logically and they can do do math um is really really important early in the early days so that might be Engineers that might be X Finance folks uh that might be an EXC consultant that hated Consulting and like really wanted to stick with something longterm and get their hands dirty I think those make generally the best first uh 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 um 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 or bigger for more than a few years it's it's just really hard to then change your mindset and go to a smaller startup and think about like how hard you have to like get your or how much you have to get your hands dirty and how differently you need to think about things like 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 and rely more on your past experience than on what you can learn from others or what you can learn from from maybe like other geographies or other companies or other peers uh so going from Playbook to first principal thinking is generally difficult to do so I would I would I've personally like stayed away from that type of profile h no I I totally understand that perspective on the skill detection how do you run an interview process then again where you're advising me I I have a number of applic 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 like when you say back Channel or test what do you mean do you mean like references or like physical take-home test test I I both so exactly both uh if you're like a series a startup it's probably like finding the best 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 um 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 is I think like actually the first step of the interview process um I would argue the second should be some sort of case study or some sort of take-home test um you could do the case study live in the conversation with them just to see how they think about things but I would not be opposed or 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 uh and then the second and hopefully you're selling based on the referral that you got 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 uh make it as real as possible and make it quantitative uh 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 um 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 um the dates don't align or missing data 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 like how much of this did they think through what was their thought process like how quickly were they able to adapt how quickly were they able even to like do the tests did they ask questions about it all of those I think are signals before you even see the output uh to understand like are they at least thinking about things in the right way but the real world is messy they should 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 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 um 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 hi them it's generally been hiring a generalist that ultimately hey this isn't for me I don't want to do this after all um 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 XYZ honestly I I think it's difficult to assess for that uh 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 okay I think probably what's most important is just being as transparent as possible both of 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 F like we've all had jobs before we're all going to have jobs again like that's that's okay do you agree that people are destined SL 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 um 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 selfstarter and you love just doing a little bit of everything it's like okay you're probably going to do better at like a seed or series a Stage Company than like a 100,000 person wellestablished business uh but that might change over time uh that might change as they gain more more experience or do different things you need to invest in your people right I mean that's 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 I don't I think that like philosophically they're like yes we want to invest in people's Learning and Development I think and 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 topped down um go how how how do you do it then help me I I think Sam SAR 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 uh he was hanging out in like the cafeteria and like what do you like to do in your free time like I like to read books uh 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 other peers and this is all organized to discuss like one of the principles in these books that samsara wanted you to embody uh 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 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 uh that took really it coming from the founders um 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 schulz's book on Starbucks and Leadership Lessons From Starbucks I run a Media company in a world of Tik Tok and deep seek I mean 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 postco millennial generation how do we think 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 Tik Tok 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 Chang that much a great example is like the book The Goal like I I'm a big fan of that book I have some recency bias because we reread 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 uh that's how you get the most out of people that's one of the core jobs of being a manager 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 from almost any book regard L 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 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 at the if you zoom out far enough that's probably the constraint for most businesses okay what would what would you like to do but because of time or lack of resources you're not able to do number one there are a lot of things I would just like to get off the ground faster when you're 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 much more slowly um I wish that there was a way to speed all of that up um 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 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 in people becoming manages and developing I spoke to so many of your former you colleagues and they all said one of your biggest strengths is the willingness to roll up your seves 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 ic's it's a great question I think a good a good leader I would'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 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 um 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 uh I think is is kind of the key okay so you hired me I've joined your team I'm I'm a junior you you hired very Junior with this one George sorry um but uh what is 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 your area of of domain I I would expect in the first three days you know how to do your job uh 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 what do I do as a leader to give you those best 30 days do I just say just Shadow the out of me do I say go sit in support do where do you go great question I think this again goes back to to the investing in 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 like actually this was something I learned from from samsara as well like I remember my first 30 days were written out in excruciating detail I think the first two weeks were completely scheduled out like to the minute for me uh 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 like structured onboarding um 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 like 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 um if you were you you were ideally hired because you have some skill set or some um unique perspective uh or there's some Gap in the business that you're feeling 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 uh 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 uh are we at least on the right track is important but there are some aspects or some times where it is difficult to put early points on the board George how fast do you know if someone you hir isn't good enough 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 um but you generally have some sort of Viber feeling in the first week or two do you know what I find really hard what 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 yeah I think I think that's true I I don't actually think that's wrong so good what are the most common reasons growth hires don't work I think like the number one reason is it was it was on the manager it was a mish hire uh they didn't scope the role effectively or the role changed the needs of the business changed and they hired the wrong person out 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 C 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 then 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 Mish hire and that's mostly on the manager if I'm being honest can ask 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 it's in that example I think it's hard to find Alpha if you're just having a ai go find the opportunities for you having said that I think AI is tremendously changing like the role of growth like it's 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 uh I think like to get real Advantage like how maybe we'll get to this point at some point soon but I 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 but maybe not in a year who knows tooling wise does it change much uh using AI yeah yes 100% uh I remember like a few years ago I was such a strong Advocate that like everyone on the growth team needs to be technical they need to like learn SQL they need to Learn Python they need to learn how to work with like a growth engineering team like very very closely I think like AI upended that like you don't need to be nearly as technical as as you used to like AI can help you write the code it can tell you other ways of doing things like it's even just like in that element of like who I used to like have a bias for hiring it's totally changed in my mind you 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 I think it is a good it's a good co-pilot for lack of a better term for for both of those roles I think that like 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 it helps more so here 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 so you think it helps creative people more I I think so like or maybe it helps uncreative people more is maybe what i' would say um the number of times that I've had chat GPT just be like or any type of AI really I'm 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 like 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 be like hey I need some help can I ask you how do you advise Founders competing incredibly intense competitive markets you know ramp is in a very competitive market across a number of different products what's your biggest advice on competing in very proliferated markets 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 uh but you also need to think about how you're going to distribute that that product and like what your unfair Advantage is 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 absolutely not no like I'm I'm on I'm a marketer at the end of the day and I'm a growth person like that is that is antithetical to everything we stand for there are some products sure where like yes they it is so amazing and the word of mouth was so strong that like you could 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 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 yeah 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 hiring you think most Founders know what good looks like that's the hard thing they 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 etc etc do you know what dude do you know why I started these vertical shows 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 was very kind um tell me what's the most underappreciated a growth Channel today uh it is probably honestly something on the influencer side of things uh 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 I think you can I think you treat it almost as a outbound funnel it's like go make a list of the 10,000 micro influencers or folks that could become micro influencers and go do some scaled outbound to them figure out a process that works like you you could solve almost any problem in that way uh 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 on that oh man um I think like very very early on it was event spons 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 does it 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 your that money would be better spent figuring out some gorilla tactic to stand out or honestly probably be better spent on paid outs we do a lot on events I think we're we're at a very different scale though um and we do things a little bit differently it's not just like go exhibit at event at an event it's also like get a speaker slot do some out of out of home advertising around it make sure we do like outbound emails immediately after it's 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 the speaker slot and the booth not just like a small Booth exactly and and this and that's why I think it changes in depending on size like when you're a series a company like most events depending upon your go to Mark 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 H George that was in plain sight it's 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 in my opinion 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 in the ROI is not very good but the reality is like figuring out how to serve imp 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 and solving for that Advantage is probably dependent on how you measure it uh so I I would say display advertising is an opportunity what have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months I I would say it's very much brand advertising um I think this is something that or brand investment in general I think this is something that gong did really really well uh 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 um but you saw that in the fact that like you saw that in the inbound numbers um and how big of like a channel like inbound was for gong because they invested in their brand so much and I think that like it doesn't make sense when you're very early startup and you don't have that type of resource but once you reach a certain size or scale like if you're not investing in brand as part of like 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 it's usually the non-traditional stuff so like cold calling I think a lot of people thought cold calling is said and like cold calling is like a tremendous channel for a lot of companies because it is hard to do door too I think is something that's really interesting and I've been thinking about this for a while now like the medical devices space is interesting because a lot of their sales and a lot of their their marketing or sales is door too um 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 uh so that's that's something I've been thinking about that any door daor salesman that want to bring a cake I love cake all in George as I said like 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 I'm honestly great questions I love the conversation hopefully I wasn't too concise uh but no it's been a fun time
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