DeepSummary
In this podcast episode, growth expert Sri Batchu shares insights from his experiences leading growth teams at companies like Instacart and Opendoor. He discusses the importance of failing fast with growth experiments, recommending that 70% should fail. Batchu emphasizes setting the right metrics, prioritizing projects effectively, and maintaining a culture of speed and learning from failures.
The conversation covers strategies for hiring and building strong growth teams, including making the first hires at the right time, structuring interviews thoughtfully, and instilling a growth mindset in team members. Batchu also shares his perspective on why operators make great investors, leveraging their experience to identify promising opportunities and provide valuable support to founders.
Throughout the episode, Batchu draws upon specific examples and lessons from his tenures at Instacart and Opendoor, illustrating key principles for effective growth strategies and team management. He emphasizes the importance of simplification, sticking to convictions, and fostering cross-functional collaboration within growth teams.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Growth teams should embrace a high failure rate (around 70%) for experiments, but aim to fail quickly and conclusively.
- Setting the right North Star metric aligned with business value creation and team impact is crucial for growth teams.
- Cross-functional collaboration and breaking down silos between marketing, product, and growth disciplines is essential for success.
- Hiring for growth teams should prioritize a growth mindset, intellectual curiosity, and the ability to learn and adapt.
- Operators make great investors due to their advantages in deal flow, due diligence, securing allocations, and supporting portfolio companies.
- Maintaining a strong culture of engagement, learning, and appreciation for the growth team is vital as companies scale.
- Simplification and sticking to first principles, even in the face of competition or short-term pressures, is important for growth leaders.
- Rapid iteration, reducing cycle times, and fostering a culture of speed are key for effective growth experimentation.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “Growth has just a typically high failure rate, you know, so two thirds of your projects are likely to fail. What's important is that you fail quickly and conclusively.“ by Growth Expert
- “I personally think that would be a perfect North Star metric for growth. It'll obviously depend on your business and there's always multiple pushes and pulls that you're trying to optimize for one of them. You're into that. I think one is like, obviously one North Star metric can be simple and intuitive for people to understand. You want it to be, as you mentioned, something that the teams can actually directly impact. So something that is much closely related to their inputs, but something that's also very aligned with the ultimate value creation of the company.“ by Growth Expert
- “Sticking to your conviction if you've arrived at it on a first principles basis, even if it gets tough. So what we decided at Opendoor is our biggest asset in competitive mode is the ability to price accurately. And we're not going to compromise that for short term growth.“ by Growth Expert
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Episode Information
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Harry Stebbings
7/26/23
Sri Batchu currently leads Growth at Ramp. He previously led Growth Strategy and Operations at Instacart where he also helped grow their Ads business. Prior to that, he was one of the first 50 employees at Opendoor where he built, scaled, and managed a variety of business teams including Analytics, Sales, and Pricing. During his time, the company grew from $100M to $5B+ revenue and to 1500+ people. He started his career in management consulting at McKinsey and also held various investing roles including in private equity at Bain Capital.
In Today's Episode with Sri Batchu We Discuss:
1. From Harvard to Private Equity to Leading the Best Growth Teams:
- How did Sri make his way into the world of growth with Instacart and Opendoor?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest takeaways from his time at Instacart? How did it change his approach and mindset towards growth?
- How did Zilllow burn themselves by buying homes? What did that teach Sri about hitting metrics and goal setting in growth teams?
2. Growth Teams Should Fail and Fail Fast:
- What is the right ratio of success to failure within growth teams?
- What are specific ways that growth teams can increase the speed with which they fail?
- How are the best post-mortems run? Who joins them? Who leads the agenda?
- What are Sri's biggest lessons on how to set the right goals?
- Where do so many growth teams go wrong with the North Star that they set for themselves?
3. Building the Bench: Hiring a Growth Team:
- When is the right time to make your first growth hires?
- What profile should your first growth hires be?
- How should one structure the interview process when hiring growth teams?
- What is the first question Sri asks all new hires?
- Why does Sri believe you have to hire slowly?
- Should candidates do case studies as part of the process, if so, on a new company or on the company they are interviewing for?
4. When Operators Become Investors:
- Why does Sri believe the best investors of the next 10 years will be operators?
- Why does Sri believe that operators can do due diligence to a higher level than traditional VCs?
- Why does Sri believe that investors should not take cold emails?
- Why does Sri believe that it is not wrong for an investor to hire from their portfolio companies?
- What does Sri believe the future of venture holds over the next 10 years?