20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Instacart and Opendoor, Why 70% of Growth Experiments Should Fail and How to Fail Fast, How to Hire a Growth Team; Secrets and Tips & Why Operator Investors WIll be the Best Investors in 10 Years with Sri Batchu @ Ram

24:00And you said before on culture, culture matters more than all structure when it comes to growth. What did you mean by this? And how does that impact how you lead and operate today? I think a lot of companies, and we've got some of this conversation earlier here as well, have in Hobbit, on like, what should the structure of growth be? Like, which function should report in there? Should it be solid? Should it be dotted? Where should product go? Where should lifecycle market go? Where should analytics go? But to me, what matters more culturally is that all of these functions are actually driving towards the same outcome and have the same culture of speed, comfort with failure and same mechanisms of working.

24:38I think if you have that, I think the reporting structure becomes less important. Why do people go wrong with this, do you think? Where this stuff breaks apart is when each team feels like, oh, actually, our team works in a very different way. So our NordStar shouldn't be SQL Pipeline or whatever you guys agreed. But it should be this other thing that we have the ability to micro -prioritize or micro -hab an impact on. And I think this is where a lot of stuff devolves when you don't have the same common currency for projects and translation layer. So one example that I'll give is that like Instacart, the growth and consumer team was over 300 people, right?

25:14Like it was a massive team. With the team that big, obviously broke into many, many smaller teams, and each team has their own little corner that they're working on, right? Like there's a team that's working on just like making search faster, making the upload faster and all those things, right? And so you tell those teams, okay, your goal is profit, or your goal is monthly active users. They're gonna be like, okay, like how much am I gonna really impact that with this small area that I'm working on and how do I know I'm actually making progress. And so what we actually did is we would have translation factors for each team on like what they did, how that would impact the monthly active users based on historical data that we would re -evaluate.

25:48I think you mean the whole level of translation factors. Sorry, you're more smaller than me, so I don't know about that. I'm not sure. So let's say like the load time team's goal with like six seconds or what, just bring it down from six seconds to two seconds or whatever. And so it's like, okay, they're gonna work on that. But, you know, should we have a 10 % engineering team working on this? Like, what is the impact of this for the overall business? It's hard to know, right? And so what we would do is try to use historical information as well as hold out to get a sense for, okay, like if we actually accomplish this, we think the propensity to order increases by like 1 .2 % or whatever, and that translates into X amount.

26:27So we give them a way to cross -price, or which says that for each second you deliver, you deliver 100 ,000 active users on the platform and we have that sort of translation for every engineering and other teams at the company. And then when we do the planning of like, okay, we're trying to go from just making up some numbers, like five million active users to 10 million active users this year, okay, what is the bridge? And what are all the various teams contributing to help us get there? I spoke to Evan Moore and he said specifically one of the best marriages he's ever seen. When you reflect on that statement, what do you think makes you such a good manager?

27:02More of been your biggest lessons on great management? I think management, like a lot of things, is actually pretty easy to learn and hard to master. It's not rocket science. The rules on what makes a good manager, what's hard is actually remembering it and putting it in practice every day. I think it requires intention. And I think what a lot of executives forget, especially as they get more senior, is that there's still a manager. The really great managers, remember that they're working with people, not like co -workers and cogs, and so what does it mean that you're caring about the person and the human?

27:32Hey, like what motivates you? What drives impact for you? What are you trying to optimize for personally? And seeing how you can help each person achieve their goals in the framework of driving value for the company as well. So one like very tactical thing that I do actually is, I've got like a two -page template of questions that's like your first one on one that I walk through with every new person. that I manage. And it goes through a lot of these questions, understanding them a little bit deeper and maybe do both ways so they get to understand me better as well. I'm fascinated by that. So first day, you'll miss it down and we go through this two -page one -to -one questions.

28:07What are some of these other questions again? And then what do we do on the back of them? Why do we do them? I'd like to find that it really builds a relationship and an understanding of each other, which when things aren't working, I think it's very rarely because someone is a bad actor. It's usually because they're not a right fit for this role, because they lack the skills or they lack the motivation, right? The skill gap is an easy one to have the conversation about and move somebody out into a different role or talk about their transition out. I think the motivation gap is one that's a little bit harder to solve and you solve it by actually understanding what motivates the person and finding ways of motivating them before taking more drastic action.

28:48And so to have a high -performing team, I think you really need to understand what drives the individuals. And what drives everybody is probably not profit for the company. Maybe it is for some, but every person has their individual motivation that they work through. And that's the main thing that I try to get out of in the first one on one. Is there a role motivation? If I say I'm inherently insecure and actually title earned view in the organization, drives me to be fucking great. Would you be worried about that? I actually don't think there's necessarily a wrong motivation, I know that might be controversial thing to say.

29:23I pulled up this one on one template while we were talking and wanted to see what the wording of the question was. What motivates you? There's no right or wrong answer here. Some typical motivating factors can be customer impact, compensation, praise and recognition from peers, exposure to senior leaders, title or position, functional learning, intellectually challenging problems, external validation and recognition outside the company, etc. etc. I start off with that. I frame it in a very non -judgmental way because I'd love to just start from a position of honesty and Work with the incentives that are in people's heads then try to create different incentives for them Do you find beat this is the first day?

29:57You find people open up like it is quite personal Yeah, it is it's not the first question that I ask obviously What's the first question? The first question I ask is how do you want to be recognized at the company? How do you like to receive feedback? And then I go into the motivations and then what are your career goals, etc. Can I ask a slightly stoic statement? I don't think people know themselves very well, especially the younger they are. I don't think they know how they like to receive feedback. I don't think they know what motivates them. I agree. And so this is not always the most productive conversation.

30:33And so you learn through that conversation where they are in their self -awareness journey as well. And that's an important data point. Because that can be challenging too, to work with people that don't have clear goals. And you can have that as your back of my notes for like, where do I want to work on with this person in terms of, you know, skills that are outside of their core craft in terms of what will make them a better coworker manager, what have you. Which one to one question do you find most revealing? And is that one that people find the hardest? I find the motivation, obviously, of a very revealing, as well as the career goals.

31:04and I asked them to give me the time horizons. Where do you see yourself in three, five, 10 plus years? A lot of people haven't really given it thought on like, okay, what does it take for me to get to the 10 year mark? What does my three year outcome look like? Five year outcome look like, etc. And it actually gets people to start thinking about stuff like that. The thing that people have a hard time also answering, which especially early career people, which they should be better at and more aware of is I ask them, what can I do to help you succeed? And people are often like, I don't think people are often asked that.

31:34So they're like stopped when somebody asked them what their manager can do to help them succeed at the job. What's been your biggest hiring fuck up some reflection? I'm enjoying this. This is like, I'm excited to see why I do this. Yeah, good question. For better words, I've had to separate with a lot of people, but typically they've been inherited teams. And one of the things that I get a lot of feedback on is that I hair very slow. My hiring bars is very, very high. That's interesting. If you're in a startup where speed is everything, Is it better to hire now and get it done? First is be really slow.

32:07So I'm a big believer in hiring slow obviously because I still do it despite getting the feedback that I'm hiring to slow. And the reason being I'm also a huge believer in this economies of scale for teams. I think teams get materially slower as they get bigger. It's really like the equivalent of a resource curse for companies rather than countries, right? When you have too many resources, you get bad at prioritizing and you get bad at accountability. and you actually end up moving slower. So it is painful in the short term where some things might not get done, but I think the right things get done and they get done better on small teams and think one thing that you learned to get comfortable with as a more experienced manager or somebody told me a while ago is you have to let some fires burn.

32:47If you think you have to fight every fire on your team, you're gonna burn yourself out. So you just have to realize that like, some things are just not gonna be worked on for a bit and they're gonna be broken and become more with that because they're less important. and try to be intentional about that. So whatever we do planning, it's like, what are you not doing? So like name the fire that you're letting burn. What fire are you letting burn, no? This is a great question. Fire that we have let burn for some time is at ramp, we have not historically invested a lot in field and in event marketing.

33:20Because we've got a very large tam and it requires us to be thoughtful about our field and event strategy. and it's not something that we've staffed adequately. And so we decided this is not staffed, we will take our time to staff and invest here. And so it's okay in the short term for us to not be worried about that. Whereas other SaaS companies have made a much bigger push into that already. Mournage Move -wise, what do you think of the biggest fuck -ups you see young mournages make? When people get their first report or what have you, and they find out that for whatever reason, the person is not up to stuff in terms of the work product that they're creating.

33:57Temptation for a lot of early managers is to just do the work for the person. So they will like spend an extra three hours in the evening like reviewing the work product of this person that they've hired recently and that just like fix it. Rather than spend the time coaching because their view is like oh my god it takes me so much longer teach them how to do this and just do it myself. Let me just do that. And obviously they do themselves and the person a huge disservice by doing that. And I think most people's mistakes come about when there's a tradeoff of short term versus long term, right? And so people are willing to give up some long term gain to avoid some short term pain.

34:32So they're finding it more painful and slower to coach somebody so they'll just do the work themselves or find another way to get it done rather than investing the time and coaching this person up to stuff or making the separation decision if that's the right decision. What right now are you willing to have short -term pain for long -term gain? So we have historically been very much as a company channel oriented for driving growth. So we would have each channel, they would have their goals, they would have their budget, and they would drive outcomes based on that. And that's how we've organized the company.

35:05And the big short -term pain that we're taking is we're moving towards a larger company segment oriented strategy. where we have cross -functional teams that are going after a customer's segment, budgeting, goaling everything based on this segment, which is a very difficult way of working versus deploying budget across channels. And this is going to be a difficult, painful transition for the company, but I think it will be a great long -term game because the segment -oriented teams presumably have a deeper understanding for the customers and having all the cross -functional teams work on the same segment will drive better conversion better results.

35:45Is there only you have short -term gain for long -term pain? One area that I can think of is we do have parallel processes of acquisition that are going after the same clients that are automated versus manual and there's some challenges and performance at different steps of like how the automated system performs versus how humans do the same, you know, prospecting and customer acquisition sales process, right? The short -term gain, of course, is that humans are better at certain steps because there's just a lot of intangibles that we haven't been able to productize, automate yet. So we hire a lot of, you know, we have a sales team that runs sales because they're good at certain things that are better than automating them.

36:21So that is a short -term gain, but I think the long -term pain if we don't focus and pivot more and more things towards self -serve and automation is that we're gonna end up having a massive sales team that is hard to scale and manage and potentially expensive, although that's not the case today, but an example on the other side. What are the first things to break in a scaling org? You've been in some of the best, ends to got opened or now ramped. What are the like that? Ah, fuck it, broke again. I think the thing that breaks is really just culture and engagement actually. This company's grow, right?

36:53So let's imagine that you're not successful as you're scaling. Obviously, people are gonna be demotivated and whatever, so that one's obvious. But I think the thing that people miss is, if you are successful, I think a lot of founders and executives can take, the growth engine and the team for granted. And I think if you're not continuing to provide kind of guidance, feedback, gratitude, the team will get burned out and disengaged and you'll see the parkers. So that's the one thing that I tend to find is like the danger of success is that the teams that drove that get taken for granted often. Because people wanna focus on problems, not the things that are working, so that can create some challenges.

37:30So you mentioned the importance of engagement there. Engagement often relies on focus. You are also a very, very prolific but successful angel investor. I'd first love to start and I hope it's okay. When you're an angel investor, stay. Do you invest through a fund? Do you invest personal money? How do you structure your investing? Yeah, so I do personal as well as I'm a scout for VC fund, so I do investments through both of those. You said to me before full -time operators who are part -time fund managers will make some of the best early -stage investors. Why do you think this? If you look at the investing process, there's four components.

38:03There's deal flow, there's diligence, there's winning the allocation, and then supporting your portfolio, right? I think operators have a distinct advantage, especially with their smaller checks in earlier stages across all four of those than a lot of professional investors. There's also this notion of like a half -life to operating experience. Something like two to four years, which is like every whatever x number of years your way from operating and become a specialized or full -time investor. your ability to really help and empathize with the current state of operations decreases by half. The reason I mentioned that is because there are also of course a lot of former operators that are investors that are successful, but speaking of operators that are currently working, I would say, okay, like what are the advantages across the four stages, right?

38:47So operators get a lot of early deal flow with the companies that they've worked in. Folks that are leaving, they get to know first who's leaving, especially if you're working at great companies, you know, alums of ramp, Open Door Instacart obviously reach out to me when they're thinking about, you know, starting their companies Which is a great way of getting that deal flow. I think that's one you get a lot more inbound because of your reputation Right, but then you also have to sort through that inbound. So one thing that I Find it as an operator. I have much less conflict, right with other investors So I get deal flow from other investors all the time especially ones that are like like, if Sequoia or Kraft or whoever are like, we're leading this round, we're really excited about it.

39:26Do you wanna be a part of it? That's great. Like, a lot of the work on the sourcing diligence everything is done for me as an operator. You know, they're not gonna do that for another fund, typically, right? I totally agree with you that it's a beautiful position being does it scale? So say you have, you know, a $5 -minute micro fund, a hundred percent tree, I'm bringing you in for every hundred K check. But you don't scale as a fund manager. Yeah, it doesn't scale. That I agree with. So I don't think we're in disagreement. I think the strategy only works up to a certain size. And my general understanding with Ventures, the job is like materially different.

40:00Every 5X or so, the check size. And it's a completely different job. What can help you win in the previous stage is probably not what's gonna help you win in the next stage, right? That's second pillar. Both of them. So deal flow we talked about. Dilligence, you often get a lot more information about the competence or strengths and weaknesses of founders that you work with, because you've literally worked with them in the past. And you have a lot more exposure to this person and how they've worked in a real operating environment, whereas people are trying to suss this out in other ways as outside in investors.

40:30There's some benefit to that again, right? Because these are folks that are in your network. And then similarly on the products when you're working with them, typically as an operator, you're often a buyer of these products, right? I have a differential insight in being able to diligence products because I'm like, would I buy this? Would I approve the budget for this product if they came to RAM or Instacart or wherever. And it helps you come through the BS of like, are they making something that people will buy? Because I'm a buyer, so I can make that decision. This is very helpful for B2B stuff, because I think a lot of people have intuition on this, on consumer, less so on B2B stuff.

41:03And so I think there is an advantage there as well on the diligence part. And yeah, on allocation we've talked about it. It's much easier to get an allocation as an operator investor than it is as a larger investor. Does it not discharge you from your operational role? I get it that it helps you pick better, but on the flip side, does it make you distracted? No, it's a great question. You have to be doing well at your core job before you're doing stuff outside of work. Having said that, the other great thing too is I get a lot of high quality deal flow. I know I'm actually very anti -cold outreach.

41:32I know it's a lot of investors go out there and say, cold outreach is great. You send me a message on LinkedIn or Twitter or or whatever and I'll look at everything. My theory is if you can't even succeed in getting a warm intro, how are you going to hustle and building a company? I only take conversations that are very high reputation warm intros where the person is like typically like already spoken to the person likes them or has a relationship with them and I have a deck so I take very few meetings but I tend to find out they're very high quality because I do a lot of that filtering before.

42:04What if it's someone who doesn't know anyone in your ecosystem? I think it's a fair question, but fortunately I think there are a lot more systems available now to help with that that are not as gatekeeping, right? Like, on deck is here. There's a few other networks like that. I don't think it's actually like for the entrepreneurial person, it's that hard to find a path to meeting the right set of investors. And it just depends on how friendly people are, right? Like, if somebody messages me with a tenuous connection, I'm typically willing to help them. Like, if they're like, hey, like I went to the same college as you blah blah blah.

42:39Like will you take a meeting maybe? But if they're like, hey, I really want to get to know this person. Will you interrupt me? And obviously I do it dual opt -in. I'll message them being like, hey, like I don't really know this person. Their profile seems interesting. I haven't really evaluated. Let me know if you'd be open to taking a convo. And even if they'd spray and pray with that tactic, they will get some meetings via warm intro. So you got to hustle somewhat. And I think there's a way to get the warm intro. And if you can't even do that, I struggle to find how you're gonna have fundraise, find customers, etc.

43:07If I'm on your team, Shree, I'm gonna do a scout program. I'm gonna raise a microphone, even better. I'm gonna raise a microphone. What do you say? As long as you're not distracted during work hours and getting your day job done, I think what you do outside of work is your prerogative. But do the best people go home and sales reps? They get more leads. They want more converted sales. They work out of hours to make it work. They don't go off and do something else. Yeah, so we didn't talk about it like the potential benefits, right, of like what's the value add of investing outside of your job? I think especially for growth, there's no playbook for necessarily how you grow.

43:45That's why it's a very experimentation driven culture, right, and a lot of experiments fail. And so you have to find your own growth path and the more creative ideas, strategies, tactics that you can come up with, the better chance you have at pitting your growth goals. And so I tend to find that the context switching and learning about different spaces actually builds more intuition and creativity for ideas. In moderation, I actually think it's a good idea to do that. And I also think, yes, there's like part of the job that are keeping the trains running on time. And there's parts of the job that are taking a beat, thinking about strategy, thinking about creative ideas.

44:22And I think that stuff is not measured in hours in and hours out. And in fact, like being on a treadmill of like doing that, I think has disacconnomies of scale again. Get out of your rabbit hole and recontextualize and get perspective to generate the best ideas. What about conflicts with your company? So say I'm in expense management. Well, I'm not an expense management, but I may pivot to it. Now I'm potentially competing with you. Yeah. So you should, I mean, how do you think? Yeah, yeah. Obviously anything that could be competitive, perceived as competitive, or looks like it's down the line competitive.

44:55I don't even take the meeting. And then I think the conflict that's like a little bit trickier is if ramp is in the market to buy the software or something like that. And you've invested in the company or you're investing in the company. There it's like you wanna be extra extra above board, make it clear to the company that you're not gonna influence the purchasing process. What about talent? You're an investor in my company as an angel. And then you nick one of my key people. I'll be like, shrie, and it may not have been you. It may have been Ram, who's not, what do we keep people? Is that a conflict?

45:28I'm pretty ruthless about that. I think that there's absolutely no conflict. I think it's extremely anti -competitive from a labor market perspective for you to think that I won't hire the best people from your company. It's your job to retain your best talent. And even if I'm an investor in you, that doesn't matter. If you're doing your job with retaining your talent, this wouldn't be a question. What have been some of the biggest lessons for you on what it takes to be a good angel? You invest, I'm sure, stay very differently than you did. What are some of those big lessons? I think one is how important the founders that you work with and invest in become as a source of leads for you.

46:00And I didn't fully imagine that when I started being an angel investor, I was like, oh, where am I going to find great deals to work? And one of the best sources, of course, is a founder that you've worked with is like, hey, I'm working this person before. They're fantastic. I'm going to invest. You've been a helpful investor. I'd love for you to chat with them. That is primo lead, right? Okay, so it was a really interesting song. I'm just loving this song. Primo lead, brilliant archbishop, brilliant taggy. Often they haven't been found as before. I find being an operator and being a founder is so different.

46:28I place a huge premium on serial launch partnership. Yeah. Primo lead is massive difference. I agree. And I think what's actually interesting is there's some operators that are very good at their operating job that I think we were founders than some bad operators. And so let me explain that a little bit further. There are people I would never want to hire again, but that I would invest in. Because they are not suited to the operating job, but what makes the bad at the operating job could make them very good at being a founder. I agree with you there. How do you determine the founders that I invest in?

47:01Do they have a secret about what they're trying to build that is uniquely built based on work and research or whatever that they have done and how relentless are they in terms of wanting to build their vision. And how good are they at telling their story at the end of the day? I think storytelling is such an important skill. And I think the best founders are excellent storytellers. So, so, and should you say that? Because you said before that storytelling founders are rarely the best operators. Yeah. Who's been about this and what you just said there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I know that's like cognitively dissonant a bit.

47:36So, let me explain further. There's a few different jobs of being a founder, right? And leaders of a company. I think a super important job is being able to fund rays, being able to close customers, early customers, and being able to close executive hires. I think all three of those people that are great storytellers do a very good job at. And what I tend to find that are part of good storytelling, and I'm curious if you have a different view, is folks that are good at that are really good at reading the room and being likable, talking with enough detail, but with enough abstraction that they sound great.

48:12Those are great skills to have as I said, they're great for fundraising, hiring, and early customers. It's not super scalable, right? Like you can't have the CEO doing every hire. Eventually you have to build a business, you have to operationalize, you have to scale. You have to be comfortable not being liked, you have to make difficult decisions. The people that can do that are typically like serial operators that work in a different way, right? I've definitely seen people that can do both, but it's rare that people can wear both hats. So I often tend to like founding teams where one person is the storyteller and the other person is like the operator and Executive.

48:46Do you ever feel like someone's too good at sales? But when you need those founders and you're like, oh, you're just saying everything's so right? Yeah, I definitely seen some founders that are two slick by a half. That's where you know some of the personal diligence works to right where you try to find out, you know, how real are they? How do you do that? Do you ask the one to one questions ever? So it's funny actually this is one of the most valuable things that I do for my founders and that's helpful for me as well which is founders are trying to hire and They are like okay like between the companies that I've worked at I've worked with hundreds possibly thousands of people at this point Right and so they're like okay.

49:23I'm looking to hire this person I have no idea if they're good or not that are linked in and their resume seems reasonable We've done the interview process which is always imperfect and so they're like have you worked with this person or can you get me to somebody That's work closely with them that'll give me an honest read because of the relationships or what have you That's like incredibly valuable and I think like having that reputation of somebody that's direct keeps things confidential And is available is helpful in a variety of different ways and I use that to try to find people where I have questions I'm getting some more comfort on the village What are the biggest mistakes you see operate angels make?

49:57So like for me, I think like number one they have varying check sizes Lesson one, you don't have conversion to the early stage. Just do 25k, 10k, 50k, I don't care, but same check size. Number two, you need 25. Is ideally your genius picker? You're not. No one is. Five is not enough. You need 25. Those would be two of the biggest that I see often. Yeah, I think those are both good ones. I also think actually, like, this is why it gets hard later too, is they have a hard time saying no. They want to be liked. And it's like usually your initial conversations that you're having are with a friend or a friend of a friend.

50:28And so I think people go one or the other extreme early on and they're angel investing which is like they never get over the risk bar and they just think everything is a bad idea. And yes, of course like most things are not great ideas because most startups fail for a variety of reasons and it's not about ideas about execution, right? There's a mindset switch that you have to make which is like how can this succeed and not about how it can fail? Like it's very easy to think about all of the ways something can fail. And so the question the app asks yourself is like how can this succeed and how big is it?

50:57if it succeeds. That like switched to like optimism from like rational evaluation is a challenge for a lot of early investors. And there's a flip side, them wanting to just like not be a bad guy and just say yes because it's a friend or a friend of a friend, even if they don't have like high conviction in the idea. So I've seen both of those mistakes happen. I'm totally agree with you. I think the other one I see also is when they choose founders that need that specific help. So there are B2B sales leader and they're like, oh, I could really help in that B2B sales engine. Doesn't mean it's a good investment.

51:30Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yes. Okay, so I'm gonna do a quick fire with you, my friend. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts, sound okay? Okay, sounds great. What tactics have not changed over the last five years? I think the PLG playbook has actually stabilized and it's pretty similar. I mean, the specific tactics will change, but like the core of it I think is the same. I think cold outbound and email still works surprisingly well, despite all of the changes in that space. Does PLG die in a world of segregation between user and buyer again? Titan budgets, CFOs manage everything.

52:04I don't think so necessarily. I think these are economic cycles. Companies go through. I think there's challenges in the short term. And then as the economic cycle moves forward, like it just eases. It's like a little bit of contraction and a little bit of easing in terms of like headwinds versus tailwinds. What tactics have totally died of death? This is an obvious one, but pouring money indisturmentally into paid marketing, I think is gone. For two reasons, one is of course like the efficiency environment, and I think we're going to be in a completely syrup environment again. And the other reason being, I think, attribution has become a lot harder.

52:33And so I think people will be hesitating for a long time to come in terms of how they deploy paid marketing. What would you say is the biggest mistake found as make when hiring growth teams? I think they hire either two senior or two junior. Two senior being like, like, you know, if you've got a three person growth team, like, don't hire a VP level person, because you actually need somebody that can really coach people and get into the weeds. And other times, while I'm a big fan of hiring for slope versus intercept, sometimes I think people under appreciate the scope of the problem. So I think that basically it's just like matching the skill set to the stage of the Northern the Company.

53:08I think it's when they have a challenge with. You mentioned pre -mortems earlier. How do you do post -mortems? Yeah, so we do monthly post -mortems. They're somewhat structured. We actually have a you know air table system where we track all of our experiments We score them etc in terms of impact and so we share like aggregate statistics of the team on like what's been shipped and and what the impact has been It's like an opportunity for us like celebrate team members as well as like Encourage the notion of like velocity and a more subtle way and then outside of that we have teams come back with one to two Winds or losses over the previous month that they present and get feedback and just share the learnings So that's super structured, but there is like a regular cadence of it every month.

53:49So it's not just when like something great or something horrible happens, is when we do post -mortems, we actually do them in a systematic way. What would you like to change about the world of growth? What I would love to change about the world of growth is just bringing the walls between the disciplines of marketing and product and growth and really have it be like one cross functional and discipline. Companies and people and teams struggle with it a lot because it's a newer function and folks come from different backgrounds. From a PVA, what's your favorite bit, Ularek? I knew this one would come back.

54:21My favorite one is, it's probably plenty, but this one is my favorite. It's asked for money, get advice, ask for advice, get money twice. And to me, it's like super helpful framing for almost any difficult situation that you're dealing with, not just fundraising. The more you bring people into what you're solving for, the more value you'll get, rather than directly asking for resources or solutions. Final one, what one company grows strategy that you've seen recently? Have you been most impressed by? There's a lot to pick from, but one I'll pick is Notion. I think they've done an incredible job of building a very large multi -prong community based growth strategy, which I haven't seen a lot of companies do that.

55:02I think it's very impressive. They actually also recently had my friend Lauren do product growth there, so I'm excited to see how they superchargers are growth. I'm totally with you. I think Canva Talk as well. Elined is fantastic. So two together. Shree, I love doing this. Thank you so much for putting up with my pit bull like a project. I loved it. Appreciate you taking the time. This is a fun conversation. I mean, that was such a fantastic discussion with Shree. If you want to see more from us behind the scenes, of course you can on YouTube by searching for two zero BC. We always love to see you there.

55:33But before we leave you today, I need your help. I need your input on the 20 -VC Mirrorboard. as I'm booking new guests that we should feature on the show in 2023. Head on over to myro .com, forward slash 2 -0 VC, and leave your suggestions with digital stickinos or comments. That's myro .com forward slash 2 -0 VC. Myro actually sponsored this episode. For those of you that haven't used it before, it's a tool that I think is really powerful in game -changing. Just ask the 1 million plus people who sign up for myro every month. It's a visual collaboration platform Pat with the right tools, tech and templates to grow your product, vision, idea, org at scale.

56:15Mirror acts as a single source of truth across teams. That means getting buy -in much faster from teams like marketing, engineering, sales, product, basically anyone who needs to have a say to make gross projects grow. And even though it seems like a simple digital whiteboard, it's much more. Hashing out a sound acquisition strategy, brainstorming Miro, rethinking your sign -up flow, use Miro as a research template. However you need to grow, Miro can help. We use Miro all the time to brainstorm future shows, vote on potential guests, and leave notes for the rest of the team in our own time. Check it out again at Miro .com, Fords -20VC.

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57:34And now you can start for free with a plan that is not time -bounded and allows you to see the full power of the platform without any time constraints. Simply head on over to funnel .io -2 -0 -VC. That's funnel .io -2 -0 -VC. As always, I so appreciate your support and I can't wait to bring you an incredible episode this coming Friday.