20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci

22:12And I think like, great, could we go try like, what's that instead of sending emails? It'll probably fail, but again, if you're doing enough of these experiments, you'll find something that works that no one else is doing. My question to you on the number one academically, is that not just learning playbooks? And do you worry that then you'll speak to your friend, George, who will tell you what worked at SAMSARA, but 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.

22:43So 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 that 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 it always comes to mind for me is 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. Everyone's talking about it now is the best way to do attribution blah blah blah. That's a really old concept.

23:12That's like from the old like mad men style advertising days in like the 1950s and 60s. So I got to get an 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 back in like the 1950s or 60s and how do you actually adapt to that playbook or that methodology to modern day, like digital advertising or modern day digital marketing as a whole. There's probably a million examples like that. Actually, direct mail is probably another example of that. There are so much. What did you see in direct mail that no one else saw?

23:43Because so many of your friends, 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 saw? No one else was doing it and it was incredibly scalable. Like that was pretty much it. Like the fact that no one else was doing it's like, okay, that's interesting. We should try it. But the fact that if it works it would be incredibly scalable and the fact that you can run it with very large sample sizes meant that we could run a lot of experiments in parallel and learn really, really quickly. There's very few channels where you can go like, hey, tomorrow, let's go reach like 200 ,000 people.

24:09Direct mail, email, those are like kind of some of the only channels that would allow you to do something at that scale and that's run a lot of experiments. What is no one trying today that you think is interesting? I don't know if I can give away my secrets, but I think the honest answer is on the B2B side, And I don't think this is super cutting edge, but influencer marketing, maybe like a year or two ago This would have been a little bit more cutting edge, but everyone's always thought of influencers and user -generated content Maybe to get more specific as more of a B2C tactic that works really well I would argue that works just as well and maybe even better in the B2B world Like especially if you're moving up marker moving to enterprise.

24:46Yeah, there's definitely unfair advantage there But it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work Like how do you think about attribution and the challenge of capturing conversion? You know, I'm into Nick at Ravlute and Antoine who's ahead of growth at Ravlute and their biggest mental shift for both of them was the power of brand marketing, but both being aware of the challenge of having no freaking idea what it does to your revenues actually. How do you think about the importance of knowing source of revenue versus brand marketing? Yeah, it goes back to the portfolio. I think that you have to be okay with the fact that most brand marketing is a long -term bet.

25:23It's high risk. It's high reward. At least that's how a growth person probably thinks about it. Is that a stage of company where it becomes interesting? I think if you're seeing all of your core direct response channels start to saturate, then it's something that you have to start doing. The assumption is that investing in brand is going to do one of a few things. It's either going to make folks that have a problem and are aware they have a problem, aware of you. I think that's how probably most companies start thinking about it. But the more interesting aspect is true demand generation. It's like, hey, there are people out there that don't realize they have a problem and brand marketing.

25:55Instead of being like, hey, try XYZ product or try XYZ company, it's like, this problem exists. There's actually a better way. And of course, we're the better way. But that I think is a much more interesting type of brand marketing to open up demand for a new part of the market that you aren't able to reach with traditional channels. Totally agree with you. Can I just on the best that we continue to go about it to, how much is too much concentration? When you think about, you know, a portfolio, it's like, hey, traditionally in Vans, you don't want to be definitely not more than 10 % in one single investment.

26:28How do you think about too much concentration in a growth portfolio? Yeah. I think the constant, if you're doing things right, the concentration will change. It's almost like when you find something that works, if you do a really good job of saturating it as quickly as possible, you will be by almost definition like really concentrated there at least for a period of time, it's really how quickly you can diversify and stack different bets and different wins so that you're not concentrated for too long at a period of time. But I think concentration in and of itself is not a bad thing. It means that you're doing a good job maximizing an area.

26:58How do you think about communicating growth goals to other elements of the organization? You're sitting there in your independent growth theme, say, and you also have to work with products and you also have to work with marketing. How do you work together most sufficiently to communicate this is what I'm going after. I think communicating the way growth thinks about things is probably more important than what specifically they're doing. As long as everyone's aligned that 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.

27:33And that might mean for a period of time working really closely with product, working really closely with product marketing or some other element of the business. but really they should recognize and growth should be able to communicate that we're bringing a unique skill set and a unique point of view that hopefully is complimentary to their skill set and their point of view but ultimately the same goal of making the business successful. You're an angel in my company George and we're sitting down for a coffee and we're going for some advice and I'm at about a million in revenue. I've just raised a series A is now the time to bring in a head of growth and how do you advise me on when is the right time to bring in someone for growth and what type of person as it senior or junior?

28:12Yeah, I would always skew more junior. I think hiring for potential, especially early on in the business as far, far more important. I actually think it would be a mistake to hire someone more senior like if you're serious, a hiring a really smart generalist that can think in terms of first principles and they can think logically in terms of solving problems is probably more important than anything. What background do you find is best? Yeah. Unless you're trying to solve a very specific problem, 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 marking background.

28:43I think hiring someone that has demonstrated they can think logically and they can do math is really, really important in the early days. So that might be engineers, that might be ex -finance folks. That might be an ex -consultant that hated consulting and like really wanted to stick with something long -term and get their hands dirty. I think those make generally the best first 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?

29:14And are they like internally motivated? Is there any profile before we actually dig into skills and skill detection? Is there any profile where you're like, I don't love that background? It's just tough to be good at growth with that background. Yeah, if you've been at a company, especially a company that's an order of magnitude or larger, bigger for more than a few years, it's just really hard to to then change your mindset and go to a smaller startup and think about how hard you have to get your hands dirty and how differently you need to think about things. I think if you've been at a much, much larger company, you're going to tend to think more in terms of playbooks and rely more on your past experience than on what you can learn from others or what you can learn from maybe other geographies, other companies or other peers.

29:55So going from playbook to first principle thinking is generally difficult to do. I've personally stayed away from that type of profile. on the skill detection. How do you run an interview process then again? You're advising me, I have a number of applicants and we have a candidate pool. How should I spend the first meeting? What question 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. So, like, if you take that channel or test, what do you mean, do you mean that references or like physical take home test?

30:32I, both, so exactly both. If you're like a series, they start up. It's probably like finding the best talent and hiring, convincing the best talent to join your company is generally gonna be really hard. I assume most people have probably never heard of most series, they start up. And in that case, yeah, the best folks are gonna be able to hire going to be like referrals, warm intros, that sort of thing. So getting some sort of back channel information from the person that is hopefully connecting you is I think like actually the first step of the interview process. I would argue the second should be some sort of case study or some sort of take home test.

31:01You could do the case study live in the conversation with them just to see how they think about things, but I don't think it would be a bad idea to go from warm conversation, get to know you kind of selling you on the opportunity in the business straight to how you take home tests. So the first call should probably be about selling. And then the set 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. Yes, take home assignment. What do you like to give as a take home assignment?

31:28And what advice would you give for me? Yes, make it as real as possible and make it quantitative. And actually, maybe the third thing I'd say is understand what good looks like before you send the test out. So a great example is I like to just take a Salesforce dump or a dump of data and be like, hey, what's the best campaign? What worked best here? What were the best leads? Whatever it might be. And if it's real world data, it's going to be really messy. There's going to be a bunch of tricks they have to catch. They're going to be a bunch of mistakes. They have to figure out duplicate leads or the date stone align or missing data or whatever it might be.

32:00So I think like that itself is like can they work with real world data is I think 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 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 were with real world data. They come back and you're impressed.

32:27What happens next? Do we go straight to an offer? Do we have a hiring panel? Do we do any other steps? They should at least meet some other members of the team. Ideally, you want this to be a mutual fit, both culturally but also they want to work with the people on the team. The team wants to work with them. So I think there's still value in doing a panel, but it's almost more culture fit and more team fit more than anything. But ideally, you are scoping that test that you send them so you know if they can do the job. When you've got growth talent wrong, what did you not see that you wish you had seen when you hired them?

32:58It's generally been hiring a generalist that, hey, this isn't for me. I don't want to do this after all. I've never done this problem or I've never done this job before. Now that I'm doing it, I really don't enjoy it. I want to go and get back into investing or I want to do like XYZ. Honestly, I think it's difficult to assess for that and you just have to acknowledge that like no one, even the best person at hiring is still going to make a lot of mistakes. and that's that's okay. Probably what's most important is just being as transparent as possible, both in terms of the opportunity and then in terms of how you're going to be assessed.

33:26And also just being transparent, like if this doesn't work, that's fine. Like we've all had jobs before, we're all gonna have jobs again, like that's okay. Do you agree that people are destined slash much better suited for certain phases of a company life? I wouldn't say they were destined, but I think you can be suited for it. Like if you spend the last five jobs and 15 years in a certain stage of company. I think it's gonna be difficult to adapt your way of operating, way of thinking to a different stage of company. Having said that, I mean, I don't think anyone in particular is destined for a certain stage.

33:58I think if you're very, very hungry in your self -starter and you love just doing a little bit of everything, it's like, okay, you're probably going to do better at a seed or series A stage company than a hundred thousand person while established business. But that might change over time. That might change as they gain more experience or do different things. You need to invest in your people, right? I mean, that's to help someone to grow and develop with scale. And you said to me before, management as a skill that needs to be invested in. Do you think it's currently invested in by most companies?

34:29By most companies, no, I don't. I think that, like, philosophically, they're like, yes, we want to invest in people's learning and development. I think they even believe that that's true. But like, actually doing it is really difficult. Like, it takes time, it takes resources. You have to be intentional. It has to be top -down. How do you do it then? Help me. I think Sam, sorry, I actually had like a great model for this. The CEO and founder, like he was very big on learning and very big on reading. And I remember like one time he was hanging out in like the cafeteria and like what do you like to do in your free time?

34:57Like I like to read books. And so as a result, you saw how that permeated throughout the culture. So I remember they launched something when I was there called leadership principles. And everyone that was a leader within the company got a big box shipped to their home. And it had literally like 15 books in it. And they're all business books. And the expectation was that you read one of these books every single month and then re -join a conversation with other peers. And this is all organized to discuss like one of the principles in these books that Sam Saro wanted you to embody. And then there was like an element where you actually then have to go put it into practice and demonstrate you're putting into practice.

35:31Like to me, that is a great example of being very intentional about, hey, we value learning and development here and we're going to add a structure and we're going to add accountability to it to make sure that you are not just learning things but putting it into practice. That took time. That took a lot of investment. That took really it coming from the founders. And I think like a lot of companies maybe sometimes get caught up in the day to day and they say, hey, we value learning, but go figure it out on your own rather than coming up with like a holistic program or a holistic mechanism like that.

35:57How do you think about the effectiveness of that? I read Howard Schultz's book on Starbucks and Leadership Lessons from Starbucks. I run a fucking media company in a world of TikTok and deep seek. It's completely different to the point on playbooks. the leadership principles? Probably don't align. Most leadership books written 20 years ago do not take account for a post -COVID millennial generation. How do we think about applicability and actually the lessons we teach being wrong? I don't think business has actually changed that much. Tactically, sure, maybe it has. The channels TikTok didn't exist 30 years ago.

36:31But I don't actually think business and being a good manager in particular has changed that much. The skills necessary to be a good manager have changed that much. A great example is like the book The Goal. Like I'm a big fan of that book. I have some recency bias because we read it recently. But one of the key concepts in that is like the theory of constraints. And now this 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.

37:04That'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 are vetting them well, and as long as 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 regardless of how old it is. What is the biggest bottleneck in your role today at RAMB? The difference would be the biggest game changer. The biggest bottleneck is probably the velocity of experimentation.

37:31Like, there are so many opportunities. We don't have enough time. We don't have enough resources. That's probably like if you zoom out far enough, that's probably the constraint for most businesses. What would you like to do, but because of time or lack of resources, you're not able to do? There are a lot of things I would just like to get off the ground faster. When you're reliant on external parties, either like external vendors or external lead sources or other legal teams to review your terms and services, things just go much more, much more slowly. I wish that there was a way to speed all of that up.

38:01I think that ramp actually does a really good job of saying like, Let's optimize for speed, just accept those legal terms, maybe not necessarily. But let's figure out a way to move as quickly as possible and just like launch it and test it, and then we can figure out the details of we're going to actually scale it up. We spoke about investing in people becoming managers and developing. I spoke to so many of your former colleagues, and they all said one of your biggest strengths is the willingness to roll up your sleeves and do the work yourself. My question to you is, ironically, how willing should a manager be to do IC work?

38:33versus that actually just being a plaster to not having great ICs. That's a great question. A good leader, I don'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 parts important. They should know how to do the job so they can step in if they need to or so that they're dangerous enough to ask the right questions. But if they know how to do the job better than the people that 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.

39:02So being able to number one either learn enough of what your team does so that you can do it poorly or number two Higher people that can do what you need them to do better than you know. I think is kind of the key Okay, so you've hired me. I've joined your team. I'm a junior you hired very junior with this one George. Sorry But what is that onboarding 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 domain. I would expect in the first three days, you know how to do your job and that's pretty much it.

39:36And 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? What do I do as a leader to give you those best 30 days? Do I just say just shadow the shit out of me? Do I say go sit in support? Do where do you go? I think this again goes back to the investing and learning. I think the leader needs to be incredibly detailed in what those first 30, 60, 90 day plans look like. Who you're meeting, what you're doing with your time. Actually, this is something I learned from Sam Sardas as well.

40:03I remember my first 30 days, we were written out in excruciating detail. I think the first two weeks were completely scheduled out to the minute for me. And as a result, it was also very clear to understand if someone was learning and picking things up and it was very easy to compare folks if they were given the same structured onboarding. So I firmly believe like the first 30 days is like you learn the business and you learn the job. Now, beyond those 30 days, like you should be able to start showing like some sort of step change impact, start having some ideas, start making things your own. And then by 90 days, you should be starting to actually show the fruits of those new ideas and the fruits of like that new experience that you're bringing, your new perspective that you're bringing.

40:39Should 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. If you were, you were, ideally hired because you have some skill set or some unique perspective or there's some gap in the business that you're 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 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?

41:13Are we at least on the right track is important. But there are some aspects or sometimes where it is difficult to put early points on the board. George, how false do you know if someone you hide isn't good enough? Oh, yeah. I think you generally have inklings in the first couple of weeks, but you should give some people the benefit of the doubt. Like you should run some sort of stride. And I guess this is why structured onboarding is so important. And this is why making sure people ship things in their first week is so important. So you actually can assess them based on facts versus just vibes or feelings.

41:41But you generally have some sort of vibe or feeling in the first week or to. 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 in enough time. Do you know what I mean? It looks like you're just cutting it prematurely short. So you know, but you keep them for three months because you're like, well, at least now it looks like I can say I've given them fair try. I think that's true. What are the most common reasons growth hires don't work? I think like the number one reason is, it was it was on the manager. It was a mishire. They didn't scope the role effectively or the role change, the needs of the business changed, and they hired the wrong person, the wrong profile.

42:15I think generally managers try to come up with like a laundry list of skills that they want to hire for and they try to find someone that checks most of those boxes, but that's almost the easy way to do things. I think the much harder way is to get really, really crystal clear on what is the one thing that we need? Like what is the one skill or trade or piece of experience, one problem we need to solve and hiring someone that you have high confidence can do that or fill that gap versus check a bunch of boxes. So But not getting clear on that, I think, is the number one reason why you would miss higher.

42:42And that's mostly on the manager from being honest. How does AI change the role of growth? We see some pretty futuristic things in terms of, here's my budget, go -spended across five channels, and it will do it in the optimal fashion for you. Is that the future of growth? And how do you think about how your role changes with an increasing prominence of AI? In that example, I think it's hard to find alpha if you're just having AI go find the opportunities for you. having said that, I think AI is tremendously changing like the rule of growth. Why is it hard to find alpha in that respect? Because they'd have all of your connected data history.

43:16And 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. Sure. It could be incredibly personalized. It could be personalized, but almost by definition, that's just going to give you incremental gains on things you're already doing and things that has data on. I think to get real advantage, maybe we'll get to this point, at some point soon, but I think it's hard. Have the AI go talk to 50 people in the industry and synthesize what they're doing and apply what they think is going to be relevant to your business model and your ICP and go apply that.

43:53That sounds really difficult to do at least at the state of AI today, but maybe not in a year, who knows? Tooling -wise, does it change much? Yes, 100%. I remember For a few years ago, I was such a strong advocate that everyone on the growth team needs to be technical. They need to learn SQL. They need to learn Python. They need to learn how to work with a growth engineering team very, very closely. I think AI has upended that. You don't need to be nearly as technical as you used to. AI can help you write the code. It can tell you other ways of doing things. Even just in that element of who I would use to have a bias for hiring, it's totally changed.

44:26In my mind, growth people bluntly are either performance driven scientific or they are creative driven artistic. Does a world of AI make one likely to be more successful than the other? It's a good copilot for lack of a better term for both of those rules. 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 to move more quickly. You've got to choose which one helps more. Here's my bias. I am not super creative at the end of the day. I'm not a creative minded person So I think it helps me a lot more.

45:01I think you are yourself. Do you think it helps creative people more? I think so or maybe it helps Uncreative people more is maybe what I'd say the number of times that I've had chat GPT Just be like how do I make this better? How do I add a joke in here? What are some other like visuals? I can do what's a good analogy for XYZ? I wouldn't have been able to do that on my own I would have had to go to someone on product market or content and be like, care, I need some help. Can I ask you, how do you advise founders competing in incredibly intense, competitive markets? Ramp is in a very competitive market across a number of different products.

45:35What's your biggest advice on competing in very proliferated markets? Yeah, I think it's like most things, you just have to have a better product and you have to have some plan for distribution. I think that having a better product probably solves like 80, 90 % of the battle, but you also need to think about how you're going to distribute that product and like what your unfair advantages and 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.

46:04No. Like I'm a marketer at the end of the day. I'm a growth person. That is antithetical to everything we stand for. There are some products where like yes, 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. Isn't 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.

46:41It makes my life a joy to be quite honest. 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, the number one, what's the most common, expensive, deadly, irreversible mistake you see founders make? Hiring for experience because they don't know any better. Like, we don't know how to do this. Well, hire someone that does. And it should be we should hire someone who doesn't. It should be like, we should actually assess for it. Hey, how do we determine what good looks like? And how do we test them for it?

47:09And like, could someone figure this out? Could someone on the team figure this out rather than hiring experts? Do you think most founders know what good looks like? That's the hard 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 cool calling really well. Go talk to the people that built that infrastructure and built that system, et cetera, et cetera. Do you know what I started these vertical shows?

47:35Right. Because one of my companies hired someone for growth that was just obviously terrible to me. And I said, this is clearly a mistake. And they said, I don't know what good growth looks like. And I was like, well, if I spoke to the 10 that I know and publish them, you'd have an idea that George is top tier, and that's what I should look for in someone that I work with. And so this was meant to be a benchmarking of world -class quality in each vertical, and that's why we started them. I love it. I think that's why I'm such a fan. No, it was very kind. Tell me what's the most underappreciated growth channel today?

48:11It is probably honestly something on the influencer side of things. I don't think most people think of it as a growth channel, but influencers absolutely is at least on the B2B side. Can you do influencer at scale? That's the hard thing. That is the fun problem to solve. I think you can. I think you treat it almost as a outbound funnel. It's like go make a list of the 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. You could solve almost any problem in that way, but short answer is yes. What's the most polluted channel to say or overrated?

48:42paid search. I think everyone goes to paid search because they have to, but I think in the very, very early days, you have nothing that works. Sure, it's like table stakes, but it saturates quickly, your pain attacks to Google. I think paid search is like relatively an inspiring of a growth channel that will scale long term. What growth tactics have you done that with the benefit of hindsight, you're like, oh, I wish I hadn't done that. Oh, man. I think like very, very early on, it was event spawn like at very small companies, it's event sponsorships like go exhibit at Dreamforce or something like that.

49:16Like it feels like something you have to do because everyone else doesn't. It's like just a waste of money. You're in a sea of other companies and no one's paying attention to you. Like you're 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 of events. I think we're we're at a very different scale though and we do things a little bit differently. It's not just like go exhibit at an event. It's also like get a speaker slot, do some Adam home out of home advertising around it. Make sure we do like outbound emails immediately after it's more than just like let's get a booth in a corner of the conference hall because it was all we could afford and let's hope people come to us.

49:49It's one of those ones where it's like if you're in you need to go all in and have to billboard outside the conference, the key cards for the hotels as well, the speakers slot and the booth, not just like a small ship booth. Exactly. And that's why I think it changes and depending on size. Like when you're a series a company like most events to pay up on your go to Mark Emotion, most events are not going to be high ROI. What growth channel did you not take advantage of that with the benefit of hindsight, you're like, oh, George, that was in plain sight. It's a good question. I think like direct mailing gifting was one that we could have actually even attempted even earlier when we were at Sam Sara.

50:26I 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 in 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.

50:54So I would say display advertising is an opportunity. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? It's a good question. I would say it's very much brand advertising. This is something that, or brand investment in general. I think this is something that Gong did really, really well. They were willing to invest in things that elevated the brand, even if it was completely unmeasurable, even if it was something that we would never be able to measure. But you saw that in the fact that you saw that in the inbound numbers and how big of a channel inbound was for Gong because they invested in their brand so much.

51:26And I think that 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 usually the non -traditional stuff. So like cold calling, I think a lot of people thought cold calling is dead and like cold calling is like a tremendous channel for a lot of companies because it is hard to do.

52:03Door to door, I think it's something that's really interesting and I've been thinking about this for a while now. The medical device of space is interesting because a lot of their sales and a lot of their marketing or sales is door to door. And I think there's actually now that folks are moving more back into the office and working from offices again. I think there's probably an unfair advantage to having a true field sales team that goes door to door and brings like a cake with them or whatever it might be. So that's something I've been thinking about. For any door to door salesman that want to bring a cake, I love cake.

52:29All in. George, as I said, like, I love it when you get concession 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. But no, it's been a fun time. I just love doing that show with George. That was one of the highest, uh, what would I say? Value to word ratios I've ever seen. What a concise and brilliant speaker George was. And if you want to watch the full episode, you can find it on YouTube by searching for 2 .0 VC.

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