20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

23:07Sure. Or Facebook will work a little bit in the beginning because they want to get you to spend more money, but pretty quickly as you try to scale your unity, economics, or deteriorate. So first of all, it's kind of a false distinction because most successful businesses end up using some combination of this sort of post -hoc hierarchy of channels we put on it. So it's kind of a false distinction, but there's really only like six channels in the world. If you think about how are the ways you find out about stuff, you hear from a salesperson, some partner brings you in because to enable you to do something, you see some ads, you do a Google search, or there's some content or inbound paid ads, or maybe hear about it from an influencer.

23:42That's really kind of it. And then if you're in like B2C, you probably count of four salespeople, partners probably won't make sense. So it's even a shorter list. And you can just sit with that list in an hour with your co -founders and whittle it down. If there's no one's googling anything related to your product, you're not going to to do SEO. If your unit economics are tight and you have a long payback cycle, you're not going to do pay like if your product isn't expensive you can't do sales. So if you just take these six channels and like cross off the four or five that probably don't work, you've got your channels and that's like one percent of the challenge.

24:1499 % of the challenge is getting it to work because each of these channels is hard. You know we talk about Google and ranking them at top three for anything these days is going to be very hard. Paid It adds a soul that auction, so you're gonna have to outbid people who are spending $100 million and have huge teams who've been optimizing this for decades. Sales, outbound, how many sales emails do you get and linked in messages and how many of them do you ignore? So really doing the experimentation to refine and get a channel or a combination of channels working is really where people should spend their time, not as you said, trying the checklists of different ideas.

24:48The thing I find funny is content. Everyone now moves to content. Everyone has a fucking podcast and I just find it so funny because it's like you will have to do 200 shows No one will care you will not make any money and then you will also have no proof that it works still Good luck and everyone's just like it's just so funny for me because the other thing that's really hard I find with a lot of channels is it takes a long time and you often don't have data knowing it works You almost just have to suspend this belief and say but it could work in in part of the book you mentioned a locksmith moment I just wanted to unpack what a law Smith moment was for startups and how you think about it.

25:26So the locksmith idea crossed my mind. It was early in my time at PayPal and I was living in San Francisco in like a gated apartment complex. One day I walked home and I got to the gate that led to the courtyard to all the apartments and there was a sticker over the lock. It said 24 hour emergency locksmith and had a phone number on it. I thought this is a clever locksmith. She could have bought ads on public transit or pod sponsored podcasts. I wouldn't have remembered, but she figured out where I'm going to be, where I suddenly realize I need a locksmith more than anything else, which is locked out of my apartment complex because someone squirted glue in the lock because it's San Francisco.

25:57And I thought, that's the key. So every successful startup finds this kind of exact moment of highest need and figures out a way to insert themselves there. Is finding people where they need it the most the key? Can you create demand from nothing, from synthetic air? So like you said there about the locksmith, which is like, you know, someone puts glue in lock and you know you need it now. Some problems you don't need now. How does the role of growth vary in those two opposing worlds of like, ah shit, I broke my leg, I need it now versus, oh, that would be cool. Athletic Greens. We were all just fine before athletic greens and yet some people spent tons of money on it.

26:32In terms of finding that person, I think the whole thing is they do have different needs and different things resonate. What are some lessons on what works in terms of the messaging that ease because for one person on athletic green, it might be recovery and for other, it might be optimal brain function or whatever that is. How do you think about effective messaging in a more horizontal product? So for a very horizontal product like air table, I mean, it's really hard, but you're going to find initial use cases and you're going to kind of start there and expand. But if you came to me with your startup and said, we have this product, we need to find our customers.

27:06I start by kind of using survivorship bias on our side, So I tell you, let's find some people who actually did sign up for your product and assume that whatever they think you do for them Not's the thing your customers want and then I go and start to interview those people and we use a jobs to be done interview Technique which I'm kind of gets to the core of like what was their problem and what were they trying to achieve and what they're trying to achieve I say like a good headline on a landing page completes the sentence now you can so that I'm trying to this and oh now you can Close out your quarter in minutes not days or whatever that is that they're trying to do So then I'm going to do those interviews.

27:40I'm going to find out the different now you can's the different outcomes that people have. And then, you know, if I've got 10 or 50 customer interview transcripts, now like what I used to do is just read through them and I'm looking for the verbs. Now you can use a large language model to do that and it's like pull out all the verbs, all the outcomes of what people are trying to do. And then I've got a shorter list. And then sometimes I'll just show, I'll mock those up as landing pages and show them to people and like, what do you think that means and what would that enable you to do? With the other one, it's just very quickly, like, in a week for 500 bucks, you can just test a bunch of ads.

28:09So you have one ad design, and six different now you can headlines, and you show it to, like, a look -alike audience, or highly selected target that looks like your customers. And these ads won't be profitable, that's not the point. But the point is you can test half a dozen, six, twelve messages in the space of a week against your audience, and see what gets them to click. I'm so pleased that you said that about, kind of, really almost kind of the importance of the testing process to find product market fit. because everyone on the show says when it comes to timing of hiring a growth lead or a growth team post -product market fit.

28:37It's always post -product market fit. And then there was one guest who said, no, you actually sometimes need to create demand to understand what product market fit is, to understand what resonates. And so you should hire them pre -product market fit for those reasons. Where do you sit? Like, on when is the right time to hire growth? Okay, so I'm going to contradict what a lot of your previous guests have said. Great, fantastic. And the reason I'm gonna do that is because your previous guests emanate as they are work for companies like Shopify and HubSpot and Segment and they have gazillions of dollars in it.

29:08Huge budgets and they have brand appeal. The best growth people in the world would be thrilled to go work for those companies. Little startups don't have the Brad Rhaegnish and I mean they're not really great jobs. They don't have it on a money. The equity is, you know, a bit sus. And so you just, you can't necessarily hire a growth genius at that stage. So part of it is just a level of talent you can hire. And if you think about growth, this is something that comes across every function, it's the hardest thing your company's gonna do. So you want the most talented, smartest person in your company who's closer to the customer, the most impatient, the fastest mover, and that sort of starts to look a lot like a founder.

29:44So I really believe very strongly that your first head of growth is your founder. And their first hires, I wouldn't start by hiring somebody senior. So I see this play out badly a lot where people are like, I'm gonna bring in the magical growth wizard and they're going to grow my company and just goes peri -shaped more often than not. These people are like bringing their playbook, they're running their last company or their bag of tricks or whatever, but they don't fundamentally understand your business. And you probably wouldn't let them do if they were good. You wouldn't let them have all the engineering resources, not all the product resources, not all the like, you wouldn't let them do the stuff that they need to do to be successful anyways.

30:18So first hire's for me. I like once you understand roughly how your business is going to grow, maybe it's content and inbound, maybe it's paid whatever. I say hire people who can do 50 % of the hard things you need and figure out the other 90%. You've got a list of hard things you need, you know, whatever, could direct response, copy, user experience, funnel optimization, deep analytics about retention cohorts. You're not going to find someone who can do all those things, so find someone who can do half of them. And then the other 90 % is between the time you write the job spec and the time that their butt hits the seat, everything's going to be changed.

30:47And six months later, everything's going to be changed again. So fundamentally what you're going for is what is their rate of learning. So I'm looking fundamentally for bright generalists who can do some of the things I need as my early growth hires With the idea that if these are really talented bright people hopefully someday one of them will be able to grow into my head of growth Okay, so we're gonna go through like the process I'm an angel investment of yours and you're gonna advise me Okay, so I've got that person who kind of knows 50 % of the core skills and then they can learn and adapt fast enough How do I find these candidates Matt?

31:16I don't have a growth network to pull from, what is the right way to start the process and start getting candid at SimPipe? I've actually found even when I worked for kind of unknown startups that general broad inbound tends to work. But I find the mistake people make is that they apply too many filters to the search. You know, you write the job spec in the recruiter, you're like, well, what do you want? You're like six years of experience and a series B high growth, fintech, in London went to a good university, former management consultant. It's like, okay, but she already has a job like what about the rest of the world?

31:49And so if you just remove filters like geography or like a certain university degree or certain work experience, often you can find these bright generalists, I'll say categorically the best growth people are hired and managed in my time at PayPal had no marketing experience had no product experience at all. They were coming to an organization where they were surrounded and supported, but they were both former scientists and they were really good at figuring things out. Did they have commonalities in their backgrounds around them? Were they maths grads? Was there other things in their profiles that were common despite the lack of marketing?

32:23I mean, one of them was a physicist, the other one was a computer scientist, but in a university doing academic research. And so both of them understood data and they could think from first principles and they understood this idea of causation and correlation and Experiment so it is like a science -reaching mind. Yes Scientists are always aware of what they don't know Unlike you know most people in most jobs You're just always you're wrong all the time you're at least you see these big gaps in humanity's understanding of Whatever your discipline is and you've got to come into a startup with this assumption that you only know like 10 % of all the stuff you're gonna need to know for this to be hugely successful.

32:59Insighting just come in with that curiosity and humility. I mean, as a venture capitalist, we're never wrong, so you're simply wrong. Because you know, you feel great every time you make a check, right? You write a check, you're like, I feel great about this company. And then the data tells you, well, no, you were stupid about 80 % of these companies. 100 % it is one of the most unique jobs in the world. I said to my mother the other day, can you imagine like a chef in a restaurant when 90 % of the meals they produce can be terrible, the worst. As long as 10 % are great, you are, you can be the best in the world.

33:29She's like, I don't get this at all. I'm like, you know, it's a unique position. Okay, so we have this profile. I love that in terms of actually the best tires, not necessarily coming from that background. So we put that out, we put it on indeed, put it on, you know, whatever we want to do, and we have this top of funnel. Start the interview process. Into you one, what am I trying to achieve from that first interview map? I've never done this hiring process before. What questions do I ask? How do I did. So remember I said you want someone who can do 50 % of the hard things you need to do and figure out the other 90%.

33:57So my entire interview process is going to be focused around figuring that out. So I've got my little list of like these five hard things and I'm going to start like a funnel create rapport. I start with really broad questions. What are you great at? What's your favorite work to do? What would you rather delegate? Either as it's to that I can already start to tick off things on my list. So I'm like okay it's obvious they can do this. I'm not worried about their ability to do that. I'll end up with one, two, three things where I'm not sure they've got it or not. And then I'll go deeper into questions about that.

34:26And those are going to be questions typically that don't have a clear right or wrong answer, but are important. So marketing attribution. How do you think about first click versus last click and how to learn and spend your money wisely? How do you break apart a retention problem or whatever? How do you get resources from a department where you don't have any official authority over them? I usually use question pairs and talk me through it and tell me about a time when who does this well in your opinion and why things like who do you follow who do you copy things like that and then the other questions are really around that 90 % what they're going to need to figure out.

35:00I'm trying to figure out literally to have a growth mindset and these are the questions I've been using them again and again for years and they just never fail and it's never close. No one's ever like kind of maybe so the first one is just like what are you hoping to learn in this role and good people will already have thought they may not have like a stock answer, but they're going to have thought about where they're out in their life and what they need to learn to get to where they're going. The second one is, tell me about a mistake you've made. Some people are comfortable talking about their mistakes and some people think it's like a trick question to find out their weaknesses and have some scripted answer.

35:30And then if they tell you about a mistake, like, what are their non -verbals? Are they comfortable talking about it? And then do they unpromptu? Do they tell you the lessons and what they do differently? Like, had they thought about this mistake before the interview? The third question is just, do you have any questions for me? because good growth people are unknowingly curious. Like not fun at cocktail parties, but very good. That's all these like sounds obvious, but I'll hold on kind of questions. And then the other piece I need to figure out there is are they a playbook runner? Are they gonna come in with their playbook and execute it or are they gonna try to write a new playbook?

36:00Because the way you get promoted in a lot of companies and product and marketing is by doing the stuff you're supposed to do, but doing it faster and doing more of it, making fewer mistakes and managing more people and more budget and making good decks. And none of those things are useful than an early stage startup. You actually don't want to do most of the things. You don't want to spend most of the money and you can hire the people. So to find the playbook writers, I'll ask things like, what do you see as the big open questions right now in our business? Do you prep them ahead of time for that?

36:26Do you send them a deck? Do you fund raising debt maybe from the last raise? Do you send them a prep on the company itself? Just so people are informed enough to come in and be like, oh, I know your business. Or is it like on the fly? Let's see how quickly they think. It may not be a first round interview question, but I don't prep them. And the truth is, I don't necessarily need them, you know, like most interviews, I don't need them to have the right answer. I want to know how they got there and what they think. And maybe it's like, well, you're in this industry and your competitors are all doing this.

36:52So no, I don't prep them, but I still find they get good answers from good candidates. What are the biggest mistakes people make in those early interviews? I think the biggest mistake early on in hiring is just being dazzled by the names on a CV and where you've worked on the past and what you've done. And I think I already said I'm very little used for experience. And if you worked for a successful company in this space, it doesn't mean you knew how to cause that success. It just means you worked there. Do we do case studies? Often people like to bring a growth experiment as part of the process and say, hey, do you do that?

37:21And do you test in some tangible way the skills that 50 % we want to see them have? I don't tangibly test stuff. As far as case studies, I'll just do it informally. You know, tell me about a time when you walk me through it. What did you learn if you had it to do over? As far as skills, you know, this isn't engineering I find if people can talk about it well and if I know they have a bias for action that they're either gonna be able to do it or figure out how to do it What's the biggest mistakes you've made in hiring? I've done this more than once and I'm not proud of this But there have been people where I interview them and they're brilliant and they're talented And I really like them and I really want to hire them But something in the interview process suggests that maybe they're dishonest or a lot of integrity And it's always a small thing like when the interview is debrief and they told this person one thing But they told this person another thing or two things it didn't make sense It's like it's just a little thing don't worry about it And what I realized was nobody lies about just one thing and if they lie about little stuff If they don't have integrity then they lie about big stuff and so I bring those people in and they are bright in their talent And they do cool stuff and then they do something that really puts me in a bad position How did it turn out in the cases where you go to wrong?

38:25I had to let those people go After I was in a situation where I was embarrassed, I looked bad, my organization looked bad, it cost us some money where it really nasty things happen. You need to be in person for gross teams. I think a lot of it is creative, it's testing as he said, it's multi -function. Do you need to be in person? I think there needs to be a part of it that's in person. A lot of it is really solitary. A lot of it is almost like coding, spending time with data, talking to customers, making sense of interviews, refining and designing creative, setting up experiments. So a lot of the execution is solitary, but a lot of the knowledge showing an ideation process is coming together.

39:01So my rhythm is I'll have typically, you know, a day, a week at least, or two days where you're together, and always a weekly growth meeting. And that point of that weekly growth meeting is what's the most impactful work? How's it going so far? What did we do last week? What did we learn from that? When loser draw? How are the numbers trending? And therefore, what should we do this week? So you're going to look at the results of all your experiments, the stuff you tried, your customer conversations, your data analysis, you're going to take everything you learned, you're going to share it with the whole team.

39:27And they're all going to be a little smarter, and they're all going to have some new ideas. And then you can have a really productive conversation about ideas they didn't have coming into the meeting that suddenly makes sense. And so at once, that's like an information sharing pump. And in the other hand, because it's a weekly cadence, it pushes the pace. You're like, we have our meeting on Monday. I need to have my experiments done by then. And the cadence of experimentation and learning is critical. Now, we've decided we want to hire this person that joining. I have no idea how to do onboarding.

39:54I think every startup does onboarding terribly for any role. For growth is even harder. And in his hard, what is the right onboarding process for a new growth hire at a startup? So every company is kind of different in how much they're like process and organization. So I'm going to just give you the core principles and people can adapt it to their systems. But there's basically two steps here. The first one is they need to become an information sponge. And they fundamentally, there's like three or four buckets. They need to get to learn everything they can about your customers. So to be some listening to customers and a lot of digesting customer research and looking at old experiments and what worked and what didn't and talking to sales and customer service people, they need to understand the growth model mathematically where customers come, how much are they cost, where are the conversions, drop -offs, which go through to and all that stuff.

40:39And then they need to understand like your team and capabilities and who are the other people here and what can we do and how do I work with them. Once you've got all that, then step two is prioritization. So remember early on I said 90 % of your results come from 10 % of the stuff you do. So which work do we do in our limited runway is actually a super important question. So I'm going to have this conversation with this person about, okay, give it all that you know, after 30 days. What should we be doing and what should we not be doing and why? Even if I completely agree with him, I'm going to stress test that shit out of that because why are we doing this and not this?

41:10Because it's a very important decision and it's worth spending some time to get that right. Then it becomes a question of like, is that stuff actually happening? How's it going? What are we learning? If this works, how big can it be? And how can I help this go faster? Are there any quick and easy wins that people can do joining teams in the growth role? And should they be going for those quick wins? Every good growth person with some experience has a bag of quick wins that will work. You know, changing a bad headline to a good now you can headline. Going back through, you know, most people track signups and conversions for their paid stuff, but they don't look at customer value.

41:43and you may find that certain channels bring you higher or lower value customers and you can just shift spend to the ones that bring you high value customers. If you haven't been emailing your database and you've got a good email sequence, you can wake up a bunch of dormant leads really quickly and there's a dozens of these quick wins and you can do them and especially if you need money or if you have one of those founders who's impatient for attraction, fine. But if you think about any of those things I just said, they're kind of one in done, you know, once your headlines good, you're not gonna, you know, if your conversion goes from 1 % to 10%, you're not gonna 10x that number again.

42:10So that's where eventually you, you know, there's just no getting around kind of doing the fundamental. How quickly do you know when they're not great or if they're not good enough? I always think actually in most roles it's about a week, which is why I try and pay people take a week off their job beforehand. I say, hey, Matt, it's a big decision for you. Let's pay you for a week, join for a week in kind of quiet and we'll see if you like it. And I put it on them. It's like a for you, you can see if you like us. But I think in a week, you know, if someone's good. I think that's a really good approach.

42:41Anyway, you can sort of try before you buy it works well. But yeah, I think it's pretty obvious right away. The bad candidates come in with people, you know, all output, no input mentally. It's usually pretty obvious, I think, once you've got some experience. And there are any big mistakes gross people make in their first days in a row. It's the opposite of what I just said, right? It's coming in and trying to run your playbook from your last job and feeling like you've got all the answers. Instead of having the humility and curiosity to understand how does this business work. Can I ask what growth experiment did you have the most conviction in that then turned out to be wrong?

43:13I'm just intrigued you for 11 years at PayPal and must have been something to be like I really went in all in on this I was just wrong LinkedIn actually for my business now someone who I really respect gave me advice to start posting on LinkedIn as like a way to build my list And I was really dismissive of it. I don't remember why but I just didn't like the idea at first But I respected this person enough I was like, you know what? I'm writing these weekly emails anyways I might as well turn them into LinkedIn posts and I started doing it. And just like you said, nothing, nothing, nothing. And eventually like, one started to get some traction.

43:43And then nothing, nothing. And then one got a lot of traction. And it really snowballed. And it turned into, you know, kind of my main source of new subscribers to my list now. But I was completely dismissive about that. A subscriber's to your list. The North Star metric fuel business. No, it's just a funnel driver. The ultimate North Star metric for my businesses, how many startups can we help? What have been some lessons in the LinkedIn building? I love content. Any big lessons to you in building the LinkedIn following? It's humbling, because I have all this stuff that I think is amazing, and some of it doesn't perform, and some of it does, and I'm always surprised.

44:14Often the more intellectual stuff I find doesn't perform. I will often tweet stuff about, kind of, I don't know, a temporal diversification of different bench -of -intishes, and people are like, no. Your stuff is amazing. But then, you know, you tweet stuff about, like, perseverance and grit. Boom! It goes crazy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think there's something there like you know if I look at people's most successful LinkedIn or Twitter posts a lot of times There is some emotion. There's just a human story in there even if there's some data Final one if we do a quick file which is like what's a growth loop to you?

44:45Everyone always says on the show about growth loops and everyone has very different definitions We talked about kind of that kind of channel leading to cool bass and whatnot What is a growth loop and how do you think about how startups should think about it? I mean, fundamentally, it's any positive feedback loop anywhere in your business. It basically means if you go to sleep and stop doing it, it keeps running itself. So that could be a classic thing like a referral loop. It could be a financial loop. If your ads are paying back 5X in 30 days, then you have a positive ad spend growth loop. There's these network effect loops where you bring people on your show.

45:16They create content that brings you to listeners, which then increases the desirability of your show. It brings you better guests, a virtuous circle. So once you've mapped your growth model, you look around and say, where can we find a positive feedback loop here? And then you double down on the growth loops that you find. Yeah. Yeah. Can you double down on more than one or two at once? It's hard. The doubling down is really down in the trenches of a really tweaking and optimizing. You know, going from 0 .5X return on ad spend to 3 or 4X return on ad spend is 100 experiments or more. Should the growth team be in the core functions, be it marketing, be it product, should it be separate completely?

45:52So in an early stage startup, it just comes up where your company becomes the growth team. You go through fundraising, you go through building your products, and sort of the eye of sauron turns, and it's like time to do growth, because the startup can't really do two things at once. And that means your founder is very involved in it, and all the king's horses and men are on deck. When you have a larger company, it needs to stand outside. It needs to be cross -fructural and diverse, because growth people have a fundamentally different orientation, different approach to life than other groups, but they need to have a really good relationships because they're going to need to pull resources.

46:24You know when I was hiring these brilliant scientists, the other trait I was screening for was with sociability. And people who could just go make friends with the engineers and the data scientists and everybody and just get stuff from people who didn't report into us. Listen, I want to move into a quick far round and I want to start with, you wrote the book, what's the hardest part of writing a book, man? I love writing and I write emails and LinkedIn posts. I'm used to writing on short form. And then turning that into a full book, I completely underestimated the magnitude. That's like an architect who designs like loft extensions, having to design terminal five of Heathrow.

46:56It's just a completely different level of thinking and I was hopeless and thankfully I found really good editors who were able to help me Really sort out and sequence my thoughts and turn that into a concise book What's the biggest mistake that people make when hiring for growth? The biggest mistake is being dazzled by the names on the CV and going for people with lots of impressive experience The whole thing about growth is that really is very few growth pros true growth price. Do you know what I mean? And the ones who are out there aren't going to come to work for you. That's it. I mean, and that like a million dollars each.

47:26Like, you know, you're a lane of earners at Dropbox. She's not going to come join your like series A company in London. Yep. I agree with you. So you have to find the diamonds in the rough. That's why I'm thinking so much about talent and ability and just get them in there and see how they grow. Because every one of these great growth people started as an SEO person or an analyst or a content marketer or an engineer and just learning to grow very quickly. So many of the great growth people started in SEO. That's one thing I really see from the initial actually. And that's because it forces you to think about customer intent, right?

47:56We talked about like you've got your product, but your customer has this context, this thing they're trying to do, this thing they're looking for. And you literally cannot do SEO unless you spend your whole time thinking, what are people looking for? And what are they trying to do? How does growth change in the world of AI in one minute? So what I see right now happening is a few things. First of all, the floor for creative has gone up. AI models can now do design and copy better than 90 % of people, so there's just no excuse for doing that bad thing. Two is they can automate previously hard to do tasks like cold outbound that all becomes a lot more effective.

48:29It becomes more effective, less effective in the commoditization of it, because you actually have this infinite supply now of it, and actually it's relatively generic and how it's done for the majority of people. Now it feels like we're still on the ascending curve. Like suddenly lots of people are getting good cold outreach in a way that they didn't. Okay. They will be coming to that in a year. But at the moment, the windows kind of still open. That's my one worry. It's like, do we see outbound? Really, just decay and die as a channel completely because you just have infinite supply of it. And suddenly it's like, shit, we need to find what's up.

49:03Well, text is a new channel loop because it's just too saturated. I have to be humble there because I don't like our bound and I've been declaring the death of our bound for many years now and it just, it kind of works. For the few people who really nail it and figure it out, it still kind of works. I think that, but I'm not going to commit to that answer. So we have, um, kind of raising the floor on call intent. We have that in terms of our bound and the nails. LLMs can help you parse large amounts of customer conversation data quickly and pull out the most important themes. And if you know the most important things your customers are talking about, that's a huge advantage.

49:37So that's the other big one I'm seeing right now. Do you think this is the most exciting time technologically speaking in your career? So I lived through dot com revolution 1 .0, but it's right up there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean 2009 mobile apps You know an Airbnb and Uber and Stripe and like so many amazing companies. We're getting born So that was a huge one and then yeah, certainly dot com 1 .0 wherever like people were first building these businesses and like that's capable of IPO. What gross tactic do you think has stayed truly dominant over the years? You know, I listed the six channels before sales and advertising.

50:12And most of those have been around for a long time. Influencers are new, but you know, some of the stuff is new. Network effects are... I always say it lovely, like, what influences new because in the days of like Audrey Hepburn, she was an influencer for the things that she wore, the cigarettes that she's moted. It's just a different channel with which it's presented. That's a great point. The democratization, the long tail of the businesses opening up programmatically is a new thing. Network effects product -led growth is new in the last 10 years, but a lot of the stuff we've been buying at since forever.

50:42The fundamentals that make it work, like having the right message, having the right design testing and experimenting, haven't changed. What would you like to change about the world of growth? The thing I'm trying to change in my business, and the thing that bugs me is back to when I I was a VC and I just saw so many people wasting so much money and talent. Like, these entrepreneurs are brilliant talented people. On stuff that I just knew wasn't gonna work and making these again, repeatable mistakes over and over again. You know, waiting to hire a head of growth, hiring a person with a dazzling resume, building this big, complicated product before validating it with the market.

51:14So I just love to see people shift from thinking they have all the answers and prematurely moving into an optimization mode and much more into like a discovery and curious and experimentation and learning mode. Are you negative on the future of European tech and innovation? I'm absolutely not negative on the talent. I mean, Europe produces incredible talent, but what you see is a lot of the best talent in Europe is going to move to an environment that's more friendly to startups in terms of regulatory, in terms of funding, in terms of pools of labor, in terms of tax rates, especially now that there's remote work.

51:47So I think the The challenge for Europe is going to be to create reasons for these people to stay, to list on European markets, to raise their later rounds. Final one, what's the most recent company growth strategy that's most impressed you? So one thing that is happening new that's even last couple years, that I can't believe more companies are not doing. And this, we actually, I mentioned it earlier, but if you go to some of these sites like Calm or Noom, they have these long convoluted onboarding flows that do a really good job of roping people in, getting them through the whole kind of information journey and building intent.

52:22And that's a neat thing because it can run you through an entire sales process without actually needing an salesperson. And to me, that just seems like the most obvious thing in the world for B2B companies to do for anything where customers maybe are only thinking about the problem and there's like eight steps to thinking about your solution or we just need to move them like a considered purchase not impulse buy. Just seems like the most obvious thing to start to adapt those. Matt, I've loved doing this. I've said it, it's been so long since we, I mean, it was like eight years ago since you're on the show last night.

52:50It's great catching up with you. It's so nice and serious. You look the same. I look older, but thank you so much for doing this. I know, I have facial hair, I actually have wrinkles. This is what Vansha does to you. Fuck, but thank you so much for doing this. My pleasure, Harry, is great catching up. I just love doing these shows, because we get so many messages and notes from founders saying that they shape how they do what they do in their companies because of the shows like this, like 20 sales, like 20 product, like 20 growth, really is so special for me to see. You can watch this interview on YouTube by searching for 20 VC, but before we leave you today, they say ad creative is king, but man is UGC creative a pain in the ass to pull together?

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55:32There's a reason it's America's number one finance destination. For comprehensive financial news and analysis, visit the brand behind every great investor, Yahoo Finance .com. The number one financial destination, that's Yahoo Finance .com. As always, I so appreciate your incredible support and stay tuned for a fantastic episode this coming Monday with Danny Reimer, General Partner at Index Ventures.