20Growth: Top Five Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook and Data Science at Sequoia Capital, The Two Skills Required to do Analytics Well, The Three Types of Execs within Companies and When and How to Hire for Growth with Chandra Narayanan

23:35Do you think pattern recognition and playbooks are good? What do you think they're misleading? When we look at about Pre -AI world versus the Post -AI world, a Pre -COVID versus the Post -COVID, the world changes so much. I know, man. I think the problem, as you point out, the biggest problem for anything with your intuition led is bias. It's bias and how the world will change around you. Those are the ones that you need to guard against, but honestly, that's the best you've got at that point. So if you actually have to make a decision and I actually think that the cost of not making a decision in my opinion is far worse than making a wrong one as long as you can iterate fast.

24:12But you're right, intuition is not fail safe for sure. But even data is not fail safe. Data also works under certain assumptions that you have and those assumptions can just get ripped off. I do have to ask, I spoke to Julie on your team before and she told me that I had to ask kind of while we're still in the formulation stage of strategy, there's no stop, there's also hypothesis. And you said never forget the hypothesis in your approach. How do you define really what is a good hypothesis? And you always need one. If you want to make great decisions, you need to understand a phenomena very deeply.

24:45That's my thesis. If you want to make a great decision, you need to understand that phenomena that you're trying to make a decision very well. If you want to understand that, you basically need to analyze that problem very well. In in order for you to construct the story around the phenomena. It turns out the data has a lot of things. I think of data as a manifestation of you have a story that you care about, and then it's manifested in the data that you have. So the data itself is manifested in a ton of different metrics, for example, you understand and say, okay, active users went up or new users went up, or you find that ads spend went up and so on and so forth.

25:19And what ends up happening is that you need to come up with a bunch of hypothesis of why they went up or down. And generally these types of hypothesis, for example, if you look at Activities is going up or something, the primarily the reasons are either Seasnality or it's a product change or it's a sales change or there is a marketing change or competition or things like that and it's manifested as behavioral change in customers and that's how it is manifested. And then ultimately you see it in the data. So to me, if you want to deeply understand a phenomena and make great decisions. You need to understand the story behind it really well.

25:55If you want to understand the story behind it very well, you have to go into metrics and see how they changed, identify them and then be able to come up the right hypothesis of why they changed. And then if you do that, you can make great decisions. I don't know if you know Annie Jig, but she is a writer and a poker player who wrote a book called Thinking in Bass, which basically talks about kind of decision making. And she talks about this theory, and I can't remember what it's But it's essentially when good process leads to not successful outcome or when successful process leads to bad outcome.

26:28How do you think about that? Does that go against the importance of hypothesis? In terms of how you do the hypothesis, you need to stress this to it, which means you come up with hypothesis and then you need to look at data to validate the hypothesis. So you just can't do a hypothesis and say this is it and so on. So the way that you do this, and I'll tell you a quick example that we did, for example, that PayPal in fraud. I mean, we wanted to reduce fraud, which is a most important metric for the risk management and probably the most important for even PayPal in terms of the metric that they catalog.

27:01So what we did was we said, okay, we made a hypothesis and basically said, hey, people, if they use the same cookie, which is a web cookie, if more than five people use the same cookie on the same day, that's something wrong with it, which basically we're saying that people were using a single computer, they were taking over other people's accounts and doing a bunch of different activity on it and then there is something bad about it. So we basically started with the hypothesis and saying, hey, this is wrong. So then you go into the data and try to validate it and saying, okay, is it really true?

27:29And when you go into the data, you say, yeah, many of them actually fraud. So you look at good use cases and a bad use case. The bad use cases are, yeah, many of them are fraudulent. Then you look at the good use case. For the same person who is using the same computer, it turned out that a bunch of them were family members. or they were using an internet cafe logging out of the product. So what you end up doing is that you need to go back from data to hypothesis and back to data and basically solve the problem that way. Now, there may be still things that you don't know, that you don't know, and your story still may be wrong.

28:00But you still want to get to the point of getting from data to hypothesis and back and then be able to tell what the story around it and then hypothesis, what story it is. If you can do that, you can make great decisions. Is it always obvious being able to tie data to hypothesis? Like, where does the challenge come in that transition between the two? Yeah, I think there are multiple problems here. One is, I think when you have the data, it is possible. I mean, you have a hypothesis, you can't even check it. For example, at Facebook, we would have saying that, hey, by the way, we would want to know why advertisers are churning.

28:32And there's no easy way to find it. I mean, you actually need to do a survey. It takes a long time, and then they would basically say ROI. When they say ROI, we still want to understand what ROI meant. to them because we don't actually know the data behind it to validate the hypothesis many many times. You can't do it through just data. You need to do it through essentially user experience research. There is a problem of just being able to validate your hypothesis because there's a lot of time you don't have the data. The flip side is also true. You may not even be able to come up with the right hypothesis and I've seen that happen to is like you don't know what went on and suddenly you realize what happened.

29:07For example, what happened at Facebook and it happened, we came with a very, very much, much later. It's like we found that there's certain parts of America which had an increase in time spent. And we didn't know what happened. And we kept looking and say, what is all this? And we kept digging deep and it ended up being very cold winters. People stay in at home and they use a product a lot more and the time spent went up. And if you look at just time spent across US on extremely cold days, you see an increase in time spent not. You mentioned that kind of incredible team members, a helping contribute to the decision making and the discovery.

29:40I spoke to so many people around you, Chandra, and they said that one of your great skills is in building teams. I do want to touch on this. When is the right time do you think to add a first growth higher? When you're advising companies and founders today, how do you advise them? Yeah, you don't want to hire anyone before product market rate. Because at the end of it, I think, as I mentioned to you, I think growth is about scaling that product market rate in a sustainable way. It basically means that if you're not able to grow if you're not even reached the point where you can actually scale it no point getting your first time.

30:11It's a product market fit. I'm just with a billion dollar founder the other day and they said to me product market fit is when literally monkeys could run the business and people want it so much that they would still sell really big product volumes. What would it be to you? Other people like all your 10 first customers? What's your like they have it or they don't? If it's a consumer product, people want to come back. They want to keep using the product. They seem to love the product. And you're not throwing more money at it, which means that's why I mean the sustainable. It's not like you're throwing huge amount of marketing dollars to just keep them on.

30:45And there is some there actually being able to provide a value that other companies don't. And I think with the product market trade, it doesn't mean the product market trade, you can actually scale it because the moment you start charging, for example, it's a free product. And maybe it's the people are only using it because of the free product. The moment you charge it and charge the same amount as a competitive image is going away. So it's not that it's guaranteed that you're going to go from product market fit, scaling product market fit, unit economics, scaling unit economics. I think those are all four different steps in my opinion.

31:14You can get to product market fit but you may not be able to scale it for several reasons and if you get to scaling product market fit you may not get to unit economics and if you do, you get to unit economics, you're not able to scale it. That's not completely agree with you. I think product market fit has many chapters. You've worked with many SaaS companies, you start in PLG, you scale into mid market, you move into enterprise at each tangent you need to regain product market fit in each customer segment. I couldn't be more aligned to you. What a terrible question, genre. I mean, God, I apologise.

31:45Listen, so we have that realization that it's post -product market fit. Okay. I'm a founder, you're an investor in my business and you're advising me. What's the right profile for that first growth hire? Yeah, the first hire, I'm not sure if you just hire one single person that's going to be that valuable to you, meaning that what will that one single person do? It probably is a team that you need to hire and if you think about the one single person that you're trying to hire, if you're thinking about the one single person you're trying to has probably the leader of the team who can then get everyone else, such as getting you the designer and the growth marketing person and the analytics person, the product manager and the engineer, all of them on board.

32:24So if you don't have that, I'm not sure how you can actually function because you can have someone, they won't have, and of course the marketing spends the dollars too for it. And so if you don't have that, I don't know what they would do if you had just one person. But I would basically say that if you had a higher only one person, it probably be someone who's relatively senior who can hire everyone else or be part of the team and so that you can actually get a team that can actually work and move a metric. Okay, and so it's really interesting. You answered that jump straight to a growth team being independent, a standalone growth theme, the alternative could be, you have designers, you have marketers with a growth slant towards the more analytical, more rigorous in that way.

33:05You have PMs in the similar vein and they work as an integrated part of the existing org. Do you think growth teams need to stand independently or do you think they can function within the org? I think there are two answers to this. I think the answer at an earlier stage of your growth, they should be a standalone team. For two reasons. One is I think it's for the best practices, meaning that they can learn from each of them and then they can go solve problems across the company. Suddenly you separate this team and put them into the different parts. I don't know if they'll be able to build the same culture of the know -all.

33:38A lot of it is knowing how to do this really, really well. I worked on many parts of this from pages to games growth to advertise a growth to and then when you have all of these types of growth, what ends up happening is that these sort of knowledge does translate and imagine that all this was not part of one single team and they were separated all over I actually don't think the learnings will be there. So my feeling at the earlier stage you should all be centralized Now once you get a large enough team if you get a large enough team I actually think that it can start to be decentralized and work go into product teams But actually think that early on it should be centralized So the more important thing is that somewhere in the interim you probably have a role where you embed people into team but you still have a centralised organisation.

34:21And then at some point you move completely centralised. My question to you there was, that's wonderful, but it almost feels inverted when you look at the budget of a scaling company. This centralized standalone is when you have the lease money. And then when you're scaled and you do have the money, that you could afford that centralised, do you see what I mean? So is it possible to do that early? And how do you think about the need for that centralised team with the budget of a young company that was maybe just hit series A. Yeah, at the end of it, think about it here at the CDC. Are you going to do 20 things?

34:56Are you going to do two things, three things, four things for the front of a growth team? So there are fewer things that you're actually going to do. And for that, a small team will just suffice. You're doing very, very few things. And for that, those five people that I talked about just do, and you'll work on one, and you'll work on the second, you'll work on the third, and you'll actually work on multiple types of problems. At any time, you probably don't work on more than two or three because the surface area can't be that large. If you're going to spend that much time on everything, you're probably going to do nothing right.

35:21So I think at a smaller phase of your company, you don't need, it's the surface area in that house, so you can actually do it with just a centralized team. But actually when the surface area grows, you can actually start to spread your wings out. So I actually think it works out. Founders are always told, hey, you need to hire for 18 months ahead of time for the future company that you will be. Do you agree with that, given the many different hiring experiences and skating journeys you've seen? Again, this comes back to the product growth, right? So this I'll give you an example. When I joined Facebook, analytics was all about counting numbers, and then it was creating dashboards, and then it was doing A, B testing, and then going towards goal's role map and strategy.

36:01So initially, the types of person that we needed to hire were basically people who can just count numbers. And secondly, so it was bunch of people who can create infra to create dashboards. The third was people who actually were statisticians who could do a B testing. Finally, it was people who could influence. And even now, I think it's Facebook is like the analytics team is largely about influence, even inside the growth team and so on. Throughout, it's about influence. So the point is that if I actually hired three years earlier and said, I'm going to hire people for influence, what would I end up happening was people who would not have been able to do the same people who do the A B testing who need stats background on other ones who can actually influence.

36:40And what would happen is that you wouldn't have actually taken the journey in the right way. So what ended up happening was that we build a dashboard, we automated it. A, B testing, we built something called Delta, we automated it. And then when we could automate all of this stuff, it became easier for us to move towards what we think was the most valuable thing that analytics teams could do is influence. So again, we would, even in the growth team, you'd actually understand, identify opportunities, influence the roadmap of products, of the roadmap of what we need to build. So my point is that I think it depends on the growth of your company and where you are at.

37:12At a later stage, I started to build for much, much longer, 18 months and so on. But the earlier stages, I actually hired for what I needed right now because there's no point in hiring someone who will be so valuable for you in 18 months. And who can influence everything but can't build your dashboard. I advise a bunch of different companies now. I change my answer based on who I'm talking to. If I think this company is in a rocket ship, for example, a company like OpenAI, in fact, I did that. And when I talked to OpenAI, they asked me who should be hiring for the head of analytics and head of growth and so on.

37:43I said, oh, someone who's looking at a rocket ship, don't worry whether they are strategicians or there's influences the most important thing for them. But if I were to be at an early stage, series A company, I would say higher for someone now because it's just as an early part of your product market fit. If you reach certain levels of scale, I think it's a very different thing. So I think it's a lot to do with the stage at which you are at and I think your answer is either Very short term or long term, but keep in mind It's going to become long term for the company. It goes into our orchestra.

38:11You do need to have it in the long term I'm fascinated you mentioned the word influence there And obviously I suppose it's an it's before the show and he mentioned that you did face some pushback Again some of the data that you presented at Facebook and some of the ideas you can have outlined Why do you think that was the case? Just help me on the summer. Great question I think influence is a hard problem. So I think influence is obviously an art, not a science. And so if people are very receptive about what you're going to say, it's actually very easy. So people who are very data -informed, who actually want to embrace data, it's actually very easy.

38:47There's also a water in a how there, which means like, what do you want to say and how you say it? If you actually are not doing that very well, so one thing is like, I mean, just not do a good job of influencing. Say, if you have the right data and be able to influence, I think there are multiple reasons. One is the person that you're talking to. If they're not receptive, it's very hard for you to influence. Second, if you're not doing a good job, you may not be able to influence. Third is that the answer may be right, but if you don't have the right data to convince people, you may not be able to.

39:18And the fourth, I think, is just biases all around. I think if people have strong biases about what they want to see and don't want to see, I think it's very hard. For me, I think in particular in my earlier time at Facebook, I think I struggled with influence largely because of the fact that I actually think that there were specifically, this is probably what Alex is talking about, who are not receptive to what I was saying. As a result, it became very hard for me to influence them. It both hurt me and I think the company went. Has the way that you influence changed over time? Often say when you're younger you may take a more dogmatic binary approach with passion and, Chandra, you've got to, is your approach changed?

39:59Yeah, it's patterned recognition, Harry. I actually think that over a period of time you do so much effort because that's all I practiced. At Facebook if you think about what I did the most was influence over a period of time and then you have so many different characters and each of them just becomes a cast of characters and you start to understand what ticks with them, what does not. And once you do that there is a way of approaching influence. So I actually think it's an art. You have an idea and say, oh, this type of person, they can be influenced through data. You need to be really good at storytelling.

40:29For example, Harvey, you go to try to influence Harvey. You just throw the data, don't give me anything other than this data. Just tell me the data. Don't tell me the story. You've got to criss -corks. Don't just throw data at me. Tell me the story, please. Both that extremely well -meaning, but there are multiple different spectrum of people that you work with and you have to understand who they are. I also found that what I worked with Sekhoye, I think I found four different types of founders. People who love data and new data and wanted to embrace, that's one. There are people who love data thought they knew a lot but would not listen to you because they never thought they knew more than you.

41:06And then there was a third who did not know data but said there is something out there come help me and that was fine too. And there are people like this is crazy, this is so stupid. I don't believe in data. it's all should be designed. This is crazy. So you have all of these types of founders and some of them you just can't. The people who are like I'm going to be closed have a wall in front of me. You just can't influence. There's no way to influence. But the people who are like I don't know much but I am hungry. You can. The people that are the no data but they say I want to know more because I want to learn from people around me.

41:39Those you can. The people who are adamant and saying I know more than you. Very difficult. I have had all these four. So you got to judge that of who are you talking to and then how you tell the story you tell the story do just show data. How much a data do you show? Do you go deep into storytelling and tell them every small thing or just be layer after layer after layer and you need to learn that while you're talking to them and then on the fly be ready to influence and that's a very hard thing. What are the biggest mistakes people make when trying to influence people have you found? The biggest one I used to make and I think most people make is confusing the what and the how.

42:15What message do you want to deliver and how do you deliver the message? When you deliver the message, we are all human beings and so if you can do it in a way that is Easier for that person to handle. I think or they can resonate with them or all the influencing skills I talked about then I think it makes your job much more easier. I've seen many many people try their influence but they fail. I mean, for example, I knew a very senior leader at Facebook who they'd be so blunt and say, this is it, they can leave it and you'll never resonate because they didn't try hard to influence. They just wanted to say the facts.

42:54I mean, at the end of it, influence is not about just saying it's about having the impact. Making sure you're able to influence into making a change in the direction that you think should be the right way to do it. It's not just about saying things. It's actually making the change. For that you need to go far more than just saying things in any way you want to you go to start to understand people and psychologies and all these things. I said someone the other day, you know No, I'm very direct in clearing communication. They said that doesn't matter. It's not what you say It's how it's heard and I was like, huh, that's a very annoying answer But I totally agree with you and I love that separation between the ward and the how I do want to touch on the hiring process So you've had many incredible teams.

43:37I suppose Alex about your hiring process and the incredible people you've brought. How do you think about the hiring process for how you add great people to teams? I think very dimensionally, which basically means that I don't think about a person as a person. I think of them as a body of skills. So what that basically means that are they peaking in one or two or three different things and not a liability in the others? That's kind of how I think about every person. So if that's what it is, I would think like, oh, this person, the exception in ABC, see they can bring a lot to the table. At the end of it what you're trying to do is hire a bunch of different people who are excellent what they do that they can learn from each other and become better each day.

44:15So what you're really trying to assemble is if you think about why anyone comes to work it's for four different reasons. One is they love what they do. Number two they love the people they work with. Number three they feel like they can learn from the people that they work with and for the company is going up into the right. If one of these four does not work, they will leave. Essentially what you mean is if you have the people with the same skills, all of them being exactly the same skills, they're not going to learn from each other. If you're going to have people that you feel like you don't love working with and they're all jerks, how are you going to stay?

44:47If the company's not doing very well, it's actually a company that was great 50 years back and doing nothing now, are you going to stay? No, the company's got to go up to the right. Finally, do you love what you do? You come into do something, you came to do designer, you came to do growth marketing, you came to do analysis, you do something. Do you actually enjoy your job? And if all four of them fit, you do a great job. I mean, this in the nicest way. Do you actually believe that? I mean, that's why Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs exist. They do not love what they do. They know a lot of cases.

45:19They do not love the people. They think their boss isn't asshole, but they get a massive comp package and the year -end bonus is 200 % base and they stay for years. I've got many friends who are like great talents and they're at shit companies but they love their team. I agree with you that there are reasons why people may stay but you ask me for the kind of person that I want to hire and what I want to have the team and what really makes them come every day. The thing about the Morgan Stanley guy who you're talking about, they're probably working out of fear or they're working because of some boss.

45:52If you ask the same question of, are you getting the best out of that person him or her? I don't think you are. It's hard for me to think about a long period of time. Maybe over a week or two you can. But a period of a year, I don't think you're going to get the best out of the person. So if you want to get to the best out of the person, they really need to do enjoy what they do. It's about making sure that they don't come to work with fear. They come with loving what they do and building up a bottom of culture that they can be happy and wonderful at. He said about the body of skills you want to really see them spike on.

46:20When you think about growth themes and analytics, it seems in particular. Is that body of skills a finite, small, limited number which you want to see, or is it largely and large and expansive? I think there are a few things. One is, I think, from an analytical perspective, I'll talk about the body of skills and then I'll talk about outcomes. The body of the skills would be like, like, are they able to break a problem down? That's becomes an important thing, which if you gave them a complex problem, are they able to simplify it and make it convert into a business question into a technical question?

46:54And then from the technical question, can they convert into a data question? And then from a data question, are they able to do the right type of analysis? And then from the analysis, can they derive the right type of insights? And then from those insights, can they convert into the actionable insights? From the actual insights, insights, can you convert it to opportunities and decisions? So there's an entire flow to that. The first few skills that you have is breaking it down is more like a consulting skill. It's like a mindset that you need to have. The second skill is a technical skill, which requires some amount of coding, et cetera.

47:26The third is analysis skill. And the fourth is basically a lot of it has to do with in terms of synthesis skills and influencing skills that you need to have. And if you did all that, you can do great in terms are analyzing a funnel, analyzing retention, or analyzing any sort of problem that you want and identify opportunities, set road maps with it and trying to move the thing forward. I'd also say that in terms of analytics itself, there are literally only two things you need to do. One is indexing. You want to see if things are under index or over indexed in anything you're comparing and benchmarking.

47:59And the second thing is asking the so -what question. The only two things. So for example, over indexing and under indexing means that if New York is going up, you're asking if Chicago also is going up, you need to benchmark to something. And if if if if me, I was going much more up, it's over indexed. And so then you want to provide there's an opportunity of some kind and just simplifying it. And then if New York went up a 0 .001 percent, is it material? And that's the so what question. And that helps you prioritize. So essentially analytics literally you need to know only how to index and how to ask this so what question.

48:28If you do that really well, that's really the two skills that you need. But in order for you to even get there, you need technical skills. because you need all the other kinds of skills, because you need to munch data. And then, being able to tell the story, put it together in influence, right? That's the other part that he said. You can actually do this so what, do that. But if you don't know how to influence it, it's a problem. That's a slightly different dimension. Technical is a different dimension, but the analysis itself, the core to it, is basically really two things. On the indexing side, does that not just relate everything to the average, as we said that, the index.

48:59And we want to be exceptional. Think about LPs in funds. We want to be in the top desk aisle, which is e -name your fund. Let me give you an example, right? I worked with MongoDB while I was a sequoia. So at Mongo, what we basically did was we basically were looking at the payment conversion rates. And I went in there and they had a data science team and they had an analytics team and they had worked on it for, I don't know how long, but I went in there, took a quick look and found out that Germany had a very low conversion rates, compared to with neighbors like France or the rest of us in Europe.

49:32It had a far lower payment conversion rate. I was like, shouldn't be, it should be similar to the other European countries. Why is it so low? And that's the benchmark. It doesn't have to be the average. It has to be what you think is a similar country or similar something. And so in this case, what ended up happening was that the turn to the Germany is very different. That's a, it's a very bank country. It's an ACH country. So they use banks a lot. Whereas the rest of the country use credit cards a lot. It turned out that MongoDB did not have a way for people to pay using a financial instruments using banks.

50:03They only had a credit card. People would go try look at bank, there was no bank available so they would just not convert. And so what I did was I told them hey guys go and change that. I did materially change the top line of the companies. I think they told me I don't know if it's true but it's a few percentage increase overall increase in terms of conversion because Germany was a big country and it was converting at abysmally low rates. So yes What does it take to do so what wow that what is a good so what lead to the so what is all asking the question of okay This thing increased by point one person or point five person or one person so what and if you ask a so what question You are basically saying so what yes if I do that it will increase my wow my not star metric or Mao may not star metric by 100 ,000 users or by 200 users So if it's 200 users, you should see the duh, it's no value to me.

50:57But if it's 100 ,000 users, wow, that's super cool. That's what I want to move. So when you look at the so what, you have to have a sense of something as material or not. And material basically means you have to have a sense of what your overall goal is. If you have an overall goal, is this the highest opportunity you can have or one of the high opportunities that you can. So you've got a tie, whatever you're trying to do, back to something into a not -star metric. Even if it's not this goes to the art and science world, even if it's not an exact, you should have a sense of how much you're going to drive.

51:27Without asking the so -what question, that's a problem. And what I've realized was the difference between good analytical people who can be good at insights, but the ones that are good at actionable insight, the muscle is really the so -what question. It's not the analysis. They can be greater coming out with lots of indexing and analysis, but coming out, they don't ask so -what questions enough. And that's what I've seen differentiate very, very good analytical leaders and not and who can take basically Data into action better because they can they know how to go from inside to actionable insights I think it's very similar to like growth investing though actually in the difference between a junior and a senior Which is someone who can you know just look at data and isolation and that's fine But this is one who ties it to a core decision because of the data that they've seen that's the difference Are there questions in the interview process that you will most frequently revert to to understand their abilities, their spikes, their skills as you described in the body of skills?

52:24Yeah, more and more senior you get. The number one and probably the only thing I care about is their ability to simplify. Chris Cox once told me that I wasn't, what is the one single thing that senior people can do? Is it simplified? And that's the same thing I have. Is like, can you actually simplify? When you look at a very senior person, I look at if they can simplify. Simplify shows clarity of thought. Clarity of thought shows your first principle's thinking. So if you have great first principle thinking, you have higher degrees of clarity of thought, which leads to simplification. And so the more senior you are, the kind of skills that I look for is can you actually simplify, which basically means that you can take very complex problems, break it down, and you can actually take on harder and harder problems because you're thinking first principles.

53:08How do you test if someone's a good simplify? So what I do is I actually have a blog and when I did the series of blogs I wrote one on sustainable growth and on the sustainable growth I have them read it. I send them and say go read it and there are things in there which is not quite right. There are things in there that make sense and I basically first question I generally ask them is synthesize. What are the primary takeaways? So those are the kinds of things I go through every single thing and it's not just I go deep into retention, I go deep into growth itself, I ask them things like you ask me is like what is product market fit and I see how they think I can have a dialogue with them because it's when you are interviewing for these people I mean I know what's on the resume I mean it tells you me a bunch of different things about the resume like how they can code or they can do this or they can do that I just take that for granted on top of that I'm trying to think you know working environment when I'm talking to you and I'm discussing with you can I actually have a conversation with you and then in the moment can you think deeply and that's what I'm trying to look for.

54:09It's funny I say the best interviews are able to have a very defined schedule but in real time move with conversation flows to make it a very natural conversation and then you have to bring it back. That's very hard but it's to your point there about a real time conversation and being able to move with it. Exactly and that's what I do. I tell them also a friend in the interview I tell them look no answer the wrong answer. I only care about how you think. If you are on the wrong track, I'll immediately tell you because some of them are objective. So I say I'll immediately tell you what is by one judgey on it is fine.

54:41All I want to do is that if you're giving me 10 ideas and eight of them are good and two are absurd, I won't judge you on it because inside a great company, those two will be weeded out anyway. But I don't want those eight not to be there, so say whatever you want. One of the biggest horror mistakes you've made. Early on the big mistakes that I used to make and I make less of it now, I think I'd probably still make them, is I think about slope and asymptote. Ascentote is how good are you? Slope is how fast are you growing? And so what I would hire more for is people with asymptote, which basically means that, oh, they have such a good profile, etc.

55:13They've done so much, etc. But they wouldn't look at the growth, and they may actually flatten out on the growth part. And that is probably much of my mistakes, we go back to it. One big one would be the hiring for asymptote rather than slope. Now I don't mind. You can imagine what it's just a matter of catch -up, right? People with a slower asymptote or the faster growth are going to overtake. And I generally tend to invest in people who are very long period of time. But within reason, within two people, within slope and this, I know that basically the effect of compounding will just overtake the person.

55:44And if you're willing to invest over time, you could. Do you think people are destined for a certain stage of a company's life cycle? You've seen many different stages. And I'm just thinking about the slope, plateauing, all certain people destined for certain stages. If you're below a certain age, You do, you're not institutionalized. Let's say you're below 27, 30, whatever those ages are. You're probably not institutionalized. Until there, I think it's very easy to mold anyone. But beyond a certain age, it's so much harder. If you're actually in a certain type of company, you're setting your ways, you have certain ways of thinking, it's that much harder for you to change.

56:18I don't think it's impossible, that's not hard. But I would say that if you've developed the growth mindset very early on, which means that even if you're 31, 35, when you've developed a growth mindset very often and your mind is nimble and flexible, you can take on almost anything. It's like how early did you develop a growth mindset? And if you did, I think you can continue to challenge yourself on anything, but if you didn't, I think you need to cast them young. What was the last thing you challenged your cell phone? Yeah, I think if you look at my career, I am a notionographer for training.

56:49I was a professor and went into a high performance computing and then I did weather forecasting. Then I went to climate change. I was in risk management at Facebook. Then I moved to analytics at Facebook and led many of the teams there. Went to venture capital and did a bunch of different things. And now I'm doing a startup. I think my journey has been one which has always been like trying to disrupt myself to be honest with you. The biggest challenge now I have is essentially, I think two things. One is growing the company itself and I think growing a remote team in India. The remote team in India had its own challenges, partly because of cultural reasons of India, and the fact that I think could not be able to role model easily because we were in the US and they were in India, the rest of the team was in India.

57:33That has been a challenge in itself. Do you find it tough because at Facebook you are inundated with data? You know, you put something live and there's a hundred million people on it if you want to by the end of the day. With any new product, it's like you fight and claw for every new customer. Is that tough to transition to? Yeah, so what I've started to develop while at Facebook was creating frameworks to think. So when you start to develop frameworks like formulas framework, right? And at Facebook we used to develop from a formula as like you have a formula for the entire company, which is if you look at revenues, the driving metric that you care about, you have a number of users and then you have time spent per user and then you have ads per time spent is formula.

58:15So those are ways actually to think in terms of frameworks. So if you think about things in frameworks, you don't need that much of data. What you really need to think about is in terms of that, which is why when I went to Sequoia, they're so little data compared to Facebook, they're so little data. And then I needed kind of think about abstractions. How do you create abstractions in frameworks? So then what we realized was that all the companies at Sequoia, for example, we could classify for the types of companies faced, the Sequoia had was eight different types of companies, e -commerce, two -sided marketplaces, consumer subscription, consumer ads, SaaS, obviously, and so on.

58:46So there are these seven or eight different types of companies, eight formulas. And then what ends to happen is that then you don't need to have a lot of data. You all you really need to do have is a way of thinking. And for that, you need to have a way of thinking from first principles. And if you can do that really well, you don't need to huge amount of data. I always believe every large data problem can be brought down to a small data problem. Every large data problem can be brought down to a small, I'm being extreme here. Obviously nothing in general is like that. But in terms of analytics, I think it's actually two is like most large data problem can be reduced to small data problems And then you're solving small data problems So essentially if you think of it that way you don't need large data to solve problems You need a right data for solving the right problem and you need to tease it out That's the art game magic at your time.

59:34How fast do you know when you've made a mess higher again? You've had so many people I would say there are three things I look for one is I think you look at skill gap knowledge gap and value slash culture gap. Those are the three things I expect. If somebody is not doing well, performance not doing well because somebody is not performing that can be easily funded. More easily funded. If someone is not performing in terms of how they're delivering you can find it. But not all people who are not performing will do badly. It may be that they're in the wrong role or it may just be that they're deep thinkers I've seen that too or they may just not be good at what they're trying to do and so on.

1:00:09So for that you need to analyze three things. One is, is the problem that they're trying to do is their skill problem. They graded Python, but this is a C++ problem. They can't do it. Okay, that's why they're slowing down. Second is like knowledge from it's a Python problem. They know Python really well, but this pays a security and they're on a security, so they can't do it really well. Values is like, are they not working hard or any other cultural things that may be. You have to first identify what the problem is and as soon as you identify it, If you think it is fixable, then you need to put them on the right track and see what happens.

1:00:40So I think identifying whether or not they're performing is an easier problem, which you can actually do, not just October, just look at the productivity and see what's going on. But to diagnose what the reason is, is the one that you need to go after. Often many, many times I've found that the reason why they're not doing well is because they're not in the right team, or not in the right role or in the right thing. And you just need to shift them and then suddenly they become a force multiplier. I interviewed someone the other day and I found I can't remember who I think was Brian Hubspot and he said that when you put someone on like an improvement plan it never works Just get rid do you agree?

1:01:15I think when you put up someone in a performance plan It's three months too late three months before you should have intervened and tried to do the right thing What happens most of the times is that people put them on the improvement plan when they've already really decided there's no chance of success. And that is why it doesn't work. If you think there's a 70 % chance of there, or 60 % chance of them succeeding, and you put them on a performance plan, then it might work. But what ends up happening is that we time it so badly, we time it at 10 % or 5 % or not even 1%. And I think it's the timing which is a problem.

1:01:47Most managers take too late to intervene. And they're not willing to have honest direct conversations. And because they don't have direct conversations, it becomes much harder, largely because most of us or conflict hours and we won't have those conversations and it becomes too late and then what do you do? Try to go into a performance plan. I think it's less about the performance plan is when you time it. But regardless, I don't think you need to call it that. Just why do you call it? The label is not great anyway. Just go, help them out. If you can't help them out, make sure that they can see reason.

1:02:15Almost everyone, I would say barring a couple of people through or left my team or company, I'm still very good friends with. And largely because I could make them see reason, it's best for us in this for you. Could you not argue that it's your fault? Say there's a skill gap, there's a knowledge gap. Your process wasn't not yours, but like the hiring process wasn't rigorous enough to determine that in the process. 100 % right. And it's most times it is that because at the end of it, think about it. It's a two -way thing. If I knew what I knew two months later would have done. Hiring is a terrible process.

1:02:48I know you ask a ton of questions of what do you want, it's useless. At the end of it, it's easiest when they work with you or you ask referrals from people you really care about. That's the only one that really, really works. You can do something in the interview, judge a few things and even I said this right oh, simplicity on all these nonsense. But honestly, you know, just don't know until they join. There is so many unknowns here. They really don't know. Before we move into a quick file, why does so many senior execs fail, Chandra? I'll say two different answers to it. One answer is that I think what I've noticed is that this happened even at Facebook and while I worked with over 100 portfolio companies, I think of it as from an exact perspective, I think there are three types of execs.

1:03:30People who know how to take companies from bad to okay and people who know how to go from okay to good and there are people who are good at going from good to great. I mean, Chris Cox, excellent exec at Facebook, Chris Cox is excellent at good to great. I don't think he was good at okay to bad to okay, which means that bad to okay requires a lot of firing. This whole thing is bad, turn them around, get a completely new government, you have to have a different type of mindset to be able to do that. The good to great are people who are superb at being visionaries, who are able to bring everyone along, everything is already in a decent place.

1:04:05They can know what kind of products you need to be dreaming for the next stage of evolution of the company, they're fantastic at it. What ends up happening is that at least at the levels at which I have seen newer execs, even cheap product offices, etc. Whatever exactly look at what ends up being is that you just go by resume and say oh, let's do this You don't actually ask a question of what is the company actually need and it ends up being that it's not the same type of person Who can do all three or four of these things and at Facebook? I knew that they were and I will name them, but there are exactly a superb at batto.

1:04:37Okay They were superb, but at good to great like I pointed out and so knowing that is a huge thing So that's one reason I think exact fail is just not second is just the fact that I think they have very strong opinions of what they think they need to be doing. I mean for example when I came to Facebook from PayPal the first week or two I mean I'd burdened on risk for so many years and I said okay I was an expert I was no more than these guys I've done this for so many years so there's arrogant me went and basically the first week or two went and told them hey do this or do that or do this and I remember Daniel Lee V who was my manager there at Facebook told me you know what you may be right but he knew you bring these people along by the way he should be listening more you're just actually talking as you know everything.

1:05:20The thing there is that obviously took the feedback to heart and have been trying to change that across almost anything in life. But I actually, that's what it is. You think you know, and you've done this before, you know what it is, you come in there, you have notions of what works, what doesn't work. That's not reality on the floor. How does the skillset change between those that are good to great and bad, okay? What different people are they? The good to great, as I mentioned, graded strategy, great at vision, not that great, not necessarily great at execution, great at bringing people along and making people feeling great about it, empowering the next set of leaders to be amazing, all the kinds of things that you want.

1:05:59The bad to OK is like essentially firing the entire squad, giving very hard messages, saying everything is crazy, having a center set of loyal groups of people that they can bring on who can completely change everything and then have very strong execution mode. I want to get shit done. I need to go to okay and that's all I care about. They're like a machine and they don't care that much about how how do people feel. Should I make people everyone happy? Culture? Another that actually matters. It matters only when you get to okay but in the process you don't need to be. So you're so much tougher in how you handle it and you need both.

1:06:35You actually need to go inside a company you need to do both but not the same person can do it. You can't get the same person to do both. They don't even think like that. Listen, I could talk to you all day, Chandra. So I'm going to do a quick fight. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Suncut. What are the biggest mistakes you see founders make when hiring for growth through analytics teams? Basically looking at a lot of it has got to do with looking at hasn't it versus slope. I actually think that not the right person, you have to find the right person for your company.

1:07:06Not look at this amazing profiler, someone who's done some amazing stuff in some amazing company that doesn't work for you. You seem very calm, Chandra. Do you ever lose your composure? Occasionally, I meditate a lot. I have different tones to my voice, which basically, for example, the last two months in my company, I consciously told them my tones are going to change. I expect a form, a form from everyone. My son realized it pretty early, and that I have different tones to my voice, but I'm still in the control. I'm under control, but I actually can have a very calm demeanor. demeanor, I can not noticely scream but I can amplify my tone to a point of showing sensibility.

1:07:43Talk to me about the meditation I'm just intrigued. It's something that I would like to be getting into. What's your meditation process today and how do you do it? Yeah so a quick story and that I used to start a lot until I was in my ninth grade back in India and I used to start a lot and one of my uncles basically was in a hypnosis group and he hypnotized me and then taught me self -hipnoses and I couldn't finish one sentence and during the process of nurses which I don't know but he recorded it on tape and he asked me to say multiple sentences and I never started and so he taught me self -hipnoses and I started to hypnotize myself within six months I stopped startling and then I realized self -hipnoses was the same as meditation so I call them meditation now so I don't even know what form it does I haven't formally learned it in any form but I just close my eyes and relax.

1:08:33A lot of times I just may meditate even unconsciously. Like you would be in a flow so I just go into the flow when I'm deep into things. I don't even know what I'm doing and I actually may meditate without knowledge. Do you repeat a singular phrase or word? Do you have any process or exercise in terms of retaining focus on purity of mind and avoidance of distraction? Yeah I try to observe myself and see this stream of thoughts and try to see whether I can see myself as a third person. And then while I do that, I try to see whether I can take the thought back to its origin and see it as a third person.

1:09:09And if I'm able to do that, my mind gets less and less cluttered and then at some point goes blank, but I don't know that it's been blank. Until I can look at the clock an hour or two later and then see that two hours passed and I didn't sleep, I must have meditated. What's the hottest part of being a founder. Ah, so many, but I think the hardest part is it's keeping your customers happy. I think the customers are happy, but if I have such a high bar for them, constantly feel like there's more to do. There's so much more to do with the customers. The hardest part is to build an amazing product that makes our customers so happy.

1:09:42What would you mind such a change about the world of growth? One of the things that we don't do enough is counter metrics and I saw that a PayPal landed Facebook where you would grow a metric like at PayPal for example there were two teams one was growing revenue and then one was actually stopping revenue which is fraud and neither team had the other as a counter metric so PayPal's growth team would keep increasing revenue and the fraud team would keep stopping them but neither wanted the other to succeed or they didn't put it as a counter metric and if the two teams can work together at two different metrics which can actually fight with each other, you know, being conflict is a big problem so you should have countermetrics.

1:10:19What would you say is been the biggest shift in your mindset? What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? I think growth is much, much harder problem than I initially thought it was and I think partly because if you want to make a good growth really, really well you need a great infra, you need to have great people with high talent density, you need to have people that can identify opportunities and execute and have the right process for it like we had at Facebook is understand identify execute. Then you need to have the leadership bind and making sure that you can have the right leadership to be able to evangelize for growth and if you don't it's that.

1:10:57The fifth one is the one I talked about impact. I think if you don't focus on impact it's hard and to get all of them right is super hard and I realize that when I worked at so many companies now is that some of this or one of this fails either they don't have the great talent density or they don't have the right infrastructure, they don't have an infrastructure in terms of doing a B testing or if they don't have the right leadership in place to basically say that this is really important or set the wrong goals which also is a big problem that you can access the wrong goals. All these can be problems.

1:11:28Final one for you. You work with Mark for many years at Facebook. What was your biggest takeaway from Marking with him? His ability to go all the way from highest level, being able to up level to the highest level and go to, you know, the 10 feet level is incredible. So he would be able to say, here, we are going to be a mobile first company. And that's essentially what he wants us to do. And then he will outlay in a five page document on every single virus, and then he'll talk about the strategy, and then why does that important? Then he'll talk about the strategy. Then he'll talk about every single team and the roadmap for each team.

1:12:04He won't get to the level of which person does what but he gets to the level of roadmap and then even initiatives inside of it. He may not get to the specific tactics and so on but his ability to go all the way from the top take a big problem, break it down all the way down to initiatives for such a large problem in a 5 page document. I think he writes in such a short time. I mean I think he wrote his S1 in one sitting on a mobile phone. It's astonishing. Listen Chandra, I've loved doing this. Thank you so much for putting up with my very moving questions and you've been an incredible guest.

1:12:41I mean you have to give the man credit. The amount of energy he brought was just exceptional. If you want to watch the full video you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 2 -0 VC that's 20 VC on YouTube but before we leave you today, short form video has never been more important for your business. Social media managers, growth marketers, this is the single biggest opportunity you have today. Did you know OliPop took their sales from 3 ,200 ,200 ,000 by doubling down on video? But wow, it is expensive to do well and it takes a shitload of time. That was until captions came into the world.

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