# 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 20Growth · May 31, 2024 · 56 min · 12,779 words Speakers: Matt Lerner, Harry Stebbings Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-bd865f17/ ## Cold open **Matt Lerner** [0:00]: 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. That's really kind of it. I'll say categorically, the best growth people I hired and managed in my time at PayPal had no marketing experience, had no product experience at all. This is 20 **Harry Stebbings** [0:26]: growth ## Intro **Harry Stebbings** [0:26]: with me, Harry Stebbings. Now 20 Growth is the show where once a month, we sit down with the best growth leaders in the world, and we discuss growth strategies and how the best start and scale growth teams. Today, we're joined by an o g of the growth world, Matt Lerner. Now Matt spent eleven years running growth teams at PayPal and led the growth marketing program at 500 Startups. He's also the best selling author of Growth Levers and How to Find Them. This is a very granular episode on starting and scaling growth teams. Get the notebooks out. There's a lot to learn from **Unknown** [0:57]: this one. ## Sponsor read **Unknown** [0:58]: But before we dive in, they say ad creative is king, but man, is UGC creative a pain in the ass to pull together? Imagine if you didn't have to. Captions just launched AI creator ads, so you can produce dozens of UGC style creatives instantly. 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There's a reason it's America's number one finance destination. For comprehensive financial news and analysis, visit the brand behind every great investor, yahoofinance.com, the number one financial destination. That's yahoofinance.com. You have now arrived at your destination. ## Conversation **Harry Stebbings** [3:23]: Matt, I cannot believe it has been I think it must be, I mean, eight to ten years since we first met. You're one of the first people I met in tech in London. So thank you so much for doing this. Likewise. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Now I would love to start with some chronology. So how did you make your way into the world of growth, and what was that entry point for you? **Matt Lerner** [3:40]: I mean, my career started in Silicon Valley, humanities philosophy and rhetoric undergrad. And so I was kind of taking any job I could find and what what I sort of got pulled to was just figuring out how to get customers stuff. And eventually in 2004, I joined the growth team at PayPal and I learned just a ton of stuff in almost eleven years there. And then after that, I left. I became a VC myself. That's kind of when we met. You know, as a VC, you just get to see so many startups rapid fire and see inside of them and what's happening in their metrics and the people's personalities. To be honest, I started to see a lot of teams wasting a lot of money and a lot of real talent, making the same mistakes over and over again, very preventable mistakes. That combined with the fact that I didn't love fundraising. That's what we were just talking about. So I left VC, and I started my own business where I work with startups and kinda help them avoid those preventable mistakes and find their high impact growth levers. **Harry Stebbings** [4:29]: If we just unpack a couple of elements there, eleven years at PayPal is a hugely impactful segment of your career. What are one or two of your biggest lessons from that eleven years? **Matt Lerner** [4:39]: So many of them. I think towards the end, it got to the point when you're in a big company where having the right answers like five or 10% of the problem and getting the entire organization and to change people's mindset and align resources ends up becoming like 80 or 90% of the problem. And so I'm very much more shifting my time and my hiring strategy and everything more around influence. That was a big piece of it. The other big one, when I look back on my time at PayPal, 90% of our growth came from like 10% of the stuff that we did. I could go back and say, you know, there are five or six things obviously before my time getting on eBay, referral bonuses and, you know, network effects growth, getting early, getting engaged with web developers who were building the sites and implementing the payment systems, getting pre integrated with shopping carts and hosts, some outbound sales. That drove almost all their growth, but they did a ton of other stuff. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing campaigns, building products that frankly nobody ever used, and you can do that when you're generating hundreds of millions per year in free cash flow. But startups don't have that luxury. But then, you know, when I step back and as a VC and start to look at other success stories, I start to see that pattern repeat of, like, 90% coming from 10%, you know, and you can see it. You've had these people on your show, Canva, Dropbox, and all of these. And so that sort of got me to this question of, like, okay, as an early stage startup without all that free cash flow, how can you figure out what that 10% is as quickly as possible? **Harry Stebbings** [5:58]: Now, you've had eleven years, you've also seen so many preventable mistakes from the side of the investor. When you sit here today, what do you know now that you wish you'd known when you entered the world of growth? **Matt Lerner** [6:08]: I think the biggest thing, how much of growth is actually figuring stuff out, is actually information discovery rather than running playbooks, doing best practices, copying what other companies did. You know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out you can do SEO, you can do ads, you can optimize your funnel. But figuring out the details of, you know, Google has 100,000 search results for any query. How are you gonna be in one of the top three results, which are the only ones anyone's gonna click on when you've got companies with way more money than you and ten years of head start who are locked into those top three positions. Ads are sold at auction. Right? So which means you've gotta be able to outbid companies. And right now, the ones who are winning those auctions have the best unit economics, the smoothest funnels, the most creative testing behind them. So much of growth is just trying to figure stuff out as quickly as possible. **Harry Stebbings** [6:56]: What's the hardest thing about figuring stuff out in growth? **Matt Lerner** [6:59]: The hardest thing about figuring stuff out, I think it's hubris. I think it's that people come in and they don't realize they need to figure stuff out. They have their best practices. They have what worked in their last job. They have what they heard on your podcast and they're like, alright, let's do this and and like turn on the tap. I mean, you see so many startups make this mistake where they overinvest in time and money and energy in building a product, in launching some massive campaign, and it doesn't survive first contact with the customer. And they did that because they were sure they were right, but they weren't. And so just having that humility and that curiosity going in can save you so many ways to cycle, so much time and resource. **Harry Stebbings** [7:33]: There's so many questions that I wanna dig in straight on, but I wanna set the foundations of, like, what growth is and what it isn't because it is so widely and bastardized as a term. Like, what is growth to you and what is it not? **Matt Lerner** [7:43]: The simple definition I use for growth is you've got some value that you deliver. You help customers do something they're trying to do they're struggling. And growth is the ability to find customers and help them understand the value that you're gonna deliver to them and get them to use and love your product or service. The way that's sort of different from traditional job functions like marketing or product or sales, it's kind of different in three ways. First of all, most of the time with growth, there's no playbook. So, you know, if you're marketing dish soap at Unilever and you hire someone from Procter and Gamble, like, they're gonna walk in, they're gonna know 90% of the job. But you're creating a product that no one's ever sold before, maybe even a new category, so there isn't a playbook to do that. And that brings me to the second thing, which is that you're trying to sell a product that nobody's looking for. And again, maybe a category no one's even looking for. So you've got to figure out who is this customer, what is it they're struggling to do, what do they think they're looking for, where are they looking for it, and so you can turn up there and look like that thing and answer those questions that they're gonna have. And the third piece that's really different is it cuts across disciplines. If you're in finance or sales, can mostly just like do your job and not have to worry about Stay in finance. Yeah. And so growth leaders and growth teams have to be and everyone on your podcast has said this, but they have to be super cross functional and really good relationship builders and able to help the other people around them be successful. **Harry Stebbings** [9:01]: The most challenging question for you to answer, but given the multidisciplinary nature there, as you said, and the element of there not being playbooks and figuring stuff out, is growth an art or is it a science? If you have to choose one. I have to choose. You have to choose one. **Matt Lerner** [9:16]: I'm gonna make the argument that it's both, but then I'll I'll choose one. Okay. I think the argument that it's both is that when you see growth science without art and you know these websites, I guess if we're naming names on this show, like some of the travel booking sites, you know, in these flows where they just over optimized and refined and AB tested every little thing. And sometimes it's it's like a yucky experience, but it's the optimal blend of conversion rate and AOV and, you know, blah blah blah. And they're just not great experiences. And then there's all these famous examples of ad campaigns where people have spent gazillions of dollars in Super Bowl ads and all this stuff, and and they just haven't sold more beer or shoes or whatever it is that they're trying to sell because it doesn't resonate with customers. It's just good entertainment. So I think at its highest form, it blends both. And the trick then is to be able to get artists and scientific people to work together, but that's like a whole other story. **Harry Stebbings** [10:06]: Just picking up on that, you said about travel sites where the flow is maybe suboptimal for the user experience, but it's like optimized for the conversion funnel for the AOV. Does user experience not correlate to the highest AOV and the best conversion funnel? Can they be at odds? **Matt Lerner** [10:22]: Yeah. I think that's a really important misconception actually. It's a it's a huge false dichotomy there. A lot of times you'll get the best customers in situations where you're actually introducing friction into the funnel. So one example of that is, I don't know if you have ever probably not tried to sign up for Noom or Calm, and they have these onboarding flows where they're like, what brings you here today? What are you trying to achieve? And what have been your problems in the past? And how much do you weigh? And what's your target weight? And blah blah blah. And they'll be 20 or 30 questions long. These long flows are actually really good at building intent. And the AB test and optimizes shit out of these flows. And it is more of an onerous user experience. **Harry Stebbings** [10:58]: And what do they get from that? They get a higher quality lead that's, like, got sunk cost fallacy because they've put enough time in to get through 30 questions. Why **Matt Lerner** [11:06]: why do they do that? So sunk cost is part of it. Like, you're not gonna not wanna see your results when you get to the end of answering 30 questions, but a big piece of it is actually, and listen, I think it's brilliant, is they're sort of taking people through the mental purchase journey. So if you're selling expensive software, you can afford salespeople, and they're gonna answer your questions and explain and demo and blah blah blah. But if your product costs $10, $30 a month, you can. So your users are coming in and wondering, how is this thing gonna help me? Why are my friends recommending it? Does it work in my specific case? What about this? What about that? And each of these questions doesn't just get some information from the customer and help qualify them which is useful, but it builds intent. Because if you go to the doctor and you say, well, it hurts here and then the doctor says, does it hurt when you do this? And does it hurt more at night? And if you're like, yes, yes, yes, Then you believe whatever the doctor says Yeah. Is more likely to be accurate. So they're actually showing that, yes, we understand you, and that builds intent. **Harry Stebbings** [12:00]: It's just fascinating, isn't it? That actually, like, a poor user experience can actually create higher conversions and be better for the business. **Matt Lerner** [12:06]: I guess it depends how you define poor, but I think most people traditionally think of that as, like, lots of form fields. So the other kind **Harry Stebbings** [12:12]: of challenge I find with growth as a definition is, and I have two different people in the show. Some are like, it's about optimizing funnels, AB testing everything, And then others are like, it's about taking the big swings, seeing outside the box and going, we're gonna test a few things, but big things. Is growth about moving the needle with big projects, or is it about actually optimizing lots of little things? **Matt Lerner** [12:36]: So the answer of course is it depends. So let me just give you a simple set of rules to figure out which. At any given time, it's gonna be, you know, seventy thirty one way or the other. And one way or the other depends on where you are in your company's growth. So in the beginning, it's premature to start optimizing. You need to figure out the big stuff first. Once you've got one lever working, two levers working, then you can start devoting resources to optimizing and trying to squeeze more juice out of that lemon. But then you've always got kind of your 30% who are like, okay, what's the next big lever? Is there a market segment we're missing? You know, is there a use case that we're missing? Something like that. Is there a channel that we could start to develop? **Harry Stebbings** [13:12]: When you look at going back to the art of science, I just wanna get an answer on this. Pushed, which one is it today? And has it changed actually? Like, we look at a world of AI where maybe creativity is more front and center. What is it if I push you? **Matt Lerner** [13:24]: I mean, if if I were running a company and you had a gun to my head and I had to choose one, I'd say science because science without art can deliver business results. And art without science, if it does, it's very rare and exceptional down to luck. It just doesn't. **Harry Stebbings** [13:38]: When we think about data versus intuition there, that kind of gut feel, can you take me to how you think about how the best growth leaders act on data versus intuition, and what's worked for you? **Matt Lerner** [13:48]: The best growth leaders understand if they possess a knowledge base to start to be intuitive. So it's easy to walk into a room, you know, and the highest paid opinion, the alpha in the room is gonna spout all their intuition, all their opinions, and they could be right or they could be wrong. You know, chat GPT will just very confidently tell me things that are patently scientifically false. Right? So you get to a point to have good intuition when you understand growth as a system in your business, and that has a few parts. You need to understand the customer's context. Who are we selling this to? Where are they stock? What are they trying to do? What do they think they're looking for? Where are they looking for it. And then you understand sort of your growth model mathematically, and you know where are the biggest points of leverage where you should be focusing for the maximum impact. And then you know your your business and your capabilities and what you're good at and can be great at and what you can't. **Harry Stebbings** [14:36]: Where does a growth model actually start, Matt? Like, I think so many people will listen to this and so many founders listen, they'll be like, oh, yeah. Sounds great. Step one, I've got a company today. We sell accounting for SMBs. Where do I start on my growth model? Because I don't really have one. **Matt Lerner** [14:52]: The way to map your growth model is you start with your Northstar, and that's gonna be a metric that increments when you deliver value to customers. Mhmm. And something that encompasses the entire funnel. And, you know, you stress test it a bit, so it's not creating perverse incentives like, hey, is there a way we could game this and make this number go up without actually delivering, you know, business value? **Harry Stebbings** [15:10]: Do most startups choose to write Northstar or the wrong Northstar? And what metric what mistakes do they make in choosing it? **Matt Lerner** [15:16]: The biggest mistake with Northstar, it's a very reasonable one, is they choose their Northstar's revenue Oh. Or profits. Always. And, you know, as an investor, you're like, you're straw manned that for me. Like, why wouldn't my Northstar be revenue? Like, we're a business. Right? And the problem is at early stage or at any stage, but there's so many ways to deliver revenue without actually delivering customer value. And as an early stage startup, decreasing password sharing or bundle or upsells, things like that, you know, they'll make you a little more money, but no one's gonna hyper grow because they shut down password sharing. Right? So you need to focus on things that deliver value to customers. And the second problem with money is if you take, you know, your six functional heads in your business, engineering, product sales, whatever, and say give me your best ideas for making money, they're gonna give you six different strategies with six different resource sets moving in six different directions. And a startup can't move in six directions. But if you tell your marketing person, your growth person, your sales person, your engineer person, how do we get more weekly active users? They're gonna a productive discussion, and they're gonna be able to figure out how they each fit into that value chain. **Harry Stebbings** [16:15]: I always think that actually it should go back to, like, a user behavior, like, of sheets created. Do you know what I mean? Number of tables shared, number of whatever that is. Because there's so many different ways also, like, weekly active users. You could have people who use it, like, once a week for a month. If it's like an accounting solution, maybe end of month, doesn't mean they don't love it or not getting value. So I say, **Matt Lerner** [16:33]: how would a normal customer behave if they absolutely loved your product? And how many of them are behaving that way? And track it in cohorts and make it go up over time. **Harry Stebbings** [16:40]: Do you agree with the I think it's the Sean Ellis or the Rahul at Superhuman, which is like, if my product were removed, how many people would, like, be viscerally upset? **Matt Lerner** [16:48]: I think that's a really good test of the strength of product market fit. Absolutely. But you can have product market fit with six customers, and next year, it's seven and you don't have a business. It depends how much they pay. Yeah. When does the Northstar change, or does it change? So the time the Northstar would change, first of all, in the beginning, sometimes before product market fit, you're just still figuring out how you deliver value to customers. And when you learn that actually it's something fundamentally different, then you might wanna change your Northstar. **Harry Stebbings** [17:16]: Do you think you should be figuring out how you deliver value to customers? I don't mean that badly, but, like, you know, we start companies to solve problems. Figuring out how you deliver value well, the whole point is I started my accounting business to make it easier for SMBs to do their finances. Surely, you solve a problem because you know the value you want to deliver. **Matt Lerner** [17:34]: But it's gonna end up being more granular than that. If you grabbed 10 SMBs and said, hey, how can people make, you know, managing your finances easier for you? You get 10 different answers. So they're looking for a really specific help, you know, and they may end up using all your features, but they're gonna sign up for a thing. There's some specific thing they're trying to do in a specific situation of spreadsheets and Xero and whatever is coming up short, and you've gotta figure out what that really specific thing is. **Harry Stebbings** [17:59]: Okay. So there's times in the meeting where we're kind of figuring it out. And then when we set it, is there a time post setting it where it's like, ah, it might be time to change that? **Matt Lerner** [18:06]: First of all, yeah, if you learn something about your customers and it's actually wrong, we think, you know, accounting software, we think that they were signing in to like log expenses, but in fact, it's mostly about filing quarterly VAT returns. And people who log expenses don't retain, but people who file quarterly VAT returns do retain. So that tells you, okay, we're looking at VAT returns filed as our Northstar. And that's a much lower frequency. That's a quarterly rather than a weekly active user cadence. The other one is if you just spawn a second business line that's different. Like Amazon's Northstar from 1996 was repeat purchases. Obviously, AWS has a different Northstar. Right? It's gonna be something around server usage or cycles or something. **Harry Stebbings** [18:43]: So we have that Northstar metric. We know when to change it. How do we align teams around it? I'm a big fan of **Matt Lerner** [18:50]: questions because, you know, if you tell people things you you don't have children yet, but if you tell people things, they they may or may not listen. But if you ask them questions, it forces them to think. So once I have it, explain the Northstar to the whole team, I have each manager go around and ask each person, explain to me how your work impacts the Northstar. Because they have to think at that point. And then they're gonna tell you something, and they may tell you something you didn't know about them or their job function or their business, or you may realize they're missing an important piece of context about their business. So that usually leads to a really productive discussion. Then after that, I'm like, okay, given that string of connections of you to the Northstar, which could be two, three, four orders removed, what's the most impactful work you can be doing this quarter to move that number? **Harry Stebbings** [19:31]: You mentioned before about seeing so many preventable mistakes when you're a venture investor. And wanted to dig in on it, but I was like, no. No. No. Let's do the, like, definitions of growth first. What were the biggest preventable mistakes? Because I see revenue as the Northstar metric is one of the biggest that I see. **Matt Lerner** [19:45]: So I guess see how much we wanna dig in on this one. I don't know if you're familiar with Anna Karenina. **Harry Stebbings** [19:51]: Yeah. I love Anna Karenina. **Matt Lerner** [19:52]: Okay. So, you know, there's a section in the beginning where you're right in the first page actually where it says happy families are all alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy. And as a VC, you're smiling because you know that successful startups are all like they have the market fit, they have the amazing founder, they attract talent that you know this. **Harry Stebbings** [20:09]: And **Matt Lerner** [20:10]: unhappy families, like there's just a million ways a startup can go pear shape and you've seen them all. And I sort of boiled it into three patterns. I'm curious if this resonates with you. And this tends to come back sort of the founder's DNA and their personality style. Some of them are overthinkers, and they just spend too long debating, you know, measure twice, cut once. **Harry Stebbings** [20:28]: Sure. Sure. And the most common, like, profile for that I find is actually people who've been in large organizations for long periods of time, but actually have never been a founder. **Matt Lerner** [20:36]: And we can even say consulting or investment banking organizations if we wanna be more specific. **Harry Stebbings** [20:40]: Sure. I find investment bankers actually have a faster, like, velocity. Than strategy consultants. Strategy consultants and and honestly, the slowest at executors are the VPs of product from big company. Yeah. Who've never been a founder before. And they raised five on 25 from Andreessen. Three years of money, and it's just like, ah, the speed is not there. Like Yeah. With all that money, you don't **Matt Lerner** [21:00]: need to be faster. You can hire people and build people. Sure. A 100%. So Okay. So that's one. So there's three patterns. One is under think overthinkers. One is under thinkers. And these people, you know, they have a bias for action and that's great. So they build something based on their sense of the market. And, you know, of course, 99.9 out of a 100 times, it doesn't work. So they build the next thing. They build the next thing. And next thing. And the problem is the solution set and the market you're playing in is so broad, you you just can't brute force it. But each time you build something else, you're making the product more complex, you're making the experience more complex, you're making the organization more complex, you're making the sales process more complex. The value proposition is slowing you down at a time where you need nothing more than speed. Right? So you guys are under thinkers. And then the last type, and I think this is also close to what you're talking about with your VP of product, are these hire and delegate types. And, you know, I'm humble. I'm not an expert, so I'm gonna hire six heads of my six important functions and they're gonna come in and do their best practices. But if you really don't have fundamentally product market fit, a strategy, a sense of who you're selling to, they're each gonna give you best practices. But you don't need to be good at six things. Like a startup needs to be good at one and a half things tops. You don't know if that's a sales motion or if that's product led or what. And so your resource asks far exceed your ability to deliver, and then all those trade offs you were trying to make just bubble right back up to the founder. **Harry Stebbings** [22:13]: So I think one of the biggest mistakes that I see is founders sort of split across channels too broadly, and they don't nail one channel efficiently. And Kit Bodnar from HubSpot said on the show that actually it takes one channel to get to 50,000,000 ARR and two to get to a 100,000,000 ARR. But actually, so few even have one ever that really works. Mhmm. Actually, I think it was Adam Gross who said that if you do paid under a 100,000,000 in ARR, you're not really product like growth. My question to you is, do you agree in terms of channel diversification too early being a massive problem that you see founders make, and how do you think about that early channel strategy? **Matt Lerner** [22:47]: So first of all, I think the exception on paid below a 100,000,000 ARR is it's a good way to get eyeballs quickly for testing. **Harry Stebbings** [22:53]: So **Matt Lerner** [22:53]: it's a good way to validate stuff quickly, but it shouldn't obviously be the crux of your growth early on. You know, the channel thing, I think people overthink that a little bit too. So obviously, let's try them all and see what sticks is not efficient because none of them are gonna work the first time you try them. Sure. Or Facebook will work a little bit in the beginning because they wanna get you to spend more money, but pretty quickly. As you try to scale, your unit economics will 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. That's really kind of it. And then if you're in like B2C, you probably can't afford 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 cofounders and whittle it down. If there's no one's googling anything related to your product, you're not gonna do SEO. If your unit economics are tight and you have a long payback cycle, you're not gonna 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 got your channels. And that's like 1% of the challenge. 99% of the challenge is getting it to work because each of these channels is hard. You know, we talk about like Google and ranking in the top three for anything these days is gonna be very hard. Paid ads are sold at auction, so you're gonna have to outbid people who are spending a $100,000,000 and have teams who've been optimizing this for decades. Sales, outbound, like how many, you know, sales emails do you get in LinkedIn 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 checklist of different ideas. **Harry Stebbings** [24:48]: The 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 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 you often don't have data knowing it works. You almost just have to suspend disbelief and say, but it could work. In in in part of the book, you mentioned a locksmith moment. I just wanted to unpack what a locksmith moment was for startups and how you think about it. **Matt Lerner** [25:25]: So the locksmith idea crossed my mind. It was this early in my time at PayPal, and I was living in San Francisco in, like, a gated apartment complex. One day, 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 twenty four hour emergency locksmith. It had a phone number on it. I thought, this is a clever locksmith. She could have bought ads, you know, on public transit or, you know, pod sponsored podcasts. I wouldn't have remembered. But she figured out where I'm gonna be when I suddenly realized 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. And 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. **Harry Stebbings** [26:05]: 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 the lock and you know you need it now. Some products you don't need now. How does the role of growth vary in those two opposing worlds of like, oh, shit. I broke my leg. I need it now versus, oh, that would be cool. Athletic greens. **Matt Lerner** [26:28]: We were all just fine before athletic greens, and yet some people spend tons of money **Harry Stebbings** [26:32]: on **Matt Lerner** [26:32]: it. **Harry Stebbings** [26:32]: In terms of finding that person, I think the hard thing is they do have different needs and different things resonate. What are some lessons on what works in terms of the messaging that you use? Because for one person on athletic greens, 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? **Matt Lerner** [26:54]: So for a very horizontal product like Airtable, mean, I it's really hard, but you're gonna find initial use cases and you're gonna kinda 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. I 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 and assume that whatever they think you do for them, that'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 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 I'm trying to do this and oh, now you can close out your quarter in minutes, not days, or whatever that that is that they're trying to do. So then I'm gonna do those interviews. I'm gonna find out the different now you cans, 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. Or the other one is just very quickly, like in a week for $500, you can just test a bunch of ads. So you have one ad design and six different now you can headlines, and you show it to like a lookalike 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. **Harry Stebbings** [28:25]: 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. It'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? **Matt Lerner** [28:54]: Okay. So I'm gonna 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 and they have huge 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 brand recognition. I mean, they're they're not really great jobs. They don't have a ton of 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 the level of talent you can hire. And if you think about, like, growth, this is something that cuts across every function. It's the hardest thing your company is gonna do. So you want the most talented, smartest person in your company who's closest to the customer, the most impatient, the fastest mover, and that sort of starts to look a lot like a founder. So I 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 gonna grow my company, and just goes pear shaped more often than not. These people are, like, bringing their playbook they ran at 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 the if they were good, you wouldn't let them have all the engineering product resources and all like, you wouldn't let them do the stuff that they need to do to be successful anyways. So first hires for me. Like, once you understand roughly how your business is gonna 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, good direct response copy, user experience, funnel optimization, deep analytics about retention cohorts. You're not gonna 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 gonna be changed. And six months later, everything's gonna 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, people, hopefully, someday, one of them will be able to grow into my head of growth. **Harry Stebbings** [31:04]: 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? I don't have a growth network to pull from. What is the right way start the process and start getting candidates in pipe? **Matt Lerner** [31:24]: 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 you write the job spec and the recruiter is like, well, what do you want? You know, like, six years of experience in 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? And 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 I 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. **Harry Stebbings** [32:13]: Did they have commonalities in their backgrounds around that then? Were they, all maths grads? Were they was was there other things in their profiles that were common despite the lack of marketing? **Matt Lerner** [32:23]: I 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 experimenting. So **Harry Stebbings** [32:38]: it is like a science rooted mind? **Matt Lerner** [32:40]: 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 this, 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. And scientists come in with that curiosity and humility. **Harry Stebbings** [33:02]: I mean, as a venture capitalist, we're never wrong. So you're simply wrong. **Matt Lerner** [33:07]: 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. **Harry Stebbings** [33:16]: 100%. It is one the most unique jobs in the world. I said to my mother the other day, can you imagine, like, a chef in a restaurant where 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. Star. Yeah. She's like, I 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 hires not necessarily coming from that background. So we put that out, we put it on Indeed, put it on, you know, whatever we wanna do, and we have this top of funnel. Start the interview process. Interview one, what am I trying to achieve from that first interview, Matt? I've never done this hiring process before. What questions do I ask? How do I do it? **Matt Lerner** [33:52]: 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%. So my entire interview process is gonna be focused around figuring that out. So I've got my little list of, like, the five hard things, and I'm gonna 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? Other answers to that, I can already start to tick off things on my list where 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. And those are gonna be questions typically that don't have a clear right or wrong answer but are important. So, marketing attribution, you know, how do you think about, you know, first click versus last click and how to learn and spend your money wisely. How you'd break apart a retention problem or whatever the 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 gonna need to figure out. So I'm trying to figure out literally do they 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 is never close. No one's ever like kinda 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 gonna have thought about where they're at 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. And then if they tell you about a mistake, like what are their nonverbals? Are they comfortable talking about it? And then do they unprompted, 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 annoyingly curious. Like, not fun at cocktail parties, but very good. They ask all these, like, sounds obvious, but, oh, 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? Because the way you get promoted companies and product and marketing is by doing the stuff you're supposed to do, but doing it faster and doing more of it and making fewer mistakes and managing more people and more budget and making good decks. And none of those things are useful in an early stage startup. You actually don't wanna do most of the things. You don't wanna spend most of the money and you can't 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? **Harry Stebbings** [36:23]: Do do you prep them ahead of time for that? And do you send them a deck? Do you a fundraising deck maybe from the last raise? Do you send them 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 quick they think? **Matt Lerner** [36:38]: 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 wanna 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. So, no, I don't prep them, but I still find they get good answers from good candidates. **Harry Stebbings** [36:56]: What are the biggest mistakes people make in those early interviews? **Matt Lerner** [36:59]: I think the biggest mistake early on in hiring is just being dazzled by the names on a CV and where you've worked in the past and what you've done. And I think I already said have very little use 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 **Harry Stebbings** [37:13]: 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, and do you test in some tangible way the skills, the 50% that we wanna see them have? **Matt Lerner** [37:25]: 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 walked 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 reaction, 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 wanna hire them, but something in the interview process suggests that maybe they're dishonest or lack integrity. And it's always a small thing, like, when the interviewer is debriefed and they told this person one thing, but they told this person another thing or two things that didn't make sense, and it's like, oh, 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 and they're talented 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 got it wrong? I had to let those people go after, you know, I was in a situation where I I was embarrassed. I looked bad. My organization looked bad. It cost us some money where, like, really nasty things happen. **Harry Stebbings** [38:35]: Do you need to be in person for growth teams? I think a lot of it is creative. It's testing. As you said, it's multifunction. Do you need to be in person? **Matt Lerner** [38:43]: 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, like 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 sharing and ideation process is coming together. So 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? Win, lose, or draw? How are the numbers trending? And therefore, what should we do this week? So you're gonna look at the results of all your experiments, the stuff you tried, your customer conversations, your data analysis. You're gonna take everything you learned, you're gonna share it with the whole team. And they're all gonna be a little smarter, and they're all gonna have some new ideas. And then you can have a really productive conversation about, you know, 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 on 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 you know, the cadence of experimentation and learning is is critical. **Harry Stebbings** [39:49]: Now we've decided we wanna hire this person. They're joining. I have no idea how to do onboarding. I think every startup does onboarding terribly for any role. For growth, it's even harder. And it is hard. What is the right onboarding process for a new growth hire at a startup? **Matt Lerner** [40:04]: So every company is kinda different in how much they like process and organization. So I'm gonna 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 it'd 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 do customers come? How much do they cost us? Where do the conversions, Dropbox, which cohorts retain, all that stuff. And 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 gonna have this conversation with this person about, okay, given all that, you know, after thirty days, what should we be doing and what should we not be doing and why? Even if I completely agree with them, I'm gonna stress test the shit out of that because why are we doing this and not this? Because it's a very important decision. 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? **Harry Stebbings** [41:22]: 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? **Matt Lerner** [41:29]: Every good growth person with some experience has a a bag of quick wins that'll work. You know, changing a bad headline to a good now you can headline, going back through you know, most people track sign ups and conversions for their paid stuff, but they don't look at customer value. And 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. 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 traction, fine. But if you think about any of those things I just said, they're kind of one and done. You know, once your headline's good, you're not gonna you know, if your conversion goes from 1% to 10%, you're not gonna 10x that number again. Sadly. So that's where eventually you, you know, there's just no getting around to kinda doing the fundamentals. How quickly **Harry Stebbings** [42:17]: 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 to take a week off their job beforehand. And I say, hey, Matt. It's a big decision for you. Let's pay you for a week. Join for a week in in kind of quiet, and we'll see if you like it. And I put it on them as like a fee. You can see if you like us. But I think in a week, you know, if someone's good. **Matt Lerner** [42:39]: I think that's a a really good approach. Anyway, 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 bad with people, you know, all output, no input mentally. It's it's usually pretty obvious, I think, once you've got some experience. **Harry Stebbings** [42:54]: Are there any big mistakes gross people make in their first days in a role? **Matt Lerner** [42:58]: 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. **Harry Stebbings** [43:08]: Can I ask what growth experiment did you have the most conviction in that then turned out to be wrong? I'm just intrigued you. You've got eleven years at PayPal. There must have been some things where you're like, I really went all in on this. I was just wrong. **Matt Lerner** [43:20]: 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. And 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, like nothing, nothing, nothing. And eventually, like one started to get some traction and then nothing, nothing. And then one got a lot of traction. 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 effort. **Harry Stebbings** [43:53]: Is subscribers to your list the Northstar metric for your business? **Matt Lerner** [43:56]: No. It's it's just a funnel driver. The ultimate Northstar metric for my business is how many startups can we help. **Harry Stebbings** [44:01]: What have been some lessons in the LinkedIn building? You know me. I love content. Yeah. Any big lessons for you in building the LinkedIn following? **Matt Lerner** [44:08]: It's humbling because I have all this stuff that I think is amazing, perform, and some of it does, and I'm always surprised. **Harry Stebbings** [44:14]: Often the more intellectual stuff I find doesn't perform. I will often tweet stuff about kind of, I don't know, temporal diversification of different venture vintages, and and people are just like, nope. **Matt Lerner** [44:24]: Your stuff is amazing. **Harry Stebbings** [44:25]: But but then, you know, you tweet stuff about like perseverance and grit. It **Matt Lerner** [44:29]: goes crazy. **Harry Stebbings** [44:30]: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. **Matt Lerner** [44:30]: 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. **Harry Stebbings** [44:41]: Final one before we do a quick fire, which is like, what's a growth loop to you? Everyone 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 core base and what that. What is a growth loop and how do you think about how startup should think about it? **Matt Lerner** [44:56]: I mean, fundamentally, it's it's any positive feedback loop anywhere in your business. It it basically means if you, like, 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. You know, if your ads are paying back five x in thirty days, then you have a positive ad spend growth loop. You know, there's these network effect loops where you bring people on your show. They create content that brings you more listeners, which then increases the desirability of your show, which brings you better guests, you know, virtuous circle. So once you've mapped your growth model, you look around and say, where can we find a positive feedback loop here? **Harry Stebbings** [45:28]: 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? **Matt Lerner** [45:33]: It's hard. The doubling down is really down in the trenches of a really tweaking and optimizing. You know, going from point five x return on ad spend to three or four x return on ad spend is a 100 experiments or more. **Harry Stebbings** [45:46]: Should the growth team be in the core functions, be it marketing, it product, should it be separate completely? **Matt Lerner** [45:52]: So in an early stage startup, there just comes a point where your company becomes the growth team. You go through fundraising, you go through building your product, 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, you know, all the kings, horses, and and men are on deck. When you have a larger company, it needs to stand outside. It needs to be cross functional and diverse because growth people have a fundamentally different orientation, different approach to life than other groups, but they need to have really good relationships because they're gonna need to pull resources. You know, when I was hiring these brilliant scientists, the other trait I was screening for was was 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. **Harry Stebbings** [46:37]: Listen, I wanna move into a quick fire round and I wanna start with, you wrote the book. What's the hardest part of writing a book, Matt? **Matt Lerner** [46:43]: 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'd completely underestimated the magnitude. That's like an architect who designs like loft extensions having to design Terminal 5 of Heathrow. It'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 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. **Harry Stebbings** [47:16]: The hard thing about growth is there really is very few growth pros, true growth pros. Do you know what I mean? **Matt Lerner** [47:21]: And the ones who are out there aren't gonna come to work for you. That's it. **Harry Stebbings** [47:24]: I mean and they're like a million dollars each. Like, know, you're you're Elena Verner's at Dropbox. It's like, she's not gonna come join your, like, series a company in London. **Matt Lerner** [47:32]: Yep. **Harry Stebbings** [47:32]: I agree with you. So you have to find the diamonds in the rough. **Matt Lerner** [47:35]: 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 grew very quickly. **Harry Stebbings** [47:48]: So many of the great growth people started in SEO. That's one thing I really see from doing the show, actually. **Matt Lerner** [47:52]: And that's because it forces you to think about customer intent. Right? We 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 badly. Two is they can automate previously hard to do tasks like cold outbound. That all becomes a lot more effective. **Harry Stebbings** [48:29]: It becomes more effective or less effective in the commoditization of it because you actually have, like, this infinite supply now of it, and actually it's relatively generic in how it's done for the majority of **Matt Lerner** [48:40]: right 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. **Harry Stebbings** [48:47]: Okay. **Matt Lerner** [48:47]: They will become a nerd to that in a year. But at the moment, the window's kind of still open. **Harry Stebbings** [48:52]: 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 WhatsApp or text as a new channel loop because it's just too saturated. **Matt Lerner** [49:07]: I have to be humble there because I don't like outbound, and I've been declaring the death of outbound for many years now, and it just it kinda works. For the few people who really nail it and figure it out, it still kinda worked. I I think that, but I'm not gonna commit to that answer. **Harry Stebbings** [49:21]: So we have, kind of raising the floor on content. We have that in terms of outbound. Anything else? **Matt Lerner** [49:26]: 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. So that's the other big one I'm seeing right now. **Harry Stebbings** [49:39]: Do you think this is the most exciting time technologically speaking in your career? **Matt Lerner** [49:42]: So I lived through .comrevolution1.o, but it's right up there. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, 2009, mobile apps, you know, and Airbnb and Uber and Stripe and, like, so many amazing companies were getting born. So that was a huge one. And then, yeah, certainly .com1.o, wherever, like, people were first building these businesses and, like, Netscape was IPO ing. **Harry Stebbings** [50:03]: What growth tactic do you think has stayed truly dominant over the years? **Matt Lerner** [50:07]: You know, I listed the six channels before, sales and advertising, and most of those have been around for a long time. Influencers are new, but, you know, some of this stuff is new. Network effects **Harry Stebbings** [50:18]: I always, like, laugh at, like, what influence is new? Because in the days of, like, Audrey Hepburn, she was an influencer for the things that she wore, the cigarettes that she smoked. It's just a different channel with which it's presented. **Matt Lerner** [50:29]: That's a great point. The democratization, the long tail of Yes. Influencers opening up programmatically is a new thing. You know, network effects, product led growth is new in, like, the last ten years, but a lot of the stuff we've been buying ads since forever. And the fundamentals that make it work, like having the right message, having the right design testing, and experimenting haven't changed. What **Harry Stebbings** [50:49]: would you most like to change about the world of growth? **Matt Lerner** [50:51]: So the thing I'm trying to change in my business and the thing that bugs me is back to when 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. So 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. **Harry Stebbings** [51:25]: Are you negative on the future of European tech and innovation? **Matt Lerner** [51:29]: I'm absolutely not negative on the talent. I mean, produces incredible talent, but what you see is a lot of the best talent in Europe is gonna 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. So I think the challenge for Europe is gonna be to create reasons for these people to stay, to list on European markets, to raise their later rounds. **Harry Stebbings** [51:55]: Final one. What's the most recent company growth strategy that's most impressed you? So **Matt Lerner** [52:01]: one thing that is happening new that seemed 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. And that's a neat thing because it can run you through an entire sales process without actually needing a 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, you know, we just need to move them like a considered purchase, not impulse buy. Just seems like the most obvious thing to start to adopt those. **Harry Stebbings** [52:44]: Matt, I've loved doing this. As I said, it's been so long since we I I mean, it was, like, eight years ago since you were on the show last night. **Matt Lerner** [52:50]: It's great catching up with you. It's so nice to see **Harry Stebbings** [52:53]: You look you look the same. I look older, but thank you so much doing this. Hair now. I I know. I have facial hair. I actually have wrinkles. This is what venture does to you. Fuck. But thank you so much for doing this. My pleasure, Harry. It's 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, 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, ## Sponsor read **Unknown** [53:25]: they say ad creative is king, but man, is UGC creative a pain in the ass to pull together? Imagine if you didn't have to. Captions just launched AI creator ads, so you can produce dozens of UGC style creatives instantly. Just cast your AI creator, paste in your product URL, and drop in your product images. AI will take care of the rest. Captions will generate dozens of UGC style creatives in seconds, 10 x your creative output, and test more hooks than you ever thought possible. Because let's be honest, your current ad creative is fatiguing as we speak. UGC ads have never been so easy. 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As always, I so appreciate your incredible **Harry Stebbings** [55:48]: support, and stay tuned for a fantastic episode this coming Monday with Danny Reimer, general partner at Index Ventures.