Triple Shot Saturday - Edition 12
Three of the highest signal-to-noise ratio snippets from the startup/tech podcasts for founders/operators.
Here are my favorite three snippets from the podcasts I read this week.
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Sriram Krishnan and Aarthi Ramamurthy spoke to Gokul Rajaram , the Silicon Valley tech whisperer on The Aarthi and Sriram Show. Gokul has been an operator (Doordash, Meta, Google) and an investor par excellence. He spoke about Doordash’s unique hiring process to discover hidden talent—people who hadn’t gone to the Ivy Leagues, didn’t have fancy logos on their CVs but had a tremendous ‘lets-get-it-done’ attitude.
The other thing DoorDash did was hoard talent. Tony Xu, one of the things he's excellent at is go after undiscovered like talent pools. So for example, most of the Door Dash people didn't have any especially the operators, they didn't have any exper experience at any company before or any of the like branded companies that we talked about. They all were like division one athletes or basically launchers at Door Dash and and Tony asked one of the things that I learned from Tony is that even most leaders uh they talk a good game but they don't they can't do anything. So Door Dash still I think employee number 500 would have the same interview question for everyone which is towards the end they would give you $100 and say acquire as many customers as you can in one day or I think they would even give you a number acquire a thousand customers in one day with this $100.
Some people would just opt out of it. They would say look I can't do it or protest this thing. This is bullshit. I can't do this. The best ones and no one ever even acquired close to a thousand. But the best ones would take it break the problem down and try six different things have your hypothesis and that's what they wanted to see that you're fearless go out and try five six different things and you'll figure something out.
I think one person went and stood outside gyms first and basically tried to do a partner. They somehow managed in a day to partner with the local gym and basically gave coupons. They created fake Door Dash coupons and gave it to Doash was already giving $5 off. They just made it into $5 off coupon and printed it out and gave it to people who were entering the gym.
So you you had to actually do it. It's not like a theoretical question. You had to actually go out and do it.
Brett Berson , partner at US VC fund First Round Capital , spoke to author and founder Matt Lerner about how high-potential companies can find growth levers to grow their business. Matt is the author of the book Growth Levers, which shares his framework that's helped over 200 seed-stage startups grow as much as 100x. I loved Matt's point about how the founders cannot outsource growth in an early-stage company. Like founder-led sales, in the early stage companies, it is always founder-led growth. They have to build the mental models to understand how growth works and lead it from the front (or, as Matt says - coalface it).
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I see that again and again. It's like you'd never hire someone else to be your head of product before you make your first product. Why do you think you're going to hire someone up the street who can do growth? And what ends up happening is people hire someone. You know, if you don't know how to grow the product yourself, you know you're hiring someone else not to be your head of growth, but to like be your figure out how to grow this business person. And that's an extremely hard job. And most of the people who can actually do that are starting their own companies or working for someone who pays a lot better than you do and has more reliable equity package. So yeah, I don't understand why people go that road, but I 100% agree. So I guess you're asking me as a founder, what, what should I do then? How do I start doing growth myself? And at what point do I start to think about hiring and whom?
So I think, I guess they think they can hire for it because they've never done it themselves. And I don't like going and doing a super important, mission critical job that I've never done before and have no idea how to do. Like, it's no fun. But I do think that's something in founder DNA. Is there ones who will just get stuck in and try something and, like, make a mess of it until it's going in terms of, like, the first growth motions? I think it's integrally linked with sales. It's at the coalface talking to customers and, you know, trying to sell the product and just watching the customers and reactions to this and that. But ultimately, you got to figure out how the business is going to grow. So, like, what I'm doing whenever I work with a company is I'm trying to build a mental model of how we're going to grow this business.
And it starts with, who's the customers? What are they trying to achieve? Where are they looking now? How are those solutions coming up short? And where can I go find those people? It's all the stuff we've talked about. Where can I get their attention? What do I have to say to them so they know they're on the right set trail towards where they want to be? What questions are they going to have? How can I address them? Most importantly, on the product side, when they first start using that product, they're trying it out. They've got questions. What do we need to demonstrate to them to reassure them and delight them immediately so they'll keep using it? I'm trying to, in the beginning, figure all those things out.
Danny Murray-Serter spoke to WeTransfer’s founder, Damian Bradfield , on the Secret Leaders podcast. While the whole episode is worth watching, as a marketer, I enjoyed Damian’s take on building a brand that is consistently non-conformist. If you think about it, WeTransfer is, at its core, a commoditized large-file sharing service. However, Damian created a unique brand personality for the business that their competitors couldn’t.
How, you know, you're building a great brand is your marketing team are really bored. They're bored of doing the same thing over and over again. They're bored of the similarities, the monotony of their weeks and days and months. If you're always doing new stuff every single week, you're not building a proper brand. So you need your marketing team and yourself to feel a little bit bored. And if you feel that way, you're probably building something consistent over a long period of time that will outlast the guys that are doing new stuff all the time.
…if I look at, if I look at brands that I think are doing really well, they're doing it always in a non conformist manner. So none of them are doing the playbook because the playbook is so obvious. And unfortunately, because even of the notion of the playbook, it's shared by everyone and read by everyone. So unless you're operating at light speed, you're behind the curve. The only way you can really stick out today is by being non conformist. You have to take your time, take a step back, look what everyone else is doing, and then try to do it differently.
…how do you square that concept with what you've just said, which is it's all about consistency?
Because I think there's some consistency in being non conformist. So, I mean, I've got an attention span of about 30 minutes. I think that's reflected in a lot of the work that we do, we can flip between doing something that's about the golden record going up into space and homelessness in LA. And I can very comfortably justify how we can live on that spectrum. And I just think it's what's sort of accepted and expected from the brand. If that's who you are, then it's fine. I mean, you mentioned fashion earlier on, and I've learned a lot from luxury. I started out working for Stella McCartney. Really? Like, back end, back office crap work. But I was watching this brand being built, and in the world of fashion, a collection has changed every four months. Creative directors come and go. You know, there's this drive to constantly renew the brand and reinvigorate it and be on, on brand, on trend and, you know, pushing this thing, yet retaining something that underlines, you know, what the company stands for or, you know, what the ethics and everything were. And in Stella's world, it was basically vegan. No leather quality. I don't know what the values would have been, but they're still there today. Yet I'm sure the collection, and I know the collection looks nothing like it did when it came out in 1998 or whenever it was that we were working there.
See you next week.
Rohit