Hypergrowth: the early years

As the VP of Growth at Shopify, Morgan Brown has helped to spearhead a revolution in commerce by empowering merchants to own their business from end to end. He has also written one of the seminal books on growth and provided a framework for some of the hottest companies to power their own hypergrowth journeys. In this episode, you'll hear more about his transition from Inman to Facebook, to Shopify, how he helps bring Shopify's strategy of "owning the rebels" to life, and his tips for getting early stage companies on the right path for growth.

Javier Ortega Estrada has had a front row seat to some of the most iconic companies in tech. Today he is the VP of global sales at Hopin, where he oversees the sales and solution engineering organizations. Prior to that, Javi was a Head of NA Sales and GM at Dropbox, where he worked for over 7 years — including stints overseeing Europe, the middle east, and all of EMEA. In this episode, you will hear: 1) How Javi structures his GTM team across inbound and outbound, 2)Why sales is an art and a science, and having "short toes" is important in a hypergrowth company, 3)Whether going after the "golden logos" is the best path for early stage startups, and 4) How to preserve your mental health while going at breakneck speed.

Zhenya Loginov has been the driver of growth and revenue at some of the most successful companies, including Dropbox, Segment, and Miro. As the COO at Segment, Zhenya led the revenue and operations teams as the company scaled from SMB to Enterprise and expanded their product categories. Today as the CRO at Miro, he is responsible for all revenue and is the main driver of the evolution of the business as they target larger customers. ‍ In this episode, you’ll hear how Zhenya: 1) Thinks about the playbook for self serve and enterprise businesses including where the teams should live, 2) Discovered the point in time to start building an enterprise business, and when is too late, and 3) Transitions the culture of an organization to better service larger customers, from product and engineering to sales and success.

Kyle Parrish had a front row seat to sales at Dropbox, which gave him the background and a knack for building sales teams at the best product led growth companies. Today, he runs sales at Figma, and has built a sales engine that sits on top of one of the best user and product led growth companies that are changing the face of collaboration today. ‍ In this episode, you’ll hear how Kyle: 1) built the first customer facing teams at Figma and how he determined what the sales team should look like, 2) which internal relationships he focused on building in his early days at the company and how they helped him grow the company, and 3) how he leveraged user data at an aggregated level to build what is considered the gold standard of customer lead qualification

Camille Ricketts is a true expert on building communities and creating a top notch content strategy. From her early days as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal and Venture Beat to her stint managing the content strategy at First Round Capital, she’s seen the best and the brightest people and companies, and been at the forefront of content and editorial strategy. These days she leads the marketing team at Notion, helping them reach, nurture, and grow their customer and continue on the path of Hypergrowth. ‍ In this episode, you’ll hear how Camille: 1) leveraged existing strengths of the Notion community to help find early advocates for the product; 2) developed a content strategy that leveraged a deep customer understanding and strategy around use cases and personas; 3) amplified word of mouth through community efforts, driving new user growth, and 4) built a teaching culture on her team to ensure that people could learn from each other.

Adam Grenier has led growth teams through the steepest phases of a company’s hypergrowth trajectory. As the leader of growth marketing in the early days of Uber, he balanced managing the growth of hundreds of markets as individual identities, and balanced them across the portfolio. Since then, he’s led growth and product at Lambda School, advised companies as an ‘Expert in Residence’ at First Round Capital, and recently joined Reforge as an Entrepreneur in Residence. Suffice to say he’s seen growth challenges in many forms. In this episode, you’ll hear how Adam: 1) used local and regional tactics to drive growth across hundreds of markets at uber, 2) leveraged craigslist in the early days to drive growth, soon becoming the biggest customer of job boards, 3) balanced individual P&Ls with a portfolio approach to growth, and much more.

Tido Carriero has had an amazing journey leading engineering and product at some of the most iconic companies. He started off on the engineering team at Facebook during the late stage start-up days, becoming a manager in just a few years, then he led product engineering at Dropbox, and most recently he was the VP of Engineering and the Chief Product Development Officer at Segment. From this vantage point, he’s had visibility and a driving role on growth and product development for products that have reached literally billions of users. ‍ In this episode, you’ll hear how Tido: 1) helped grow Segment’s world class engineering team by starting with building the company and engineering brand, 2) leveraged Segment’s strength in open source and content to filter the list of candidates to find the best people, 3) experimented with multiple approaches to finding product-market fit for their newer products, 4) laid the groundwork for the enterprise business.

Early Stripe employees Krithika Muthukumar and Eeke de Milliano have had first row seats to one of the most legendary companies of our time. In her role as the first (and only) marketing leader at Stripe for the first few years, Krithika has led teams across marketing and design, launched all of Stripe’s major products, and helped the company expand into the enterprise business. Meanwhile, as the leader of the Business Operations function, Eeke incubated many of Stripe’s early GTM teams, and later led the machine learning product and Stripe radar. In this episode, you’ll hear how Krithika and Eeke: 1) viewed product-market fit beyond Stripe’s core product, including the launch of Stripe Connect that helped the company power the on-demand service economy, 2) how Stripe viewed itself as a new-age VC in the early days (and still does!) when picking which customers to build for, and 3) how GTM teams were incubated out of the strategy group, and what worked and didn’t work with that strategy.

Dan Hill has had a wide range of experiences growing companies — from founding his own to running the growth team at Airbnb. In his time at Airbnb, Dan led the payments, risk and trust, and growth and performance marketing teams, and towards the end of his tenure, led the team that managed the end to end guest experience. Most recently, he has started another company, Alma, focused on charitable giving. In this episode, you’ll hear how Dan helped the team at Airbnb leverage referrals to jumpstart early growth, quantify customer experience metrics, and utilize an input and output metrics framework to measure success. Dan will also talk about the motto the growth team of the growth team and what it means, “love creates growth, not the other way around.”

Amirah Raveneau-Bey has deep experience in growing and scaling companies. In her time at Opendoor, Nerdwallet, and Trulia, she has grown go-to-market teams across sales, partnerships, operations, and growth. In this episode, you’ll hear how Amirah helped the teams at Trulia create pent-up demand for products before they were released, build communities of superfans to evangelize new products, and and get crystal clear on their target customer. You’ll also learn how Nerdwallet teams pulled customer insights out of qualitative interviews to inform product direction, and how to “hire for today so you have a tomorrow.”

As a co-founder of Branch, Mada Seghete has helped create a new industry around mobile revenue management and architected the growth strategy of many companies. Today at Branch, Mada manages the marketing, market development, and strategy teams, helping Branch get their technology out to even more customers. In this episode, you’ll hear the story of Branch, and how they started after several pivots, finally finding product market fit around solving a problem that the founders themselves faced. Mada will also share insights on finding product-market fit, leveraging content and organic search to grow your business, and how to measure and properly attribute your efforts across channels.

No individual has had a more critical role in driving growth at early stage companies than Andy Johns. As an early growth leader at Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and Wealthfront, Andy has seen and experienced it all, and taken many companies beyond the S-curve of hypergrowth. In this episode, you’ll hear about Andy’s approach to consolidating early customer conversations into a product strategy that wins both the hearts and the minds of prospective customers. He’ll also share his radical thoughts on paid marketing and how to build early growth teams.

Square & Opendoor with Brett Browman by Basis Set Ventures