Aarthi Ramamurthy (Head of International at Clubhouse, ex Product Director at Facebook)

Hey everyone, this is Erik Torenberg and you're listening to Execs by On Deck. Execs is a show for founders, operators, and leaders who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. Our guests are tech execs in key roles at top tech companies who share their hard-won, earned secrets on how to scale faster.

Arthi is Head of International at Clubhouse and the co-host of the popular Good Times show. Prior to working at Clubhouse, Arthi had roles at Microsoft, Netflix, Facebook, and started a YC-backed company. In this episode, we talk about various lessons she's learned from working at those respective companies, as well as how to build an international organization. I hope you enjoy. So, Arthi, you've, uh, you've been at different places and you've had different kinds of roles. You've been at Microsoft, you've been at Netflix, Facebook, Clubhouse, started your own company, went through YC, Lumoid. When you reflect back on your, um, extensive career, what is sort of the, the thread that ties it together in terms of the types of opportunities that you pursue or your, your interests and your, and your superpowers? Like, how do you sort of tie the threads together there?

That's a great question. You know, I think, uh, it's all hindsight for me. I just don't have like a cohesive kind of story that ties everything. I think a lot more people are like very polished about talking about their entire background and history. I think for me, it's about like really building fun product experiences. I've always been a product person. I have a master's in software engineering and then decided to work on compilers and loaders and like really low-level stuff. And that led me to Xbox because at Xbox, you know, you built this consumer product, but somebody had to build the underbelly. And so that was a really good fit. And so I've kind of parlayed like my software product building skills for skills to be able to like market things or learn consumer products or sell things or price them and things like that, which I have no clue about. I don't have a marketing degree. And so I've just like traded one experience to the other. And I think being a founder was really important because since then it's been able to, I've been able to apply the founder mindset. And it's really hard to explain, but really I think being able to take that on and apply it to my future roles has been kind of critical to just learn a lot along the way and just build some really cool products. So I think the single common thread that's just tied everything is like building, being at the right places at the right time where you can learn a lot and just building some really fun products.

And I know that you invest and advise companies as well. And so whether it's at the seed stage or Series A and as they get bigger, where do you find yourself helping founders the most?

Yeah, so that's a great question. I think a lot of founders, if they're first-time founders, they haven't been through the process. You know, they've built products, but they haven't been through fundraising. They haven't been through storytelling in a way where they can basically gain the wins early on. Something like a startup, I think it's, you have to hire the best people. You have to focus on fundraising and close it really quickly. And time is of the essence. And you also need like really high caliber talent, which if you'd worked only at say a big company or you've never had experience and you're like straight out of college, you kind of sort of tend to like go with the system and play the game and it just takes a longer time. So for me, I think Having been through the process once, I think one of the things I do is like tell them, okay, fundraising means it works this way. Like, what are you trying to raise? What's the round? How can I be helpful? And either it's connections or it's like setting them up for the structure of the round and things like that, which, you know, sounds kind of odd, but, you know, a lot of founders just don't know.

Yeah.

And YC as a system really, really helps with this. And you can see that too, where you go through the 3 months and you come out, it's kind of a fellowship program, which just works out pretty well. But, you know, I think a lot of folks just don't have the experience doing this if they're doing it for the first time. And I've been through that process. And then for some companies, when they hit like Series B or Series C, they start hitting the scale issues. And I've been at these big companies before. And so being able to help them with that structure Okay, how do you hire your actual first set of execs? How do you do performance reviews, calibrations? Like, these are things which no one teaches you. You just have to kind of do it. And there's no course or a formal program. So wherever founders need help, and I've done everything from like, I'll take a look at your Facebook ads and optimize them for you, all the way to like, hey, you want me to call this potential candidate? I'm happy to do that. um, introduce you to other folks. Um, and so that's kind of what I mean by the founder mindset, where problems need solving. And if you surround yourself with the right set of people who can help solve that for you, then I think it's still really hard to be a founder, but you're like somewhat there towards finding success.

Let's go deeper into some of those points. Let's start with hiring execs, right? You know, founders, they start by getting a a team, a product, you know, they're getting some traction and now they have to think about building an executive team. What sort of tips or frameworks or philosophies do you advise founders you work with?

It really depends on the stage of the business. If you're very, very early, just focus on product and finding product-market fit. And a lot of people would try and do the opposite where it's kind of signaling on like, I hired the coolest person, or And that's great if that's what you need to do, that's fine. There's no one size fits all, but in very early stages, we just tell them, you don't really need these really big exec hires and just focus on building and shipping. And I think the rigor around building and shipping, I wish a lot more people just thought about that because it's very, it's unsexy to say, it's unsexy to do because you're just grinding. And, you know, you're not looking for any press, you're not looking for anything. You're just like finding the first 10 customers or 20 customers who would like really use your product, not because they're your friends.

Yeah.

That kind of thing. I think the later stage, you start thinking about who do you really need in the next 18 to 24 months to be able to help you to scale? And that isn't super obvious. And so, What I try to help them do is like, okay, by the time you hit a Series B, here is kind of the metrics you're looking at, which means in these and these areas, you're probably going to have to like 10x or you have to grow like, you know, 3x this year. Then what do you need to do? Like, do you need a marketing person? Do you need somebody who can help you with business operations or partnerships or whatever that might be? Or, you know, more often than not engineering. and help them close. But, you know, think about it from not just what you need right this second and who do you need to bring on board right now, but opportunistically look at like 2 years out and say, where do you need the company to be then? And bring that set of folks. So again, it sounds really fuzzy, but no one size fits all. Depends on the stage of the business, depends on the business itself, and finding the right set of people who are Excited to work with you. The energy matters a lot, and just being able to join your team and just grow the business, really.

We did the reverse challenge of what you talked about in terms of most startups try to hire execs too quickly before they have product-market fit. We have product-market fit, we have 250 employees, and we've focused so much on the product and our customers that we didn't focus on the product that is our organization enough. And we're taking care of some org debt as a result. For example, we're just starting to implement performance reviews for the first time.

Oh my God. Yeah. And so it's hard because it doesn't feel obvious because it's, you know, in a truly meritocratic system, things like performance reviews just don't really make sense because you're like, well, the folks who do the most amount of work and the best work, will surface up and what does it mean? But then you realize, like, having worked at like really large companies like Microsoft and Facebook, you kind of understand what the system is for. And the system is really for both like rewarding the awesome people because you do realize that these incentives come at play, but also, you know, just making sure that everyone feels like they're taken care of at some level. And so, yeah, I mean, I used to, like, at least if you'd asked me a decade ago, I'd have been like, I don't think we need performance reviews. That's such a waste of time. But I think having been through all of this and doing my own startup, I'm like, oh, I see. I think hindsight is 20/20.

Say more about how to do them well or what mistakes to watch out for for founders doing them for the first time in their business.

You mean for performance reviews as such?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think I'm no expert here. It's also like I said, I think I've had to move from being very skeptical of processes And essentially anything that's not like building the product or engineering, I've had a lot of trouble with on like, why do we need to do this? But, you know, I think, like I said, I think having been through building companies, you kind of see it in a new perspective. Generally performance review structure, every firm does it differently. I think, I don't know, like Netflix, you know, has this very, they talk about this, they have a whole deck out there, it's public. And they have this very structured approach. They do a start, stop, continue. And really performance reviews are not, at least when I was working there, it wasn't really tied to incentive structures right away, but it was really meant to be this 360 feedback and keeping you honest about how you're doing really. And so that there's no surprises. So at the end of the day, I see performance reviews as like you shouldn't have surprises about how you're doing your work and what your coworkers and your manager and your team thinks about how you're doing your work. The worst thing you can do is like, I've seen people do performance reviews once every 6 months or once every year, and they're just shocked. They're like, why didn't you say so? Like, you really hated this quality of work that I did. And I think the whole point of it is one, there are no surprises. to incentives. People who are doing well need to feel like they're being rewarded and this is the best place for them to come in and work. And it turns out that financial incentives are just as good as anything else. And you have to consider it as much as like no one wants to talk about the finance side of things. And then the other way works too, unfortunately. It's like people who are not doing well, you have to figure out what is the right structure for them. And more often than not, they know this more than you do and before you did. And so figuring out what's the right role for them, maybe it's this company, maybe it's not, maybe it's a different role in a different part of the organization and making that really clear. But I think a lot of it is about, I think one thing I've noticed with founders is everyone's a little too afraid, afraid to like just do the hard things, take the hard stance. And that's the hard part. Like that's the hard part of being a founder. It's a It's a fairly thankless job in the beginning until it really works. And then it's like, you know, there's a little bit of glory, but, you know, I think you just have to think through performance reviews as what is the system that you wanna create and the culture you wanna create at the company?

Yeah.

And are you willing to take on the hard problems and the hard bets of like hiring the right people and incentivizing them and firing the people who are not working, as horrible as it sounds and just unfortunate as it like makes you want to There's no good feeling about it, but you just have to do it.

Let's segue into building a product team. If you're an early-stage founder, often you or one of the other co-founders is very involved in product. But as you scale, you're going to need to hire your first product manager and then eventually build a product team. Why don't you take us through that journey of what's that like, or how do you recommend founders build a product team once they're starting to get some product-market fit or really just starting to scale that product team and hire the first PM, what that looks like.

Hiring out a team once they find product-market fit. I know this sounds again very fuzzy, but no one size fits all. Every team and every structure is gonna be different. But generally, if you look at like a typical— I'm familiar with the tech side of things and just tech company as such. And so let's say they're at like post-product-market fit and however you define that, Most often than not, it's about retention. The set of users that you— well, retention and some sort of growth and whatever growth levers and growth equation you're coming up with. And if you're able to showcase that in a demonstrable way, some companies look for J-curves, some companies look for some particular milestone on retention of the first set of cohort of users or like acquisition costs coming to a certain level or a lifetime value hitting a certain value. So whatever you want your threshold to be, And especially if you fundraised, being really clear with your set of investors or your board on what is that, at what point do you consider yourself product-market fit, and like having that expectation set. Because what you have in your mind might not be universally agreed upon. And I had this trouble where I was like, I think we are good. And everybody else is like, what are you talking about? You're very early. And you're like, oh, okay, sounds good. And you just continue chugging along. But once you've hit that point, you're, say, at a Series A or some level like that. I'm just making this up. You look for Series B, you want to be at like X amount in valuation working backwards. Your revenue needs to be here if it's a monetization-focused business, which means in some companies, what at least some companies I've invested, they'd be like, oh man, I need a sales team. I have nobody running sales. And usually what happens is if it's like a pure, you know, the 2 founders or one founder who's just focused on writing code and writing the product, usually not the sales folks. And so then they're like looking around going, let's just go hire a salesperson. And I've seen it, you know, a lot of people say don't like outsource things that you can do yourself, like get to a point where you're really comfortable and then you can outsource. I've actually seen it work the other way too, where if you're just not that good at it, just hire somebody who can go do it. So again, there's no like one size fits all and there's no one thing to go do, but at least like learn what the skillset is, like do the sales loop so that when the person's, whenever you've hired the person and they come in and do it, you at least have an understanding and empathy for what they're going through. And you know whether they're actually doing the thing that you want them to do. And so, I encourage founders to just like try it, do it, especially if it's something like sales, as hard as it is. And as much as you have to like pick up the phone and call and meet people, it's a grind. You just have to do it. Like, what's the point otherwise?

Yeah.

And then find the right set of people, but there's no like structure on this is the team, this is when you hire, you know, HR or recruiter, or it's really, it depends on companies.

I definitely resonate with that. If I had to wait to hire people until I was proficient at a certain activity, I would never hire some people. It would take too long.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, Peter Thiel would say this and, you know, it's kind of a cliché now, but it's like, what could you do in 6 months that, you know, if you had initially, if it had taken 10 years, could you do it in 6 months? And yeah, I think speed is everything. Like, you just have to move fast on some, you know, and sometimes speed is all the advantage you have that, you know, another competing big company doesn't. And so, can you ship faster? Can you close this deal sooner? So, if you're just waiting for the founder to get like really, really good at something, that might just not work.

And I know it's general, but any advice for when founders should think about they need to bring in product leadership? Like, when do you bring in a VP of product or more senior and maybe what to look for in that?

A lot of, in a lot of cases, I've seen the CEO be the product person. And if they have a product background, that's great. I think the bigger thing for me is, are you looking for product leadership? What is the reason you're looking for product leadership? Are you looking for them because you're like out of bandwidth and you need somebody to do your role as a founder where you're like, you want somebody else to, you know, pick up the product mantle and just like run with it kind of thing? Or are you looking at somebody who can project manage and really keep the whole thing going on rails and not like have the whole thing fall off because the founder has so many things to do and they just can't like manage it? And what I've at least found from just doing my own startup as well as like advising investors investing in companies is CEOs or founders just don't often know which one they want. In the worst case scenario, they would hire an awesome product leader from another company who would join, and then they'd be like, project manage this thing for me, set OKRs and get this going, which is fine, but I think you're missing the point on what product really does and what good product leadership needs to do. And then you are, or what your expectations are. Like, I don't think you've like set it in the right way. And that's when a lot of like conflicts happen and everything. Best case scenario is where the founder's like, this was my role. I'm handing this on to you. This is what you need to be able to do. Your expectations for the next, say, 6 months, I don't even want you to think about the next year, for the next 6 months is we are going to get into this rigor. Part of it is project management. Part of it is like, when we ship this, are we finding product-market fit? Are we focusing on this thing? If it is like a much later stage company, Series C, Series D kind of thing, then I think what happens is sometimes you hire a director of product to just do one project or to cater to one part of the organization. And that's okay too, but you have to set the right expectations where the churn and problems happen is they think they're running product, but they're really not. They're basically being like an incubation kind of team for you. And you just have to set the right expectations being like, look, in like 18 months, this project might really take off. I really want you to come in and like start this and do it. So a lot of it is like, before joining, have you spent enough time? It's kind of like a dating process, right? You just have to like sit down and talk to them about— and product, I think, is the worst hit of all of them. With sales, you know what you need to do. Engineering, you know what you need to do. Product is so fuzzy. And it's also easy for people— and I hate to be so cynical about this— it's really easy for people to pretend like they're really good at product building when they're really not. And maybe that's not their true skill set, and it takes a while to find out. And so, like, you use the right set Frameworks and you use the right patterns and you're always talking about OKRs and shipping and all of that stuff, but what have you actually done in the past and are you the right fit for this company kind of thing? I think just having that insight and having that intuition as a founder, I think it's super important.

You mentioned earlier about how in hindsight you really appreciate some of the performance reviews and calibration that some of the bigger companies you worked at What's another sort of technique or cultural practice, whether it relates to product or just company building that you took from Netflix, Facebook, or Microsoft, you think is non-obvious that more startups should do?

A couple of things. One, I think hackathons are great. I love the culture of just people coming together, spending a couple of days, maybe once a quarter, and just putting together, doing some cool shit. Just like, you know, this is not tied to the product, but if you had the bandwidth, and you had, say, 3 days to go work on something that you were truly passionate about, what would you come up with? And Facebook used to do this really well where they would do these hackathons and it was such a big event. And people, especially if they're very, very passionate about what they're working on, they usually have some ideas that are set aside. And this is not tied to whether they're engineers or product people or whichever division. They just have ideas and you want that. You want that energy and you want those people and you want them to feel heard and feel like they have the bandwidth to contribute. And so hackathons, I think, are great. I think the other thing Netflix used to do this, they used to do these brown bags and it was basically like, bring your lunch. And I think even at Microsoft, it was, I was like, when I first moved from India to here, I joined Microsoft, they would say brown bags. I'm like, what is a brown bag? It makes no sense to me. And they would be like, oh, you know, you just bring your brown bag and you like sit down and like listen to this talk or lecture or whatever. And I try to do this wherever I go and set that as a culture where it's like, you bring your lunch. Now it's all Zoom. You carve out a time. It's usually that lunch hour where these days what I try to do is like, if people have projects they want to discuss, that's great. If you just wanna talk data, I think a lot fewer companies have open conversations on just looking at metrics. And it's usually like somebody looking at some dashboard in the middle of the night being like, huh, what is that? Why is that going? Why is that happening? What is that curve? And instead, I wish more teams just came together and just had some idle time to just noodle on things and look at data. And I try to do that now. I do international work, which means it's easy to like just miss literally markets or countries where you're like, oh, I never saw this trend kind of thing. So the culture of like getting the team together in a very laid-back kind of setting for an hour a week, maybe like hour every month, doesn't have to be every week. That seems like a lot. And get them to talk about stuff that they would otherwise not have the bandwidth for because Especially now with everyone being remote, you just have this packed schedule of 30-minute or 45-minute or whatever meetings, and then you just don't have the bandwidth to just look at things and just noodle on them.

That's fascinating. Hackathons and brown bags, we might take that for On Deck. We have our founders do what we call build weekends before they start a company. They're brainstorming different ideas. And we have them do sprints on them, but we should do them ourselves as well. I want to segue actually into your international experience at Clubhouse.

Yeah.

And we're interested also because we've just started to build out an international team ourselves and we have big— obviously it's a different product, but we have big ambitions right now. I think 50% of our companies that we back in their new accelerator are outside of the US and we want to go even bigger because that's where opportunity is. And so Why don't you, at a high level, why don't you just talk about what you focus on with the international team at Clubhouse and how you structure it, the team?

Yeah, sounds good. I think I've looked around and talked to a lot of folks who've done international roles in other companies, and I've noticed that the role wildly varies and it depends on the stage of the business and what's the expectation. But overall, generally, when you think about a head of international, they're usually responsible for non-core market, like non— in our case, it's non-US growth. And what that really means is like, are you growing other markets, whatever those metrics look like for you? And so for me, what we look at it for Clubhouse is, you know, US is a core market and we have a team here that focuses on US, on what are the right products and how do we do branding and marketing and all of that. There's a ton of support there. But then for international markets, that same infrastructure might not apply. So what do we need to do? And so the first thing I had to go figure out is like what we call as tier 1 markets. How do you prioritize when the rest of the world is just rest of the world? What does that mean? How do you stack rank countries? And it can be, you know, you can apply different lenses to this. I basically picked up the phone and called a lot of people who did growth in other companies and I was like, what do you mean? Like, how do you pick markets? And so the framework that I've come up with is, you know, you can look at everything from what's the core metric you wanna go drive. And if it is something like MAU or WAU or whatever that is, then what are the markets where you're gonna get that from and stack ranking that. Second is, you know, something maybe like monetization potential. We don't, like at Clubhouse, we don't do monetization yet, but for a lot of companies that might be relevant. And so then you look at ARPU. and which are high ARPU markets and, you know, mid to low ARPU markets. Then you look at things like, you know, in some cases if you're building an app, it's smartphone penetration or internet connectivity or things like that, where even if it's high ARPU, maybe the policy and laws are not that great in that market, so it doesn't really matter. Also, where can you actually set structure? We have found markets where you can't hire in that market. It's just, you know, the policy just like does not allow you to go hire, or, you know, the government is not that friendly. And so, you know, as much as it's like, it's a great market from metrics and revenue and all of that standpoint, it's probably not worth it at this point to go invest. So that the concept of tier 1 keeps— it changes every quarter or a couple of quarters or maybe longer, but Honestly, like, if you take a step back and look at it, it's like, how do you grow a market that's not the main focus? And so for international, I think a lot of companies similar to On Deck are realizing this, where a lot of the growth is coming from outside and they want to invest, but they don't know where to start. So having the right framework, being able to be flexible with that framework, and then what teams do you need in place? Hiring international markets is totally different beast. And it's also with the remote culture, it's also hard to like set that right culture because you here within the US, they've probably worked at like very similar companies or tech companies and the culture just bleeds through. But internationally, that's not always the case. And for good or for bad, like in some cases where we're like, oh my God, this amazing. Like, they've not been like polluted by what we do here kind of thing. And so you kind of look at it as like, how do you hire and scale? What's the organization structure? What's the budget? And again, in the next 2 to 3 quarters out, what is the expectation? Some cases it's, hey, go strike a partnership with this like other company or this, you know, 5 other brands. And in some cases it's like, No, you have a remote engineering team, that's their job, and they're going to go ship a bunch of things. So it really depends. But I think the one thing I've noticed, folks who've like never done international growth is they don't really have a framework on thinking about success for international. Because you can't, if you're a small company, you can't tackle all markets. And then what I've seen people do is do like a head of APAC or head of EU, that kind of thing. It sounds really glorious in titles, but what is it that you really want them to do and how do you want them to scale? And so that's kind of how I start and then think about like breaking it down on like what success and outcomes look like.

And so what do you expect an international team at Clubhouse to look like at scale for you guys?

We are at a stage where, you know, we're Series C, but we are a 20-month-old company. And a lot of people tend to forget that where, you know, usually CDC businesses have been around for a while. And, you know, it's also the company that just came up through the pandemic. It's a COVID company, so to speak. And so for us, when we think about international, I joined in May and when I joined, there was like no international team. There was no way to think about like, what do we want out of this whole Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 markets, what is success gonna look like and all of that. So part of it for me was like establish a baseline and understand which markets would we really go focus on. Like for example, when you think about Japan, Japan is incredibly friendly with respect to policies, internet policies. It's really, really easy. It's easy to hire. in the sense of like, you don't have government or policy restrictions in hiring. And when you look at people and audience, it's very focused on Japan as a culture. It's very inward focused and insular, which means you need somebody who's been there, who's on the ground, who's able to like scale. And so then we think about like, who do we hire? How, what does it mean to run Japan as an operation center? And then there, what do partnerships look like? Which is gonna be very different from, say, a country like India where it's less insular in the sense it's less inwards focused. Most people speak English or understand it. So when we think about even features like internationalization and local language translation, for Japan it's really important. For India, even like we have it in place, I think we now have it in 8 different Indian languages or so. But it's almost like a secondary thought because a lot of people speak the language. So what tiers and filters do you apply for each market changes. I think, Erik, you had asked me what does the future look like. I don't know. I think that's the honest answer. I think for me it's like we've hired, we're hiring in Japan right now. We've hired our first international person employee in India. And we have creator consultants, contractors, and a bunch of other markets like Korea. I had no idea what that looked like. So a lot of it is like, you just find the right people, hire them, learn from them, that kind of thing, and just keep moving. Also, it helps us like stay connected when we have competitors like social audio. We pioneered it and we started the whole like social audio thing, but now, you know, we have a lot of other companies jumping in. So for me, it also helps to like understand on the ground who are like local competitors. How do they perceive themselves? How do we scale? So that's the fun part. Like I've never had that kind of a role before where I focused on an international market and then every market is a different problem to go solve. It's almost like you're playing multidimensional chess and you kind of like look around and say, okay, France, what do we need to do? And Japan, what do we need to do? And kind of apply a different tactic in each one.

I want to share more about how we're thinking about international and ask for your advice. So right now we have one head of international and we have 2 GMs. We have one in India. He was a former VP of product at Quora. He's quite good. And we have one in Canada who is a former YC founder and he's great. And I think both of those were more bottoms-up. We just met the right person and they were already in the On Deck ecosystem and we said, okay, we think they could be a great partner. It's sort of the equivalent of if YC had local partners on the ground who were investing in companies but also supporting them and was building a local presence.

Yeah.

And we're wondering if we just keep doing that model and if so, what places do we pick? How much is it bottoms up for what people are applying versus tops down of, hey, we think Brazil is going to be big or something? And is it— yeah, I'll sort of pause there. You sort of get the sense of what we're doing. What would you advise?

Yeah, I think I had to go figure this out a few months ago. So basically what I put together is just this matrix of sorts on what is the success and what's the outcome that we are looking for. And that could vary market to market. And I think from what I started doing is like I started applying this framework of, like I said, you know, where is your MAU going to come from? Where is your revenue or monetization potential? Smartphone penetration, policies, laws. We looked at a few more filters on hireability and all of that. Where can we, if you have to go hire an engineering team remotely, what would that look like? Where would we go? And so stack ranked, you know, the top, it turns out that there are just a finite set of countries and most companies focus on just those, right? And like, you know, you stack rank it, there are like top 10 and basically that's it. Rest of the world, you'll see spikes and you need people on and off to support. And for those kind of the rest of the world markets might change from company to company. And so you have to figure like for us, For example, Indonesia has been doing really well and most people don't look at it that way. When I worked at Facebook, gaming was huge in Vietnam and it wasn't something that was like super obvious when we started out with. So it just varies on how you stack rank. So I put together a framework. We picked— we just ranked a bunch of these countries and there are lots of publicly available information on like, you know, where do they stack rank on each one of these. So leverage data. So we started— I started building out models on like 18 months from now, what would it look like? And so if you have this amount of growth based on where we are today, and for us, for something like Clubhouse, we also had to look at like, what about— what is the culture of the country? Is it more of a verbal, oral culture, or is it all written down? And we had to like think about that, like the core product itself, that premise, does it work in the market or not? So when we look at India, for example, there are pockets of India where like Malayalam is language, which is like, uh, what I realized is, uh, much harder to write but easier to speak. So a lot of the next generation people, the younger people, want to speak and learn it. And so Clubhouse seems like a really natural fit for them because there's nothing written. And so a lot of them don't tweet, uh, they're not on any other like written platform, but they want to speak on Clubhouse. And so we didn't know that insight early on, but once we found that, we started finding other markets that are similar and mapped it. And so I think similar for On Deck, I think it's about like your framework on what is success and trying to figure out, you know, where do they all stack rank. The bottoms-up approach, I'm actually a huge fan of it and that's kind of how I hire too. I think it's easier to do it that way because one, there's a lot of incentives that are aligned. Like you feel like, you know, it's the right culture, it's the right person who's coming in and doing it. I'm a little more skeptical of like working with the recruiting team and finding a head of and finding, you know, like finding like super top-down leadership positions first. I know a lot of companies do that and start there with the one person and then like go hire the entire team, but I just optimize for what needs solving then. And I think Uber took this approach and for them it worked out really well. They just found like incredibly good, like high-quality operators in each market who are like, who can do data modeling really well, who can roll up their sleeves and solve any problems, whether it's policy or government stuff, or, you know, hey, how do we price like cars going from place A to place B in this like local thing? Or there's a strike that's happening. What should we do? And they're like, they can just do it and they're just problem solvers. And so I like to model myself after like that kind of culture on like who do we go hire. So I feel like you're doing all the right things.

Yeah, thank you. And another way of, of asking, um, some, some variation of this question is if, if YC came to you and said, hey, Aarthi, one, I'd love some general advice on our international strategy. We're going to hire some international partners and where should we go? How should we think about it? And then maybe a sub-question there could be like, hey, we at YC are big in India, we're big in Nigeria. Does that mean we should hire some partners there or does that mean we should hire partners in places where we're not big because we organically get all this talent anyways and we should hire people in Singapore or whatever? It's another place where there's great founders, but we just don't get that talent. And should those people be alumni, YC alumni, be partners, et cetera? How would you advise? Like an org like YC to think about international strategy?

Yeah, I think YC does a lot of work internationally, like, uh, you know, underneath the, uh, you know, just behind the scenes. I think they do a lot of work. Um, I speak to Anu Hariharan, who runs, uh, the growth side of things at YC. She's a part of the Growth Fund, and, you know, she's, uh, she talks about like her role and the Growth Fund's role is to take like companies that are have found product-market fit at a much more later stage and kind of help them scale and find like the next kind of path to success. But, you know, I've seen, uh, not just from them but overall YC, they do a lot of like roadshows in different international markets. I think a lot of it is like awareness on what YC is. They— I think it's also easy for us to be here in our bubble and be like, of course, like how do they not know what YC is? But, uh, I think I remember even like 5, 6 years ago they used to go to India and talk to a lot of founders and go to different markets and just like tell people. Like, they would host events and just talk to people on what is YC, what do they get out of it, that kind of thing. Now I think Michael Siebel publicly posted this. I think a big chunk, like 40-50% of the YC batch, were all international or something.

Yeah.

So it's clearly paid off, right? And people understand what it is. And also, it's a— it's— the system is great. Like, you know, if you've never done a company, if you've never founded anything, you don't really know how to go about it, especially if you're like straight out of college. This one feels like a 3-month college program except that, you know, you're like being helped and you're being mentored to go do this and scale it. And so, uh, I don't think they have international teams, but YC has been thinking about this for many years now, and, uh, they just do it the hard way where it's like the core team goes internationally and talks to founders and talks to companies and is able to scale. So I mean, I don't really have advice for something like YC, but I think if you're doing it for the first ever time and scaling out internationally, especially when you're like looking at incubation, I would look at it as like before you start hiring on the ground, like what do you want out of it? Like do you want, say, a portfolio mix of say half your companies coming internationally And if that's what you're looking for, what do they need to do? And in some cases it might just be the equivalent of the Tuesday dinners, which I used to be a really big fan of where, you know, my batch was the last batch where we had PG and Jessica just do these Tuesday dinners. And it was really fun because one, if startups are in a struggle, everyone's just miserable and you're going through this like really hard time. And you can just commiserate and come together. Like in my batch, DoorDash was a part of it and we were like, how are those guys consistently crushing it? I don't get it. Like for me, everything was such a struggle and we had a bunch of these companies that were just clearly doing well. And so it just brings, it just normalizes everything. It makes you like aspirational. Like you look at it and say, okay, I wanna be that. And then you get some really good founders who come in and talk about their story and it turns out that incredibly successful founders also had like a really shitty path to get there. And so, uh, like, you know, they would talk about their first checks and how it took them forever to close the first round of fundraising and all of that stuff. So I think international markets, I think before you go all in and go hire big teams and all of that, I think it's about like what is the portfolio mix that you'd like to look at and scale that. I don't know if that's helpful at all, but—

Yeah, that is very helpful. Yeah, one of the related questions that a program like YC or we would have is, is it worth building kind of a localized experience? The work that you mentioned that they do is more top of funnel. Like, hey, they go out.

Exactly.

They talk to people and that's great. And then the question is, should there be something more local on the ground or is that not what they want actually? And that's in this remote world, for example. And so that's what we're— of course, back then YC was just come to SF. Now everybody's remote and so they're not going to come to SF. But what is your take there? It's a bit tactical, but what do you think about it?

Yeah, no, I, yeah, it is tactical and that's kind of what I like about it. I think it's just not knowing too much about your, like the operations, internal operations side of things. I think 3 years ago things would have been different, but now everyone's used to remote, you know, for even for YC Alumni Demo Day, like 300+ companies was entirely remote. So, and it was all recorded, which means I could just like, And the whole Saturday night, I literally spent like midnight to 5:00 AM, just combing through all the applications and just looking through it. So I don't know. I just, I'm a little skeptical of like hire first and then think about what they do.

Yeah.

I think for me, it's like, go solve the problem first. And if it's like really impossible to do it being remote, then you can go hire locally because hiring locally, hiring part is one part of the challenge, but then now you have people on the ground who you're responsible for. And that is hard because then you have to think about, are they happy? Are— oh my God, they're like, you know, 6,000 miles away. And are they like feeling motivated and incentivized and all of that stuff? So, and the culture, does it like bleed through there? Does it not? I don't know. I feel like that's a lot of things to go tackle on before you found the next set of, like, you know, for you it's like next set of like founders and companies.

Yeah.

who are in these markets kind of thing. So I would do everything remote. I would kind of use it as like top of the funnel first, and as you get mid-funnel or bottom funnel, then think about like, do you really need people on the ground versus like, can you scale everything remotely through processes? And at some point it may not— it's probably not going to scale, and then you can think about hiring and all of that.

Zooming out a little bit but still talking about the role, and I'm sure you talked about this with other people when you You talked about international with them.

Yeah.

Where does international fit in in the org and how does it best leverage the resources of the org, but also best fit in from a tactical, who does it report to, where does it fit to more philosophical?

Yeah. I realized that there was again, no one straight answer for this when I looked around, because this is a role at Clubhouse, at least where nobody had ever done this before. They were hiring for the first time on this head of international. So when Paul and Rohan were looking for this role, they were like, you know, we were going back and forth on like, what does this mean? What would success look like? And all of that. And I report to Paul and it's just easy. Like, you know, we are a small enough company where we can actually make that happen. But in a lot of other companies, what I've seen is it either reports to the CEO or it falls under the marketing partnerships org. or it falls into the growth arc if they have a growth team. And so that's kind of what I've seen where international usually gets tied to marketing, strategic partnerships, hiring like country managers, like that kind of thing. And that's where it rolls up in like very, very mature companies. So for us, it just made like, we didn't have a lot of that when we, you know, 8 months ago or so when I started. And so for me, it was just like, Let's just do the simple thing, like come on board, set up structures, set up processes, get a sense of which markets we want to tackle and what projects we want to go build in each market. And then we can figure out reporting structure and roles and all of that stuff. Let's not pretend like we are a big, big, big business right away. We just have to get the process going and then we can scale the executive team and leadership and structure and all of that stuff. So that was kind of the understanding that I came in with and that's worked out pretty well so far. I think it's really about hiring the right sort of people who are flexible enough to think about it and not get hung up to like, but this was supposed to be my scope and this was meant to be my role and these many reports and all of that. At the end of the day, if the company's finding really good success in finding product-market fit, none of that stuff matters.

Yeah.

And you just have to double down and grow and scale and hire whoever and just keep going.

Zooming out and gearing towards closing here, you were at Clubhouse, which has how many people working for it?

Now it's about 90. The entire company is about 92 or so, something like that. Yeah.

Obviously, Clubhouse has had unparalleled hypergrowth in the last year, almost 2, but it's still at the stage where culture is being built and formed. And you've been at cultures that have scaled, so you've seen sort of that rise. What do you think it's really important to get right during that hypergrowth phase of, hey, in the beginning it was just kind of organic, it was all the people that everyone knew, and as you get bigger, you have to be a lot more deliberate about setting the culture that you want. What do you think is most important to get right or to avoid getting wrong?

Great. Yeah, I think It's something I think about a lot. I think for Clubhouse, it's still a little too early to apply a framework yet. I think we are at a point where we found really great hypergrowth very, very early on, almost to the point where we grew too fast and it put a ton of pressure on everything, like literally from like infrastructure scaling each room all the way to like how quickly can we go higher in each of these markets and everything. I think for me, the parallel is when I worked at Netflix, and this was a while ago, and Netflix was not anywhere close to the really global behemoth that it is right now. That year was 2010, 2011. Netflix was doing DVDs and they were just pivoting into streaming and about 400 people all in the company. And I remember, I lived in San Francisco, I had to commute down to Los Gatos, which is all the way at the very end of Silicon Valley, the other side of it. And that's when, I don't know if you know or remember this, Erik, but that's when we had this whole like Qwikster fiasco where, you know, they tried to split the company as DVD and streaming. My job at that time was one of the earliest people to do the Netflix streaming SDK, make sure that Netflix works on TVs and set-top boxes and Blu-ray players and all of that. And so my job was a little bit international partnerships too, because I had to go work with hardware companies in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea and integrate Netflix into their devices. I think for me at that point, what was really interesting was looking at Reed and his, like, the way he set structure and him being a leader where the company was clearly going through this big crisis. And, you know, there was this SNL skit with like Reed with a teal shirt and all of that stuff. And, you know, it was just easy to like be like, oh, look at those guys kind of thing. And at that time there was no original content programming. There is no like international markets. There's nothing. You think all we had was like Netflix in the US that doing DVDs. So it wasn't super clear what the future would look like, but Reid basically painted this vision of like, look, okay, what if we had DVD streaming? We had streaming. What if every TV, every device had Netflix built in? And what if it could be content in every market? Like when we think about international, what would it look like if you had Bollywood movies for folks in India and, you know, for Brazil you had like the right set of like TV shows? And what I thought was really interesting and how Reed did it was he painted a really good long-term vision on where he wanted to see the company be. And they've stayed mostly true to what they said they would do 10 years later or 11 years later. But the way they tried out things were these really small experiments. So the first experiment internationally was Latin America. And so Netflix were like dipping its toes into one market, very scoped, and trying it out. Then they were like, well, we want to do original content, but where do we start? And instead of doing like a, you know, Game of Thrones, House of Cards kind of big budget thing. They basically were like, we're gonna renew one season of Arrested Development and produce it ourselves and see what happens kind of thing. They just tried a lot of these bets and at a point when they had, and they would have success criteria and they would publicly, they would talk about it and if it hit that, then they would double down and scale kind of thing. So I really like that culture of you set a long-term vision, So it feels like everybody's aligned on what that path to success looks like. And if folks who are not aligned, if it's not a good fit, then they should go do something else. But then the ways to get there are really tactical. You're not going to blow this huge budget and tell your board that I'm spending like a billion dollars trying to do like House of Cards kind of thing. And I really, really liked that. And I've learned a lot since then on like, how do we go set a vision, but also be really, really tactical and scrappy, even as you are a big company?

By the way, on the Netflix example, I see that they have co-CEO because they split the business. Do you think that is a construct that works or can work, or what's important to get right? And when does it work? Is it when they're just different businesses, or what do you think about that?

Yeah, I think it's just different businesses, and they have roles and responsibilities that are just not overlapping, and I think they can make it work. And, you know, they're at a stage where I know very little about the business because I haven't worked at Netflix in over a decade now, but I think just looking at it from the outside, it just feels like complete separation of church and state and they can just go do their thing. But also I think Reed is just that kind of a person. Like he's just a really good leader. He's probably one of the greatest storytellers I've seen. You know, like a lot of how he comes across, I think it just like hides the amount of aggression that he puts into a lot of the products and efforts and stuff that he does. So It's just really easy to write him off as this very genial, grandfatherly type, but he's just very, very good at execution and just staying focused and setting a really good long-term vision.

Speaking of storytelling, we'll close on this one. You are a storyteller yourself, the great host of the Good Times Show with your husband, Sharam. And you've had Elon, you've had Zuck, you've had normal people like myself. There's a lot of drama on tech Twitter this week. If only we could solve it on the Good Times Show. Why don't you just say a minute about what's upcoming for you in terms of Good Times Show or anything else?

It started out as a completely random thing, to be honest. I wish it was all strategic and well thought through. It wasn't. I feel like nothing in my path so far has been very structured and thought through. If there's one takeaway from this whole thing, it's like, it's okay to not completely curate your career path and manage the structure. I think you can like find the right things that you want to gravitate towards and, you know, good things will happen. I think for the Good Times Show, we literally started it about a year ago. I think it was December 29th or so, the first show. And it was this goofy little idea, you know, we'd never— it had been about a little over a year into the pandemic. And, uh, Shriram and I love hosting people at home. We like doing these like dinner parties and that kind of thing, especially in the world of tech and sciences and that kind of thing. I tend to like learn a lot from people who are like just really good at what they do in their fields. And we just stopped doing that, you know, we, and so we were like, what if we could do that virtually and have everybody else join? And hey, there's this platform called Clubhouse and we could just do this. And so we kind of started this as like a really goofy idea. And it was, you know, there was Steven Sinofsky, there was Marc Andreessen, and we just like got a bunch of these folks in who are prolific in their own worlds. Like, Stephen's like, you know, he's basically saved Microsoft with leading Windows and he has a ton of stories to tell and he has a Substack going. So we were like, we should get him. And Marc Andreessen, as you know, is just like probably one of the greatest thinkers, readers, you know, doers of our time. So I think we just got these folks in and a lot of the early conversations were all like, like pretty similar to what we chatted, which is like, how do you do performance reviews and how do you fundraise and things like that? And then I think the Elon episode happened and it was again, like fairly not very well structured. It was just like random. And then it just blew up. And then the next week, Zuck showed up and, you know, I'd worked with Mark internally at Facebook and everything, but, you know, I think I didn't realize what a big deal that was gonna be. And then, you know, we had not just like folks in tech, but people from other areas, other industries who were like trying to dip into the world of NFTs and crypto and all of that. So we had like Calvin Harris and Chainsmokers, and, you know, we had Virgil Abloh at some point, and then we were able to like scale into like other markets and industries. And so for me, it feels like it fills a gap of just, I want to learn from other people, and that's really what we do. Like, I think we got— like, I think the Elon episode, we got a lot of criticism on like, these two are not savvy hosts, and we're like, No, we are not. Like, what gave it away? We're just like goofy little people trying to like do this. So it's been a year. We've done about 100 episodes. And I think a lot of it is like, we just didn't want to give it up because we're just having so much fun. We still are. I think when Coinbase went public, we got the whole team in and it was a really emotional moment, right? Like everyone's like, it's a decade of going through this whole thing. There was a whole crypto winter, and they survived that and came here. And just being in that room and celebrating with them was awesome. And so we've had these big moments where I felt like the conversation was just really fun, and and I've learned a lot there. So hopefully it's adding value to other people too. We you know we'll keep this going as long as we can, but I've never seen myself as a creator, and neither has Shriram. And now it's like. Oh wow, like people like actually recognize us. I'm like, we know you from the Good Times Show. And we're like, that's so crazy, but thank you. And so it's just been fun.

That's awesome. I've been a big enjoyer of the show and learned a lot from it. And I appreciate you coming on this podcast and sharing your learnings on product and culture and international. I've— I think the audience learned a lot. So thanks so much for coming on, Arthi.

Thank you. Thanks for coming on. And you know, you've been a pretty early part of the Good Times Show. And, you know, with On Deck too, I think there's a lot of like, I've come on Deck to do like live shows before where I've just talked to a lot of the On Deck fellows. I think it's such an interesting concept. It's such a great idea. And I think it's like, these are the set of people who are gonna go off and build some really incredible things. So you're basically building a foundation for the next set of like future founders and future thinkers and all of that. So I think I'm a big fan and— And, you know, we should get you back on the show at some point.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, we'll have an announcement pretty soon, so I'll ping you about that.

Awesome. Yeah, that sounds good.

Yeah, grateful for your support in On Deck. Thanks, Aarthi. Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for listening to today's episode. Execs is produced by On Deck, where top talent goes to start companies, find their next roles, or invest in their careers. If you're looking to start a company, uplevel your career, or navigate a career transition, I encourage you to visit beyonddeck.com.

See you next time.