Greylock's Josh Elman On Growth Hacking

Welcome to Ask a VC, where we put VCs in the hot seat. Today we're joined by Greylock's newest partner, Josh Elman. Welcome, Josh. We're really excited to have you here.

Thanks for having me, Lina.

I'm going to go into your bio. As I mentioned, you're the newest partner, just announced last week. You focus on consumer investments, and prior to Greylock, you were the product lead for growth and relevance at Twitter. You worked on platform at Facebook and led the launch of Facebook Connect, and you were also part of the early team at LinkedIn and Zazzle, and you also worked at RealNetworks. Oh my gosh, that was a mouthful. You've done a lot, obviously, especially in product. So describe to me, what is the difference between a principal, which is what you were at Greylock before, and being a partner now?

Yeah, well, I think venture capital firms are partnerships, and they're really based around the idea of you know, a team of people who work with their limited partners who've trusted them with money to invest. And the partner's responsibility is to go identify, find companies to invest in. The whole partnership kind of agrees or concurs and supports the partner in leading that investment. And then the partner really becomes the steward of that money that's been invested in the company, joining the board of the company, being a close confidant of the company, doing everything they can to help the company, whether it be recruiting, and, you know, at Greylock we also have other services that help with things like recruiting, and we're always focused on how can we help the company be successful, really as the steward of that money. For principals and associates and junior partners at other firms, you're not necessarily in the position where you're a steward of the money and really the representative of the firm and the partnership with the companies, but you're really part of sourcing and identifying deals and helping make decisions and helping make those companies, but the investment partnership is really the one that's trusted with making those decisions. So, you know, I feel so lucky and privileged to have been invited to kind of join the group and sort of both, you know, be part of the decision-making process, but also really be trusted to go help find and identify and get to work with some companies that I really believe can be some of the next big pillars of what we're all trying to build.

Well, leading into that, I want to jump to a reader question because, you know, you've had a lot of expertise in social networks.

Yeah.

And this question is about SoLoMo, which is social, local, mobile. The question is, do you think that local networks are gaining traction at the expense of social networks like Facebook? Do you see that as a long-term trend? I guess local networks for me would be something like Nextdoor, like a neighborhood community type of platform. What do you think?

I'll start with our local networks, something that's new, that's getting interesting. I think Nextdoor is a great example of something that feels like it's more part of the future than anything we have today. The idea that the people around you should be, you should be just as close and able to interact with them and message them. And if you, there's a crime in your neighborhood or even if you just need to borrow a lawnmower and you don't have one, before things like Nextdoor, you just didn't have any way to message the people around you. There's other things like Highlight and a bunch of stuff that have tried to test the ways of how we're interacting kind of when we're out in the world. And I think we're just at the beginning of what things like Highlight and sort of people discovery can really do.

Right.

I don't think this takes— so if the question is like, does it take away from social networks? I don't think so. I think the idea of like the friends and the people that we care about and the other interesting content we want to find on Twitter or Instagram or other things are going to be around for a really long time. They've become these kind of new pillars of ways we get information and share. But I think we're just at the beginning of the fact that we all have computers in our pockets all the time. And they're both beacons of who we are and where we are. And they're ways that we can connect with the people around us. I think we're just so untapped with all the things that that can become. And both in Nextdoor, which is trying to build these communities around your own neighborhood and a way to, you know, when you're out and about in your neighborhood, you can quickly take a picture of, you know, something good or bad that happened and send it to everybody, all the way through what kind of what it means to discover people and see what's going on around you that you didn't have access to before. And I'm super excited about what this can become now that, you know, we've gone from some people having smartphones to more people to now just about everybody.

Yeah.

carrying that around.

What are your thoughts on niche networks or marketplaces? For example, there's a lot of fashion niche marketplaces, let's say like Poshmark, which I've been using more recently, that I think have a— there's something there. What do you think that is, and is that going to sustain itself?

I don't really use the word niche to describe something like Poshmark, a lot of these things, because I think fashion is a Hundreds of billions or even into the trillions of dollars of industry worldwide every year. All of these things like Poshmark or Uber for transportation or Airbnb for changing the way that we collaboratively share hotels, they're all tackling these entrenched existing businesses where there really are billions and hundreds of billions of dollars spent every year on transportation, hotels, fashion. Right. Changing the way that it doesn't always need to be some entrenched company that sets up a big facility that then becomes the way that you get everything entrenched, but instead, people can provide this to other people dynamically, transacted by the internet, connected by the internet. The way that these marketplaces are going to form around almost every industry we see, I think, is going to be huge. I think Poshmark is a great example of what it's doing within fashion that starts small as, hey, I have a sweater and I want to sell it out of my closet. Oh, somebody else had a neat thing and I want to buy it from them, to like, you know, some people will buy from stores, more people will start buying on the second market.

Right. That's a really interesting— I mean, it's really interesting to see how those industries like you said fashion, you know, hotels and travel are being disrupted by people like Airbnb, Uber, Poshmark. I want to move on to our next reader question. Another area where you've had a lot of experience, growth hacking. What resources would you recommend for growth hacking for a startup? What advice would you give to a startup that already has a product and paid users?

Well, I think the couple of great things— this term growth hacking is kind of funny because I don't really think it's hacking at all. I think building these patterns of sustainable long-term growth is actually a pretty challenging and important thing for every company to become expert at. But I think it's great that it's entered the conversation. In the past 2 years, there's been much more realization that it's not just build a great product and they will come, but it's build a great product and build a ton of great tools and features and ways that people interact with it that cause more people to come and that cause more people to get engaged when they come. And so now that it's really in the conversation, I think there's a couple things. I think Quora has some really great resources on it. I think there's just some great bloggers who both blog really well about it and have written other things. And I've been writing a few things even on Medium. which is kind of my new place to sort of write articles and throw them out there that have helped me kind of share some of the stuff I've learned. There's a Growth Hackers Conference that Gagan Piani started a couple years ago. That's gone on a couple times.

A former TechCruncher.

He was a former TechCruncher. And then I even put together like a Product SF conference that we had in April, and one of our panels was on growth, but we were really talking to all product managers about how to think about, you know, growing their products and why that's fundamental to just also building something great.

Yeah, well, that's definitely going to be a buzzword, I feel like. Like big data or something we're going to be hearing more about.

Yeah, certainly.

The last question that we had for this segment was, do investors that have technical talents like you, do you examine the code of a startup that you're evaluating? Like how in-depth do you get in there when it comes to evaluating the technical part of a startup? a startup that you're potentially going to invest in?

Yeah, well, I think there's a couple parts to that question. I mean, I think when we try to invest in a company, we're trying to really understand what is special about what the team and the founders and the original product has done and how it's working and how people are using it before, you know, we want to try to understand how you can take that asset and build something much bigger. If you looked at the original LinkedIn, you had to understand how interesting it was in the way the network got formed. But you then had to really believe in this fuzzy vision of this vibrant network of hundreds of millions of professionals. And so we try to get in to understand how the people think, how they think about the product, how they made as many decisions as possible on exactly why the product works. And when there's points that are truly— it's the technical innovation that actually matters, there are some times when we might even have experts. I'm probably not the best person to bring in to look at code anymore. It's been about 10 years since I was writing code every day. But we'll bring in other experts to examine that if that's really what's one of the fundamental assets of the company.

Right.

In most cases in the consumer internet these days, it's actually been more about the product design and the network and things that we really can play with and examine and use ourselves and use with our friends and interview users who are using without needing to go all the way to the code level. But if you're doing a new security firewall protocol or things that I don't understand as well, there may be reasons to actually get all the way down to the code level. But it's all about not understanding how it works today, but how the choices made and how something works today can help lead to those much bigger, longer-term opportunities in the future.

Great. Well, Josh, we're so happy that you came on the show. And good luck with this new journey that you're on.

Thanks. I'm looking forward to figuring it out along the way.

Great. Thanks.

Thanks, Lena.