Sri Batchu: Biggest Growth Lesson from Instacart & Opendoor; 70% of Experiments Should Fail | E1040

You have to let some fires burn. If you think you have to fight every fire on your team, you're going to burn yourself out. So you just have to realize that like some things are just not going to be worked on for a bit and they're going to be broken and be comfortable with that because they're less important and try to be intentional about that. So whenever we do planning, it's like, what are you not doing? You know, name the fire that you're letting burn.

Sri, I am so excited for this. I spoke to Apurva, I spoke to Evan, I spoke to Jason Child. They all said terrible things. No, I'm joking. They said fantastic things. But thank you so much for joining me today.

Yeah, of course. I'm very excited. Huge fan of your show. So excited about the conversation.

That is very, very kind of you. I want to start— and growth is this kind of weird new-ish discipline, really. So how did you first make your way into the world of growth? And what was that first entry point for you?

Yeah, as you mentioned, growth is a relatively new field that's at the intersection of product, marketing, and data and analytics, right? I've come here in a slightly different path than most, probably. I've been thinking about growth both as a consultant and an investor prior to becoming an operator. And I joined Opendoor when it was 40 people in hypergrowth phase, got to see it grow to, you know, 2,000 people nearly and $5 billion of revenue. And being an early business journalist, worked on anything that, you know, needed help. So sales, analytics, pricing, etc. And then subsequently went to Instacart where the key problem that they had at the time was building out the ads business. And so I kind of leveraged my analytics and investment background into a growth rolled that way, spent time working on growth at Instacart, primarily in the ads business first and then the overall business, and now lead growth at Ramp. So I kind of came to it via an investment and analytics background versus a product or marketing background, which is often how you see a lot of growth leaders. And I think you'll see more people like me because I think increasingly growth is a discipline of making a portfolio of bets, thinking about ROI and thinking about data and experimentation in a rigorous way. Which I think my background speaks to.

I totally agree with you in terms of portfolio bets there. I think the best growth and marketing leaders are actually very much like VCs, place many bets, analyze what works, doubles down efficiently. So I totally agree with you there. I do have to ask, you mentioned Opendoor, you mentioned Instacart, two incredible companies. If you were to think about one or two big takeaways and how they impacted your mindset from each, what would you say they would be, Sri?

Yeah, one lesson and experience that I remember vividly from my time at Opendoor, for those of, folks that know the market is, you know, Opendoor was the leader in the space called iBuying, buying and selling homes. And Zillow, the largest player, you know, in real estate, had entered our market in 2017. And as you can imagine, that had some impact on our growth because they entered the exact same markets that we were in. And we at Opendoor had a choice to make, which was, do we price compete? Do we price match Zillow to acquire customers if Zillow is bidding higher on homes or not? And, and it was a really tough decision. And, and something I learned from that process is sticking to your conviction if you've arrived at it on a first principles basis, even if it gets tough. So what we decided at Opendoor is our biggest asset in competitive mode is the ability to price accurately, and we're not going to compromise that for short-term growth. And we stuck to our guns. We never did a price match and we never negotiated on price with sellers of homes. Lo and behold, we were right longer term in the sense that Zillow eventually lost their shirt and exited the market a few years before the market crash. Right. So they left while still in a peak real estate market. So I'm proud of that decision. But, you know, it was painful for a while while we were in that competitive situation.

How do you analyze the statement the market can stay irrational longer than your company can stay solvent? Because you may be right, but if they had enough cash, say SoftBank was behind them, they could have kept outbuying you forever.

That's certainly true. And that was a risk that we took. And I think our mitigating factor there is our overall goal was to be, and we were, consistently profitable on every cohort of homes that we were buying. So our goal was even if they were outstripping us in volume, we would be able to survive for a long period of time because we were unit economic positive as long as we were doing our business right.

So stick to convictions, stick to first principles. This is Opendoor. What about Instacart?

Yeah, Instacart was in some ways an even more complicated business than Opendoor because it's a four-sided marketplace. We have shoppers, we have buyers, we have advertisers, and we have the retailers. That are on the platform as well, with various different incentives and, and revenue streams. And so as you can imagine, it was a lot of stuff to juggle. And one thing I learned from Apoorva and Instacart is simplification is a superpower and it's actually very difficult. And a lot of executives, you know, when they're faced with two potentially high-impact initiatives, are often tempted to say, let's do both. Let's figure out how we can do both. The good ones can pick one and make a clear decision. I think the best ones will just say, actually, we're doing neither because they don't fit in our overall strategy and are distracting. And Apoorva was particularly good at this. And it's great when the founder says it, right? And then people are like, okay, all right, this is great. We're going to focus on our original thing. That was something that I picked up from my time at Instacart. And there were a few of us that we had a joke that we would call ourselves the VPs of no., we would be the people that would tell people no, like we are not doing that because we are focusing on the things that matter most.

I want to start with, you know, this show fundamentally is a benchmark for what great growth and great growth leaders look like. I think there's a misunderstanding on growth and VP of growth. What does growth or VP of growth mean to you and how do you define it?

Yeah, it's a great question. As you mentioned, like if you were to poll 10 different people on what their growth team looks like, you would get 10 different answers, uh, today. And it's often determined, at least you know, historically kind of ad hoc based on who's in the seat, who was hired first, what the org structure is, rather than a principled decision. Personally, to me, a growth function is something that you build post-product market fit and is the home for all high-volume data and experimentation-oriented customer acquisition, retention, engagement strategies. So what does that mean? Typically things like paid marketing, SEO, as well as product-led growth website. I would recommend working as closely together as possible structurally. And at Ramp, they're all under one roof, which is great, and have the same kind of north stars and goals. But I know other companies design them differently. But me personally, I think you got to put everything that drives acquisition and retention that's high volume and experimentation-oriented under one roof.

When you say under one roof, what do you mean by that? Do you mean like it's integrated into product and engineering? Do you mean it's a standalone team? How do you think about that and what does under one roof mean?

I think there's a couple of different ways to do it. I think there's, you could do it structurally as a different team and have like the growth product leader report to, you know, the growth leader as well as the high volume marketing channel leaders also reporting into the same leaders. So that would be under one roof in a very literal sense in terms of reporting lines and structure. I think you can, which works, you can play with dotted lines versus solid lines on that. You know, a lot of product leaders that are very principled about not having product teams report outside of product. Same with marketing leaders on that. So hence there's so many permutations of growth leadership. I think the other way that you can do it is even if you don't have solid line reporting into one place is clear accountability. Like all 3 or whatever of these teams are driving towards the same North Star goals and are jointly accountable. The problem with a lot of joint accountability I tend to find in org structures is when more than one person is responsible, no person is responsible. And so that's a balance that you have to strike culturally.

You also said about North Star metric that I think one of the biggest problems that I see, honestly, Sri, is that people have the wrong North Star metric. Often it's revenue, and revenue for me is an output, it's not an input. How do you advise founders today on choosing the right North Star metric, and how do you approach it?

Yeah, I think as you mentioned, there's not a per— I personally think there'll never be a perfect North Star metric for growth. It'll obviously depend on your business, and there's always kind of multiple pushes and pulls that you're trying to optimize for while you're into that. Obviously, one North Star metric would be simple and intuitive for people to understand. You want it to be, as you mentioned, something that the teams can actually directly impact. So something that is much closely related to their inputs, but something that's also very aligned with the ultimate value creation of the company, right? And I typically like to have like a volume goal and efficiency or ROI goal for growth teams. On the volume goal, like if you were to take the B2B example, right? You could have the growth team's goal be some sort of qualified leads like MQLs or PQLs or something like that. But As you know, businesses are ultimately valued on long-term dollars of profit and cash flow generation. And humans are very good at intentionally or unintentionally optimizing for the targets and metrics that they're given. So in this particular example, how could it go wrong if you give a team qualified lead goal? They can hit that goal by bringing a bunch of small leads or lower quality leads that don't end up driving much profit, right? And there's a lot of temptation, as you mentioned, for a lot of teams to go the other extreme in that case and be like, okay, well, what is it I'm really trying to measure? Okay, why don't we hold the team accountable for contribution profit dollars? Because that's actually very correlated to long-term value. Then you have the opposite problem where the results are so far away from the sphere of influence of the team, both in terms of the time it takes as well as their own actions, that the feedback loop is slow and the teams become demotivated and it becomes almost like an irrelevant target metric because they're like, we can't we can't really move it, or if we move it, we won't see it for a really long time. So I think you have to kind of strike the right balance there and have some guardrails. So typically for B2B, you know, where I land at is like dollars of like SQL pipeline, which kind of controls for that quality element and controls for the size of the lead element as it are. So that's just one example, but obviously depending on your business model, you want to find something somewhere in between where it's highly correlated with the actual business outcomes that you're trying to drive, but close enough to the actions of the team that they can directly impact it and have a feedback loop.

You said there about the speed of the feedback loop being so important. You said before, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Could be a line from Kama Sutra. Some things get edited out, some don't. We'll see what the editors decide on that one. What did you mean by slow is smooth and smooth is fast?

Yeah, I think this one's actually repurposed from the Marines. But basically, the concept is that— well, I'll maybe just use the Growth example directly, which is in the early days of Growth, you've got kind of a small ragtag team that's throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and seeing what works. This works for a bit, but often tends to devolve into undiagnosable chaos. If things aren't working, you have no idea why. And if things are working, you still have no idea why and don't know where to— double down. So what I tend to do, you know, usually bringing in a growth leader is a nice opportunity to do it. You can do it any time, which is to slow down a bit, like reset the basic structures of a team. So what do you do during this quote unquote slowdown period is one thing is what we just talked about is set the right North Star metrics for the team, create a framework for how do you prioritize projects How do you measure success and ROI? And I think once you have that clear process of this is how we select projects, prioritize them, promote experiments, you know, is clean and understood and aligned, I think it helps the team move a lot faster. I don't want to slow down teams with a lot of process, but I think some sort of lightweight process and aligned framework on how we, you know, select projects and, you know, scale them to general availability or what have you as they succeed. Is I think really important.

If we select a project and we decide to focus on it, what is the success versus failure rate that we should expect within growth? What does that look like to you?

In my experience, and I've seen this to be pretty consistent actually across the various companies that I've worked on these types of projects, growth has just a typically high failure rate. And my historical success rate that I've seen at various companies is around 30%, you know, so two-thirds of your projects are likely to fail. What's important is, you know, that you fail quickly and conclusively, right? And happy to talk more about what that looks like, but—

Yeah, yeah, can we actually? How should you increase the speed to failure?

Yeah, I think on speed point, it's really around reducing cycle times. I think there's a bunch of cultural baggage that you get, which is the unit of planning time that you work with the larger that is, the slower you are as a company. You know, Google has, you know, OKRs that are 1-year based, right? Startups should have time periods of planning that are much, much shorter. We at Ramp still, for example, run the growth team, whether it's product or non-product teams as well, on a 2-week sprint cadence. So you really reduce the cycle time to output at least. I mean, obviously some projects are going to take longer than that, but you have the 2-week accountability mark on like like, what have you shipped so far? That really pushes the speed point. And at Ramp, the other thing that we've done culturally as a company as well is to just really drill that in into the teams by talking about days actually. So we talk about what day it is since the founding of Ramp at every all-hands, at every board meeting, etc. So people start thinking about the smallest unit of time as days. Like, what have you shipped today? You know, it's an implicit kind mental model that we have at Ramp. And something that's funny to see is it's something that's spreading via the Ramp alumni, you know, some of whom I've invested in, where they in their investor updates say day number X since founding of my company, and this is what we've shipped or accomplished over the last month or quarter or whatever.

Can I ask you a hard one that's not in schedule? Speaking of successes and failures, you said 70% fail. What's been the biggest failed growth experiment you've done and how did it change your mindset?

Things can fail in two ways, right? One is they— you don't grow with the experiment or you grow in the wrong way and it hurts the business in a different way. So I'll pick an example of the second kind. When we were at Opendoor, we— competitive situation and growth was slowing and we were like, okay, we should try to figure out other ways of driving scalable growth that are not, you know, paid advertising or what have you. So one idea which seemed obvious that we had was there's a bunch of people that are listing their homes on the market rather than trying to, you know, get buyers that are, that are not agent represented. Why don't we just put bids on homes that are listed on the market based on, you know, whatever our pricing model to drive acquisition volume at, at Opendoor. I don't know if you guys, if you see why this didn't work coming already, but as you can imagine, when you're buying a listed home, there's a few things happening there. If the person is willing to sell to you after they've listed, it means there's probably some asymmetric information. They know something about the home that you don't because it hasn't sold and they've gotten a bunch of buyer feedback and they're willing to now take it off the market and sell it to you. There's also more costs involved for the seller when it's a listed home because they still have to pay their agent commission and they have to pay Opendoor, etc. So the kind of buyer that's willing to make that decision there's a ton of adverse selection on the property that our diligence process couldn't catch. These homes, you know, we did this program for a few months and we learned that they were tremendously unprofitable for Opendoor because of the adverse selection element. And we had to shut down the program.

So what did you learn as a result of that?

Yeah, great question. I think a lot of growth teams, especially when push comes to shove, think about, okay, let's, let's hit our goals of whatever, you know, top line North Star metric goals that we've talked about. And, and don't think about kind of pre-mortem what, what might happen, like what can go wrong as well as like really keep in mind that paired metric that we talked about. So actually, I don't know if I mentioned earlier when we talked about North Stars, we want a volume goal and an efficiency goal. So you want something that you track track even as you're hitting volumes to make sure that you're driving growth profitably or efficiently, right? And so for something like this, we probably should have had a, what is the specific profitability of this program and should we track it early to make sure that it doesn't go off the rails? It would have been one way to solve for this.

Can I ask you, when you think about pre-mortems, does that inhibit your ability to move fast and experiment quickly?

Yeah, I think you have to be selective on any process, right? And try to shy away from as much as possible, in my opinion. So I typically think of like premortems as something that feels like a big departure from current strategy or something that's a lot of investment or that you believe has a lot of high potential in terms of visibility or risk or pipeline generation. For things like that is where I would recommend doing a premortem.

You mentioned throwing spaghetti at walls. Brilliant analogy. But it is the early days of a growth team that are sometimes most important in setting the foundations. When is the right time to start thinking about a growth team?

I think many of the other guests on your podcast have also said this before, which is finding product market fit, in my opinion, is the founder's primary job. It is not something that you outsource to a growth team. In my view, like a growth team in the beginning days is honestly like sales team, the founder, and maybe one kind of like early career generalist that has like an analytical background that can run some experiments and tests, right? I think once you have clear product market fit and you have some escape velocity and you're actually like growing is when I would actually staff a growth team that's more than like one person, right? I don't know where the right number is. Is it like $5 million ARR, maybe something like that? I don't know. I'm sure people can arrive at different numbers or thresholds to get there, but that's like one opinion.

I would love you to give me a very precise—

at $4.23 million ARR, you need to at that point.

Okay, so say we find that tipping point where we need it. Do we hire a junior analyst who is super analytical and smart and hustles and experiments, or do we hire a growth leader? Which role is the right to hire for?

A growth leader is helpful when you have multiple, like, quote unquote, programs that are starting to show work. So when I say programs, I mean, you've spent a little bit on paid marketing, it seems like it's working, you've got potentially somebody full-time working on paid marketing or thinking about it, and you've, you know, you've got some initial traction on product-led growth or what have you, is when I would say you start looking for that like, you know, director-plus level of person. The early days of growth can be managed by, in my opinion, a lot of different types of people. I actually really like the Biz Ops profile. For the early days until you're like ready to really put some gas on the fire and, you know, hire a VP. But I think what's great about growth is that it's truly a cross-disciplinary field. And so I actually think people that are generalists do a lot better than hiring a specialist early on.

Do you think you need to hire someone who's been ahead of growth before? It's such a small field. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't think so. I think what you want to look for is people that have, you know, the T-shaped classic thing where they have like a deep spike in one area or one discipline of growth in some way. And whether that spike is product, some function of marketing, or analytics and data, and you can invest in somebody to try to scale into the other areas and really build out a growth function. And you're right there. It's not like the function has been around for so long that there are so many people that you can hire from that are good.

So speaking of investing in someone, I need to fricking hire them. And you're my angel investor, Sri, so you get to help me. How do I structure the process for hiring the first growth hire? And what do the stages look like?

I could probably speak to, uh, like, um, a more senior growth hire, how you kind of think about it. I think in terms of sourcing, uh, I don't think the process looks that different, um, versus, uh, another kind of senior leader or what have you that you're trying to do. Um, and I I think Gokul has actually done a good job of summarizing on Twitter what people actually do, which is use your network of your investors and executives to identify companies and people that you think are 1 to 2 stages ahead of you that are exceptional at the function, namely growth here. And you use those companies and people to find more people and you kind of validate reputations, etc. And depending on how advanced the company is, you target people that are actually at the head of the role at that company, or you target one level below that. And as you know, the best candidates are often passive and the role, as we've talked about before, can be very nebulous. Get ready for a long process because you'll have to like iron out the scope and think about your own org structure as you bring that person in. And then, you know, once you actually get, you know, mutual fit and feel like there's something with a few candidates. I think the next step is actually having them do something that simulates the actual job. I'm a big believer in doing a little bit of homework or case study type of thing. And it works at— I think fundamentally you should do it for all levels. People often think about it as like something that you do for potentially a more junior candidate.

Do we make them do a case study on our company, on their old company, on a neutral company? Which one?

I would prefer the third. The way I kind of think about it is you want a space where neither you nor the candidate has asymmetric information, right? Because then that can cloud your judgment on their performance. You either pick something that is about a third company or you pick a problem at your company that's relatively new to you that you haven't worked out yet and give them the context to see how they think about it. So you're kind of jamming on it together, so to speak.

Do we bring other disciplines in? So they do the case study, they impress. Do we bring head of product engineering? See, how does that work in terms of who we bring in?

Yes, absolutely. And what I actually have done in the past and is have a panel. So not just have them like, you know, write out a case or whatever, but have a small panel where they actually present their work and where you bring the cross-functional leaders in, and you can ask them, you know, questions, see how they react, uh, to, you know, on-the-spot thinking as well as how they react to feedback. And, and you learn a lot about, you know, how this person works. You know, the main thing— you know, we use the term, probably overuse it, growth mindset, uh, in the tech world. But I think it's like especially critical for, for somebody in growth, uh, to be nimble, uh, in their thinking, uh, and, uh, and be open to new information and creative.

So Sri, what questions do we ask in the interview process? What determines the growth mindset? There's some that we love to go back to. I have mine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I always love my favorite is how did you first make money?

My favorite interview question that I ask that tests that, which is a very simple one, is what's something that you are bad at that you enjoy doing? For me, I think one thing that it shows is like, how interested are you in learning versus only doing things that you are good at and how, how afraid are you of failure? I think there are two data points that you get when people struggle to answer that question. If they can't name a single thing that they're bad at that they like doing.

Sure. I mean, there's so many things I suck at, so I stopped doing them.

But I'm sure there's something that you're bad at that you like doing.

What if I told you as a response to that, I believe in focusing on your strengths and really honing in on your superpower because I'll only ever be mediocre at what I'm bad at.

Yeah, and I think that's fair from a skill set perspective. But I think from a knowledge perspective, because this is such an interdisciplinary field, you want somebody that is interested in going places where they necessarily don't have the expertise or knowledge and have that intellectual curiosity and not just staying in their own lane where they are knowledgeable and they're good at something.

Are there other massive red flags that you see in this process that worry you when you see them?

I think if you see a lot of defensiveness during the case presentation, for me, that's like a big red flag. I think people that are very open to feedback and respond thoughtfully versus feeling like they have to quote unquote defend their work. Because look, you worked on it for whatever, a day, on a problem space that you don't know a lot about. So if you, uh, come in with like humility and an open mindset, obviously green flag. Uh, but there are some people that come in pretty defensive.

I mean, it slightly goes back to culture in terms of making them feel safe enough to feel like they can be challenged and that they are safe. And you said before on culture, culture matters more than all structure when it comes to growth. What did you mean by this and how does that impact how you lead and operate today?

I think a lot of companies— and we've had some of this conversation earlier here as well, hem and haw a bit on like, what should the structure of growth be? Like which functions should report in there? Should it be solid? Should it be dotted? Where should product go? Where should lifecycle marketing go? Where should analytics go, et cetera? And yes, those are important questions and eventually you might want to solve them as the company gets much bigger. But to me, what matters more culturally is that all of these functions are actually driving towards the same outcome and have the same culture of speed, comfort with failure, and same mechanisms of working. I think if you have that, I think the reporting structure becomes less important.

So where do people go wrong with those, do you think?

I think where this stuff breaks apart is when each team feels like, oh, actually our team works in a very different way. So our North Star shouldn't be SQL pipeline or whatever you guys agreed, but it should be this other thing that we have the ability to, you know, micro-prioritize or micro-have an impact on. And I think this is where a lot of stuff devolves when you don't have the same common currency for projects and a translation layer. So one example that I'll give is that like, you know, Instacart, the growth and consumer team was over 300 people, right? Like it was a massive team. Massive team that was working on that part of the function. And so with a team that big, obviously it's broken into many, many smaller teams and each team has their own little corner that they're working on, right? Like there's a, you know, there's a team that's working on just like making search faster, making the app load faster and all those things, right? You tell those teams, okay, your goal is profit or your goal is monthly active users. They're going to be like, okay, like how much am I going to really impact that with this small area that I'm working on? And how do I know I'm actually making progress? What we actually did is we would have translation factors for each team on like what they did, how that would impact the monthly active users based on historical data that we would reevaluate.

Can you give me an example of a translation factor? Sorry, you're smarter than me, so I don't know about that.

So what we would say is, okay, so let's say like the load time team's goal was like 6 seconds or what, let's bring it down from 6 seconds to 2 seconds or whatever. But, you know, should we have a 10-person engineering team working on this? Like, what is the impact of this for the overall business? It's hard to know, right? And so what we would do is try to use historical information as well as holdouts to get a sense for, okay, like if we actually accomplish this, we think the propensity to order increases by like 1.2% or whatever, and that translates into X amount. So we give them basically, and as well as the broader team, a way to cross-prioritize, which says that like for each second you deliver, you deliver like 100,000 active users on the platform. And we have that sort of translation for every engineering and other teams at the company. And then when we do the planning of like, okay, we're trying to go from, I'm just making up some numbers, like 5 million active users to 10 million active users this year. Okay, like what is the bridge? And what are all the various teams contributing to help us get there?

I spoke to Evan Moore and he said specifically you're one of the best managers he's ever seen. When you reflect on that statement, what do you think makes you such a good manager and what have been your biggest lessons on great management?

Yeah, I think Evan is being too kind, but I appreciate the sentiment. I think management, like a lot of things, is actually pretty easy to learn and hard to master. It's not rocket science. The rules on what makes a good manager. What's hard is actually remembering it and putting it in practice every day. I think it requires intention. Fortunate of working with a bunch of great, great managers and executives closely, including Evan. And I think what a lot of executives forget, especially as they get more senior, is that they're still a manager. Like you do have a management part of your job to do.

What does that mean when you remember that you do actually have a management part of your job?

Yeah.

So what?

I think this sounds a little bit kitschy, but, or maybe sentimental, but I say like the really great managers remember that they're working with people, not like coworkers and cogs. And so what does it mean that, you know, you're caring about the person and the human? It's sure, maybe it's about knowing about their personal life, but it's less that and more about seeing them as a person. Taking the time to understand, hey, like, what motivates you? What drives impact for you? What are you trying to optimize for personally in your life? And kind of approaching all of those questions in a non-judgmental way and seeing how you can help each person achieve their goals in the framework of, you know, driving value for the company as well. And so how do you kind of still see that? And so one like very tactical thing that I do actually is I've got like a 2-page template of questions that's like your first one-on-one that I walk through with every new person that I manage. And it goes through a lot of these questions on just understanding them a little bit deeper. And maybe do both ways so they get to understand me better as well.

Sorry, I'm fascinated by that. So first day, you and me sit down and we go through this like 2-page one-to-one questions. What are some examples of those questions again? And then what do we do on the back of them? Like, why do we do them?

I tend to find that it really builds a, like, a relationship and an understanding of each other, which, to be honest, so maybe I'll say it in a different way, which is when things aren't working, I think it's very rarely because someone is a bad actor. It's usually because they're not a right fit for this role because either they lack the skills or they lack the motivation.

Right.

The skill gap is an easy one to have the conversation about and move somebody out into a different role or, you know, talk about their transition out. I think the motivation gap is one that's a little bit harder to solve. And you solve it by actually understanding what motivates the person and finding ways of motivating them before, you know, taking more drastic action. And so to have a high-performing team, I think you really need to understand what drives the individuals.. And what drives everybody is probably not profit for the company. Maybe it is for some, but every person has their individual motivations that they work through. And that's the main thing that I try to get out of in the first one-on-one.

Is there a wrong motivation? If I say I'm inherently insecure and actually title and view in the organization drives me to be fucking great. Would you be worried about that?

I actually don't think there's necessarily a wrong motivation. I know that might be a controversial thing to say. So I pulled up this one-on-one template while we were talking and wanted to see what the wording of the question was. What motivates you? There's no right or wrong answer here. Some typical motivating factors can be customer impact, compensation, praise and recognition from peers, exposure to senior leaders, title or position, functional learning, intellectually challenging problems, external validation and recognition outside the company, etc., etc. I start off with that. I frame it in a very non-judgmental way because I'd love to just start from a position of honesty and work with the incentives that are in people's heads, then try to create different incentives for them.

Do you find— this is the first day, you're my boss.

It's not necessarily the first day, but in the first, you Couple of weeks. Yeah.

You find people open up though. It is quite personal.

Yeah, it is. It's not the first question that I ask.

Obviously. What's the first question?

The first question I ask is how do you want to be recognized at the company? How do you like to receive feedback? And then I go into the motivations and then what are your career goals, etc.

Can I ask a slightly stoic statement? I don't think people know themselves very well, especially the younger they are. I think, I don't think they know how they like to receive feedback. I don't think they know what motivates them.

Yeah, I agree. And so this is not always the most productive conversation. And so you learn through that conversation where they are in their self-awareness journey as well. And that's an important data point because that can be challenging too, to work with people that don't have clear goals. And you can have that as your kind of back of mind notes for like, what do I want to work on with this person in terms of, you know, skills that are outside of their core craft in terms of what will make them a better coworker or manager or what have you.

Which one-to-one question do you find most revealing? And is there one that people find hardest?

I find the motivation one obviously very revealing. I, as well as the career goals, and I ask them to give me like the time horizons, like where do you see yourself in 3, 5, 10+ years. A lot of people haven't really given it thought on like, okay, what does it take for me to get to the 10-year mark? What does my 3-year outcome look like? You know, 5-year outcome look like, etc. And it actually gets people to start thinking about stuff like that. The thing that people have a hard time also answering, which especially early career people, which they should be better at and more aware of, is I ask them, you know, what can I do to help you succeed? And people are often like, I don't think people are often asked that. So they're like stunned when somebody asks them, you know, what their manager can do to help them succeed at the job.

I totally agree with you. What's been your biggest hiring fuck-ups on reflection? I'm enjoying this. This is great. Turns out this is why I do this show.

This is a good question. For better or worse, I've had to separate with a lot of people, but typically they've been inherited teams. And because of my, like, one of the things that I get a lot of feedback on is that I hire very slow. My hiring bar is very, very high.

That's interesting. If you're in a startup where speed is everything, is it better to hire now and get it done versus be really slow?

I'm a big believer in hiring slow, obviously, because I still do it despite getting the feedback that I'm hiring too slow. And the reason being also, I actually I'm also a huge believer in diseconomies of scale for teams. I think teams get materially slower as they get bigger. It's really like the equivalent of a resource curse for companies rather than countries, right? When you have too many resources, you get bad at prioritizing and you get bad at accountability and you actually end up moving slower. So it is painful in the short term where where some things might not get done. But I think the right things get done and they get done better on small teams. And I think one thing that you learn to get comfortable with as a more experienced manager, somebody told me a while ago, is that you have to let some fires burn. If you think you have to fight every fire on your team, you're going to burn yourself out. So you just have to realize that like some things are just not gonna be worked on for a bit and they're gonna be broken and be comfortable with that because they're less important and try to be intentional about that. So whenever we do planning, it's like, what are you not doing? So like, you know, name the fire that you're letting burn.

What fire are you letting burn now?

This is a great question. We're fixing it. But, you know, a fire that we have let burn for some time is, you know, we just at Ramp, we have not historically invested a lot in field and event marketing because, you know, we've got a very large TAM and it requires us to be thoughtful about our field and event strategy. And it's not something that we've staffed adequately. We decided, look, this is not staffed. We will take our time to staff and invest here. And so it's okay in the short term for us to not be worried about that. Whereas other, you know, SaaS companies have made a much bigger push into that already.

Management-wise, what do you think are the biggest fuck-ups you see young managers make?

Related to that actually is when people get their first, you know, report or what have you, and they find out that that, well, for whatever reason, the person is not up to snuff in terms of the work product that they're creating. Temptation for a lot of early managers is to just do the work for the person. So they will like spend an extra 3 hours in the evening like reviewing the work product of this person that they've hired recently and just like fix it rather than spend the time coaching because their view is like, oh my God, it would take me so much longer to teach them how to this, I just do it myself. So let me just do that. And obviously they do themselves and the person a huge disservice by, by doing that. Most people's mistakes come, come about when there's a trade-off of, you know, short-term versus long-term, right? And so people are willing to give up some, you know, long-term gain to avoid some short-term pain. So they're finding it more painful and slower to coach somebody So they'll just do the work themselves or find another way to get it done rather than investing the time in coaching this person up to snuff or making the separation decision if that's the right decision.

What right now are you willing to have short-term pain for long-term gain?

We have historically been very much as a company channel-oriented for driving growth. So we would have each channel They would have their goals, they would have their budget, and they would drive outcomes based on that. And that's how we organized the company. The big short-term pain that we're, we're taking is we're moving towards a larger company segment-oriented strategy where we have cross-functional teams that are going after a customer segment and, you know, budgeting, goaling everything based on the segment. Segment, which is a very difficult way of working versus, you know, deploying budget across channels. This is going to be a difficult, painful transition for, for the company, but I think it will be great long-term gain because the segment-oriented teams presumably have a deeper understanding for the customers. And having all the cross-functional teams work on, you know, the same segment will drive better conversion, better results. Et cetera.

Is there anything you have short-term gain for long-term pain?

One area that I can think of is we do have parallel processes of acquisition that are going after the same clients that are automated versus manual. You know, there's some challenges in performance at different steps of like how the automated system performs versus how humans do the same, you know, prospecting and customer acquisition sales process, right? The short-term gain, of course, is that humans are better. At certain steps because there's just a lot of intangibles that we haven't been able to productize and automate yet. So we hire a lot of, you know, we have a sales team that runs sales because they're good at certain things that are better than automating them. But I think the long-term pain if we don't focus and pivot more and more things towards self-serve and automation is that we're going to end up having a massive sales team that is, you know, hard to scale and manage and potentially expensive. Although that's not the case today.

What are the first things to break in a scaling org? You've been in some of the best, Instacart, Opendoor, now Ramp. What are the like the, ah, fuck, it broke again?

The thing that breaks is really just culture and engagement actually, as companies grow, right? So let's imagine that you're not successful as you're scaling obviously people are going to be demotivated and whatever. So that one's obvious. But I think the thing that people miss is if you are successful, I think a lot of, you know, founders and executives can take, you know, the growth engine and the team for granted. And I think if you're not continuing to provide kind of guidance, feedback, gratitude, the team will get burned out and disengaged and you'll see departures. So that's the one thing that I tend to find is like the danger of success is that the teams that drove that get taken for granted often because, you know, people want to focus on problems, not the things that are working. And so that can create its own challenges.

Sri, you mentioned the importance of engagement there. Engagement often relies on focus. You are also a very, very prolific but successful angel investor. I'd first love to start, and I hope it's okay, when you're an angel investor, say, do you invest through a fund? Do you invest personal money? How do you structure your investing?

Yeah, so I do personal as well as I'm a scout for, for a VC fund. So I, I, I do investments through both of those.

Okay, got you. So scout and personal. You said to me before, full-time operators who are part-time fund managers will make some of the best early-stage investors. Why do you think this?

Yeah, so I mean, if you look at the investing process, right, there's 4 components. There's deal flow, there's diligence, there's winning the allocation, and then supporting your portfolio, right? I think operators have a distinct advantage, especially with their smaller checks in earlier stages across all 4 of those than a lot of professional investors. I don't know if you've had other people articulate this to you. There's also this notion of like a half-life to operating experience, something like 2 to 4 years, which is like, you know, every whatever X number of years you're away from operating and become a specialized or full-time investor, your ability to really help and empathize with the current state of operations decreases, you know, by half or what have you. So the reason I mentioned that is because there are also, of course, a lot of former operators that are investors that are successful, but speaking view of operators that are currently working, I would say, okay, like, what are the advantages across the 4 stages, right? So operators get a lot of early deal flow with the companies that they've worked in. So folks that are leaving, they get to know first who's leaving, especially if you're working at great companies. You know, alums of Ramp, Opendoor, Instacart obviously reach out to me when they're thinking about, you know, starting their, their companies, which is way of, uh, of getting that deal flow. You also have the ability to give out—

we're gonna have fun here. Fuck it, discussions are way more fun. Sure, narrow. Yeah, even if you work at many companies, it's 3. The actual network's age, yeah, put that one in the can, not buying it.

All right, fine. Uh, but it just depends on how many you need, right? Uh, and how big of an investment pool that you're driving. Um, and so I think I think that's one. I think I agree with you. There's other benefits to, you know, institutional investor, which is like you get a lot more inbound because of your reputation, right? But then you also have to sort through that inbound. So one thing that I find it as an operator, I have much less conflict, right? In terms of with other investors. So I get deal flow from other investors all the time, especially ones that are like like, you know, if Sequoia or Kraft or whoever are like, you know, we're leading this round, we're really excited about it, do you want to be a part of it? That's great. Like, a lot of the work on, you know, the sourcing, diligence, everything is done for me as an operator. You know, they're not going to do that for another fund typically, right?

I totally agree with you. That is a beautiful position to be in. Does it scale? So say you have, you know, a $5 million microfund, 100% free, I'm bringing you in for every $100K check. But you don't scale as a fund manager. Yeah, it doesn't scale.

That I agree with. So I don't think we're in disagreement. I think the strategy only works up to a certain size. And, you know, my general understanding with venture is the job is like materially different every 5x or so the check size. So, and it's a completely different job. What can help you win in the previous stage is probably not what's going to help you win in the next stage, right?

Agreed. You do get brought into great stuff. So that, that's second pillar or third pillar.

Deal flow we talked about. Diligence, I think you actually— so whereas like, you know, VCs or whoever are, you know, and this is like in a limited scope that we're talking about, right? You often get a lot more information about the competence or strengths and weaknesses of founders that you work with because you've literally worked with them in the past and you have a lot more exposure to this person and how they've worked in a real operating environment. Whereas, you know, people are trying to suss this out in other ways as outside-in investors. There's some benefit to that again, right? Because these are folks that are in your network. And then similarly on the products, when you're working with them, typically as an operator, you're often a buyer of these products, right? So I have a differential insight in being able to diligence products because I'm like, would I buy this? Would I approve the budget? Would, uh, for this product if they came to Ramp or Instacart or wherever. And it helps you think through, uh, just cut through the BS of like, okay, is this— are they making something that people will buy? Because I'm a buyer, so I can make that decision. This is very helpful for, for B2B stuff because I think a lot of people have intuition on this on consumer, uh, less so on, on B2B stuff. So I think there is an advantage there as well, uh, on the, you know, diligence part.

I also think like the rate of decay on operating experience has never been greater, and like specifically on two which is like, if you haven't operated in the world of AI, it's fundamentally different thinking kind of AI first and with AI as part of your stack than 15 years ago. And then two, like COVID. I don't know what you think, man, but like I find two things. Millennials don't want to work or come into the office. If you worked 15 years ago, everyone did come into the office and everyone did work. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so you just mean like it's harder in a remote world to evaluate how good someone is?

You miss managing people.

Yeah.

If you're an investor, stay in a VC and you haven't managed people in 15 years.

Yeah.

You don't know how it works. Yeah.

I agree with that. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Yeah.

100%. And yeah, on allocation, we've talked about it. It's much easier to get an allocation as an operator investor than, than it is as a, you know, a larger investor.

Does it not distract you from your operational role? I get it that it helps you pick better, but on the flip side, does it make you distracted?

No, it's, it's a great question. Uh, and, uh, you know, some principles are universal, right? Which is everything in moderation. And also you have to be doing well at your core job before you're doing stuff outside of work. You want to be respectful of obviously work hours. Having said that, the other great thing too is like I get a lot of high-quality deal flow. I know I'm a— I'm actually very anti-cold outreach. I know it's a lot of investors go out there and say, cold outreach is great. You send me, you know, a message on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever, and they'll look at everything. My theory is if you can't even succeed in getting a warm intro, how are you going to hustle in building a company? I only take conversations that are very high reputation warm intros where the person is like typically like already spoken to the person, likes them or has a relationship with them. And I have a DAC, so I don't take, I take very few meetings, but But I tend to find that they're very high quality because I do a lot of that filtering before.

I actually agree with you totally, but I get killed for being exclusionary. What if it's someone who doesn't know anyone in your ecosystem? Is that fair? And what do you— what should I respond?

I think it's a fair question, but fortunately, I think there are a lot more systems available now to help with that that are not not as gatekeeping. On Deck is here. There's a few other networks like that. I don't think it's actually like for the entrepreneurial person, it's that hard to find a path to meeting the right set of investors. And it just depends on how friendly people are, right? Like if somebody messages me with a tenuous connection, I'm typically willing to help them, right? Like if they're like, you know, 'Hey, like, I went to the same college as you, blah, blah, blah. Like, will you take a meeting?' Maybe. But if they're like, 'Hey, I really want to get to know this person. Will you intro me?' And obviously I do a dual opt-in. I'll message them being like, 'Hey, like, I don't really know this person. Their profile seems interesting. I haven't really evaluated. Let me know if you'd be open to taking a convo.' And even if they spray and pray with that tactic, they will get some meetings via warm intro. So you got to hustle somewhat. I think there's a way to get the warm intro. And if you can't even do that, I struggle to find how you're going to fundraise, find customers, etc.

If I'm on your team, Sri Batchu, I'm going to do the Scout program. I'm going to raise a microfund even better. I'm going to raise a microfund. What do you say?

As I mentioned before, I think as long as you're not distracted during work hours and getting your day job done, I think what you do outside of work is is, is your prerogative. And I actually do have folks that are—

but do you— and I mean this in that I don't mean it badly— the best people go home and sales reps, they get more leads, they want more converted sales, they work out of hours to make it work. They don't go off and do something else.

Well, we didn't talk about, or like, the potential benefits, right, of, uh, like, what's the value add of investing, uh, outside, uh, of your job. I think there's no playbook for necessarily how you grow. That's why it's a very experimentation-driven culture, right? And a lot of experiments fail. And so you have to find your own growth path. And the more creative ideas, strategies, tactics that you can come up with, the better chance you have at, you know, hitting your growth goals. And so I tend to find that the context switching and learning about different spaces actually builds more intuition and creativity for ideas. So I think in moderation, I actually think it's a good idea to do that. And I also think like, yes, there's like parts of the job that are like keeping the trains running on time and there's parts of the job that are like taking a beat, thinking about strategy, thinking about creative ideas. And I think that stuff is not measured in hours in and hours out. And in fact, like being on a treadmill of like doing that, I think has diseconomies of scale again. Like, I think you need to like, uh, get out of your kind of rabbit hole, uh, and, and recontextualize and get perspective to generate the best ideas.

What about conflicts with your company? So say I'm in expense management, or I'm not in expense management, but then I pivot to it. Now I'm potentially competing with you.

Obviously anything that could be competitive, perceived as competitive, or looks like it's down the line competitive, I don't even take the meeting and I strongly advise against anybody at the company taking meetings as well if they're considering them. And so I think that one's like a more obvious one, which is like, okay, like, you know, use your judgment. If you have a question, ask me or ask our GC. But the conflict that's like a little bit trickier potentially is if Ramp is in the market to buy the software or something like that and you've invested in the company or you're investing in the company, what there, it's like you want to be extra, extra aboveboard, make it clear to the company that you're not going to influence the purchasing process as well as actually like not influencing the purchasing process.

What about talent? You're an investor in my company as an angel. And then you nick one of my key people, I'll be like, Sri, what the fuck?

Yeah.

And it may not have been you. It may have been Ramp who's nicked one of my key people. Is that a conflict?

I'm pretty ruthless about that. I think that there's absolutely no conflict. I think it's extremely anti-competitive from a labor market perspective for you to think that I won't hire the best people from your company. And so you, it's your job to retain your best talent. And even if I'm an investor in you, it doesn't matter. If you're doing your job of retaining your talent, this wouldn't be a question.

You're a hero. I think the exact same as you on that one. The people like, oh, you can never nick from your friends or your portfolio. I'm much more laissez-faire about it, which is why I have few friends. I'm kidding. Tell me, what have been some of the biggest lessons for you on what it takes to be a good angel? You invest, I'm sure, today very differently than you did. What are some of those big lessons?

I think one is just how important the founders that you work with and invest in become as a source of leads for you. And I didn't fully imagine that when I started being an angel investor. I was like, oh, where am I going to find, you know, great deals to work? And like one of the best sources, of course, is like a founder that you've worked with is like, hey, I've worked with this person before. They're fantastic. I'm going to invest. You've been a helpful investor. I'd love for you to chat with them. Like that is, you know, primo lead, right? I think one thing a lot of Do you worry?

Okay, so it was really interesting. Sorry, I'm just loving this. Primo Lead, brilliant attribution, by the way, brilliant tagging. Um, often they haven't been founders before. I find being an operator and being a founder is so different. I place a huge premium on serial entrepreneurship. Operators, massive difference.

I agree. And I think what's actually interesting is there's some operators that are that are very good at their operating job that I think would be worse founders than some bad operators.

Right.

And I've like found— so let me explain that a little bit further. There are people that I would never want to hire again, but that I would invest in because they are not suited to the operating job. But what makes them bad at the operating job could make them very good at being a founder.

I agree with you there. How do you determine?

Yeah, to me, you know, the founders that I invest in have— I mean, it's the same diligence process anywhere else. Like, do they have a secret about what they're trying to build that is, you know, uniquely built based on, you know, work and research or whatever that they have done? And how relentless are they in terms of wanting to, you know, build their vision and how good are they at telling their story at the end of the day. I think, you know, storytelling is such an important, important skill. And I think the best founders are excellent storytellers.

It's so interesting you say that because like you've said before that storytelling founders are rarely the best operators. Yeah. Talk to me about this and what you just said there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I know that's like cognitively dissonant a bit. So let me explain further. Look, there's a few different jobs of being a founder, right? And leaders of a company. I think a super important job is being able to fundraise, being able to close customers, early customers, and being able to close, you know, executive hires. I think all three of those people that are great storytellers do a very good job at. And what I tend to find that, you know, are part of good storytelling, and I'm curious if you have a different view, is folks that are good at that are really good at reading the room and being likable and talking like with enough detail but with enough abstraction that they sound great. All of those are great skills to have. As I said, they're great for for, you know, fundraising, hiring, and early customers, it's not super scalable, right? Like you can't have the CEO doing every hire. Eventually you have to build a business, you have to operationalize, you have to scale, you have to be comfortable with not being liked, you have to make difficult decisions. The people that can do that are typically like serial operators that work in a different way, right? I've definitely seen people that can do both, both, but it's rare that people can wear both hats. So I often tend to like founding teams where one person is the storyteller and the other person is like the, you know, operator and executor.

Do you ever feel like someone's too good at sales? You know, when you meet those founders and you're like, oh, you're just saying everything's so right, something's wrong?

Yeah, I definitely seen some founders that are too slick by And that's where some of the personal diligence works too, right? Where you try to find out how real are they.

How do you do that? Do you ask the one-to-one questions ever?

Usually the networks here aren't so big, right? Especially with some of these referrals that I— So it's funny actually, this is one of the most valuable things that I do for my founders, and that's helpful for me as well, which is founders are trying to hire and they are like, okay, like between the companies that I've worked at, I've worked with hundreds, possibly thousands of people at this point, right? And so they're like, okay, I'm looking to hire this person. I have no idea if they're good or not. Their LinkedIn and their resume seems reasonable. We've done the interview process, which is, you know, always imperfect, right? And so they're like, hey, can you actually like, have you worked with this person or can you get me to somebody that's worked closely with them that'll give me an honest read because of the relationships or what have you, that's like incredibly valuable. And I think like having that reputation of somebody that's direct, keeps things confidential and is available is helpful in a variety of different ways. And I use that to try to find people, you know, where I have questions on getting some more comfort on the diligence side.

What are the biggest mistakes you see operator angels make? So like for me, I think like number one, they have varying check sizes. Lesson one, you don't have conviction at the early stage. Just do $25K, $10K, $50K, I don't care, but same check size. Number two, you need 25. This idea that you're a genius picker, you're not. No one is. 5 is not enough. You need 25. Those would be two of the biggest that I see often.

I think those are both good ones. I also think actually like This is why it gets hard later too, is they have a hard time saying no. They want to be liked. And it's like usually your initial conversations that you're having are with a friend or a friend of a friend. And, and so I think people go one or the other extreme early on in their angel investing, which is like they never get over the risk bar and they just think everything is a bad idea. And yes, of course, like most things are not great ideas because is most startups fail for a variety of reasons. And it's not about idea, it's about execution, right? There's a mindset switch that you have to make, which is like, how can this succeed? And not about how it can fail. Like, it's very easy to think about all of the ways something can fail. And so the question that you have to ask yourself is like, how can this succeed? And how big is it if it succeeds? And I think that like switch to like optimism from like rational evaluation is a challenge for a lot of early investors. And there's a flip side, which is them wanting to just like not be a bad guy and just say yes because it's a friend or a friend of a friend, even if they don't have like high conviction in the idea. So I've seen both of those mistakes happen.

I totally agree with you. I think the other one I see also is when they choose founders that need their specific help.. So they're a B2B sales leader and they're like, oh, I could really help in their B2B sales engine. Doesn't mean it's a good investment. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. So I'm going to do a quickfire with you, my friend. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Sound okay?

Okay. Sounds great.

What tactics have not changed over the last 5 years?

I think the, the PLG playbook has actually stabilized and it's pretty, uh, similar. I mean, the specific tactics will change, but like the core of it, I think is the same. I think cold outbound and email still works surprisingly well despite all of the changes in that space.

Does PLG die in a world of segregation between user and buyer again? Tightening budgets, CFOs manage everything.

It's a good question, but I don't think so necessarily. I think these are economic cycles that companies go through. I think there's challenges in the short term and then as the economic cycle moves forward, like it just eases. It's like a little bit of contraction and a little bit of easing in terms of like headwinds versus tailwinds.

Okay. What tactics have totally died a death?

I mean, I think this is an obvious one, but pouring, you know, money indiscriminately into paid marketing, I think is gone for two reasons. One is, of course, like the efficiency environment. And I don't think we're going to be in a completely SERP environment again. And the other reason being, I think attribution has become a lot harder. And so I think people will be hesitating for a long time to come in terms of how they deploy paid marketing.

What would you say is the biggest mistake founders make when hiring growth teams?

Honestly, hire either too senior or too junior for the given problem that they have. Too senior being like, you know, if you've got a 3-person growth team, like don't hire a VP-level person because you actually need somebody that can really coach people and get get into the weeds. And other times, while I'm a big fan of hiring for slope versus intercept, I think sometimes I think people underappreciate the scope of the problem. So I think basically it's just like matching the skill set to the stage of growth in the company. I think it's one they have a challenge with.

You mentioned premortems earlier. How do you do postmortems?

Yeah, so we do monthly postmortems. They're somewhat structured. We actually have an Airtable system where we track all of our experiments, we score them, etc., in terms of impact. And so we share like aggregate statistics of the team on like what's been shipped and what the impact has been. It's like an opportunity for us to like celebrate team members as well as like encourage the notion of like velocity in a more subtle way. And then outside of that, we have teams come back with 1 to 2 wins or losses over the previous month that they present and get feedback and just share the learning. So it's not super structured, but there is like a regular cadence of it every month. So it's not just when like something great or something horrible happens is when we do postmortems. We actually do them in a systematic way.

What would you most like to change about the world of growth, Sri?

What I would love to change about the world of growth is just breaking the walls between the disciplines of marketing and product and growth and really have it be like one kind of cross-functional discipline. I think companies and people and teams struggle with it a lot because it's a newer function and folks come from different backgrounds.

From a perva, what's your favorite Pitbull lyric?

I knew this one would come back. My favorite one is, there's probably plenty, but this one is my favorite. Ask for money, get advice. Ask for advice, Get Money Twice. And to me, it's like super, super helpful framing for like almost any like difficult situation that you're dealing with, not just fundraising, which is like the more you bring people into what you're solving for, the more value you'll get rather than like directly asking for resources or solutions.

Final one. What one company growth strategy that you've seen recently have you been most impressed by?

Yeah, I think there's, there's a lot to pick from, but one I'll pick is Notion. I think they've done an incredible job of building a very large, multi-pronged community-based growth strategy, which I haven't seen a lot of companies do that. I think they're— it's very impressive. And they actually also recently hired my friend Lauren to do product growth there. So I'm excited to see how they supercharge their growth.

I'm totally with you. I think Canva Talk as well, Aligned, is fantastic. So the two together, Sri, I've loved doing this. Thank you so much for putting up with my pitbull-like approach today. It's the end of the day here, so I just thought—

Yeah, yeah, no, I loved it. I appreciate you taking the time. This is a fun conversation.

You're a star, man. Thank you so much for that.