Luc Levesque: The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring for Growth | 20VC #906

Three, two, one, zero. You have now arrived at your destination. Luke, this is such a joy to do. I heard so many great things before the show. I so enjoyed our chat before the show. So thank you so much for having, like, the time to come on the show, and I really appreciate you joining me.

Tha- thanks, Harry. Thanks for having me.

Not at all. I want to start there. You've got a pretty fascinating background, so I want to start with how you made your way into the world of some of the most powerful growth orgs with the likes of Facebook and most recently Shopify. And what was that entry into growth for you?

So I originally started as an entrepreneur, kind of bouncing between product and growth for a really long time, which I think is pretty common for a lot of growth people. I originally started building my first product when I was 21. I built a travel blogging network called TravelPod that I sold to TripAdvisor. And when I did TravelPod, I really focused on building the best product in the world and not on growing it, which, you know, had its- its own issues, uh, later that I discovered. But what happened was during the acquisition process with TripAdvisor, the CEO of TripAdvisor, I remember he was asking these really deep technical questions like, "What are your meta tags? What- what does the SCO configuration look like? How much traffic do you get from different sources like Google or Google Images?" And I was really thinking, "Why is this guy, the CEO of TripAdvisor, asking so many technical questions about SCO?" And this is, you know, quite a while ago, and back when SCO was a dark art, and growth in general. But that's a moment where I realized how important growth was and really realized that building a great product is important, but if you don't have a strong growth loop for it, it doesn't matter 'cause you can't scale a product. So from that, that was a pretty pivotal moment for me, and one where I really started focusing on viral loops and SCO and paid search and funnel optimization to grow the products that I was building. So after TravelPod, built a Facebook app called the Traveler IQ Challenge. That grew to about 100 million users on the Facebook platform. Also built a travel photo product called TripWow, which grew to 65 million users. Those products were- were very much about viral loops and- and- and growth on the Facebook platform. After that, moved on to growing TripAdvisor itself, which was mainly about SCO. We built a pretty sophisticated SCO growth engine and grew TripAdvisor to be the largest, uh, site on the internet, travel site on the internet, uh, which was a ton of fun. Um, after that, went on to advise a bunch of companies. So I worked with Pinterest, uh, Patreon, Twitter, and shared some of my- my growth playbook with them. And kind of through that, got connected with Mark at Facebook. And, you know, met with Mark, had a- a 15-minute meeting that turned into an hour meeting, and really hit it off, frankly, and, uh, had a- a great chat. And, you know, originally, he was trying to convince me to come down to California to work at Facebook. I was in Canada, wasn't, uh, all that, um, not- not so much interested, but it was a difficult leap to- to make, uh, to leave Canada. So it took a while, uh, and, you know, had a- a long kind of discussion with him. He... The experience was actually pretty im- im-, like, it was quite the experience. We, flew me out to- to California with my wife, we had dinner with him and his wife, and we ended up playing Oculus Rift all night actually. And this is before the Oculus was- was released, so it's pretty cool. So I was, you know, just really having a good time there. And I remember after doing that, he just pulled an envelope out of his pocket with an offer, and I flew back home with an offer to join Facebook, and eventually ended up leaving Canada, coming down to California and working at Facebook.