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 gonna 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, uh, 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.

Trí, I am so excited for this. I spoke to Apoorva, 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 been, I've come here in a slightly different path than most probably. Uh, I've been thinking about growth as a consultant and, uh, an investor prior to becoming an operator, uh, and I joined Opendoor when it was 40 people in hyper-growth phase. Got to see it grow to, you know, 2,000 people nearly and five billion of revenue, and being an early business generalist, worked on anything that, you know, needed help, so sales, analytics, pricing, et cetera. And, uh, 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 role that way, spent time working on growth, uh, at Instacart, pr- primarily in the ads business first and then the overall business, and now lead, uh, 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, uh, 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, uh, and thinking about data and experimentation in a rigorous way, which I think my background, uh, speaks to.

I totally agree with you in terms of the portfolio of bets. 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 t- I totally agree with you there. I do have to ask, you mentioned Opendoor, uh, 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, Trí?