Ely Lerner: Should Startups Hire Advisors & How much should they be paid? | E1075
Ely Lerner (guest), Harry Stebbings (host)
In this episode of The Twenty Minute VC, featuring Ely Lerner and Harry Stebbings, Ely Lerner: Should Startups Hire Advisors & How much should they be paid? | E1075 explores ely Lerner Explains Startup Advisors, Compensation, Strategy, And Growth Levers Ely Lerner, former Yelp and Chime product/growth leader and Reforge instructor, unpacks how founders should think about advisors, when to use them, and how to pay them. He distinguishes company-level, functional, and domain advisors, and contrasts coaching, high‑level advising, hands‑on advising, fractional roles, and full‑time hires. A major theme is that founders must own the strategy around their primary growth lever, use advisors to ‘teach them to fish,’ and rigorously differentiate offensive vs defensive work. He also shares practical frameworks on incentive alignment, activation and retention, org design, and how big companies should run zero‑to‑one initiatives like true internal startups with P&L ownership.
Ely Lerner Explains Startup Advisors, Compensation, Strategy, And Growth Levers
Ely Lerner, former Yelp and Chime product/growth leader and Reforge instructor, unpacks how founders should think about advisors, when to use them, and how to pay them. He distinguishes company-level, functional, and domain advisors, and contrasts coaching, high‑level advising, hands‑on advising, fractional roles, and full‑time hires. A major theme is that founders must own the strategy around their primary growth lever, use advisors to ‘teach them to fish,’ and rigorously differentiate offensive vs defensive work. He also shares practical frameworks on incentive alignment, activation and retention, org design, and how big companies should run zero‑to‑one initiatives like true internal startups with P&L ownership.
Key Takeaways
Founders must own strategy for their primary growth lever.
Whether the main growth driver is product, marketing, or sales, the founder cannot outsource or delegate the core strategy; senior hires and advisors should provide leverage and expertise, but only the founder has the full‑company view and appropriate risk appetite.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Choose the right advisor ‘shape’ for the problem you have.
Use company‑level advisors when you need holistic business and growth thinking, functional advisors for gaps in specific disciplines (e. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Hands‑on advising can be more valuable than traditional high‑level advice.
Instead of monthly, generic advice based on past anecdotes, hands‑on advisors meet weekly, dig into data and user research, and act as true thought partners who help founders reason through their specific business, while still teaching them to fish rather than executing for them.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Use the offense vs defense lens to prioritize work and org design.
Offense is a small set of compounding bets aimed at pushing the business to its next level; defense is essential work that mitigates downside risk (infra, security, trust & safety) with diminishing returns beyond a certain point. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Big companies should run true internal startups for new zero‑to‑one bets.
Meaningful new business lines inside incumbents succeed more often when led by a GM with real P&L ownership, staged funding (like seed, Series A), autonomy, and board‑style reviews, leveraging the parent’s distribution, customers, and data rather than being buried in a legacy org or ‘innovation lab’ with no real authority.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Incentive alignment is a core growth lever in marketplaces and fintech.
Businesses like Yelp and Chime win when product, customer value, and company economics are tightly aligned—when improvements simultaneously benefit users, suppliers/partners, and the company’s P&L, rather than forcing constant trade‑offs between sides of the ecosystem.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Activation and ICP clarity are often the highest‑leverage growth levers.
Retention is ‘king,’ and the strongest driver of retention is getting the right users (your ICP) to an early moment of real value and forming a habit; many teams waste time on broad churn or conversion fixes instead of defining ICP attributes and fixing activation for those users specifically.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Notable Quotes
“The whole point of strategy is to say no to most things and focus in on a small number of really high leverage things.”
— Ely Lerner
“If the leader of that [internal startup] doesn’t have P&L, you’re not a startup within a big company.”
— Ely Lerner
“As a founder you should be owning the strategy for your primary growth lever… you cannot delegate that strategy.”
— Ely Lerner
“Offense is compounding… every cycle you invest past the diminishing‑returns point on defense is a huge opportunity cost.”
— Ely Lerner
“Horizontal products also have an ICP. A true ICP should be defined in terms of attributes, not personas.”
— Ely Lerner
Questions Answered in This Episode
How can an early‑stage founder practically diagnose whether their core growth lever should be product‑led, marketing‑led, or sales‑led before choosing advisors and hires?
Ely Lerner, former Yelp and Chime product/growth leader and Reforge instructor, unpacks how founders should think about advisors, when to use them, and how to pay them. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What specific signs indicate that a defensive investment (e.g., infra, security, tech debt) has passed the point of diminishing returns and should be scaled back?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How would you structure the first 90 days of a hands‑on advising engagement to maximize impact on a seed‑stage company with weak data and slow shipping?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
In a horizontal product with many potential use cases, what concrete process would you use to empirically discover and validate ICP attributes?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
For a later‑stage company spinning up a ‘wave two’ internal startup, how should comp, equity, and governance be structured to make the GM truly feel and act like a founder?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
The whole point of strategy is to say no to most things and focus in on a small number of really high leverage things. Like, you have to make that bet. When you see companies with nine company level OKRs at the top level or whatever, right, they are just trying to do all the things. Your chance of success is already low. If you do not focus down on one or two core key bets and do that strategy work to figure out where that leverage is, you're not gonna succeed.
(instrumental music) Eli, I have heard so many good things from many different members of the Reforge community, so thank you so much for joining me this day, first.
Yeah. Happy to be here, man. Excited to have a fun convo.
Uh, it's gonna be great. But I wanna start, we look at Chime, we look at Yelp, these are some incredible product orgs. How did you first make your way into the world of product and growth, and what did that entry point look like for you, Eli?
Yeah. Great question. Um, so if you go all the way back, uh, I've got, uh, a couple of degrees in computer science. I did bachelor's, master's in computer science. I was an engineer, engineering manager for a while. I think this used to be a more common path into product, right? It used to be one of the most common paths. These days, it's much less, which is, like, good, I think. But, so I was the engineering path. I had a startup of my own for a little while. Like, a big chunk of my product career was at Yelp. I was at Yelp for a little over eight years, across a whole bunch of different areas of that product and business. One of the cool things about Yelp is it's really like 10 different vertical marketplaces combined into a single product, which was a fantastic place to sort of like up-level and grow up as a product and growth professional, because you really see, like, all the different kinds of dynamics in marketplaces. It's also consumer. It has a big SMB play. It also actually has a pretty big enterprise, uh, play. And I worked across all of those things, and so it was a really good kind of like growing up (laughs) in this space. So I did, I did a whole bunch of different things at Yelp. I tended to be the person that got tapped to do zero to one stuff there a lot. I think organizationally maybe we didn't have a lot of organizational muscle around doing that, and so I got tapped to do that in a number of different areas a few different times, which was super cool. One of the ways that we built new product there also was through acquisition. And so back in 2015 now, we, we bought a company called Eat24. It was a food delivery startup.
Install uListen to search the full transcript and get AI-powered insights
Get Full TranscriptGet more from every podcast
AI summaries, searchable transcripts, and fact-checking. Free forever.
Add to Chrome