Matt Lerner: How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI | E1159

There's really only, like, six channels in the world. If you think about how are the ways you find out about stuff. You hear from a salesperson, some partner brings you in 'cause to enable you to do something, you do a Google search, or there's some content or inbound, paid ads, or maybe you hear about it from an influencer. I'll say categorically, the best growth people I hired and managed in my time at PayPal had no marketing experience, had no product experience at all. (camera shutter clicks)

Ready to go? (instrumental music plays) Matt, I cannot believe it has been, oh, I think it must be, I mean, eight, 10 years since we first met. You were one of the first people I met in tech in London, so thank you so much for doing this.

Likewise, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Now, I would love to start with some chronology. So how did you make your way into the world of growth and what was that entry point for you?

I guess, I mean, my career started in Silicon Valley. And, you know, I was, like, humanities, Philosophy and Rhetoric undergrad, and so I was kind of taking any job I could find, and what, what I sort of got pulled to was this figuring out how to get customers stuff. Um, and eventually in, in 2004, I joined the growth team at PayPal. And obviously, you know, we know how that story went. Um, and I learned just a ton of stuff in almost 10 y- almost 11 years there. And then after that, I left, I became a VC myself. That's kind of when we met. And I got to see, you know, as a VC, you just get to see so many startups rapid fire, and see inside of them, and what's happening, and their metrics and the people's personalities. And I just, to be honest, I started to see a lot of teams wasting a lot of money and a lot of real talent making the same mistakes over and over again, very preventable mistakes. And, you know, that combined with the fact that I didn't love fundraising-

(laughs)

... as we were just talking about. So I left VC and I started my own business where I work with startups and kind of help them avoid those preventable mistakes and find their, their high impact growth levers.

If we just unpack a, a couple of elements there-

Yeah.

... 11 years at PayPal is a hugely, uh, impactful, uh, segment of your career. What are one or two of your biggest lessons from that 11 years?

So many of them. I think, you know, towards the end it got to the point when you're in a big company where having the right answer is like 5% or 10% of the problem, and getting the entire organization and to change people's mindset and align resources ends up becoming like 80% or 90% of the problem. I'm sure I've messed up the math there, but something like that. And so I'm very much more shifting my time and my hiring strategy and everything more around influence. So, that was a big piece of it. The other big one is when I look back on my time at PayPal, 90% of our growth came from like 10% of the stuff that we did. And by that I mean like I could go back and say, you know, there are five or six things, obviously before my time, getting on eBay, uh, referral bonuses and, you know, network effects growth, getting early, getting engaged with web developers who were building the sites and implementing the payment systems, getting pre-integrated with shopping carts and hosts, some outbound sales. Like, that drove almost all their growth. But they did still, like, a ton of other stuff. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing campaigns, building products that frankly nobody ever used. And you can do that when you're generating hundreds of millions per year in free cashflow. But startups don't have that luxury. But then, you know, when I step back and, as a VC, and start to look at other success stories, I start to see that pattern repeat of like 90% coming from 10%, you know, and you can see it. You know, you've had these people on your show, Canva and Dropbox and, and all of these. And so that sort of got me into this question of like, okay, as an early stage startup without all that free cashflow, how can you figure out what that 10%-