Ryan Wiggins: Scaling WhatsApp from 0-100M; How to Build a Growth Team; Mercury Neobank | E1016

One of the craziest fun facts about WhatsApp is that WhatsApp got to a billion and a half users without running any AB test.

(instrumental music) Ryan, I am so excited for this, my friend. I spoke to Alex Schultz, I spoke to Cordoneo, I spoke to Sachin, I know so much about you, but thank you for joining me.

Hey, Harry. Excited to be here. Uh, really excited to get to chat.

Now, I would love to start with, uh, a little bit on you. So first question is, how did you make your way into the world of startups, and then kind of secondarily, how did you make your way to Mercury today?

Well, I started my career in a customer support role at Facebook right out of college, and didn't really know what I wanted to do, but one day someone offered a SQL class, and I took that class and it basically changed my life. I kinda used that in my support job. I, I tried to basically figure out why I was getting yelled at so much, uh, and tried to improve what we were doing with customer support. Um, then a couple years later when I was looking for a new job, it turns out that what I was doing the whole time was growth. That got me connected to Alex Schultz and a team at Facebook known as growth marketing that sits at the intersection of data, product, and marketing. And I spent six years there helping grow different products across Facebook, things like Facebook Ads, Workplace, a product in London, uh, and WhatsApp, uh, where I spent about three years really going deep on how we, uh, grow some products. I learned a ton, but at some point I, I wanted to go explore some earlier stage problems, and so started to, to look and stumbled across Mercury. And how I ended up at Mercury was that I started some conversations and then took a look at the product and immediately knew that I wanted to join. For those in your audience who aren't aware, Mercury is banking for startups. Uh, we offer a product that helps startups, uh, solve all their banking needs. Uh, and it's such a better banking experience than anything else I had experienced, and I thought that if I could help bring this to the world, I would be so stoked to, to spend my time doing that. Um, and since then, about two years in, uh, we've scaled to over 100,000 startups. We have established a super strong product-led growth motion and I've gotten the opportunity to help build a world-class analytics team. Still having a, a ton of fun while doing it.

So I meet this with respect. You don't have the Harvard Stanford Facebook growth team like b- born out of, uh, LinkedIn profile like Brian Hale and like many other greats. My question to you is, do you think we place too much emphasis on these logos, and what do you advise people who are navigating their careers and maybe kind of like you didn't always know that this was what you'd ultimately do in the end, uh, what would you advise them?