Mike Duboe: Top 5 Lessons Scaling Stitch Fix to IPO; Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric | 20VC #978

Anyone could submit an experiment idea, even if you're not on the growth team. But we built this very simple, kind of one-pager framework that included an objective, a hypothesis you're testing, design or resources, uh, required to execute the experiment, timeline, so how long you need the experiment to run, and then what success quantifiably looks like, so you're not actually going and having revisionist history on like, "Hey, it actually did work even though, you know, the data showed this." And then finally, the next steps that one takes if the experiment fails or succeeds.

Mike, I am so excited for this. We've known each other for a while. We've been back and forth on Twitter DM. So first, thank you so much for joining me today, Mike.

Thanks for having me, Harry. I've been a longtime listener and learned a lot from your show over the years, so thank you.

Do you know what? I really needed that ego inflation. So thank you for that.

(laughs)

But, uh, I would love to dive in, you know. Growth is a weird and a wonderful world. And so how did you make your way into the world of growth and how did you come to lead the growth team at Stitch Fix?

Yeah, so I'll go back and I'll start with my undergrad. So I studied engineering undergrad. I finished up University of Michigan in 2007. Most folks at that time out of engineering school were either going to work in the auto industry in Detroit or move to Chicago or, or New York to work in, in "business," uh, I'm using air quotes. Uh, Google was just kinda opening up their Ann Arbor office at the time. And, you know, my, my objective when I was thinking about what I wanted to go do was really to go avoid r- routine, uh, so avoid getting bored, and then go optimize for learning, which is a theme that's held true throughout most of my career. I felt like in general, I was most stimulated by starting at the base of a new learning curve, working my way up and moving to the next, kinda like engineering problem sets. And so right outta school, I joined Bain, (laughs) uh, because of this pattern. I think from a distance it felt like, uh, the breadth of problems and clients w- would kind of offer that. Um, I actually had a great time and, and if anything, it trained my brain to be a structured thinker, but I always wished I could have been better aligned, I could have better aligned how I spent my time with what I actually cared about or had some passion for. And so at the time, uh, one of my colleagues at Bain, um, had went to go work for Danny Meyer and then Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas who were running this big restaurant group, you know, the Alinea Group.