Early Stripe employees Krithika Muthukumar and Eeke de Milliano have had first row seats to one of the most legendary companies of our time. In her role as the first (and only) marketing leader at Stripe for the first few years, Krithika has led teams across marketing and design, launched all of Stripe’s major products, and helped the company expand into the enterprise business. Meanwhile, as the leader of the Business Operations function, Eeke incubated many of Stripe’s early GTM teams, and later led the machine learning product and Stripe radar.
In this episode, you’ll hear how Krithika and Eeke: 1) viewed product-market fit beyond Stripe’s core product, including the launch of Stripe Connect that helped the company power the on-demand service economy, 2) how Stripe viewed itself as a new-age VC in the early days (and still does!) when picking which customers to build for, and 3) how GTM teams were incubated out of the strategy group, and what worked and didn’t work with that strategy.
Dan Hill has had a wide range of experiences growing companies — from founding his own to running the growth team at Airbnb. In his time at Airbnb, Dan led the payments, risk and trust, and growth and performance marketing teams, and towards the end of his tenure, led the team that managed the end to end guest experience. Most recently, he has started another company, Alma, focused on charitable giving.
In this episode, you’ll hear how Dan helped the team at Airbnb leverage referrals to jumpstart early growth, quantify customer experience metrics, and utilize an input and output metrics framework to measure success. Dan will also talk about the motto the growth team of the growth team and what it means, “love creates growth, not the other way around.”
Amirah Raveneau-Bey has deep experience in growing and scaling companies. In her time at Opendoor, Nerdwallet, and Trulia, she has grown go-to-market teams across sales, partnerships, operations, and growth.
In this episode, you’ll hear how Amirah helped the teams at Trulia create pent-up demand for products before they were released, build communities of superfans to evangelize new products, and and get crystal clear on their target customer. You’ll also learn how Nerdwallet teams pulled customer insights out of qualitative interviews to inform product direction, and how to “hire for today so you have a tomorrow.”
As a co-founder of Branch, Mada Seghete has helped create a new industry around mobile revenue management and architected the growth strategy of many companies. Today at Branch, Mada manages the marketing, market development, and strategy teams, helping Branch get their technology out to even more customers.
In this episode, you’ll hear the story of Branch, and how they started after several pivots, finally finding product market fit around solving a problem that the founders themselves faced. Mada will also share insights on finding product-market fit, leveraging content and organic search to grow your business, and how to measure and properly attribute your efforts across channels.
No individual has had a more critical role in driving growth at early stage companies than Andy Johns. As an early growth leader at Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and Wealthfront, Andy has seen and experienced it all, and taken many companies beyond the S-curve of hypergrowth.
In this episode, you’ll hear about Andy’s approach to consolidating early customer conversations into a product strategy that wins both the hearts and the minds of prospective customers. He’ll also share his radical thoughts on paid marketing and how to build early growth teams.
As the one of the first marketing hires at two breakthrough companies, Square and Opendoor, Brett Browman has lived through every critical early decision on growth — from which channels to invest in first, to how to think about LTV, to what to look for in your first growth hire.
In this episode, you’ll hear more about early marketing decisions that influenced the growth trajectory of both companies, how Brett and team tested value props through a rapid testing framework, and what tactics worked at Square and Opendoor in the early days.
