Growth: A Combination of Art and Science

A Panel with the Former Growth Leaders at Airbnb and Uber

A decade ago, “growth” teams were unheard of. Today, startups already begin thinking about building a growth team as soon as they achieve product market fit. At The Scaleup Offsite, we invited some of the pioneers in growth to share their experiences scaling some of today’s leading consumer companies.

Uber’s former VP of Product and Growth, Ed Baker, along with YC partner and former Growth Product Lead at Airbnb, Gustaf Alströmer, shared the stage with Greylock general partner Josh Elman to discuss the early days of mobile and social virality, key lessons from different growth experiments they’ve tried, and measuring things that can’t be measured. Below are a few of the core topics they discussed:

• The Evolution of Growth Teams: Gustaf explains that the role of growth teams have changed from being the evangelizing team that does it all, to evangelizing the rest of the company so everyone can manage product innovation in a similar way.
• Organizing a Growth Team: Prior to Uber, Ed worked as Head of International Growth at Facebook where the growth team was made up of five functions: product, engineering, analytics, design and marketing. This integration shaped Ed’s mindset and he applied a similar structure at Uber.
• Paid Acquisition vs. Organic Acquisition: Good growth teams should invest in paid marketing, says Gustaf. He explains that today’s platforms make the opportunity for free growth harder while paid marketing has become easier. Similarly, Ed explains that paid acquisition further accelerates growth and the faster you grow, efficiencies such as network effects become stronger.
• Scaling Local Markets: When Uber launched in different cities and countries, they created a role that was a bridge between the operations and product team. Ed describes this function as critical to ensure successful growth. Gustav advises that a huge growth driver that is often overlooked is to make sure all content can be translated well in different languages.
• Experimentation: The smallest tweaks can make the biggest impact on your business. Ed shares an example of how Japan was at one point their least viral region. They dug in and saw that very few new users were sending invitations to friends, and realized that the word “invitation” was seen as an imposition in Japanese culture. They made a simple copy tweak from “Invite your friends” to “Announce to your friends” in the signup flow, and that small change turned Japan into one of their most viral countries. At Airbnb, growth teams host regular experiment reviews and share their results with the team. Gustav explains that these results are often counterintuitive and enable teams to ask the right questions.

This presentation was recorded at The Scaleup Offsite, an event focused on scaling companies co-hosted by Greylock Partners and YC Continuity. Talks will be available on video on Greylock’s YouTube channel and on our podcast channels.

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