Welcome Casey Winters as Growth Advisor in Residence

Growth. It’s a topic on the mind of nearly every startup that we meet and work with at Greylock. For early stage consumer startups, how you attract, engage, and retain users into your product is critical to your long term success. Building a great product, of course, is paramount. But it isn’t usually enough. The best companies couple great product with a deep understanding of how to read metrics, experiment constantly with new growth strategies, identify sustainable growth mechanics, and spread organically. There are a lot of ways to get an app to go viral or acquire users — it is both a science and an art to find the right strategies and set up the proper metrics.

This is why we are so excited to announce that Casey Winters is joining Greylock as a Growth Advisor in Residence. Casey is one of the most strategic and insightful growth advisors I have met. It’s evident through his work at Pinterest and Grubhub that he understands growth is not about quick wins, but rather about finding a path to sustainability for retention and conversion. (For some valuable advice on building a growth team, read Casey’s post here). We are looking forward to his work with companies within our portfolio to help them grow faster and more sustainably. We expect him to work with and share lessons and learnings with many companies and growth leaders beyond Greylock, too.

Casey’s approach to growth is based on creating engaged users — not just signups or downloads. Pinterest’s mission is to be the world’s catalog of ideas and to help people discover and try new things. With that, he focused on driving users to discover new Pins when they opened the app, instead of just focusing on app opens. When people found and saved those Pins, it gave Pinterest confidence to show that content to more people. At Pinterest, he built and led growth initiatives around SEO, conversion optimization and email marketing globally. In September 2016, Pinterest hit 150 million monthly active users.

Before Pinterest, Casey was the first marketing hire at Grubhub, where he helped the company grow the customer base by 100x — from 30k in three cities to more than three million users in 500+ cities. He led efforts on SEO, paid acquisition, conversion, analytics, mobile and M&A to launch new markets and drive user growth across the country. Grubhub focused on driving repeat orders, not just new users. Casey found that if a customer were to order again using Grubhub within 30 days, they were likely going to be long term customers. He implemented strategies around using emails about new restaurants to drive repeat usage and helped developed the company’s first loyalty program, Yummy Rummy, which increased revenue significantly.

At Greylock, we are always looking for ways we can help companies scale from the ground up to become meaningful networks and platforms. With his deep experience from two hyper-growth startups, Casey is an excellent addition to the team. I am looking forward to working with him as he helps Greylock portfolio companies grow and scale. Please welcome him to the team and ask him for help growing your own startup! You can reach him via Twitter, Linkedin, or send him a quick email at cwinters@greylock.com.