Leveraging growth advisors, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta)

we talk about the 10x engineer and we don't really talk about the 10x growth advisor or 10x growth person but the same Dynamic applies You could argue it flies even more because the right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact something I've experienced several times in hindsight when you're like okay here's the needle in the haystack and then it's implemented and you can see hundreds of percentages sometimes over a thousand percent lift when you get it right it's one of those weird disciplines where the right person at the right time can literally say a sentence that changes the trajectory of your company you can't say that for a lot of different disciplines but this is one of them welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products today my guest is Luke Levesque Luke is

currently the chief growth officer at Shopify before this he was recruited personally by Mark Zuckerberg to help grow Facebook Messenger Instagram and WhatsApp he's also VP of growth and a GM at TripAdvisor he's also been a growth advisor to companies like Twitter Pinterest patreon Thumbtack and canva and in our conversation Luke shares advice on how and when to think about getting a growth advisor including how to structure the relationship and what to look for in an advisor we also spent a ton of time on SEO how to think about this as a growth Channel who it's well suited for and how everything is about to change in SEO with Bard and Chachi BT plus Luke shares a ton of really interesting advice around the value of self-reflection building routines cold plunges also a couple of amazing stories about working with Zuck and what he learned from him this is such an Insight Rich episode and I know you will love it

with that I bring you Luke Levesque after a short word from our sponsors this episode is brought to you by mixpanel get deep insights into what your users are doing at every stage of the funnel at a fair price that scales as you grow mixpanel gives you quick answers about your users from awareness to acquisition through attention and by capturing website activity add data and multi-touch attribution right in mixpanel you can improve every aspect of the full user funnel powered by first party behavioral data instead of third-party cookies mixed panels built to be more powerful and easier to use than Google analytics explore plans for teams of every size and see what mixpanel can do for you at mixpanel.com friends slash Lenny and while you're at it they're also hiring so check it out at mixpanel.com friends slash Lenny this episode is brought to you by atio a new type of CRM that's powerful flexible

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Luke welcome to the podcast thank you good to see it it's good to see you too I want to start with a story that you shared once when we were hanging out in the past and something that I'll never forget and it's about the time that you just joined Facebook and apparently you had some kind of big presentation you had to give to the entire company or the executive staff and then I just love the way it kind of unfolds it and kind of gives you a glimpse into what it's like to work with Zuck and at Facebook can you share that story if that rings a bell I remember the story well basically I had just started at Facebook about I'll use those two interchangeably I remember it as Facebook and always will now it's three months in and was working on a new area for me so came in started putting together our thoughts on a strategy and was asked to do a presentation in front of the company with Mark on the strategy so I

whipped up a draft strategy put together some plots and plans presented in front of the company went well and then every six months there's something called the Mt review at Facebook and you basically you know product area leads will go in and present their strategy how it's going again I just joined three months before so I walk in no idea what to expect I'm sitting at a table you can kind of Envision it's a big room really big room with a bunch of tables set up in a big square with a little microphone so I sit in there there's Mark and all the executives sitting on the other side and I sit down and it's quiet for what felt like five minutes I'm sure it was not but it was quiet for a while just sitting there waiting for you what's going to happen now and at some point mark kind of looks over says hey you saw your presentation sorry strategy now when are we going to start seeing results and

that was my introduction to Facebook it was kind of my introduction to working with Mark and uh was a pretty kind of intense thing to go through again I just joined the strategy was very much a draft at that point but I think what it highlights is something that Facebook does really really well which you get very quickly when you join Facebook and it's why there's such an execution machine and can build a lot of great product it's because they focus exclusively on that magic word which is impact and that was kind of by my first introduction to working uh with Mark and uh just that laser focus on all right got it now when are we gonna start seeing impact and kind of moving from there so it's something that is very much in the culture there and something that is so important is something of course that we focus on a lot at Shopify but it's that difference between I don't care how hard you've worked I don't care what you're

working on what the activities are what are the outcomes what is the impact you're having and I actually really love that word impact and and focusing on it because it's vague enough that it covers off any work that is impactful towards the mission and it's precise enough to know you know what does that mean when you say are you having an impact or what is the impact we're having so it's a great way to approach things that was my my first experience there within a few months and uh and yeah and uh we jumped in and started focusing on having a lot of impact from there I love that story there's a couple things there one is uh if I were in your shoes I'd I'd poop my pants sitting there for five minutes waiting for what do you guys it's not happen I'm happy to report okay how did it go how did you deal with it or I guess how did you respond well we funny enough already started having impact so

I was able to at least uh respond with hey we've kind of already started in a few ways and walked through where we were having impact and just focus on uh the strategy what our plans forward were and where we wanted to go from there so that's that's I think that's how he responded okay great great work so

something I've started doing actually on this podcast is I've started to keep a little Post-it of here it is of like themes that continue to recur across companies that are most successful and impact comes it's like number one on my posted here is just like impact comes up so often as something that the best companies continue to come back to and focus on and put a lot of emphasis on I yeah I guess I don't know if what the question is exactly but is that just what you find in the work that you do with all the companies you worked with just how important it is to come back to impact as the maybe the primary thing yeah I mean I think it's easy for a lot of leaders and companies to get caught up in how hard are people working what did they do I think recognizing and rewarding activity uh I mean everybody wants to have impact and the companies that truly focus on that are the ones that break through and uh really make a

lot of progress towards admissions so that seems obvious I think when I say it out loud but being in that culture and having it really ingrained in everything you do and whether it's performance reviews or strategies or easy reviews with the executive team it all gravitates around impact and I think it's that laser focus on it that matters so much but I mean I've certainly Seen It Go in other ways where it's more about you know working long hours and certainly there's a correlation to be clear between working hard and uh and the impact but I find it's just such a precise way to think about how people are performing or what you're doing in terms of is your strategy working is your the direction you're moving in having the intended outcomes that you want and uh and yeah I do think it's all about that and being a growth leader where everything's so measurable impact is something that can be very clearly measured and you know

whether you have it or not so the most important thing that we work on constantly is reviewing what's our strategy what are we working on is that driving towards the top level Northstar outcome we want is that having the impact and then basically doing everything around that that singular North Star so so it's very very important and um I think it's more profound than uh it might seem just from the outside but if you've worked in different companies you've probably experienced different versions of this too yeah I want to

spend more time on this but before we move on you also have another Zuck story and correct me if I'm wrong but Zuck recruited you personally to join Facebook slash meta uh is that true and then if true what was that what was that like to be recruited by Zuck so personally it was an interesting experience very uh intense but also uh one of the reasons for it was I was living in Canada and my family was there and I had some strong personal reasons why I couldn't leave Canada but yeah we had a lot of discussions with Mark I won't get into the micro details of it that's more Mark's story to tell than mine but a few takeaways from going through that experience as a leader hiring is the most important thing as we as we all know it's it's a craft and a skill that I'm always working on refining I have my own Playbook that I'm constantly tweaking testing out different approaches trying to find the best talent and assessing

them and trying to close them and bring them on board so I learned a lot through that experience with Mark and a couple things that stood out were the first one would be that you know Mark really involved the entire executive team it wasn't just me talking to recruiting or Talent OR HR or just mark it was the entire executive team and that's something that I think a lot of leaders don't take advantage of I've seen leaders I've certainly done this at times where you go it alone or you're working with recruiting but the reality is all the leaders all these acts in the company know how important it is to bring in talent and they're always more than happy to help so that's something that I think more leaders should do is really recruit all of their peers and their leaders in the company to help close and that's certainly something that happened when I was in discussions with with Mark and Facebook

about joining the second one which I had I suppose never experienced before was that they made it very personal I had these reasons why I couldn't leave so initially I was I was excited by the opportunity but I couldn't see myself moving to California for personal reasons and through discussions Mark basically and involved my wife involved my spouse in this Andrea and we flew down had dinner with him and Priscilla and his wife and Andrea had ended up meeting with many of the executives of Facebook and really talking through what was holding us back why we couldn't come potential options and ideas for how we could come down but involving somebody's spouse and family I think is a really good idea because it's a very personal decision to change company it involves more than just that person you're talking to it involves their whole family so that was something that I think is an important thing to have in

in your kind of playbook for hiring is really think about the whole person's family and involve them if you can in fact he'll be this as well at Shopify he flew down here with Fiona for and we had breakfast with with Andrea and them and reviewed a few offers when I when I joined Shopify and then the the third thing is just to be absolutely Relentless and don't give up and don't let momentum drop took seven months for me to go from there's you know this is amazing exciting but there's no way I can make this work to okay let's move to Palo Alto and you know Marv the exact a variety of leaders there were in discussions for months and months and months and never letting the momentum die and that's something that I think is really important no doesn't necessarily mean no and in this case it definitely wasn't the case and had the same experience with Toby at Shopify where we've been talking about working

together for over 10 years now and then finally the timing was right and I was able to join the company so just be relentless involve the family involve the the spouse if you can and recruit some some help from other Executives in the company those are some of the things that stood out and through my experience but yeah it was a it was a pretty wild time in my life Relentless is actually another word I wasn't necessarily on supposed to yet but I feel like it's another Trend across the most impactful and successful Founders is just this like I will not give up I will keep at it and so that's a really interesting example that in

action I was going to talk about this later but maybe it's a good time to talk about it now which is around hiring so you talk about you have this playbook for how to hire and you mentioned to me that you kind of find that as you scale as a leader hiring ends up being like the most important skill maybe maybe one of the most important skills I'd love to hear your take on just what you found about hiring as you've grown as a product Leader wait I think you reach a point in your career where you realize that hiring is the skill you now need to become world class at because you're no longer doing the work yourself you're still of course involved and doing some of the work and getting your hands dirty but the bulk of your team's success now will be the quality of The Hires you make and you truly need to be world class at that so yeah I built this this playbook out I was in Canada in Ottawa when I uh I sold

a company a Trip Advisor and really started growing my team and becoming more of a uh leaning into leadership at the time through that experience and one of the benefits of being in Ottawa I kind of Off the Grid if you will is it's a curse and a benefit is that you don't have a ton of people you can learn from so it does mean you need to go to First principles and think things through from the ground up it takes a little longer but you come up with your own playbooks on how to do things and yeah I think you've seen my my blueprint which is a good example of that where I have this this blueprint put together and when new people join the team I show them my blueprint which is basically a list of my quirks so we can really quickly align that's something that just being in Ottawa and trying to figure out how to be a leader and avoid mistakes I was like wouldn't it be nice if you had a blueprint

when somebody joins you can just tell them all of your quirks and you can just quickly calibrate on how it is to work together versus through awkward long discussions over the course of a year my hiring playbook's a similar thing so I think of it in three different chapters if you will there's finding Talent assessing talent and closing talent in terms of finding talent I do believe that the best predictor of future performance is past performance so I'm looking for what I call signs of Excellence so I want to know you know the top people generally have done multiple amazing things in their life repeated success not just once maybe it was work related maybe not work related but generally speaking if you think back to the Stars you've worked with they've done some amazing things and that's why I always start when I interview when I chat with people I start talking about just trying to understand what what is in your path

what have you done professionally and not professionally and uh generally Stars kind of stand out it's very rare that there's not something obvious that comes through so I for myself personally I'm looking for kind of three different signs of Excellence to tell me that it doesn't have to be three the mental model I have is there's as you're talking to them you're getting pluses and negatives there's red flags you're hearing and there's really great things and then at the end you're gonna make an opinion of how good this person is another great sign of excellence and this was just through reflecting on my team and stars on the team and thinking what makes them unique what about them and one of them is when somebody's boss leaves the company and then comes back to poach them that is such a strong signal because if you think of what just happened the person left the leader who knows exactly how

good this this person you're talking to is they have the most knowledge of the performance of this individual they left the company they've come back to poach them putting their own reputation at risk by coming back depending on the situation and you know they would never do that unless this person was really really good so it's you know you don't want to over pivot on one signal you want to look at the full picture but those are the types of things I look at to bring in top talent I've got this this whole Playbook mistakes I've made that I've learned from things to avoid and uh over the years I've put together this Playbook that I I try to follow and I'm always running little experiments to try to make it better we're going to

link to that blueprint that you mentioned a lot of what you're talking about is probably more relevant to like senior executive type people because you're looking for or maybe not because you're looking for savings three okay so people like early in their career could also have three say moments of Excellence yeah I mean just just thinking off time it depends on the type of person you're hiring but have they you know have they are their founder have they tried to do something did they won an award somewhere are they you know a gold medalist or something have they done something that others have not that that shows grit that shows drive that shows the ability to succeed and I've seen the that you can apply that to any candidate you're hiring and the implication there is without that they're probably not going to be stars that that's there's a strong correlation between having signs of excellence and them performing really

well in this role right exactly it would be a good I mean I suppose it's possible but it would be pretty rare that somebody would come in without some sign that they stand above the crowd and again I'm talking about you generally want to hire the top one percent of candidates so when you're looking for the best of the best you definitely are looking for those those signals awesome okay so I'm going to bring us back on the agenda that I had for myself which

is I want to start with talking about advisorships and Advising and growth advisors you've been a growth advisor for a long time to some of the most amazing companies out there Twitter Pinterest patreon canva Thumbtack I'm sure there's others that you don't list that are more informal I work at Shopify and so what I think about here is a lot of Founders are often think about should I bring on an advisor what should I look for an advisor I've heard stories of advisors being useless sometimes people tell me I don't need advisors so I guess the question here is just what's your take on when it makes sense to bring on and consider bringing on a growth advisor and what should people look for when they're exploring and talking to a potential growth advisor a few thoughts in terms of when I I don't think you can probably come into early it's probably harder to find really good ones than it is to time it but generally speaking I

would say you don't want to focus too much on growth until you have product Market fit so make sure you have a product that users love that's either showing strong signs of retention or has some good Loop that you can see that that you can start thinking about growth let me follow on that thread real quick because I find some founders still want to have someone come help them with growth even though they know they don't have product Market fit even though this tip comes up every single time and I'm talking to a person like wait till you have product Market fit before doing growth stuff so could you just add like a little bit of why that's important while we're on that topic growth advice is generally always applicable and if you can start thinking about how to build your product early even if it's pre-product Market fit you're not gonna do any damage but you may be wasting some capital on an

advisor or a growth person too early the problem that I see is if you start growing a product that doesn't have product Market fit you're actually doing more damage than than good because you have a product that is now being exposed to the market through growth levers and through optimization that is giving a bad experience with your product and you want that that product that you know is tight and you know has product Market fit to start building a flywheel and start growing you don't want it to be growing if it doesn't satisfy that need that you're trying to build out for so I can see it having more damage than good because when somebody tries something they're unlikely to try it again so it's that's that's the dangerous game you can get into So you you're better off with a good product that's satisfying a need and then growing from there I will say to kind of play Devil's Advocate with

myself and something that I've um done actually in one of the products I built uh several consumer products and grown them the is that sometimes to know if you have a product you need users to use it so there's like some subtlety in here but I would say if you are trying to get users in to start playing with it at scale I mean try to focus in on a market that is maybe Off the Grid like pick a country that's I some English-speaking country that's a bit off the grid that you can isolate your marketing to so you can start getting dozens or a couple hundred people per day coming in and giving you feedback I've seen that work too so I'd say wait till you have product Market fit if you do start growing your product early because you need that signal from people actually using it Beyond just focus groups and friends or small numbers of people try to do it Off the Grid in smaller markets that you can

kind of contain the growth and get what you're really trying to get which is that signal on is it working or not awesome okay I threw us off track let's get back on track so we're talking about when it makes sense to find a growth advisor and then what to look for in someone that you might want to work with I mean what makes a great growth advisor is somebody who really understands what to do but also why certain growth Levers work it's that kind of deep understanding of levers of onboarding or whatever area they're focusing on that really makes growth advisor stand out so when you're looking for a growth advisor you want to have those discussions to see like how much depth does this person have have they you know seen a Playbook and they're just good at repeating the Playbook or are they evolving are they growing and the best way to to get to know that is to start really asking them questions about

growth and growth advising and there's certain things that they've done and why they think those have worked this can be tricky if you don't yourself know growth so I think one one thing that I have not seen a lot of Founders do that I would advise is if you have an advisor already because this applies to finding growth advisors but it also applies to hiring good growth Talent so if you have somebody you know whether it's already an advisor or somebody you know who knows growth you can solicit their help in trying to flush out whether somebody you're trying to hire is of high Talent so if you have an advisor you can make make that one of their their roles is vet out any new talent coming in and if you're looking for an advisor try to find somebody that you know and trust who can do that first pass because for somebody who knows growth that you trust it's actually not a lot of work for them

to vet out have talented someone else's and it's an easy ask to make and something that if you if you have that person your network or that worked with you that you can leverage for but I haven't seen that too often where Founders kind of take advantage of people they know or existing growth advisors to help recruit and vet talent because it can be quite hard if you don't know the growth space to know if

somebody's good or not that's a really interesting idea and it could be where you find someone that's too busy to work with you but maybe you could just ask hey could usually help me vet people and it takes a lot less time yeah I've never been asked that which is I mean I don't know if I'll start getting asked this now but but it does seem like that's a really simple way to add a ton of value uh and as a Founder I mean even if you have to pay this person or whatever you have to do but it's it's a it's such an important hire to get right you know we talk about the 10x engineer and we don't really talk about the 10x growth advisor or 10x growth person but the same Dynamic applies You could argue it flies even more because the right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact where they're either building or helping to ideate or helping to implement a growth Loop that literally changes the company as we know

you need a great product and you need a great growth Loop and it's usually just one Loop that you need to get right most companies have gotten to where they are just off of one really strong channel that they've just dominated so it's important to get it right is there an example of that sort of impact that you've seen in your advisorship or other peoples of just an impact from one conversation or a little bit of the help definitely uh and I think what I would point to is the advantage of a growth advisor is it takes a long time to understand a channel and certainly you know people have to know their stuff they have to be uh very good at their craft their growth craft but also they have to be exposed to a large set of experiments or an environment where they've just seen what works and what does it so no matter how good somebody is if they haven't been exposed to an environment where there's

a lot of experimentation a lot of learning it's very hard for them to to internalize that so once you've once a growth advisor has that it takes years to learn it but it literally can take seconds literally to communicate that so I've worked with some companies that you've mentioned and certainly have had impact very very quickly every one example would be a company that I worked with now a public company at the time they weren't on day one walked in they presented their strategy their plans their funnels and their their landing pages and I could see very quickly that there was something they were doing that was a little off and I asked them why why are you doing it that way and they said well you just we think it just looks better that way and as well just do it this other way and I remember this because it was such a short conversation and then three weeks later we connected and I heard they had rolled it out and it was

a large uh impact that that they had from this one change and it's just a good example of this this happened many times with the companies I work with but it's a good example that it's it's not actually once you know it it's not hard to recognize it and to if you deeply understand it to give advice but it takes a long time to get the base knowledge so I don't do these too often anymore but when I do advise I I take them very seriously I focus exclusively on having impact and I think that's really important because like you say there's a lot of advisors out there some of them are great some of them you know different qualities and you really want to make sure that if you are an advisor if you want to be in the camp of you know when this person comes in they have a lot of impact and it takes time and focus and energy and and alignment and there's a bunch of things we can talk about that that helps to drive that alignment but

having impact is the most important thing whether you're an advisor or if you're you're hiring and because it's it's one of those weird disciplines where the right person at the right time can literally say a sentence that changes the trajectory of your company and you can't say that for a lot of different disciplines but this is one of them there's that word impact again impact

impact the point you just made about how one conversation can have a ton of impact is a reminder of why sometimes the price of an advisor feels absurd or like for one hour it's like thousands of dollars but it's because obviously they spent a decade learning a thing in one conversation is all that work they put into it uh crystallized for you in the moment exactly and and it's something I've experienced several times in hindsight when you're like okay here's the needle in the haystack and then it's implemented and you can see hundreds of percentages sometimes over a thousand percent lift when you get it right it's exhilarating it's great I have a something I used to say which is you want your impact to be so big there's a slide in the next board deck on like trying to explain what happened and that can happen when your uh advising companies because uh because you're able to share very quickly uh

insights but one way to drive alignment is not everybody can do this not all advisors do it this way but I personally love just when when I do these which which is not that frequent just purely doing equity and because I love the alignment in outcomes where the founder will be successful and you will be successful so the incentives are really good to drive uh the right performance and the right outcomes that that you want as a Founder so if you can do it I would definitely advise uh Founders to bring advisors in for Equity if you can and I think the same applies for your internal growth team you want to make sure that the teams are incentivized not on activities on doing stuff because there's a lot of stuff to be done in growth but really driving the outcomes that that you want and Equity is just a great way of saying hey we're in this together we're on the same side of the table let's go grow this this company I

was actually about to ask you what kind of structure you recommend for an advisorship is there anything else you can share about just like what you'd recommend a Founder do in terms of compensation for an advisor there's a couple things I mean I I do I'm a big fan of equity because of the alignment of incentives you should think about without getting into too much detail of the the actual structure of the deals but think about how you invest the equity the last thing you want is an advisor holding back on sharing knowledge the ideal engagement would be an advisor comes in delivers as much value as possible quickly and then trains your team and then maybe it's a one-year engagement and hopefully they've learned because the advisor has been incentivized to share as much as possible and to train the team as much as possible and then ideally you don't need them anymore after so there's something there about

structuring uh Equity vesting I'm a big fan of vesting earlier rather than later so think about it in terms of structure you're investing commensurate with the value you want which is very much front loaded I'm also a big fan of three month Cliffs something I've I've done I I always do actually is uh listen in the first three months you'll know both sides if it's working or not and you want to de-risk that on both sides because it really should be seen as a partnership between the advisor and the founder and if the founder thinks you're not adding value in the first few months I think they should just tear it up and and both sides move on it's not good for the founder to continue the deal and it's not good frankly for the advisor because they're not for some reason able to add value in that environment so I love a three month Cliff at the beginning where if it's not working in the first three months you tear up the

deal and and both parties walk away and do you risk the entire thing and again drives incentives in the right way where the advisor is a hundred percent incentivized to add as much value as fast as possible and so that's another thing that I've that I tend to do and I've done it for a long time that's a really good tip basically don't do four-year vesting for advisors probably not even two year but yeah there's a bunch of ways to do it honestly it's hard enough to find growth advisors that have capacity so you gotta also say like what can you do that the advisor is comfortable with but yeah I mean just to be candid I think you want to structure in a way where you're not dependent on the advisor over time they're adding a ton of value they're helping teach the team they're probably bouncing around because your company's changing your team's changing your leaders are changing but over time

and you know that can be it can be years but it shouldn't be indefinite you shouldn't need an advisor forever I've seen a scenario where there's desire to keep the advisor out almost as insurance like if something goes wrong I just want to be able to pick up the phone that that can make sense but I do think a good growth advisor is incentivized to share as much as possible as fast as possible to have impact to train your team and then whether you want to keep them on or not long term as an insurance policy or just answer questions as things change that should be a choice and not because if we lose the advisor we're you know we're completely screwed that would be a bad place for you to be in as a founder

he said it's hard to find a good advisor 100 agree any advice for people to help them find an advisor that might be the right fit yeah I would say there's more of them these days than there were even just five years ago or uh 10 years ago I would start with depending on your situation if you're a Founder I would start with your investors I think VCS have an amazing network of advisors I get I don't know a couple requests a week that I'm not taking right now but that from my experience and what I what I've seen that's probably like the high especially the high nvcs the very talented VCS will have this network and it frankly it's a great partnership as an advisor for you to have you can help the companies you can help the VCS and it helps you so everybody wins just asking other founders of it had good experience much like hiring the third advice I would give is to find companies that are world class

at what you're trying to grow what channel or skill you're looking at and then reach out and see if there's a way to to help that way that's actually how I got started I was a Trip Advisor and a prominent VC reached out one of the companies they were working with needed some help on SEO got connect I was still in Canada at the time got connected with them had a phone call had a significant impact through that one phone call and rather than joining as an advisor I essentially helped them out pro bono in exchange for hey this I want to get connected in the valley so I was in Canada I want to start another company I wanted to get connected so through that that tactic where they reached out for to a company that was known to be world class at SEO I think that was really smart on this the VCS part and then maybe some advice up and coming uh growth advisors would be you know that first one I I didn't take a

single shred of equity or or money and just tried to have as much impact as possible and to help out this company as much as possible and then make sure that I was able to get connected to other people that I wanted to meet in the Bay Area and then kind of thing snowballed from there I definitely want to chat

about how to become a growth advisor because I think people listening here might be like oh that sounds pretty good someday I'll maybe I'll become a growth advisor but before we get to that what are things that an advisor are best suited for versus is finding someone full time versus no one like what are the ideal kind of problem sets for an advisor versus a full-time higher person I would say your ideal setup is always your preference should always be to have somebody in the house I'll start there because you want to have that as part of the culture there's so much more that they can do when they're in-house that being said if you can't find somebody in-house then bring on advisor but even if you bring on an advisor some advice to Founders would be you want to surround your your team or at the one person that you've identified who's just a amazing world-class doer even if they don't know

growth with a set of growth advisors so that they're learning that's being put through the culture of the company and that that knowledge is stays inside of the company so I'd say you generally prefer I would prefer to go internal surround these people with great advisors and then indentate it from there that would be how I approach it okay so two thoughts here one is I feel like this podcast is becoming an interesting way to discover awesome growth advisors and I think over time I'm building this directory of like who are awesome smart growth people that are open to advising so that could be an interesting opportunity just look through the focus on this podcast and yeah there's some great people that have been on here definitely it's only working my way through all the amazing at least smart growth people and product leaders the other is I've noticed that a lot of the best growth advisors have

worked with the same sorts of companies I find Euro comes up a lot canva comes up a lot Pinterest like all these people that have worked with say Pinterest that I hear better just awesome Casey comes to mind Melissa tan who's coming out of the podcast I think she worked with them uh Dropbox anyway so maybe one idea see who these companies work with as advisors and that can maybe point you to people that are worth exploring I mean I that's that's a good idea the um it kind of goes back to something I mentioned earlier which is companies that have a lot of traffic and then I have a lot of users are great learning ground for growth people and for advisors because uh no matter how smart you are you need you need the Reps you got to go to the growth gym and put in the rep switches experiments you've gotta try things things are gonna work things aren't going to work and there's a discipline of like when something doesn't work you

can learn almost as much as when something works so but you need that traffic you need that environment and that's why certain companies have these great people coming out like Casey at Pinterest and other people that have been at these companies that have the traffic have the culture to support it uh to support growth and and I think that's I don't think it's a coincidence why some of these companies have some great people coming from them the other tip I just thought about as you're talking is everyone's launching a substack newsletter that has is doing any sort of advising because there's a lot of power in building an audience creating kind of awareness of what you do so I wonder if another tip is search sub Stacks directory of newsletters for specific things you're dealing with like saying go to market or plg or sales and you might find someone there I haven't done that but that seems like a

reasonable way to do it that's where we're all they're all heading I'm not saying that the people on substack have this but as advice to the people listening is when you're vetting for a growth advisor or growth Talent don't just weight it on the public Halo of somebody that's a common mistake I've seen where you know maybe somebody's done presentations at a conference or somebody's done I I don't know but they're they're Twitter following it is Broad they can be excellent that's not a disqualifier immediately but just make sure not to make the hire just exclusively on that I made that mistake a few times and it's a common one to get into so make sure you're vetting properly even if somebody with a large following that sub stack or or Twitter that that's uh I think an important thing to keep in mind one thousand percent agree I always say that the best product leaders the best growth people don't have time to sit on

Twitter and tweet and write newsletters they're doing the job working building growing and maybe eventually they get out of that and start writing but a thousand percent agree there's a lot of people not not to disqualify all the people on Twitter some of them are tweeting with melts but but my point is just just be don't over pivot on the Halo uh just do your look at their past performance what what what teams have they been on what environment do they have do they really know growth uh and sometimes they do but I think it's a common mistake to say oh yeah they have a large following let's hire this person one thousand percent yeah rarely does a celebrity kind of hire that seems really genius on Twitter and substack end up being as amazing as you think yeah it does happen but yeah it does happen absolutely one last question

around this topic people listening might want to become growth advisors I mentioned this earlier is there any other advice you want to share just like if you want to become a growth advisor someday here's what you should think about yeah I think the right mental model as a growth advisor is around the same one as an investor so the most important thing an advisor can do aside from having impacts and knowing their craft is picking which companies to work with especially if you're working for Equity so I'll only speak to that but you're basically putting in your time you're picking a you know likely a smaller number you only have so many hours in the day of companies to work with and you want to make sure there's a likely exit in the future so for me personally I have a you know a spreadsheet like most big decisions that I make in my life and over the years I've just added criteria and questions

to ask myself about the company and then reflect on okay is this kind of checking all the boxes for a likely outcome because you don't just need to be successful you need to be successful and for the company to be successful and for there to be a liquidity event so you need to put yourself in the shoes of an investor and look at it as an investment that is the arguably the most important thing because you can go and do a great job and then wait many years and potentially not see any any reward for it and that I think that's the the nice thing about the equity structure and that you're you're tied in the same um incentives with the founder which is just great in terms of a relation any relationship to have the same incentives but you you want to make sure that there's a good likelihood of a decent outcome down the road the other if I can throw another one in the other piece of advice I would give

is um it can take a long time for some of these companies to be successful that's okay you should expect that in fact you should just go in with that mindset when I'm deciding to work with a company I'm in there for 10 years and I know that and and I say that as I'm in I'm in we're running this together if I choose to work with the company but it does mean that the structure of the deal needs to reflect that so you need to have a long tail at the end so if you're taking options or rsus and it's purely Equity make sure you have the time for that to happen there would be nothing worse than putting your heart and soul having impact and then waiting I don't know a couple years and then your Equity expires so you make sure there's a long tail I mean it can take it can literally take over 10 years for these companies to exit and you should be okay with that uh I think that's okay you're taking some risks they're taking

some risk on you and that's a great partnership but you'll just need the time for that so advice the growth growth advisors make sure to ask for a long tail so that you don't uh end up in in a bad spot in the end and that incentives again are perfectly aligned between the founder and the advisor this episode is brought to you by EPO EPO is a Next Generation a b testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams companies like DraftKings zapier click up twitch and Cameo rely on EPO to power their experiments wherever you work running experiments is increasingly essential but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern grow team stack this leads to wasted time building internal tools or trying to run your own experiments through a clunky marketing tool when I was at Airbnb one of the things that I loved most about working there was our experimentation platform where I was able to slice and

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so I want to segue to a different topic SEO you're kind of the uh you tell me but it feels like you're one of the earliest uh SEO people in Tech you helped grow TripAdvisor many years ago and it was mostly SEO driven I think innovated a lot of the SEO tactics and strategies and then you help Pinterest Thumbtack other companies that are very SEO driven you talked about how many companies grow through one channel and these are all very SEO driven companies imagine Shopify has a lot of SEO work that's happening right now with you there and so I want to chat about SEO so I guess broadly SEO is like there's like this amazing growth channel it's like basically free it continues to work after you stop doing any work on it you know for a while many Founders think about should we invest in SEO how do we approach SEO so maybe just as a first question what are what are signs that your product and Company is a good fit

for SEO being potentially a huge channel for growth yeah I've been doing SEO for a really long time it's a lot of fun and um certainly being a supervisor was a great learning ground uh for that that we're able to really innovate and try try new things there in terms of the The Playbook that we built out that was a lot of fun those those years a couple thoughts the first one would be I do think there's an SEO play in any company maybe at a different extents but Google is such a large funnel of existing demand for your product or your product area that there's usually an angle to get some SEO traffic there so I do think it applies to most companies I would say they're if you're an early product that's never seen that the world's never seen it's a brand new brand new thing there might be some creation some demand creation you need to do but most of the time there's existing demand in Google

we can Harvest demand or there's queries that are related to your topic that you can start ranking for to start building brand awareness so there's always some angle and then I kind of divide websites or online products into two categories there's the ones which are smaller sites small number of pages very targeted at your product and don't have this kind of loop of creating new pages automatically this would be um most mostly Commerce sites actually you have would have a number of pages around the products and about us those types of pages that's one type of sites let's say they have a dozen pages and then there's other ones with thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions of pages which are either user generated content uh or like TripAdvisor and Pinterest and others or marketplaces like sub attack and other types of websites like that those are generally easier to see a huge amount of impact

very quickly because it's such a large optimization surface and ideally it's growing and generating traffic automatically voice thought of LinkedIn is just a great example of this where you have this viral Loop where you you would you recall when it was just starting uh everybody was getting these invites from LinkedIn and those come and go you get an invite you register you don't that that happens but the byproduct is when people join they create this beautiful landing page which is your profile that gets indexed it's kind of like a viral Loop feeding an SEO Loop that continues to grow so that's a good example of user generated content which kind of feeds on itself and grows so those those two categories going back to the first category if you only have a small handful of pages the way to the thing about that is you certainly want to optimize those pages then you want to start creating content that

speaks to your audience beyond that so you need a Content strategy whether it's a blog or or creating new parts of your

site that address questions that your audience might have but generally speaking I think there's an SEO play in any company and there's just different tactics strategies and approaches to get there awesome I never thought of it that way that there's kind of these these two buckets so the first bucket is like you don't have a ton of pages that naturally are generated as a part of your experience and the second is you do and I guess in the second bucket I think I've read it in Glassdoor and quora TripAdvisor great example interest in the first bucket is the way to generate Pages basically it's like editorially like create like write content have people write things for you is that is that generally different ways of doing it but a good content strategy is a kind of tried and true approach definitely and in that bucket of you don't naturally have a ton of pages can you primarily grow through SEO or is SEO

he's always going to be this minority Channel and you have to find something else no you can it can be a big Channel and this is also about creating content but it's not your users creating the content you have to go create the content and have some high quality answer to a question that's being asked on on Google and you know I think one thing to keep in mind with SEO is entire Industries are based off of single keywords I remember when I was uh in the travel industry that you know literally companies were bought and sold based on one keyword rank so it's not like oh it's a little bit of traffic and I think this is a bit unintuitive with growth a lot of people think of growth as linear or it's another Channel or it's another thing I mean girls done writing is exponential it literally is company changing when he's talking specifically about SEO keep in mind the world is searching for that thing on that one targeted on that

one that one keyword and likely you're clicking the number one search result so getting that number one spot is not like oh that's a little bit of traffic that you can literally build an entire business around that that first spot so don't think that's well maybe it is commonly known I'm not sure but it's it's definitely something that is non-obvious or intuitive I think to most people and if you have an entire SEO team working on one keyword I don't think that's crazy because as one you know small number of keywords can define an entire industry or a business is there an example of that sort of situation when keyword building a massive company yeah I mean there's there's a lot I'm sure I can speak to uh my own company that I sold to TripAdvisor it was called travel pod it was a travel blogging website where you can think WordPress but for travel uh which I I started earlier was the first sight to do that

and I made the mistake of not knowing SEO or growth before I sold the company and so that was a great learning for me when I went in um this is a story where we're looking to acquire another site and I thought the product was pretty poor and I remember talking to the founder and thinking he'd asked me if we want to acquire it and uh the product's terrible why would I want to acquire that he's like yeah they're 10 times bigger than you what and that was that was when I realized okay we've been building a great product and great engineering culture and it is important but you really need to know this girl stuff so that's that's actually the moment I shifted to all right we have to really know this these growth levers and in that space the number one key word was travel blog and so owning that was a big deal and we did not own it and we I think ranked number two for a really long time I think I can't remember if we

got it in the end but that's just one example where and there was many many travel businesses where um I always loved looking at a business and like trying to figure out what's their growth Loop like how did they do that it's not like oh it's great business it just grew most of the time it's you know Priceline crush it at SCM Facebook crush it at a viral Loop where you got tagged in a photo no you got an email and you had to go register because there's a photo of you someone you really want to see TripAdvisor did a great job at SEO and and it's often it's just one really strong channel that propelled the company forward and in this case it can literally come down to one keyword like like we had a travel

pod so maybe a good time just to give a people a mental model of the different channels slash Loops that exist so you've talked about seos one paid searches one what are the what's like the collection for people to think about I'm like usually as you said one of these is the primary source of growth for a company yeah there's a there's a variety of them I think you have to look at where the intent is right now and uh it does change over time but you have social channels like Tick Tock Instagram uh influencers are a great uh area to engage with there you have SEO you have search I think chat chat GPT is another upcoming one that uh we might want to talk about a little bit where I do think we've never seen that kind of growth for search before and that's a platform that we have to start thinking about how do we optimize for it and Google just announced there are recent changes they're going to be putting in an AI box

at the top of the search results so how do you optimize in a world where it's not so much about optimizing for the platform but teaching the AI what you do and why you're the best in the world at it so that's that's another whole other area we could we could talk about but that's that's a big Channel I think that that's growing viral Loops are always a powerful thing if you can get them to work that's more about psychology and channel optimization where you want people to be incentivized to share the product that you have with their friends and then to have their friends come back and register so you can have you can have one buyer Loop you can have secondary wire Loops you can bolt fire Loops onto existing products there's different ways of doing this and then you know just backing up when I think about growth I don't think about a specific it's not growth equals SEO and Instagram for me growth equals whatever it takes

to move the needle so I get this question all the time how do you build a growth team what does a growth team do and I say whatever it takes and that could be zero to one building a new product it could be M A it could be SEO it could be social it could be onboarding and I think that's a better framework to look at and then if you look at it through that lens then you know Partnerships easily folds into that where I've seen a lot of businesses get very big on just really clever Partnerships either strategic or broad kind of affiliate based Partnerships so there's a lot of channels I definitely wouldn't restrict the scope of a growth team to just a small subset but but have a very wide funnel in terms of or at least strategy in terms of just test a lot of different things and go after the channels that work and pivot pivot uh pivot when it does and then really lean into the one or two or three that really work

because sometimes that's all it takes for business

well you definitely nerd sniped me with the chachypts so let's just spend some time there I think this relates to just the general sense that SEO is always changing and it feels like this is an sem I guess in this case too in jet gbt in Bart I guess is maybe the latest change so what should we know there yeah I think we're all still trying to figure it out I was at Google I O last week or the week before and as soon as I saw the search result with the big box of AI answers at the top having done this for so long I immediately knew the impact that I think is about to come and I've seen this play out in travel where you know Google acquired ITA and did flight search and hotel search generally is great for users and great for Google and the search engines but makes it a little bit difficult for the Publishers and the the sites that are adding value to the ecosystem through through being ranked

in the search results so what we're about to see is basically Google what they showed was a big box on top of the search results that answers the query directly so if you think about that that means that there's a lot of queries right now that are that users are clicking through down on the organic links and getting their answer there which will be answered directly in the search results we've seen this play out over the last 10 or five to ten years where more and more answers are being shown at the top every time something changes entire Industries are disrupted or changed and I think that's going to happen again so there's different types of keywords there's transactional ones like e-commerce keywords and and with purchase intent there's navigational ones where you're trying to get somewhere and there's informational keywords which is I have a question I'm looking for an answer it's pretty broad it's a big area

I think that last category of keywords is particularly at risk so if any body listening to this is currently getting traffic on those you should start thinking about what does that mean when things start changing and I think the changes will be we'll probably start seeing things shift to paid you have to pay for that free traffic and the second one is there may just be a case where those keywords just don't don't get many clicks anymore you might drop down to a very small number of clicks if at all because answers will get questions will get answered directly in the search results so it's a big shift we have to see how things land but that's I think over the next 12 to 24 months if history repeats itself we'll we'll see that channel change and we've seen this play out at all the different channels they kind of evolve generally the the uh you can't blame the companies they're doing what they have to do chat

GPT is now 50 of my daily searches and not Google so I think Google has to react and this is what we'll see so from a growth perspective definitely something to start to think about super fascinating I think about my newsletter and now cool suck it all up and just tell you all the answers great good news for me now yes I yeah and change is great you know things are exciting it's exciting we haven't had a big like just geeking out on growth a little bit we haven't had a big platform change in a long time so I'm like all right cool we get to let's go see what we can do here uh how do you optimize this how do you how do you you know how do you get listed if you can we're not sure where the placements will be but that will be the new game yeah there's actually a uh lennybot.com that is a GPT bot trained on my content that there's a newsletter post about how it was all built so you could build your own and so I think my

new goal is going to have to be to convince people to go to lennybot.com instead of Google wish me luck yeah that's just you gotta lean into it yeah we have uh we have a shop.ai this great uh AI based shopping engine I'll tell you I I bought so much on it it's so good it's the more you use these Technologies the more you realize how good they are and that's something Vegas coming it's not just oh yeah there's another change I was summarizing the Google changes to um some people and originally was thinking this is the biggest change in the last 10 years and then when I reflected on the last 10 years I thought this is actually the biggest changed since since the Inception of Google actually I don't think we've seen something as profound as what's coming and you really need to get ready for it damn yeah I've been using Chachi PT for helping me with interview questions actually and once in a while there's like a really

good one well that's cool so thank you to gbt bringing me good things also

maybe one more question along these lines around kind of connecting advisorship and SEO would you suggest when you're starting to think about SEO starting to invest in SEO you might be listening to this feeling like I got to think about SEO does it make sense to bring on say SEO advisor like you I know you're not available currently but other folks like you or are an agency that is really good at this stuff or bring on someone full time do you have any kind of Frameworks for thinking about which direction to go it's hard for an agency or a pure advisor without internal help to do it a really good job without internal Talent at the center so I would say I would start with just hire somebody internally and give them the mandate to incentivize them correctly to go and own this this channel if even if they don't know SEO my advice would be hire get an engineer get somebody who is just a Relentless

doer who wants to learn this and surround them with great advisors that I've just seen that work really well there are some good agencies out there agencies will be working with multiple companies so it's a little bit harder to get the same impact from an agency it can work sometimes but uh my preference is generally Our Last Resort would be an agency and I'd much rather have somebody who's internal who knows the business who knows the keywords who knows who who can have the knowledge internally inside the company permanently and help grow a team around them and you know have succession in place and a proper team so that you're not too dependent on this this one person but that would be my my go-to and then if you're really stuck you can use agencies but my my default would be having somebody internal supplemented with agencies if you have to SEO is sorry SEO is very um very specific I mean there's it's a very tight channel

that certain knowing certain things about it can have a big impact and um I think you do want people that are have that experience that can bring that in from uh from the outside to augmenting internal team so it'll take a really long time to learn it awesome I was gonna ask that so you ideally want to find someone that's done it before that isn't just a Relentless learner but like is that plus as that SEO in the past oh yeah ideally you hire an amazing SEO person you can bring internal second would be somebody amazing who can get things done surround them with advisors and then in my stack rank will probably be third would be agencies awesome and

then the other kind of common issue with seos it takes a long time to show impact do you have just a rule of thumb of just like give them this much time to see if they can make an impact I'd say a few things I'd say if you already have content and pages that are are pretty good and getting a decent amount of traffic it doesn't necessarily have to take a long time so that would be my my first reaction it can take a long time generally it takes a long time when you have to build new content uh so the way to think about Google is it is going to take your content it's going to show it to its users people that are searching and it's going to determine which piece of content is the best to rank highly it's not just about little you know tricks and links and keyword ratios that those days are over those do matter but it's not purely about that and if you have a new piece of content it takes time for

Google to build enough trust to say okay I'm gonna I'm gonna start showing this to users now and then start collecting user feedback and then rank it appropriately that can take some time but if you have existing pages that are ranking you know eight and they're already on the first page it does doesn't always happen but I've certainly seen it in fact more common than not that you can have you know sometimes hundreds of percentages have lift very quickly and it depends what you're starting with it's probably the right way to think about it so if I'm trying to summarize it I would say 12 months is probably like max if you can't see impact in 12 months is something wrong if you have existing content it could happen pretty early could happen on day one actually I've seen that uh happen it could happen if you have to build new parts of the site it can take months I've seen that happen in companies I've worked with

where I think it would be like a quarter we had to wait till we saw a big lift so it's somewhere between you know three to 12 months yeah awesome that's really helpful okay so final topic slash final question you've had a truly incredible career you've worked with Incredible companies incredible leaders I'm looking at your site here in a side window and you're like here's a picture of you and Zak here's a picture of you and Toby from shop hoi and there's a there's more and I'm curious what you believe has been key to your success in your career success that you suggest listeners who want to have some measure of similar success do it's probably a a bunch of things we can talk about here uh yeah this is the obvious thing is like I think you've you've just gotta love what you do uh you gotta work hard you have to have impact certainly at the end of the day in growth that's all that will matter if I if I think back to specific

things that I do though that are to pick one thing that's been very important for me throughout my journey is that are of self-reflection and encode coaches I've had coaches my whole career but but the the macro theme is you're constantly iterating experimenting and becoming the best you can be in your career also as a dad and as a husband but uh and support for your own personal health but um that reflection is so important and I've leveraged many many different coaches over the years and now do a lot of uh self-reflection through a morning routine that I have and that I've been doing for quite some time that has been a big unlock for me and the biggest most important part of that morning routine is like dedicating an hour aside to really think about what's going well what's not going well what am I screwing up well why am I screwing it up which is often more important than what am I screwing up and of course what

am I going to do about it but as long as you're learning and iterating every day then you're just making constant progress towards your goals and it's something I do that I I love doing I love thinking uh so I literally can just sit there and think for hours actually and I have a dashboard on all the areas that I'm focusing on with the red yellow green and just constantly revving on what am I working on improving what am I doing what experiments am I running and where am I doing well and where am I not doing well and how can I be better as a in all areas of my life including being a leader so that if I there's a lot of different things to it but I I think that's that's really important and something that I've learned over the years that is probably the most most valuable to to have as a skill okay I definitely want to spend more time on this so you said you sit for an hour reflecting on what's going well what's

not going well is there more you can share about how you accomplish that how you find time to do this for an hour yeah it sounds crazy when you say it but I do um the uh so I I wake up at five I um workouts I do cardio do some exercise this is great book called spark which is all around the Neuroscience of exercise and really uh learned a lot from that in terms of having this great morning routine that really boots you up I kind of call it my bootloader when I start in the day if I go through my bootloader I have a much better day so exercise uh stretching meditation uh and then your cold plunge now so do a bunch of different things but then I I I do some reading but I do carve aside yeah one hour where I go through and this is probably important and it's kind of where I've landed but structured self-reflections that's why I have this dashboard I have certain areas that I think about what's going well what's not

I track all the experiments I'm writing and I'm just really passionate about you know if you're gonna do something try to do it as best as you can and this is a habit that has allowed me to kind of sharpen my my skills in certain areas what are some of these things you're working on if you can share like what's on this dashboard how can people imagine what this might be so there's a lot of personal stuff on it but it literally is broken down between you know being a better friend better husband better bad uh and then better leader and so I don't mean on the personal side I you know I've been known to to work a lot of times you know balance is always hard to to find and you know from being a dad and then thinking about how to be better there I realized you know about six months ago that I've never actually asked for feedback on how I'm doing so I asked my kids uh six months ago I asked both of them independently

what's one thing I can do to be a better to do more of or do less of to be a better dad and you know they were kind of caught off guard by it my son's 15 and my other son is 12. and I said it takes some time to think about it and after about a month my son came back and said Dad I've I got one he said I want to spend more time with you so I you know that was that was very helpful for me to hear and I'm big on routines and habits to make sure that things that you want to do are repeatable and it's not one one-off things so ever since that day I've now have a a daddy date if you want to call it but every two weeks we do one-on-one time uh together with each of the boys they get to pick what we do this we have that consistent whether it's dinner or play basketball in the front but but it's you know it's all about feedback so that's one example on the personal side this reminds me of a tweet I just saw where someone said

that the only people that are going to remember that you worked late for many nights is your kids um wow wow that's deep yeah I like that a lot you know is it soon to be parent that's gonna stick with me wow I like that a lot so it's it's tough right it's tough to balance it all out um it's very difficult because you want to excel at everything you do in life and uh you have to so that reflection helps be a check-in as well of like how am I doing in all these areas and that's I find the color coding is helpful for that too of just doing a bit of a gut check and and asking for for that feedback this also makes me think about I was watching a Jeff Bezos interview and I asked him what his morning routine was and he said that he just likes to put her around I hope she likes to just sit around talk to his kids read the newspaper like he doesn't book any meetings in the morning because he just

finds he just needs like a little Flex time at the beginning totally so I read before I became a dad I read somewhere that the one of the most impactful things you can do as a father is just be there for dinner every night so I have been there for 15 years every single night but it's a good reminder it's not enough you know having dinner is important with your family but in in our case there's there's more you can do and uh just getting that feedback and doing some some repriorisation is always

important speaking of dinners and maybe just as a last question I know you do this really interesting thing where you have dinners with interesting people you just kind of invite them to your house I don't know if interesting is the right way to describe it but just kind of uh interesting people prominent people can you just talk about what what that is and what you think yeah and what and the benefits of doing something like that I think interesting is the right way to think about it I um I started this when I was in Ottawa with a bunch of Founders there and uh it's become one of my favorite things to do honestly it's like the bright spot in my month that I call them guilds uh so the word beguilders Builders and that's how it originally started so Guild night is what I call it and the idea is basically you know all interesting people doing interesting things actually want to spend time with each other that's why

I'm actually surprised more people don't do this but I'll basically have interesting people come usually five or six and we'll sit around talking about specific topics so I do one for consumer product I do one for SEO I do one for growth growth leaders and just have really smart interesting people come and we'll talk about different topics that are relevant sometimes we'll pick a topic so we'll have a group and then we'll say hey we want to talk about AI so one of the advantages of being in the Bay Area is you can find three or four people that likely wrote some of the core code in Google or an AI and then they'll join and people want to be people want to get together and have these conversations so it's very exhilarating I learned a ton it's a lot of fun I don't know why more people don't do it and it's a bit of work to organize but it's also just tactically been a great way to meet Fascinating

People it's uh helped a lot for recruiting for if you need a back Channel now you know all these people that are in different Industries but but you know business aside they're very valuable business-wise but they're just a lot of fun and they've become some of my my favorite things that I do and I'm really surprised why more people don't do it because I think especially now that everybody's remote and we're working from home or most people are it's more valued than ever so so something I'm looking forward to continuing and always actually through my morning reflection thinking about what are new ones I can spin up who are interesting people that we want to break bread with and I do think it's important that it's done at your house if anybody's thinking of starting this you can do it at a restaurant but there's something about being in your home or being in somebody's home five or six people having a great conversation about

a topic that's mutually interesting and I think everybody values it and it's uh it adds a lot of spice to life I think it's really important any other tactical tips for making one of these happen uh so do it at your home you cater do you how many people how long anything else you want to share there yeah so I think the most I've done is 10 that's a bit too much um six seems to be perfect six to eight uh eight at the the max I do get it catered so you don't have to uh worry about cooking the topic something like a topic that is common so that everybody can rally around I do think it's important like I mentioned doing it at home usually we start around six go till nine or ten and it's just been uh a really good thing that I've learned over time uh is a really good thing to do to let me just make for a better life frankly a richer life with some great friends and we say Caterers just like ordering

and basically rates nothing yeah you either store Dash some food so you don't have to worry about cocaine and I'm sure there's other things I've never really deeply thought about it but in terms of like what are the specific things I've evolved over over time but I don't cook anyway so it would be terrible if I cooked so this is much easier uh to do it this way and as long as you're inviting kind of interesting people everybody's going to want to come and and spend some time and break some bread

well with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round I've got six questions for you are you ready I I think so I think you are well question one what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people so there's one that I've already mentioned which is Spark It's the Neuroscience of exercise and that was this is a great book and uh it's not one of these like you know exercises to stay fit if they live longer this is really about frankly if you exercise and do it in a specific way to have a kind of a blueprint they lay out it's good for just cognition and kind of horsepower and and performance so that that's been a a really important one and has been a big part of me building on my morning routine the second one is one I picked up about I think about a year ago or six months and I recommended it geez I don't know at least 200 a couple hundred people now because uh I recommend it to my team

it's called smart brevity have you heard of this one no but I love the sound of it I've always been big on you know writing crisply uh and being very tight and not having like three page memos that you're sending off especially now that we're remote and we're all doing slack and email and and uh different ways of messaging how tightly you communicate how crisp your communication is is really important for frankly you getting your point across and also for the other person who's probably digesting 100 of these messages so this book is uh it's a book on how to do that it's uh it breaks down how to write crisply and the different parts of it and I've definitely seen improvements in the team since I've passed around so that's a great book if frankly for anybody uh work or personal because we're writing so much and communication is so key so that's the second one the third one is a is a golden oldie it's

one that I've read many many times and I recommend from a growth perspective this one I you've likely heard of as influenced by uh calvini I've got it back on my bookshelf there yeah it's a great great book and it's because it's really the underpinning of so many different product in growth principles that you can apply so that's this is the classic that is good to reread at least once a year so that's those are three books I'm going to extend this a little bit I'm going to add two books that are building on your two books or the first two books I guess one is uh Peter ortia just wrote a book called outlive okay and it's exactly the same kind of premise of just how important exercises and there's a whole I think there's a quote in there just like the only thing proven to help you live longer is exercise and then smart gravity there's another book that I'd recommend if people want more knowing this topic called nobody wants

to read your and it's by um the guy that wrote the war art and Backer Vance and I forget his name off the top of my head but it's like nobody wants to read your here's one this is what you need to do for people to want to read anything you're writing yeah you want to skip you want to read yeah that's good I'll pick that one up nobody wants to exactly what a title that's a great title all right back on track what is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed you know I don't watch TV much and I haven't really watched any movies in a while but I do watch a lot of podcasts on YouTube and I Andrew huberman's got of course a great series I've watched I think everyone he puts out so I don't know if that counts but that's absolutely okay so I watched that and then of course the all-in podcast is always fun so I make sure to watch those uh when they come out as well uh a lot of fun and informative so those are my

two I would say great picks what is a favorite interview question that you like to ask teach me something about growth that I don't already know because and you could apply this to engineering a product any other area because it really gives you a sense of what this person thinks is the top of the stack in terms of the smartest thing they know whether you know it or not is irrelevant but it uh sometimes you actually do end up learning some stuff but it's my favorite question because you can really engage in a conversation around okay this is the the thing you think is so unique that maybe you've you've come up with this learning yourself or if you've created this tactic and then gives you a sense of uh how much they know the craft so that's my favorite question what is a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you just really love I've got a cold plunge that I bought that I love it's the so it's called the

renew cold plunge it's cold but super convenient and I do that every morning and I just love it any advice for Coldplay engine that sounds very painful and hard I you know I usually start going I go in a hot tub warm up then I go in the cold plunge and back in the hot tub that's an easy way to get started but I will say I jumped in yesterday and today without going out of it was very painful but I felt so much better after so I might be changing up my my Approach but I'm just kind of experimenting with different things but uh that would be some advice and then just go slow start start it you know not too cold and then slowly make it cold over time but it's a pretty good uh I think it's a pretty good thing to add in so far how long do you spend in the cold plunge varies right now I'm doing five minutes uh five minutes at I think it's 53 degrees so it's just I started at uh 68 is slowly bringing it down so but you

do have to go slow because I I brought it down even further and uh kind of caught me off guard and kind of a little dizzy so you've got to find your your your sweet spot damn uh very huberman uh inspired I imagine this it definitely was part of the uh the source there I know people hear a lot about coal plunges I guess what have you seen as a benefit just while we're in this topic for people to like seriously consider doing this so a couple days mood afterwards is so much better you get this this great multi-hour uh Boost from doing it especially like I mentioned not do doing warm before or waiting 10 minutes and waiting 10 minutes after before you warm up after you get out uh great mood boost it also helps a lot with sleep so if you do it at night which is a little bit difficult it helps a lot with sleep those are probably the two biggest things and you do get to a point I'm there now where I kind of look forward

to it because you know how good you'll feel afterwards so when I'm thinking about it I know it's painful it doesn't make it easier but I do I do look forward to it now it's it's uh it's a pretty cool thing oh man gotta get one now yeah um okay two more questions what's something relatively minor that you've changed in your product development process that has had a big impact on your team's ability to execute one change that comes to mind is you know it's common to hear discussion around yeah you need to experiment you need to have rigor you need to look at results iterate based on those results that's pretty much common knowledge is how all you know all good companies that execute growth do it see the subtle the subtlety is that experiments are great but they're also they can be slow you have to look at the results you have to analyze how things went you have to learn what's going on you have to

build the experiment so there's there's a cost to an experiment and not everything needs to be experimented and that's not something that I generally hear growth teams talk about it's usually hey we need to experiment so one thing that we're definitely focused more on lately is this idea of sometimes you just need to YOLO it because it's a better product experience or you just kind of know it's going to work and you know if you're yoloing 40 things and three of them work and you can look at pre-post you can look at holdouts there's ways of making sure you're you know cause major damage but the speed can outweigh the cost and time it takes to do experiments so that's one change we've recently implemented that's been pretty impactful final question so we met actually a long time ago in Montreal or maybe it was an Ottawa in Canada somewhere and uh I think it was through an organization called c100 when I was

starting my company back in the day and so my question is what is your favorite Canadian food you know it's funny my favorite Canadian Foods I'm from Ottawa and um there's a lot of shawarma Lebanese Shawarma everywhere I know it's not traditionally Canadian but Canada is so Multicultural so I'll make this count I love a good Shawarma and it's so hard to find a good form on the Bay Area so we've we've still been looking here but my favorite Canadian food our pseudo Canadian is shawarma if I had to pick one purely Canadian food and uh this is you know related to Montreal where we first met it's got to be a Montreal smoked meat sandwich excellent choices you're making me very hungry I'm gonna go get some shawarma buy me a coal plunge Luke this was amazing we talked through everything I was hoping to talk through advisorships SEO hiring building habits cold punches two final questions where can folks

finding a line if they want to reach out and learn more and how can listeners be useful to you you can find me online at lucleavec.com so uh first name last name.com and how can they be useful to me listen we're always looking to hire the best of the best so if you want to work create an amazing company with an amazing team doing very impactful work and learn the craft of growth please reach out we're always looking to bring on amazing talents so that would be the one way awesome Luke thank you again so much for being here thanks great to chat bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com

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