It’s not what I thought that makes a company grow

Go big or go home story

Every year, a new startup is crowned 'fastest-growing company'. But how do they do it? Through my journey—from chasing tools to understanding the importance of culture—I’ve uncovered key drivers of exponential growth that I’ll explore here: tools, frameworks, and culture.

When I started my growth career, I thought I was the only person responsible for the company’s growth. You bet I’d try my best to move those metrics. Being a junior, I thought it all came down to some magic tool, and all it takes - is to find it. With my mouth wide open, I listened to all these people talking at big conferences about a better way to approach some parts of growth. Almost shivering from excitement, I’d run to my laptop to try it out right after. It didn’t work.

I thought it was because others were doing the same! I switched from conference content to a ground-level truth (or, at least I thought so)—scientific papers on behavioral psychology and statistics (looking at Ronny Kohavi!). My toolbox kept getting bigger and bigger. But that company I worked for never became a thing.

It was harsh. The metrics didn’t move. Am I a failure? I switched to frameworks instead. I thought maybe it’s how you combine all the tools, and that gets you growing. Some frameworks helped. Some were just trendy things that died shortly after.

I made my whole personality around being a growth manager. And I was desperate. I worked across several seed-stage startups, but none of them was even remotely on track to get past the product-market fit stage, let alone grow into a unicorn. Seeing all my efforts failing, I figured the only solution was to join a fast-growing company to secure a front-row seat and learn how to do it.

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Culture

I want you to launch the first two experiments by the end of the week.

I heard on Tuesday, right after finishing onboarding as a growth lead at this company called Bird.

In January 2018, Bird was valued at $1 billion. In June, it hit the $2B mark. That ask from my manager is a quintessential example of why a company could go from 0 to $2B in 14 months. We were on a rocket ship, where there was no time left to talk, as we needed to build the rocket’s engine as we went. It didn’t age well, but some of the credits are due anyway.

There was something magical about that place. It was so different that I felt like I was an alien (say hi to imposter syndrome). I never managed to grasp what that was until a few years later.

The culture.

It was so drastically divergent because growth was the culture: the culture of (un)achievable goals, common language, accountability, speed, and prioritizing growth over anything else.

This is my evolution from tools to frameworks to culture and how to get into the “fastest-growing startup” ranks.

(Un)achievable goals

As I write this, I sit at Scale’s office in San Francisco after an intense work day. Just based on the public information, it’s clear—we grow fast. Like, really fast. I have flashbacks to Bird every now and then. We have multiple growth stand-ups every day and throughout the day, EOD meetings, countless war rooms, and a big “Why Not Faster?” value slogan on the wall.

We have to double or sometimes even triple our metrics every so often. Nobody has any illusions if that’s even doable. We’re aiming for the moon to land on the stars.

Brian Chesky once said that he’d ask his team what a 10x better experience would be for this feature. Instead of asking this question in product review meetings, an unachievable goal forces you to think big from the start. It shapes your roadmap so there’s no space left for minor things.

Speed

It was a relatively cold January day in Bird’s office in Santa Monica. I asked for more time to get enough data to design the experiment in a way that would increase our chances of having a winner. The goal was to double our activation rate in one quarter. Coming fresh from Reforge, I knew better. I knew we should clearly define our AHA moment and the timeline for when it’s feasible for a user to get activated.

I said I needed one more week to do the analysis, and my manager’s response was:

I want you to launch this experiment today, with the best knowledge you have right now. Then, while it’s running for a week, you can spend this time digging into whatever data you might need to ship the next iteration. One week from now, you’ll have your analysis and the real-life signal of what works. So your next shot surely will get us a winner.

That very much contradicted my previous experience of spending a big portion of my time developing a strong hypothesis, but it surely helped us to move fast.

We used the bucketing tooling provided by Braze and sent webhooks so our server knew who goes into control vs. treatment. It’s so tempting to have a perfect process that makes life easier, where a growth manager can only focus on finding the next opportunity and executing on it. That was definitely not the case for Bird. You just slam together a few apps with the help of some duct tape and custom-made queries to create a workflow that works.

At Scale, it takes hours (if not minutes) to ship an experiment. And you might think this is because of how amazing the tooling is, and to that I say—not even close. This is done with a creative and scrappy mind. I use user-level tags and apply them manually to bucket people into control and treatment groups. I then have a query to check the performance against key metrics. I use a simple =rand() function in a spreadsheet to figure out who gets into which bucket.

The tech debt is piling up, but there’s no time to stop. This is not about the tools and the perfect process. This is about the process that can get you to your goal today, instead of tomorrow.

Common language

When everything moves fast, it’s easy to trigger a domino effect. This is a game with uncapped gains, followed by uncapped losses. When people don’t have time to talk and align, how does a company ensure that things won’t break every day?

Well, they have to speak the same language. And in the office, that usually means metrics. Every person’s job needs to align around one very specific metric. At Bird, it was about rides. At Uber, this is also about rides. At Scale, it’s about hours delivered. No matter what you do at the company, you always speak about rides/hours you’ve delivered.

Prioritizing growth

As cliché as it sounds, all these companies prioritize growth over anything else. That has implications for all the things people do every day. Should we send the third email to this user today? Yes, because it gives us more rides, regardless of the fact it feels spammy. Some companies low-key band the law. Over two years ago, Uber’s docs got leaked. What did we learn? They were well aware of all the bad things they did.

While in Paris, I met someone from the GR team of a US-based mobility company. She shared how on her second day she had to fly to a meeting with city officials in another state. In that meeting, her manager was dropping bombs on how efficient the company was and how it was good for the city and people. He had tons of stats right on top of his mind. After the meeting, she asked him how he managed to memorize all of that. The reply was: “I didn’t. I just made them up.”

Another scooter company example: when they were launching a new market, they would just drop a bunch of bikes on the street overnight and run away so they wouldn’t get caught by the government. The whole idea was to get the volume before the city council figures out what to do with that, so that then they can say, “Hey, here are thousands of people riding our bikes every day, and they love it. You don’t want to take it away from them, do you?”

While other examples aren’t as wild, it still boils down to picking whatever idea you have that can drive you more growth. And it’s more important than user experience, and sometimes even ethics or law.

Accountability

As a manager, and even more so at the C-level, you edit the works of others. You do it with the questions you ask. And for sure, you lead by example. After you ask the same set of questions a couple of times, people will recognize what’s important to you and will try to follow your logic. Happy boss, hassle loss.

As much as I hate saying this, among a gazillion other things, it might be a good idea to still follow up with that person who didn’t have the right answer at the last WBR and hasn’t come up with it ever since. Maybe, not so much for the sake of an argument, but just to show that there’s no way one can just rest and vest here. I once witnessed how, in response to a CPO’s question, a VP of analytics said: “Oh, this is the query written by my direct, and they’re OOO, so I don’t have access to it.” There was no response from the CPO, so the next thing you know—people normalized that behavior real quick. That definitely wouldn’t slide at Scale. The CPO didn’t stick around for a long time, but this low degree of accountability might explain why shares of that company are down 95% and never recovered back. Once there’s a crack in accountability, this house of cards will quickly collapse.

Sure way to die

It’s impossible to have hyper-growth for a long time. Every company that seems to be growing exponentially in a moment regresses back to the average over a span of a decade. When you combine all of the above, it becomes not only a path to growth but also a fast track to widespread burnout. Just read what people say on the Blind app about those AI companies and how hard it is to keep up there.

Bird invested a lot of money into building a scooter that would be profitable. If COVID hadn’t happened, we might have seen a totally different story, but they did it too late, and the company is just a shell of what it used to be.

When I joined, we monitored all of our competitors quite closely: Lime, Uber, Jump (remember it? It was a fun one!), and some others. I remember asking about this company called Bolt from Estonia and why we don’t pay close attention to them. I was laughed at. They said, “It’s a small company, so we don’t care.” That one didn’t age well either. Bolt seems to win the EU market, closely followed by Lime. I don’t know for sure, but I think Bolt was the first scooter company that managed to build a scooter with a swappable battery, drastically improving their contribution margins. I recently saw a similar scooter from Lime.

When a company runs so fast, it gets closer to hitting an inevitable wall, risking smashing all its potential against this wall. The wall can be in the form of people leaving a company en masse, or a wrongly timed investment in R&D, but that will happen. After a crazy ride, the ultimate question is not how to keep up with this pace (as it’s impossible), but how to slow down as close to the wall as possible, and then pivot to a more steady business, so at least we get a chance to build a generational company—which is a whole other beast.