20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Reddit and Zynga on Scaling to Millions of Users | Why, When and How To Hire Your First Growth Hires | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make In Hiring, Onboarding and Integration for Growth Teams with Vaibhav Sahgal, VP
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 26 October 2022
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Vaibhav Sahgal is VP of Consumer Product @ Reddit where he has been for close to 5 years. Prior to his leading consumer product, Vaibhav spent 3 years as Head of Growth at Reddit. Before Reddit, Vaibhav spent an incredible 8 years at Zynga across different roles including Director of Product and GM for "Words with Friends".
In Today's Episode with Vaibhav Sahgal We Discuss:
1.) Entry into Product + Growth:
- How did Vaibhav come to lead some of the best growth orgs in the world at both Reddit and Zynga?
- What are 1-2 of Vaibhav's biggest takeaways from working with Mark Pincus @ Zynga?
- What is the most painful growth lesson that Vaibhav learned that he is also pleased to have learned?
2.) WTF Really is "Growth":
- How does Vaibhav define growth today? What is it not?
- How does Vaibhav fundamentally differentiate between value connection and value creation?
- Is growth an art or a science? What tactics have died a death? What remains stronger than ever?
3.) Hiring Your Growth Team:
- How does Vaibhav advise founders on when is the right time to hire their first growth professionals?
- Where should they sit within the org? In product? In marketing? Standalone growth team?
- What are the biggest mistakes Vaibhav sees founders make when hiring their first growth hires?
4.) The Interview Process:
- How does Vaibhav structure the interview process for all new growth hires? What are the steps?
- What are the must-ask questions when hiring for growth? What are good answers?
- How can founders use case studies and data to determine the quality of a growth candidate?
5.) The Onboarding and Integration:
- What is the optimal onboarding process for all new growth hires?
- What are signs in the first 3 days that a growth hire will vs will not work out?
- What can leaders do to ensure growth hires are integrated with the rest of the teams?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when onboarding growth hires?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Vaibhav's Favourite Book: Andrew Chen: The Cold Start Problem
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back. This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, in this monthly show, we sit down with the world's best growth leaders to discuss why, when and how. You may need to start and scale your growth team, taking lessons from their immense experiences, scaling some of the best. And I'm so thrilled today to be joined by V. Sagal, VP of Consumer Product at Reddit, where he's been for close to five years. Prior to his leading |
| 0:21.5 | consumer product, V spent three years as head of growth at Reddit, and before Reddit, V spent |
| 0:26.0 | an incredible eight years at Zinger, across different roles, including Director of Product and GM, |
| 0:30.9 | for the very famous Words with Friends. I also want to say a huge thank you. This show would |
| 0:34.7 | not have happened without Casey Winters, an incredible |
| 0:37.5 | leader in the growth world, and so appreciate all you did to make this one happen, my friend. |
| 0:41.6 | But before we dive into the show today, have you ever met an employee that likes company |
| 0:45.6 | travel booking tools or even worse expense reports? I mean, it is a nightmare. Tripactions |
| 0:50.5 | was born out of the realization that business travel should be easy. |
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| 1:04.3 | to serve travellers and companies of all sizes. |
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| 1:12.6 | make their own bookings and manage their spend within policy. They swipe a corporate card and the technology |
| 1:17.9 | automates expense entry, approvals and compliance in real time. And for program managers and |
| 1:23.2 | finance teams, this is a dream. It means access to real-time data to help keep employees safe, |
| 1:28.6 | reduce spend and drive productivity. And that's why Fortune 500 companies like Adobe, Unilever, |
| 1:34.2 | Heineken, and startups like Carter, Notion, Patreon and Canver have made the switch to trip actions. |
| 1:39.6 | Try tripactions for free at tripactions.com forward slash VC20 and get $500 after your first |
| 1:46.1 | completed trip or after you spend and pay off your first thousand dollars of business expenses |
| 1:50.6 | on the liquid corporate card. Again, that's tripashions.com forward slash VC20. And speaking of |
| 1:56.4 | game changing software, think of the last time you imported a spreadsheet. Did it work the first time? |
| 2:01.6 | It happened to me the other day in the studio and I lost my shit because guess what? Like always, |
... |
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