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

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2023

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Brought to you by Mixpanel—Product analytics that everyone can trust, use, and afford | Attio—A powerful, flexible CRM for fast-growing startups | Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments

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Luc Levesque is Chief Growth Officer at Shopify and has advised companies like Canva, Twitter, Pinterest, and Patreon on growth and product strategy. Previously he served as an executive at TripAdvisor, where he built and led the growth team that helped it become the world’s largest travel site. Luc was then recruited by Mark Zuckerberg to Facebook, where he was an executive and held senior product and engineering leadership roles. In today’s episode, we discuss:

• Why you need to become world-class at hiring

• Tips for finding a great growth advisor and assessing their impact

• Why truly great companies focus on impact

• Common mistakes to avoid when building a growth team

• The importance of passion and continuous self-improvement

• Signs your company should explore SEO as a growth channel, and strategies to do so

• Why Mark Zuckerberg personally recruited Luc and what it taught him about the recruiting process

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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/leveraging-growth-advisors-hiring-well-mastering-seo-and-honing-your-craft-luc-levesque-shopify-meta-tripadvisor/#transcript

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Where to find Luc Levesque:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/luclevesque

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luclevesque/

• Website: https://luclevesque.com/

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Luc’s background

(03:31) Luc’s first MT review at Facebook

(07:09) Impact vs. industriousness

(09:20) Facebook’s relentless, personalized approach to recruiting talent

(13:12) Luc’s hiring playbook

(16:56) When to focus on growth and the importance of product-market fit

(18:04) What to look for in a growth advisor

(23:15) The large impact Luc made from a small conversation

(26:52) Advice on compensating advisors

(31:35) How to find a good growth advisor using VCs and your network

(33:33) The importance of having an in-house person and growth advisors as support

(38:15) Tips for becoming a growth advisor

(41:59) The power of SEO

(45:29) The two buckets of SEO

(49:21) Channels of growth

(51:49) The potential impact of ChatGPT on Google and SEO

(56:04) Advice on hiring an SEO person

(58:19) How long it takes for SEO to make an impact

(1:00:07) Self-reflection, cold plunge, and other tools Luc uses to excel in his personal and work life

(1:06:46) Luc’s famous dinner guild

(1:10:33) Lightning round

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Referenced:

• Luc’s blueprint: https://coda.io/@luc-levesque/blueprint-for-leaders-managers-communicate-your-quirks/my-blueprint-9

• Jeff Bezos’s morning routine: https://finty.com/us/daily-routines/jeff-bezos

• Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain: https://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-Brain/dp/0316113514

• Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less: https://www.amazon.com/Smart-Brevity-Power-Saying-More/dp/1523516976

• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion: https://www.amazon.com/Influence-New-Expanded-Psychology-Persuasion/dp/0062937650/

• Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity: https://www.amazon.com/Outlive-Longevity-Peter-Attia-MD/dp/0593236599

• Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t: And Other Tough-Love Truths to Make You a Better Writer: https://www.amazon.com/Nobody-Wants-Read-Your-Tough-Love/dp/1936891492

• The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles: https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1936891026

• The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life: https://www.amazon.com/Legend-Bagger-Vance-Novel-Golf/dp/038072751X

• Huberman Lab podcast: https://hubermanlab.com/welcome-to-the-huberman-lab-podcast/

• The All-In Podcast: https://www.allinpodcast.co/

• Renu cold plunge: https://www.renutherapy.com/

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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

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Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	We talk about the 10X engineer and we don't really talk about the 10X growth
0:05.0	advisor or 10X growth person but the same dynamic applies you could argue applies
0:08.7	even more because the right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact.
0:13.7	The advantage of a growth advisor is it takes a long time to understand a channel.
0:19.2	And certainly people have to know their stuff, they have to be very good at their growth craft, but also they
0:24.7	have to be exposed to a large set of experiments or an environment where they've just seen
0:30.2	what works and what does it.
0:31.4	Once a growth advisor has that, it takes years to learn it, but it looks does it. Once a growth advisor has that it takes years to learn it but it
0:34.7	literally can take seconds literally to communicate that. It's one of those weird
0:38.3	disciplines where the right person at the right time can literally say a
0:41.5	sentence that changes the trajectory of
0:43.2	your company and you can't say that for a lot of different disciplines but this is
0:45.9	one of them.
0:48.9	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.
0:58.0	Today my guest is Luke Laveck. Luke is currently the chief growth officer at Shopify.
1:02.0	Before this, he was recruited personally by Mark Zuckerberg to help grow Facebook,
1:06.7	messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
1:08.4	He's also a VP of Growth and a GM at TripAdvisor.
1:11.6	He's also been a growth advisor to companies like
1:13.9	Twitter, Pinterest, Patreon, thumb tag, and Canva. And in our conversation, Luke
1:18.9	shares advice on how and when to think about getting a growth advisor,
1:22.4	including how to structure about getting a growth advisor,
	...

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