Greymatter

This episode of Greymatter comes from Stanford University's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series podcast. Greylock Partner Josh McFarland shared with students his presentation The First Derivative of Startup Life. In this lecture at Stanford, Josh charts the ups and downs of entrepreneurship through his personal story with TellApart. He opens up about the lessons he learned as a founder and CEO, offers fundraising advice for startups, and shares the untold story of TellApart's acquisition by Twitter, which was the largest acquisition in Twitter history. Greymatter is produced by Greylock Partners and offers perspectives and lessons from some of the world's top technology entrepreneurs and business leaders.

Are B2C companies starting to see a decline in viral growth responsiveness? That’s what Greylock’s Growth Advisor Casey Winters and Head of Rider Growth at Uber, Andrew Chen believe. Andrew coined the term The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs to describe the idea that every ad channel and every marketing platform eventually sees a decay in responsiveness. Due to increased consolidation and competition, viral growth is now much harder to break through and in the long term will see a break down in effectiveness.    In this episode of Greymatter, Casey and Andrew riff on why consumer growth is getting harder and more expensive, and what viable opportunities companies can leverage in their own growth strategies. Both Andrew and Casey have a deep background in growth. Andrew advises and invests in tech startups including Barkbox, Dropbox and Tinder and for the past decade, he’s written extensively on mobile, metrics, and growth. Before heading growth at Pinterest, Casey ran marketing for Grubhub.   Casey and Andrew share actionable growth strategies for startups, current trends in paid acquisition, and why they are excited for the rise of enterprise viral growth. For even more growth advice, be sure to check out Andrew’s blog and Casey’s blog.

Traffic accidents are one of the leading causes of death in the United States. Fully automated vehicles promise a new era in car safety, but completely self driving cars on roads are still in the future. With this in mind, Nauto is rethinking transportation by using AI technology to learn how to best equip automated vehicles for a future of safe and trusted transportation.  In this episode of Greymatter, Nauto CEO Stefan Heck and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman discuss a blended environment with humans and machines, the evolution of road infrastructure, and the impact of AI on human jobs. The two visionaries also share advice on how startups can successfully partner with large companies and enterprises.

Companies that have successfully managed crisis realize that how they behave in the minutes, days and weeks following a crisis is even more important than what actually happened. A company’s ability to successfully manage a challenging news cycle is paramount to maintaining company value.   While working in the White House during the Obama Administration, Eric Schultz was the person you wanted in the trenches with you during times of crisis. As the former White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary, Eric helped managed the responses to Congressional oversight investigations including the Solyndra bankruptcy, the Justice Department’s Fast & Furious operation, and the Benghazi attacks.    In this episode of Greymatter, I sit down with Eric to discuss relationship building with the press, why honesty is crucial during crisis (and always) and best practices to develop a credible communications response.

In the latest Greymatter episode, we welcome back Twitter’s former Head of Revenue Engineering, now Greylock Executive In Residence, Wade Chambers. He sits down with Greylock partner Josh McFarland to discuss what characteristics make a great engineering leader and the best environment to foster leadership. Wade helped scale product and build out TellApart’s engineering, product, and services team at a time when the company was on track to almost triple revenue to over $50M. The two startup veterans share lessons learned from building TellApart, how founders can create a culture built on honest conversations, and advice for coaching up great engineering leaders.   To hear more from Wade, listen to his previous Greymatter podcasts on Increasing Your Team’s Capacity to Win and the follow-up discussion on the Art of Hiring 10x Engineers.

The startup environment is chaotic. Resources are limited and the hours are grueling. But it can also be one of the most rewarding experiences for an entrepreneur. They must get creative and think fast when it comes to building a team that will excel in this type of environment. The same is true in a presidential campaign. Stephanie Hannon was the Chief Technology Officer for the Hillary for America campaign and was tasked with building a team from scratch. In under 20 months, she built an 80 person engineering team which launched more than 100 products for fundraising, grassroots organizing, voter registration, voter activation and volunteer engagement.    In this episode of Greymatter, Greylock EIR Stephanie Hannon and Greylock general partner John Lilly discuss their experience building and scaling some of today’s market-defining technology products. They share hiring advice for startups, best practices for building a diverse team and learning lessons for product managers.  Stephanie and John both have a deep understanding of what it takes to build an enduring technology product. Prior to joining the Clinton presidential campaign, Stephanie spent a decade as Director of Product Management for Social Impact and Civic Engagement at Google. She launched Google Maps in 25 countries, built Google Wave and was Product Manager for Gmail in its first year of life. As an investor, John has partnered with several transformative companies including Instagram, Dropbox, and Quip to name a few. Prior, he was CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind the open source Web browser Firefox, used by more than 450 million people worldwide.

The rise of social network giants Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn paved the way for the world to connect online and showed the power of people sharing their own ideas, thoughts and images. Today, people share their personal moments billions of times a day yet these platforms are still largely considered asynchronous, meaning you post to your followers and they interact later. The advancement in mobile communication technology has, in many ways, detached the human aspect of communication with the ease and speed of text, “likes” and shares replacing phone calls.    Live group video chat app Houseparty is on a mission to reconnect people in the most human way possible, when they are physically apart. Founders, Ben Rubin and Sima Sistani, have been through the trenches together pivoting from live video app Meerkat to Houseparty. Houseparty is now winning over Generation Z, with more than 1 million daily active users connecting with friends and family through spontaneous togetherness.    The co-founders have deep knowledge of what drives mobile social apps. Previously, Sima was Head of Media at Tumblr responsible for global media strategy and partnership. Ben is a serial entrepreneur who has worked abroad in Israel scaling startup companies and working with large corporations including Intel. In this episode of Greymatter, the Houseparty founders share learning lessons from pivoting a company, the challenges of adopting live video and the opportunity to rethink what it means to communicate online.

Historically, there has been a clear divide of how to grow a B2B company and a consumer business. However, in the past 5 years, we have seen B2B companies shift from the traditional sales growth practice to techniques used by consumer startups, such as product driven growth initiatives, distribution through mobile App stores, free trials and lower price plans. Today’s leading companies like Atlassian and Twilio reached IPO levels without a traditional sales-specific approach and startups like Dropbox and Slack use growth tactics pulled right out of a consumer-oriented playbook. In this episode of Greymatter, Invoice2go VP of Growth Naomi Ionita and Greylock Growth Advisor in Residence Casey Winters discuss their experience with growth retention and monetization at B2B companies. They share insight on monetizing your product, best practices for converting your freemium users to paying customers and advice for preventing customer churn.    Both have a deep understanding of what drives user retention and paid conversion. Prior to Invoice2go, Naomi worked in mobile product management at Evernote where she founded and built the Growth team. Casey led acquisition efforts at Pinterest and ran marketing for Grubhub, where he helped the company grow from 30,000 users to over 3 million.

Engaging with customers is one of the most difficult challenges for most companies. With the growing number of ways consumers interact with brands — from phone calls, to texting, to social media messaging — it’s becoming increasingly hard for companies to aggregate interactions into useful information. Even today, customer service products focus on individual communication channels and treat customers as case numbers or tickets. The founders of Gladly think this standard needs to change. They are reimagining the business/consumer relationship by centralizing all communications and making the atomic unit of their product what it should be: the customer.  Gladly CEO Joseph Ansanelli and VP of Engineering Michael Wolfe have a deep history of successful ventures together. The two first worked with each other at Kana, an early customer service software company that helped managed email and web based communications. The pair later founded Vontu, a data loss prevention software that was later acquired by Symantec. In 2015, they got the band back together and incubated Gladly at Greylock with mission to change how large enterprises interact with their many customers.   In the latest episode of Greymatter, Joseph and Michael sit down with Greylock partner and Gladly board member, Jerry Chen. The founders share their vision for reinventing customer service, identifying spaces ripe for disruption, and what it takes to become the industry standard. Below are a few key takeaways from the discussion.

We’re still many years away from computers being able to write and create content at the level that humans can. But today there are a number of ways we can leverage artificial intelligence to help us write and publish smarter. This is the belief of AJ Frank, the chief executive of Verst. AJ is a technology and product veteran who’s worked at Uber, Twitter (Vine), and Google (YouTube) before coming on to lead Verst in 2016. Based in New York, Verst is building an intelligent, modern publishing platform. AJ and his team realized that in today’s publishing landscape, many of the tools are outdated, overly complex, or sometimes don’t offer enough. Verst saw a wave of publishers start to move towards building custom content management systems to manage their content, which is often both expensive and time consuming. AJ believes that publishers shouldn’t spend resources trying to build a complicated CMS; they should focus on what they do best —  creating amazing content. Verst wants to be the technology layer that makes publishing intuitive, while at the same time offering powerful tools such as advanced analytics and A/B testing to help us create and share content more effectively. Upon the launch of Verst 2.0, Greylock’s John Lilly caught up with AJ to talk about what drove their team to build a new publishing platform and how it will differentiate itself from the other tools out there. They also talk about the pros and cons of building a world class tech company in New York, how AJ thinks about interviewing engineers, and the operating principals that set the foundation for Verst’s company culture.

In this panel, Greylock's Josh Elman talks with Y Combinator Partner and former Airbnb Product Lead for Growth Gustaf Alströmer and former Uber Head of Product and VP of Growth Ed Baker about establishing a north star metric, growing in local markets, and how to measure the things that can't be measured. This panel was recorded at The Scaleup Offsite, an event focused on scaling companies co-hosted by Greylock Partners and YC Continuity.

In our latest podcast, our Growth Advisor in Residence Casey Winters invites Eventbrite VP and GM Brian Rothenberg to riff on starting and scaling marketplaces. Brian has a deep background in marketplaces — he was a PM at Yahoo! for their local marketplaces businesses, founded a local services marketplace called SkillSlate, and served as Taskrabbit’s Co-Head of Marketing before joining Eventbrite as VP of Growth. Before heading growth at Pinterest, Casey ran marketing for Grubhub. The pair dive into marketplace strategies and share how they’ve solved growth and operations problems in their past roles. This podcast is packed with helpful content and examples for anyone starting or working at a marketplace business.

Redfin’s CEO Glenn Kelman joined us at The Scaleup Offsite to share how his relationship with the board of directors has evolved over the year. He speaks from the heart about how to think about building a pipeline for your board, how to interview potential candidates, and how to leverage their skills and knowledge for the success of the company. This talk was recorded at The Scaleup Offsite, an event focused on scaling companies co-hosted by Greylock Partners and YC Continuity.

Bringing on world class leadership is incredibly valuable for a scaling company, but executive hiring can be a long and delicate process. In this talk, Greylock Talent Parter Jeff Markowitz breaks down five steps of hiring executives, starting from planning all the way to making the final offer. This fireside was recorded at The Scaleup Offsite, an event focused on scaling companies co-hosted by Greylock Partners and YC Continuity.

The Rhumbix inception story is unlike most in Silicon Valley. It’s a story of two navy veterans on seemingly parallel paths. Before founding Rhumbix, co-founders Zach Scheel and Drew DeWalt both served in the navy, as a civil engineer and a submarine pilot respectively, and eventually crossed paths at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. In the summer of 2013, both Zach and Drew were working in Northern Chile. Zach was working at a copper mine, and Drew was at a startup that was building a non-collocated solar and pump hydropower plant. They found that they were facing the same challenges of data collection on construction sites and estimating labor costs, which led to a fateful conversation over beers about solving this problem. Soon after the pair returned from South America, they began the ideation for Rhumbix — a mobile platform that is reinventing the construction site by providing real time project data and insights to all stakeholders.   In our latest podcast, Greylock partner Jerry Chen is joined by Zach and Drew to talk about the experience as veteran entrepreneurs, what Rhumbix does, and the future of the massive but slow moving construction industry.