George Bonaci, VP of Growth @Ramp: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever |E1264

I think the way that you find Alpha is either by doing things that no one else knows about. I think another aspect is probably doing things that everyone is convinced will not work. I think a good leader needs to know how to do everyone on their team’s job, but poorly, and I think the poorly part is important. I would always skew more junior. I think hiring for potential, especially early on in the business, is far more important.

George, I’m so excited for this, dude. Ramp is one of my favorite companies to feature. I’ve heard so many great things about you, so thank you so much for joining me today.

No, thank you so much for having me.

Now, listen, as we just said, I know a show is going to be great when I actually have to do very little work because you give me such great suggestions. You said to me before, “Growth is just science, and most marketers are bad at science.” I was always terrible at science, so it doesn’t bode well for me. What do you mean by that statement?

The goal of growth is to figure out how to grow the business, and usually, early on, that’s very top-of-funnel-focused. How do you figure out how to get more leads? How do you figure out a channel that works and is repeatable, with predictable outputs given some inputs?

The honest answer is that no one really knows. Every business is different, so even if you understand from past experience something that’s worked, usually just taking that one playbook or that one tactic and copy-pasting it to a new company generally doesn’t work.

1. How the Best Growth Teams Experiment

I think that’s the tendency of a lot of marketers. When I say that growth is mostly just science, I mean that you kind of have to come in with a blank slate, form a hypothesis, and then run a bunch of experiments. You’ll be surprised by what works, and you’ll be surprised by what doesn’t work. Ultimately, if you run enough of those experiments, you’ll find something.

I think that’s usually lost on a lot of marketers because they don’t think in terms of experiments. They think in terms of, “What do I know, and how can I apply it here?”

Is that because of the profile of person that they are, that they don’t think in that way?

Partially, it’s probably the profile, but it’s also partly just how you think. I think the type of person who would go and become a chemist, like me, or an engineer, is probably very different from someone who says, “Hey, I want to become a writer,” or, “I want to get into comms or PR.”

Those are very valuable skills, but they’re very, very different from the way of thinking that would make someone successful at scoping an experiment and thinking about what my hypothesis is and how I’m going to measure results. It’s just a different part of your brain. I’d be a terrible writer, for example.

You said about running experiments and running a number of them. In your mind, is growth about increasing performance by 1% or 2% in many different areas, or is it about needle-moving chapters of a company and being much more pivotal in that respect?

2. How to Allocate Bets and Resources for Growth

The short answer is that it has to be both. What I mean by that is, if you’re doing a good job—and it depends on the stage of the company—but in general, if you’re doing a good job, you’re thinking in terms of different time horizons.

You have to have some bucket of bets or experiments that are going to be those big swings—huge step changes in impact—but those are generally high-risk, high-reward. You can’t just do that; otherwise, you’re going to fail and miss your number this quarter.

At the same time, you need to have some bets where you have high confidence, but they’re probably not going to move the needle a ton. They’ll help you get the 2%, 3%, 4%, or 5% improvement this quarter. Then you have everything in between.

Ideally, you’re being intentional with how you’re allocating your resources across everything from the very long term to the very short term. How you make those bets and how you allocate those resources is actually a conversation you should probably have with finance and with leadership, aligning it to the goals of the company. But that’s my way of thinking about it.

You said there about bets, and I often think about growth very much like venture, which is you place a number of investments or bets, you observe, and then you wait to see what works and double down. Do you agree with that analogy? How do you think about what is enough bets and the failure rate associated with them?

Yes, it’s absolutely a portfolio, but I think, like an investment portfolio, it depends on what you’re optimizing for and the stage of the company. Your risk tolerance is going to depend on the stage of the company, and it’s going to depend on whether you’re optimizing for growth, profitability, or whatever it might be.

It is a portfolio. I think that if you’re doing things right, you should assume the majority of your bets are going to fail, which is why I always believe that velocity is probably more important than getting things perfect.

But it is a spectrum. You could do some really well-controlled, rigorous experiments, and it’s going to be incredibly academic and you’re going to learn something, but it might take you a year to say something conclusive. Or you can just run a bunch of experiments at incredibly high velocity. It’s kind of sloppy, and similarly, you might not learn anything because you made a bunch of mistakes or didn’t fully think through how you’d measure something.

You kind of have to balance it, but in general, I’d probably bias toward running more things faster than running something perfectly.

3. Velocity vs. Quality in Growth

Does that philosophy impact the quality of conversion? What I mean by that is, if we’re a little bit sloppy but with very high velocity, we won’t spend so much time on the visuals for that campaign or the graphics for it. It’s velocity, but it’s not as good. How do you think about that trade-off?

I think if you had to choose, velocity is more important. But there’s another side of that coin, which is that if you’re just doing a bunch of sloppy things, it doesn’t matter how many things you run; you’re not going to actually learn anything.

What did you do that was sloppy that you wish wasn’t sloppy?

I’m reminded of this one time—I won’t say which company—but we had a webpage, and the webpage’s conversion rate was trending down. It was trending down for a long time, and it was our number-one channel. It was, “Hey, what are we going to do to solve this?”

There were two paths. There was one where we could run a bunch of individual, well-controlled experiments and understand, “Hey, changing this button or changing this H1 is what’s going to improve the page,” and see whether it worked or not.

Or we could just run everything at once, use our gut, use our past experience, and hope that it worked. We ended up going that latter route, which was definitely the sloppier route and the less rigorous experiment.

It did end up working. We ended up 3x-ing the webpage conversion rate over the course of a couple of weeks, and it helped us hit our number that quarter. I say that was a mistake because we never actually knew what did or didn’t work, and we had to go back and undo a lot of the changes that we made once we did end up A/B-testing them.

But I think that goes back to the portfolio. We were operating on a very short time horizon, so we had to optimize for velocity versus rigor. Once we were no longer under the gun, we went back and optimized for rigor to understand what worked and what actually didn’t.

How do you think about giving something enough time to know if it works? We want high velocity, and we need to move on, but sometimes it takes a little bit of time. Content in particular?

Honestly, I would say 12 to 18 months.

How do you think about enough time but not being slow?

It goes back to the portfolio. If you’re going to allocate 20% or 30% of your time to longer-term bets, that’s fine. Be okay with the fact that you’re not going to get results anytime soon.

Having said that, it would be great if you could figure out what some leading indicators are or scope down the experiment so you could get some signal that, “Hey, we have confidence this will or won’t work.”

In general, I’ve always tried to prioritize experiments based on impact and effort. I think those are the obvious ones, but also confidence and time to results. If you’re really confident something is going to work, you should just do it. If you’re really unconfident that something is going to work but the time to results is really fast, you should do that as well.

Usually, those 2 dimensions are lost when people are prioritizing. They tend to just go for impact and effort and not think about confidence or time to results.

When you think about impact, you also said the word “indicator.” I think it’s really important to understand what you’re actually trying to move and what the core objective is. What’s your biggest advice to founders and growth teams on how to set the right metric that you want to move?

That’s where the experimental design and the rigor of experiments come in. You’ll have a hypothesis, and I think most marketers tend to jump to, “Let’s go do something. Let’s go launch something.”

But the experimental design—understanding what you’re actually able to measure, what you will measure, how long it’ll take to get that result, and whether it’s statistically significant—all of that means you either need to be able to do the math yourself or go find someone on a data team and work with them.

Or acknowledge the fact that, “Hey, we don’t actually have a good way to think about this or measure this.” That’s okay. We’re going to go collect some qualitative data, and it means we might be wrong. I think folks need to be honest about that upfront and define that upfront.

We have this portfolio of bets, and then we see one that starts to work. Do we immediately double down on it? How do we know how much to double down on? Do we set a benchmark of what good is versus great? How do we think about that?

Yes, absolutely. You should triple down on that. I think another mistake most startups make is they see something that works and they say, “Okay, great. Let’s increase our spend. Let’s double it. Let’s triple it.”

Ideally, if it’s working, you take that channel to saturation as quickly as possible. If you graph out what the results are over a long period of time, you’re probably going to see it approach an asymptote. You’re going to see the incrementality of those results start to decay.

If you just burn a shitload of cash on a channel super quickly—say you’re spending $10K and you’re like, “Fuck it, it works. Let’s put $200K on it”—the $200K will not be nearly as efficient as that $10K was.

Would it not have been better to do $30K, $50K, $70K, and gradually get up there than just whack it as hard as possible? I’m naive.

Yes, but it depends. If you’re able to graph that response curve, going from $10K to $200K, obviously you’re probably not going to be able to go from $10K to $200K overnight. If you were, that would probably be a good problem to have.

But yes, if you’re able to graph that response curve and see when something goes from linear to starting to decay in terms of response, that tells you, “Okay, we’re no longer getting an expected output given the input.” Then you have a conversation about whether the returns are worth it.

Figuring out the asymptote, where things start to actually plateau, is the most important thing. I think most companies, or most startups at least, get to that asymptote too slowly, and they should really be scaling much, much faster if they find something that works.

Having said that, I think most things saturate more slowly than people expect, so going from $10K to $200K might not be as insane as it sounds. But it depends. You’ve got to watch it.

Do CACs get cheaper over time as the brand becomes better known and you become more established in an ecosystem, or do they get more expensive as you saturate the core target market and have to expand into maybe less directly relevant ICPs?

The only right answer is that, yes, CACs become more expensive. As you get more and more market share, it makes sense that every incremental acquisition is going to cost more than the previous one.

Having said that, I think the reality is that’s usually not true. Usually, you figure out new products to sell that actually make the LTVs improve. You figure out new geographies to break into. You figure out new channels that work. You figure out maybe that combining different channels has a halo effect and that you’re not fully capturing that in the customer acquisition cost.

The reality is that it takes a really long time to get to the point where the macro effect of saturation is hitting your CAC. But that’s how I think about it.

Do you think early-stage founders should look at LTV? Often, CAC to LTV is the hailed metric. You know as well as I do, George, it’s so difficult to calculate LTV in any product, let alone early-stage products. How do you think about LTV and its utility value to early-stage founders?

I think it’s a reasonable framework. You have to have some threshold that you agree on as a business: “This is what we’re willing to spend, and this is what we think a customer is worth.”

But the reality is that it’s false precision. You’re not going to know where your LTV is if you’ve been in business for a year, 6 months, or whatever it might be. I wouldn’t over-index on that false precision.

I would instead acknowledge that there’s some threshold we’re going to be okay with in terms of spending to acquire a customer and what that customer is worth. That should change over time as you learn things and run experiments.

When you’re running experiments, do you have culture challenges in terms of maintaining morale if you shut off someone’s baby? What I mean by that is, someone’s really been working hard on YouTube, Instagram, or SEO, and you say, “George, it’s 3 months. We’re not seeing the returns needed. Cut it.” But they’re very attached to it. How do you think about that?

No one should be that attached to the experiment that they’re running. I think that’s a cultural problem. They should acknowledge that the vast majority of what they work on is going to fail, and that if they’re not failing, honestly, they’re probably not doing their job well.

You need to be running a bunch of things. It needs to be unique and creative, and that means most of it is not going to work. If you’re that attached to something that’s working, you should be very, very high on the confidence aspect of how we prioritized it. In that case, maybe we were wrong, and we should have that conversation.

But definitely, no one should be that attached to any experiment.

4. The Role of Postmortems and How to Do Them

How do you use pre-mortems and post-mortems to effectively analyze the success rate of different experiments and programs?

You should be doing a pre-mortem and a post-mortem. I think that’s part of good experimental design: understanding what the different failure modes are and acknowledging what the probability of those failure modes is.

If you do a—sorry, just so I understand, because so many founders get really granular and get notebooks out for pre-mortems—is this right before we’re about to start? We plot out the 3 main things that could likely kill this project?

That’s one way to do it. I would actually get more specific than that when you’re planning the experiments. Why would this fail? It could be, “We’re not going to have a large enough sample size as we predicted,” or there are a million things. You should probably write out those million things.

What’s more interesting is when you do a post-mortem: if the experiment failed for something that you didn’t actually anticipate, something that you didn’t factor into your experimental design. I think that’s an interesting conversation.

But if it’s something that you had anticipated and maybe the probability was wrong, that is less interesting, and I probably wouldn’t even do a post-mortem for that.

How often is the pre-mortem the reason why something didn’t work? How often do you get it right?

For the high-probability, high-confidence bets—the things that you’re doing to hit a number this quarter or even this year—I think it’s probably pretty high. It’s probably 90% or more.

For the big swings, there’s always some Black Swan. There’s always something that you cannot anticipate, that you had no idea about. That’s where the post-mortem is actually valuable, trying to figure out what you learned and how it might apply to either other big swings or maybe even higher-confidence bets.

That, I think, is actually the much more interesting and more valuable conversation.

I think every growth team is going, “Well, I couldn’t predict COVID.”

That is very true. That was a tough one for us all.

Okay, so we have that as the pre-mortem and the post-mortem. How do we structure that? Who’s invited? What does that look like?

The person who was ultimately the DRI for an experiment—the person who also hopefully scoped the experiment—should write the post-mortem. They need to be clear on, number 1, whether we ran the experiment well or whether it failed for some reason that we could have avoided.

Outside of whether we scoped the experiment well, the question is whether we learned something that could be generalized to other aspects of the business. That’s an important aspect to include.

The third-most-important component is making sure that the right cross-functional stakeholders are there: the folks who can learn from it and the folks who can prevent the failure in the future. That’s maybe the third-most-important aspect of a post-mortem.

Beyond that, the structure doesn’t actually matter that much. It’s going to be very company-dependent.

What do you like to do? Is it a Notion document or a Google Doc? When do you send it out? You want people to have time with it, but not too much time. How do you think about that?

I’m a Google Doc person. The DRI should write it up and send it out in advance, at least 24 hours in advance, so people have time to think about it.

But ideally, I’m more in favor of a live conversation rather than adding comments and having a conversation in the comments in the document, then having a maybe more boring live conversation. I’m big on live conversations.

I really like one of the suggestions, which is, “Are there any learnings that could be generalized to other aspects of the business?” Is there an example from the past that you could share, just to illustrate that a little bit?

I’ll give you a really tactical example. We were doing some very basic A/B testing on our homepage, and we saw that a red button by far outperformed anything else.

Red, as a button, is generally a bad idea. It has a negative connotation. It’s like something is wrong: “Don’t hit the red button.” But we could never find anything that outperformed that red button on a pure A/B-testing basis.

It turned out that when you looked at the data by segment, although it outperformed in general, it severely underperformed for the enterprise segment. It’s a great example of Simpson’s paradox.

When we took that information and removed it from the web team and applied it to the content team and to everyone else who was using the red button as a best practice, that was incredibly valuable. Most of the content we were generating was for enterprise. Most of the webinars we were generating were for enterprise. Most of the direct mailers we were sending were for enterprise.

What we were actually doing by saying, “Red is the best button”—or, sorry, the best practice—was decreasing the performance of all of these things that were specific to the enterprise segment.

5. Growth Team Structure and Standalone or Not?

Can I ask you, does growth sit in its own team, or are you in the product team? Are you in the marketing team? Where do you sit?

My personal opinion is that growth should be independent. The growth team’s mandate should be to figure out how to grow the business, and that should be more than just marketing. It should be more than just product.

It should mean that you have the mandate to do whatever is the highest leverage. To me, that means you probably should report to—I honestly, that’s one of the reasons why I love Ramp: the growth team reports to one of the co-founders.

Some companies have chief growth officers. Other folks have growth organizations that are more like SWAT teams and kind of roam between different parts of the business. Ultimately, it does depend on the business, but I think they should be as independent as possible.

6. The Three Ways to Find Alpha in Growth

You’ve said to me before about seeking Alpha in growth. It was a cliffhanger because I had no idea what you quite meant by it. What did you mean by seeking Alpha in growth?

I was stealing “Alpha” from investing terminology. “What’s your unfair advantage?” is maybe a better way to put it.

I think that’s the key to being a good growth team. You’ve got to figure out something that is not saturated and that other people ideally are not doing. I think the way that you find Alpha is either by doing things that no one else knows about, most likely because it’s so new.

Think about when TikTok first came out. I don’t think any B2B brands were thinking about advertising on TikTok. I don’t think there even was advertising on TikTok when it first came out. But the folks who were really ahead of the game were thinking, “Eventually, they will be advertising on TikTok, and it’s going to be totally saturated with consumer brands to begin with. But eventually there will be a B2B opportunity.”

When they were the first ones to run those experiments, they probably had huge returns. Doing things that people don’t know about is one aspect.

I think another aspect is probably doing things that everyone is convinced will not work. I remember first suggesting we try direct mail years and years ago, and the reaction was, “Why would direct mail work? Junk mail to people’s homes? That absolutely won’t work.”

It became one of our most successful, biggest channels after a few iterations.

I’m happy to chat about where you find these things, but can we actually? It totally makes sense: do things that people don’t know about and do things that people don’t believe. How do you find them?

I think this is a good segue into how you just learn in general. As a member of the growth team, or someone in a company in general, I would say there are 3 areas.

You can learn academically. You can read a book and learn what’s worked for other companies or other growth people or companies in the past. Those are great aspects of being able to learn, so learning academically is one aspect.

You can also learn from your peers. You can go and learn from folks at other companies and growth people at other companies. I think that’s a great area for finding Alpha, granted, probably not the best unfair advantage since someone else knows about it.

I actually think the most interesting thing is to go and learn from other niches—other verticals and other geographies, especially if they’re tangential to what you’re doing.

A great example is WhatsApp. WhatsApp as a marketing channel is not huge for most brands or most companies in the United States, but it’s massive in a lot of international regions. I think, “Could we go try WhatsApp instead of sending emails?”

It’ll probably fail, but again, if you’re doing enough of these experiments, you’ll find something that works that no one else is doing.

On the number 1, academically, is that not just learning playbooks? Do you worry that you’ll speak to your friend George, who will tell you what worked at Samsara, but Ramp is a totally different business? Respectfully, to your point on playbooks earlier, they’re not applicable often. Does academic learning really work?

I think it does, but it depends on how you look at it. Yes, there are playbooks that you can just take and copy-paste. There are also playbooks that you can look at, think critically about, and adapt. Then there are playbooks you come up with from scratch.

A lot of academic learning is taking a past playbook and adapting it. The example that always comes to mind for me is in the world of attribution in marketing—media mix modeling, or marketing mix modeling, depending on who you talk to: MMM. Everyone’s talking about it now as the best way to do attribution.

That’s a really old concept from the old Mad Men-style advertising days in the 1950s and 1960s. You could look at how they measured the impact of ads in literal newspapers before anything was digital, back in the 1950s or 1960s, and think about how to adapt that playbook or methodology to modern-day digital advertising or modern-day digital marketing as a whole.

There are probably a million examples like that. Direct mail is probably another example.

There’s so much there. What did you see in direct mail that no one else saw? So many of your friends were like, “George crushed it on direct mail,” and no one thought this was a good idea. What did you see that no one else saw?

No one else was doing it, and it was incredibly scalable. That was pretty much it. The fact that no one else was doing it was like, “Okay, that’s interesting. We should try it.”

But the fact that, if it worked, it would be incredibly scalable, and the fact that you can run it with very large sample sizes, meant that we could run a lot of experiments in parallel and learn really, really quickly.

There are very few channels where you can say, “Hey, tomorrow, let’s go reach 200,000 people.” Direct mail and email are some of the only channels that would allow you to do something at that scale and then run a lot of experiments.

What is no one trying today that you think is interesting?

I don’t know if I can give away my secrets, but I think the honest answer is that, on the B2B side—and I don’t think this is super cutting-edge—influencer marketing.

Maybe a year or 2 ago this would have been a little bit more cutting-edge, but everyone’s always thought of influencers and user-generated content, to get more specific, as more of a B2C tactic that worked really well.

I would argue that it works just as well, and maybe even better, in the B2B world, especially if you’re moving upmarket and moving toward enterprise.

There’s definitely an unfair advantage there, but it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. How do you think about attribution and the challenge of capturing conversion?

I interviewed Nick at Revolut and Antoine, who’s the head of growth at Revolut, and their biggest mental shift for both of them was the power of brand marketing. But both were aware of the challenge of having no freaking idea what it does to their revenues.

How do you think about the importance of knowing the source of revenue versus brand marketing?

It goes back to the portfolio. I think you have to be okay with the fact that most brand marketing is a long-term bet. It’s high-risk, high-reward, at least that’s how a growth person would probably think about it.

Is there a stage of company where it becomes interesting?

I think if you’re seeing all of your core direct-response channels start to saturate, then it’s something that you have to start doing.

The assumption is that investing in brand is going to do one of a few things. It’s either going to make folks who have a problem and are aware they have a problem aware of you. I think that’s how most companies probably start thinking about it.

But the more interesting aspect is true demand generation. There are people out there who don’t realize they have a problem, and brand marketing, instead of being, “Hey, try XYZ product or try XYZ company,” is, “This problem exists. There’s actually a better way.” Of course, we’re the better way.

That, I think, is a much more interesting type of brand marketing: opening up demand for a new part of the market that you aren’t able to reach with traditional channels.

Can I ask, on the bets that we continuously go back to, how much is too much concentration? Traditionally, in venture, you don’t want to be more than 10% in a single investment. How do you think about too much concentration in a growth portfolio?

7. Common Pitfalls in Hiring Growth Talent

If you’re doing things right, the concentration will change. When you find something that works, if you do a really good job of saturating it as quickly as possible, you will, by almost definition, be really concentrated there, at least for a period of time.

It’s really about how quickly you can diversify and stack different bets and different wins so that you’re not concentrated for too long a period of time. But I think concentration in and of itself is not a bad thing. It means that you’re doing a good job maximizing an area.

How do you think about communicating growth goals to other elements of the organization? You’re sitting there in your independent growth team, and you also have to work with product and marketing. How do you work together most efficiently to communicate, “This is what I’m going after”?

Communicating the way growth thinks about things is probably more important than what specifically they’re doing, as long as everyone is aligned that the growth team’s job is aligned with everyone else’s in the company, which is that we need to be successful.

The growth team’s job is not to make anyone happy. It’s to make the business successful. That might mean, for a period of time, working really closely with product, product marketing, or some other element of the business.

But they should recognize—and growth should be able to communicate—that we’re bringing a unique skill set and a unique point of view that hopefully is complementary to their skill set and their point of view, but ultimately with the same goal of making the business successful.

I know that’s a little bit meta, but that’s how I would describe it.

You’re an angel in my company, George, and we’re sitting down for a coffee. I’m at about $1M in revenue, and I’ve just raised a Series A. Is now the time to bring in a head of growth? How do you advise me on when the right time is to bring in someone for growth, and what type of person is it—senior or junior?

I would always skew more junior. I think hiring for potential, especially early on in the business, is far more important.

I actually think it would be a mistake to hire someone more senior. If you’re a Series A company, hiring a really smart generalist who can think in terms of first principles and logically in terms of solving problems is probably more important than anything.

What background? For someone who can solve problems and is that kind of generalist, what background do you find is best?

Unless you’re trying to solve a very specific problem and you have high confidence that this is the right problem to solve, I would not hire a specialist or someone with a traditional marketing background.

I think hiring someone who has demonstrated that they can think logically and do math is really, really important in the early days. That might be engineers, former finance people, or an ex-consultant who hated consulting, really wanted to stick with something long term, and get their hands dirty.

I think those generally make the best first growth hires. But really, you should just be trying to assess for potential, which I think is a combination of whether they can have vision, whether they can see areas where they can go, whether they can acquire new skills really, really rapidly, and whether they’re internally motivated.

Before we actually dig into skills and skill detection, is there any profile where you’re like, “I don’t love that background. It’s just tough to be good at growth with that background”?

If you’ve been at a company—especially a company that’s an order of magnitude larger—for more than a few years, it’s really hard to then change your mindset and go to a smaller startup, think about how hard you have to work, how much you have to get your hands dirty, and how differently you need to think about things.

If you’ve been at a much, much larger company, you’re going to tend to think more in terms of playbooks and rely more on your past experience than on what you can learn from others, other geographies, other companies, or other peers.

Going from playbook to first-principles thinking is generally difficult to do, so I’ve personally stayed away from that type of profile.

8. How to Hire for the Best Growth Hires

I totally understand that perspective. On the skill detection, how do you run an interview process? Again, you’re advising me. I have a number of applications, and we have a candidate pool. How should I spend the first meeting? What questions should I ask? What should I try and uncover?

I think if you’re able to do some sort of back channel and some sort of test in that first interview, that is going to be the most valuable, highest-signal thing you can do.

When you say back channel or test, what do you mean? Do you mean references or a physical take-home test?

Both, exactly. If you’re a Series A startup, finding and hiring the best talent, and convincing the best talent to join your company, is generally going to be really hard. I assume most people have probably never heard of most Series A startups.

In that case, the best people you’re going to be able to hire are going to come through referrals, warm introductions, and that sort of thing. Getting some sort of back-channel information from the person who is hopefully connecting you is actually the first step of the interview process.

I would argue the second should be some sort of case study or take-home test. You could do the case study live in the conversation with them, just to see how they think about things, but I would not be opposed to—and I don’t think it would be a bad idea to—go from a warm conversation, getting to know them and selling them on the opportunity and the business, straight to a take-home test.

9. How to do Take-Home Assignments When Hiring for Growth

The first call should probably be about selling, and you should be selling based on the referral you just got—the very strong referral you just got. Then the second stage would be, “Okay, let’s assess.”

Let’s assess. What take-home assignment do you like to give, and what advice would you give me?

Make it as real as possible and make it quantitative. Actually, maybe the third thing I’d say is to understand what good looks like before you send the test out.

A great example is that I like to take a Salesforce dump or a dump of data and say, “Hey, what’s the best campaign? What worked best here? What were the best leads?” Whatever it might be.

If it’s real-world data, it’s going to be really messy. There’s going to be a bunch of tricks they have to catch and a bunch of mistakes they have to figure out: duplicate leads, dates that don’t align, missing data, or whatever it might be.

I think that itself is an interesting question to answer: can they work with real-world data? Then there’s how much of this they thought through, what their thought process was, how quickly they were able to adapt, and how quickly they were even able to do the tests.

Did they ask questions about it? All of those are signals, before you even see the output, to understand whether they’re at least thinking about things in the right way. But the real world is messy. They should work with real-world data.

They work with real-world data, they come back, and you’re impressed. What happens next? Do we go straight to an offer? Do we have a hiring panel? Do we do any other steps?

They should at least meet some other members of the team. Ideally, you want this to be a mutual fit, both culturally and in terms of whether they want to work with the people on the team and the team wants to work with them.

I think there’s still value in doing a panel, but it’s almost more about culture fit and team fit than anything. Ideally, you are scoping that test that you send them so you know whether they can do the job.

When you’ve got growth talent wrong, what did you not see that you wish you had seen when you hired them?

It’s generally been hiring a generalist who ultimately says, “Hey, this isn’t for me. I don’t want to do this after all. I’ve never done this problem or this job before, and now that I’m doing it, I really don’t enjoy it. I want to go and get back into investing,” or, “I want to do XYZ.”

Honestly, I think it’s difficult to assess for that, and you just have to acknowledge that no one—even the best person hiring—is still going to make a lot of mistakes. That’s okay.

I think what’s most important is just being as transparent as possible, both in terms of the opportunity and how they’re going to be assessed. Also, be transparent that if this doesn’t work, that’s fine. We’ve all had jobs before, and we’re all going to have jobs again. That’s okay.

Do you agree that people are destined, or much better suited, for certain phases of a company’s life?

I wouldn’t say they were destined, but I think you can be suited for it. If you’ve spent the last 5 jobs and 15 years in a certain stage of a company, I think it’s going to be difficult to adapt your way of operating and way of thinking to a different stage of a company.

Having said that, I don’t think anyone in particular is destined for a certain stage. If you’re very, very hungry, you’re a self-starter, and you love doing a little bit of everything, you’re probably going to do better at a seed or Series A company than at a 100,000-person, well-established business.

But that might change over time, as they gain more experience or do different things.

10. Investing in Management and Learning

You need to invest in your people, right? That helps them grow and develop with scale. You said to me before that management is a skill that needs to be invested in. Do you think it’s currently invested in by most companies?

By most companies? No, I don’t. Philosophically, they’re like, “Yes, we want to invest in people’s learning and development,” and I think they even believe that’s true. But actually doing it is really difficult. It takes time, it takes resources, you have to be intentional, and it has to be top-down.

How do you do it, then? Help me.

I think Samsara actually had a great model for this. The CEO and founder was very big on learning and very big on reading. I remember one time he was hanging out in the cafeteria, and someone asked, “What do you like to do in your free time?” He said, “I like to read books.”

As a result, you saw how that permeated throughout the culture. I remember they launched something when I was there called Leadership Principles, and everyone who was a leader within the company got a big box shipped to their home. It had literally 15 books in it, all business books.

The expectation was that you read 1 of these books every month and then rejoin a conversation with your peers to discuss one of the principles in these books that Samsara wanted you to embody. Then there was an element where you actually had to go put it into practice and demonstrate that you were putting it into practice.

To me, that’s a great example of being very intentional about, “Hey, we value learning and development here. We’re going to add structure and accountability to it to make sure that you’re not just learning things, but putting them into practice.”

That took time. That took a lot of investment. It took it really coming from the founders. A lot of companies sometimes get caught up in the day-to-day and say, “Hey, we value learning, but go figure it out on your own,” rather than coming up with a holistic program or mechanism like that.

How do you think about the effectiveness of that? I read Howard Schultz’s book on Starbucks and Leadership Lessons from Starbucks. I run a media company in a world of TikTok and DeepSeek, so it’s completely different.

To the point on playbooks, the leadership principles probably don’t align. Most leadership books written 20 years ago do not take account of a post-COVID, millennial generation. How do we think about the applicability and the possibility that the lessons we teach are wrong?

I don’t think business has actually changed that much. Tactically, sure, maybe it has. The channels have changed; TikTok didn’t exist 30 years ago. But I don’t actually think business, and being a good manager in particular, has changed that much. The skills necessary to be a good manager haven’t changed that much.

A great example is the book The Goal. I’m a big fan of that book. I have some recency bias because we reread it recently, but one of the key concepts in it is the theory of constraints.

That doesn’t have anything to do with management, but the concept of the theory of constraints existed 40 years ago and still exists today. Every team is operating with some bottleneck in its process, and being able to identify that bottleneck and remove it is a very valuable skill for anyone, but it’s especially valuable for a manager.

That’s how you get the most out of people. That’s one of the core jobs of being a manager. I would argue that most business books, as long as you’re vetting them well and being intentional about what principle you want to pull out of them and have your team put into practice, have something that can be learned from them, regardless of how old they are.

What is the biggest bottleneck in your role today at Ramp that, if removed, would be the biggest game changer?

The biggest bottleneck is probably the velocity of experimentation. There are so many opportunities, and we don’t have enough time or enough resources. If you zoom out far enough, that’s probably the constraint for most businesses.

What would you like to do but, because of time or lack of resources, aren’t able to do?

Number 1, there are a lot of things I would just like to get off the ground faster. When you’re reliant on external parties—either external vendors, external lead sources, or other legal teams to review your terms of service—things go much more slowly.

I wish there were a way to speed all of that up. I think Ramp actually does a really good job of saying, “Let’s optimize for speed. Just accept those legal terms”—maybe not necessarily, but let’s figure out a way to move as quickly as possible, launch it, test it, and then figure out the details if we’re going to scale it up.

We spoke about investing in people becoming managers and developing. I spoke to so many of your former colleagues, and they all said one of your biggest strengths is your willingness to roll up your sleeves and do the work yourself.

My question to you is, ironically, how willing should a manager be to do IC work versus that actually just being a plaster for not having great ICs?

It’s a great question. I think a good leader—I wouldn’t even say just manager; I think a good leader—needs to know how to do everyone on their team’s job, but poorly. I think the poorly part is important.

They should know how to do the job so they can step in if they need to, or so they’re dangerous enough to ask the right questions. But if they know how to do the job better than the people they’ve hired, then they didn’t hire the right people.

11. How AI Changes Growth Products and Strategies

That’s going to lead to micromanagement and to filling in gaps that, to your point, are not the most effective use of their time. Being able to either learn enough of what your team does so that you can do it poorly, or hire people who can do what you need them to do better than you know how to do it, is the key.

Okay, so you hired me. I’ve joined your team. I’m junior—you hired very junior with this one, George, sorry—but what does that onboarding look like? What do you expect from your new growth hires in the first 30 days?

The first 30 days are about learning the business, learning the team, and learning your area of domain. I would expect that in the first 3 days, you know how to do your job, and that’s pretty much it.

You should understand how the company operates and how the company makes money. I think a strong foundation is understanding how the business works.

What do I do as a leader to give you those best 30 days? Do I just say, “Shadow the shit out of me”? Do I say, “Go sit in support”? Where do you go?

Great question. This again goes back to investing in learning. I think the leader needs to be incredibly detailed in what those first 30-, 60-, and 90-day plans look like: who you’re meeting, what you’re doing with your time, and so on.

This was something I learned from Samsara as well. I remember my first 30 days were written out in excruciating detail. I think the first 2 weeks were completely scheduled out to the minute.

As a result, it was also very clear whether someone was learning and picking things up, and it was very easy to compare people if they were given the same structured onboarding.

I firmly believe that the first 30 days are about learning the business and learning the job. Beyond those 30 days, you should be able to start showing some sort of step-change impact and start having some ideas and making things your own.

By 90 days, you should actually be starting to show the fruits of those new ideas and the new experience or new perspective that you’re bringing.

Should you always go for early wins, just to get points on the board?

If you see the opportunity, yes, and there should be an opportunity. Ideally, you were hired because you have some skill set or unique perspective, or because there’s some gap in the business that you’re filling.

There should be some early points you can put up. Having said that, if someone isn’t able to put up points on the board, you should understand why and whether they were set up for success. If they weren’t, you should address that as quickly as possible.

But there are some roles and some problems that do just take time to solve. That’s where the question of how we can scope this down and run an experiment to validate whether we’re at least on the right track is important.

There are some aspects or some times when it is difficult to put early points on the board.

George, how fast do you know if someone you hire isn’t good enough?

I think you generally have inklings in the first couple of weeks, but you should give some people the benefit of the doubt. You should run some sort of structured process, and I guess this is why structured onboarding is so important.

This is why making sure people ship things in their first week is so important. You can assess them based on facts versus just vibes or feelings.

But you generally have some sort of vibe or feeling in the first week or 2.

Do you know what I find really hard? It’s hard to get rid of someone after a week. You haven’t given them enough time. It looks like you’re just cutting it prematurely short, so you know, but you keep them for 3 months because you’re thinking, “Well, at least now it looks like I can say I’ve given them a fair try.”

I think that’s true. I don’t actually think that’s wrong.

What are the most common reasons growth hires don’t work?

I think the number 1 reason is that it was on the manager. It was a mis-hire. They didn’t scope the role effectively, or the role changed and the needs of the business changed, so they hired the wrong person or the wrong profile.

Generally, managers try to come up with a laundry list of skills they want to hire for, and they try to find someone who checks most of those boxes. But that’s almost the easy way to do things.

I think the much harder way is to get really, really crystal clear on the one thing that we need: the one skill, trait, piece of experience, or problem we need to solve. Then hire someone you have high confidence can do that or fill that gap, versus someone who checks a bunch of boxes.

Not getting clear on that is the number 1 reason why you would mis-hire, and that’s mostly on the manager, if I’m being honest.

Can I ask how AI changes the role of growth? We see some pretty futuristic things in terms of, “Here’s my budget. Go spend it across 5 channels,” and it will do it in the optimal fashion for you. Is that the future of growth, and how do you think about how your role changes with an increasing prominence of AI?

In that example, I think it’s hard to find Alpha if you’re just having AI go find the opportunities for you. Having said that, AI is tremendously changing the role of growth.

Is it hard to find Alpha in that respect because it would have all of your connected data history? It could look at all prior performance and conversion on every channel, compare it like-for-like, benchmark it against standards, and then do what’s best for you—not against an anonymized data set, but telling you what you should do based on your own data.

It could be incredibly personalized, but almost by definition, that’s just going to give you incremental gains on things you’re already doing and things it has data on.

To get a real advantage, maybe we’ll get to this point at some point soon, but I think it’s hard to have AI go talk to 50 people in the industry, synthesize what they’re doing, apply what it thinks is going to be relevant to your business model and your ICP, and go apply that.

That sounds really difficult to do, at least at the state of AI today. But maybe not in a year. Who knows?

Tooling-wise, does it change much using AI?

Yes, 100%. A few years ago, I was such a strong advocate that everyone on the growth team needs to be technical. They need to learn SQL, learn Python, and learn how to work with a growth engineering team very, very closely.

I think AI upended that. You don’t need to be nearly as technical as you used to. AI can help you write the code, and it can tell you other ways of doing things.

Even in that element of who I used to have a bias for hiring, it’s totally changed in my mind.

Growth people, bluntly, are either performance-driven and scientific, or they’re creatively driven and artistic. Does a world of AI make one likely to be more successful than the other?

I think it’s a good co-pilot, for lack of a better term, for both of those roles. On the creative side, it can help you think about new ideas and brainstorm. On the performance side, it can help you analyze the data and maybe be more efficient or move more quickly.

You’ve got to choose which one it helps more. Here’s my bias: I’m not super creative. At the end of the day, I’m not a creatively minded person, so I think it helps me a lot more.

I think you are. Don’t discredit yourself.

So you think it helps creative people more?

I think so. Or maybe it helps uncreative people more, is what I’d say.

The number of times I’ve had ChatGPT—or any type of AI, really—say, “How do I make this better? How do I add a joke in here? What are some other visuals I can do? What’s a good analogy for XYZ?” I wouldn’t have been able to do that on my own. I would have had to go to someone in product marketing or content and say, “Hey, I need some help.”

Can I ask, how do you advise founders competing in incredibly intense, competitive markets? Ramp is in a very competitive market across a number of different products. What’s your biggest advice on competing in very proliferated markets?

I think it’s like most things: you just have to have a better product, and you have to have some plan for distribution.

Having a better product probably solves 80% or 90% of the battle, but you also need to think about how you’re going to distribute that product and what your unfair advantage is in distribution. Hopefully, that’s where the growth team comes in and where it can provide value.

But I do think it’s mostly on the product.

Do you agree with the suggestion, “Build it and they will come”?

Absolutely not. I’m a marketer at the end of the day, and I’m a growth person. That is antithetical to everything we stand for.

There are some products where, yes, they’re so amazing and the word of mouth is so strong that you could build it and people would come. But that is so out of the ordinary and leaves your fate so much to chance that it’s not a good approach.

12. Quick-Fire Round: Common Mistakes and Growth Channels

Listen, George, I’ve loved this. You are unbelievably concise with answers. I call it word economy, which is value per word. Most people are fluffy and don’t say much, but it takes a long time. You’re unbelievably concise, with very dense value. It makes my life a joy, to be quite honest.

I want to do a quick-fire with you. I’ll say a short statement, and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

Sure, let’s do it.

Number 1: what’s the most common, expensive, deadly, irreversible mistake you see founders make?

Hiring for experience because they don’t know any better. “We don’t know how to do this. We’ll hire someone who does.”

It should be, “We should hire someone who doesn’t.” It should be, “We should actually assess for what good looks like and how we test them for it. Could someone figure this out? Could someone on the team figure this out?” Rather than hiring someone who already knows.

Do you think most founders know what good looks like?

That’s the hard thing. They’ve got to figure it out. I think that’s where the learning comes in.

Go talk to other people. Let’s say you’re trying to figure out how to do cold calling. Maybe it will work for us, maybe it won’t. Go identify 10 companies that do cold calling really well. Go talk to the people who built that infrastructure and built that system, and so on.

Do you know why I started these vertical shows? One of my companies hired someone for growth who was obviously terrible to me. I said, “This is clearly a mistake,” and they said, “I don’t know what good growth looks like.”

I thought, “Well, if I spoke to the 10 people I know and published them, you’d have an idea that George is top tier, and that’s what I should look for in someone I work with.” This was meant to be a benchmarking of world-class quality in each vertical, and that’s why we started them.

I love it. I think that’s why I’m such a fan. That’s very kind.

What’s the most underappreciated growth channel today?

Honestly, it’s probably something on the influencer side of things. I don’t think most people think of it as a growth channel, but influencers absolutely are one, at least on the B2B side.

Can you do influencer marketing at scale?

That’s the hard thing. That’s the fun problem to solve.

I think you can treat it almost as an outbound funnel. Make a list of the 10,000 micro-influencers or people who could become micro-influencers, and do some scaled outbound to them. Figure out a process that works.

You could solve almost any problem in that way. The short answer is yes.

What’s the most polluted or overrated channel today?

Paid search. I think everyone goes to paid search because they have to. In the very early days, when you have nothing that works, sure, it’s table stakes. But it saturates quickly, and you’re paying a tax to Google.

I think paid search is a relatively uninspiring growth channel that will scale long term.

What growth tactic have you done where, with the benefit of hindsight, you think, “I wish I hadn’t done that”?

Very, very early on, it was event sponsorships. At very small companies, it’s event sponsorships. You go exhibit at Dreamforce or something like that, and it feels like something you have to do because everyone else does it.

It’s just a waste of money. You’re in a sea of other companies, and no one’s paying attention to you. That money would be better spent figuring out some guerrilla tactic to stand out or, honestly, probably better spent on paid ads.

We do a lot on events. I think we’re at a very different scale, though, and we do things a little bit differently. It’s not just, “Go exhibit at an event.” It’s also getting a speaker slot, doing some out-of-home advertising around it, and making sure we do outbound emails immediately afterward.

It’s more than just, “Let’s get a booth in the corner of the conference hall because it was all we could afford, and let’s hope people come to us.”

It’s one of those things where, if you’re in, you need to go all in and have the billboard outside the conference, the key cards for the hotels, the speaker slot, and the booth—not just a small shit booth.

Exactly. That’s why I think it changes depending on size. When you’re a Series A company, most events, depending on your go-to-market motion, are not going to be high ROI.

What growth channel did you not take advantage of that, with the benefit of hindsight, you think, “That was in plain sight”?

It’s a good question. Direct-mail gifting was one that we could have attempted even earlier when we were at Samsara.

In my opinion, I think there are probably unfair advantages to be gained in display advertising. Display advertising is so inexpensive right now, but it’s not measured well, and most people think of it in terms of direct response.

No one clicks these ads, so the response and the ROI aren’t very good. But the reality is that figuring out how to serve the right number of impressions, with the right message, into an account or to a contact actually does have a halo effect.

There’s definitely an advantage there, but solving for that advantage is probably dependent on how you measure it. I would say display advertising is an opportunity.

What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

Very much brand advertising, or brand investment in general. I think this is something that Gong did really, really well.

They were willing to invest in things that elevated the brand, even if they were completely unmeasurable and something we would never be able to measure. But you saw that in the inbound numbers and how big a channel inbound was for Gong because they invested in their brand so much.

It doesn’t make sense when you’re a very early startup and you don’t have that type of resource. But once you reach a certain size or scale, if you’re not investing in brand as part of your long-term horizon or long-term bucket of bets, then you’re going to screw yourself over in the future.

Final one for you, George: what growth strategy have you been most impressed by in the last 12 to 24 months? Which company made you think, “That was smart”?

It’s usually the nontraditional stuff. Cold calling—I think a lot of people thought cold calling was dead, but cold calling is a tremendous channel for a lot of companies because it’s hard to do.

Door-to-door is something that’s really interesting, and I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. The medical device space is interesting because a lot of its sales and marketing are door-to-door.

Now that people are moving back into the office and working from offices again, I think there’s probably an unfair advantage to having a true field sales team that goes door-to-door and brings a cake with them, or whatever it might be.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about.

Any door-to-door salesman who wants to bring a cake, I love cake.

All in, George. As I said, I love it when you get concision with quality. It’s very hard to do, but you’ve been fantastic. Thank you so much for this. I’ve loved having you, and you’ve been amazing.

No, thank you. Honestly, great questions. I loved the conversation. Hopefully, I wasn’t too concise, but it’s been a fun time.