Interview, Fireside Chat
Adam Fishman: Takeaways from Lyft and Patreon; How to Build Viral Loops | 20VC #897
- Future growth team structures are expected to evolve from standalone units into functions folded within product or marketing, with temporary separations recommended only to drive focus on new loops.
- Hiring timelines and seniority levels are predicted to depend on the existence of a defined growth model, required skills, and founder involvement, with recommendations favoring director-level or slightly below "player-coach" hires who can build processes rather than pure doers or senior strategists.
- A core hiring process is planned to replace traditional executive interviews with on-the-job side-by-side work, including quantitative exercises with dummy data, prioritization challenges under constraints, behavioral assessments for grit and humility, and multi-hour collaborative brainstorming sessions.
- Onboarding success strategies involve establishing clear 30, 60, and 90-day plans where the first month focuses on learning, the second on iteration, and the third on long-term planning, with early momentum assessments at 45 to 60 days and over-communication via public documents to align the entire company.
- Communication protocols are set to include reliable, predictable streams like weekly updates, visual aids, and prototypes, with an initial preference for one-on-one discussions with executives and a eventual shift to team-managed templates.
- Rebranding initiatives require external guidance, rigorous qualitative testing of positioning statements, simultaneous feature launches to validate the new promise, and a specific instruction to avoid monitoring social media reactions for the first two weeks post-launch.
- Long-term tactical effectiveness is expected to shift as social graphs and incentivized referrals become productized and less novel, while SEO and content generation face higher competitive bars, necessitating a move away from pattern matching toward broader skills in product, data, and marketing.
- Future growth opportunities are predicted in leveraging new iOS features like home screen widgets for viral coefficients, while foundational psychological principles such as loss aversion and scarcity are expected to remain stable over the next five years.
- Critical risks include the disastrous outcomes of hiring growth teams to fix product-market fit issues, the dangers of managing too many growth loops simultaneously, and the failure of companies that fail to be opinionated in their branding.
- Strategic plans include adopting a holistic growth system that integrates acquisition, retention, and monetization, and applying identical management frameworks regarding empathy, difficult conversations, and growth mindset to both employees and children.