14 Take Aways from Our Annual HBS Trip to Silicon Valley

Last month, I took 40 MBAs from Harvard Business School out west for my course "Decoding Growth in Silicon Valley" with the help of Sheela Zemlin . Our goal was to dive into Product Led Growth (#PLG) on the B2B front, "growth" teams on the B2C front, and explore the broader issues that are top of mind for some of the best leaders in the region. 

We met with John Zimmer (Co-Founder/President) and Dan Friedman (VP of Growth) at Lyft ,   Daniel Shapero (COO),  Lekha Doshi (VP of GTM Ops), and   Archana Sekhar (VP of Biz Ops) at LinkedIn ,  Dylan Field (Founder/CEO) and  Amanda Kleha (CCO) at Figma , Sid Sijbrandij (Co-Founder/CEO) and Ashley Kramer (CMO/CSO) at GitLab ,  Mamoon Hamid (Partner) at Kleiner Perkins ,  Archana Agrawal Board of Director at MongoDB and Zendesk ,  Christian Sutherland-Wong (CEO) at Glassdoor ,  Selina Tobaccowala (Co-founder) at Evite ,  and  Dan Springer (CEO) at Docusign .

Here are some of my favorite quotes from these leaders.

"AI will have the same disruptive impact as the Internet did. However, if I were to draw a timeline analog as to where we are in the disruption cycle of AI compared to the Internet, I think we are in the year 1995. Like the Internet in 1995, AI as a technology has finally become known in the mainstream. However, we don't know how to use it and cannot visualize the true disruptive potential. Like the Internet, we will likely see a lot of investment into the "hype", a massive loss on those initial investments with a few winners over the next few years, and then a decade or so of steady disruption that will dramatically change our world."  

"We are going through the biggest transformation in work place culture in the history of the corporation. The pandemic forced us to reconsider the performance optimization of an individual, team, and organization. One highly discussed aspect is the best practice use of remote versus in-person time. In that area, the best cultures are leaning much more into pre-reads and asynchronous communication, replacing the inefficient, expensive team meetings that simply reported out information. Check in calls between managers and front-line workers are taking place remotely but are twice as frequent and in half the time. The bar on work required in-person is much higher. In-person meetings are largely reserved for intense barnstorming where that in-person experience is really needed."

"Pricing and packaging in PLG is simple. If the feature adds value to the end user, give it away for free. If the feature adds value to the executive, charge for it."

"As I have matured professionally, my leadership style has transitioned from "here is my vision and my decision on the path forward - we are doing this unless you can convince me otherwise" to " my job is to choose the right senior leaders to promote around me, empower them to be great, and make the hard decision when the business needs to up-level them."

"I am excited about the impact AI will have on data insights. With the rise of ops teams, everyone is showing up to meetings armed with their "spin" on the data interpretation. AI will evolve to be the determiner of what is actually going on in the business so senior leadership teams and boards can make better decisions."

"Optimal growth team structure evolves with the stage of the startup. At the seed stage, the team starts off as a handful of "jack-of-all-trade" athletes reporting to the CEO, transitions at the Series A-B-C stage to a team of specialists (i.e. engineers, designers, data analysts, data scientists, marketers, CSMs) under a growth PM, and then evolves at the Series D+ stage to multiple growth teams where each growth team is assigned to a single product or market."

"Aligning sales/marketing and product/engineering is quite simple. Focus everyone on generating user value. Product/Engineering should focus on features that create the most user value. Sales/Marketing should find the customers that can benefit the most and tailor the pitch around maximize user value. User value creation is every organizations north star."

"Originally I didn't want to raise venture capital when we started out. I didn't want the pressure to grow according to their agenda versus what I believe our opportunity warranted. However, then I realized that the lack of capital did not allow me to build a senior leadership team with the best people in the business. I took on venture capital in order to surround myself with the best executives possible."

"One of the lesser know attributes of a future unicorn PLG company is an L28 chart has a smile shape to it."

"When two co-founders don't see eye to eye on an exit opportunity, they need to default to the lowest common denominator and take the exit. If they continue and fail, it will be a very difficult outcome for the co-founder wanting the original exit to recover, especially if it would have been the first meaningful exit in their career."

[I wanted to keep these quotes anonymous but this one is publicly documented and cool so I figured John would be OK with it]. "Even though I am President of a large public company now, I still drive a Lyft every New Years Eve. That night is one of the more challenging nights for our drivers and I like to be out there on the front line with them."

"PLG pricing and packaging strategy depends on the stage of the business. In the first phase, almost all features are put into the free product. The organization is trying to find product-market-fit for their free SKU. However, once that PMF is found and the DAU/WAU/MAU growth on the free product is predictable, almost all future feature development is put into the paid SKUs for optimizing upsell and cross sell opportunities."

"Over the next decade, the most valuable specialists in the tech industry will be pricing and packaging experts. Almost all organizations are under-estimating the upside that exists in optimizing their pricing model."

"Here is the formula to quantify your value to your company: ([Your IQ] / [Your Ego])^[How Hard You Work]"