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

Podcast: Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
Source: whisper-tiny
URL: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/124955089/7c4d3b0a35faeb66e035b5acbfcad69a.mp3
Fetched: 2026-03-05 00:40:00

We talk about the 10x engineer, and we don't really talk about the 10x growth advisor, or 10x growth person, but the same dynamic applies. You could argue it flies even more, because the right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact. The advantage of a growth advisor is, it takes a long time to understand a channel. And certainly, people have to know their stuff. They have to be very good at their craft, their growth craft, but also they have to be exposed to a large set of experiments or an environment where they've just seen what works and what does it. Once a growth advisor has that, it takes years to learn it, but it literally can take seconds literally to communicate that. It's one of those weird disciplines where the right person at the right time can literally say a sentence that changes the trajectory of your company. You can't say that for a lot of different disciplines, but this is one of them. Welcome to Lenny's podcast, where interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experience is building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest does Luke Levek. Luke is currently the chief growth officer at Shopify. Before this, he was recruited personally by Mark Zuckerberg to help grow Facebook Messenger Instagram and WhatsApp. He's also VP of growth and a GM at TripAdvisor. He's also been a growth advisor to companies like Twitter, Pinterest, Patreon, thumbtack, and Kanba. And in our conversation, Luke shares advice on how and when to think about getting a growth advisor, including how to structure the relationship and what's a look for in an advisor. We also spent a ton of time on SEO, how to think about this as a growth channel, who it's well suited for, and how everything is about to change in SEO with Bard and ChatchoBT. Plus, Luke shares a ton of really interesting advice around the value of self-reflection, building routines, cold plunges, also a couple of amazing stories about working with Zuck and we learned from him. This is such an insight rich episode, and I know you'll love it with that. I bring you Luke Levek, after a short work from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by MixPannell, get deep insights into what your users are doing at every stage of the funnel at a fair price that scales as you grow. MixPannell gives you quick answers about your users from awareness to acquisition through retention. And by capturing website activity, add data, and multi-touch attribution right in MixPannell, you can improve every aspect of the full user funnel. Powered by first party behavioral data, instead of third party cookies, MixPannell's built to be more powerful and easier to use than Google Analytics. 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Atio is the CRM for fast-broing startups. Get started today and get 15% off your first year at atio.com slash Lenny. That's ATT-I-O.com slash Lenny. Luke, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. You can see it. It's good to see you too. I want to start with a story that you shared once when we were hanging out in the past and something that'll never forget. And it's about the time that you just joined Facebook and apparently you had some kind of big presentation yet to give to the entire company or the executive staff. And then I just love the way we kind of unfold it and kind of gives you a glimpse into what it's like to work with Zuck and at Facebook. Can you share that story if there is a bell? If I remember the story, well, basically I had just started at Facebook about I'll use those two interchangeably. I remember it as Facebook and always will. Now it was three months in and was working on a new area for me. So it came in, started putting together our thoughts on a strategy and was asked to do a presentation from the company with Mark on the strategy. So I whipped up a draft strategy, put together some plots, some plans presented in front of the company, and went well. And then every six months, there's something called the MTV Review of Facebook and you basically product area leads will go and present their strategy, how it's going. Again, I just joined three months before. So I walk in no idea what to expect. I'm sitting at a table, you can kind of envision it's a big room, really big room with a bunch of tables set up in a big square with a little microphone so I sit in there, there's Mark and all the executive sitting on the other side. And sit down and it's quiet for what felt like five minutes. I'm sure it was not, but it was quite for a while just sitting there waiting for what's going to happen now. And at some point Mark kind of looks over, says, hey, you saw your presentation, sorry strategy. Now when are we going to start seeing results? And that was my introduction to Facebook. It was kind of my introduction to working with Mark. And it was a pretty kind of intensity to go through again. I just joined the strategy was very much a draft at that point. But I think what it highlights is something that Facebook does really, really well, which you get very quickly when you join Facebook. And it's why there's such an execution machine and can build a lot of great product. It's because they focus exclusively on that magic word, which is impact. And that was kind of my first introduction to working with Mark. And just that laser focus on, all right, got it. Now when are we going to start seeing impact and kind of moving from there? So it's something that is very much in the culture there and something that is so important. It's something, of course, that we focus on a lot at Shopify. But it's that difference between, I don't care how hard you work. I don't care what you're working on with the activities are, what did the outcome? What is the impact you're having? And I actually really love that word impact and focusing it on it because it's big enough that it covers off any work that is impactful towards the mission. And it's precise enough to know, what does that mean? When you say, are you having impact or what is the impact we're having? So it's a great way to approach things that was my first experience there within a few months. And yeah, and we jumped in and started focusing on having a lot of impact from there. I love that story. There's a couple of things there, one is, if I were in your shoes, I'd poop my pants, sitting there for five minutes waiting for, what do you guys do? I'm happy to report. Okay, how did you deal with it? Or I guess how did you respond? Well, we had funny enough already started having impact. So I was able to at least respond with, hey, we've kind of already started. And if you guys and walk through where we were having impact and just focus on the strategy, what are our plans for and where we want it to go from there. So that's, I think that's how it responded. Okay, great work. So something I've started doing actually on this podcast is I've started to keep a little posted of, here it is, like themes that continue to recur across companies that are most successful and the impact comes, it's like number one on my post it here, is just like impact comes up so often as something that the best companies continue to come back to and focus on and put a lot of emphasis on it. I guess I don't know what the question is exactly, but is that just what you find in the work that you do with all the companies you work with? Just how important it is to come back to impact as maybe the primary thing? Yeah, I mean, I think it's easy for a lot of leaders and companies to get caught up in how hard are people working, what did they do and recognizing and rewarding activity? I mean, everybody wants to have impact and the companies that truly focus on that are the ones that breakthrough and really make a lot of progress towards the mission. So that seems obvious, I think when I say it out loud, but being in that culture and having it really ingrained in everything you do and whether it's performance reviews or strategies or easy reviews with the executive team in all gravitates around impact and I think that laser focus on it that matters so much. But I mean, I've certainly seen it go in other ways where it's more about working long hours and certainly there's a correlation to be clear between working hard and the impact, but I find it's just such a precise way to think about how people are performing or what you're doing in terms of is your strategy working is your direction you're moving in and having the intended outcomes that you want and yeah, you think it's all about that and being a growth leader where everything's so measurable impact is something that can be very clearly measured and you know whether you have it or not. So the most important thing that we work on constantly is reviewing what's our strategy, what are we working on? Is that driving towards the top level north star? I'll come, we want, is that having the impact and then basically doing everything around that singular north star. So it says very, very important and I think it's more profound than it might seem just from the outside, but if you've worked in different companies, you've probably experienced different versions of this too. Yeah, I want to spend more time on this, but before we move on, you also have another Zuck story and correct me if I'm wrong, but Zuck recruited you personally to join Facebook Slapsh meta. Is that true and then if true, what was that? Was that like to be recruited by Zuck so personally? It was an interesting experience, very intense, but also one of the reasons for it was I was living in Canada and my family was there and I had some strong personal reasons where I couldn't leave Canada, but yeah, we had a lot of discussions with Mark. I won't get into the micro details of it. That's more Mark's story to tell of it than mine, but if you take away from going through that experience as a leader, hiring is the most important thing as we all know, it's a craft and a skill that I'm always working on with finding. I have my own playbook that I'm constantly tweaking, testing out different approaches, trying to find the best talent and assessing them and trying to close them and bring them on board. So I learned a lot through that experience with Mark. And a couple things that stood out where the first one would be that Mark really involved the entire executive team. It wasn't just me talking about recruiting or talent or HR or just Mark, it was the entire executive team. And that's something that I think a lot of leaders don't take advantage of. I've seen leaders, I've certainly done this a time where you go to loan or you're working with recruiting, but the reality is all the leaders, all the execs in the company know how important it is to bring in talent, and they're always more than happy to help. So that's something that I think more leaders should do is really recruit all of their peers and their leaders in the company to help close. And that's certainly something that happens when I was in discussions with Mark and Facebook about joining. The second one, which I was never experienced before, was that they made it very personal. I had these reasons why I couldn't leave. So initially I was excited by the opportunity, but I couldn't see myself moving at California for personal reasons. And through discussions, Mark basically involved my wife, involved my spouse in this Andrea, and we flew down, had dinner with him and Ursula, his wife, and Andrea had ended up meeting with many of the executives of Facebook and really talking through what was holding us back, why we couldn't come tensile options and ideas for how we could come down, but involving somebody's spouse and family, I think is a really good idea because it's a very personal decision to change company and involves more than just that person you're talking to and involves their whole family. So that was something that I think is an important thing to have in your kind of playbook for hiring. It's really think about the whole person's family and involve them if you can. In fact, Toby, this is while it's Shopify, he flew down here with Fiona for only in breakfast with Andrea and then reviewed a few offers when I joined Shopify. And then the third thing is just to be absolutely relentless and don't give up and don't let momentum drop. Took seven months for me to go from, there's this amazing exciting, but there's no way I can make this work to, okay, let's move to Palo Alto. And Mark, the exact, a variety of leaders there were in discussions for months and months and months and never letting them momentum die. And that's something that I think is really important. No, it doesn't necessarily mean no. And in this case, it definitely wasn't the case. And at the same experience with Toby, at Shopify, where we've been talking about working together for over 10 years now. And then finally, the timing was right and I was able to join the company. So just be relentless, involve the family, involve the spouse of you can, and recruit some help from other executives in the company. Those are some of the things that stood out. And through my experience, oh yeah, it was a pretty wild time in my life. Relentless is actually another word. It wasn't necessarily supposed to yet, but I feel like it's another trend across the most impactful and successful founders is just this like, I will not give up and we'll keep at it. And so that's a really interesting example of that in action. I was gonna talk about this later, but maybe it's a good time to talk about it now, which is around hiring. So you talk about, you have this playbook for how to hire. And you mentioned to me that you kind of find that as you scale as a leader hiring and as being like, the most important skill may be, maybe one of the most important skills. I love to hear your take and just what you found about hiring as you grown as a product leader. Well, I think you reach a point in your career where you realize that hiring is the skill you now need to become world-class at, because you're no longer doing the work yourself. You're still of course involved in doing some of the work and getting your hands dirty. But the bulk of your team's success now will be the quality of the hires you make. And you truly need to be world-class at that. So yeah, I built this playbook out. I was in Canada in Ottawa when I sold a company a TripAdvisor and really started growing my team and becoming more of a leading into leadership at the time. That's where that experience. And one of the benefits of being an Ottawa and kind of off the grid if you will is, it's a person to benefit is that you don't have a ton of people you can learn from. So it does mean you need to go to first principles and think they screw from the ground up. It takes a little longer, but you come up with your own playbooks on how to do things. Yeah, I think you've seen my blueprint, which is a good example of that, where I have this blueprint put together and when people join the team, I show them my blueprint, which is basically a list of my quirks. So we get really quickly aligned. And that's something that just being an Ottawa and trying to figure out how to be a leader and avoid mistakes, I was like, wouldn't it be nice if you had a blueprint? When somebody joined, you can just tell them all of your quirks and you can just quickly calibrate on how it is to work together versus to offer long discussions over the course of a year. The hiring playbooks are similar things. So I think of it in three different chapters, if you will, there's finding talent, assessing talent, and closing talent. In terms of finding talent, I do believe that the best predictor of future performance is past performance. So I'm looking for what I call signs of excellence. So I want to know, top people generally have done multiple amazing things in their life, repeated success, not just once. Maybe it was what related, maybe not work related, but generally speaking, if you think back to the stars you've worked with, they've done some amazing things. And that's why I always start when I interview, when I chat with people, I start talking about, just trying to understand what is in your path, what have you done, especially in not professionally, and generally stars can stand out. It's very rare that there's not something obvious that comes to your sight. For myself, personally, I'm looking for kind of three different signs of excellence to tell me that, it doesn't have to be three. The mental model I have is there's, as you're talking to them, they're getting pluses and negatives. There's red flags you're hearing, and there's really great things. And then at the end, you can make an opinion of how good this person is. Another great sign of excellence. And this was just reflecting on my team and stars on the team and thinking, what makes that a unique, what about them? And one of them is, when somebody's boss leaves the company, and then comes back to coach them, that is such a strong signal. Because if you think of what just happened, the person left the leader who knows exactly how good this person you're talking to is, they have the most knowledge of the performance of this individual. They left the company, they've come back to poach them, putting their own reputation at risk by coming back, depending on the situation. And they would never do that, unless this person was really, really good. So you don't want to overpivot on one signal, you want to look at the full picture, but those are the types of things I look at to bring in top town. Now I've got this whole playbook, mistakes I've made that I've learned from, things to avoid. And over the years, yeah, I've put together this playbook that I try to follow, and I'm always running a little experiment to try to make it better. We're going to link to that blueprint that you mentioned. A lot of what you're talking about is probably more relevant to senior executive type people, because you're looking for, or maybe not, because you're looking for savings three. Okay, so people like early in their career could also have three say moments of excellence. Yeah, I mean, just thinking off time, it depends on the type of person you're hiring, but have they, you know, are they, are they're founder? Are they tried to do something that they wouldn't award somewhere? Are they a, you know, gold medalist or something? Have they done something that others have not, that that shows grit, that shows drive, that shows the ability to succeed. And I've seen that that you can apply that to any candidate you're hiring. And the implication there is, without that they're probably not going to be stars, that there's a strong correlation between having signs of excellence and them performing really well. And that's real correct, exactly. Yeah, it would be, I mean, I suppose it's possible, but it would be pretty rare that somebody would come in without some sign that they stand above the crowd. And again, I'm talking about, you generally want to hire the top one percent of candidates. So when you're looking for the best of the best, you definitely are looking for those signals. Awesome, okay, so I'm going to bring us back on the agenda that I had for myself, which is, I want to start with talking about advisory ships in advising and growth advisors. You've been at growth advisor for a long time to some of the most amazing companies out there, Twitter, Pinterest, Patreon, Canva, thumbtack. I'm sure there's others that you don't list that are more informal. Maybe we could chopify. And so what I think about here is a lot of founders are often think about, should I bring on an advisor? What should I look for an advisor? I've heard stories of advisors being useless sometimes. People tell me I don't need advisors. So I guess the question here is just, let's your take on when it makes sense to bring on and consider bringing on a growth advisor. And what should people look for? When they're exploring and talking to a potential growth advisor. A few thoughts. In terms of when, I don't think you can probably come into early, it's probably harder to find really good ones than it is to time it. But generally speaking, I would say, you don't want to focus too much on growth until you have product market kit. So make sure you have a product that users love that's either showing strong signs of retention or has some good loop that you can see that you can start thinking about growth. Let me follow on that thread real quick because I find some founders still want to have someone come help them with growth, even though they know they don't have product market fit. Even though this tip comes up every single time and I'm talking to a group for a said, wait till you have product market fit before doing growth stuff. So could you just add like a little bit of why that's important while we're on that topic? Growth advice is generally always applicable. And if you can start thinking about how to build your product early, even if it's a product market fit, if you don't do any damage, but you may be wasting some capital on an advisor or growth person too early. The problem that I see is if you start growing a product that doesn't have product market fit, you're actually doing more damage than good because you have a product that is now being exposed to the market through growth levers and through optimization that is giving a bad experience with your product. And you want that product that you know is tight and you know has product market fit to start building a flywheel and start growing. You don't want it to be growing. If it doesn't satisfy that need that you're trying to build out before. So I can see it having more damage than good because when somebody tries something they're unlikely to try it again. And so that's the dangerous game you can get into. So you're better off with a good product that satisfying a need and then growing from there. I will say to kind of play Devils Advocate with myself and something that I've done actually in one of the products, I've built several consumer products and grown them. The is that sometimes to know if you have a product you need users to use it. So there's like some subtlety in here, but I would say if you are trying to get users in to start playing with it at scale, I mean try to focus in on a market that is maybe off the grid, like pick a country that's some English speaking country that's a bit off the grid that you can isolate your marketing too. So you can start getting dozens or a couple hundred people per day coming in and giving you feedback. I've seen that work too. So I'd say wait till you have a product market fit. If you do start growing your product early because you need that signal from people actually using it beyond just focus groups and friends or small numbers of people, try to do it off the grid and smaller markets that you can kind of contain the growth and get what you're really trying to get, which is that signal on is it working or not? Awesome, okay. I throw a soft track, let's get back on track. So we're talking about when it makes sense to find a growth advisor and then what to look for and someone that you might want to work with. I mean, what makes a great growth advisor is somebody who really understands what to do but also why certain growth levers work. It's that kind of deep understanding of levers of onboarding or whatever area they're focusing on that really makes growth advisors stand out. So when you're looking for a growth advisor, you wanna have those discussions to see, how much depth does this person have? And they've seen a playbook and they're just good at repeating the playbook or are they evolving or are they growing? And the best way to get to know that is to start really asking them questions about growth and the advising and the certain things that they've done and why they think those of work. This can be tricky if you don't yourself know growth. So I think one thing that I have not seen a lot of founders do that I would advise is if you have an advisor already, because this applies to finding growth advisors but it also applies to hiring the growth talent. So if you have somebody you know whether it's already an advisor or somebody you know who knows growth, you can solicit their help and try to flush out whether somebody you're trying to hire is a high talent. So if you have an advisor, can make that one of their roles is vet out any new talent coming in and if you're looking for an advisor, try to find somebody you know and trust who can do that first pass because for somebody who knows growth that you trust, it's actually not a lot of work for them to vet out how talented someone else is and it's an easy ask to make and something that if you have that persevere network that work with you that you can leverage for but I haven't seen that too often where founders gonna take advantage of people they know or existing advice growth advisors to help recruit and vet talent because it can be quite hard if you don't know the growth space to know if somebody's good or not. That's a really interesting idea and it could be where you find someone that's too busy to work with you but maybe you could just ask, hey, could you just leave it to help me vet people and it takes a lot less time? Yeah, I've never been asked that, which I mean, I don't know if I'll start getting asked this now, but it does seem like that's a really simple way to add a ton of value and as a founder, I mean, even if you have to pay this person or whatever you have to do but it's such an important hire to get right. We talk about the 10x engineer and we don't really talk about the 10x growth advisor or 10x growth person, but the same dynamic applies, you could argue it flies even more because the right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact where they're building or helping 98 or helping an implement a growth loop that literally changes the company as we know being a great product and you need a great growth loop and it's usually just one loop that you need to get right. Most companies have gotten to where they are just off of one really strong channel that they've just dominated. So it's important to get right. Is there an example of that sort of impact that you've seen in your advisor ship or other people's of just an impact from one conversation or a little bit of the help? Definitely. And I think what I would point to is the advantage of a growth advisor is it takes a long time to understand a channel and certainly people have to know their stuff. They have to be very good at their craft, their growth craft but also they have to be exposed to a large set of experiments or an environment where they've just seen what works and what does it. So no matter how good somebody is, if they have an exposed to an environment where there's a lot of experimentation, a lot of learning, it's very hard for them to internalize that. So once a growth advisor has that, it takes years to learn it but it literally can take seconds literally to communicate that. So I've worked with some companies that you've mentioned and certainly have had impact very quickly. One example would be a company that I worked with. Now a public company at the time they weren't. On day one, walked in, they presented their strategy, their plans, their funnels and their lightning pages. And I could see very quickly that there was something they were doing that was a little off and I asked them why are you doing it that way and they said, well, we think it just looks better that way. And I said, well, just do it this other way. And I remember this because it was such a short conversation and then three weeks later we connected and I heard they had rolled it out and there was a large impact that they had from this one change. And it's just a good example of, this has happened many times with the companies I work with but it's a good example that it's not actually, once you know it, it's not hard to recognize it and if you do you understand it, to give advice but it takes a long time to get the base knowledge. So I don't do these too often anymore but when I do advise, I take them very seriously and I focus exclusively on having impact. And I think that's really important because like you say, there's a lot of advisors out there some of them are great, some of them, different qualities and you really want to make sure that if you are an advisor, you want to be in the camp of, now when this person comes in they have a lot of impact and it takes time and focus and energy and alignment and there's a bunch of things we can talk about that helps to drive that alignment but having impact is the most important thing whether you're an advisor or if you're hiring and because it's one of those weird disciplines where the right person at the right time can literally say a sentence that changes the trajectory of your company and you can't say that for a lot of different disciplines but this is one of them. There's that word impact again, impact impact. The point you just made about how one conversation can have a ton of impact is a reminder of why sometimes the price of an advisor feels absurd or like for one hour it's like thousands of dollars but it's because obviously they spend a decade learning a thing and one conversation is all that work they put into it, of course the life for you in the moment exactly and it's something I've experienced several times and then hindsight when like okay here's the needle and the haystack and then it's implemented and you see hundreds of percentages sometimes over a thousand percent lift when you get it right it's exhilarating it's great. I have something I used to say which is you want your impact to be so big there's a slide in the next board deck on like trying to explain what happened and that can happen when you're advising companies because you're able to share a very quickly insights but one way to drive alignment is not everybody can do this not all advisors do it this way but I personally love just when I do these which is not that frequent just purely doing equity and because I love the alignment in outcomes where the founder will be successful and you will be successful so the incentives are really good to drive the right performance and the right outcomes that you want as a founder so if you can do it I would definitely advise founders to bring advisors in for equity if you can and I think the same applies for your internal growth team you want to make sure that the teams are incentive to advise not on activities, on doing stuff because there's a lot of stuff to be done in growth but really driving me outcomes that you want and everybody's just a great way of saying we're in this together on the same side of the table let's grow this company. I was actually about to ask you what kind of structure you recommend for an advisor ship is there anything else you can share about just like what you'd recommend a founder do in terms of compensation for an advisor. So a couple of things I do I'm a big fan of equity because of the alignment of incentives you should think about without getting into too much detail of the actual structure of the deals but think about how you vest the equity. The last thing you want is an advisor holding back on sharing knowledge the ideal engagement would be an advisor comes in delivers as much value as possible quickly and then trains your team and then maybe it's a one year engagement and hopefully they've learned because the advisors didn't incentivize to share as much as possible and to train the team as much as possible. And then ideally you don't need them anymore after. So there's something there about structuring equity vesting, I'm a big fan of vesting earlier rather than later so think about it in terms of structure you're investing, commensurate with the value you want which is very much front-loaded. I'm also a big fan of three month cliffs, something I've done I always do actually is listen in the first three months you'll know both sides if it's working or not and you want to de-risk that on both sides because it really should be seen as a partnership between the advisor and the founder and if the founder thinks you're not adding value in the first few months I think they should just tear it up and both sides move on it's not good for the founder to continue to deal and it's not good frankly for the advisor because they're not for some reason able to add value in that environment. So I love that three month cliff at the beginning where if it's not working in the first three months to tear up the deal and both parties walk away and do you risk the entire thing? And again, as incentives in the right way where the advisor is a hundred percent incentivized to add as much value as fast as possible so that's another thing that I tend to do and I've done it for a long time. That's a really good tip basically don't do for your vesting for advisors probably not even to your but yeah these are bunch of ways to do it honestly it's hard enough to find growth advisors that have capacity so you guys also say like what can you do that the advisor is comfortable with? But yeah I mean just to be candid I think you want to structure in a way where you're not dependent on the advisor over time they're adding a ton of value they're helping teach the team they're probably bouncing around because your company's changing your teams changing your leaders of changing but over time and that can be, it can be years but it shouldn't be indefinite you shouldn't need an advisor forever. I've seen a Sarah where there's desire to keep the advisor on almost as insurance like if something goes wrong I just wanted to be able to pick up the phone that can make sense but I do think a good growth advisor is incentivized to share as much as possible as fast as possible to have the impact to train your team and then whether you want to keep them on or not long term as an insurance policy or just to answer questions as things change that should be a choice and not because if we lose the advisor we're you know we're completely screwed that would be a bad place for you to be in it as a founder. You said it's hard to find a good advisor 100% agree any advice for people to help them find an advisor that might be the right fit. Yeah, I'll say there's more of them these days than there were even just five years ago or 10 years ago I would start with depending on your situation if you're a founder I would start with your investors I think VCs have an amazing network of advisors I get, I don't know, a couple of requests a week that I'm not taking right now but that from my experience and what I've seen that's probably the high, especially the high NVCs the very talented VCs will have this network and frankly it's a very partnership as an advisor for you to have you can help the companies you can help the VCs and helps you so everybody wins just asking other founders that had good experience much like hiring. The third advice I would give is to find companies that are world class at what you're trying to grow what channel or skill you're looking at and then reach out and see if there's a way to help that way. That's actually how I got started. I was a trip advisor and a problem of VCs reached out one of the companies they were working with needed some help on SEO. I was still a can of the time, got connected with them, had a phone call, had a significant impact. So that one phone call and rather than joining as an advisor I essentially helped them out pro-bodo and it changed for, hey, I want to get connected in the valley so I was in Canada I want to start another company I want to get connected. So through that, that tactic where they reached out to a company that was known to be world class at SEO I think that was really smart on this VCs part and then maybe some advice to up and coming growth advisors would be that first one I didn't take a single shred of equity or or money and just tried to have as much impact as possible and to help out this company as much as possible and then make sure that I was able to get connected to other people that I wanted me in the Bay Area and then kind of things no balls in there. I definitely want to chat about how to become a growth advisor because I think people listening here might be like, oh, that sounds pretty good. Some day I'll maybe I'll become a growth advisor but before we get to that, what are the things that an advisor are best suited for? Versus, finding someone full time versus no one. Like what are the ideal kind of problem sets for an advisor versus say full time higher person? I would say your ideal set up is always, your preference should always be to have somebody in house. I'll start there because you want to have that as part of the culture, there's so much more that they can do when they're in house. That being said, if you can't find somebody in house, then bring on advisor, even if you bring on a advisor so your advice to founders would be, you want to surround your team or a one person that you've identified who's just amazing world class doer even if they don't know growth with a set of growth advisors so that they're learning that's being put through the culture of the company and that knowledge is stays inside of the company. So I'd say you generally prefer to go and turn around these people with great advisors and then take it from there that would be how it approach it. Okay, so two thoughts here. One is I feel like this podcast is becoming an interesting way to discover awesome growth advisors and I think over time I'm building this directorate of like who are awesome smart growth people that are open to advising. So that could be an interesting opportunity to just look at the folks on this podcast and this and create people that have been out here definitely. It's only working my way through all the amazing, least smart growth people and product leaders. The other is I've noticed that a lot of the best growth advisors have worked with the same sorts of companies. I find Euro comes up a lot, canbe comes up a lot, Pinterest, like all these people that have worked with say Pinterest that I hear better just awesome. Casey comes to mind Melissa Tan who's coming out with a podcast I think she worked with them, drop box anyway. So maybe one idea, see who these companies work with as advisors and that can maybe point to you to people that are worth exploring. I mean, that's a good idea. The kind of goes back to something I mentioned earlier which is companies that have a lot of traffic and then have a lot of users are great learning around for growth people and for advisors because no matter how smart you are, you need the reps, you gotta go to the growth gym and put in the reps which is experiments. Try things, things are going to work, things aren't going to work and there's a discipline of like when something doesn't work, you can learn almost as much as when something works. So but you need that traffic, you need that environment. And that's why certain companies have these great people coming out like Casey at Pinterest and other people that have been at these companies that have the traffic, have the culture to support it, it's a support growth. And I think that's, I don't think it's a coincidence why some of these companies have some great people coming from them. The other tip I just thought about is you're talking because everyone's launching a sub-stack newsletter that is doing any sort of advising because there's a lot of power in him building an audience creating kind of awareness of what you do. So I wonder if another tip is search, sub-stacks, direct group newsletters, for specific things you're dealing with, like say, go to market or PLG or sales and you might find someone there. I haven't done that, but that seems like a reasonable way to do it through the world, they're all heading. I'm not saying that the people on sub-stack have this, but as advice to the people listening is when you're vetting for a growth advisor or growth talent, don't just wait it on the public halo of somebody. That's a common mistake I've seen, where maybe some of these done presentations at a conference or somebody's done, I don't know, but their Twitter following it is broad. They can be excellent, that's not a disqualifier immediately, but just make sure not to make the higher just exclusively on that. I made that mistake a few times, and it's a common one to get into. So make sure you're vetting properly, that even if somebody with a large following at sub-stack or Twitter, that's, I think, an important thing to keep in mind. One thousand percent agree, always say that the best product leaders, the best growth people do have time to sit on Twitter, and to eat and write newsletters, they're doing the job working, building, growing, and maybe eventually they get out of that, and start writing, but a thousand percent agree. There's a lot of people going to do. Not to disqualify all the people on Twitter, some of them are tweeting about, but my point is just, just be, don't over-pivot on the halo. Just do your, look at their past performance, what teams have they been on, what environment do they have, do they really know growth? And sometimes they do, but I think it's a common mistake to, oh, yeah, they have a large following, let's start this person. One thousand percent agree, yeah. Rarely does a celebrity kind of higher that seems really genius on Twitter and sub-stack, end of being as amazing as you think. That does happen, but yeah. It does happen, absolutely. One last question around this topic, people listening might want to become growth advisors, I mentioned this earlier, is there any other advice you want to share just like, if you want to become a growth advisor someday, here's what you should think about. Yeah, I think the right mental model as a growth advisor is the same one as an investor. So the most important thing in advice you can do, aside from having impact and knowing their craft is picking which companies to work with, especially if you're working for equity. So I'll only speak to that, but you're basically putting in your time. You're picking a likely a smaller number. You only have so many hours in the day of companies to work with. And you want to make sure there's a likely exit in the future. So for me personally, I have a spreadsheet, like most big decisions that I make in my life. And over the years, I've just added criteria and questions to ask myself about the company, and then reflect on, okay, is this kind of checking all the boxes for a likely outcome? Because you don't just need to be successful, you need to be successful, if the company needs to be successful, and for there to be liquidity of them. So you need to put yourself in the shoes of an investor and look at it as an investment. That is the arguably the most important thing because you can go and do a great job and then wait many years and potentially not see any reward for it. And I think that's the nice thing about the equity structure and that you're tied in the same incentives with the founder, which is just great in terms of a relationship to have the same incentives. But you want to make sure that there's a good likelihood of a decent outcome down the road. Other effects can throw another one in. The other piece of advice I would give is it can take a long time for somebody's company to be successful. That's okay, you should expect that. In fact, you should just go in with that mindset. When I decide to work with a company, I'm in there for 10 years and I know that. And I say that as I'm in, we're running this together if I choose to work with the company. But it does mean that the structure of the deal is only to reflect that. So you need to have a long tail at the end. So if you're taking options, there are issues and it's purely equity. Make sure you have the time for that to happen. They would be nothing worse than putting your heart and soul having impact and then waiting a couple of years and then your equity expires. So you make sure there's a long tail. I mean, you can literally take over 10 years for these companies exit. And you should be okay with that. I think that's okay, you're taking some risks. They're taking some risks on you. That's a great partnership. But you just need the time for that. So advice to growth advisors, make sure that that's asked for a long tail. So that you don't end up in a bad spot at the end and that incentive, again, are perfectly aligned between the founder and the advisor. This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next-generation AB testing platform built by Airbnb alums from modern growth teams. Companies like draft teams, Zapier, click up, Twitch, and Camille rely on Epo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential. But there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern growth team stack. This leads to waste of time building internal tools or trying to run your own experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most about working there was our experimentation platform, where I was able to slice and dice data by device-type, key-country, user-stage. Epo does all that and more delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytics cycles and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issues you discover. Epo lets you go beyond basically two metrics, and instead use your North Star metrics like activation retention, subscription, and payments. Epo supports test on the front end, on the back end, email marketing, even machine learning claims. Check out Epo at getEPEO.com that's getepo.com and 10x your experiment velocity. So I want to segue to a different topic, SEO. You're kind of the, you tell me, but it feels like you're one of the earliest SEO people in tech, you helped grow TripAdvisor many years ago. And it was mostly SEO driven. I think it evaded a lot of SEO tactics and strategies. And then you'll Pinterest, thumbtack, other companies that are very SEO driven. You talked about how many companies grow through one channel and these are all very SEO-driven companies. Imagine Shopify has a lot of SEO work that's happening right now with you there. And so I want to chat about SEO. So I guess broadly SEO is like, this is like this amazing growth channel. It's like basically free, it continues to work. After you stop doing any work on it for a while, many founders think about should we invest in SEO? How do we approach SEO? So maybe just as a first question, what are signs that your product and company is a good fit for SEO being potentially a huge channel for grow? Yeah, I've been doing SEO for a really long time. It's a lot of fun and certainly being a TripAdvisor was a great learning ground for that that we're able to really innovate and try new things there in terms of the playbook that we built out. That was a lot of fun those years. Couple thoughts, the first one would be, I do think there's an SEO play in any company, maybe a different extent, but Google is such a large funnel of existing demand for your product or your product area that there's usually an angle to get some SEO traffic there. So I do think it applies to most companies. I would say, if you're an early product that's never seen by the world's never seen. It's a brand new thing. There might be some creation, some demand creation needs to do. But most of the time there's existing demand in Google, we can harvest demand or there's queries that are related to your topic that you can start ranking for to start building bread awareness. So there's always some angle. And then I can divide websites or online products into two categories. There's ones which are smaller sites, small number of pages, it's very targeted at your product. And don't have this kind of loop of creating new pages automatically. This would be most e-commerce sites, actually. You would have a number of pages around the products and about us, those types of pages. That's one type of site, let's say they have dozen pages. And then there's other ones with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of pages, which are either user-generated content or like TripAdvisor or Pinterest and others or marketplaces, like Thub attack and other types of websites like that. Those are generally easier to see a huge amount of impact very quickly because there's such a large optimization surface. And ideally, it's growing and generating traffic automatically. I've always thought of LinkedIn as just a great example of this, where you have this viral loop, where you would, you recall when it was just starting, everybody was getting these invites from LinkedIn. And those coming go, you get an invite, you register, you don't. That happens, but the buy product is when people join, they create this beautiful lighting page, which is your profile, that gets indexed. It's kind of like a viral loop feeding an SEO loop that continues to grow. So that's a good example of user-generated content, which kind of feeds on itself and grows. So those, those two categories, going back to the first category, if you only have a small handful of pages, the way to think about that is you, certainly want to optimize those pages, then you want to start creating content that speaks to your audience beyond that. So you need a content strategy, whether it's a blog or creating you parts of your site that address questions that your audience might have. But generally speaking, I think there's an SEO play in any company and there's just different tactics, strategies, and approaches to get there. Awesome, I never thought of it that way that there's kind of these two buckets. So the first bucket is like, you don't have a ton of pages that naturally are generated as a part of your experience. And the second is you do. And I guess in the second bucket, I think of Reddit and Glassdoor and Corea, TripAdvisor, great example, interest. In the first bucket is the way to generate pages. Basically, it's like editorial, like create, like write content, how people write things for you is that generally different ways of doing it. But a content strategy is a kind of try and through approach that whole thing. And in that bucket, if you don't naturally have a ton of pages, can you primarily go through SEO? Or is SEO always going to be this minority channel? And you have to find something out. No, you can, it can be a big channel. And this is also about creating content. But it's not your user's creating the content. You have to go create the content. And have some high quality answer to a question as being asked on Google. And I think one thing to keep in mind with SEO is entire industries are based off of single keywords. I remember when I was in the travel industry that literally companies were bought and sold based on one keyword right. So it's not like, oh, it's a little bit of traffic. And I think this is a bit unintuitive with growth. A lot of people think of growth as linear, or it's another channel or it's another thing. I mean, growth done right is exponential. It literally is company changing. When you're talking specifically about SEO, keep in mind, the world is searching for that thing on that one, target is on that one, that one keyword. And likely you're clicking the number one search result. So getting that number one spot is not like, oh, that's a little bit of traffic. That you can literally build an entire business around that for spots. So don't think that's, well, maybe it is commonly known. I'm not sure, but it's definitely something that is not obvious or intuitive, I think to most people. And if you have an entire SEO team working on one keyword, I don't think that's crazy. And because one, you're a small number of keywords can define an entire industry or a business. Is there an example of that sort of situation when keyword building a massive company? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot, I can speak to my own company that I sold to TripAdvisor. It was called TravelPod. It was a travel blogging website where you can think WordPress, but for travel, which I started early, it was first sight to do that. And I made the mistake of not knowing SEO growth before I sold the company. And so that was a great learning for me. When I went in, this is the story where we're looking to acquire another site. And I thought the product was pretty poor. And I remember talking to the founder and thinking, he'd ask me if we want to acquire it. And the product's terrible. And why would I want to acquire that? Because I have the 10 times bigger than you. And that was when I realized, OK, we've been building a great product and great engineering culture. And it is important. But you really need to know the skill of stuff. That's actually the moment I shift it to you. All right, we have to really know these growth levers. And in that space, the number one keyword was travel blog. And so owning that was a big deal. And we did not own it. And I think we ran number two for a really long time. I can't remember if we got it in the end. But that's just one example where. And there was many, many travel businesses where I always loved looking at a business and trying to figure out, what's their growth loop? I got to do that. It's not like, oh, it's great business to just group. Most of the time, it's price line, crush it at SCM. Facebook, crush it on a viral loop where you got tagged in a photo, you got an email, and you had to go register because there's a photo of you. So you really want to see. Try and find it a great job at SCM. And it's often, it's just one really strong channel that propelled the company forward. In this case, you can literally come down to one keyword, like we had a travel pod. So maybe a good time, just to give a people a mental model of the different channels, slash loops that exist. So you've talked about SCO as one, paid searches, one, what are the, what's like the collection for people to think about? And usually, as you said, one of these is the primary source of growth for a company. Yeah, there's a variety of them. I think you have to look at where the intent is right now and it does change over time. But you have social channels, like TikTok, Instagram, influencers are a great area to engage with there. You have SCO, you have search. I think ChadGPT is another upcoming one that we might want to talk about a little bit where I do think we've never seen that kind of growth for search before. And that's a platform that we have to start thinking about. How do we optimize for it? And Google just announced their recent changes. They're going to be putting in an AI box with some of the searchers also, how do you optimize in a world where it's not so much about optimizing for the platform, but teaching the AI, what you do, and why you're the best in the world at it. So that's another whole other area we could talk about. But that's a big channel, I think that's growing. Viral loops are always a powerful thing if you can get them to work. That's more about psychology and channel optimization where you want people to be incentivized to share the product that you have with their friends and then to have their friends come back and register. You can have one viral loop. You can have secondary viral loops. You can bolt viral loops under existing products. There's different ways of doing this. And then just backing up, when I think about growth, I don't think about a specific, it's not growth equals SEO and Instagram. For me, growth equals whatever it takes to move the needle. So I get this question all the time. How do you build a growth team? What does a growth team do? And I say, whatever it takes. And that could be zero to one building a new product. It could be M&A. It could be SEO. It could be sort of like a beyond boarding. And I think that's a better framework to look at. And then if you look at it through that lens, then partnerships easily folds into that where I've seen a lot of businesses get very big on just really clever partnerships. Either strategic or broad kind of affiliate-based partnerships. So there's a lot of channels. I definitely wouldn't restrict the scope of a growth team to just a small subset, but have a very wide funnel in terms of, or at least strategy in terms of, just test a lot of different things and go after the channels that work can pivot, pivot, pivot when it does. And then really lean into the one or two or three that really work, because sometimes that's all it takes for business. Well, you definitely nerds state me with the chatGPTTs. So let's just spend some time there. I think this relates to just the general sense that SEO is always changing. And it feels like this is NSM. I guess in this case, too, in chatGPTT in borrowed, I guess, is maybe the latest change. So what should we know there? Yeah, I think we're all still trying to figure it out. I was at Google Iow last week or the week before. And as soon as I saw the search result with the big box of AI answers at the top, having done this for so long, immediately knew the impact that I think is about to come. And I've seen this play out in travel where Google acquired ITA and did flight search and hotel search. Generally it's great for users and great for Google. And the search engines, but makes it a little bit difficult for the publishers and the sites that are adding value to the ecosystem through being ranked in the search results. So what we're about to see is basically Google what they showed was a big box on top of the search results that answers the query directly. So if you think about that, that means that there's a lot of queries right now that our users are clicking through down on the organic links and getting their answer there, which will be answered directly in the search result. You've seen this play out over the last 10 or 5 to 10 years where more and more answers are being shown at the top. Every time something changes, entire industries are disrupted or changed. And I think that's gonna happen again. So there's different types of keywords. There's transactional ones, like e-commerce keywords and with purchase intent, there's navigational ones where you're trying to get somewhere. And there's informational keywords which is, I have a question I'm looking for an answer. It's pretty broad, it's a big area. I think that last category of keywords is particularly a risk. So if anybody listening to this is currently getting traffic on those, you should start thinking about what does that mean when things start changing and I think the changes will be, we'll probably start seeing things shift to paid. You have to pay for that free traffic. And the second one is there may just be a case where those keywords just don't get many clicks anymore. You might drop down to a very small number of clicks if at all, because answers will get. Questions will get answered directly in the search result. So it's a big shift. We have to see how things land, but that's, I think over the next 12 to 24 months, if history repeats itself, we'll see that channel change. And we've seen this play out at all the different channels. They kind of evolve. Generally, the, the, you can't blame the companies they're doing, what they have to do, chat to UBT is now 50% of my daily searches. And not Google. So I think Google has to react, and this is what we'll see. So for no growth perspective, definitely something to start thinking about. Super fascinating, I think about my newsletter. And now Google second all up and just tell you all the answers. I'm great. Good news for me. Just any problem, sorry. Let's see. Yeah, wow, yes. Yeah, and change is great, you know? Things don't decide. It's exciting. We haven't had a big, like just geeking out on growth a little bit. We haven't had a big platform change in a long time. So I'm like, all right, cool. We get to, let's go see what we can do here. How do you optimize this? How do you, how do you, how do you get listed if you can? We're not sure where the play splits will be, but that will be the new game. Yeah. Actually, a Lennybot.com that is a GPT bot trained on my content that there's a newsletter post about how it was all built. So you could build your own. And so I think my new goal is going to have to be to convince people to go to Lennybot.com instead of Google. Wish me luck. Hey, that's just, get a lean into it. Yeah, we have a shop that AI, this great AI-based shopping engine, I'll tell you, I bought so much on it. It's so good. The more you use these technologies, the more you realize how good they are and that's something biggest coming. It's not just, oh yeah, there's another change. I was summarizing that Google changes to some people. And originally it was thinking, this is the biggest change in the last 10 years. And then when I reflected on the last 10 years of that, this is actually the biggest change since the inception of Google actually. I don't think we've seen something as profound as what's coming. And you really need to get ready for it. Damn. Yeah. I've been using ChatGPT for helping me with interview questions actually and once in a while, there's like a really good one. That's cool. So, thank you, ChatGPT, bringing me good things also. Maybe one more question along these lines around kind of connecting advisorship and SEO. Would you suggest when you're starting to think about SEO, starting to invest in SEO, you might be listening to this feeling like I got to think about SEO? Does it make sense to bring on, say, SEO advisor like you? And you're not available currently, but other folks like you, or an agency, that is really good to listen to stuff or bring on so-and-full time. Do any kind of frameworks with thinking about which direction to go? It's hard for an agency or a peer advisor without internal help to do it a really good job without internal talent at the center. So I would say, I would start with just hire somebody internally and give them the mandate to incentivize them correctly to go and own this channel. If even if they don't know SEO, my advice would be, hire, get an engineer, get somebody who is just a relentless doer who wants to learn this and surround them with great advisors that I've just seen that work really well. There are some good agencies out there, agencies will be working with multiple companies so it's a little bit harder to get the same impact from an agency. It can work sometimes, but my preference is generally a last resort would be an agency. And I might rather have somebody who's internal, who knows the business, who knows the keywords, who can have the knowledge internally inside the company permanently and help grow a team around them and have succession of place in a proper team so that through the pet it on this person, but that would be my go-to. And then if you're really stuck, you can use it by agencies but my default would be having somebody internal supplemented with agencies if you have to. SEO is very specific. I mean, it's a very tight channel that certain knowing certain things about it can have a big impact and I think you do want people that have that experience that can bring that in from the outside to augment the internal teams or I'll say a really long time to learn. Also, I was gonna ask that, so you ideally want to find someone that's done it before, that isn't just a relentless learner, but is that plus as done SEO in the past? Oh yeah, ideally you hire an amazing SEO person who can bring internal. Second would be somebody amazing who can get things done, surround them as advisors and then in my stack rank will probably be third would be agencies. Also, and then the other kind of common issue with SEO is it takes a long time to show impact? If just a rule of thumb of just like, give them as much time to see if they can make an impact. I'd say a few things. I'd say if you already have content and pages that are pretty good and getting a decent amount of traffic, it doesn't necessarily have to take a long time. So that would be my first reaction. It can take a long time, generally takes a long time when it's a build new content. So the way to think about Google is, it is going to take your content. It's going to show it to its users. People are searching and it's going to determine which piece of content is the best rank highly. It's not just about a little tricks and links and keyword ratios, those days are over. Those do matter, but it's not purely about that. And if you have a new piece of content, it takes time for Google to build enough trust. To say, okay, I'm gonna start showing this to users now, and then start collecting user feedback and then rank it appropriately, that can take some time. But if you have existing pages that are ranking each and they're already on the first page, this doesn't always happen, but I've certainly seen it. In fact, more common than not, that you can have sometimes hundreds of percentages of lift very quickly. It depends what you're starting with. It's probably the right way to think about it. So if I'm trying to summarize it, I would say 12 months is probably like max. If you can't see impact in 12 months is something wrong. If you have existing content, it could happen pretty early. It could happen on day one. Actually, I've seen that happen. It could happen. If you have to build new parts of the site, it can take months. I've seen that happen in companies that have worked with, where I think it would be like a quarter, we had to wait till we saw a big lift. So it's somewhere between three that 12 months. Yeah. Awesome. That's really helpful. Okay, so final topic, slash final question. You've had a truly incredible career. You worked with incredible companies, incredible leaders. I'm looking at your site here in a side window and you're like, here's a picture of you and Zuck. Here's a picture of you and Toby from Shopify. And there's more. And I'm curious of what you believe has been key to your success in your career success that you suggest listeners who want to have some measure of similar success do. Probably, yeah, a bunch of things we talked about here. Yeah, this is the obvious thing. It's like, I think you've just got to love what you do. You get to work hard, you get that impact. Certainly, at the end of the day in growth, that's all that will matter. If I think back to specific things that I do though, that are to pick one thing that's been very important for me throughout my journey is the art of self-reflection. And coat coaches, I've had coaches by my whole career, but the macro theme is constantly iterating, experimenting, I'd be coming the best you can be in your career, also as a dad and as a husband, but and work for your own personal health. But that reflection is so important and I've leveraged many, many different coaches over the years and now do a lot of self-reflection through a morning routine that I have and that I've been doing for quite some time that has been a big unlock for me. And the biggest, most important part of that morning routine is like dedicating an hour aside to really think about what's going well, what's not going well, what am I screwing up, why am I screwing it up? Which is often more important than what am I screwing up? And of course, what am I gonna do about it? But as long as you're learning and iterating every day, then you're just making constant progress towards your goals and something I do that I love doing, I love thinking. I literally can just sit there and think for hours, actually. And I have a dashboard on all the areas that I'm focusing on with red, yellow, green, and just constantly redding on, what am I working on improving? What am I doing? What experiments am I writing? And where am I doing well? And where am I not doing well? And how can I be better as all layers of my life including being a leader? So that if I, there's a lot of different things to it, but I think that's really important and something that I've learned over the years that is probably the most valuable to have as a skill. Okay, definitely want to spend more time on this. So you sit for an hour reflecting on what's going well, what's not going well, is there more you can share or about how you accomplish that, how you find time to do this for an hour? Yeah, it sounds crazy when you say it, but I do. Yeah, so I wake up at five, I work out. So I do cardio, do some exercise, this is a great book called Spark, which is all around the neuroscience of exercise and really learned a lot from that in terms of, having a great morning routine that really boots you up. I kind of call it my bootloader when I start in the day, if I go through my bootloader, I have a step much better day. So exercise, stretching, meditation, and then, do a cold punch now, so do a bunch of different things, but then I do some reading, but I do carve aside one hour where I go through, and this is probably important, it's kind of where I've landed, but structured self-reflections. So that's why I have this dashboard, I have certain areas that I think about what's going well, what's not, I track all the insurance I'm writing, and I'm just really passionate about, if you're gonna do something, try to do it as best as you can, and this is a habit that has allowed me to kind of sharpen my skills in certain areas. What are some of these things you're working on if you can share what's on as dashboard, and how can people imagine what this might be? So there's a lot of personal stuff on it, but it literally is broken down between being a better friend, better husband, better dad, and then better leader, and so I'm able to personal side. I've been known to work a lot of times, I've been, you know, balances, it's always hard to find, and, you know, from being a dad, and then thinking about it would be better there, I've realized, let's six months ago, that I've never actually asked for feedback on how I'm doing. So I asked my kids, six months ago, I asked both of them independently, what's one thing I can do to be a better, to do more of or do less of, to be a better dad, and, you know, they were caught off guard by it, my son's 15 and my son is 12, and I said, get, it takes some time to think about it, and after about a month, my son came back and said, I, I got one, he said, I want to spend more time with you. And so I, you know, that was, that was very helpful for me to hear, and I'm big on routines and habits to make sure that things that you want to do are repeatable, and it's not one, one off things, so ever since that day, I now have a daddy day if you want to call it, but every two weeks we do one on one time together with each of the boys, they get to pick this way that consistent, whether it's dinner or like basketball and the fun, but it's, you know, it's all about feedback. That's one example on the personal side. This reminds me of a tweet I just saw where someone said that the only people that are gonna remember, that you worked late for many nights is your kids. Hey, wow, wow, that's deep, you know, I like that a lot. You know, it's a, soon to be parent, that's gonna stick with me. Wow, I like that a lot. So it's tough, right? It's tough to balance it all out. It's very difficult because you want to sell everything and do in life. And so that reflection helps be a check in as well of like how am I doing in all these areas, and that's, I find the color coding is helpful for that too, just doing a bit of a gut check. And, and an asking for that feedback. So this makes me think about, I was watching a Jeff Bezos interview, and I asked him what his morning routine was, and he said that he just likes to put her around, he likes to just sit around, talk to his kids, read the newspaper, like he doesn't book any meetings in the morning. He just finds he just needs like a little flex time at the beginning. Totally. So I read, before I became a dad, I read somewhere that one of the most impactful things you can do as a father is just be there for dinner every day. So I have been there for 15 years, every single night, but as a good reminder, it's not enough. You know, having dinner is important with your family, but in our case, there's, there's more you can do and just getting that feedback and doing some repirivization is always important. Speaking of dinners, and maybe just as a last question, I know you do this really interesting thing where you have dinners with interesting people. You just kind of invite me to your house. I don't know if interesting is the right way to describe it, but just kind of interesting people, prominent people. Can you just talk about what what that is and what you think of it and what I end the benefits of doing something like that? I think interesting is the right way to think about it. I started this when I was in Ottawa with a bunch of founders there. And it's become one of my favorite things to do. Honestly, it's like the bright spot in my month that I call the guilds, so the word the guild is the builders, and that's how it originally started. So, you know, guild night is what I call it. And the idea is basically, you know, all interesting people doing interesting things actually want to spend time with each other. That's why I'm actually surprised more people don't do this, but I'll basically have interesting people come, usually five or six, and we'll sit around talking about specific topics. So, I do one for consumer product, I do one for SEO, I do one for growths, growth leaders, and just have really smart, interesting people come, and we'll talk about different topics that are relevant. Sometimes we'll pick a topic, so we'll have a group, and then we'll say, hey, we want to talk about AI. So, one of the advantages of being in the area is you can find three or four people that likely wrote some of the core code in Google or an AI, and then they'll join, and people want to meet people want to get together and have these conversations. So, it's very exhilarating. I learn a ton, it's a lot of fun. I don't know why more people don't do it, and it's a bit of work to organize, but it's also just technically been a great way to meet fascinating people. It's helped a lot for recruiting, and for, if you back channel, I know all these people that are in different industries, but business aside, they're very valuable business-wise, but they're just a lot of fun, and they've become some of my favorite things that I do, and I'm really surprised why more people don't do it, because I think, especially now, that everybody's remote, and we're working from home, or most people are, it's more value than ever. So, it's something I'm looking forward to continuing, and always, actually through my morning reflection, thinking about what are new ones I can spin up, who are interesting people that we want to break bread with, and I do think it's important that it's done at your house. If anybody's thinking of starting this, you can do it at a restaurant, but there's something about being in your home, or being in somebody's home, five or six people, having a great conversation about a topic that's mutually interesting, and I think everybody values it, and it adds a lot of spice to life. I think it's really important. Any other tactical tips for making when these happen? So, due to your home, you cater, do you, how many people, how long, anything I'll see what I want to share there? Yeah, so I think the most I've done is 10. That's a bit too much. Six seems to be perfect. Six to eight at the max. I do get a cater, so you don't have to, we're about cooking the topic, something like a topic that is common, so that everybody can rally around. I do think it's important, like I mentioned, doing it at home. Usually we start around six, go till 9 or 10, and it's just been a really good thing that I've learned over time, isn't a really good thing to do to just make for a better life, frankly, make sure that you're life with some great friends. And we say cater, it's just like ordering in basically rates, nothing like that. Yeah, evil store dash, so you don't have to worry about cooking, and I'm sure there's other things I've never really deeply thought about it, but in terms of like, what are the specific things I've evolved it over over time, but I don't cook anyways, so it would be terrible if I cook. So this is much easier to do it this way, and as long as you're inviting, kind of interesting people, everybody's going to want to come and spend some time in racing bread. Well, with that we reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got six questions for you, are you ready? I think so. I think you are. Well, question one, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? So there's one that I've already mentioned, which is Spark. It's the neuroscience of exercise, and that was this a great book, and so one of these like exercise to stay fit. If they live longer, this is really about frankly, if you exercise and do it in a specific way, they have a kind of blueprint they lay out. It's good for just competition and kind of horsepower and performance. So that's been a really important one. It's been a big part of building on my morning routine. The second one is when I picked up about, I think about a year ago or six months, and I recommend it to you, at least 200, a couple hundred people now, because I recommended it to my team. It's called Spark Brevity. I've heard of this one? No, but I love the sound of it. I've always been big on, you know, right, and crisply, and being very tight, and not having like three-page memos that you're sending off, especially in other words, remote, and we're all doing slack, and email, different ways of messaging. How tightly you communicate, how crisp your communication is, is really important for, frankly, you getting your point across, and also for the other person who's probably digesting a hundred of these messages. So this book is a book on how to do that. It breaks down how to write crisply, and the different parts of it, and I've definitely seen improvements in the team since I've passed around. So that's a great book if frankly for anybody, work or personal, because we're writing so much and communication is so key. So that's the second one. The third one is a golden oldie, which is one that I've read many, many times, and I recommend from a growth perspective. This one, you've likely heard of as influence by young meaning. I got it back in my bookshelf there. Yeah, it's a great book. And it's because it's really the underpinning of so many different product and growth principles that you could apply. So that's just a classic that is good to reread, at least once a year. So that's those three books. I'm going to extend this a little bit. I'm going to add two books that are building on your two books or the first two books. I guess one is Peter T. I just wrote a book called Outlive. I got it. That is. Okay, and it's exactly the same kind of premise of just how important exercises. And there's a whole thing that is a code in there. Just like the only thing proven to help you live longer as exercise. And then smart brevity, there's another book that I'd recommend if people want more in the one on this topic called Nobody wants to read your shit. And it's by the guy that wrote the war art and back events. And I forget his name off the top of my head, but it's like nobody wants to read your shit. Here's what you need to do for people to want to read anything you're writing. Yeah, we want to skip one read. Yeah, that's very well, I'll pick that one up. Nobody wants to read. Exactly. What a title. That's a great title. All right, back on track. What is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed? You know, I don't watch TV much, and I haven't really watched any movies in a while, but I do watch a lot of podcasts on YouTube. And Andrew, a few of them has got, of course, great series. I watch, I think everyone who puts out, so I don't know that counts, but that's absolutely. Okay, sorry, watch that. And then, of course, all in podcast is always fun, so I make sure to watch those when they come out as well at a fun and informative. So those are my two. I would say. Great picks. What is a favorite interview question that you like to ask? Teach me something about growth that I don't already know. Because, and you could apply this to engineering product, any other area, because it really gives you a sense of what this person thinks is the top of the stack in terms of the smartest thing they know, whether you know it or not is irrelevant, but it sometimes you actually do end up learning some stuff, but it's my favorite question, because you can really engage in a conversation around, okay, this is the thing you think is so unique that maybe you've come up with this learning yourself or have you've created this tactic, and then use you a sense of how much they know the crap. So that's my favorite question. What is the favorite product that you've recently discovered that you just really love? I've got a cold plunge that I bought that I love. It's the, really, so it's called the Renew cold plunge. It's cold. But super convenient, and I do that every morning. I just love it. And anybody's for cold plungeing that sounds very painful and hard. I, you know, I usually start going, they're going to hot tub warm up, then I go in the cold plunge and back in the hot tub. That's an easy way to get started. But I will say, I jumped in yesterday and today without going out of tub, it was very painful, but I felt so much better after. So I might be changing out my approach, but I'm just kind of experimenting with different things. But that would be some advice, and then just go slow. Start, start it, you know, not too cold, and then slowly make it cold over time. But it's a pretty good, I think it's a pretty good thing that and so far. How long do you spend in the cold plunge? Barry's right now. I'm doing five minutes. Five minutes. I think it's 53 degrees. So it's just, I started at a 60, it is slowly breaking it down. So but you do have to go slow because I brought it down even further and kind of caught me off guard and kind of looked as you say, you've got to find your, your sweet spot. Damn. Very Hebrewman inspired I imagine this definitely it was part of the the source there. I know people are here a lot of back whole plunge is I guess what have you seen as a benefit just while we're in this topic for people to like seriously consider doing this a couple of days. Moved afterwards is so much better. You get this just great multi hour boost from doing it, especially like I mentioned not doing more before or waiting 10 minutes and waiting 10 minutes after for you warm up after you get out. Great move boost. It also helps a lot of sleep. So if you do it in night, which is a little bit difficult, it helps a lot with sleep. Those are probably the two biggest things and you do get to a point on there now where I kind of look forward to it because you know how good you'll feel afterwards. So when I'm thinking about it, I know it's painful. It doesn't make it easier, but I do look forward to it now. It's a it's a pretty cool thing. Oh man. Gotta get one now. Yeah. I'm sorry. Okay, two more questions. What's something relatively minor that you've changed in your product development process that has had a big impact on your team's ability to execute. One change that comes to mind is, you know, it's common to hear discussion around Yeah, you need to experiment, you need to have rigor, you need to look at results, iterate, based on those results. That's pretty much common knowledge as how all, you know, all good companies that execute growth to do it. See, the subtle, the subtlety is that experiments are great, but they're also, they can be slow. You have to look at the results you have to analyze how things went, you have to learn what's going on, you have to build the experiment. So there's, there's a cost to an experiment, and not everything needs to be experimented. And that's not something that I generally hear friends teams talk about. It's usually, hey, we need to experiment. So one thing that we're definitely focused more on lately is this idea of, you know, sometimes you just need to yellow it because it's a better product experience, or you just kind of know what's going to work. And, you know, if you're yellowing 40 things and three of them work, and you can look at pre-posts, you can look at holdouts, there's ways of making sure you're, you don't cause major damage, but the speed cannot weigh the cost and time it takes to do experiments. So that's one change we've recently implemented, that's been pretty impactful. Final question. So we met actually a long time ago in Montreal, or maybe it was an Ottawa in Canada somewhere. And I think it was through an organization called C100, when I was starting my company back in the day. And so my question is, what is your favorite Canadian food? You know, it's funny. My favorite Canadian food's out from Ottawa. And there's a lot of Schwarma, Lebanese Schwarma everywhere. I know it's not traditionally Canadian, but Canada is so multicultural, so I'll make this count. I love a good Schwarma, and it's so hard to find a good Schwarma in the area. So we've still been looking here, but my favorite Canadian food are soon Canadian is Schwarma. If I had to pick one yearly Canadian food, and this is, you know, really some a trial where we first met, it's got to be a Montreal smoked meat sandwich. Excellent choices. You're making me very hungry. I'm going to go get some Schwarma by me a cold plunge. Luke, this was amazing. We talked through everything I was hoping to talk through advisorships, SEO, hiring, building habits, cold lunches, two final questions. Working folks, finding a line if they want to reach out more and I can listen, there's beautiful to you. You can find me online at looklovec.com. So first name last name.com, and how can they be useful to me? Listen, we're always looking to hire the best of the best, so if you want to work, create an amazing company with an amazing team doing very impactful work and learn the craft of growth, please reach out. We're always looking to bring on an amazing talent, so that would be the awesome Luke. Thank you again so much for being here. Thanks, great chat. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast.com. See you in the next episode.