one of the biggest pieces of advice I'm giving to people that are like how should we adjust our marketing with the economic changes and things like that I was like start by assuming you no longer have product Market fit because you had product Market fit in a different Market it's a different market
now so you have to start over and and hopefully you do or it's pretty close to it and you just have to adjust a couple things and you can be right back on track but like if you just assume like you need to launch a new channel to fix this problem like you're gonna be wrong
because like your entire customer base change not just the next 10 percent of customers that you're looking for welcome to Lenny's podcast I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products I interview world-class product
leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies today my guest is Adam grineer Adam was head of growth marketing and Innovation at Uber where he basically built their growth marketing infrastructure and the team from the
ground up then he went on to VP of product and marketing at Lambda school and most recently he was VP of marketing at masterclass these days Adam advises companies large and small on growth and marketing strategy in our conversation we cover how to decide when to try new and
emerging acquisition channels like Tick Tock VR newsletter ads and how to go about testing them out we get into the growth CMO role which is an emerging role that Adam has helped Pioneer now we get into some real talk about burnout and depression and mental health issues that often come with
working in Tech this was a really powerful and insightful conversation and I learned a lot from Adam both as an operator and as a human I can't wait for you to hear this episode and so with that I bring you Adam grineer this episode is brought to you by Whimsical when I asked product managers
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your account Adam welcome to the podcast thank you thanks for having me it's my pleasure I'm really excited to chat so I'm going to give a very brief overview of your very impressive career and just let me know if I missed anything all right sound good okay so
you were uh most recently VP of marketing at masterclass which I'm actually a happy subscriber of and I've watched many many a video before that your VP or product and marketing Lambda school I don't know if that's right before but that was something you did I'll see your head of growth in
marketing and marketing and Innovation at Uber which is a really cool title and I think you spent four years there and you basically built their growth marketing infrastructure and the team and currently you're doing a bunch of advising and kind of exploring to see what you kind of want to do next is that
about right yeah yeah you you hit most of most of the key points I think pre-pre-over the first kind of chunk of my career was on the advertising side so worked in like agency world so I kind of think of this is phase three of my life that at ads world was phase one kind of
startup and growth world phase two and now really just spending time helping helping entrepreneurs and Founders and and build companies and that type of stuff so yeah what's been your favorite face so far I mean kind of all of them I'm I'm like I just Embrace what gets thrown at me and
and allow it to to organically happen so it each kind of phase has had its its pros and cons and ups and downs and so I think they've all fit pretty well into where I was in my career speaking of uh moving and adjusting and and iterating I know you're big into
improv and how like how serious are you about improv yeah good question serious in the sense that I've like done it for a very long time and and I still do it and I try to do it regularly serious is in like am I aiming to you know make money off of it and like have a career
out of it unfortunately not there was a point in my life that that is what I wanted to do I lived in Chicago did Second City improv Olympic a variety of different places did quite a bit of Performing but also got into you know corporate paychecks uh early as well and so kind of built a lifestyle that made
doing improv full-time probably not the best path for me at the time and so it made a pretty conscious Choice early on that it was more of a hobby and if something ever came of it cool but if not that's okay it's still it's something I keep coming back to because it's very grounding and like fulfilling
in ways that you know work and family life and things like that don't quite hit for me actually at Airbnb we had an improv teacher come and work with the PM team it was like for months we did like improv games every once a week and played all these fun things and I'm
curious what what you've taken away from improv that has helped you become better at your work yeah so I think like generally the whole Suite of skills that you develop in improv are are pretty applicable right because you're getting comfortable on your feet with change with teamwork
building off of each other experimenting trying new things like a little bit of everything I think a couple of the the key Like rules or themes of improv that I I like really try to hammer home with people or like obviously the yes and side of improv which everyone's
probably heard which is you know in a scene the worst thing you could do is deny somebody because you're actually just like stopping progress and you're not building off of anything so the the appropriate approach is to say like yes that is true and and add to it so if
someone's like hey you have a chicken on your head like not saying no I don't just kind of ruins that scene versus saying like yes I do and it's uh name is Sally like what's your chicken's name like Builds on that and like gives it more opportunity and so like I think that in in growth in business is super
important to be able to say like yes I do see you know your idea or yes we did accomplish This and like this is what we want to do next and this is how it's going to build on it I think is is super important the other one that I I think is less known um or talked about is is
the gift of details and so in in a scene if you give somebody like really specific details about something like it gives like so much more meat to be able to work off of in terms of like what's coming next so if uh if someone's starting a scene and they're clearly like watching television and like
clicking through the channels and I walk up and just say like oh you're watching TV cool like that's a yes statement I'm not denying what they did but if I come up and say like oh cool you're watching TV oh is that an Alf episode oh I haven't seen elf since I was a kid it
reminds me this one time I actually ate my own cat like just giving those specific details of Elf and me as a kid and I ate a cat like that which if people don't know elf like he ate cats the uh I don't remember that I remember out but I remember he was always trying to get the family cat
um so those kinds of details like add a ton of value and you take that into the business world to use masterclass for instance if I say like yeah Master Class we've got this way to build content that is both entertainment and education like that's interesting right but if I say we
create content that is both education and entertainment to solve people's like deep Curiosities in the way that maybe a biography would like that just like opens up like the exact problem that you're trying to solve like what are other alternatives to that problem like
how are people consuming that so I think the gift of details in like good improv and learning those skills is something that I I really value and and look for kind of in every aspect of my business life as well it sounds like it's really helpful one in like marketing creativity and
positioning things like that you just described have you found it also to be helpful in collaboration like the CSM piece I'm curious is there an example or story where you like yes ended someone do you actually say yes and in a meeting how do you actually find that I hear it every now and then I don't usually
literally say it I think one of the areas that I found it to be valuable is when you've got like cross-functional work so obviously like at Uber we dealt with City teams a lot and so a lot of the times the way that the central team would scope a problem versus a local
team would scope a problem would almost feel at odds with each other and if you approach it with that yes and it's often still true right it's like oh both of these things can be true at once you could have a different goal than I have or you have a system problem local to
you that is important to you and it's not important to me like that's okay that's that both things can exist so now that we accept both and can work off of each other like we're more likely to build both a better Rapport and energy among ourselves because we're not just
saying like no no no you're wrong like like that's not true that's not important to the business why are you doing that like that type of energy when cross-functional work like it just kills the scene right it kills that progress and then you just you don't build relationships you don't build the right
Solutions all that type of stuff this sounds really good like everyone in theory wants to be really good at this and I imagine just doing a bunch of improv is a really good way to get better at like not getting defensive and being like yes and how do we make this idea better is there something you can
advise folks to work on this skill or is it just like do a bunch of improv classes and it'll kind of help that's one way I would say that like I'll I'll say that all the time to people like do some improv classes and I get a lot of people like no I'm not funny or I I
don't want to do improv and I I think it's still a really great class to take even if you have zero interest in doing improv or public speaking or any of that kind of stuff because again like improv 101 is taught everywhere like every city has it somewhere and it's rarely ever like
people that are trying to do improv professionally right it's just like it's all games like you said like the the classes that you all did at Airbnb is what improv 101 is right it's just like hey let's just have fun let's just get out of our skin and things like that so I I do think everybody should take
improv classes I think it's also something with a lot of goals or skills that you want to develop I think being really public and open about you wanting to develop that so if you're managing a team and you want to sharpen that skills like make it a team goal or you know have accountability and just say like
hey guys I I know that I've been pushing back on things lately I want to really try to embrace and grow off of ideas better hold me accountable like call me out and be like Adam yes and this please or you know like we can like you know giving people permission to push back on
that one it doesn't happen I think also just opens the door for more like productive conversations with people and the ability to like hold yourself accountable and keep trying it I love that and such a good team bonding activity there's like all these reasons
to do this as a team my wife actually she's a designer artist writer illustrator kind of person and she's been taking a lot of these sorts of classes to help kind of inspire her creativity she just never wants to be an improv person she didn't like stand up classes and it's just awesome yeah as
you said it just helps you kind of like get the juices flowing along these lines okay so we're not going to talk about improv the whole time there's kind of we could if you want to we could let's just throw me away let's let's go no we don't do that so there's basically three
things I really wanted to chat about with you one is how to decide when to invest in an emerging acquisition Channel like Tick Tock VR Clubhouse was a big thing you have some really interesting thoughts on how to decide and approach this thing to the growth CMR role which is kind of this I think
emerging role something you're you're really good at and I just want to get your thoughts on what's happening there and then threesome Real Talk on burnout and depression that often comes with working in Tech and stuff that we can go through does that sound good yeah okay great so
to start with in the first topic if you think about just every company essentially goes through this kind of s-curve of growth they start slow they find something that's kind of working then hopefully it works out and things start to grow grow and then eventually kind of flattens out
and you kind of see this S curve that happens and every company is always trying to find the next s-curve to add this layer on the cake that keeps overall growth up while this first growth Channel slows and so people are always looking for like what's the next thing the real man Clubhouse coming out
we should get on clubhouse oh tick tock's so hot we're gonna run some Tick Tock ads and there's all these there's always some new like newsletter ads I don't know podcast ads if that's new and you have a really interesting framework for how to think about this and make
decisions and experiments so um I'd love to hear insights there yeah so um the like exploring emerging channels framework that I'll take either my teams or companies that I'm advising through has kind of core Three core ingredients that I like to spend time with so the
first is really understanding if there is a an overlap between what the customers need is what your company's goals are and what the channel actually does like really well so the example I've used in the past is you know Spotify in the moment of like things like Clubhouse and Paparazzi and stuff
like that becoming really popular well for Spotify you know they are you know they're they're trying to get more people to consume music and be entertained by music and things like that and it's all audio driven right and so they're growth goals are probably around new customers or deeper
engagement with with audio the the customer's needs are you know like like Discovery and you know more ways to maybe have deeper relationships with their music if if you're a jazz fan like like can you learn you know new jazz artists or more about the artists that
you love things like that and then take those two channels if you take something like Clubhouse it's audio first it's almost like live podcast Radio type feel to it you can get into these rooms with just like people with really amazing esoteric knowledge about something and
so its strengths have like a really clean overlap to me with the goals of Spotify the the needs of the customer and the the strengths of that and so that to me is like great that is probably a a green light in terms of is it even worth our time right versus like Paparazzi as like very photo driven and
like nothing really to do with music or anything like that and so it's like yeah even though Paparazzi might have like become the best biggest Channel ever like is that the thing you should be putting your time into it would be like a yellow light for me at best right how
would you how would you describe that again that's like the medium matches yeah so the medium like the the strengths of the medium right so let's take like influencer right now actually like to the channels that a lot of people are talking about right now are like streaming TV or Ott and influencer
marketing right and so to me like one of the strengths of influencer marketing is hyper targeted contextual marketing right and so I can go find the five influencers that are like hardcore Alf fans right like and if I'm you know marketing elf something like great I can go find that specific thing whereas
Ott's a lot harder to get like that specific Ott strength is like broad reach and video storytelling and that type of stuff right so it's like okay well maybe my medium is if I'm master class and I have a ton of Videocon content and storytelling and things like that like
that channel actually like makes a ton of sense probably right so it's kind of like what are the strengths of that channel is something that I that is actually probably the piece I see people ignore the most which is they just want to know if a channel is hot or not and it and this gets especially
hairy like in this world of a lot of B2B doing like more consumer-esque marketing and like but like there's so many B2B companies that like just don't apply to emerging channels right emerging consumer channels right and it's just like please just stop I don't you know I
I don't need a a notion Clubhouse channel this week like there just isn't like and maybe there is maybe there's a world to do that but I think that's that's kind of number one is making sure that there's like even a reason that you should be there to put it on your radar
right now awesome what does OTT stand for by the way instead of it being like cable TV it's sorry it's coming from a box or so it's primarily if you think of like ads on Amazon or Hulu or or even if you go to like CNN.com and you start streaming and you get an ad first it's basically like video ads
um but a lot of them now are happening on televisions and on streaming services rather than just on on websites got it okay cool so the first is kind of the strength of the channel you should look at that yep yep and and how that overlaps with your customer and your
business needs the the second is the channel DNA and so um this is looking at things like where you know where are they in their their trajectory so Clubhouse is actually a perfect example because in a weird way so Clubhouse got hot before Facebook got cold and I was pretty amazing amazed how
many more people were trying to crack Clubhouse than tick tock like because Tick Tock hadn't really released their ads solution yet but neither had Clubhouse but everybody was talking about Clubhouse like Tick Tock is very clearly like not going away anytime soon we're Clubhouse hopefully well like this
is an amazing product I really enjoyed it and loved it but it was like clearly like very early very quickly at that point of hotness where everyone was just kind of like that's the reason I should be there and part of this reason is to accept like the risks of going into that
channel right so if I go and dedicate two quarters to of work to clubhouse I need to accept that like they are so early in this curve that there's a good chance this is like a once in a lifetime opportunity and it'll be over next it's not a repeatable action it also
is important because if you get something to work on a channel that's earlier in their growth curve the likelihood that they will change is very high you're going to need to commit a lot of Cycles to keep it going right because it's like okay well the their product is going to evolve drastically
very quickly over the next two years and so the thing that's working right now and so a really good example is like Facebook early company I was at Zoosk and so like Zoosk and companies like Zynga got tons of their early growth because of notifications on Facebook which was one of their early like
features which allowed basically anybody that took any action on Zynga it would post on everybody else's page that like you got 10 carats and that was like a huge growth level right but then Facebook just pulled the plug on that and so it's like well if you put all of
your energy into that and that's it like it was pretty clear that that was still an area that's like this may not last forever right the last thing on the Channel DNA that I like to look at that's a little bit more I don't know if it's if odd or unusual is the right term is I like to spend a
lot of time thinking about how they monetize like what is the monetization strategy of the channel and the reason is because if you as a business can match or support their monetization strategy it actually gives you like a really interesting leg up with that
channel because the likelihood of you being able to like call them up and like go do custom stuff with them or partner with them or that your Solutions will actually like stick around for a while go up pretty drastically and so this is like my key example of this was with
when Facebook started exploring mobile ads hotel tonight we were one of the like Alpha testers of of mobile ads because I'd been sitting here buying you know ad inventory on networks for you know the last five or six years and just waiting for Facebook to work because it just wasn't really working for mobile
installs and it's like I know this is a huge Channel because I can use it on my like online mark marketing like my my web marketing but as a mobile acquisition it's nowhere near as efficient as a lot of these other networks and so as soon as they were doing that I was able to basically position and say
like look it you want to work with us like let me in your Alpha because I have five years of experience like already buying mobile ads I know the space I know it'll work and if you get us to work we're a killer case study because we are a non-game and like a lot of
money is spent on gaming but there's these whole other major categories that you're going to need other than gaming like examples within that that group so like you're going to be able to use me as a case study and like a lot of different scenarios than the gaming players and so I was spending a lot less
in the gaming players but because of that understanding that like your goal at Facebook is to make ads work for all of travel and for all of leisure and all you know those kinds of things like that's the value of working with me so that's another piece of the kind of the
channel DNA I like people to to focus on awesome that's such a good one because to your point if your goals are aligned they're going to be like yes we want let's make this happen and they're always like it's this Behemoth that doesn't want to talk to any new startups but if
you can make the case of this is going to help you and the way you laid out is so clear such a good idea and especially with emerging channels right because their whole thing is that like they want to make this work for a long time not not just you know it's it's part of the
challenge you see with some new channels flipping to the other side of like growing an ads business will gravitate towards like oh I want to get Disney on here but like Disney is like very campaign driven or they have been traditionally where it's like yeah you may get one big paycheck from them but
that doesn't like the way that like UA driven gaming works is like you get that to work that's like a gift that keeps on giving forever right because it's like there's not one of those companies there's thousands of them and they all do the same thing so being able to drive
that conversation is really helpful cool and then the third main ingredient is just your own company DNA and so I think like Risk profile is a big one like do you actually have comfort in being like a first mover like a true first mover like nobody knows anything tracking is
not going to work like it's not going to be programmatic it's not like you're probably gonna show up on content that's offensive you're probably like going to ask for refunds that won't happen like there's going to be really painful to be a true first mover do you have that
appetite do you have the staff to actually be able to like put someone on that and then not distract from everything else and then the other piece on the company's side is just your your current Channel mix there's very few companies that I recommend saying like yes go put energy on this brand new
channel that you don't know how to scale yet before you've figured out some type of like volume on Google and Facebook like if you're trying to do it like every now and then there may be like a perfect fit where it's like absolutely you should be the person doing this but
like if if you're not at least getting something out of the basic channels that everybody else is using it's probably not the thing you should be putting your first energy into it should be like great I've got a good foundation like you said like now we're at that stage of
trying to add things tends to be a better are a better stage to do more risky exploration into new channels what advice do you have or can you give to Founders teams that are trying to test one of these in terms of just like how to how to run these tests like how much time should they spend would you
say what do they look for I know this is a hard question super dependent on the situation but any advice there yeah so I think the going through those three ingredients should help shape that answer right because if you're like okay well the first one is super strong the
channel DNA is maybe like really early and I've got a small to mid-sized team and maybe only one channel working then it may be like right put like half of one person into this because it's maybe interesting but like don't put any more than that into it right versus if it's like man this is a killer fit the
channel is like a little further along it seems pretty space and I have a 20 person team so I'm gonna put like three dedicated people to this because we are in Prime position to be the leaders in this new channel and like really push it so I think it really it's figuring those
pieces out because it is a very like it depends answer but rarely ever is it like hey this should be your entire team's Focus for the next three Sprints or five Sprints like I think that you know if you've got that half person working on it for a while and there starts to be some magic
happening sure put a Sprint or two against it like as a whole team but generally speaking I think keeping it minimum at first is my like typical recommendation I had another guest Yuri who I think you know from a former grammarly and he made a really good point that it's often
better not to try something than to do it badly and then take away the wrong lessons I guess like in your experience was like a time frame you think people should put into the stuff like is it you said two sprints maybe like a couple weeks like I don't know it's like the
range of just like maybe don't spend more than x months on something new if it's not like clearly working just based on your experience generally like I wouldn't let anything bleed past a quarter like you can probably get some good signal in a month or less like like what I would call
fishing like it wouldn't be like you're just you know putting bait in the water to figure out where the fish are not necessarily getting statistically significant repeatable Solutions the big variables I can change that timing so like you know if I'm exploring a new video channel like the
content I need to create is if I'm going to have to create something that takes three weeks to produce and twenty thousand dollars to make I may want to give it a little more time because I gave it a more of an upfront investment right versus if it's like oh I want to
put text ads in podcasts like listings or something like that actually great I can like I can do that by myself you know like at midnight and it's not distracting anybody or anything and if it doesn't work in three weeks let's move on but yeah generally like I'm I ideally what you're working through and
we'll talk you would touch a little bit more on this with like the growth CMO is it like this should all be part of a road map right like it shouldn't just be like randomly Chosen and thrown at is this should be part of your like Sprint process and you should have a backlog of
other things that you want to try and so you're actually weighing that decision of how long based on like what other opportunities you're missing out on by investing in that but I would say like most channels especially new ones are going to take more than a couple Cycles to kind of suss out because there's no
rules there's no there's no playbooks yet on how to do them well so give it a little bit of time but yeah if you're going over a quarter and you don't feel like directionally it's getting better or it's interesting like I would you know put it back on ice for a while cool and to your point
you're not going to see any like statistically significant answers is the thing you look for just like is it like you know when you see it like oh wow qualitatively feels like it's working kind of thing is that what you kind of look for yeah and I think the I Define
that going into it like what am I looking for for that so something like Clubhouse I'm probably not going to see clicks right it's it's more about like okay are we able to start a room and increase the size of that room by 10 every time that we run it okay great that means that we're at least getting
better at this and there's more reach like available to us but if we're getting 20 people every time we start a room and then it goes down to 15 then like we're either not doing this well the Channel's not doing well or like there's just not enough reach for us to
actually like expand versus like Tick Tock you might be able to say like great this is all about like I can actually track clicks and conversions so let's look at it the way we would any other channel got it so kind of look for momentum and that you're getting better and that it's moving somewhere awesome
yeah yep cool so a question that I'm sure is on many people's minds that they would want to ask is Adam what are merging platforms that are interesting right now that we should experiment with um yeah so I mean I mentioned uh Ott or like basically the key thing with Ott is
that it's way more trackable than traditional television but it has similar value that traditional TV does in terms of the ability to do more long-form storytelling type content and a lot of it's not skippable if you buy it right and so you can actually like oh
my God yeah and so so those are reasons to be exploring that right now it's hard for me to call that an emerging Channel because it's been around forever it's just there's more of it and there's the tools and services around it are way better now than they were four years ago
and so I think the the sophistication and ability to scale Ott is much higher now than ever before influencer is probably the one that I'm most intrigued by because similar to Ott like the the scale and services and the ability to go do it is still there it's also got that
hyper granularity that like when I get into influencer tools it feels to me like early Facebook when I used to go be able to Target Lenny right or 10 people that have exactly the same likes as Lenny right and that type of stuff where it's like you can get so specific and like find exactly who you
need it's incredibly tedious and manual and it's a lot of like like relationship management so I'm also I I'm also keeping an eye on like the technology being built around influencer because I think that's a huge area of opportunity for entrepreneurs right now but
generally speaking like the scope and opportunity there is huge and it's not going away but it's very it feels very new and different right now and the ability and it supplements the ability to do some hyper level targeting that you've not been able to do like that Facebook and Google are getting Less
open about at the same time I think VR is a really interesting in the way that mobile was interesting before like iPhone 3 right where it was like if you've got a VR app like it's a really interesting space but if you don't I I it's not that interesting to me yet any that have come up for you
that you're like no these are great like all I think of tick tock I feel like tick tocks across the chasm whereas they actually have a formalized ad platform now people are finding scale there's still a ton to do there and it you know influencers is also weird because it
crosses all of these other worlds as well but I think Tick Tock is actually hyper interesting and everyone should be doing that like that but I think of that less as you should be doing it as this like should I do it should I not it's more I need to figure out how to do Facebook if
I'm at least mildly appropriately should be there the like podcast ads I think are great I think that I I bought podcast ads like 15 years ago so it's not it doesn't feel like an emerging channel right I think there's way more volume now than there's ever been before the one of the guys that was on my team
at Uber has a company that's doing like programmatic buying and that type of stuff and so I think there's more opportunities on podcast I think podcasts people want to treat it like Facebook ads or like like direct response ads like immediate response ads and actually what I keep seeing as the
effective like strategy with podcast ads is treating it more like radio where it's more about getting on the right program making it personal and feel like it should be part of that program and then repeating over and over and over again and so yeah so I think podcast is
super interesting I think it's just hard to scale like it's it's likely not going to get people the same volumes as the Googles and Facebooks of the world QR mid-roll ad I'm excited to chat with my friend John Cutler from podcast sponsor amplitude hey John hey Lenny excited to be here
John give us a behind the scenes at amplitude when most people think of amplitude they think of product analytics but now you're getting into experimentation and even just launched a CDP what's the thought process there well we've always thought of amplitude
as being about supporting the full product Loop think collect data inform bets ship experiments and learn that's the heart of growth to us so the big aha was seeing how many customers were using amplitude to analyze experiments use segments for outreach and send data to
other destinations experiment in cdb came out of listening to and observing our customers in supporting growth and learning has always been amplitude's core Focus right yeah so ampleju tries to meet customers where they are we just launched starter templates and have a great scholarship program for startups
there's never been a more important time for growing absolutely agree thanks for joining us John and head to amplitude.com to get started I also come from a very consumer perspective I I would I'm actually stronger on like B2B companies using podcasting because it has that exact
same value I just described but each one of their customers is substantially more valuable so they don't need the scale that a consumer like application or product would need yep that's exactly who I work with usually one last question on this topic yep what percentage of the time do you find that
an emerging Channel kind of works is like 20 of time ten percent five percent like what's kind of like a what should people estimate of like okay it's probably not gonna work but when it does it's gonna be Game Changer like five percent of the time like like there's
new things popping up all the time yeah I think the the area that I think of is emerging that I found more success in is taking things that exist already and make them like like so the two slices of it are either it's existed for a long like podcasting suggested for a long
time and now we're finally getting to a spot where like it's like like it's it feels scalable the other is like exist testing channels that introduce something brand new so like the mobile ads I described on Facebook right like pre-mobile install ads and posts like those first 18 months of mobile install
were very like it felt like an emerging channel right because they were changing the product every week and like tracking didn't work and like there were all these kind of funky problems with it even though Facebook had been around forever but brand spanking new channels
like I like I don't know they they rarely work or are worth the effort early that you hope that they will be cool but when they work it's it's a game changing I imagine reminds me Airbnb apple is coming out with Apple TV I think it was and they're just like a Airbnb should make an app for Apple TV
it'll be huge and there's a team put on it I don't know it's been a month building this app and did not a bunch of nothing as far as I understand yep but it felt it felt good it felt good to be part of the launch one question I wanted to come back to are there tools that you
recommend for influencer marketing that you want to plug or or point out or is there nothing we were using grin at a master class we onboarded them I I looked so there's probably like half a dozen companies in that same Zone where they're they're they're building tools
that allow you to do the discovery of influencers the CRM of those influencers and also often like the like the measurement and payments and all that kind of so it's like an all-in-one type of management platform that being said though it like I said it's still super manual like it's nice to be able to go
and like find this list of like 50 influencers that are the exact right influencer for this class launch or whatever it might be but it's still then I have to go like wait till they all respond to me and there's still a lot of manual back and forth so that's probably one of um yeah I'm trying to think of
the there's a few other in that same category they're competitive with grin that are they all seem equally pretty good I can't even remember the reason we chose grin over some of these good names like it was all pretty close yep sweet okay if any other comes to mind we'll
throw it in the show notes yes before we get to the growth CMO discussion there's kind of this tangential area that I wanted to spend a little time on which is this idea of as a startup you initially should and often do start with a very narrow audience kind of your like
early adopters I call I and I'd rather post about your super specific who and eventually you want to cross the chasm and go broader and you have some interesting insights on how to think about that when to do that can you talk about that yeah so I think the book cross the chasm
is like a great place to start in terms of like thinking about the broader topic of that um what I see missed a lot of the time that I like to spend time with people on is to really understand that those early adapters are actually like or adopters are are often just drastically different
than the the broad audience and spending time to actually figure that out and like and and map out like what you need to see with those early adopters to have confidence that the product is actually going to have product Market fit Beyond them yeah so that that's I don't have anything
like hyper specific to add to that necessarily or happy to dig in deeper to it but it's it's probably the biggest challenge that I've seen with a lot of companies that I've worked with and then as I do more investing and things like that like it's it's probably the biggest
flag that I see with a lot of companies that claim to have product Market fit which is like you've got you have a very your Tam and your product Market fit are not using the same definition right like in that problem I think is is often a yeah just a red flag for a lot of
companies that I meet got it it's essentially you often underestimate how challenging it'll be to grow from your initial kind of early adopter crowd do you have any is there like an example of that happening where a company just like got screwed because they didn't think about that enough or there's some
someone can do early on is it like test a little bit more broadly early what do you recommend there I mean Clubhouse might have been might be a good example in the sense that they leaned into the broader audience maybe quicker than they should have right like if they'd given
it more time to really understand like the like their product Market fit seemed to fit the moment in time and like uh could they have built some experiments or tools or features that maybe stress test will this work like in an ongoing fashion that's you know if they were on such tear that's pretty hard
decision to make sure losing hindsight um that product I think that's another piece of it is that like the the audience changes like aren't always just like literal people right like like even right now like one of the biggest pieces of advice I'm giving to people that are
like how should we adjust our marketing with the economic changes and things like that I was like start by assuming you no longer have product Market fit because you had product Market fit in a different Market it's a different market now so you have to start over and and
hopefully you do or it's pretty close to it you just have to adjust a couple things and you can be right back on track but like if you just assume like you need to launch a new channel to fix this problem like you're gonna be wrong because like your entire customer base
change not just the next 10 of customers that you're looking for it's just a reminder of how freaking hard startups are man man we have more productive Market fit um okay we've done we're done let's move on not anymore not anymore oh man okay sweet so on to this next topic
around the growth CMO so you're this really interesting combination of marketing brain and also like very analytical growth person and I think you refer to this as kind of this growth CMO which I don't actually hear the term much so I'm curious what is a growth CMO how do you define it and why is it
important yeah so it's something I've just spent a lot of the last few years thinking about specifically because now I've been at a handful of companies where we've brought in CMOS that in all ways are like absolute world-class CMOS and they don't last they don't fit and
like they don't succeed right and so I've spent a lot of time figuring like well why not some of it coming because of spending time with those people being like why are you doing it this way that's not how a company at our stage operates trying to do it the way that like a traditional
CMO would have done you know marketing for a company Etc like one of the key examples I like to use is brand in that like everybody when they think about brand they think of it as an action not as like a consistent ongoing investment or they think about it as like campaigns and
things like that and from like from planning to execution to learnings a traditional CMO like will drive learnings and identify learnings and in my mind I think a growth CMO is looking at each brand investment is how do you then immediately follow that up with the next one like how do you shift to this
kind of like Fast product iteration mindset with even things like brand it's very possible but it's so like counter to a lot of traditional marketing DNA that it to me means that we have a lot of mismatch marketing leadership and that quickly eliminates trust with the marketing
organization it means that we rename everything marketing to product-led growth or growth or like referral programs and like like everything that it to me it actually like dilutes the value of like marketing should be playing in the company and it doesn't mean that like the traditional marketing
CMO isn't a good fit for some companies like I think uh like direct consumer products are still like very well suited to have a more traditional CMO but I think product driven companies product LED companies if you're CMO and you're product leader aren't married at the hip
you're just missing out on just tons of opportunity and the likelihood of things actually working like very well consistently and like compounding on each other so what other attributes of this person of what you call a growth CMO sounds like partly it's being much more performance driven sounds like a big
part of it is being very product understanding product and not kind of creating these silos we're gonna Market the thing you guys go build this thing but also as a person that's a great statement what else do you look for yeah so I would say so data driven generally like it doesn't have to be
like to me performance is like a very loaded word in our world because people think especially in marketing think that means not brand but they're very data driven and so when we take things like like retention and and even brand and like the consideration funnel and yes
you can't you can't measure those exactly like you can measure landing page clicks and sales but you absolutely can measure them and like making that part of the DNA of everything that's happening like data being part of that I think is is pretty quintessential of being a growth driven CMO the the second
I think is the iteration process is not thinking about things and like hey we need to plan for the next 24 months but like you can still do that and you can still have a vision and everything but having that more of like a agile type approach to everything whether like and
again this could be like the storytelling that your sales people are doing to you know what are your landing pages look like to like what is the design of your logo to the brand itself like all of those things like being more open to everything being like possibly
iterated on on a regular basis using data to like validate that and like challenge what has worked for you a week like we live in such a real-time world now especially with product driven companies the things change so quickly if you as a marketing leader aren't being iterative and thoughtful about
things with it like you'll get eaten alive and then I think experimentation is just a huge piece of it and something that I see a lot of more traditional marketing leaders um like that it's just it's the idea of experimentation is like trying a new channel it's not like how do we
experiment with our brand how do we experiment with our like the funnel like every like the whole picture not just the top of the funnel or the external elements of it but one of the things that I've I haven't quite figured out the right like language to put against
this but you know the traditional model of marketing is the the four Ps product placement promotion pricing and in my mind like the world that we live in now like like product is no longer a part of marketing but it's actually like they're married at the hip it's actually they're
all they're one in the same and most companies aren't operating that way they're still operating as if they're two wildly different things even if they say they're working together it's still like like there's not and to me it's just like no no like the product it is like the company now and the marketing
like is integrated with literally every single piece of it and it's not just a like a lot of traditional marketing got established in like the 1920s and the 1950s around like products that took you know years to develop or try or thing and like or like a product team was like
a science group trying new flavors of cereal not necessarily and like so the marketing team owned the Box the like where it went on the shelf and you know like what the price was and like all those kinds of things was marketing right because product was such a wildly
different part of the organization and I I think still there's just like a lot of fundamental things that marketers think about that are stuck in that world because most haven't had to grow through the like true growth of of a business that's just being established today and the assumption is every software
company should be hiring a CMO that is of this sort of a growth CMR right yeah now I would say that like my sense is that there's very few marketing leaders that can't be at growth CML so I don't think you have to have come up as like a a performance driven experimentation
it's it's more about like adapting and growing and like like again like the fundamentals are all the same right like one of my like like pet projects that I haven't done anything with yet is that every time like something new comes out in the growth world I go back in history
as far as I can to try to find like the earliest example of that just to be able to say like well look this isn't new but we can learn from the way that like like Coca-Cola invented the coupon like the first known coupon was Coca-Cola giving away Coke for free but it was actually a
Marketplace because what they would do is they would actually give like they would go to a town and they would go to like the soda fountain and they would give like a like free Coke like syrup to that side of the market and they would give coupons to the other side of the
market to like spark it to like get it going and then it's like well now all the customers want Coke now you need to supply it you'll pay for it and actually just like like learning that and understanding that is like really cool and it's just interesting to me because I'm a huge nerd but that to me is like
all of the things that great marketing leaders have learned are right it's the operating aspect of those insights and those skills and understanding your customer and their psychology like all of those things have stayed the same it's the operating of it in the way a
growth like organization like a product driven growth organization operates is very fundamentally different than the way a traditional marketing run organization had run I was going to ask you what a marketing leader can do to evolve into this where you think things are going in your point about you you're
capable of it you can iterate and adapt is really great and empowering is there anything specific they can do to learn how to do this better other than is it like mentorship is there classes courses or just do the job figure it out is there anything you can suggest there so
folks who are sitting there like oh I'm in trouble yeah I honestly I think like learn product development right like go learn agile product development and there's there's actually a a book called hacking marketing I think I'll I'll confirm that but it's essentially
like how to run a marketing team on agile that to me is just like again any great marketing leader should be able to go and consume how to do product development how to run a product like like Sprints and those types of things and their mind if they're great marketing CMO or CMO like we'll be like
oh my gosh I could do this with this big like event that we want to host I could do this with you know everything like there's nothing off the table when when you actually like learn those fundamentals but you know as well as I know like smart people can learn that
stuff like there's lots of resources out there every Forge has some classes on it there's a bunch of new product-led growth classes out in the wild like Maven I think has a couple and yeah there's a variety of those types of things that just going and doing it you don't have to go and like operate it
yourself like you don't have to go become a product manager but understanding those skills and those systems will one I think make you think differently about how to run your marketing team and two make you exponentially better at working with your product organization awesome I'm
actually hearing from folks listening to this podcast not live right now but broadly that this is a good way to learn how product works and how product leaders think so that's interesting so if you're listening to this good job you also mentioned that a lot of marketing leaders don't work out at a
company they join they leave things go wrong as a hiring founder or leader what what do you look for to kind of tell you this person's probably not what we need and not what you'd call a growth CMO like what are flags that are like they're probably not going to adapt and
evolve to the way we want to operate so I think first and foremost obviously depends on the stage anything like let's say C or below like comfortable with chaos and willingness to go do something they have not done for probably 15 years are like two huge signals for me because like the
every company I've been part of at every scale now which is all of them basically is that's the thing that a lot of people coming from more traditional marketing environments into startup worlds they're they're like it's a it's like a pace and the just the the
unpredictability and change and those kinds of things are just at such a higher rate than they've seen for a long time that it can be really jarring for people I think it's totally reasonable like it's crazy right if anybody that's had the exposure on both sides and then
the the willingness to go do the work is just that like you know like people are churning constantly and the challenges are different every week and those types of things and so it's like every now and then you gotta go write an email or you gotta go like you know open up Facebook
and get into the weeds with it with your team like into the data of it and that type of stuff and that stuff that like I don't want to do personally me I'm past the point where I should be in Facebook but like man when I need to I'm willing to and I'll go get in the weeds with it
and I'll like I'll use my time to just be like look we have to figure this out now and like I'm gonna go do the things that I thought I was done with in my career so those are those are pretty big ones I think then generally speaking one of the exercises I like to take Founders
through when they're hiring a marketing leader is is you know every marketer is going to have a t-shaped career right everybody came from like something they probably became awesome at and then over time just expanded their purview and so like for me it was you know mobile my
like I got into Mobile my first client ever was on Microsystems like early 2000s getting Java developers to make apps for flipped phones so I just like new digital mobile world like really really well before a lot of people did but then eventually I'm like great now I'm running an entire digital
marketing team now I'm running an entire marketing team now I'm getting into growth now I want to learn product and like I've expanded and so typically it's like going through that exercise of like find out their tea like find out their strength and then spend time figuring
out how they make up for those other things right so for me I've Lambda school I ran our PR team for a while I am not a PR person but I'm like I make it a goal in my life to get to the like the the value of despair of the dunning-kruger effect to be like great I just need to know how bad I am at PR
before like because I still think I'm good at it that's not a good place for me to be but once I know how bad it is I now know I need to go hire the right person to come in and I'm going to listen to them I'm not going to assume that I'm smarter than them and those
types of things and so like uh I think same thing with like product questions and data questions and experimentation questions for this this concept of a growth CMO is like well if somebody's coming from a a world where they've not had to work really closely with the product team
spend time with them to figure out how they plan on adapting to that my guess is most won't have thought of that the good ones will be able to figure it out together with you in that interview or afterwards or whatever it might be awesome maybe one day we'll do a follow-up chat just it's dive into
hiring a marketing person I know that's like an awful a whole deep topic yeah lots of thoughts okay we gotta put that but okay so you mentioned the valley of Despair and that's a good segue to our next topic so I found this little Tweety years where you talk about burnout and
depression and you kind of make this point that a lot of times you feel like it's burned out and it's actually depression and just broadly mental health is just this topic that's not really spoken a lot about in Tech and in business and so I'd love to just spend a little time on this I know you're very
you're a big proponent of talking about these sorts of things so I'm curious I know you've been through both these things and I'm curious just to hear your journey what that's been like what you've learned about how to get through it yeah so I um kind of the two biggest
inputs for me in terms of like really taking the time to understand my my mental health like one is my wife who's been a very strong proponent of like Mental Health Resources for everybody like since I met her and so like just being able to learn from her and you know get exposure to like well why is
this important like what are the values of it and seeing it pretty regularly of like you know family members or co-workers where it's like oh man like I bet there's something deeper here that like maybe is important for them to figure out and is that just something
she's good at or is she like trained in this stuff no she's good at it and she's you know she's had therapy and stuff like that and and just I she's like one of the most like uh empathetic passionate people I've ever met in my life and so she just feels like poor people so much that I think it's it's
something like really important to her and then at Uber I got like to a spot where I was like incredibly exhausted and tired and just down not excited about work and things like that and so I started going to therapy and with this assumption that I was just working too
hard right that was kind of my like man I need to go to therapy to figure out the tools that I need to deal with me working too hard and I just uncovered so many interesting things that I wouldn't have expected so like you know one was that like I'm the youngest child in my
family and I did something pretty different than a lot of my like relatives and things like that so like recognition is something I I long for and it turns out I get that at work and I just hadn't gotten that like in other parts of my life and so this thing that I'm like this is my problem was actually
like a solution to my real problem and knowing that just helped me like totally just change my perspective of how hard I work and it made me less like like I was I was getting judgmental about myself around like man I'm working too hard I shouldn't be doing this but I have to
and then I got in the spot where I'm like oh I'm working hard because I love it because I like it I'm I'm having an impact and I I'm working with people I like and people respect the work that I do and that helped me identify that like oh I can work just as hard but I can
work smarter I can work more on the things I have impact on I can work more with people that actually respect the type of work that I'm doing and that actually just like like started to like relax me right and get me to the spot of like oh okay that like I I spilled some
burnout in there and like that's part of the Innovation part of my my title was that I got to a spot where I'm like I I was traveling constantly I had teams all over the world and I was the the structure of uber was working where every city had a GM and I was like the person they called when their spend was
too high and so 500 GMS super gyms so yeah exactly and so I I was working a world where I was dealing with a lot of politics and a lot of and I love mentoring people and I had this massive team of like 150 people that I barely know any of them and so I'm not mentoring people either anymore more and
I just got to I'm like I'm working so hard on things that I actually don't enjoy and so I'm like I'm gonna go work on flying cars and which is a whole other podcast okay so that was kind of my like okay there was burnout in there I I know that was a fact but like some of those feelings or
things that I felt my entire life that I uncovered that I thought was just burnout I was like oh actually like at this point in my life this point in my life and this point in my life I felt this way too and at those points I wasn't burnt out and so I actually have
deeper work to do here and deeper understanding of myself so that I could actually like maximize my life and enjoy it right and because I'm gonna keep working to some degree this hard and um yeah I want to just like make the most of that I don't know if you mentioned this but it I imagine parts of
those points were depression not burnout what's whatever you found to be that line of just like oh wow this is a lot more serious than I'm just working way too hard for me it's almost the like it's kind of it's hard to describe but like I I I personally now can pretty
cleanly like tell the difference between exhaustion and depression and it tends to tie to my my broader motivations not just my motivation to work right so like the like when I'm exhausted I will also show up to work I'll still execute I'll still do those types of things but like I'm
gonna go and like if I if I can take an improv class it's going to be a blast I'm going to enjoy it and I'm gonna love it right if I'm depressed I won't go to that improv class like I'll just like cancel it you know I won't go to it I won't or if I go to it I'll go home
immediately like one of the things I love about actual improv classes is the like is the community right it's the like hey let's all go grab a drink now and this is like a totally different group of people it's not my family it's not my you know it's not my work people it's just me right and I wouldn't do
that right and so it's kind of noticing like where else is this impacting to what degree and why like can help me understand like oh there's like what's going in my life is more often than not I can then take those feelings and it'll be like oh I felt this way for like three weeks now
I should think about this and like dissect it a little bit and so again I'll spend time with my therapist and like work with my one of the one of the tools that my therapist has given me is to like open up with my friends and have these conversations with my friends and so now
I went from five six years ago really just having my therapist or my wife to talk about this kind of stuff too I don't know I have five or six different friends that were massively transparent with each other about this stuff because the second I shared any of this with them they shared it with me and now
we've become like safe places to have those conversations we're all gonna be like hey there's this thing going on you know like my my dad has ALS and so like he's been really sick and you know I've got three kids and I've got jobs and work and money in the market crash and
like there's so many different things it's like okay let me actually figure out which one of these things is causing this energy right now and having many years of therapy now and those resources can help me get to that solution to get to that answer so that I can figure out
okay what do I need to do right now is it do I need to actually take time for myself and dig deeper into these personal things do I actually need to change something with the shape of my career like those types of things awesome and it sounds like the things that have been most helpful and I'm
curious what else you'd recommend to folks that are maybe feeling some of this so it sounds like therapy is really powerful your partner being open with your partner finding a group of friends where you could be transparent about these sorts of things is there anything
else you suggest folks look into um yeah so I think the like meditations a good one like the startup people love to talk about meditation and so you can find lots of ways to do that it's kind of evolved for me so there's the it's in that tweet thread and I can't remember
it now there was a meditation thing that was the first it almost felt like new for me for motivation where it wasn't just Sam Harris yeah waking up right where it's like oh I'm actually learning about meditation not just learning how to meditate and that's how my brain
likes to do things I'm a like a lifetime learner I love digging into things and so that was the first time I actually like I I learned breathing techniques and things like that but going through that program of waking up was the first time I actually like really appreciated when and how and where to do it I'm
still not uh everyday meditate person I now use uh I'm an investor so I'm biased but Aura a-u-r-a um which is like a Marketplace app for it's like some of the other meditation apps but it's a Marketplace so it's actually like coaches and stuff adding content so I use that now as needed
which I really enjoy the um like exercise and diet and those types of things definitely tie to it it's like like eating is like a pretty clean signal for me or snacking is a really clean signal at least for me of like okay this is like I'm snacking more than I should be and like eating healthy can
both like help me identify that I'm in those spots but also just like make me feel better one thing I would say is that like the therapist that I found I found through a service that we had at Uber and I think I was surprised how much stuff is covered by companies in terms of the ability to get find a
therapist pay for a therapist or other tools and so that's one thing is I would suggest like go look through your your benefits your your health care provider offers a lot of that stuff too yeah so those are a handful listen to to Lenny's podcast I hope I hope that to be true I
don't know if that's anywhere near as powerful as these other things one thing I'll mention is on the meditation front there's this amazing book that kind of does exactly what you also describe where it teaches you why this works it's called it's got like a bad title it's
called why Buddhism is true and it's not trying to convince you to be a Buddhist but it has a lot of incredible insights on why meditation is so powerful and and how to think about it so I'll put that in the show Notes too awesome yeah I'm gonna check it out I wanted to come
back to the burnout piece I imagine some folks are listening to this and like might burn down I don't know what are what are signs that you're burnt out versus just like working a lot and tired the one that I see the most is is a like adaptability goes down really fast and this is more me noticing
like I I've managed a lot of people and coached a lot of people and so like when I see that from people that I'm working with I like I usually immediately bring up and like look like your openness to change in the business or trying new things or going back and trying things
that maybe we tried before and didn't work like has shifted from oh here are the flags that we should be aware of but let's give it a shot to why are we wasting our time let's not do this like this just like energy around like let's just do the thing we're supposed to do
it's that to me is just and and I think that's maybe specifically applicable to our environment it to like high growth and marketing and product where it's just like that's just a key ingredient to doing this job well is adaptability and flexibility and you know exploration
and if you're losing that it's probably not because you gotten bad at it right it's probably because you're just over it right like where you're like I just don't want to deal with the BS around this I want to go do the thing that makes my job easier which again most of the people that have
chosen this career path want their jobs to be harder because it's more fun it's more interesting it's more rewarding and so when you're looking for ways to like minimize the challenge or the opportunity I think that's like a pretty good signal that like they may be more burnout than just
exhaustion because if if anything I see the opposite for people that are exhausted where like they get re-motivated by new stuff by opportunities to go do something different and that kind of well really good Insight second to last question I know you have to run where are you on
this journey today and then just what's next for Adam green here yeah thank you good question I'm constantly optimizing this Matrix of like what am I good at versus what do I love doing and so what I found is that I just I really love like entrepreneurs and working really closely with
entrepreneurs and helping them you know figure out all of these like funky things that I've been able to see over the last 20 years and maneuver it and and I've I've worked at a lot of places and so I I'm really good at context changing and and helping connect the dots for people and and so a couple of
ways I've found to be able to do that is advising companies so working with Founders and growth leaders and things like that and investing and so I'm actually right now I've been investing now for kind of six seven years I've recently joined andreessen's Scout funds
from doing a bit more volume now but I I would say if I had to make a bet right now I think a full-time or closer to full-time investing world is what I'd like to lean more towards but I'm very much uh let's just open up opportunities and once the right one is in front of me
I'm gonna tackle it and so who knows I may go back full time somewhere or whatnot but right now like the advising investing coaching kind of hybrid is the uh the the term I think it was bezod at reforge used was me as a service uh it is my my current world but I I'd be shocked if I eventually don't gravitate
towards some kind of foundation because I I thrive when I've got a little bit of an anchor amazing a mass me as a service okay for folks that may want to reach out to you about invest taking your money in their startup or asking whatever questions maybe advising
questions where can folks reach you and learn more yeah just a Twitter AKA grineer and Linkedin as well as AKA Grenier so yeah look me up connect I'm I'm always open to connecting and chatting with people and I just love digging into problems so I'm happy to happy to abide amazing Adam this was
such an action-packed chat so many levels and layers I can't wait for folks to listen to this thank you so much for joining me and being here yeah thanks for having me my pleasure thanks man stuff Take Care thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to
the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode