6 December 2021

Link to podcast: https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/podcast/bangaly-kaba/

Link to transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tKz-GayOG4tXlu_2Pjg2h1G4mO1VltCx/edit (20VC doesn’t provide transcripts; so I got a draft from temi.com and @core_chirag our intern cleaned this up! You are welcome!)

Sajith: Good overview of the Growth (Hacker) role in startupland, and how founders should think about the role, as well as hire for it and manage the hire.

“Bangaly Kaba is the Head of Platform Growth @ Popshop Live, a live streaming mobile marketplace that combines commerce, entertainment, and social. Prior to Popshop, Bangaly led the product growth and consumer product orgs at Instacart and before Instacart was Head of Growth @ Instagram, where he built and led the product team that helped grow Instagram from 440M to > 1B monthly actives in 2.5yrs. Bangaly has also spent time investing as a Sequoia Scout having made investments into Career Karma, Binti.com and Squad App to name a few.”

Harry Stebbings (04:44): I do think that there's a lot of learnings when you sit and look back at, with hindsight, you know, the times with Facebook, there are times with Instagram, with Instacart, if you were to isolate some key lessons from those organizations, what would you say are the lessons that stood out from sitting inside some of those incredible growth orgs?

Bangaly Kaba (04:59): Yeah, I mean, one thing for me that resonates is those world class companies, especially those that have tremendous growth have like incredible focus. They focus on one thing at a time that is working really, really well. They make sure they understand it. They know why it's working, how to increase it and then they build an unfair advantage around it. And so, for Instagram, for example, that was like our account graph and understanding kind of like what type of connections really provide value for users and what really made people keep coming back, like find magic in our product. And when we really figured that out, you know, our charts really kind of moved exponentially. I think we improved our retention from about 20% to maybe over 50% while I was there. It was incredible. Likewise, for Instacart, you know, Instacart just has this incredible muscle around partnerships and operations and they do it so very well that they're able to like, they're so dialed in on how to create value for the users in terms of bringing on new products, bringing on new partners, getting them like the most efficient service. And so, these hypergrowth companies, like they really figure out what their kind of like muscle is and they just run with it.

Harry Stebbings (05:56): …How do you advise founders on how to choose the right north star and also how long to give it to know whether that's the right one to choose?

Bangaly Kaba (06:07): Yeah, it's a great question. It's really quite hard. Actually, metrics are always a representation of your strategy, right? And so, you shouldn't just choose a metric. You know, the thing that I talked to founders about is like, let's talk qualitatively about what is the magic of the product, what makes this product really tick and how do we know that this thing makes sense and what our users are telling us and what do we see in the behavior of the product? And you can usually dial in kind of like your north star metric by going through some qualitative exercises and saying, “Hey, what is the magic of Instacart? What is the magic of Instagram?”

Like when do you know that this thing is going to be really valuable to someone after they join and that they've really found some long-term value and if you can say that in words, then that really translates to a metric pretty easily. So, at Instagram, for example, you know, what we found was that people after they join, after they see some amount of really interesting visually distinct content in their feed from people they know, they want more. So, like that qualitatively, that is a really easy thing to be able to explain. So, then what does it mean quantitatively? It means that you have to have a certain number of high-quality connections who are posting pretty regularly for you to get that magic moment. You know, then we kind of back into what does that look like and how do we measure it.