Entering StartUpLand: An Essential Guide to Finding the Right Job by Jeffrey Bussgang

Author:Jeffrey Bussgang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-07-27T13:13:52+00:00

charge of conflict resolution between Growth and Product.

P R O F I L E

Julie Zhou

Julie Zhou, Director of Growth, Yik Yak

I started my career in product and growth roles at Google

and then at startups like Hipmunk and Yik Yak. At Yik Yak,

Growth is product-driven: we own the user experience from

the moment of app download until they become a long-

term user. My team worked on projects like optimizing the

onboarding process, increasing conversion to complete key

actions, and sending personalized notifications based on

user behavior.

In contrast, when working on growth at Hipmunk, my

projects were marketing-driven and focused on making the

top of the funnel bigger. Our top priorities were user acqui-

sition, closing marketing partnerships, and increasing brand

awareness overall.

To work at a startup, the absolute most important qual-

ity for a person to have is drive. He or she has to be driven every moment of every day to think of more ways that

they can make the company grow, and then be driven to

personally make those ideas happen. Because otherwise,

chances are that task just will not get done. There is no

one else to pick up the slack because there are so few peo-

ple. They have to be driven to work fast and jump on new

opportunities at a moment’s notice. A startup’s existence

is dependent on finding product/market fit and building a

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120 Entering StartUpLand

sustainable business model before running out of resources.

The competition always has more money, more manpower

and more brand awareness than you do—what a startup

has is single-minded focus on one goal and the drive to get

there before anyone else does.

A startup is a completely different work environment to a

corporate job like Google. The advantages that a startup has

over a big company include: clearer focus (large companies

tend to deal with infighting between teams working on dif-

ferent goals), nimble and efficient teams (you can spin up a

new project in a matter of hours versus weeks), and a directly

observable impact (it can be difficult to see how your work

directly moves the needle at a large company). The disadvan-

tages around startups are their emotional volatility (you will

experience the highest of highs and the lowest of lows), the

dependency on your relationships with coworkers (you’ll be

spending every working moment with the same group) and

their inherent risk of failure (believe me, I know).

The Growth Function in the Context

of the Company

Company Size

As with Marketing, a growth function tends to be created after

a startup is already shipping its initial product and is in the early stages of achieving initial product market fit. That magic moment

may come at twenty or thirty employees on the earlier side, or not

until over a hundred employees on the later side.

Company size impacts both the organizational structure of the

growth team and its interaction with other teams. In smaller com-

panies, a single individual or a small growth team tends to operate

as a shared service advising or coordinating the work of other teams.

As an organization grows, it becomes more difficult to align dispa-

rate teams with the growth objective, and in these circumstances,

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The Growth Manager 121

the growth team is structured as a heavyweight team with all of its

functions reporting to the same leader.

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