20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Instacart and Opendoor, Why 70% of Growth Experiments Should Fail and How to Fail Fast, How to Hire a Growth Team; Secrets and Tips & Why Operator Investors WIll be the Best Investors in 10 Years with Sri Batchu @ R

**Sri Batchu** (0:00)
Growth has just a typically high failure rate. You know, so two-thirds of your projects are likely to fail. What's important is that you fail quickly and conclusively. Startups should have time periods of planning that are much, much shorter on a two-week sprint cadence. So you really reduce the cycle time to output.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:16)
I mean, the amount of granular tactical advice in this show is just incredible. Welcome back to 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, this is the monthly show where we sit down with the leading growth experts to unpack how they start, scale and manage growth teams today. And we're joined by one of the fastest growing companies in tech in the form of Ramp with their head of growth, Sri Batchu, joining us in the hot seat today. Prior to Ramp, Sri led growth strategy at Instacart where he also helped grow their ads business. Before Instacart, he was one of the first 50 employees at Opendoor and during his time at Opendoor, the company grew from 100 million to $5 billion plus in revenue and up to 1500 people. But before we dive into the show today, I need your help. I need your input on the 20VC Miro board as I'm booking new guests that we should feature on the show in 2023 Head on over to miro.com forward slash 20VC and leave your suggestions with digital sticky notes or comments. That's miro.com forward slash 20VC. Miro actually sponsored this episode. For those of you that haven't used it before, it's a tool that I think is really powerful and game changing. Just ask the one million plus people who sign up for Miro every month. It's a visual collaboration platform packed with the right tools, tech and templates to grow your product, vision, idea, org at scale. Miro acts as a single source of truth across teams. That means getting buy-in much faster from teams like marketing, engineering, sales, product, basically anyone who needs to have a say to make growth projects grow. And even though it seems like a simple digital whiteboard, it's much more. Hashing out a sound acquisition strategy, brainstorming Miro, rethinking your sign-up flow, use Miro's user research templates. However you need to grow, Miro can help. We use Miro all the time to brainstorm future shows, vote on potential guests and leave notes for the rest of the team in our own time.
Check it out today again at miro.com forward slash 20VC. And I'm really excited about this next sponsor because a few of my portfolio companies love and use it. The question, do you know the impact of your marketing efforts? Or how much you've spent so far this month? And what you got as a result? Funnel is the world's first and only marketing data hub that takes all the manual effort out of data collection and lets you blend data from different platforms to unlock new deeper insights. And the best part is this can all be achieved without writing a single line of code. That's why it's used by more than 2,000 of the world's top brands and media agencies, including Samsung, Adidas, Sony and Havas Media. And now you can start for free with a plan that is not time-bounded and allows you to see the full power of the platform without any time constraints. Simply head on over to funnel.io forward slash 20VC. That's funnel.io forward slash 20VC.
Sri, I am so excited for this. I spoke to Apova, I spoke to Evan, I spoke to Jason Child. They all said terrible things. And I'm joking, they said fantastic things. But thank you so much for joining me today.

**Sri Batchu** (3:31)
Yeah, of course. I'm very excited. Huge fan of your show. So excited about the conversation.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:35)
That is very, very kind of you. I want to start and growth is this kind of weird new-ish discipline really. So how did you first make your way into the world of growth? And what was that first entry point for you?

**Sri Batchu** (3:45)
As you mentioned, growth is a relatively new field that's at the intersection of product marketing and data and analytics, right? I've come here in a slightly different path than most probably. I've been thinking about growth as a consultant and an investor prior to becoming an operator. And I joined Opendoor when it was 40 people in hyper growth phase, got to see it grow to 2,000 people nearly and 5 billion of revenue.
And being an early business generalist worked on anything that needed help. So sales, analytics, pricing, etc. And then subsequently went to Instacart, where the key problem that they had at the time was building out the ads business.