Elena Verna on how B2B growth is changing, product-led growth, product-led sales, why you should go freemium not trial, what features to make free, and much more

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:03)
Elena Verna is possibly the single most experienced and smartest person on growth strategy in the entire world. I am not being hyperbolic. Elena led growth at Miro, Surveymonkey, and now at Amplitude, and she's worked with companies like MongoDB, Netlify, and HP to help them figure out their growth strategies.
In our chat, we cover B2B growth strategies, what's changing in B2B growth, why freemium is usually a better path than going trial, why every company should be thinking about their product led growth strategy, how product led growth often gets crushed as you move up market and how to avoid that, the emergence of product led sales, and how that might be the future of growth, and also how to hire your first growth lead.
My brain is always buzzing after I talk to Elena, and I suspect yours will too. Enjoy the episode.
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Elena, welcome to the podcast. I've been so looking forward to our conversation and especially all the things that listeners are going to get to learn from you and that I'm going to get to learn. And so thank you for being here.

**Elena Verna** (3:13)
Thank you for having me. I'm very excited.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:15)
I'm more excited.
So I was browsing your LinkedIn in preparation for our chat and it's pretty unreal. You have such an incredible variety of experiences. As far as I can count, you've worked with 17 different companies, possibly more. And as far as I can tell, it's kind of between you and Casey Winters for who's worked with more companies on their growth strategy. And I think you're winning.

**Elena Verna** (3:37)
But it's not a competition or anything.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:40)
How many items can you add to LinkedIn that are awesome?
And so for all those reasons, I'm really excited to dig into a bunch of different stuff. But before we do that, can you just kind of, for context, walk folks through your career path, just kind of at a high level?

**Elena Verna** (3:54)
Absolutely. So first of all, I've never, if you asked me this question 10 years ago and said, well, will you be in 10 years? I would have never said that this is what I'll be doing, advising, interim level engagement, board level seats.
So it's been definitely a journey of discovery and very strategic pivots in my career that I had an opportunity to take. I started my life in data. So I was a data analyst in the very early stages of my career. I graduated with a statistics degree from UC Berkeley, which is a California university in the United States.
And I went into data analytics. I actually thought I was going to be an actuary when I graduated. So that person that calculates your insurance rates. But in order to progress in actuary field, you have to continue taking exams. And I was not a really big fan of taking exams as a means of validation of whether I'm good or not. So I went into data analytics. I started in a very large company, Safeway, which is a grocery chain here in the United States. I very quickly realized that their velocity does not match my expectations of how quickly I want to move.