Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor)

**Luc Levesque** (0:00)
We talk about the 10x engineer, and we don't really talk about the 10x growth advisor or 10x growth person, but the same dynamic applies, you could argue applies even more, because the right growth advisor can have literally company-changing impact.
The advantage of a growth advisor is it takes a long time to understand a channel. And certainly people have to know their stuff, they have to be very good at their craft, their growth craft, but also they have to be exposed to a large set of experiments or an environment where they've just seen what works and what doesn't. Once a growth advisor has that, it takes years to learn it, but it literally can take seconds, literally, to communicate that. It's one of those weird disciplines where the right person at the right time can literally say a sentence that changes the trajectory of your company. And you can't say that for a lot of different disciplines, but this is one of them.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:49)
Welcome to Lenny's podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Luc Levesque. Luc is currently the chief growth officer at Shopify. Before this, he was recruited personally by Mark Zuckerberg to help grow Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
He's also VP of growth and a GM at TripAdvisor. He's also been a growth advisor to companies like Twitter, Pinterest, Patreon, Thumbtack, and Canva. And in our conversation, Luc shares advice on how and when to think about getting a growth advisor, including how to structure the relationship and what to look for in an advisor. We also spent a ton of time on SEO, how to think about this as a growth channel, who it's well suited for, and how everything is about to change in SEO with Bard and ChatGBT. Plus, Luc shares a ton of really interesting advice around the value of self-reflection, building routines, cold plunges, also a couple of amazing stories about working with Zuck and what he learned from him. This is such an insight-rich episode, and I know you will love it. With that, I bring you Luc Levesque, after a short word from our sponsors.
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Luc, welcome to the podcast. Thank you.

**Luc Levesque** (3:47)
Good to see you.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:48)
It's good to see you too. I want to start with a story that you shared once when we were hanging out in the past, and something that I'll never forget. It's about the time that you just joined Facebook, and apparently, you had some big presentation you had to give to the entire company or the executive staff, and then I just love the way it unfolded and gives you a glimpse into what it's like to work with Zuck and at Facebook. Can you share that story if that rings a bell?

**Luc Levesque** (4:12)
If I remember the story, well, basically, I had just started at Facebook about it. I'll use those two interchangeably. I remember it as Facebook, and always will. Now, it's three months in, and was working on a new area for me.