Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:03)
Merci Grace has been a founder and investor, head of growth at Slack, and now a founder again. She's also one of the co-founders of Women in Product, which if you listen to this podcast, you know I'm a huge fan of.
In our conversation, we cover what she's learned from her time helping Slack build a product team and figure out growth, how Slack innovated the concept of product-like growth, and scale it to become one of the biggest B2B companies in the world, the most common mistakes companies make when going product-led, signs you can and should go product-led, when to hire your first head of growth, and what to look for, a bunch of advice on hiring, something Merci is incredibly good at, and so much more. I hope that you enjoy this episode with Merci Grace.
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Merci, thank you so much for joining me. I've always been such a fan of yours from afar through your writing and your Twitter, and we've interacted a bit on Twitter. We've never really had a deep conversation, and so I'm really excited, and so welcome.

**Merci Grace** (3:18)
Thank you. Excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:20)
I'm excited to chat. You have this incredible background. You're a founder, you're a game designer, you're head of product, head of growth at Slack. Then you became a VC and now you're a founder again. Such an impressive and unusual journey.
And I'm curious how you got into product initially, and then just how did you kind of work your way up to head of product and then head of growth at Slack?

**Merci Grace** (3:42)
Yeah, I got into product accidentally. I was first a game designer and actually started a venture-backed game studio right after college, when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
I got my first term sheet as a founder before I knew what venture capital was, purely accidental. And it's funny because my career art went founder, game designer, product management, VC, CEO of your own startup, something that people try to do on purpose now. And I was not trying to do it on purpose at all. I was just following my curiosity and my love of how thinking works and how people make decisions. And so that really went from games to product management, to venture and then back into product.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:32)
Having been in VC now, having your own startup, what did you learn in that time that may be surprised you? Now being a founder, that was useful to learn and experience.

**Merci Grace** (4:42)
Oh, yeah. So many things. I think one of the things that is quite obvious from the get-go, when you have had a few months under your belt, even seeing a bunch of pitches and seeing the one-on-one pitches and then seeing the partner meeting pitches, is how different really great CEOs and startup leaders are at storytelling, at coming up with a pithy answer at owning the room and how different, the fundamentals of their businesses might not even look a lot better, but when you're in that room, you feel so differently about it. So I think how much really the founder matters. And then the other thing, and this is kind of my surprising thing about that venture that I tell people that I didn't expect to learn, which is especially on Twitter and even in the media and the press, some merger happens or doesn't happen, some deal happens or doesn't happen.