Naomi Ionita: preference

Transcript context

…Awesome. That's exactly what I was just going to say, so I'm glad that you covered that. And so that's a good segue just to... Let's get into your background briefly. Can you talk about some of the wonderful things that you've done in your career both at Reforge, which you'll touch on, and growth stuff, and then your VC life now? Perfect. So, I'm a partner at Menlo Ventures. I focus on early-stage SaaS from seed to series B. I started my career in engineering and consulting before getting into tech back in '06. Fell in love with product. Did some new product development at a big media company before business school. And while at business school, I spent time at the Design Institute at Stanford. So, this was an opportunity to kind of bridge my analytical background with this refreshing view on human-centered design and learning from the founder of IDEO. So, brought that with me then to Evernote back in 2011, early days over there. I was there from about 10 to 100 million users. And over that arc, I shifted from more of a core product role to starting our growth product function. This was super organic. I started just collaborating with colleagues from across the business, come up with hypotheses, do user research, run experiments, drive metrics. This was a new way of building product back then. This was a decade ago, so the acronym PLG had not been coined yet. And I really just thought of myself as a user and data-driven product person. After Evernote, I joined a bootstrapped mobile SMB company called Invoice2go. It was the top-grossing business app at the time. There, I built teams across product, data, growth engineering, design and research, and again, focused on product-led growth and monetization. Over those two jobs, I found myself doing a lot more advising and speaking on the side on these topics. And my board members used to farm me out to their companies to help their founders think through things around product growth and pricing and various topics like that. And Reforge came together at the same time, so I would come in and speak on topics through that community. So, that really accelerated my transition into venture. I realized how much I love having that portfolio view of the world and helping founders look around corners. So, I think it's an incredible privilege to get to do the work that I do. One thing you mentioned is Evernote. I don't know how much you can talk about this, but they just got sold, right? Someone bought Evernote. And if I think back to Evernote, it feels like they could have been Notion, which is killing it right now. Any thoughts on what maybe they missed and didn't turn into Notion along the way?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.