Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…That’s what actually started even before the official growth team with Javi in that first hackathon. But that was the seed of this idea of, oh actually the way to get past this growth wall as people refer to it in retrospect that we’re hitting, is use the product itself. And internationalization, there’s even more to it than what you said. One, when you have the users themselves who are translating a product as you’re seeding it in these new markets, they’re so much more bought in and feel a sense of ownership over it. Versus, oh I’m just airdropping this translated American product onto your country here. It’s not just that it’s a better translation, it’s that you’re actually seeding those first power users who are going to be deeply engaged and feel ownership over the product. Then two, the nuance in this local markets that might even be in the same language, Spanish is the perfect example. Spanish is spoken in so many places around the world, but the local nuances and needs in Spain are super different than Mexico or Argentina or Latin America, et cetera. That’s exactly right. I think my point with all this is: (1) growth is a pretty new discipline in our industry, (2) growth is not marketing. It’s very tempting. You see, especially with incumbents like big Fortune 500 companies who have someone whose title is growth and then you ask them what they do and you’re like, oh no, that’s not growth, that’s marketing, you don’t actually modify the product at all, that’s a different thing. It’s important to realize not only did Facebook invent the discipline, they are perhaps still the best at it. They really eat, sleep, and breathe the idea that growth comes from product. It was that core initial team, all of them of which Javi’s now the COO, Alex is now the CMO of Meta, Naomi is now Meta’s longest tenured employee besides Mark and runs a ton of stuff at the company, and Chamath who deserves so much credit for starting the team, pulling it together, protecting it, advocating for it within the rest of product in the way that only Chamath can.…

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