Nikhyl Singhal: evaluation

Transcript context

…FAANG doesn't. Okay, I like this. Okay, let's try to make MAGMA the new thing. MAGMA, make that the title of this episode. Just joking. So the next area I want to touch on is, you wrote this kind of hot take on something you call ex-growth companies and how it's not good to be at an ex-growth company currently. So can you just talk about what is an ex-growth company and then why is that not a good place to be as a product manager for probably any kind of role? I have a pretty strong opinion on this that I think that for 10 years we created the hypergrowth, blitzscaling type phenomenon, and there was a lot of good reasons for that, some of which were just distribution platforms just got so good. You could take out Facebook ads, you could grow with Google, and you could grow in 18 months that maybe took previous companies 10 years. So I think that the idea was that all of these companies could instantly grow when they found product market fit and that birthed all these unicorns. And then suddenly, 18 months ago, it almost like the music stopped. 0% interest rate went away, and it became a lot harder to find growth through just fueling it with capital. And I think that the sudden change meant that not only capital was harder to raise, but companies started to focus on their core products. You've talked about it on this podcast, just how many layoffs and restructuring and managers moving to ICs, and all of that work is happening. Well, the one funny pocket was there's these large number of growth companies who have raised substantive dollars. So they're not going to run out of capital in 2022 or 2023. What's going to happen is, they actually have quite long periods of time, so you don't see them raising new rounds, you don't see them laying off, but in some ways they're still hiring or they're still seeking the next product. The sad truth is that many of their contemporary companies that went public are worth 10% or less than what they were worth back then, and these companies are privately held and so they're sort of sleeping in the shadows. My fear is, from a career point of view, so many tech professionals are in these organizations or joining these organizations with the expectation that they'll make money on their equity, that they'll continue to do fine. And my sense is we're going to see, even in the second half of this year, lots of boards pulling back, taking their capital back, companies essentially saying, "Hey, we're capitalized. We're a scaled ocean liner, and now we need to go find product market fit." But doing that with 300 people and expectations of hitting a multi-billion dollar valuation just isn't going to happen. So that's the reason why I'm like, "Danger. This is not the company to join, this is the company to leave. Find another phase. Time's a wasting." And I worry very much that people aren't getting the message. I know you probably don't want to name any names of companies, but what are some signs that may be you're at one of these companies?…

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