Luc Levesque: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, absolutely. The other piece of advice I would give is it can take a long time for some of these companies to be successful. That's okay. You should expect that. In fact, you should just go in with that mindset. When I'm deciding to work with a company, I'm in there for 10 years and I know that and I say that. And I say, "I'm in. We're in this together if I choose to work with the company." But it does mean that the structure of the deal needs to reflect that. So you need to have a long tail at the end. So if you're taking options or RSUs and it's pure of the equity, make sure you have the time for that to happen. There would be nothing worse than putting your heart and soul having impact and then waiting, I don't know, a couple years and then your equity expires. So you make sure there's a long tail. I mean, it can literally take over 10 years for these companies to exit. And you should be okay with that. I think that's okay. You're taking some risks. They're taking some risk on you and that's a great partnership, but you'll just need the time for that. So advice to growth advisors, make sure to ask for a long tail so that you don't end up in a bad spot in the end. And that incentives, again, are perfectly aligned between the founder and the advisor. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is the next generation A/B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like DraftKings, Zapier, ClickUp, Twitch and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern grow team stack. This leads to waste of time building internal tools or trying to run your own experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most about working there was our experimentation platform where I was able to slice and dice data by device types, country, user stage. Eppo does all that and more delivering results quickly, avoiding knowing prolonged analytic cycles and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your north star metrics like activation, retention, subscription and payments. Eppo supports test on the front end, on the backend, email marketing, even machine learning claims. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com. That's geteppo.com and 10X your experiment velocity. So I want to segue to a different topic, SEO. You're kind of the... You tell me, but it feels like you're one of the earliest SEO people in tech. You helped grow Tripadvisor many years ago and it was mostly SEO-driven. I think you innovated a lot of SEO tactics and strategies. And then you helped Pinterest, Thumbtack, other companies that are very SEO-driven. You talked about how many companies grow through one channel and these are all very SEO-driven companies. I imagine Shopify has a lot of SEO work that's happening right now with you there. And so I want to chat about SEO. So I guess broadly SEO is like... It's like this amazing growth channel. It's basically free. It continues to work after you stop doing any work on it for a while. Many founders think about, "Should we invest in SEO? How do we approach SEO?" So maybe just as a first question, what are signs that your product and company is a good fit for SEO being potentially a huge channel for growth?…

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