Growth Insights
Lessons from 247 conversations with growth leaders
Synthesized from 125 hours of podcast interviews across 40 shows in 4 languages. Every article quotes the people who actually built it.
Elena Verna on Why $100M ARR Doesn't Mean You Have Product-Market Fit
Elena Verna helped Lovable hit $100M ARR in 8 months—faster than any company in history. Here's why she believes they still don't have product-market fit and what that means for every growth leader building in AI.
Elena Verna · Head of Growth
Andrew Chen on AI's Pre-Google Ads Moment and Why PMs Are Becoming ICs
The a16z general partner believes we're in AI's pre-commercialization era—and that the product manager role is about to look radically different as leverage per person explodes.
Andrew Chen · General Partner
Cem Kansu on How Duolingo Built a $500M Business Being "Unhinged"
Duolingo's Chief Product Officer reveals how streaks, passive-aggressive notifications, melting app icons, and AI-powered video calls helped build a freemium juggernaut that grows 60% year-over-year.
Cem Kansu · CPO
Everett Butler on Building Go-to-Market in a Category That Doesn't Exist Yet
The head of marketing at Lindy explains why you can't outsource positioning to the market, why retention is a growth responsibility, and how AI will change what marketing teams look like.
Everett Butler · Head of Marketing
Vanessa Hope Schneider on Why AI Efficiency Isn't the Goal (Yet)
Descript's Head of Marketing breaks down how to build AI fluency in your team, why avatars won't replace humans, and the framework she uses to think about automation across three levels.
Vanessa Hope Schneider · Head of Marketing
Justin Kistner on Why AI Is Your New Junior Team Member, Not Your Boss
CopyClub.ai founder Justin Kistner explains why most growth leaders prompt AI wrong—and how building a context library turns ChatGPT into your best junior hire.
Justin Kistner · Founder
Marily Nika on Why AI Isn't the Product—The Experience Is
Google's GenAI Product Lead has been building AI products for a decade. Her take: stop treating AI as the solution and start using it to create better experiences.
Marily Nika · Gen AI Product Lead
Raman Malik on Why Perplexity Spends Almost Nothing on Paid Acquisition
Raman Malik ran a paid acquisition team at Lyft before joining Perplexity. Now he barely touches it. Here's why retention beats channel optimization, what good activation rates actually look like, and how to know when CAC:LTV even matters.
Raman Malik · Head of Growth
Vicki Pang on Why Founders Obsess Over Solutions Instead of Problems
Sequoia's product partner breaks down three archetypes of PMF—hair on fire, hard fact, and future vision—and why most founders are solving for the wrong side of the equation.
Pablo Srugo · Partner
Felipe Aranguiz: Cómo Instantly escaló de $0 a +$15M ARR bootstrap en 18 meses
Felipe Aranguiz pasó de ejecutivo de ventas a Director de Revenue en un unicornio bootstrap. Aquí revela los 4 pilares del cold outreach que siguen funcionando y cómo escalaron sin inversores.
Felipe Aranguiz · Director de Revenue
Colin Specter on Why Enterprise Sales Still Needs Face Time to Win
Orum's VP of Sales breaks down how physical touchpoints, product pilots, and a live conversation platform turned bootstrapped beginnings into Series B success.
Colin Specter · VP of Sales
Alex Schultz on Why Your North Star Isn't a Metric—and Growth Teams Are Overrated
Meta's CMO breaks down why retention is the only metric that matters pre-PMF, why you shouldn't hire a growth team at 50 employees, and how AI will create entire companies run by one person.
Alex Schultz · CMO and VP of Analytics
Luke Harries on Why ElevenLabs Doesn't Use Product Managers for Growth
The Head of Growth at ElevenLabs explains why horizontal products can work, how to hire your first growth marketer, and why your launch video needs to hook in 30 seconds.
Luke Harries · Head of Growth
Santiago Savinon: Cómo AI está rediseñando growth en 99minutos
Santiago Savinon, CGO de 99minutos, comparte cómo está usando AI para turbocargar cada etapa del customer journey, desde lead generation hasta retención, en una empresa que mueve 30 millones de paquetes al año.
Santiago Savinon · Chief Growth Officer
Cem Kansu on How Duolingo Ships 10x Faster by Killing the Product Spec
Duolingo's CPO on why the traditional spec-to-code assembly line is dead, how a PM vibe-coded an entire course with no engineers, and why consumer products live and die in the pixels.
Cem Kansu · CPO
Fernando del Rio: Cómo quitarle mercado a Mercado Libre sin perder dinero
El ex-director comercial de Mercado Libre revela cómo llevó a Linio de marketplace olvidado a competidor real con triple dígito de crecimiento, sin gastarle en tráfico ni quemar caja.
Fernando del Rio · Chief Growth & Marketing Officer
Kieran Flanagan on Why Growth Teams Will Disappear at HubSpot
HubSpot's former VP of Growth says AI is collapsing the walls between product-led and sales-led motions—and growth teams as we know them won't survive. Here's what replaces them.
Kieran Flanagan · CMO
Nicolás Rojas: De Copiar a Globant a Crear un Producto de AI con 50.000 Usuarios
El fundador de DAPTA cuenta cómo pasó de intentar replicar el playbook de Globant en una software factory a construir un producto de AI que hoy tiene 50.000 usuarios y $5.4M levantados.
Nicolas Rojas · Founder
Elena Verna: Why 95% of Growth Is Now Innovation, Not Optimization
Elena Verna has thrown out 60% of her growth playbook at Lovable. Here's what actually moves the needle when you're scaling to $200 million ARR in 12 months.
Elena Verna · Head of Growth
Elena Verna on Why 95% of Growth is Now Innovation, Not Optimization
The head of growth at Lovable explains why traditional activation tactics don't matter anymore, how shipping velocity became the ultimate retention strategy, and why she's spending 95% of her time inventing new growth loops instead of optimizing old ones.
Elena Verna · Head of Growth
Amol Avasare on How Anthropic Grew from $1B to $19B ARR in 14 Months
The hardest job in growth means throwing out 70% of what you know, spending most of your time firefighting success disasters, and betting big instead of optimizing small.
Amol Avasare · Head of Growth
Jeremy Goillot : Pourquoi Mobile First tue les logiciels d'entreprise
L'ancien Head of Growth de Spendesk a levé 12 millions de dollars en seed pour reconstruire les outils B2B sur mobile. Son pari : les PME n'achèteront plus jamais de tableaux de bord à 85€ par licence.
Jeremy Goillot · CEO @ The Mobile First Company
Vanessa Hope Schneider on Building AI-Native Marketing Teams Without Chasing Efficiency
The head of marketing at Descript believes the nearest-term objective of AI adoption isn't efficiency—it's rewiring your brain. Here's her three-level framework for getting teams there.
Vanessa Hope Schneider · Head of Marketing
Santiago Savinon: Autonomía del vendedor, AI como turbo y frameworks contra el caos
Santiago Savinon cree que los vendedores deben tener poderes de CEO. Para lograrlo, mapea cada proceso de venta al detalle más mínimo y deja que AI quite las excusas.
Santiago Savinon · Chief Growth Officer
Raman Malik on Why Growth Teams Should Fail More and Spend Less
The head of growth at Perplexity thinks your team is running too many A/B tests, playing it too safe with big bets, and obsessing over the wrong activation metrics.
Raman Malik · Head of Growth
Nicolas Rojas: De Soñar con Globant a Construir Agentes de IA en Arizona
El niño que vendía software en buses a Villa de Leyva ahora levanta millones en Silicon Valley, pero su obsesión nunca fue crear una unicornio latina, sino no depender de nadie.
Nicolas Rojas · Founder
Marily Nika on Why AI Is Not the Product (The Experience Is)
Before generative AI was cool, Marily Nika was building machine learning into video games. Now she's teaching growth teams that personalization matters more than the model—and that experimentation beats data volume every time.
Marily Nika · Gen AI Product Lead
Luke Harries on Building Growth Teams That Don't Need Product Managers
Most growth leaders preach focus. Luke Harries built one of the fastest-growing AI companies by ignoring that advice—serving developers, creators, and consumers simultaneously with discrete growth teams for each.
Luke Harries · Head of Growth
Kieran Flanagan on Why Growth Teams Will Disappear and AI Will Own GTM
The HubSpot CMO predicts growth teams will vanish—replaced by AI innovation pods that collapse product-led and sales-led motion into a single, agent-driven experience.
Kieran Flanagan · CMO
Justin Kistner on Treating AI Like a Junior Employee, Not a Senior Expert
The founder of CopyClub.ai built an $18K MRR content subscription by using AI as a team member, not magic—and his biggest insight is that most growth leaders prompt like they're talking to senior colleagues when they should be talking to interns.
Justin Kistner · Founder
Everett Butler on Building Go-to-Market in a Category That Doesn't Exist Yet
Most marketers debate what to call their product. Everett Butler ships language into the world and lets customer behavior reveal the truth—because in AI, the syntax is being written in real time.
Everett Butler · Head of Marketing
Elena Verna's Growth Machine: How Lovable Broke Every Rule
The head of growth at Lovable—now at $350M ARR in barely a year—has thrown out 70% of her playbook. No optimization. No rebrands. Just innovation, building in public, and giving product away.
Elena Verna · Head of Growth
The Cem Kansu Playbook for Building Product 10x Faster with Smaller Teams
The Duolingo CPO who put ads on a beloved app believes consumer products live and die in the pixels—and that "unhinged" is the highest compliment a product change can receive.
Cem Kansu · CPO
Andrew Chen on Growth in the AI Era: Why the MVP Is Dead Again
The a16z general partner sees AI products growing to millions of users with no growth strategy, random acronym names, and zero notifications—just like the early internet.
Andrew Chen · General Partner
Alex Schultz: Why All Marketing Is Performance Marketing
The Meta CMO who runs analytics believes every company hires growth teams too early, most North Stars are actually broken, and the idea of one-person companies is less crazy than you think.
Alex Schultz · CMO and VP of Analytics
Adam Fishman on Building Innovation Labs That Actually Kill Things
Most companies hire innovation leaders to launch new products. Mozilla brought Adam Fishman in to kill them—and built a funding framework that treats internal teams like venture-backed startups.
Adam Fishman · Interim SVP New Products