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xiaolai committed Mar 7, 2015
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Expand Up @@ -55,13 +55,15 @@ So now, how do you attack operating for growth? Let’s say you have awesome pro

My contrarian viewpoint is, if you're a startup, you shouldn't have a growth team. Startups should not have growth teams. The whole company should be the growth team. The CEO should be the head of growth. You need someone to set a North star for you about where the company wants to go, and that person needs to be the person leading the company, from my opinion, that's what I've seen.


![](l6f3.png)

Mark is a fantastic example of that. Back when Facebook started, a lot of people were putting out their registered user numbers. Right? You'd see you registered user numbers for MySpace, you'd see a registered user numbers for ___11:38, you'd see registered user numbers. Mark put out monthly active users, as the number both internally he held everyone to, and said we need everyone on Facebook, but that means everyone active on Facebook, not everyone signed up on Facebook, so monthly active people was the number internally, and it was also the number he published externally. It was the number he made the whole world hold Facebook to, as a number that we cared about. If you look at what Jan has done with WhatsApp I think that's another great example. He always published sends numbers.

If you’re a messaging application, sends is probably the single most important number. If people use you once a day, maybe that’s great, but you’re not really their primary messaging mechanism, so Jan published the sends number. Inside Airbnb, they talk about ‘nights booked’ and also published that in all of the infographics you see in side TechCrunch. They always benchmark themselves against how many nights booked they have compared to the largest hotel chains in the world. They have at each of these companies, a different north star. The north star doesn’t have to be the number of active users for every different vertical. For eBay, it was gross merchandise volume. How much stuff did people actually buy through eBay? Everyone externally tends to judge eBay based on revenue. Actually, Benedict Evans has done this amazing breakdown of Amazon's business, which is really interesting to look at their marketplace business versus their direct business. So eBay is all marketplace business, right? So eBay's being judged by its revenue, when it actually has 10 times Gross Merchandise Volume going through the site. That was the number that eBay looked at when I was working there. Every different company when it thinks about growth, needs a different North star; however, when you are operating for growth it is critical that you have that North star, and you define as a leader.

The reason this matters is, the second you have more than one person working on something, you cannot control what everyone else is doing. I promise you, having now hit 100 people I’m managing, I have no control. It’s all influence. It’s like I tell one person to do one thing, but the other 99 are going to do whatever they want. And the thing is, it’s not clear to everybody what the most important thing is for a company. It would be very easy for people inside eBay to say, ‘you know what? we should focus on revenue,’ or ‘we should focus on the number of people buying from us’ or ‘we should focus on how many people list items on eBay.’ And Pierre, and Meg, and John, those guys as various leaders, have always said ‘no, its the amount of Gross Merchandise Volume that goes through our site, the percentage of e-commerce that goes through our site, that is what really matters for this company. This means that when someone is having a conversation and you’re not in the room, or when they’re sitting in front of their computer screens, and thinking about how they built this particular project or this particular feature, in their head it’s going to be clear to them that it’s not about revenue, it’s about Gross Merchandise Volume, or it’s not about getting more registrations, registrations don’t matter, unless they become long-term active users. A great example of this was when I was at eBay in 2004, we changed they way we paid our affiliates for new users. Affiliate programs are a bit out of fashion these days, but the idea of an affiliate program is essentially, you pay anyone on the internet a referral for sending traffic to your site, but it’s mostly about getting access to big marketers who do it on their own.
The reason this matters is, the second you have more than one person working on something, you cannot control what everyone else is doing. I promise you, having now hit 100 people I’m managing, I have no control. It’s all influence. It’s like I tell one person to do one thing, but the other 99 are going to do whatever they want. And the thing is, it’s not clear to everybody what the most important thing is for a company. It would be very easy for people inside eBay to say, ‘you know what? we should focus on revenue,’ or ‘we should focus on the number of people buying from us’ or ‘we should focus on how many people list items on eBay.’ And Pierre, and Meg, and John, those guys as various leaders, have always said ‘no, its the amount of Gross Merchandise Volume that goes through our site, the percentage of e-commerce that goes through our site, that is what really matters for this company.

This means that when someone is having a conversation and you’re not in the room, or when they’re sitting in front of their computer screens, and thinking about how they built this particular project or this particular feature, in their head it’s going to be clear to them that it’s not about revenue, it’s about Gross Merchandise Volume, or it’s not about getting more registrations, registrations don’t matter, unless they become long-term active users. A great example of this was when I was at eBay in 2004, we changed they way we paid our affiliates for new users. Affiliate programs are a bit out of fashion these days, but the idea of an affiliate program is essentially, you pay anyone on the internet a referral for sending traffic to your site, but it’s mostly about getting access to big marketers who do it on their own.

We were paying for confirmed registered users, so all of our affiliates were lined up on getting confirmed registered users to the eBay site. We changed our payment model to pay for activated confirmed registered users. So you had to confirm your account and then bid on an item, or buy or list an item, to become someone that we paid for. Overnight when we made that change, we lost something like 20% of confirmed registered users that were being driven by the affiliates. But the ACRUs (15:45) only dropped by about 5%. The ratio between CRU to ACRU went up, and then, the growth of ACRUs massively accelerated. The cause of this is, if you want to drive CRU, if someone searches for a trampoline, you land them on the registration page because they link you have to register and confirm before they get their trampoline. If you want to drive ACRUs, you land them on the search results page, within eBay for trampolines, so they can see the thing they want to buy, get excited, and then register when they want to buy it. And if you drive just CRUs, people don’t have an amazing magic moment on eBay, when they visit the site. And that’s the next most important thing to think about: How do you drive to the magic moment that gets people hooked on your service.

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