Speedrun Investor Spotlight | Fareed Mosavat | The Growth Playbook Behind Slack & Instacart

0:01You want to do the outtake like mic drop in my head thing or anything like that? All right. Where do you want me to look? [music] Hi, I'm Farid Mosovat. I'm a partner here on the speedrun investing team. I've been part of the team for a little over a year and have had the opportunity to work with close to 50 founding teams over the course of just a year and a half across three separate residencies starting with speedrun 5. This is my first professional investing job. I have been a builder running growth product and engineering teams at scaling startups for longer than I would like to

0:37count for close to 20 years now. I was the head of product growth at Slack for close to four years from 2016 through 2019. Helped the company go public uh in 2019 and was the lead for the self-service business. So if you've ever signed up for Slack for free or used a credit card uh to pay for it, that was something you probably touched something that I was responsible for. For that I was first 100 employees at Instacart where uh I was the first product manager for consumer growth. I was also a founding engineer at a social gaming startup. This was in the heyday of the

1:09Facebook apps ecosystem. We were acquired by Zinga in 2010. But actually I I started my career I'm a I was a CS major at Brown, math CS at Brown and really interested in computer graphics. And my first job out of college, I was an intern and then uh went full-time at Pixar Animation Studios. I got a chance

1:24to work there for close to seven years. Uh worked on some during what we called the golden age of Pixar at that time. What years? So it was uh 2002 through 2008. My first feature film there was Finding Nemo and I worked on basically every film from Nemo through up. So the thing about a Pixar film is that it takes hundreds of people and many many years to put it together. And when it comes out on screen, it looks like one thing. It looks like one unified beautiful experience from beginning to end. And I think if you look at it from the outside, it looks like, oh, this

2:07must have been a really top-down process, right? Like a great startup, there's a single director with a single vision who believes in what they're building and is driving the creative process from end to end. But they can't do all the work. Like any great startup, it takes many, many people to actually piece all that together. And what I learned there is that even these things that look so refined, so polished, so detailoriented, and every single little bit is actually an incredibly iterative process. Um, and this was actually very difficult for me as a engineering type brain to figure out early on. You know, I'd be asked to do a

2:47test. So, I was working on like visual effects, some internal tools, but the first film I worked on on Finding Nemo, I was basically like the bubble guy. Uh, I was working on bubbles and fish tanks and in the ocean and that kind of thing and doing visual effects and stuff. And honestly, I'd kind of never done it before. I like knew the math about how to make things move and look cool, but I'd never made anything pretty before. I was not an artist. I didn't really understand that it's not just about making it physically real. It's about making it solve a creative problem in a

3:17shot or in the story. And so the first time I did something, I built it and I thought it looked really cool. And uh my boss came in and was like, "Honestly, this kind of looks like crap." And I was like, "What do you mean? It follows all the physics and it does the right things." And I was like, "Well, that's not the point. The point is it needs to help us tell the story." And so the story is really the driver of everything. And so I I started to learn what I think people who maybe come from more creative fields uh from more artistic fields etc. are used to which

3:47is um it's all about iteration. It's all about feedback. It's all about you know seeing a bunch of different eyes on something but having one ultimate decision maker about where what what great looks like and driving that across every every bit of the of of every pixel on the screen. And so that was really the thing I feel like I learned at my time there is that it's not just about building cool technology. It's not just about it being correct, but rather that it sends the right feeling and that all the little details are there. It did feel like a place I could spend the rest

4:21of my life. Um the people were absolutely exceptional like every single person in every single job was exceptional and cared deeply. It was like such a well-aligned organization. The work was interesting, creative, and most importantly, everybody in the world knew what I did. Like, here we are close to 20 years later and we're still talking about it, right? And so, like, it did scratch that feeling of like

4:47working on something important. Were there hallmarks from the Steve Jobs era? Was that still Yeah. No, I mean, when I started there, Steve was still CEO and he was still there one day a week and I never talked to him, but I saw him around a lot, [laughter] you know. Here's the thing. When you make a film, you actually know what the end product looks like. It's usually around 90 minutes. It has three acts. There's a bunch of like well understood art around what makes a great film, what makes a great story, and you know it's sellable. Startups are different because you actually don't know that anyone's going to care about

5:21it. You don't know if it solves a real problem. You don't know where it fits into the market, etc. And so this kind of this I think what is common is that sense of like iteration and trying things and actually trusting your internal team to be good at that iteration but also layering in customers

5:41on the outside as part of that process. On a Pixar film like most of our iteration is internal. It's we have a ton of smart people who are really really creative who have great judgment and that's not enough when you're building a product in a new market. You also need the judgment of your actual humans and actual customers to be part of that loop which we actually explicitly did not do uh at Pixar like uh notoriously like didn't do focus groups didn't screen films in advance you know very often until they were close to done etc. We trusted the internal team to do that iteration. For

6:14most startups, you can't do that. You really do need to trust an out the the customer to be part of that process. So, how do you do that effectively? I think was something that I had to learn there. And that does mean putting bad stuff in front. It's all about finding the version of the product that tests the hypothesis that's most important. For a film, it's is the story good. Everything else like cascades down from that. For a product, it's usually like, do we solve a specific problem for a customer? So, what is the lowest fidelity way you can do that? That doesn't mean it needs to

6:44be bad. It just needs to be like a simpler form. Being acquired by Zingo in 2010 was one of the most interesting moments uh in my career because what I realized was the difference between two companies working on the same thing but having dramatically different results. It's funny. We were this small scrappy gaming company. We thought we were doing like really unique, really creative, cool, like edgy stuff that was, you know, higher quality than anybody else. We had a little bit of that Pixar DNA of like thinking we were doing the best possible things. I don't know if I should say this, but I'll be deeply honest. We sort

7:29of like thought Zingy games were like not as cool or interesting or uh valuable. you know, we had a little bit of ego about them and and we were when we were getting acquired, it it was the pro we it took a little time for us to like assimilate into it. We didn't know anything about what actually works on this platform. We were still kind of building games in an in a in an older way and thinking that taking those things and applying them to a new market would work. And Zingga understood the dynamics of social gaming and social platforms and distribution on those platforms better than anyone else in the

8:11world. I thought I was being data driven in the work I was doing at the startup cuz we were learning from other people and using analytics and using data to make decisions and trying to drive virality. And then I got to Zinga and realized I had no idea what I was doing. the level of sophistication around understanding every single move in terms of how customer behavior changes about retention about engagement about virality. The level of depth of understanding at an analytical level of what that was doing was was just mind-blowing for me. And I learned honestly 80 plus% of the stuff I still use today to understand uh to analyze a

8:54company or to analyze growth metrics or to understand a funnel or to understand retention. I learned in those early days at Zingga from people who had figured it out from first principles. [music] I helped run the growth team at Slack for close to four years. And uh when I joined, we spent almost all of our effort as a team on new user experience and onboarding. And if you think about it, it's the most important uh piece of the puzzle. this is a new product uh type of experience that most people hadn't used before and was doing something super unique which is random individuals at a company would sign up

9:34for this product invite a few people that they work closely with and start using it and while this seems normal now because there are so many different kinds of like B2B or work products that operate this way at the time it was relatively unique and I think a lot of that came out of the early gaming DNA of the company and honestly the CEO Stewart's like very like consumerry mindset towards what a great product looks like. We tried millions of things uh early on and and over the course of many many years uh to try and you know improve how many people were able to onboard use the product and effectively

10:16uh work with others. I think the main lesson that I learned there is that what really works in the past doesn't necessarily work in the future because people would always ask me like why do you have a team working on onboarding for multiple years? Like shouldn't you be able to just AB test your way to something that works and then set it and forget it and move on to another part of the funnel? That sounds right, but it's actually like very very wrong. And the reason it's very very wrong is that the people coming to your product are evolving and changing over time. There are that there's no such thing as the

10:52perfect onboarding. Every single user is different and we're trying to generalize as best as we can. Maybe now with AI you can build the perfect experience for every single person, but at the time you definitely couldn't do that. And also it's it's very timeconuming to build lots of personalized versions. So what you're really trying to do is find something in common that works. your user base tends to have certain things in common with each other and that evolves over time. So if you think about it like who's signing up for Slack in the earliest days of startups, it's a lot of people in San Francisco. It's a lot of people in tech,

11:24maybe some media and other companies where that kind of communication was really important. Um but they all there's some similarity to them. Often what I find is like what works early, which is like just get me into the product, reduce friction as much as possible, make it as easy to get going, really really works when you're early. One of the early assumptions we had at Slack and that were that was a really strongly held assumption was that we didn't really need to convince people to

11:58pay for Slack. It was a free product. he'd start using it and the expectation was that any organization that used Slack in a meaningful way would eventually choose to pay for it which kind of makes some sense right let's focus on engagement let's focus on getting people using it let's focus on getting the whole organization onto the product let's uh let's let's just work on getting them using it and the value proposition will be very very clear and very very obvious I I wasn't sure about this uh and so started doing some digging around it and actually found that while you would expect that a team

12:35that had been on Slack for a year, had almost all of its employees on the product and was using it all day every day would probably be paid. And it actually turned out that more of them were free teams than were paid teams. And so what we found was there were actually hundreds of thousands of of companies around the world using Slack on a daily basis who were not had had not paid for it. And so you think like your first assumption is well they must not find value in the paid product. We should add more features. We should do more stuff. We should make more reasons

13:05for them to pay. And we started digging into it. And this is the process I think is really really important which is not jumping to some conclusion based on your prior assumptions but rather actually trying to ask the question why and dig in a little more deeply. What we actually found out and I I I actually the first time I saw this, this is an example I love to give is I just started reading app store reviews uh because they're just a source of qualitative feedback. And I remember one of the reviews so distinctly a person said, "I

13:36love this product. It's so important. I hope they never put ads in it because I don't understand how they make money." And I read that and I thought to myself, that is like the oddest thing I've ever heard. This is obviously a work product. We have a subscription. There's a pricing page on the homepage, etc. Like why would they say ads? Like there's no way we would ever put ads in this. That makes no sense. And what I realized is

14:03like maybe there's some a thread here. And what I found was we did some other research around this etc. It just turned out that most of our users had no idea that there was a paid version or what they would get if they paid for it. That the problem wasn't that we weren't providing enough value. was actually just a lack of awareness. And part of the reason was we had focused so hard on getting people to use the free product and we didn't want to get in their way and we didn't want to, you know, cause any friction or make them feel like they were missing something that we just the

14:30free product was awesome and it had no surface area at all that would say, hey, if you paid for it, you might get X, Y, and Z feature that you would get that would be really valuable to you. And so we pivoted our whole modernization strategy towards awareness just like simple ways of making it clear the

14:49existing product is obviously valuable. Tons of people were paying for it. We were one of the f we were at the time the fastest growing SAS company ever. Uh but there were tons of other people who didn't even know that they would get that value. And so your first instinct when you're like okay I want to get I want to drive more monetization for a product is what great features can we add to get people to pay for it. But it turned out that we didn't add new paid features for close to two years after that just driving awareness and drove a

15:17ton of growth. After I left Slack, I joined a company called Reforge. Uh Reforge is a grow education company around helping product managers, people in marketing and growth learn the skills that you know we had learned. How do we give back a little bit and how do we help people understand you know the processes, the systems, the ways of uh you know building their careers in great ways? How do they learn from other experts not academically but rather from people who have actually done the real work? And I joined as an EIR and was teaching some classes and as a result of that work I started doing a

15:55bunch of advisory work with uh early stage startups but also with more scaled organizations and uh ended up joining the executive team there helped build the company and then after I transitioned out of there went into like advisory full-time. I saw this opportunity as like okay one is you can do education and teach lots and lots of people or you can work with individual organizations and I didn't really know what I wanted to do next but what I found myself doing was every time I had a meeting with a founder even if it was the first time we'd ever talked I found myself excited for it I found

16:28myself enga deeply engaged in the conversation and like loving every minute of it because you'd get the kinds of feedback that's like wow this 20-minute conversation saved me like months of effort on this thing because you could see around a corner or I could give them an example of someone else who's dealt with something or make a great intro and I loved that kind of work. Uh but I wasn't doing I I couldn't make it be the only thing I was doing. I have known some of the speedrun team for a long time. Uh I knew Andrew from when he was at Uber. He was also involved

17:01with Reforge. Uh some of the other folks had worked at Zingo before. And uh as Speedrun was growing, uh they asked if I was interested in a visiting partner role. And I just thought to myself, well, this is something I've never done before. Matches my past in that way. Uh the joy I get every day working with early stage founders is higher than any of the joy I get working with any other kind of people. Uh, and it's an opportunity to no longer be like a solo practitioner, soloreneur working on my own in my home office, you know, on a bunch of Zoom calls and actually have

17:39sort of a home team of people that I've worked with before and also deeply trust and really enjoy working with uh to do the kinds of work that I love. And so, uh, I thankfully they agreed. I think of my job as an here at speedrun as having two really important components and then a bunch of other stuff. But the two really important components are one be really good at identifying the best founders in the world and the high people who are of exceptional talent because every single

18:15company is a reflection of the founders. And so how do we find the best people in the world and convince them to work with us? And then two, how do we do everything we can to help that those people achieve the highest their highest potential? We choose people with really high potential, tons of potential, energy, intelligence, hard work, uh deep expertise or understanding of their markets, a really good idea, but that's just potential. Then it's like how do you help them actually reach that potential? Our job is to help them reach that in any of the ways that we can. And so I think of my job in a lot of ways as

18:53sort of a the quarterback for that founder of like just moving resources around, pointing them in the right direction and helping them use the resources we have at Speedrun uh across all of our different things that we do for founders across capital, across talent, across go to market uh and help them prioritize what's most important so that they can get there as quickly as

19:14possible. [music] Look, all companies have certain things that challenges that they face. How do I hire great people? How do I know what I how to find a first customer? How to build a business model that's going to scale and be valuable in some way? How to think about being rejected by customers, by talent, by fundraising partners or or or VCs, etc. We're in the business of of uh it's a little bit like uh therapy at times just like sitting and helping a founder understand that the problems they're dealing with are not unique to them that they've they've had that there are hundreds of others who have gone through the same things

20:00and made it through. But I think the thing that I try to spend the most time on with founders is really around finding their first customers and helping them figure out what a great product looks like for that customer. One of the things I've seen time and time again is that the discovery of product market fit is a very very difficult problem and that it's really you have to solve for two variables. You have to solve for product and you have to solve for market. You have an idea of what your product looks like and you bring it to a a bunch of different perspective types of customers. Well,

20:34how you find them matters. What their unique problems are matters. What you're hearing from them matters. How do you translate between what a customer is telling you and what they're how they're behaving to figure out whether your product is a fit for that. A lot of breath of experience helps with that process because it it tends to what I think of it as is the best founders in the world are sort of very good at heating. They're good at knowing the difference between uh yeah, I'm kind of interested and I need this right now and marching their way towards that. And so a lot of what I do is test founders on

21:08that heat. I feel like that's the biggest problem that founders face early on. I am pretty bearish on cold email. Oo, controversial. Yeah, I think especially for a super early stage founder, you're really trying to convince people to do something they've never done before and trust you as a no-named person just trying to solve a problem. And I think while we've seen people have great success with it, I just think that with AI and everybody doing it that uh it it's it's it's as close to burned of a channel as exists right now. I think there's still some returns there, but I think it's pretty overrated. I think you need to find

21:54other pathways to get to get in front of people. I will say that I am still a deep believer in word of mouth, network effects, and virality as the best way to drive growth for almost any company. Great products are things that people want to talk to other people about. And the way that you do this is really about not just being a little bit better, but being 10x better. So I always like to use the example of Uber. In the early days, people talked about Uber because it was so so so much different than uh riding in a taxi. But over time, that stopped being true. You got used to the

22:38experience. So it's about con consistently exceeding expectations. Same is true for Slack. In the early days, people talked about Slack because it was like cute and fun and had good design and was so different than other work software which was all just sort of like bland and boring and hard to use. But now all work software is that way. So it's not enough to just do that. You

22:59have to actually like set some new bar. And I I think so many products today are just trying to like solve problems and not wow customers. The green flag that I now really look for is are there signs or evidence that you have done something weird, exceptional, or that wasn't asked of you in the past. Because that's really what it takes to build a great company is you need to do

23:35things that nobody ever asked you to do. You need to do things that your peers aren't doing. You have to be willing to do things that make you look stupid uh or that will stand out in some meaningful way beyond just like you know getting good grades and going to good schools etc. Really the biggest green flag for me is some experience in your past where you've done something exceptionally hard that no one ever

24:01asked you to do. I think we have a lot of great stuff. This was really Yeah. Okay. Great. You think? I don't know. We'll see. I'm always I'm always per I hate talking about myself. So, it's like the Well, I like it, but I also hate it. [music]