Leveraging growth advisors, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta)

Luc Levesque: We talk about the 10X engineer and we don’t really talk about the 10X growth advisor or 10X growth person, but the same dynamic applies. You could argue it applies even more because the right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact. Something I’ve experienced several times in hindsight when you’re like, “Okay, here’s the needle in the haystack.” And then it’s implemented and you can see hundreds of percentages, sometimes over a thousand percent lift when you get it right. It’s one of those weird disciplines where the right person at the right time can literally say a sentence that changes the trajectory of your company. You can’t say that for a lot of different disciplines, but this is one of them.

Lenny: Welcome to Lenny’s Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard one experiences building and growing today’s most successful products. Today my guest is Luc Levesque. Luc is currently the chief growth officer at Shopify. Before this, he was recruited personally by Mark Zuckerberg to help grow Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. He’s also VP of Growth and a GM at Tripadvisor. He’s also been a growth advisor to companies like Twitter, Pinterest, Patreon, Thumbtack, and Canva.

In our conversation, Luc shares advice on how and when to think about getting a growth advisor, including how to structure the relationship and what to look for in an advisor. We also spent a ton of time on SEO, how to think about this as a growth channel, who it’s well suited for, and how everything is about to change in SEO with Bard and ChatGPT. Plus Luc shares a ton of really interesting advice around the value of self-reflection, building routines, cold plunges, also a couple of amazing stories about working with Zuck and what you learned from him. This is such an insight rich episode and I know you’ll love it. With that, I bring you Luc Levesque after a short word from our sponsors.

Luc, welcome to the podcast.

Luc Levesque: Thank you. Good to see you.

Lenny: It’s good to see you too. I want to start with a story that you shared once when we were hanging out in the past and something that I’ll never forget, and it’s about the time that you just joined Facebook and apparently you had some kind of big presentation you had to give to the entire company or the executive staff. And then I just love the way it kind of unfolded and it kind of gives you a glimpse into what it’s like to work with Zuck and at Facebook. Can you share that story if that rings a bell?

Luc Levesque: If remember the story, well, basically I had just started at Facebook about… I’ll use those two interchangeably. I remember it as Facebook and I always will. I was three months in and was working on a new area for me. So I came in, started putting together our thoughts on a strategy and was asked to do a presentation in front of the company with Mark on the strategy. So I whipped up a draft strategy, put together some plots and plans, presented in front of the company and went well. And then every six months there’s something called the [inaudible 00:04:32] Team Review of Facebook and basically product area leads will go in and present their strategy, how it’s going. Again, I just joined three months before, so I walk in no idea what to expect. I am sitting at a table. You can kind of envision it’s a big room, a really big room with a bunch of tables set up in a big square with a little microphone.

So I sit in there, there’s Mark and all the executives sitting on the other side. And I sit down and it’s quiet for what felt like five minutes. I’m sure it was not, but it was quiet for a while, just sitting there waiting for what’s going to happen now. And at some point Mark kind looks over, says, “Hey, we saw your presentation, saw your strategy. Now when are we going to start seeing results?” And that was my introduction to Facebook. It was kind of my introduction to working with Mark and was a pretty kind of intense thing to go through. Again, I just joined. The strategy was very much a draft at that point, but I think what it highlights is something that Facebook does really, really well, which you get very quickly when you join Facebook and it’s why they’re such an execution machine and can build a lot of great product. It’s because they focus exclusively on that magic word, which is impact.

And that was kind of my first introduction to working with Mark and just that laser focus on, “All right, got it. Now when are we going to start seeing impact and kind of moving from there?” So it’s something that is very much in the culture there and something that is so important. It’s something of course that we focus on a lot at Shopify, but it’s that difference between, “I don’t care how hard you’ve worked. I don’t care what you’re working on, what the activities are. What are the outcomes? What is the impact you’re having?” I actually really love that word impact and focusing on it because it’s vague enough that it covers off any work that is impactful towards the mission and it’s precise enough to know what does that mean when you say, “Are you having impact? Or what is the impact we’re having?” So it’s a great way to approach things. That was my first experience there within a few months. And yeah, we jumped in and started focusing on having a lot of impact from there.

Lenny: I love that story. There’s a couple things there. One is, if I were in your shoes, I’d poop my pants sitting there for five minutes waiting for what do you guys-

Luc Levesque: That did not happen. I had a report.

Lenny: Okay. How did it go? How did you deal with it? Or I guess how did you respond?

Luc Levesque: Well, we had, funny enough, already started having impact, so I was able to at least respond with, “Hey, we’ve kind of already started in a few ways” and walk through where we were having impact and just focus on the strategy, what our plans forward were and where we wanted to go from there. So I think that’s how I responded.

Lenny: Okay, great work. So something I’ve started doing actually on this podcast is I’ve started to keep a little Post-it of, here it is, of themes that continue to recur across companies that are most successful. And impact comes… It’s number one on my Post-it here, is just impact comes up so often as something that the best companies continue to come back to and focus on and put a lot of emphasis on. I guess I don’t know what the question is exactly, but is that just what you find in the work that you do with all the companies you work with? Just how important it’s to come back to impact as maybe the primary thing?

Luc Levesque: Yeah, I mean I think it’s easy for a lot of leaders and companies to get caught up in how hard are people working, what did they do, and recognizing and rewarding activity. I mean, everybody wants to have impact. The companies that truly focus on that are the ones that break through and really make a lot of progress towards the mission. So that seems obvious I think when I say it out loud, but being in that culture and having it really ingrained in everything you do whether it’s performance reviews or strategies or these reviews with the executive team, it all gravitates around impact. And I think it’s that laser focus on it that matters so much. But I mean I’ve certainly seen it going other ways where it’s more about working long hours. And certainly there’s a correlation, to be clear, between working hard and impact, but I find it’s just such a precise way to think about how people are performing or what you’re doing in terms of is your strategy working? Is the direction you’re moving in having the intended outcomes that you want? And yeah, I do think it’s all about that.

Being a growth leader where everything’s so measurable, impact is something that can be very clearly measured and you know whether you have it or not. So the most important thing that we work on constantly is reviewing what’s our strategy, what are we working on? Is that driving towards the top level north star outcome we want? Is that having the impact? And then basically doing everything around that singular north star. So it’s very, very important. I think it’s more profound than it might seem just from the outside. But if you’ve worked in different companies, you’ve probably experienced different versions of this too.

Lenny: Yeah. I want to spend more time on this, but before we move on, you also have another Zuck story. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Zuck recruited you personally to join Facebook/Meta. Is that true? And then if true, what was that like to be recruited by Zuck personally?

Luc Levesque: It was an interesting experience, very intense, but also one of the reasons for it was I was living in Canada and my family was there and I had some strong personal reasons why I couldn’t leave Canada. But yeah, we had a lot of discussions with Mark. I won’t get into the micro details of it, that’s more Mark’s story to tell than mine. But a few takeaways from going through that experience. As a leader, hiring is the most important thing as we all know. It’s a craft and a skill that I’m always working on refining. I have my own playbook that I’m constantly tweaking, testing out different approaches, trying to find the best talent and assessing them and trying to close them and bringing them on board. So I learned a lot through that experience with Mark.

A couple things that stood out were the first one would be that Mark really involved the entire executive team. It wasn’t just me talking to recruiting or talent or HR or just Mark, it was the entire executive team. That’s something that I think a lot of leaders don’t take advantage of. I’ve seen leaders, I’ve certainly done this at times where you go it alone or you’re working with recruiting, but the reality is all the leaders, all the execs in the company know how important it’s to bring in talent and they’re always more than happy to help. So that’s something that I think more leaders should do is really recruit all of their peers and their leaders in the company to help close. And that’s certainly something that happened when I was in discussions with Mark and Facebook about joining.

The second one, which I had I suppose never experienced before, was that they made it very personal. I had these reasons why I couldn’t leave. So initially I was excited by the opportunity, but I couldn’t see myself moving to California for personal reasons. And through discussions, Mark basically involved my wife, involved my spouse in this, Andrea. We flew down, had dinner with him and Priscilla, his wife. Andrea had ended up meeting with many of the executives at Facebook and really talking through what was holding us back, why we couldn’t come, potential options and ideas for how we could come down.

But involving somebody’s spouse and family I think is a really good idea because it’s a very personal decision to change company. It involves more than just that person you’re talking to, it involves the whole family. So that was something that I think is an important thing to have in your kind of playbook for hiring, is really think about the whole person’s family and involve them if you can. In fact, Toby did this as well at Shopify. He flew down here with Fiona and we had breakfast with Andrea and them and reviewed a few offers when I joined Shopify.

And then the third thing is just to be absolutely relentless and don’t give up and don’t let momentum drop. It took seven months for me to go from, “This is amazing, exciting, but there’s no way I can make this work” to, “Okay, let’s move to Palo Alto.” And Mark, the execs, a variety of leaders there were in discussions for months and months and months and never letting the momentum die. That’s something that I think is really important. No doesn’t necessarily mean no, and in this case it definitely wasn’t the case. I had the same experience with Toby at Shopify where we’ve been talking about working together for over 10 years now. And then finally the timing was right and I was able to join the company.

So just be relentless, involve the family, involve the spouse if you can, and recruit some help from other executives in the company. Those were some of the things that stood out through my experience. But yeah, it was a pretty wild time in my life.

Lenny: Relentless is actually another word. I wasn’t necessarily I’m supposed to yet, but I feel like it’s another trend to cross. The most impactful and successful founders is just this like, “I will not give up. I will keep at it.”

Luc Levesque: [inaudible 00:13:10].

Lenny: And so that’s a really interesting example of that in action. I was going to talk about this later, but maybe it’s a good time to talk about it now, which is around hiring. So you talked about you have this playbook for how to hire. You mentioned to me that you kind of find that as you scale as a leader, hiring ends up being like the most important skill maybe, maybe one of the most important skills. I’d love to hear your take on just what you found about hiring as you’ve grown as a product leader.

Luc Levesque: Well, I think you reach a point in your career where you realize that hiring is the skill you now need to become world-class at because you’re not no longer doing the work yourself. You’re still of course involved and doing some of the work and getting your hands dirty, but the bulk of your team’s success now will be the quality of the hires you make and you truly need to be world-class at that. So yeah, I built this playbook out. I was in Canada in Ottawa when I sold that company, Tripadvisor, and really started growing my team and becoming more Leaning into leadership at the time through that experience.

One of the benefits of being in Ottawa and kind of off the grid if you will, is it’s a curse and a benefit as that you don’t have a ton of people you can learn from. So it does mean you need to go to first principles and think things through from the ground up. It takes a little longer, but you come up with your own playbooks on how to do things. I think you’ve seen my blueprint, which is a good example of that where I have this blueprint I put together. When new people join the team, I show them my blueprint, which is basically a list of my quirks so we can really quickly align. That’s something that just being in Ottawa and trying to figure out how to be a leader and avoid mistakes, I was like, “Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a blueprint? When somebody joined, you can just tell them all of your quirks and you can just quickly calibrate on how it is to work together versus through awkward long discussions over the course of a year.”

My hiring playbook’s a similar thing. I think of it in three different chapters, if you will. There’s finding talent, assessing talent, and closing talent. In terms of finding talent, I do believe that the best predictor of future performance is past performance. So I’m looking for what I call signs of excellence. So I want to know the top people generally have done multiple amazing things in their life, repeated success, not just once. Maybe it was work related, maybe not work related. But generally speaking, if you think back to the stars you’ve worked with, they’ve done some amazing things. And that’s why I always start when I interview or when I chat with people, I started talking about just trying to understand, “What has been your path? What have you done professionally and not professionally?” And generally, stars going to stand out. It’s very rare that there’s not something obvious that comes through.

So for myself personally, I’m looking for kind of three different signs of excellence to tell me that it doesn’t have to be three. The mental model I have is as you’re talking to them, you’re getting pluses and negatives. There’s red flags you’re hearing and there’s really great things. And then at the end you can make an opinion of how good this person is.

Another great sign of excellence, and this was just through reflecting on stars on the team and thinking what makes them unique, what about them. One of them is when somebody’s boss leaves the company and then comes back to poach them, that is such a strong signal because if you think of what just happened, the leader who knows exactly how good this person you’re talking to is, they have the most knowledge of the performance of this individual, they left the company. They’ve come back to poach them, putting their own reputation at risk by coming back depending on the situation. And they would never do that unless this person was really, really good.

So you don’t want to over pivot on one signal, you want to look at the full picture. But those are the types of things I look at to bring in top talent. And I’ve got this whole playbook, mistakes I’ve made that I’ve learned from, things to avoid. And over the years, yeah, I’ve put together this playbook that I try to follow and I’m always running little experiments to try to make it better.

Lenny: Were going to that blueprint that you mentioned. A lot of which you’re talking about is probably more relevant to senior executive type people because you’re looking for… Or maybe not because you’re looking for say three.

Luc Levesque: [inaudible 00:17:06].

Lenny: Okay. So people early in their career could also have three, say, moments of excellence?

Luc Levesque: Yeah, I mean just thinking off the top, it depends on the type of person you’re hiring, but are they a founder? Have they tried to do something? Did they win an award somewhere? Are they a gold medalist at something? Have they done something that others have not that shows grit, that shows drive, that shows the ability to succeed? And I’ve seen that you can apply that to any candidate you’re hiring.

Lenny: The implication there is, without that, they’re probably not going to be stars, that there’s a strong correlation between having signs of excellence and them performing really well in this role.

Luc Levesque: Correct, exactly. Yeah, I mean I suppose it’s possible, but it would be pretty rare that somebody would come in without some sign that they stand above the crowd. And again, I’m talking about you generally want to hire the top 1% of candidates. So when you’re looking for the best of the best, you definitely are looking for those signals.

Lenny: Awesome. Okay, so I’m going to bring us back on the agenda that I had for myself, which is I want to start with talking about advisorships and advising and growth advisors. You’ve been a growth advisor for a long time to some of the most amazing companies out there, Twitter, Pinterest, Patreon, Canva, Thumbtack. I’m sure there’s others that you don’t list that are more informal. Now you work at Shopify. And so what I think about here is a lot of founders often think about, “Should I bring on an advisor? What should I look for an advisor? I’ve heard stories of advisors being useless sometimes. People tell me I don’t need advisors.” So I guess the question here is just what’s your take on when it makes sense to bring on and consider bringing on a growth advisor and what should people look for when they’re exploring and talking to a potential growth advisor?

Luc Levesque: A few thoughts. In terms of when, I don’t think you can probably come into early. It’s probably harder to find really good ones than it is to time it. But generally speaking, I would say you don’t want to focus too much on growth until you have product market fit. So make sure you have a product that users love that’s either showing strong signs of retention or has some good loop that you can see that you can start thinking about growth.

Lenny: Let me follow on that thread real quick because I find some founders still want to have someone come help them with growth even though they know they don’t have product market fit, even though this tip comes up every single time when I’m talking to growth person, like, “Wait till you have product market fit before doing growth stuff.” So could you just add a little bit of why that’s important while we’re on that topic?

Luc Levesque: Growth advice is generally always applicable. And if you can start thinking about how to build your product early, even if it’s pre-product market fit, you’re not going to do any damage, but you may be wasting some capital on an advisor or a growth person too early. The problem that I see is if you start growing a product that doesn’t have product market fit, you’re actually doing more damage than good because you have a product that is now being exposed to the market through growth levers and through optimization that is giving a bad experience with your product. And you want that product that you know is tight and you know has product market fit to start building the flywheel and start growing. You don’t want it to be growing if it doesn’t satisfy that need that you’re trying to build out for. So I can see it having more damage than good because when somebody tries something, they’re unlikely to try it again. And so that’s the dangerous game you can get into. So you’re better off with a good product that’s satisfying a need and then growing from there.

I will say to kind of play devil’s advocate with myself and something that I’ve done actually in one of the products, I’ve built several consumer products and grown them, is that sometimes to know if you have a product, you need users to use it. So there’s like some subtlety in here, but I would say if you are trying to get users in to start playing with it at scale, I mean try to focus in on a market that is maybe off the grid. Like pick some English-speaking country that’s a bit off the grid that you can isolate your marketing to so you can start getting dozens or a couple hundred people per day coming in and giving you feedback.

I’ve seen that work too. So I’d say wait till you have product market fit. If you do start growing your product early because you need that signal from people actually using it beyond just focus groups and friends or small numbers of people, try to do it off the grid in smaller markets that you can get kind of contain the growth and get what you’re really trying to get, which is that signal on is it working or not.

Lenny: Awesome. Okay, I threw us off track. Let’s get back on track. So we’re talking about when it makes sense to find a growth advisor and then what to look for and so on that you might want to work with.

Luc Levesque: I mean, what makes a great growth advisor is somebody who really understands what to do but also why certain growth levers work. It’s that kind of deep understanding of levers of onboarding or whatever area they’re focusing on that really makes growth advisor stand out. So when you’re looking for a growth advisor, you want to have those discussions to see like, “How much depth does this person have? Have they seen a playbook and they’re just good at repeating the playbook or are they evolving, are they growing?” The best way to get to know that is to start really asking them questions about growth and growth advising and the certain things that they’ve done and why they think those have worked.

This can be tricky if you don’t yourself know growth. So I think one thing that I have not seen a lot of founders do that I would advise is if you have an advisor already… Because this applies to finding growth advisors, but it also applies to hiring good growth talent. So if you have somebody you know whether it’s already an advisor or somebody who knows growth, you can solicit their help in trying to flesh out whether somebody you’re trying to hire is of high talent. So if you have an advisor, you can make that one of their roles is vet out any new talent coming in. And if you’re looking for an advisor, try to find somebody that you know and trust who can do that first pass. Because for somebody who knows growth that you trust, it’s actually not a lot of work for them to vet out how talented someone else’s. It’s an easy ask to make and something that if you have that person in your network or that worked with you that you can leverage for.

But I haven’t seen that too often where founders kind of take advantage of people they know or existing growth advisors to help recruit and vet talent because it can be quite hard if you don’t know the growth space to know if somebody’s good or not.

Lenny: That’s a really interesting idea and it could be where you find someone that’s too busy to work with you, but maybe you could just ask, “Hey, could you just easily help me vet people?” And it takes a lot less time.

Luc Levesque: Yeah, I’ve never been asked that, which is, I mean I don’t know if I’ll start getting asked this now, but it does seem like that’s a really simple way to add a ton of value. And as a founder, I mean even if you have to pay this person or whatever you have to do, but it’s such an important hire to get right. We talk about the 10X engineer and we don’t really talk about the 10X growth advisor or 10X growth person, but the same dynamic applies. You could argue it applies even more because the right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact where they’re either building or helping to ideate or helping to implement a growth loop that literally changes the company. As we know, you need a great product and you need a great growth loop. And it’s usually just one loop that you need to get right. Most companies have gotten to where they are just off of one really strong channel that they’ve just dominated, so it’s important to get right.

Lenny: Is there an example of that sort of impact that you’ve seen in your advisorship or other people’s of just an impact from one conversation or a little bit of a help?

Luc Levesque: Definitely. And I think what I would point to is the advantage of a growth advisor is it takes a long time to understand a channel. Certainly people have to know their stuff, they have to be very good at their craft, their growth craft, but also they have to be exposed to a large set of experiments or an environment where they’ve just seen what works and what doesn’t. So no matter how good somebody is, if they haven’t been exposed to an environment where there’s a lot of experimentation, a lot of learning, it’s very hard for them to internalize that. So once a growth advisor has that, it’s takes years to learn it, but it literally can take seconds literally to communicate that. So I’ve worked with some companies that you’ve mentioned and certainly have had impact very quickly.

I mean, one example would be a company that I worked with. Now, a public company. At the time, they weren’t. On day one, walked in, they presented their strategy, their plans, their funnels and their landing pages. I could see very quickly that there was something they were doing that was a little off and I asked them, “Well, why are you doing it that way?” And they said, “Well, we think it just looks better that way.” And I said, “Well, just do it this other way.” I remember this because it was such a short conversation and then three weeks later we connected and I heard they had rolled it out and it was a large impact that they had from this one change. This has happened many times with the companies I’ve worked with, but it’s a good example that once you know it, it’s not hard to recognize it if you deeply understand it to give advice, but it takes a long time to get the base knowledge.

Luc Levesque: So I don’t do these too often anymore, but when I do advise, I take them very seriously. I focus exclusively on having impact. I think that’s really important because like you say, there’s a lot of advisors out there. Some of them are great, some of them different qualities, and you really want to make sure that if you are an advisor, you want to be in the camp of when this person comes in, they have a lot of impact and it takes time and focus and energy and alignment and there’s a bunch of things we can talk about that that helps to drive that alignment. But having impact is the most important thing, whether you’re an advisor or if you’re hiring because it’s one of those weird disciplines where the right person at the right time can literally say a sentence that changes the trajectory of your company. You can’t say that for a lot of different disciplines, but this is one of them.

Lenny: There’s that word impact again,

Luc Levesque: Impact. Impact.

Lenny: The point you just made about how one conversation can have a ton of impact is a reminder of why sometimes the price of an advisor feels absurd where like, “For one hour it’s like thousands of dollars,” but it’s because obviously they spent a decade learning a thing and one conversation is all of that work they put into it crystallized for you in the moment.

Luc Levesque: Exactly. It’s something I’ve experienced several times in hindsight when you’re like, “Okay, here’s the needle in the haystack” and then it’s implemented and you can see hundreds of percentages, sometimes over a thousand percent lift when you get it right. It’s exhilarating. It’s great. I have something I used to say, which is, you want your impact to be so big there’s a slide in the next board deck on try to explain what happened. That can happen when you are advising companies because you’re able to share a very quickly insights. But one way to drive alignment is not everybody can do this, not all advisors do it this way, but I personally love just when I do these, which is not that frequent, just purely doing equity because I love the alignment in outcomes where the founder will be successful and you will be successful. So the incentives are really good to drive the right performance and the right outcomes that you want as a founder.

So if you can do it, I would definitely advise founders to bring advisors in for equity if you can. I think the same applies for your internal growth team. You want to make sure that the teams are incentivized not on activities, on doing stuff, because there’s a lot of stuff to be done in growth, but really driving the outcomes that you want. And equity’s just a great way of saying, “Hey, we’re in this together. We’re on the same side of the table. Let’s go grow this company.”

Lenny: I was actually about to ask you what kind of structure you recommend for an advisorship. Is there anything else you can share about just what you’d recommend a founder do in terms of compensation for an advisor?

Luc Levesque: There’s a couple things. I’m a big fan of equity because of the alignment of incentives. You should think about, without getting into too much detail of the actual structure of the deals, but think about how you vest the equity. The last thing you want is an advisor holding back on sharing knowledge. The ideal engagement would be an advisor comes in, delivers as much value as possible quickly, and then trains your team. And then maybe it’s a one-year engagement and hopefully they’ve learned because the advisor has been incentivized to share as much as possible and to train the team as much as possible. And then ideally you don’t need them anymore after. So there’s something there about structuring equity vesting. I’m a big fan of vesting earlier rather than later. So think about in terms of structure you’re vesting, commensurate with the value you want, which is very much front loaded.

I’m also a big fan of three month cliffs. Something I’ve done, I always do actually, is listen, in the first three months you’ll know both sides if it’s working or not. And you want to de-risk that on both sides because it really should be seen as a partnership between the advisor and the founder. If the founder thinks you’re not adding value in the first few months, I think they should just tear it up and both sides move on. It’s not good for the founder to continue the deal and it’s not good frankly for the advisor because they’re not, for some reason, able to add value in that environment. So I love a three-month cliff at the beginning where if it’s not working in the first three months, you tear up the deal and both parties walk away and de-risk the entire thing, and again, drives incentives in the right way where the advisor is 100% incentivized at as much value as fast as possible. And so that’s another thing that I tend to do and I’ve done it for a long time.

Lenny: That’s a really good tip. Basically don’t do it for a year if you’re vesting for advisors, probably not even to a year, but yeah.

Luc Levesque: There’s a bunch of ways to do it. Honestly, it’s hard enough to find growth advisors that have capacity, so you got to also say like, “What can you do that the advisor’s comfortable with?” But yeah, I mean just to be candid, I think you want to structure in a way where you’re not dependent on the advisor over time. They’re adding a ton of value, they’re helping teach the team, they’re probably bouncing around because your company’s changing, your team’s changing, your leaders are changing. But over time, and that can be years, but it shouldn’t be indefinite. You shouldn’t need an advisor forever.

I’ve seen a scenario where there’s desire to keep the advisor on almost as insurance, like, “If something goes wrong, I just wanted to be able to pick up the phone.” That can make sense. But I do think a good growth advisor is incentivized to share as much as possible, as fast as possible to have impact to train your team. And then whether you want to keep them on or not long term as an insurance policy or just to answer questions as things change, that should be a choice and not because, “If we lose the advisor. We’re completely screwed.” That would be a bad place for you to be in as a founder.

Lenny: You said it’s hard to find a good advisor, 100% agree. Any advice for people to help them find an advisor that might be the right fit?

Luc Levesque: Yeah, I would say there’s more of them these days than there were even just five years ago or 10 years ago. Depending on your situation, if you’re a founder, I would start with your investors. I think VCs have an amazing network of advisors. I get, I don’t know, a couple requests a week that I’m not taking right now. But that from my experience and what I’ve seen, that’s probably especially the high end VCs, the very talented VCs will have this network. And frankly, it’s a great partnership as an advisor for you to have. You can help the companies, you can help the VCs and it helps you. So everybody wins, just asking other founders that had good experience, much like hiring.

Luc Levesque: The third advice I would give is to find companies that are world-class at what you’re trying to grow, what channel or skill you’re looking at, and then reach out and see if there’s a way to help that way. That’s actually how I got started. I was at Tripadvisor and a prominent VC reached out. One of the companies they were working with needed some help on SEO. I was still in Canada at the time, got connected with them, had a phone call, had a significant impact through that one phone call. And rather than joining as an advisor, I essentially helped them out pro bono in exchange for, “Hey, I want to get connected in the Valley.” So I was in Canada, I wanted to start another company, I wanted to get connected. So through that tactic where they reached out to a company that was known to be world-class at SEO, I think that was really smart on this VC’s part.

And then maybe some advice to up and coming growth advisors would be that first one, I didn’t take a single shred of equity or money and just tried to have as much impact as possible and to help out this company as much as possible and then make sure that I was able to get connected to other people that I wanted to meet in the Bay Area. And then kind of things snowballed from there.

Lenny: I definitely want to chat about how to become a growth advisor because I think people listening here might be like, “Oh, that sounds pretty good. Someday maybe I’ll become a growth advisor.” But before we get to that, what are things that an advisor are best suited for versus finding someone full-time versus no one? What are the ideal kind of problem sets for an advisor versus say, full-time hire person?

Luc Levesque: I would say your preference should always be to have somebody in-house. I’ll start there because you want to have that as part of the culture. There’s so much more that they can do when they’re in-house. That being said, if you can’t find somebody in-house, then bring on an advisor… Even if you bring on an advisor, some advice to founders would be you want to surround your team or at least one person that you’ve identified who’s just a amazing world-class doer, even if they don’t know growth, with a set of growth advisors so that they’re learning, that’s being put through the culture of the company and that knowledge stays inside of the company. So I’d say I would prefer to go internal, surround these people with great advisors and then take it from there. That would be how I approach it.

Lenny: Okay. So two thoughts here. One is I feel like this podcast is becoming an interesting way to discover awesome growth advisors. I think over time I’m building this directory of who are awesome, smart growth people that are open to advising. So that could be an interesting opportunity to just look through the folks on this podcast and-

Luc Levesque: Yep, there’s some great people that have been on here. Definitely.

Lenny: Totally working my way through all the amazing least smart growth people and product leaders. The other is I’ve noticed they’re a lot of the best growth advisors have worked with the same sorts of companies. I find Miro comes up a lot, Canva comes up a lot, Pinterest. All these people that have worked with say Pinterest that I hear about are just awesome. Casey comes to mind, Melissa Tan who’s coming out with a podcast, I think she worked with them. Dropbox. Anyway, so maybe one idea, see who these companies work with as advisors and that can maybe point you to people that are worth exploring.

Luc Levesque: I mean, that’s a good idea. It kind of goes back to something I mentioned earlier, which is companies that have a lot of traffic and that have a lot of users are a great learning ground for growth people and for advisors, because no matter how smart you are, you need the reps. You got to go to the growth gym and put in the reps, which is experiments. You’ve got to try things, things that are going to work, things that aren’t going to work. There’s a discipline of when something doesn’t work, you can learn almost as much as when something works. But you need that traffic, you need that environment. And that’s why certain companies have these great people coming out like Casey at Pinterest and other people that have been at these companies that have the traffic, have the culture to support it, to support growth. I don’t think that’s a coincidence why some of these companies have some great people coming from them.

Lenny: The other tip I just thought about as you were talking is everyone’s launching a Substack newsletter that is doing any sort of advising because there’s a lot of power in building an audience and creating kind of awareness of what you do. So I wonder if another tip is search Substack’s directory of newsletters for specific things you’re dealing with, like say, go to PLG or sales and you might find someone there.”

Luc Levesque: I haven’t done that, but that seems like a reasonable way to do it.

Lenny: That’s where we’re all heading.

Luc Levesque: I’m not saying that the people on Substack have this. But as advice to the people listening, is when you’re vetting for a growth advisor or growth talent, don’t just wait it on the public halo of somebody. That’s a common mistake I’ve seen where maybe somebody’s done presentations at a conference or somebody’s done… I don’t know, but their Twitter following is broad. They can be excellent. That’s not a disqualifier immediately, but just make sure not to make the hire just exclusively on that. I’ve made that mistake a few times and it’s a common one to get into. So make sure you’re vetting properly, even if somebody with a large following on Substack or Twitter. That’s I think an important thing to keep in mind.

Lenny: 1000% agree. I always say that the best product leader is the best growth. People don’t have time to sit on Twitter and tweet and write newsletters. They’re doing the job, working, building, growing, and maybe eventually they get out of that and start writing. But I 1000% agree, there’s a lot of people-

Luc Levesque: Well, not to disqualify all the people on Twitter.

Lenny: Absolutely.

Luc Levesque: Some of them are tweeting [inaudible 00:37:45], but my point is just don’t over pivot on the halo. Just look at their past performance. What teams have they been on? What environment do they have? Do they really know growth? And sometimes they do, but I think it’s a common mistake to say, “Oh yeah, they have a large following, let’s hire this person.” That’s poorly.

Lenny: 1000% agree. Rarely does a celebrity hire that seems really genius on Twitter and Substack end up being as amazing as you think.

Luc Levesque: Yeah, it does happen, but yeah.

Lenny: It does happen. Absolutely. One last question around this topic. People listening might want to become growth advisors, I’d mentioned this earlier. Is there any other advice you want to share? Just like, “If you want to become a growth advisor someday, here’s what you should think about.”

Luc Levesque: Yeah, I think the right mental model as a growth advisor is around the same one as an investor. So the most important thing an advisor can do aside from having impact and knowing their craft is picking which companies to work with, especially if you’re working for equity. So I’ll only speak to that, but you’re basically putting in your time, you’re picking likely a smaller number. You only have so many hours in the day of companies to work with and you want to make sure there’s a likely exit in the future. So for me personally, I have a spreadsheet, like most big decisions that I make in my life. Over the years I’ve just added criteria and questions to ask myself about the company and then reflect on, “Okay, is this kind of checking all the boxes for a likely outcome?” Because you don’t just need to be successful, you need to be successful and for the company to be successful and for there to be liquidity of that.

So you need to put yourself in the shoes of an investor and look at it as an investment. That is arguably the most important thing because you can go and do a great job and then wait many years and potentially not see any reward for it. And I think that’s the nice thing about the equity structure in that you’re tied in the same incentives with the founder, which is just great in terms of any relationship to have the same incentives, but you want to make sure that there’s a good likelihood of a decent outcome down the road.

If I can throw another one in.

Lenny: Yeah, absolutely.

Luc Levesque: 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.

Lenny:

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?

Luc Levesque: Yeah, I’ve been doing SEO for a really long time. It’s a lot of fun and certainly being a supervisor was a great learning ground for that, that we were able to really innovate and try new things there. In terms of the playbook that we built out. That was a lot of fun, those years.

Couple thoughts. The first one would be I do think there’s an SEO play in any company. Maybe at a different extent, but Google is such a large funnel of existing demand for your product or your product area that there’s usually an angle to get some SEO traffic there. So I do think it applies to most companies. I would say if you’re an early product that the world’s never seen, it’s a brand new thing, there might be some creation, some demand creation you need to do, but most of the time there’s existing demand in Google where you can harvest demand or there’s queries that are related to your topic that you can start ranking for to start building brand awareness. So there’s always some angle.

And then I kind of divide websites or online products into two categories. There’s the ones which are smaller sites, small number of pages, very targeted at your product and don’t have this kind of loop of creating new pages automatically. Most eCommerce sites actually have would a number of pages around the products and about us, those types of pages. That’s one type of sites. Let’s say they have dozen pages. And then there’s other ones with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of pages which are either user generated content like Tripadvisor and Pinterest and others, or marketplaces like Thumbtack and other types of websites like that. Those are generally easier to see a huge amount of impact very quickly because there’s such a large optimization surface and ideally it’s growing and generating traffic automatically.

Luc Levesque: I’ve always thought of LinkedIn as just such a great example of this where you have this viral loop where if you recall when it was just starting, everybody was getting these invites from LinkedIn. Those come and go. You get an invite, you register, you don’t. That happens. But the byproduct is when people join, they create this beautiful lightning page, which is your profile that gets indexed. It’s kind of like a viral loop feeding an SEO loop that continues to grow. So that’s a good example of use generated content which kind of feeds on itself and grows. So there’s those two categories. Going back to the first category, if you only have a small handful of pages, the way to think about that is you certainly want to optimize those pages, then you want to start creating content that speaks to your audience beyond that. So you need a content strategy, whether it’s a blog or creating new parts of your site that address questions that your audience might have. But generally speaking, I think there’s an SEO play in any company and there’s just different tactics, strategies, and approaches to get there.

Lenny: Awesome. I never thought of it that way, that there’s kind of these two buckets. So the first bucket is like you don’t have a ton of pages that naturally are generated as a part of your experience. And the second is you do. I guess in the second bucket I think of Reddit and Glassdoor and Quora, Tripadvisor, a great example, Pinterest. In the first bucket is the way to generate pages. Basically, it’s editorially write content and have people write things for you. Is that generally the strategy?

Luc Levesque: There’s different ways of doing it, but a good content strategy is a kind of tried and true approach. Definitely.

Lenny: And in that bucket of you don’t naturally have a ton of pages, can you primarily grow through SEO? Or is SEO always going to be this minority channel and you have to find something else?

Luc Levesque: No, it can be a big channel. This is also about creating content, but it’s not your users creating the content. You have to go create the content and have some high quality answer to a question that’s being asked on Google. I think one thing to keep in mind with SEO is entire industries are based off of single keywords. I remember when I was in the travel industry that literally companies were bought and sold based on one keyword rank. So it’s not like, “Oh, it’s a little bit of traffic.” And I think this is a bit unintuitive with growth. A lot of people, they’ll think of growth as linear or it’s another channel, it’s another thing. I mean, growth done right is exponential. It literally is company changing.

When you’re talking specifically about SEO, keep in mind the world is searching for that thing, targeted on that one keyword and likely you’re clicking the number one search result. So getting that number one spot is not like, “Oh, that’s a little bit of traffic.” You can literally build an entire business around that first spot. So don’t think that’s… Well, maybe it is commonly known, I’m not sure, but it’s definitely something that is non-obvious or intuitive I think to most people. And if you have an entire SEO team working on one keyword, I don’t think that’s crazy because a small number of keywords can define an entire industry or a business.

Lenny: Is there an example of that sort of situation when keyword’s building a massive company?

Luc Levesque: Yeah, I mean there’s a lot I’m sure. I can speak to my own company that I sold to Tripadvisor. It was called TravelPod. It was a travel blogging website where you can think WordPress, but for travel, which I started earlier. It was the first site to do that. I made the mistake of not knowing SEO or growth before I sold the company. And so that was a great learning for me. When I went in, this is a story where we’re looking to acquire another site and I thought the product was pretty poor. I remember talking to the founder and thinking… He’d asked me if we’d want to acquire it, and, “The product’s terrible. Why would I want to acquire that?” He’s like, “Yeah, they’re 10 times bigger than you.” And, “What?” That was when I realized, “Okay, we’ve been building a great product and great engineering culture and it is important, but you really need to know this growth stuff.” So that’s actually the moment I shifted to, “All right, we have to really know these growth levers.”

In that space, the number one keyword was Travel Blog. And so owning that was a big deal and we did not own it. I think we ranked number two for a really long time. I can’t remember if we got it in the end, but that’s just one example where… And there was many, many travel businesses where I always loved looking at a business and trying to figure out, “What’s their growth loop? How did they do that?” And it’s not like, “Oh, it’s a great business. It just grew.” Most of the time it’s price line crushed it at SEM. Facebook crushed it at a viral loop where you got tagged in a photo, you got an email and you had to go register because there’s a photo of you somewhere you really want to see. Tripadvisor did a great job at SEO. In [inaudible 00:49:14], it’s just one really strong channel that propelled the company forward. And in this case, it can literally come down to one keyword like we had at TravelPod.

Lenny: So maybe it’s a good time just to give a people a mental model of the different channels/loops that exist. So you’ve talked about SEO is one, paid search is one. What’s the collection for people to think about? Usually as you said, one of the use is the primary source of growth for a company.

Luc Levesque: Yeah, there’s a variety of them. I think you have to look at where the intent is right now. It does change over time, but you have social channels like TikTok, Instagram. Influencers are a great area to engage with there. You have SEO, you have search. I think ChatGPT is another upcoming one that we might want to talk about a little bit where I do think we’ve never seen that kind of growth for search before and that’s a platform that we have to start thinking about how do we optimize for it. Google just announced there are recent changes. They’re going to be putting in an AI box at the top, the searchers also, how do you optimize in a world where it’s not so much about optimizing for the platform, but teaching the AI what you do and why you’re the best in the world at it. So that’s another whole area that we could talk about, but that’s a big channel I think that that’s growing.

Viral loops are always a powerful thing if you can get them to work. That’s more about psychology and channel optimization, where you want people to be incentivized to share the product that you have with their friends and then to have their friends come back and register. So you can have one viral loop, you can have secondary viral loops, you can bolt viral loops on your existing products. There’s different ways of doing this. And then just backing up. When I think about growth, I don’t think about a specific… It’s not growth equals SEO and Instagram. For me, growth equals whatever it takes to move the needle. So I get this question all the time, “How do you build a growth team? What does a growth team do?” And I say whatever it takes. That could be zero to one building a new product. It could be M&A, it could be SEO, it could be social, it could be onboarding.

Luc Levesque: I think that’s a better framework to look at. And then if you look at it through that lens, then partnerships easily folds into that where I’ve seen a lot of businesses get very big on just really clever partnerships, either strategic or broad kind of affiliate based partnerships. So there’s a lot of channels. I definitely wouldn’t restrict the scope of a growth team to just a small subset, but have a very wide funnel or at least strategy in terms of just test a lot of different things and go after the channels that work and pivot when it does, and then really lean into the one or two or three that really work because sometimes that’s all it takes for business.

Lenny: Well, you definitely nerd sniped me with the ChatGPT, so let’s just spend some time there. I think this relates to just the general sense that SEO is always changing and it feels like this is an SEM I guess in this case too. And ChatGPT and Bard, I guess, is maybe the latest change. So what should we know there?

Luc Levesque: Yeah, I think we’re all still trying to figure it out. I was at Google IO last week or the week before. As soon as I saw the search result with the big box of AI, answers at the top, having done this for so long, I immediately knew the impact that I think is about to come. I’ve seen this play out in travel where Google acquired ITA and did flight search and hotel search. Generally, it’s great for users and great for Google and the search engines, but makes it a little bit difficult for the publishers and the sites that are adding value to the ecosystem through being ranked in search results.

So what we’re about to see is basically Google, what they showed was a big box on top of the search results that answers the query directly. So if you think about that, that means that there’s a lot of queries right now that users are clicking through down on the organic links and getting their answer there, which will be answered directly in the search result. We’ve seen this play out over the last five to 10 years where more and more answers are being shown at the top. Every time something changes, entire industries are disrupted or are changed. And I think that’s going to happen again.

So there’s different types of keywords. There’s transactional ones like e-commerce keywords with purchase intent. There’s navigational ones where you’re trying to get somewhere. And there’s informational keywords, which is, “I have a question. I’m looking for an answer.” It’s pretty broad. It’s a big area. I think that last category of keywords is particularly at risk. So if anybody listening to this is currently getting traffic on those, you should start thinking about what does that mean when things start changing. And I think the changes will be… We’ll probably start seeing things shift to paid. You have to pay for that free traffic.

The second one is there may just be a case where those keywords just don’t get many clicks anymore. You might drop down to a very small number of clicks, if at all, because questions will get answered directly in the search results. So it’s a big shift. We have to see how things land, but that’s, I think over the next 12 to 24 months, if history repeats itself, we’ll see that channel change. We’ve seen this play out in all the different channels. They kind of evolve generally. You can’t blame the companies are doing what they have to do. ChatGPT is now 50% of my daily searches and not Google. So I think Google has to react and this is what we’ll see. So from a growth perspective, definitely something to start to think about.

Lenny: Super fascinating. I think about my newsletter and now Google suck it all up and just tell you all the answers. Great. Good news for me.

Luc Levesque: [inaudible 00:54:34].

Lenny: Yeah. Yeah. And change is great. Things don’t-

Luc Levesque: It’s exciting. It’s exciting. I’m just geeking out on growth a little bit, we haven’t had a big platform change in a long time. So I’m like, “All right, cool. Let’s go see what we can do here. How do you optimize this? How do you get listed if you can?” We’re not sure where the placements will be, but that will be the new game.

Lenny: Yeah, there’s actually a lennybot.com that is a GPT bot trained on my content that there’s a newsletter post about how it was all built so you could build your own. And so I think my new goal is going to have to convince people to go to lennybot.com instead of Google. Wish me luck.

Luc Levesque: Hey, you got to lean into it. Yeah, we have a shop.ai, this great AI-based shopping engine. And I’ll tell you, I bought so much on it. It’s so good. The more you use these technologies, the more you realize how good they are. And that’s something biggest coming. It’s not just, “Oh yeah, there’s another change.” I was summarizing the Google change is to some people and originally was thinking this is the biggest change in the last 10 years. And then when I reflected on the last 10 years, I thought this is actually the biggest change since the inception of Google actually. I don’t think we’ve seen something as profound as what’s coming. And you really need to get ready for it.

Lenny: Yeah, I’ve been using ChatGPT for helping me with interview questions actually, and once in a while there’s like a really good one.

Luc Levesque: Oh, that’s cool.

Lenny: So thank you ChatGPT, bringing me good things also. Maybe one more question along these lines around kind of connecting advisorship in SEO. Would you suggest when you’re starting to think about SEO, starting to invest in SEO, you might be listening to this feeling like, “I got to think about SEO,” does it make sense to bring on, say, SEO advisor like you? I know you’re not available currently, but other folks like you or are an agency that is really good at this stuff or bring on someone full time? Do you have any kind of frameworks for thinking about which direction to go?

Luc Levesque: It’s hard for an agency or a pure advisor without internal help to do a really good job without internal talent at the center. So I would say I would start with just hire somebody internally and give them the mandate and incentivize them correctly to go and own this channel. Even if they don’t know SEO, my advice would be get an engineer, get somebody who is just a relentless doer who wants to learn this and surround them with great advisors that I’ve just seen that work really well.

There are some good agencies out there. Agencies will be working with multiple companies, so it’s a little bit harder to get the same impact from an agency. It can work sometimes. But my preference is generally a last resort would be an agency. And I’d much rather have somebody who’s internal who knows the business, who knows the keywords, who can have the knowledge internally inside the company permanently and help grow a team around them and have succession in place and a proper team so that you’re not too dependent on this one person. But that would be my go-to. And then if you’re really stuck, you can use agencies, but my default would be having somebody internal supplemented with agencies if you have to. Sorry, SEO is very specific. I mean, it’s a very tight channel that knowing certain things about it can have a big impact. I think you do want people that have that experience that can bring that in from the outside to augmenting internal teams. It’ll take a really long time to learn it.

Lenny: Awesome. I was going to ask that. So you ideally want to find someone that’s done it before that isn’t just a relentless learner, but is that plus, has done SEO in the past?

Luc Levesque: Oh, yeah. Ideally, you hire an amazing SEO person who can bring internal. Second would be somebody amazing who can get things done, surround them with advisors. And then in my stack rank, the third would be agencies.

Lenny: Awesome. And then the other kind of common issue with SEOs, it takes a long time to show impact. Do you have just a rule of thumb of just give them this much time to see if they can make an impact?

Luc Levesque: I’d say a few things. I’d say if you already have content and pages that are pretty good and getting a decent amount of traffic, it doesn’t necessarily have to take a long time. So that would be my first reaction. It can take a long time. Generally, it takes a long time when you have to build new content. So the way to think about Google is it is going to take your content, it’s going to show it to its users, people that are searching, and it’s going to determine which piece of content is the best to ranked highly. It’s not just about little tricks and links and keyword ratios. Those days are over. Those do matter, but it’s not purely about that. And if you have a new piece of content, it takes time for Google to build enough trust to say, “Okay, I’m going to start showing this to users now” and then start collecting user feedback and then rank it appropriately. That can take some time.

But if you have existing pages that are ranking eight and they’re already on the first page, it doesn’t always happen. But I’ve certainly seen it, in fact more common than not that you could have sometimes hundreds of percentages of lift very quickly. And it depends what you’re starting with, is probably the right way to think about it. So if I’m trying to summarize it, I would say 12 months is probably max. If you can’t see impact in 12 months, there’s something wrong. If you have existing content, it could happen pretty early. It could happen on day one. Actually I’ve seen that happen. If you have to build new parts of the site, it can take months. I’ve seen that happen in companies I’ve worked with where I think it would be like a quarter, we had to wait till we saw a big lift. So it’s somewhere between three to 12 months.

Lenny: Awesome. That’s really helpful. Okay, so final topic/final question. You’ve had a truly incredible career. You’ve worked with incredible companies, incredible leaders. I’m looking at your site here in a site window and you’re like, here’s a picture of you and Zuck. Here’s a picture of you and Toby from Shopify, and there’s more. I’m curious what you believe has been key to your success and your career success that you suggest listeners who want to have some measure of similar success do.

Luc Levesque: It’s probably a bunch of things we could talk about here. Yeah, this is the obvious thing is I think you’ve just got to love what you do. You got to work hard. You have to have impact. Certainly at the end of the day in growth, that’s all that will matter. If I think back to specific things that I do though to pick one thing that’s been very important for me throughout my journey is the art of self-reflection. And coaches. I’ve had coaches my whole career. But the macro theme is you’re constantly iterating, experimenting, and becoming the best you can be in your career also as a dad and as a husband, and of course for your own personal health. But that reflection is so important. I’ve leveraged many, many different coaches over the years and now do a lot of self-reflection through a morning routine that I have and that I’ve been doing for quite some time that has been a big unlock for me.

The biggest, most important part of that morning routine is dedicating an hour aside to really think about, “What’s going well? What’s not going well? What am I screwing up? Well, why am I screwing it up?” Which is often more important than, “What am I screwing up?” And of course, “What am I going to do about it?” But as long as you’re learning and iterating every day, then you’re just making constant progress towards your goals. It’s something I do that I love doing. I love thinking. So I literally can just sit there and think for hours actually. I have a dashboard on all the areas that I’m focusing on with red, yellow, green, and just constantly revving on what am I working on improving, what am I doing, what experiments am I running and where am I doing well and where am I not doing well and how can I be better in all areas of my life, including being a leader. There’s a lot of different things to it, but I think that’s really important and something that I’ve learned over the years that is probably the most valuable to have as a skill.

Lenny: I definitely want to spend more time on this. So you said you sit for an hour reflecting on what’s going well, what’s not going well. Is there more you can share about how you accomplish that, how you find time to do this for an hour?

Luc Levesque: Yeah, it sounds crazy when you say it, but I do. So I wake up at 5:00. I work out. So I do cardio, I do some exercise. There’s this great book called Spark, which is all around the neuroscience of exercise and I really learned a lot from that in terms of having this great morning routine that really boots you up. I kind of call it my bootloader. When I start in the day, if I go through my bootloader, I have just a much better day.

So exercise, stretching, meditation, and then I do a cold plunge now. So I do a bunch of different things. But then I do some reading, but I do carve aside one hour where I go through… And this is probably important and it’s where I’ve landed, but structured self reflections. That’s why I have this dashboard. I have certain areas that I think about what’s going well, what’s not. I track all the experiments I’m writing. I’m just really passionate about if you’re going to do something, try to do it as best as you can. This is a habit that has allowed me to sharpen my skills in certain areas.

Lenny: What are some of these things you’re working on? If you can share what’s on this dashboard, how can people imagine what this might be?

Luc Levesque: So there’s a lot of personal stuff on it, but it literally is broken down between being a better friend, better husband, better dad, and then better leader. And so on the personal side, I’ve been known to work a lot of times. Balance is always hard to find. From being a dad and then thinking about how to be better there, I realized about six months ago that I’ve never actually asked for feedback on how I’m doing. So I asked my kids six months ago, I asked both of them independently, “What’s one thing I can do to do more of or do less of to be a better dad?” And they were kind of caught off guard by it. My son’s 15 and my other son is 12. And I said, “Take some time to think about it.” And after about a month, my son came back and said, “Dad, I got one.” He said, “I want to spend more time with you.”

So that was very helpful for me to hear. I’m big on routines and habits to make sure that things that you want to do are repeatable and it’s not one-off things. So ever since that day, I’ve now have a daddy date if you want to call it. But every two weeks we do one-on-one time together with each of the boys. They get to pick what we do just so we have that consistent, whether it’s dinner or play basketball in the front. But it’s all about feedback. So that’s one example on the personal side.

Lenny: This reminds me of a tweet I just saw where someone said that the only people that are going to remember that you worked late for many nights is your kids.

Luc Levesque: Wow. Wow. That’s deep. I like that a lot.

Lenny: As a soon to be parent, that’s going to stick with me.

Luc Levesque: Wow, I like that a lot. So it’s tough, right? It’s tough to balance it all out. It’s very difficult because you want excel at everything you do in life. So that reflection helps, be it check-in as well of how am I doing in all these areas? And that I find the color coding is helpful for that too, of just doing a bit of a gut check and asking for that feedback.

Lenny: So it also makes me think about, I was watching a Jeff Bezos interview and ask him what his morning routine was and he said that he just likes to putter around. he likes to just sit around, talk to his kids, read the newspaper. He doesn’t book any meetings in the morning. He just finds he just needs a little flex time at the beginning.

Luc Levesque: Totally. Before I became a dad, I read somewhere that one of the most impactful things you can do as a father is just be there for dinner every night. So I have been there for 15 years every single night. But it was a good reminder it’s not enough. Having dinner is important with your family, but in our case there’s more you can do. And just getting that feedback and doing some reprioritization is always important.

Lenny: Speaking of dinners, and maybe just as a last question, I know you do this really interesting thing where you have dinners with interesting people. You just kind of invite them to your house. I don’t know if interesting is the right way to describe it, but just kind of interesting people, prominent people. Can you just talk about what that is and what you think about and the benefits of doing something like that?

Luc Levesque: I think interesting is the right way to think about it.

Lenny: Okay.

Luc Levesque: I started this when I was in Ottawa with a bunch of founders there. It’s become one of my favorite things to do. Honestly, it’s like the bright spot in my month that, I call them guilds. So the word guild is with the builders. That’s how it originally started. So Guild Night is what I call it. The idea is basically all interesting people doing interesting things actually want to spend time with each other. That’s why I’m actually surprised more people don’t do this. But I’ll basically have interesting people come, usually five or six. We’ll sit around talking about specific topics. So I do one for consumer product, I do one for SEO, I do one for growth leaders and just have really smart, interesting people come and we’ll talk about different topics that are relevant.

Sometimes we’ll pick a topic, so we’ll have a group and then we’ll say, “Hey, we want to talk about AI.” So one of the advantages of being in the Bay Area is you can find three or four people that likely wrote some of the core code in Google or in AI, and then they’ll join. People want to meet. People want to get together and have these conversations. So it’s very exhilarating. I learn a ton. It’s a lot of fun. I don’t know why more people don’t do it. And it’s a bit of work to organize, but it’s also just tactically been a great way to meet fascinating people. It’s helped a lot for recruiting, for if you need a back channel. Now you know all these people that are in different industries. But business aside, they’re very valuable business wise, but they’re just a lot of fun and they’ve become some of my favorite things that I do.

I’m really surprised why more people don’t do it because I think especially now that everybody’s remote and we’re working from home, or most people are, it’s more valued than ever. So it’s something I’m looking forward to continuing and always actually through my morning reflection, thinking about what are new ones I can spin up who are interesting people that we want to break bread with. I do think it’s important that it’s done at your house. If anybody’s thinking of starting this, you can do it at a restaurant, but there’s something about being in your home or being in somebody’s home, five or six people having a great conversation about a topic that’s mutually interesting. I think everybody values it and it adds a lot of spice to life. I think it’s really important.

Lenny: Any other tactical tips for making one of these happen? So you do it at your home, you cater. How many people? How long? Anything else you want to share there?

Luc Levesque: Yeah, so I think the most I’ve done is 10. That’s a bit too much. Six seems to be perfect, six to eight, eight at the max. I do get a catered so you don’t have to worry about cooking. The topic, something like a topic that it’s common so that everybody can rally around. I do think it’s important, like I mentioned, doing it at home. Usually we start around 6:00, we go till 9:00 or 10. It’s just been a really good thing that I’ve learned over time is a really good thing to do to just make for a better life, frankly. Make richer life with some great friends.

Lenny: And when we say cater, it’s just ordering in basically, right? It’s not that-

Luc Levesque: Yeah, you can just DoorDash some food so you don’t have to worry about cooking. I’m sure there’s other things. I’ve never really deeply thought about it, but in terms of what are the specific things, I’ve evolved it over time, but I don’t cook anyways, so it would be terrible if I cooked. So this is much easier to do it this way. And as long as you’re inviting kind of interesting people, everybody’s going to want to come and spend some time and bring some bread.

Lenny: Well, with that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. I’ve got six questions for you. Are you ready?

Luc Levesque: I think so.

Lenny: I think you are. Well, question one. What are two or three books that you’ve recommended most to other people?

Luc Levesque: So there’s one that I’ve already mentioned, which is Spark. It’s the neuroscience of exercise. That’s a great book. It’s not one of these exercise to stay fit and to live longer. This is really about, frankly, if you exercise and do it in a specific way, they have a kind of blueprint they lay out, it’s good for just cognition and kind of horsepower and performance. So that’s been a really important one and has been a big part of me building on my morning routine. The second one is when I picked up I think about a year ago or six months, and I recommended it, gee, I don’t know, at least to a couple hundred people now because I recommended it to my team. It’s called Smart Brevity. Have you heard of this one?

Lenny: No, but I love the sound of it.

Luc Levesque: I’ve always been big on writing crisply and being very tight and not having three-page memos that you’re sending off. Especially now that we’re remote and we’re all doing slack and email and different ways of messaging, how tightly you communicate, how crisp your communication is really important for frankly you getting your point across and also for the other person who’s probably digesting a hundred of these messages. So this book is… It’s a book on how to do that. It breaks down how to write crisply and the different parts of it. I’ve definitely seen improvements in the team since I’ve passed around. So that’s a great book frankly for anybody, work or personal because we’re writing so much and communication is so key. So that’s the second one. The third one is a golden oldie. It’s one that I’ve read many, many times and I recommend from a growth perspective. This one youlikely heard of, it’s Influence by Cialdini.

Lenny: I got it back on my bookshelf there.

Luc Levesque: Yeah, it’s a great book, and it’s because it’s really the underpinning of so many different product and growth principles that you can apply. So that’s just a classic that is good to reread at least once a year. So those are three books.

Lenny: I’m going to extend this a little bit. I’m going to add two books that are building on your two books, or the first two books, I guess. One is Peter Attia just wrote a book called Outlive. That is-

Luc Levesque: I’ve got to read it.

Lenny: Okay. And it’s exactly the same kind of premise of just how important exercise is. I think there’s a quote in there of just the only thing proven to help you live longer is exercise. And then Smart Brevity, there’s another book that I’d recommend if people want more on though on this topic called Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit.

Luc Levesque: [inaudible 01:13:08].

Lenny: And it’s by the guy that wrote the War of Art and Bagger Vance. I forget his name off the top of my head, but it’s like, “Nobody wants to read your shit. Here’s what you need to do for people to want to read anything you’re writing.”

Luc Levesque: Yeah. We want to scan. We want to read. Yeah, that’s great. I’ll pick that one up. Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit.

Lenny: Exactly. What a title.

Luc Levesque: That’s a great title.

Lenny: All right, back on track. What is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you’ve really enjoyed?

Luc Levesque: I don’t watch TV much and I haven’t really watched any movies in a while. But I do watch a lot of podcasts on YouTube. Andrew Huberman has got, of course, a great series. I’ve watched I think everyone he puts out, so I don’t know if that counts, but that’s-

Lenny: Absolutely

Luc Levesque: Okay. So I watched that. And then of course the All-In Podcast is always fun, so I make sure to watch those when they come out as well. A lot of fun and informative. So those are my two, I would say.

Lenny: Great picks. What is a favorite interview question that you like to ask?

Luc Levesque: Teach me something about growth that I don’t already know. Because… and you could apply this to engineering product, any other area, because it really gives you a sense of what this person thinks is the top of the stack in terms of the smartest thing they know. Whether you know it or not is irrelevant. But sometimes you actually do end up learning some stuff. But it’s my favorite question because you can really engage in a conversation around, “Okay, the thing you think is so unique that maybe you’ve come up with this learning yourself or you’ve created this tactic and then it gives you a sense of how much they know the craft.” So that’s my favorite question.

Lenny: What is a favorite product that you’ve recently discovered that you just really love?

Luc Levesque: I’ve got a cold plunge that I bought that I love. So it’s called the Renew Cold Plunge. It’s cold but super convenient and I do that every morning and I just love it.

Lenny: Any advice for cold plunging? That sounds very painful and hard.

Luc Levesque: I usually start going… I go in a hot tub to warm up, then I go in the cold plunges and back in the hot tub. That’s an easy way to get started. But I will say I jumped in yesterday and today without going to hot tub. It was very painful, but I felt so much better after. So I might be changing up my approach, but I’m just kind of experimenting with different things. But that would be some advice. And then just go slow. Start it not too cold, and then slowly make it cold over time. But I think it’s a pretty good thing to add in so far.

Lenny: How long have you spent in the cold plunge?

Luc Levesque: It varies. Right now I’m doing five minutes. Five minutes at, I think it’s 53 degrees. So I’ve started at 60, slowly bringing it down. But you do have to go slow because I brought it down even further and kind of caught me off guard and got a little dizzy. So you got to find your sweet spot.

Lenny: Damn. Very Huberman inspired. I imagine this-

Luc Levesque: Definitely it was part of the source there.

Lenny: I know people would hear a lot about cold plunges. I guess what have you seen as a benefit just while we’re on this topic for people to seriously consider doing this?

Luc Levesque: So a couple things. Mood afterwards is so much better. You get this great multi-hour boost from doing it. Especially like I mentioned, not doing warm before or waiting 10 minutes and waiting 10 minutes after before you warm up, after you get out, great mood boost. It also helps a lot with sleep. So if you do it at night, which is a little bit difficult, it helps a lot with sleep. Those are probably the two biggest things. And you do get to a point, I’m there now where I kind of look forward to it because you know how good you’ll feel afterwards. So when I’m thinking about it, I know it’s painful, it doesn’t make it easier, but I do look forward to it now. It’s a pretty cool thing.

Lenny: Oh man. I got to get one now.

Luc Levesque: Yeah. [inaudible 01:16:49].

Lenny: Okay, two more questions. What’s something relatively minor that you’ve changed in your product development process that has had a big impact on your team’s ability to execute?

Luc Levesque: One change that comes to mind is it’s common to hear discussion around you need to experiment, you need to have rigor, you need to look at results, iterate based on those results. That’s pretty much common knowledge is how all good companies that execute growth that do it. I think the subtlety is that experiments are great, but they can be slow. You have to look at the results. You have to analyze how things went. You have to learn what’s going on. You have to build the experiment. So there’s a cost to an experiment and not everything needs to be experimented. And that’s not something that I generally hear growth teams talk about. It’s usually, “Hey, we need to experiment.”

So one thing that we’re definitely focused more on lately is this idea of sometimes you just need to YOLO it because it’s a better product experience or you just kind of know it’s going to work. And if you’re YOLO-ing 40 things and three of them work and you can look at pre-post, you can look at holdouts, there’s ways of making sure you don’t cause major damage, but the speed can outweigh the cost and time it takes to do experiment. So that’s one change we’ve recently implemented. That’s been pretty impactful.

Lenny: Final question. So we met actually a long time ago in Montreal, or maybe it was in Ottawa, in Canada somewhere. I think it was through an organization called C100 when I was starting my company back in the day. And so my question is, what is your favorite Canadian food?

Luc Levesque: It’s funny. My favorite Canadian food, I’m from Ottawa and there’s a lot of shawarma, Lebanese shawarma everywhere. I know it’s not traditionally Canadian, but Canada’s so multicultural, so I’ll make this count. I love a good shawarma and it’s so hard to find a good shawarma in the Bay Area. We’ve still been looking here. But my favorite Canadian food or pseudo Canadian is shawarma. If I had to pick one purely Canadian food, and this is related to Montreal where we first met, it’s got to be a Montreal smoked meat sandwich.

Lenny: Excellent choices. You’re making me very hungry. I’m going to go get some shawarma, buy me a cold plunge. Luc, this was amazing. We talked through everything I was hoping to talk through. Advisorships, SEO, hiring, building habits, cold plunges. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and learn more? And how can listeners be useful to you?

Luc Levesque: You can find me online at luclevesque.com. So first name, last name.com. And how can they be useful to me? Listen, we’re always looking to hire the best of the best. So if you want to work at an amazing company with an amazing team doing very impactful work and learn the craft of growth, please reach out. We’re always looking to bring on amazing talent. So that would be the woodway.

Lenny: Awesome. Luc, thank you again so much for being here.

Luc Levesque: Thanks. It’s great to chat.

Lenny: Bye everyone.

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