Sri Batchu on Growth Experiments, Hiring and Operator Investing

Sri Batchu says managers must deliberately let some fires burn. Trying to fix everything exhausts a team; planning should include naming the less important problems that will remain broken for a while.

Harry Stebbings asks how Batchu entered growth, a discipline at the intersection of product, marketing and analytics. Batchu came through consulting and investing, joined Opendoor at roughly 40 people, worked across sales, analytics and pricing as it scaled, then helped build Instacart’s ads business before leading growth at Ramp.

He sees growth increasingly as a portfolio of bets, grounded in return on investment, data and rigorous experimentation. His analytical and investment background therefore offers another path into the field alongside product and marketing.

At Opendoor, Batchu recalls Zillow entering the home-buying market and bidding against it. Opendoor chose not to match prices or compromise its pricing discipline for short-term volume. He says Zillow later exited the market, while the competitive period was painful for Opendoor.

Stebbings points out that a competitor can remain irrational longer than a business can remain solvent. Batchu acknowledges the risk, but says Opendoor’s intended protection was positive unit economics and profitability on each cohort of homes, allowing it to survive with lower volume.

Instacart taught him that simplification is a superpower. Its shoppers, buyers, advertisers and retailers have different incentives; founder Apoorva Mehta could reject even promising initiatives if they distracted from the strategy. Batchu and colleagues jokingly called themselves the “VP of no.”

Batchu defines a growth function as a post-product-market-fit home for high-volume, data-driven experiments in acquisition, engagement and retention. He would bring channels such as paid marketing and SEO close to product growth and the website, with shared goals; at Ramp, he says, they sit under one roof.

The reporting lines can vary. Product and marketing leaders may want their teams to remain in their own functions, so dotted lines and clear common accountability are alternatives. But when several people are jointly responsible, no one may feel responsible; culture has to resolve that tension.

A useful north star should be simple, controllable enough to provide feedback, and correlated with the company’s ultimate value. Batchu generally pairs a volume target with an efficiency or ROI target, since people optimize for whatever is measured.

A qualified-lead count can be gamed by bringing in small or low-quality leads. Contribution profit is closer to long-term value but can be too distant in time and influence to motivate the growth team. For a B2B business, he offers sales-qualified pipeline dollars as an intermediate example, not a universal metric.

“Slow is smooth and smooth is fast,” Batchu says: an early team can throw experiments at the wall but eventually create chaos, unable to explain either success or failure. A lightweight reset of metrics, priorities, measurement and promotion of successful experiments can make the team faster without burying it in process.

Across companies, he has seen roughly 30% of growth experiments succeed. His goal is to fail quickly and conclusively. Ramp’s growth teams use two-week sprints as accountability points, even for longer projects, and the company counts days since founding to reinforce the importance of what gets shipped today.

One Opendoor experiment illustrates growth in the wrong direction. To find volume beyond paid advertising, the team bid on homes already listed on the market. A seller willing to withdraw a listing might know something a buyer did not, and the extra agent costs added to adverse selection.

Batchu says the program ran for a few months and proved tremendously unprofitable, so it was shut down. Looking back, a specific early profitability measure could have acted as a guardrail alongside volume. He reserves pre-mortems for large departures from strategy, substantial investments or unusually visible and risky projects.

Before product-market fit, growth is primarily the founder’s and sales team’s job, perhaps supported by an analytical generalist running tests. Batchu suggests building a larger growth team once the product has fit and some momentum; he floats $5 million ARR as a possible threshold while explicitly acknowledging that the right number varies.

He would add a more senior growth leader when several programs show early traction, such as paid marketing and product-led growth. Before then, he likes a business-operations generalist. A future leader need not already have held the title: a deep strength in one discipline and the ability to learn across others can be enough.

For senior sourcing, he recommends using executive and investor networks to identify strong teams one or two stages ahead and check reputations. Scope and reporting lines are often ambiguous, so good, frequently passive candidates can take time to recruit.

Batchu favors a practical case study at every level. Use a third company or a new problem in your own business, so neither side has a large information advantage, and provide the context. A panel of cross-functional leaders can see the candidate present, think on the spot and respond to feedback.

His favorite interview question is: “What are you bad at that you enjoy doing?” It tests curiosity and comfort with failure. Stebbings argues for focusing on strengths; Batchu agrees that strengths matter, but says an interdisciplinary growth leader also needs curiosity beyond existing expertise. Defensiveness in the case presentation is a warning sign for him.

For growth, Batchu considers a shared culture of speed, experimentation and comfort with failure more important than precise reporting lines. Teams still need a common measure of value, rather than each optimizing a convenient local metric.

He describes Instacart’s growth and consumer organization as more than 300 people divided into smaller teams. A team improving load time cannot easily see its effect on overall profit or monthly active users, so the organization used historical data and holdouts to translate local changes into expected business impact, revisiting those factors over time.

For illustration, Batchu imagines reducing loading from six seconds to two, estimating its effect on ordering and translating each second saved into active users. The numerical examples are illustrative; the point is to compare investments across teams against a shared goal.

Management is easy to learn but hard to practice consistently, Batchu says. Even senior executives remain managers. He tries to see people as individuals, understand what motivates them and connect their personal goals with creating value for the company.

In the first weeks with a new report, he uses a two-page one-on-one template. It asks how the person likes recognition and feedback, what motivates them, what their career goals are and how he can help. He wants a candid, nonjudgmental discussion rather than assuming everyone is motivated by the same thing.

When performance falls short, he distinguishes a skills gap from a motivation gap. A skill mismatch can prompt coaching, a different role or departure; motivation requires understanding what drives the person before taking more drastic action.

Stebbings asks whether status or title can be the wrong motivation. Batchu says he does not think there is necessarily a wrong answer: compensation, recognition, learning, customer impact and external validation can all matter. He prefers knowing the real incentives to imposing supposedly better ones.

Stebbings questions whether people, especially younger employees, know themselves well enough to answer. Batchu agrees that the conversation can reveal limited self-awareness too. He asks about three-, five- and ten-year goals and what he can do to help, a question many people are surprised to receive.

Batchu says his high hiring bar has brought feedback that he hires too slowly. He believes larger teams can suffer diseconomies: extra resources make prioritization and accountability harder. Small teams may leave more work undone, but can do the most important work better.

That is why he asks teams to identify which fires they will let burn. At the time, Ramp had not invested heavily in field and event marketing, and had accepted the gap while taking time to staff and develop a suitable strategy.

A common new-manager mistake is fixing an underperforming report’s work in the evening because coaching feels slower. Batchu says that sacrifices long-term development to avoid short-term pain; a manager should coach or make the decision to separate if appropriate.

Ramp was moving from organizing growth by channel and budget toward cross-functional teams focused on customer segments. Batchu expected a painful transition but believed deeper customer understanding would improve conversion. He also saw a risk in relying indefinitely on human sales where self-service and automation might eventually scale better, while acknowledging that people were then better at some steps.

Culture and engagement can break during rapid scaling, even in successful companies. Batchu warns that leaders can take the teams behind a working growth engine for granted. Without continued feedback, guidance and gratitude, those people can burn out or leave.

Batchu invests personal money and acts as a venture fund scout. He argues that current operators can have advantages in sourcing, diligence, winning allocations and supporting portfolio companies, particularly with small early-stage checks; he also suggests operating experience loses relevance as time away from the work passes.

Former colleagues can bring operators early deal flow, while other investors may welcome a small operator check alongside a lead. Stebbings challenges the limits of a network and whether this approach scales. Batchu agrees that it only works up to a certain fund size and that a much larger check changes the job.

Having worked with a founder can give an operator more evidence about strengths and weaknesses than a few investor meetings. A growth leader may also be a potential buyer of B2B software and can assess whether they would approve the budget. These advantages are bounded by the operator’s own experience and network.

Asked whether investing distracts from his day job, Batchu says it must be done in moderation, outside work hours, and only if the core job is going well. He thinks exposure to other businesses can also improve creative thinking about growth, which is not simply a matter of hours worked.

Batchu prefers highly regarded warm introductions and a deck before agreeing to meet. Stebbings asks whether this excludes founders without access to the network. Batchu acknowledges the question but believes communities and tentative connections can create paths to introductions, and says he makes them on a double-opt-in basis.

Stebbings asks whether an employee’s scout role or microfund would compete with their job. Batchu again emphasizes performance and work hours, arguing that learning across contexts can generate ideas. He also says some strategic work benefits from perspective away from the daily treadmill.

On conflicts, Batchu says he avoids meetings with potentially competitive companies and advises colleagues to do the same. If Ramp might buy software from a company in which he invests, he says he should disclose the relationship and neither promise nor exercise influence over the purchasing process.

Stebbings raises the possibility of recruiting talent from a portfolio company. Batchu says he sees no conflict and regards restrictions on hiring as anti-competitive in the labor market; in his view, retention is the employer’s responsibility. This is his opinion as both an operator and investor.

Founders he has backed are an important source of new deals, Batchu says. Stebbings distinguishes operating from founding, and Batchu agrees: someone who is a poor fit for an operating role may make an excellent founder, and vice versa.

When assessing founders, Batchu looks for a distinctive insight built on their work or research, relentless commitment and storytelling ability. Storytelling helps with fundraising, early customers and executive recruiting, but building scalable operations requires another set of skills. He often likes a founding team that combines a storyteller with an operator.

For founders who seem too slick, he seeks candid references through trusted networks. Those relationships can also help portfolio founders assess prospective hires, provided the investor is direct, discreet and available.

Stebbings suggests consistent check sizes and a portfolio of around 25 investments rather than believing five picks demonstrate exceptional skill. Batchu adds two opposite mistakes: refusing every risky idea, and saying yes to friends without conviction. He asks how a company could succeed and how large that success could be.

Stebbings adds that a founder’s need for an angel’s specific expertise does not itself make a good investment. In the rapid-fire round, Batchu says the core product-led growth playbook remains useful and cold outbound email still works; he expects budget pressure on PLG to vary with the economic cycle.

He expects indiscriminate paid-marketing spending to remain less attractive because of efficiency pressure and more difficult attribution. Another hiring error is mismatching seniority to the problem: a tiny growth team needs hands-on coaching, while some problems require more experience than founders recognize.

At Ramp, teams hold monthly post-mortems, tracking and scoring experiments in Airtable, sharing aggregate results and presenting one or two wins or losses for feedback. The regular cadence celebrates contributions and spreads learning instead of waiting for a spectacular success or failure.

Batchu would like the boundaries between marketing, product and growth to soften into a more cross-functional discipline. He favors asking for advice and bringing others into difficult problems, and praises Notion’s community-based growth strategy, while noting that his friend had recently joined its product growth team.

Stebbings adds Canva as another example of a strong growth strategy, and the two close the conversation.