The Journey from Senior VP to Solopreneur | Elena Verna (Dropbox)

I have a huge impostor syndrome I've never shaken it off and if anything sometimes it flares up deeper and more aggressive than I've ever had it before imposter syndrome is not something you should shy away from or use them as excuse of why not to do something realize that you have imposter syndrome because you set unrealistic goals for yourself and use that as your superpower because now you will do extra work and extra research and you will really know your before you open your mouth today my guest is Elena Verna a solopreneur who has served as head of growth at companies like Dropbox amplitude Meo and more Elena and I talked about why she left a full-time role to work for herself the Five Laws of growth and the how they can be applied to your career and her advice for people who want to explore solopreneurship and going out on their own Elena is incredibly inspiring and I think you love our conversation be sure to like And subscribe for more interviews like this let's diving thanks so much for coming today super interested in your career growth framework so why don't we just dive in yeah let's do it thanks for having me so you spent the

first phase of your career at Ser monkey where you kind of rose from a manager to the SVP and let me talk a little bit about that phase like what are some traits that really helped you grow at that company well I didn't just rise from a manager I actually Rose from entry level IC all the way to SVP and seven and a half years that I've been there so I joined there as a entry-level analyst I actually took a step down when I joined Survey Monkey because before that I was at Safeway and I Rose to senior analytics but then to switch into Tech I needed to take a step back again so I took a title cut and pay cut in order to get into Tech just because I thought there was going to be more opportunity for Learning and I did a couple of career shifts at Survey Monkey so I went from analytics and I got to a leadership level at analytics to a director level and then I went into product marketing growth product management marketing and then I like solidified it as just overall growth which consisted of growth marketing growth product management and analytics so there was quite a few changes that doesn't mean that it was all linear and it was all happy path and that's exactly what I wanted to be there's a couple of things that are were very important for me in my time on serving monkey number one having really fantastic managers and sponsors that actually wanted to challenge me and saw potential in me and wanted to invest into me so environment very much matters this is not a replicatable journey that I could have gone through in every single company I just found the right environment and there is a little bit of a science and luck involved in finding that but at the same time there's also a very important framework that I've always applied to my life that I only Rec recognized recently but that is we as humans grow linearly we go from point A to point B we have

a goal of point B that is linear in nature however what we want to have is exponential growth paths in our career so how do you take a linear growth line and turn it into exponential growth pattern well that is by inflecting the slope of that line as often as possible in the more steep steeper Direction so the point is to identify the inflection points and inflection points is what helps you change the slope of the line and create a linear curve out of a bunch of linear progressions that you are shooting towards and identifying the right set of inflection points for yourself is the most important exercise that you can do for your personal growth a lot of people think that inflection points are switching jobs I get a new job and that will be my inflection point that's actually the biggest deflection Point most of the time because taking on a new job is extremely risky for you as a person you in fact absorb all of the risk of taking a new opportunity because you will have to explain that job for the rest of your life in your resume and in your career for a company you're a blip in their lifetime they will never have to explain you so by accepting a position especially within our broken recruiting system you absorb all of the risk of potential failure and Company absorbs nearly none and so for that perspective yes new job can be a really amazing inflection points but more so than not it's actually a deflection point for your growth because you are in wrong environment in the wrong business in the wrong industry you're not able to exercise your superpowers much more stable inflection points are finding a mentor or sponsor in organization getting a new manager getting new responsibilities managing up and uh unlocking new potential or uh giving another role another try like an internal switch within departments that gives you a lot more stable and predictable output to inflect your growth curve as opposed to switching jobs but that's not to say that I didn't try to switch jobs when I was at Survey Monkey I just had really amazing managers that prevented me from doing so okay so it's sticking it out at a good company and then like finding those mentors and finding those roles that allows you to I mean it sounds like you also had like a pretty diverse range of experiences that maybe also helped your senior leadership position where you got it right it's like yeah yes and no I mean at the end of the day I only had analytics experience that was my superpower and I carried that analytics experience with me into every single position that I took on I didn't never try to switch away from it I layered on top of it so that helps me continuously progress and layer forward as opposed to having to start from the beginning in another position so when I got to director of analytics I didn't take a step back to icpm when I went into growth product I was already a director at product because even though I did have some player jobs and I did pming myself for the beginning before I hired the team so to speak at the end of the day because I was able to leverage my previous skills I could continue progressing forward more in the t-shape so I went up vertically as far as I could and then I went t-shape horizontally by exercising the skills that I've learned in analytics and then leadership to just start absorbing other teams as opposed to starting from scratch in every single team and special team because I didn't no longer needed to have all of that technical skill set my respons ability was different on that side my responsibility was more of a Visionary for that department not an executioner that I had to actually go into AdWords and manage the account so to speak yeah that makes sense and we talk about layering more in the growth Frameworks a little more about that but yeah so after Sur monkey I would love to understand your path from rising up in organization to doing your own thing and like how you decide to make that leap yeah it's that leap came from failures that I've experienced my first failure

that I've had is that I realized that I don't know how to interview for leadership level roles and that came from when I left serving monke when it was time for me to leave and there was a lot of events happening a survey markeet that really told me that I had to go one of them biggest one is that our CEO passed away de Goldberg so it was just a very emotional time at the company and I needed a one-step separation but then I jumped into another company so quickly just because I got attached to idea I got married to a concept and I thought that all of the problems that the company had is what I could solve and then I realized that it wasn't a good match now it's not the company is bad it's just it was a bad match for me and my skill set and I was not successful in that company and I was trying to reverse engineer my interview process and I'm like what would I done differently and I had a really hard time coming up with how would I interview differently for the next job yeah I can have like this additional data point of what I should be looking for but I'm missing so many like I'm missing a framework of how to find my next best job that I can stay in for next seven and eight years because I don't have any experience in doing that and everybody in the recruiting Market tells you the story of rainbows and unicorns and butterflies of how everything is incredible because they just want you to sign on a dotted line and then your retention suffers because nobody actually speaks the hard truths about the company and the problems that they're facing and I'm as a candidate not incentivized to tell hard truths either because I want to land the position so it's like both parties are lying to each other and then the consequences is bad match most of the time or incorrect placement and on leadership level it's very detrimental to hire a bad leader whether it's for the company or for the person themselves because you have pretty wide impact on a business so a bad hire and there's so many bad leadership hires that are happening that are leaving a year two years after being on a job it's just a set everybody back however many years so I actually went into advising as a way to try before I buy my next position I never went to it as a way to find my Independence and my solar preneurship I went into it to say listen I have no idea how to interview let me start advising and then convert one of those advising positions to full-time after I validate as a try before you buy concept so to speak that this is the right match I get not only through setup moment of interview I get an aha moment with them where I exchange value I get into habitual moment I finish my activation and then I can monetize by moving into core frequency of Engagement by accepting their full-time position that was my train of thought of why I wanted to do advising got it yeah so you advised some great companies like Meo and other companies and at some point you decide not to do a full-time thing right you just decid to keep advising so like how did that have happen just like you're enjoying the advising phase yeah so at the beginning

I always thought that fulltime is the end destination but then as I started advising I all saw additional benefit of not being tied to a full-time position which is for me as a somebody who loves growth and who loves data it's one thing to be in one company and only see data points from that one company only and not really know whether they work because it's that company or whether it's actual framework that is applicable across the entire industry when I started advising and because I always picked Fair L fairly tightly in my swim Lane of this is B2B companies with product Le growth uh Frameworks within some sort of productivity development at developer industry so when I started advising I'm like who I'm running a multivariate Ab test across all of these companies so I know for sure what is a data point and what is a framework because I very clearly see what tactics and what strategy scale and which ones are super pointed because of how that product or how that user base is acting with that product so it actually became a lot more interesting to me of focusing not just on successful implementation of one-pointed solution in the company but developing Frameworks for the entire industry which then give me ability to create a lot of content because now I see what other people have really hard time seeing because they're missing data points and that can act as my premium acquisition vehicle to create pipeline for more advising so it started creating the content Loop for me and standing up the freemium business model but it took me six to eight months to realize that because at the beginning I was laser focused with hey I'm looking for my next full-time job but then when I figure it out that I can learn more through advising than I can through full-time position and I can lose all of the jobs of creating decks writing memos managing forecasts doing people management I'm like I actually can focus on things that I love that are my superpowers let go of everything else continue my Learning Journey and be more self-sufficient and not having to be dependent on a single company but it was an evolution it's not like I went into it thinking this is what I'm going to do this was definitely a prototype that I tested into was it like just at the initial phase like we you didn't have a W2 anymore like was it hard to find the first few companies to do this advisory role or like pretty much you were off the basis right away so first of all it

was terrifying the terrify I have two kids I have mortgage payments I have car payments yeah I have vacations that I need to take for my brain I have groceries to buy I have private school bills that I had to pay for my preschool in kindergarten age kids I had at that time when I did that move I was terrified like I had a hard time sleeping because like what am I doing there's so much pressure on my shoulders to PR from my family and yet I'm taking this leap of faith into something that I don't even know if it's sustainable yeah and if it's not sustainable consequences of it are not oh I fail but I learned haha everything's great no consequences I can't make my mortgage payments I was not financially free I did not have that Financial Freedom that some people enjoyed that say I'm just gonna do things for fun no I had to make money yeah because that Financial Freedom was not there so it was very terrifying and the way that I tried to Der risk it was the following first of all I met with a couple of people that were already doing it my most memorable meeting was with Casey Winters who was already doing advising as a full-time job and I'm like how do you do this just to give me an Insight of how somebody has been able to succeed with this already how much was he charging how was he structuring contracts where did he get his health care like I didn't even know any of those questions because had to answer all some all of them and then the second of all I actually there's no really good place that I found yet at least that you can go to and say oh all of these companies are looking for advisors apply here yeah like those positions are not advertised however what I did do is I have a lot of well not a lot but I had recruiters reaching out to me and when it was a recruiter that was reaching out internally from the company or even more so if it was a hiring manager that was reaching out to me or CEO reaching out to me from the company trying to recruit me I would turn back that request and I said I'm not available for fulltime but would you consider exploring advising relationship and to my surprise 70 to 60% of them said yeah absolutely we need help right now and we'll take any help that we can get and that's how I closed my first couple contracts and after I was able to put them on my LinkedIn and like really start changing my positioning on the market that this is what I do now then the pipeline started coming my way but that initial switch is you have to take your full-time Pipeline and convert it so to speak to advising pipeline at the beginning before you can start changing your positioning in the market altoe interesting yeah I imagine as like a startup founder like it also sucks for the founder to like hire someone full time and like have that person leave after a year because it didn't work out so they probably want the cost is

enormous yeah if you have a wrong hire and the way that I position my advising by the way at the beginning which I genuinely was expecting to do is to say I'm not looking for fulltime would you do an advising relationship with me right now if it works out I'm happy to discuss full-time position afterwards but I just want to understand what's happening first on more of a lighter basis and if this works out let's talk more and by the way one of those advising fromo that I started first and they actually saw me first speak at growth marketing conference in San Francisco and that's what prompted them to approach me and to say hey can we work with you in any capacity and I'm like not a aable for fulltime but can we maybe do advising and they said yes and that transitioned into my first interim gig so they approached to me and they said hey we've parted ways with our head of marketing part of marketing left could you step in as our CMO we need help right now we know you us can you just come in and help us out on a short-term basis and that's how I landed CMO of Meo for the first time so I saw that it was actually a great way to then transition into additional use case for myself additional package so to speak for myself which is interim engagements and that's because advising is awesome I love advising that's really my main use case but as an operator it lacks accountability for me like I love the crushing weight of feeling being responsible for something and as an adviser I'm only coaching I'm not a player mode at all and sometimes I know exactly what a company needs to do and I just want to shake them and say please do it I know this is going to be right and they say no we're going to go in a different direction and I have to accept it as an adviser that they can disagree and they can just go in a different uh path so sometimes going back into operating shoes but not have to commit to full-time position gives me my fix of accountability and then I can go back to advising and it also gives me a really incredible way to prototype the Frameworks that I'm creating in my head so I can actually run through it myself as a very involved data point and then come out of it without having any long-term expectations from either company or Market or myself on the position go back to advising and select another case study that I'd want to do on an interim basis got it yeah that sounds really awesome because like you're probably also just making more impact on the World by doing this right you're like helping multiple companies then it's not just one or being a diversified i' actually think the biggest impact that I've been making is with my content on LinkedIn because I have so many people reaching out to me saying it's been enlightening or they share it inside their company or they're learning new ways of looking and thinking about things so that impact that scale is very gratifying for sure let's talk about some of the growth Loops but maybe like let's make it fun so let's talk about some of the growth Loops that you have going for yourself like what are some of these Loops that you have going you have a Content Loop

you I my content Loop is strong very strong so I post content I share it it's being viewed by many people hundreds of thousands of people sometimes depending on success of the post they share it with other people internally or they reshare it and the loop just keeps on going because it gives me a great discussion points within my content like I read every single comment that goes on my post because that's a great source for me to create even more content that's also a great source for me to connect with people to generate more ideas at the same time so that content loop I love it spinning it's actually a huge educational piece for me and it's a acquisition for my business as well because it acts almost as qualifier for my top of the funnel people know exactly my point of view they know exactly my beliefs and my Frameworks so when they come to me for help I don't need to screen them they already screened through my content so I can go into business of okay how can I actually help you there's like not a lot of qualification that I have to do which saves me a lot of time but I also have a really fantastic Word of Mouth loop I do a lot of free workshops with companies to assess whether I'm the right advising potential for them so I have a freemium onboarding for every single advising client I have a conversation okay it's qualified conversation this is interesting company interesting problem I go into an hour workshop for free with them to qualify whether they're going to be a good candidate for me to advise afterwards I do not proceed with probably 50 to 60% of them but they refer me to other companies because CEO network is very small thec so those Word of Mouth referrals out of the workshops that I've held that I even didn't monetize in the end are quite powerful to drive additional very high intent leads my way and those High intent leads can help me create additional streams of how to monetize them not everybody needs an ongoing engagement with advising so some people just want Workshop so I created a plan for just monetary workshop and that's it without advising expectations I've created a plan for just doing a presentation inside the company because they're like we just want to hear from an expert here I'm like I can monetize on that because I get a lot of inbound on that so it starts creating different packages on which my monetization streams can rely as opposed to having Only One Singular source of income that's awesome yeah it sounds like your advisory and your inter roles are coming from like the SE Suite how about just like is there like some sort of user Loop where like the people who follow your content or like the students that you taught at reforge is there loops there or like maybe something you're planning there's a lot of referral Loops there that are going out most of them are word of mouth or it's I use it they share my content so I'm like I'm a company generated content and then it's user distributed because they share it on my behalf so there's a lot of referrals happening in that sense and that's falls into brand building yeah Fally and my brand promise so to speak is that Frameworks are cheap and I'm going to share every single framework possible out there what's hard is implementing those Frameworks and localizing them to your business to actually understand how it works and how to succeed within that framework and that's what I monetize on so that's my strategy so my premium content is a huge acquisition vehicle for me I monetize on operationalizing it with few and then there's a lot of word of mouth and referral happening in everywhere in between got it okay yeah that that's awesome it sounds like I haven't fortifi those Loops but I think I can actually I should create a Quant model for myself yeah just you got to track all this stuff all the exactly okay so let's talk about growth a little bit more I think why don't we just jump straight to your

somewhere on your website you listed Five Laws of growth and maybe we can just like elaborate on what those five things are and um just like briefly yeah yes absolutely uh in these law of growth is something that I noticed as a pattern of when growth actually works and not so this is not um any company specific this is just a pattern of works in the growth field so first of all you have to do product Market fit first cannot focus on growth before you reach product Market fit Now growth hypothesis is weave done into the product Market fit because especially if you in a product L growth it has to be weave in into product Market fit but if you focus on distribution too soon you actually might kill your potential reaching product Market fit and understanding the problem that is you solving for the market then you have to focus on data because the whole concept of growth is to be data driven and scientific about your decision making so product Market fit then data then growth that order is non-negotiable and if you try to switch things around you're just going to have very minimal results out of growth function or you're going to have false starts or very unhappy highes in growth that you bring in if you're missing one of those pieces and this is really solving for startups trying to hire head of growth way too soon before they actually have strong product Market fit or for trying to hire for growth before you have any sort of data infrastructure and then all that growth person does is just uses their intuition why not have just product manager do that the whole point of growth is to be data driven and experimentation experimental in nature second of all is scale with Frameworks not hacking that's the second principle Frameworks is just patterns on how to solve problems our limiting factor as human beings is context switching we cannot constantly come up with a unique and solution for every single problem in fact what makes us scale successfully as team members As Leaders is the ability to have Frameworks of how to solve those problems now a hack may be valuable here and there as oneof pointed solution that is very specific to this problem but a framework presents you the patterns that you can apply and solve things not only in predictable way in sustainable way but also in a way that the team can do it at scale as opposed to relying only on yourself to solve things uh to solve the problems for your business so Frameworks especially for growth ensure sustainability and predictability in your growth model that can scale across the entire organization and the team the third law is build Loops not funnels is an awesome framework that was introduced some 10 years ago and it's all about AR it's a pirate final I activation retention uh revenue and referral and it's incredible but it assumes um marketing will always own acquisition product will always own activation and retention and sales will always own uh some sort of monetization and referral piece well in the world where we have sales Le growth models product Le growth models marketing Le growth models you need to not think about it as a funnel where each department is assigned to a specific metric but you need to think about it as a growth Loop and how each department can contribute into that growth Loop specifically this breaks with product L growth models because in product Le growth models product is responsible for acquisition product can be responsible for monetization so you really need to identify those loops and have all of the Departments contribute to those Loops as opposed to building funnels always leaky in general you constantly need to feed them with more on top to get something at the bottom Loop is a self- enforcing and it breaks the concept of departmental silos as well so that's the third law the fourth law is growth is evolution not a revolution that's probably one of my most important laws and that's because growth is meant to be predictable sustainable and competitively defensible but in order to get predictability and sustainability you need to evolve there the whole point is to test into it so you have the learnings of what actually works and what doesn't if you're trying to revolt and create a revolution you haven't started growth soon enough because it's already too late and you need a revolution Evolution gets adoption across the company Evolution gets more learnings and sustainable learnings and predictable successes so I'm all for just evolving in a sustainable way versus revolving or creating Revolution within the company and then the last one which is just the

core concept of what growth is all about which is turning failures into learnings growth is actually about failing a lot it's not about winning and only if you can be comfortable with the failures and apply growth mindset to turn those failures into learnings and Define better success points based on those learnings that's the only time that you can win so learning how to fail will teach you how to win but going after wins without knowing how to fail and learn from those fails creates not only lack of predictability and sustainability again but it actually it undermines the whole concept of growth mind said yeah if you just see everything you don't really reflect on anything so only when you like painfully fail then you actually down reflect on what happened fa failure is the most important things that we can extract day-to-day out of our life in general especially in work context failures show us that we have perception and reality Gap with our customers yeah and understanding that Gap is the most valuable information that you can have in your business only relying on your intuition and winning because of your intuition which by the way is what we reward leadership on have an idea be right in that idea that's what we celebrate which is so backwards versus saying this is what we've learned and now this is what we're going to do based on our learnings and this is why perception and reality gaps grow Within These businesses and then they get disrupted by somebody else because they become disattached from what's actually happening in the market because they're continuously following intuition and blackp decision- making like what work before doesn't mean that it'll work now right yeah exactly so like right

now it's like a pretty hard time for tech people and you've went on this journey where you taking the power back for yourself and like just like do you have any advice people who are in different levels in Tech who want to apply some these Frameworks for their own career or just like not be at the whim of these different employers do you have any thoughts on yeah so first of all of those different employers play very valuable part in building your skill set building your learning and building your brand so I would not be where I am right now if I didn't have my Survey Monkey experience I'm very grateful to servy monkey and to my employment there and everything that it taught me so don't just try to get out of it use it as a learning opportunity like this is my anchor that I'm starting second of all I think it's about setting the correct career goals for yourself I've actually had in correct goals for myself I always thought that I want to be a CEO or I want to EVP at the company or SVP at the company because it came with some sort of increased perceived value it came obviously with bigger impact I was really shooting for impact it came with bigger Financial upside I didn't realize that I actually should be shooting much farther than that I should be shooting to become an independent and own my own Journey as opposed to relying on somebody else to earn to own my success but that came much later in my realization I hope I realized that early so I hope that everybody who's reading this or listening to this will set their goals on Career optionality not on a specific title that would be my point number one that's what you should be shooting towards and working backwards from it second of all you do need to build a growth model around you if you ever want to have career optionality so start as early as possible accept that public speaking engagement andate your knowledge on LinkedIn co-write a blog post with somebody write a blog post on your own go to your PR team and say what are the public engagements that are available that I can participate in what is the co-marketing that the company is doing that I can participate in and add my value so start getting your name out there because you do need to build your own brand and that is an important exercise that you do need to invest into very early on in your career don't wait for it because it takes years to materialize and don't wait till you need it have it ready for you if you want to leverage it later down the road so that would be my second advice and then my last advice would be find the right positioning for yourself the worst thing that you can do for yourself is be a complete generalist where you everything to everyone now for a company that's very lucrative to have you as a generalist because they can throw anything your way and you just go and solve it but if you're going to be your own entity you need to have a unique positioning why you why are you worth an

advising contract why should they engage with you that doesn't mean you shouldn't be a generalist I'm definitely a generalist i h the roles of CPO CMO a head of growth a head of data all variety of them but I have my specialty and it's a very narrow specialty B2B plg or scale companies that's it so even though I have generalistic skill set I've always maintain my superpower so don't lose that superpower of yours of something that you love to really dig into and do and you also excellent at it better than everybody else and the moment you identify that superpower Never Let It Go build the skill set around it and become a generalist potentially around it but never let go of that specialty because that will be what differentiates you in the market because remember just like your product will only win if it has a unique positioning that tells customers why they should choose you find that for yourself that's amazing advice and like a lot of people have impost right they're like oh I have to like become SVP to have credibility in this space or something like do you have any thoughts on that or like it sounds like your advice is to start building a brand as early as possible I have a huge impostor syndrome I've never shaken it off and if anything sometimes it flares up deeper and more aggressive than I've ever had it before yeah imposter syndrome is not something you should shy away from or using as excuse of why not to do something realize that you have impostor syndrome because you set unrealistic goals for yourself and use that as your superpower because now you will do extra work and extra research and you will really know your before you open your mouth and that's a good thing because you will bring things to the table and you will have stuff to back it up and that's incredible because you're not going to be one of those people that is just talks without any substance yeah amazing quity so when you feel imp Foster syndrome just know that you are learning you're doing something outside of your comfort zone you might need to fake your confidence but you will never have to fake your ability because that will you like just not allow yourself to do it yeah and whenever I feel imposter syndrome I lean into it because I know that's going to take me to places that's going to generate learning for me and that's going to take me to the next level so I've let go of trying to get rid of my imposter syndrome it does not go away I promise you that much I just learn to view it as a positive quality within your personality and your Ambitions as opposed to viewing it as a negative trait and turn it into a reason for you to know when you need to lean into something when you feel that feeling yeah to like learn more and like have that drive yeah absolutely you know what I really love best about being a Creator is like instead of just having your boss or like one person decide your fate you basically have like tens of thousands or hundreds of people who are your customers right you're like the product to a certain extent and like every bra becomes the product yeah your brain becomes the product and however you monetize that product is your company and yeah you don't have to wait six months for a promotion or something you just every day you gain customers or lose customers like you can see what's going on yeah it's great absolutely I love it too and I've only really started investing in being Creator on LinkedIn at the beginning of 2022 so it's fairly early for me on my journey for creation I've invested into being creative for reforge much earlier but it was a lot more guided creation where they've helped me really materialize what was in my brain onto paper and then they attracted people to take that content versus being an independent Creator you're really talking about imposter syndrome it really flares it up but continue pushing through it and seeing the incredible output that comes out of it is what keeps me going well if you have like T people following you that helps imp a little bit too I think there's a reason why they follow you or it makes it worse because you're like my gosh people are actually reading it what will they say versus before it's like ah I supp nobody's gonna see it no big deal right now the I actually feel like the stakes are higher thanks so much for your time yeah this is super helpful it's great to see people like you who are like really strong Pro leaders make the leap to solopreneurship I hope it encourages more people to do the same thing yeah take the power back don't continue giving the power away to companies to Define your employment engagement you will earn it at some point in your career to Define it on your own so take it into your hands as opposed to continuously adhering to whatever is being thrown