Mission, Strategy, and Metrics

Founder-CEOs must learn to excel at three primary tasks:

Hire a great leadership team and make sure they work well together
Create purpose, direction, and alignment in the company
Nurture a culture that attracts, motivates, and retains great talent

This document is about the second task on this list: creating purpose and alignment across a company. We describe a simple Mission-Strategy-Metrics framework (or “Mission-to-Metrics”) that you can use as a tool to create better alignment at your company. Itʼs the founder-CEOʼs job to ensure that the mission, strategy, and key metrics of a company are well-defined. Metrics are the most important of the three to have in place, so if you're struggling with writing your mission or strategy, make sure to have the key metrics that define success in place.

An effectively articulated "mission-to-metrics'' framework fosters alignment. It aids your team in understanding priorities without the CEO needing to always be involved. We strongly advise penning your mission-to-metrics document in writing, reviewing it every quarter, and revising it annually.

1. Mission

We recommend taking a practical view on the importance of mission statements. Founders sometimes obsess over the wording of a mission statement, but you shouldnʼt. Great companies are formed around solving a customer problem, not around a grand mission statement. Some founders are lucky enough to define mission statements fairly early in their lives that inspire and endure for a long time.

Some examples are:

Stripe: Increase the GDP of the internet
Rippling: We free smart people to work on hard problems
Whatnot: Enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.
Zip: To unblock innovation by helping businesses procure with the fastest process, least risk, and best value.
Clay: To help organizations turn any growth idea into reality
OpenAI: Ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity

But most startups, even the very successful ones, iterate on their mission statement periodically. What is most important is having it written down and communicated to the company. This helps you define your “field of play” as a company and reminds employees (new and old) about the big picture of what you're trying to accomplish. But donʼt obsess over getting the wording perfect or making it sound timeless. Be open to revisiting it and rewriting it from time to time. As one founder put it, "I know I need a mission statement because people want something to inspire them and to frame our long-term strategy, but it can become problematic if the mission statement starts to define what we do too closely and keep us from seeing our customers' biggest problems. It's important to have a mission that's broad enough to be enduring but not distract from focusing narrowly on the customer."

Jeff Lawson (Twilio) and Grant LaFontaine (Whatnot) describe this dynamic and why Mission matters below:

Jeff Lawson (Twilio) on Mission

"We've gone through multiple iterations of our mission statement over the years. Somewhere between 20 and 50 employees we realized, 'Oh, we need a mission.' So we'd spend time writing one and say, 'OK, good enough. Let's just use that.' Some of them were really bad. It took a while for us to have conviction around the words to describe why we exist. I always had a sense for why we existed: the future of the communications industry is clearly going to be built by the many software developers of the world and will not remain in the hands of a few companies. Today, our mission is to fuel the future of communications, which we settled on after many other versions.”

Grant LaFontaine (Whatnot) on Mission, Vision, and Strategy

“Mission, vision strategy. I wrote the first whole draft of the mission, vision, and strategy at around 40 or 50 people. I tend to view these things mostly as an alignment tool. In the early days, you don't need it that much because everyone in the room is very clear with what they're doing and why they're doing it. But as we started to scale and get bigger, you need to write down those things, so it's very clear what you're trying to do, what direction you're moving in, and what you're going to do, and the things you're not going to do to get there."‍

2. Strategy

As you scale to 50 people and beyond, a strategy document can become an important way to keep a growing team aligned. It's also helpful as a way to capture your thinking at a point in time about the company and track how your thinking evolves.

In our experience, the best companies have written documents (or some other artifact) that describe both their product and go-to-market strategies. The first versions of these are almost always written by the founder-CEO or another co-founder. Over time, other executives contribute, with heavy involvement from the founders. The best strategy documents are deeply connected to your customer. They reflect a nuanced understanding of the customer problem you intend to solve and how you intend to solve it. They are also grounded in customer observation and research.

How do you come up with a strategy document for the first time?

Here's a simple approach:

Start with the most important top-level goals for your company.
- Depending on your business, these might include things like revenue, number of customers, GMV, payment volume, API calls, etc.
Envision your company in 12 months. What does success look like for these goals?
For your product strategy, ask:
- Who is the customer you are building for?
- What are the key problems you are trying to solve for them in the next 12 to 18 months?
- It helps to be narrow rather than broad. Start with a small group of customers who have a clear problem that you can solve. If your early customer growth has been organic, this can feel unnatural. It requires you to shift your mindset to pinpointing customer profiles in a more precise way and defining what you need to build for them.
- Do you have an understanding of which product levers will drive your top-level metrics? Which new product features can you build to pull these levers?
- What supporting infrastructure do you need to build to ensure that your products will scale and that your product and engineering teams will be effective?
Developing a go-to-market strategy is generally harder in the early days. Most founders are not go-to-market experts, and most products require a fair amount of experimentation before a repeatable, effective GTM strategy can be defined. But this shouldnʼt deter you from writing something down. View it as an iterative process, driven by a set of initial hypotheses about how you can effectively distribute your product. Adapt from there as you learn more.
- In this phase, a good practice is to meet with other startup founders and compare your GTM approach with theirs. You'll get smarter about GTM and develop a better understanding of what makes your approach unique.
To start writing V1 of your go-to-market strategy, ask:
- Who is the buyer of your product? How do you reach that buyer effectively?
- What is the value proposition that will convince this person to buy or use your product?
- What channels should you use, and how can you make these channels effective?
- How should you price and sell your product in order to reach your 12-month goals? What is the selling motion and how does it need to be staffed?
A few final tips:
- Always start with your Mission/Values and Vision before outlining your strategy. This drives better alignment as it reinforces 1) why the company exists, 2) how you make decisions, and 3) where you are going.
- Tie the strategy back to the key metrics you need to achieve within the time frame. This makes clear what it takes to “win” in the strategic planning period.

Some founders choose to share their strategy doc with the team, while others do not. Regardless, it should inform your business and metric reviews with the team. We recommend revisiting your strategy, your capital allocation in support of that strategy, and your progress toward goals and metrics at least quarterly. As part of that review, make adjustments and set new goals or targets if the facts have materially changed.

Finally, the best strategy documents we have seen are written in long form, not as slide decks or a few notes on paper. They tend to be three to five pages long. Writing it out forces you to be thorough and helps expose flaws in your thinking. This is why Amazon, and many other companies, have long favored memos for new initiatives and outlawed PowerPoint.

3. Metrics

One of the most crucial tasks to ensure alignment across your organization is to determine the key metrics that define your startup’s success. You can think of metrics as either “input” or “output” metrics. As the CEO, it’s imperative for you to discern and convey the internal factors (“input metrics”) that influence the desired results (“output metrics”) for your business.

Output metrics are results that external stakeholders, such as your investors, use to assess your business. Identifying these is typically straightforward.
On the other hand, input metrics are the detailed metrics that are instrumental in your day-to-day business management. These are the levers that your employees can directly influence and that subsequently impact your output metrics. It's vital to comprehend how different input metrics influence output metrics, for instance, understanding which input metrics affect revenue or customer interaction. Unraveling these influential factors can be challenging and might necessitate extensive experimentation and investigation.

We recommend starting with a smaller number of clear and concise metrics—ideally around three or four—that are communicated regularly, instead of overwhelming the team. As the company scales, individual teams can then establish their own sub-metrics.

Example: Output and Input Metrics

‍

One of Segment’s key input metrics is the number of integrations that are receiving data, serving as a gauge of the volume of data each customer is monitoring
- When a customer surpasses a specific threshold in this metric, their likelihood of churn significantly diminishes. Thus, the number of integrations acts as a primary predictor of customer attrition. Consequently, the team strives to ensure that customers integrate the maximum number of tools available to maximize retention
Another metric closely tracked was “Pipeline Coverage” as a key leading metric for success
- Pipeline Coverage is the total $ amount of pipeline you have relative to your target net new ARR
- Segment would look at the total amount of pipeline that they had each week. Pipeline grows at the beginning of the quarter and then the pipeline either by stuff getting punted out to future quarters, getting closed won, or losing kind of shrinks down to 1x…
- By the time Peter sold the company, he could tell in like week two of the quarter almost exactly what they were going to close because they knew pipeline, typical close rates, etc.
- If you have a very predictable way of generating these things, then you know when to hire the next account executive, how you expand the sales team, and that you're not hiring people into dead zones. Predictability didn’t just happen. It was engineered over time.

‍

As of 2025, the company focuses on four parent metrics, which are tracked every week. Each of these is tied back to input metrics the team can own. These are listed out below.

ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)
Gross Revenue Retention
Net Revenue Retention
Number of Global 2000 Logos

One of the leading indicators of ARR for Rujul is Pipeline (Sales). Rujul rigorously tracks:

Pipeline creation and progression by stage (S1–S6 in Salesforce, from qualified opportunity to closed-won).
Pipeline by source and deal size, with week-over-week changes to spot growth or gaps early.
Pipeline concentration by rep – identifying whether revenue is distributed evenly across the team or concentrated in a few individuals.
Pipeline concentration by rep cohorts (e.g. <6 months in role vs. mature reps), to assess onboarding ramp and repeatability of performance.
Leading indicators for reps – hires, days in seat, meetings booked, quota attainment. These helped anticipate whether enterprise reps would be able to close deals despite long cycles.
Segment-level forecasts (Commercial, Key Enterprise, Strategic Enterprise) with best-case and worst-case scenarios, reviewed each week

Rujul also reviews separate marketing Pipeline metrics.

Marketing Pipeline Creation
Pipeline Influence

‍

Gusto breaks down all its metrics into outputs and inputs

Sales & Marketing Metrics

Output: New ARR

Number of AEs
Ramp times
ARR quota for AEs
Average deal size
Number of organic leads
Number of AE sourced leads
Number of paid leads
Close rate

Customer Support Metrics

Output: Customer Support Reps

Calls received per person
Calls handled per rep (time per ticket, tickets closed, etc)
Rep ramp time
Rep specialization (e.g., a benefits question might take longer per ticket vs. a general question)

Engineering Headcount

Output: # of Engineers

Input: No ratio. Driven by 1) how much do you need to accomplish to achieve your goals and 2) target burn

‍

Zepto's key output metrics are orders per day and FCF per order
To drive orders per day, Zepto's key L0 inputs are monthly order frequency and retention
To drive FCF per day, Zepto's key L0 inputs are average order value, fees/advertising per order, product margin, and total costs per order
These inputs are all further broken down into L1 and L2 inputs at a team level
Zepto's approach to metrics has been refined consistently as the team's internal understanding of their business equation has evolved
As an example, gross profit per order was only introduced as a key metric about 6-12 months after public launch and drivers of growth were better understood. This changed to FCF per order once they understood all the cost levers.

4. Example MSM Docs

Segment’s 100 Week Plan

Below is a case study on how Peter Reinhardt set and operationalized Segment’s strategy at $50M to $100M ARR. Peter believes narrative construction is key to communicating strategy. The right narrative drives urgency and alignment at scale

From Peter: “Strategy is the layer of the stack of mission value strategy where you have the most flexibility as CEO. If you try to constrain the strategy to any of the strategy frameworks that are out there it's transparently bullshit and not really the right way of approaching it. This is where your skill at synthesis as a CEO is tested the most. Can you create a narrative from scratch of what needs to happen and why that needs to happen? At the highest level that distills things down.”

‍When Segment reached $70M ARR, Peter developed a "100 week" narrative to transition the company to the enterprise. Salesforce and Adobe wanted to launch competing products and were telling customers that everyone needed a CDP (Segment's product). They had distribution, but no product. Segment had a product, but needed to build enterprise distribution. Peter picked 100 weeks as an arbitrary timeline to build distribution before Adobe and Salesforce could build a new and competing product. He communicated this to the company.

Peter on the 100 week narrative: “The articulation was that we have a hundred weeks until Salesforce and Adobe have a product in the market. They already have the GTM team, and so we have a hundred weeks until they get a product on the market. And if we don't have a footprint in all the enterprise companies before they have a product in market, we're going to get locked out of all their accounts. So we have a hundred weeks to get a footprint in all the enterprises. This narrative aligned the company and created urgency as it clarified that Segment had 100 weeks to win the most attractive segment of the market.”

They broke down this high-level narrative into 1) building a fast growing commercial business (e.g., tier just below enterprise) and 2) an enterprise business

“It was a rallying call, it had FOMO and all the things that you would hope for in a strategy. We broke it down into needing a highly efficient and fast growing commercial business and then secondarily an enterprise growth story.‍”

The 100-week plan was then broken into a financial plan with quarterly targets and input metrics that were owned by leaders and teams. They would track progress against the plan through: 1) weekly executive team KPI reviews and 2) all hands (that happened every couple of weeks). All hands are an important communication forum as its your opportunity to highlight progress against the strategy and reiterate the initial narrative you outlined

“We broke down the strategy further into metrics. You can write these however you want, but for us this was OKRs. The important part of OKR is just that it keeps breaking things down into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces until you have things that people can actually go do this week.”

Example Q1 KPIs that came out of the financial plan

ARR and Gross Retention
Productive Capacity [capacity of sales team]
Pipeline Coverage [pipeline over target ARR]
% Healthy Accounts [based on customer indicators]
Enterprise customers “promoters” [enterprise customers ready to advocate for Segment]
A Segment specific metric that captured Gross Margin
Rule of 40

“From an operating perspective, we had these weekly E-team KPI reviews, and all hands every couple of weeks. We [outlined] the structure for what was going to happen at each all-hands at the company. Like when we were going to review the last quarter, when we were going to do the board recap, when we were going to talk about the next quarter. And we would show people this is how all these pieces of company infrastructure fit together into an execution model.”

Operationalizing the plan

Weekly E-Team KPI reviews
All hands every couple weeks (meticulously planned what/when to share information)

Keeping External Stakeholders Aligned

External stakeholder alignment is just as important as internal alignment. You want your board and any other important stakeholders to be bought into the strategy of the company. They also can be helpful accountability partners for you as you execute quarter over quarter
Use the process of writing your board memo as a mechanism for driving clarity. Distill your key metrics, how they are progressing, how you are addressing issues, and where you need further focus. Try to use no more than a few pages. Peter, from Segment, wrote board memos each quarter for exactly this reason
Hold yourself accountable. You have accountability meetings internally. This accountability meeting is for you. Create a scorecard and present it to the board each meeting. This simply highlights performance against key metrics, learnings from the plan, and how you are tracking against them

Whatnot's Mission-to-Metrics

From Grant La Fontaine (CEO of Whatnot):

“If you want to deliver a lot in a small period of time, you just need to move fast. You can't be spending shitloads of time debating the merits of going into shops, whether it's possible. And so [defining what we wouldn’t do] was truly for focus. Because we felt we had enough conviction in what we were doing that we were going to go all in on it. And then we, you know, we never thought we were always going to be right, but we always set up mechanisms to be nimble enough that if we learned something new, we would adjust more.

I tend to view strategy as always developing. You take all known information, put it at the best guess as to what the things you should invest in are. We try to carve out about 20 percent of resources to work on things that are off strategy, which are like adjacencies, where we may be able to learn something new that can transform the business. We had less screening guideposts in the early days, just because, honestly, I ran a ton of the roadmap, and I could just do what I felt was right. These days, at a bigger scale, the general guidepost that we give the teams is like 80 percent on core strategy and 20 percent on newer emerging things just to make sure we're always learning something new so that we can expand the market. The impact of being overly focused on the near-term strategy (6-12 months) is you can miss opportunities to lay the groundwork for future growth. This sometimes results in a sudden slow down once your core engine starts to break as you haven’t built the foundations for your next act.”

Mission

Enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.

Customer and Market Insight

Buyers

Here’s what we know/hypothesize about buyers

Users most value product categories that have [these] characteristics.

[Explanation based on user research]

‍The core reason that people come back to Whatnot is [this]

[Explanation]

‍People need to trust Whatnot to come back and purchase‍

All marketplaces are built on the trust that you will get exactly what you purchase. To date buyers have loved Whatnot because they trust it. But if this erodes, the marketplace could fall apart.

‍People come to Whatnot looking for specific products or product types

[Explanation based on user research]

Sellers

Here’s what we know/hypothesize about sellers

Sellers are motivated by money

Sellers typically care most about generating money, so if we want to keep and retain them we should help them make more money by using Whatnot.

Sellers are trying to build and optimize their business

As a function of trying to make money, their presence on Whatnot is largely about business building: They really want to know how to optimize it. How do they best market, when is the best for a show, what supply sells best.

Buyers really want to sell on Whatnot

The single most asked for thing on Whatnot is the ability to sell. [Explanation for how we know this]

Our wedge

Our research and experience to date suggests that [this category] appears to be the gate to live and social commerce.
Once we get this category to scale, the opportunities to tack on other categories and products increase drastically.

Product Strategy

We’re building a P2P social marketplace by investing in:

Live: [Explanation of specific features]
Trust and safety: We’ll invest further in reviews, moderation, authentication and more to ensure when someone buys on Whatnot, they have a great experience. We aim to create the safest P2P horizontal marketplace on the internet.
Key feature X: [Explanation]
New product area Y: [Explanation]

Distribution or Go-To-Market Strategy

We’re going after enthusiasts and power sellers by:

Getting the community talking:‍

Scaling sellers: Sellers drive demand and increase supply on Whatnot. We’ll need to be best in class at onboarding them. [More explanation on how to do this]
Content strategy: [explanation on methods]
Owning influencers: [Explanation]
Paid ads: [Explanation]

Fix the funnel:

As we get people talking and into Whatnot there will be some significant areas in the funnel we’ll need to fix. We’ll avoid small incremental things, but will unlock things like scaling the seller waitlist to make sure people sell and go live on Whatnot, as well as doing a better job converting our initial buyers.
As we scale growth, we must ensure we’re doing this on positive unit economics—that is, we’re actually making money on each transaction. We should not subsidize our way to negative unit economics. As we launch early categories, we can do it for a small period of time, but we must quickly get them to positive unit economics in every category.
Further, we are not going to invest heavily into discounting subsidies, and instead focus our limited resources on creating value for our highest-value buyers and sellers.

Things we are not doing

X
Y
Z
A
B
C

Metrics

North-Star Metric

GMV = gross merchandise value = the value of all items sold on the marketplace not including taxes, shipping, or other fees

While this is our North Star metric, this is not the end-all-be-all for prioritizing. We still need to make sure we’re prioritizing a quality and reliable user experience; otherwise, long-term GMV will not materialize.

Key Metrics to Define 2022 Success‍

Build a “machine” that turns our major categories into market leaders

P0: Grow the GMV of W, X, Y, and Z categories to be x%+ of eBay’s monthly sales and increase GMV to y% in December 2022 amongst other existing categories.
P0: Enable [new format] that drives x% of monthly sales in W, X, Y, and Z categories.
P1: Build [new business segment] that generates x% of GMV in W, X, Y, and Z categories.

Generate significant sales in W+ categories with X, Y, and Z and enable rapid scaling of new categories

P0: Organically grow x+ new categories generating $xm/mo in additional GMV.
PO: Actively launch into y+ new categories generating $ym/mo in additional GMV.
P0: Build infrastructure to support launching into z+ categories by end of year.

Build a reliable and high-quality core live and marketplace experience

P0: Maintain buyer NPS at x%.
P0: Maintain seller NPS at y%.
P0: Get monthly gross profit/GMV to z%.

Grant on Planning:

“Our belief, and I still think it's generally correct. Whatever time you allot, the shorter the time period for planning, the faster people will move. Because they'll see a goal with a tight time window and they'll run to achieve it. And so philosophically, we've always felt that we wanted to make planning as short as is reasonably possible, while making good decisions. This began with weekly sprints, then monthly plans until we reached about 150 people when it broke and we’ve moved to quarterly cycles.”

Who wrote the mission to metrics doc at Whatnot at every stage?

5. Cadence

It is crucial to have a clear process for reviewing metrics, driving business change, and adjusting goals. That means documenting your metrics, holding regular meetings to review them, and using the insights from those meetings to make changes that drive outcomes.

These meetings are good opportunities to score keep and drive accountability, but the magic happens afterward. It is in how you take a metric from red to green and work the problem to solve both the immediate issue and the underlying long-term one.

Below are examples of how teams create operating cadence.

Zip

Rujul uses three meetings to run the company: 1) a biweekly OKR review, 2) a weekly leadership meeting, and 3) a weekly cofounder meeting.

Biweekly OKR Meeting

8am on Mondays with 20-25 leaders at the company. Meeting is happens every 14 days
Serves as an accountability mechanism as leads have to report on goals in front of the company leadership
In this meeting, they review pacing against key topline metrics and each of the objectives and sub-initiatives
Rujul optimizes for more detail rather than less - he’s found its better for alignment and enabling inspection

Management Meeting

Runs a separate management team meeting with just 6 people. One hour on Mondays each week
Rujul sets the agenda. The goal is to discuss strategic topics. These are topics rarely discussed elsewhere
Example topic: We have customers that pay $1M/year and $20k/year and we haven’t looked at the PL by customer cohort. Is it worth it to continue to serve $20K/year customers? This forced a discussion amongst executives that only Rujul is thinking about.

Cofounder Meeting

Lu and Rujul work on Sunday and have a cofounder alignment meeting

Faire

Weekly Executive Team Meeting

Running agenda each week to discuss big company level topics
Goal is to make sure the executive team stays connected and to discuss big strategic topics
The output of these meetings is typically decisions on big strategic and hiring topics

Weekly Team Leads Meeting

Once they scaled past ~80 people this became important. Its a meeting for directors and above
Max uses this time to broadcast what is top of mind for him and the leadership team at Faire
The goal is to ensure alignment on key goals. It is impossible to be too repetitive

Weekly Business Review

Weekly meetings reviewing all key metrics in the business
If metrics are off, they understand why and how to address missed performance

Zapier

Weekly Leadership Meeting

One-hour meeting on Tuesday at 1pm. The meeting is structured around a Google Doc where key company metrics are automatically populated each week as a status update. Within the doc, each executive also has a section to answer the following questions:

Red/yellow/green on professional and personal things
Key focus areas for the week
Things youʼre concerned about
Things you need help on

People read and comment on the doc for the first 10 minutes. This allows little things to get resolved via the comments. The remaining 50 minutes they discuss key topics that Wade has curated.

Monthly Business Review

Monthly OKR meeting to track performance versus goals

Athelas

The weekly operating cadence is driven by two meetings: 1) Sunday Weekly Planning and 2) Friday Checkouts

The Sunday Meeting

6 hour meeting on Sunday. Goal is to review last week’s performance and align on execution/tasks for next week

Meeting Structure

4:30pm - 6:00pm. Hersh (CBO) and Tanay (CEO) spend 1.5 hours on GTM and Account Operations. Review quota attainment, customer sentiment, retention, and do one or two key spot checks of teams and/or active deals. [See the section on spot checks for more details on what this is]

6:00pm - 8:00pm. GTM leaders from one of their mid-market teams presents. They discuss what was accomplished last week, status of key inputs (pipeline, attainment, status of key deals), and key needs from the product. They will also spot check a few deals. Relevant engineering leaders also attend these meetings. This helps maintain the connection between GTM/Product and forces teams to align on what to prioritize to build.

8:00 pm - 10:00 pm. GTM leaders from the enterprise segment present. Deals can be as large as $40M/year, so they warrant their own attention. This meeting follows a similar structure to the mid-market segment, but is focused on fewer deals and customers.

Checkout Meetings

Each pod presents to Hersh (CBO) with the same format each week their progress against quarterly goals
Teams report: 1) what they accomplished, 2) what are the key bottlenecks, and 3) what the big outstanding risks
Hersh spends most of his time on “risks” to figure out how they can unblock or unlock these for the business
This ensures 1) accountability and 2) alignment. Everyone knows metrics will be evaluated/discussed on Friday

DoorDash

Primary cadence mechanism is a weekly business review

Weekly Business Review (50-100 people)

DoorDash was single product (Restaurants) and single geography (USA)
Tony drove cadence via a Weekly Business Review that he led each week
They reviewed topline metrics, input metrics, and week/week variance
They would decide: 1) where to double down, 2) what to stop, and 3) what to watch
The only problem they were solving at the time: Survival. Found intensity right at weekly pace

Weekly Business Review (10,000+ people)

DoorDash has 5 business lines and operates across multiple geographies
Despite the dimensions expanding, the process for maintaining cadence is still similar
At the company level, Prabir (Tony’s President) leads a Weekly Business Review
- For the 7-8 top initiatives, they have monthly reviews as these are more mature business lines
- For the 20-30 new bets, Tony and Prabir review data more frequently (daily, hourly, weekly)
The main change for Tony is he reviews initiatives at different frequency levels depending on maturity
- The restaurant business is predicted with 99% accuracy, so Tony reviews this monthly
- For new bets (seed stage/pre-PMF bets), he might spend 15 minutes a day with each team
He also adjusts his judgment/patience levels depending on the project or business line
- A miss in restaurants is treated differently to a miss in one of the pre PMF bets they make
- Pre PMF bets with 20% success rate require more patience than a mature unit like restaurants
- Treating everything the same is sure fire way to fail at laying foundations for new bets at scale

Whatnot

They utilize a combination of two main documents: 1) an OKR tracker in Google Sheets and 2) a metrics deck
The OKR tracker tracks weekly performance against goals and tags goals as “On-Track”, “Lagging”, or “Off-Track”
The metrics deck covers key business performance metrics and are mainly pulled from established dashboards
- At 50-150 people, the deck was more oriented towards health tracking and was prepared weekly
- At 500 people, the deck is input driven, is prepared biweekly, and is used for discussing lagging inputs

Biweekly Business Review

Expensive meeting. 40-50 people attend every other week
Analytics and Biz Ops prepares a pre-read deck. It is ~100 slides long and is sent around to the group in advance
Team comments on the deck in advance or during reading time. Team discusses comments
The majority of time is spent on off-track metrics or metrics where they are ahead or behind plan
The first version of the deck was created by Grant with support from Biz Ops and Analytics
Agenda
- Executive Summary
- User Feedback / Social Sentiment
- Topline Business Metrics
- Buyer Funnel
- Seller Funnel
- US Categories
- Customer Support
- Trust & Safety
- International Performance
- Discovery
- Community
- Marketplace
- Logistics
- Ads
- Tech Stability

Twitch

Here is an example of a monthly review document that Emmett Shear used at Twitch: Twitch: Monthly Business Review

6. Communicating your mission, strategy, and key metrics

Mission, strategy, and metrics are useless unless your team understands and internalizes them. Learning to communicate clearly to an ever growing employee base can feel unnatural at first, but it's important for driving accountability.

Key things to keep in mind

You should simplify the message and repeat it to a degree that may feel strange.
You will be surprised at how often you will have to repeat yourself for the company to understand
Your words carry tremendous weight as a CEO, especially as you grow past 100+ employees

Key principles for communication

Communicate to the entire company at least once a week.
Repeat the key strategic priorities in every company communication.
Take the time to write your strategy, customer insights, and other learnings in long form

Tactics for company wide communication

Take the time to write your strategy, customer insights, and other learnings in long form at a cadence
All hands will become your main company-wide alignment mechanism. Invest in them as you scale

Example: How Figma uses All Hands

Use all hands to beat the drum on progress (e.g., ARR) as well as excitement about future initiatives
The best all hands register emotionally. For example, they’ve had former prisoners who used Figma to get their first job speak at all hands. It’s motivating to see your impact and this drives intensity/effort
Strategically emphasize teams or people that need recognition. For example, Dylan recently framed an all hands around support. The support team doesn’t typically get much recognition, and this helped the support team feel appreciated

7. FAQ

Question #1: Changing goals and replanning

When targets are missed multiple times and there's a decision to change the execution strategy, how do you adjust this in the biweekly deck, especially when strategic changes occur at a micro scale?

Response

It depends on the level of predictability in the business. In general, want to try not to “re-plan”
In low predictability settings, emphasize change and that you will adjust course as is needed
In higher predictability settings, try not to regularly re-plan as does not hold the team accountable
Don’t set goals that are egregiously unattainable - will result in demotivation. Make sure there is a path

Peter on Re-forecasting (high-predictability)

“Re-forecasting is a big deal because you're not really holding yourself accountable to what you thought you would achieve, and it's very costly in terms of actually rebuilding a full financial model and renegotiating everything. So, I would really try not to do it. I think there were two years where we had to do it mid year.”

Grant on egregious goals

“We try and make the goals be stretched, but there's always a story behind it for how we can hit it. When we've had goals that are so large that it's just hard to wrap your mind around it, the teams have gotten demotivated. And then sometimes what happens if they are so far off you just kind of ignore them through time.”

Question #2: Risk profile on making investments once strategy is working

Did your risk-profile change once you knew the strategy was working? Could you be more aggressive?

Response

Yes, but needs to be supported by data
You should be OK throttling a team’s hiring plans or expansion if they are not performing or hitting the metrics