Episode 12 – Hire Quickly, Fire Faster – Atif Khan – VP of business, ThirdWeb

In this episode:

Matt Widdoes
Welcome to Growth at Scale. I’m your host, Matt Widdoes. This is a podcast for leaders who want to bring sustainable, predictable, scalable growth to their businesses. Every episode, I sit down with world -class growth experts across product, marketing, finance, operations, you name it. The hope is that these conversations will give you real, actionable advice for building and sustaining company growth. Welcome to the Growth at Scale podcast. Our guest today is Atif Khan, an expert in go -to -market business development and Web 3. He’s current VP of business at ThirdWeb. Welcome, Atif. How are you doing?

Atif Khan
Thanks for having me, Matt. I’m really excited to have this conversation, knowing you for a long time. So I think it’ll be a fun one.

Matt Widdoes
Yeah, yeah. I agree. I can’t wait as well. So for our listeners who don’t know you, tell us who are you, where have you been, what do you do?

Atif Khan
Yeah, so thank you for the kind introduction. I joined ThirdWeb to help scale up the business team a few months ago. Proud of that was at another Web 3 infrastructure company at Stardust. I was the chief operating officer there. And then where we met about 10 years ago, spent about eight years at Facebook on the ad side in games, working with some of the largest partners. And then before that, did a bunch of startups. One was a great success when we went public and one was a terrible failure and I learned a ton from there. So that’s a little bit about me. Yeah.

Matt Widdoes
I was talking with somebody earlier today, some near misses and some far misses in a variety of seats. But I think you’ve had a lot of hits and maybe more near hits than near misses. I’m curious, you’ve done a lot in partnerships, BD, now most recently in the Web 3 side of the space. I’m curious, we deal a lot with companies that are kind of, I’d say early -ish stage as well as companies that are maybe series F or even public. When companies are starting out, what do you think about the landscape and how to approach BD generally partnerships at an early stage? What does that look like and then maybe as a follow -up? What does that kind of start to morph into at a later stage?

Atif Khan
Yeah, I think when you talk about like BD or sales, there’s two kind typically two adages, right? There’s the hunting phase and kind of a farming phase and when you look at like early stage startups It’s it’s a lot of like hunting, right? You’re hunting for product market fit. You’re hunting for revenue You’re hunting for the right types of partnerships and and customers And so, you know, I think that type of a person that you’re looking for or the team that you’re trying to build is Drastically different than what you would do at the later stage at the later stage You know like for what for example when I was at Facebook it was a lot less hunting and it was a lot more farming Right. How do you actually grow a business? How do you understand? Kind of what are some of the challenges that they’re facing and how can you bridge those with the technology that you have? And so I think like when you look at the two differences, that’s like the biggest difference is one is very very ambiguous kind of like exploratory and one is established consistent and it’s all about more enterprise. When I think about those two stages, that’s the two ways that I bring it down.

Matt Widdoes
If you unpack that a little bit, for the first phase, how do you think through infrastructure? Because it’s so early, it’s like you don’t want to have infrastructure for infrastructure’s sake, but you think of a Facebook, I’m sure they had plenty of infrastructure and process and a lot of that stuff sorted. How do you think through the investment into process and architecture at a really early stage versus mid to late?

Atif Khan
Yeah, I think that’s a great question. It’s tough because you want there to be some process, but you also kind of want there to be a bunch of chaos. Because if you’re trying to do things like find product market fit or find customers that are actually going to scale revenue, that has to be really exploratory. Sometimes when you have too much process that can really slow things down and really at that early stage, it’s kind of like you got to take shots on goal. If you can take 100 chances versus 50, even if 10 of them are right or 10% of them are right, if you took 100 different shots, that’s just better for you. As you think about that early stage, it’s really like have a little bit of process, but a lot more of chaos is the best way to describe it.

Matt Widdoes
Would you typically start kind of more broad and then narrow down from there or start with some fairly clearly defined paths and test maybe two or three of them that are hyper defined? How do you think through that kind of general flow?

Atif Khan
Yeah, I think the way that I would think about it is like 70, 20, 10. 70% some sort of measured hypothesis based off of where you think you’re building either a product or a technology. And then 20% in that, hey, we’re going to try a bunch of different things and see kind of what sticks. And then 10% is really meant to be really creative, right? Things that are completely out of the box, completely wonky ideas that you want to test. And that’s kind of the way that I’ve always broken it down because you do want to have some hypothesis, right? You need to be able to prove or just prove. improve something at that early stage. Now, when you get later in the mix, then it becomes a little bit of a different ratio. But at that beginning stage, if you don’t have a centered hypothesis, then you’re really not going to have a product that you’re trying to build towards. And I think that is important at that stage.

Matt Widdoes
Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. And you also, I guess the challenge I always had in sales focused roles is that the data is so far and few between to where you’re getting only, I guess it depends on what you’re selling, but you’re not getting, you can’t run a campaign and in 48 hours have 100 ,000 data points on what is or isn’t shaping that. How do you think through that transition from this hunting phase to something that is more in the farming state where having clear data and being able to delineate what did or didn’t work and start to really quantify between if you had to choose between, you’ve got three paths that all seem to be producing. and starting to kind of dissect the areas that are or really try to understand the efficacy of one campaign over another, how do you think through that?

Atif Khan
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think a couple of things that are really important, right? So finding pattern recognition, regardless of whether it’s like a company or a campaign or anything like that, you don’t need like you said 100 ,000 different data points, but you have a set of five to eight customers and three of them are saying the same thing. That’s an example of having quick pattern recognition. I think the other thing here is really around, you kind of need to just take as many chances as you can get, right? And so it’s less about the like measured stuff. It’s really about like having deep listening with some of those external customers and understanding like, hey, are these actual pain points I’m going to be solving for that could drive a sustainable and large business? Or are these different data points that are like operational functions that I’m just doing to help offload somebody’s, you know, headaches? And I think understanding the nuance of those takes a lot of deep listening at that BD and partnerships level. And so when we’re like going back to the question, two questions are going like, what do you do at an early stage? I think a lot of his discovery, spend a lot of time on asking questions and taking the time to get to know kind of what people’s pain points are. And so that’s kind of the two things that I really think about like we finally have five paths, you know, what pattern can I recognize? And then when I do deep listening, am I really solving for a business problem that’s going to scale into a big business?

Matt Widdoes
Mm hmm. Makes sense. And I’m curious, you know, when hiring, where do you think most companies kind of go wrong when hiring for BD sales partnership type roles?

Atif Khan
Yeah, I think like the biggest mistake is always hiring for pedigree, right? When you take a look and, you know, over the last, let’s call it the golden age of tech over the last like 15 or so years, you really have, you know, six or seven companies that stand out, right? Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, you know, fang, Apple. And I think typically what like early stage founders do is to add some reputational piece or to actually say, Hey, this person’s done it. before I should go hire that resume or that logo, right? I think that’s kind of like one of the biggest mistakes. And I’m saying this like as an ex -Facebook person, right? As somebody that stayed there for a long time. But, you know, if you go back to what you need at that early stage, if you need somebody that’s gonna handle ambiguous problems, you’re typically gonna get a better person from either a mid -stage startup or a startup that’s helped scale, versus somebody that’s been at a big company for a while. And I think that’s a really big mistake a lot of founders make. Or even like early C levels or VP of sales when they’re hiring out their teams.

Matt Widdoes
Yeah, well, we think about kind of the world in a few different ways. But one of those is, are you in an infrastructure phase? Are you in a testing and optimization phase? Are you on a scaling phase? Or are you in a maintenance phase? And if you look at, you know, you take the Facebooks of the world, they’re largely in maintenance or any major, you know, super, like anybody doing five billion plus in revenue, they’re largely in maintenance. You look at an early stage startup. They’re very much either in scaling or maybe like a series A or a newly minted series B. Now they’re kind of in an optimization phase, but they’re not really scaling. Sorry, they’re still in an infrastructure stage. I may have misspoke at the beginning. And so, you know, the people that you bring in, in any role, whether it’s BD or, you know, paid acquisition or lifecycle, the people that maintain or scale are not the same people that build the infrastructure. And usually the people who have a ton of experience building the infrastructure are not necessarily have backgrounds that have scaled unless they were at one company for a long time or they did a few of these things early and bounced around. But usually these transitions take place over many years. And so to have all four at one company, you needed to kind of be there early days and have to build that, but they’re totally different skill sets. And so when do you, and there’s no like magic answer to this or any sort of like formula, but how do you think through kind of the building out, let’s take a sales team or something that’s more, I guess like I’ll blend sales and partnerships because those, those kind of depends on the product of what you’re selling. But, you know, how do you think through for somebody who’s maybe doing founder led sales right now and they want to hire, you know, they want to start staffing that out. Do you end up starting with like a junior SDR to help set meetings? Is it better to start with somebody senior who can kind of build that out? Do you have a philosophy around that?

Atif Khan
Yeah, you know, I think like even for the stage that we’re at, I think founder led sales and even like, you know, myself and my role currently being in a lot of those day to day sales closing deals is really important, right? Like until you get to, let’s say, you know, let’s say, you know, 500 million or 50 million, whatever the right number is based on the multiplier in the SaaS market or the advertising market, you have to be close to the problem, right? And so at a very early stage, yeah, I think an SDR, some of that’s basically just going to get in, get out there, set up meetings, you know, send emails, you know, like give you the layout because if you don’t have product market fit and you’re not out there selling, how are you actually going to get product market fit. And that’s like the first thing. And even when you do hire, you know, a VP of sales, having somebody that is founder that in the founder suite, like still be a part of that conversation, because like, you know, the way that I think about every round of funding is it just increases your likelihood of a positive outcome, right? And until you get to really like the C stage, you know, that that drop off is huge. It’s kind of weird to me when a founder isn’t kind of in as many conversations as they can be. So that’s kind of how I think about it.

Matt Widdoes
Yep, that makes sense. I’d spoken with another founder who has philosophy. I’m curious to hear you take on this kind of it’s different for every business, but his take was hire three SDRs to essentially help set meetings for you, for you, the founder, expect to fire two of them in the first four months, set really clear goals, and it’s just like sink or swim, and then make your turn those winners that went through this you know essentially bake off i don’t know it’s it’s that’s a very generous term for it. But take those and you turn them into your future VPs kind of to your point earlier you don’t start with the VP like make VPs are made because i think that’s the other thing is. I’m using VP loosely to be ahead of sales is made because usually the in my experience going after really experienced successful sellers they have huge pipe they have all this money that they have to walk away from so you have to be able to make it super you know interesting for them and then oftentimes i mean this is always the case but usually the what the more senior sellers who are willing to walk away from an existing role usually means i don’t have much of a pipe or much of a bag that they’re walking away from and so usually it’s like those are the people that you want and do you agree with that philosophy general is like start with juniors and let it and sink or swim or. Is that a little too rough maybe?

Atif Khan
No i think like the you know i think the star which you are sink or swim you know one makes it out of three and four months i think make sense. I think the context of where we are today versus three years ago also is different right so you have the ability to bring in SDRs and move that around i don’t know if you know that person becomes ahead of sales i think that’s probably where i would disagree. Yeah one of my old boss is at facebook you know Peter Jonas one of the things that he used to used to say is you know sometimes you know sometimes people grow with the business and sometimes and most time the business outgrows people right and then you know you’re talking about that maintenance and infrastructure phase and so for me i don’t know if that’s like. That’s true you know so but yes i like the idea of the first hey this is the first year two years let’s do it this way.

Matt Widdoes
Yep that makes sense and then you know you mentioned the change that we’ve seen in in recent years you know reflected not only in kind of the labor market and how teams are hiring but particularly in web3 something you’ve got a bunch of experience and i remember talking with you about. about crypto before crypto was cool, I guess, on some level. And I’m curious, now that you’ve doubled down on the Web3 side, just things that you’re seeing, if you take into account the shifts that we saw post all of the stuff that happened with FTX and particularly in NFTs, and that’s kind of almost becoming a bad word if it already isn’t, where people, anybody who had NFT in their product roadmap are now starting to kind of downplay that, not even talk about it as an NFT because it just spooked so many people. I’m curious to hear what you’re seeing, kind of what your thoughts are on current state of the market in the future.

Atif Khan
Yeah, we call them digital collectibles. Like I think that’s the word versus NFTs because you’re right, it is a bad word. It’s been wild, right? Like if you take a step back and think about LUNA, which was, let’s call it 14 months ago, That was only 14 months ago, right? And then you have FTX and you have so many in between Celsius and others. You know, I think it’s actually a really great time, right? Like I really do believe in the Warren Buffett. Like if everybody’s going this way, you got to go this way. And if you look at the actual use cases, you’re starting to see some really good use cases. It takes people a while to build games. And I think people thought that these games were going to come out right away. But I think over the next 12 months, we’ll see some really great games that use digital ownership and digital collectibles and tokens to actually drive utility and better game experiences. I think you’re starting to see some of the larger brands in the world’s lean in. You know, Nike, Adidas, LVMH are all brands that are super leaned in. These also are brands that if you look back 15, 20 years ago, leaned into the e -commerce piece and they have saved and grown their businesses. LVMH is owned by the richest man in the world now. You’re starting to see financial institutions take this seriously, both at the government level and also at the institutional bank level. And so, you know, for me, I think it’s a fantastic time because you’ve gotten rid of a lot of people that were in it for the quick fix. Right. For me, I came to Web 3 because I worked at Facebook for eight years and I fundamentally think that the internet is broken, right? And it’s current state, the centralization of a few different people that hold information and violate a lot of privacy stuff. It just foundationally, to me, I think it’s an important piece of how we move forward and what the original vision of the internet was, right? It was just a network of networks. And then we started to bring in search engines and social media would start to centralize things. And so, for me, I’m like more bullish on Web 3 than ever. I think that you have really smart people attacking real problems, building real products that are starting to generate real revenue. And I think in the next bull cycle, you know, I try to separate the… I don’t know if the crypto bull is the same as the next actual bull, but whenever we… we start to see interest rates decrease and we start to see the economy come back from that liquidity perspective. I think blockchain and Web3, crypto, whatever you’d like to call it, is going to have a massive emergence. I think AI has taken a lot of the share over the last four or five months, but I do think that there’s a huge, huge use case there.

Matt Widdoes
You mentioned some of these larger institutional firms getting engaged as well as some of these large brands and being by and large. In the grand scheme of things, early adopters, and you think back, you parallel that with the e -commerce side. There was a time for many years when people were like, nobody’s ever going to buy anything online. It’s not going to happen. Stop trying to make it happen. They’re not going to put their credit card. There’s too much risk. There’s not enough trust. People vehemently stood behind that. And people were like, yeah, this is crazy. You’re not gonna, like bulletin board technology, you’re not gonna like, what are you gonna do? Post your credit card. And so, yeah, so I think, I agree with that. I also, you know, the benefits that Web3 brings to experience, particularly in gaming. I mean, it’s a no brainer for gaming and actual ownership of in -game rewards that create real scarcity. Whereas, you know, there have been so many instances where something comes off as scarce and then greedy developers are just like, click, click, click, and it’s like, okay, now everybody has it. Or, and you have all these people that were early that hate that. Now granted, I guess you could do a new mint of something else, but the actual ownership and transfer of that, you know, you and I have seen it a lot in games, in all sorts of games, but you take games like Clash Royale or Clash of Clans, where you’ve built up, people have built up, you know, maybe for some listeners, it’s gonna be hard to believe, but, you know, quarter million plus in actual in -game value. And maybe you’re like ready to pass that account on. And there’s some other person who’s like, I’ll happily buy that for 80. Because you just fast forwarded me three more years. And there’s no real way to do that and set without giving away your entire Apple account. Or so I don’t know, I’m sure people do it, but, you know, are there other areas outside of gaming that come to mind for you as far as other areas where web three, or I can’t remember the euphemism, you were digital collectibles. Yeah, are there other areas where you see those outside of gaming having kind of early success with, early might still be in the next two to three years, but kind of what are some of those emerging things that you’ve seen?

Atif Khan
Yeah, so, you know, I think definitely on the, let’s call it loyalty brand ticketing is kind of the best way to describe it. You know, I think there’s, for e -commerce and loyalty, you know, my first job out of school is at Safeway and the corporate finance department. So we got to spend a lot of time. If you know anything about supermarkets is they segment their customers better than anybody else, that little Safeway card that you get. It basically says, hey, Atif lives in Redwood City, him and his wife spend X amount of dollars a week, and they, buy a bunch of milk and they break it down and they give you offers off of that. Now, a lot of that data funnel is kind of broken for different privacy reasons. iOS 14 is a big piece of it, right? And so, if you think about it from an e -commerce company or a commerce company standpoint, if you can create that like Safeway loyalty card into a digital collectible or some sort of digital ownership, you can actually track the data at such a strong level. You can offer up things to those loyal customers of yours like coupons and getaways and all that kind of stuff. So that is that one piece. The second piece is if you look at like, you know, it was a phenomenon and this I’m going to date myself, but like, you know, when I was out of school and you probably use it too, there was Gil Group and there was all these other membership based retailers, right? And so, you know, there was a lot of people who were like, you know, I’m not going to token gated commerce, I think is another thing, right? If you go in and you are a member of certain thing, you get exclusive rights to other things. For me, that loyalty, let’s call it a brand ticketing piece, I think there’s a huge use case there in terms of like, hey, blockchain enables a better experience, like you said, for the end customer.

Matt Widdoes
Yeah. I think I was talking with a guy earlier today who’s working on something in this space they are using this for essentially authenticating a real world item. You can think of it as like, kind of like artist memorabilia, if you will. Where, okay, this can be used to say, nope, this is authenticated by the artist who says, yes, this is my thing. And then it can be sold. And then it can be resold, a la StockX, where it’s still got the tag on it, but the tag is not this thing that’s hanging on it, that could be faked and could be forged, but instead is something that follows that item and is resold on that platform, which also means that the knock -on effect of that sale can also go back to benefit the artist. So if you were to take that in the ticketing standpoint, I’m sure there’s people working on this, but where it’s like, okay, there’s like this massive resale market, the artists don’t benefit from the ticket sales being $1 ,500 for a front row seat. They sold that for 90. Ticketmaster, whoever kept half of that, anyways, and the scalpers are actually the ones benefit. They want that fee. Which nobody wants, right? The fans don’t want that. Ticketmaster doesn’t want that. The artist doesn’t want it. Well, Ticketmaster might because they might own some of those secondary sites, but there’s so much there. Are there any other things that come to mind for you as far as kind of some of the functional elements of that that are really unique to blockchain generally? And you have just any opinion there?

Atif Khan
Yeah. If you take a step back and you look at what blockchain is, it’s a transparent ledger in a public database. And so if you work backwards that way, gaming was obvious because data is so important. Having public transparency around that data, digital ownership, and allowing for that. Very similarly for e -commerce, right? And so you’ve worked backwards. What are the other different types of verticals that this could really help with? You know, one thing that I think a lot about is like travel, right? Whether it’s logistics or just actual airline travel, right? I mean, dealing with that and how you set that up. Logistics, even today with all of the different tracking, there’s a large percentage of FedEx and UPS boxes that get lost. Imagine if you could have that same thing that you talked about on the authentication side with an actual package and you decrease the amount of loss there. And so those are some of the other ways that I think about it is like, what is a transparent ledger on a public database? What are the different industries that could really benefit from that? And those are the ones that I think about right away. Typically, if you look at the last couple of like, let’s call them transformations, whether it’s like PC and mobile, gaming and e -commerce has kind of gone first and then everything else is followed. And so I think cracking those two use cases will unlock a lot more for everybody else.

Matt Widdoes
Yeah, makes sense. You know, I’m curious on either the Web3 front or BD partnership sales front, are there any kind of resources that you lean on, be it a podcast or blogs or any books that you think are particularly good? I remember earlier in my career looking at a guy, Jeffrey Gettimer, who had some like very practical boots on the ground kind of advice, but I don’t know what the not 20 years ago version of that is today. What any things that for people who are kind of interested in learning more about, you know, Web3 or sales partnerships generally that you’d say, hey, these are good resources to start on?

Atif Khan
Yeah, so I think sales partnerships like always first book is the little red book of selling. You know, I think it’s like the one that everybody reads. And you know, I think it is regardless of whether you’re in sales or BD, if you have aspirations to be an executive at a company, you should assume that a large percentage of your job will be selling, right? When you get to be an executive, it’s actually not like the stuff that you did, you know, managing a team or as an IC, it’s selling candidates, selling investors, selling customers, right? And a lot of times selling your internal teams on what to do. And so I think for anybody that wants to either be in sales partnerships or eventually become an executive, I think that’s really important. On the Web3 side, just spend all day on Twitter or as much time as you can on Twitter and on Discord. That’s where the conversations are happening. And it’s less about the conversations than the opinions. It’s just about what are the different products that people are actually launching? And then what are the different use cases they’re finding? And then figuring out like what works and what doesn’t work? Because right now it’s like every emerging tech, it’s really just taking shots on goal and like throwing stuff against the wall.

Matt Widdoes
Great, cool. Well, any other advice you’d have for startups generally, either founders or people who are maybe pre -go -to -market and they’re kind of thinking through their approach there? you

Atif Khan
Yeah, I think first foremost, hire quickly, fire faster. I think one of the biggest things I think founders make a mistake of is you need great people. Good people are just not going to make you exist in six to 12 months. Watching costs and being very mindful of that, keeping burn low. And I think this is something that everybody talks about. But I think you really need to scrutinize every single dollar and have very strict budgeting on that side. And the last thing is, it’s like when you hire people, you need to tell yourself something and them. This is like a five to 10 year thing. This is not a, we’re going to get rich in two years. It’s going to be a long, horrible, wonderful, terrible, amazing ride all at the same time. And you have to be comfortable there.  Every day is different now. So those are the three things that I would take.

Matt Widdoes
Yeah. Yeah, and I think there’s people who thrive in super dynamic, rapidly changing environments, and then there’s people who are crushed by that and desire the kind of predictability and routine, you know, day to day of a more traditional corporate job, which those are usually the people self select out of those, but you know, finding people who have that kind of entrepreneurial spirit and ability and kind of that mental toughness and resiliency, I guess, probably, that is required of probably everybody, you know, anytime you have super dynamic environments, that’s going to always come out versus people who are like, it’s going to be tough. And so for people who drop off at the first kind of sign of struggle, that’s never going to be good for anybody long term. So that all makes sense. Cool. Well, thanks again for the time today. Super helpful. I know it was very helpful for me and we hope our audience enjoys these insights into BD and Web3 as much as we did. Look forward to the next one.

Atif Khan
Yeah, appreciate the time. Thanks for having me on. If you want to know anything about third web or Web3 infrastructure, find me on the internet.

Matt Widdoes
Okay, perfect. Thank you so much, Atif.