Inside Facebook&Pinterest’s growth machines - with Cat Lee(Partner at Maveron, ex Facebook&Pinterest) - a podcast by Shamanth Rao

My guest today is Cat Lee. Cat Lee is the newest partner at Maveron, a $160MM consumer-tech fund, primarily focused on funding hyper-growth startups at the series A and seed rounds. Cat has had a long history of working on some groundbreaking growth projects - and taking huge leaps in her own career. She worked on the Facebook platform team starting in 2008, and helped drive the adoption of Open Graph, which drove some breakout growth for Facebook outside of its own platform. She then joined Pinterest in 2012 as the Head of Growth, and helped drive 3x growth in MAUs for the then fledgling platform - and set it on the path to scale & sustainability. After working on growth & marketing at Pinterest for over 4 years, she transitioned to being the Head of Culture at Pinterest, in which capacity she did some very interesting & tremendously impactful work, before she moved to being a VC at Maveron Partners earlier this year. In this fascinating & wide-ranging conversation, we talk not only about Cat’s unconventional career choices but also explore the elements that made Facebook and Pinterest’s growth machines as powerful as they were. We talk about the gender diversity problem in venture capital - and how Maveron’s approach has yielded dramatic results. Cat has had so many dimensions to her work and career - and all of these make this a fascinating conversation.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• What inspired Facebook’s Open Graph. How Facebook’s teams approached pitching Open Graph to publishers at a point when they didn’t have a lot of leverage or clout.
• What inspired Cat to join Pinterest - and why Pinterest was invite only at first even when it had millions of users. How Pinterest’s network effect was driven by content more than social interactions between users.
• How mobile traffic overtook web traffic in 24 hours of the launch of Pinterest’s mobile apps. 
• What inspired Cat to move to a head of culture role, even though this was a role whose success wasn’t as objectively measurable as that of growth roles. How Cat assessed the possible impact she could have heading up culture - and how she approached changing the elements of the culture that she felt needed changing.
• What inspired Cat to move to the VC space - and her very elaborate research & learning process before making the move.
• Why the % of VC money going to women is so low(at about 2.2%). How the lack of diversity in the VC space impacts this. Why Maveron’s leadership team’s composition unusual in terms of diversity - and how this has changed their results compared to most VC firms(even though these results weren’t something they tracked actively). 
• What inspired Cat to go on a sabbatical after working on two high growth startups - and what her personal goals were during this sabbatical.

Check out the full transcript and show notes here:
https://howthingsgrow.co/facebook-pinterest-growth-cat-lee-maveron-vc-diversity/

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