Luc Levesque
Luc Levesque is Chief Growth Officer at Shopify and has advised companies like Canva, Twitter, Pinterest, and Patreon on growth and product strategy. Previously he served as an executive at TripAdvisor, where he built and led the growth team that helped it become the world’s largest travel site. Luc was then recruited by Mark Zuckerberg to Facebook, where he was an executive and held senior product and engineering leadership roles.
AI & Technology Skills
Generative AI in search engines shifts the strategy from keyword optimization to 'teaching' the AI to recommend your brand.
"What we're about to see is basically Google... showed a big box on top of the search results that answers the query directly... how do you optimize in a world where it's not so much about optimizing f..."
Communication Skills
In a remote-first world, the ability to communicate complex ideas with extreme brevity is a competitive advantage.
"It's called Smart Brevity... I've always been big on writing crisply and being very tight and not having three-page memos that you're sending off. Especially now that we're remote and we're all doing..."
Growth Skills
Scaling growth before achieving product-market fit can damage a brand by exposing a subpar experience to too many users.
"Generally speaking, I would say you don't want to focus too much on growth until you have product market fit. So make sure you have a product that users love that's either showing strong signs of rete..."
Most successful companies scale primarily through one dominant, well-executed growth loop.
"The right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact where they're either building or helping to ideate or helping to implement a growth loop that literally changes the company. As we k..."
The most powerful growth engines combine different types of loops, such as a viral acquisition loop feeding an SEO content loop.
"I've always thought of LinkedIn as just such a great example of this where you have this viral loop where if you recall when it was just starting, everybody was getting these invites from LinkedIn......"
Hiring & Teams Skills
Asking a candidate to teach you something reveals the depth of their expertise and their ability to communicate complex concepts.
"Teach me something about growth that I don't already know. Because... it really gives you a sense of what this person thinks is the top of the stack in terms of the smartest thing they know. Whether y..."
The best predictor of future performance is a history of repeated excellence across different areas of life.
"I'm looking for what I call signs of excellence. So I want to know the top people generally have done multiple amazing things in their life, repeated success, not just once. Maybe it was work related,..."
Being poached by a former manager is one of the highest-fidelity signals of a candidate's quality.
"One of them is when somebody's boss leaves the company and then comes back to poach them, that is such a strong signal because if you think of what just happened, the leader who knows exactly how good..."
A high-performance culture is built by prioritizing measurable outcomes over activities or hours worked.
"It's because they focus exclusively on that magic word, which is impact. And that was kind of my first introduction to working with Mark and just that laser focus on, 'All right, got it. Now when are..."
Leadership Skills
Over-reliance on rigorous A/B testing can kill execution speed; sometimes 'YOLO-ing' obvious improvements is more efficient.
"Experiments are great, but they can be slow... the subtlety is that experiments are great, but they can be slow... sometimes you just need to YOLO it because it's a better product experience or you ju..."