Elpha Office Hours: Ask me anything about corporate venture capital, growing companies, & more
Hi everyone! I’m Kat Garcia, Growth Architect at BCG Digital Ventures in Corporate VC, and a contributing writer at Forbes. I am also the founder of The Corporate Diary, focused on sharing female perspectives in male dominated fields; the platform has 20K+ followers across channels.
I held office hours on Elpha and answered your questions on: corporate venture capital, growing companies, unit economics & more
Last week, I held office hours on Elpha. Members asked me about corporate venture capital, growing companies, unit economics (LTV, CAC, CPA, etc.) incubating start-ups, content strategy, reverse mentorship, being a female minority in business & tech, personal branding, and more.
What is Elpha?
Elpha is where women in tech talk candidly online. Members come for personal and professional support, to find jobs, and make friends. How do you define women? We welcome people who identify as women or non-binary women, and we rely on our members to sign up in good faith.
Office hours are held on a weekly basis where certain members openly discuss their career paths and answer questions pertaining to their experience in support of founders, women in tech and more.
Who has Elpha featured?
Some notable women featured include: Founder & CEO of Glossier, Emily Weiss; Managing Director & Partner at Union Square Ventures, Rebecca Kaden; AI Resident at Google Brain, Jessica Yung and many more!
I answered yours questions on Elpha - Here are a couple of them:
A few Elphas sent me their questions and I loved answering them. Here are a couple of my favourite interactions.
Question 1: Hi Kat! Thank you for sharing your expertise and insights. I'm curious about how you structure your time and balance between The Corporate Diary, writing for Forbes, and your work at BCG Digital Ventures. What advice do you have for Elphas looking to excel in their day jobs and do things that they love that helps build their careers?
Answer 1:
Your day job comes first: BCGDV is my priority and depending on the work I have to do there, I'll balance my spare time (evenings and weekends) to Kat Garcia Online and portfolio brands (Kat Garcia Blog, The Corporate Diary, Koach Kat, Ladies Who Lunch, and all other partnerships like Forbes writing). It's important to always focus on your day job first, and be the very best at your craft before jumping into side / external projects to support career building. I'm grateful to know that I work at a place like DV that champions my entrepreneurship and I will say that finding a place that "gets it", makes the world of a difference.
Be kind to yourself: I've been building my online presence for 10+ years across platforms and there were years I pushed more than others. It's not easy and being kind to yourself is my most important tip. You can't have it all and sometimes it's recognizing what you want to say "Yes" to.
Structure your +1’s: I often think about how to best structure my "+1's" and how to create synergies between my work at DV and future career goals. For Kat Garcia, I've gone about creating a content strategy to understand the following:- sub-brand- goal (conversion, awareness, deal flow)- type (organic, paid, etc.)- content type (article, video, partnership, email, social, etc.)- platform channel (website, blog, email newsletter, social, partnership, YouTube, etc.)Creating a calendar, and using marketing tech stack and automation tools can also help.
Create synergies: When I first started out on YouTube, I was making viral videos about auditioning for Disney channel. I was an actress at the time and shared behind the scenes to my life as a TV actor on set. It was great! However, when I went to business school and needed to rebrand my online persona, I began to look for ways to create content or have my +1s relate to where I wanted to be. "The Corporate Diary" came about. When I partner with brands and say "Yes" to my time, I always ask myself how it will help my current firm, my career, future goals, communities I support and my mental health + happiness.
Get support: Just like you have people who audit your work, have a board of directors in your life who can help audit your "+1s".
Question 2: Hi Kat, nice to have you here. What are the core functions of a growth Architect and how does this apply to a startup that wants to grow fast?
Answer 2:
A Growth Architect is at the forefront of product, finance, marketing and technology.Growth Architects at DV are responsible for incubating growth thinking into ventures at every stage, from ideation (i.e. innovation) to customer adoption (incubation and commercialization).
We continuously seek to evolve the industry standard for growth best practices, rapidly inventing transformative new strategies to validate launch and scale our ventures. The work spans across product, finance, marketing and technology, and we drive successful growth by leveraging the symbiotic relationship that exists between them. Through a hypothesis-driven, rapid test and learn approach, we strategize, implement and execute go-to-market activities that ensure best in class customer acquisition, engagement and retention.
As an example, we'll run market validation tests using marketing tech stack tools and growth modeling, across a variety of channels to understand: product-market fit, market size & potential, generate unit economic metrics (i.e. CAC, LTV, CPC, CTR, etc.) to serve as inputs into the financial model, branding support, and more. Driving a venture's growth ultimately sits a Growth Architect.
It's strategic but also very much hands-on, more than I've ever seen.
Question 3: What are your top 5 tips for startup growth?
Answer 3:
As for quick tips, I'd keep in mind a couple of buckets:
Unit economics: What are your metrics? Work on driving LTV up and CAC down through a series of exercises. Understand how margin-based marketing, SEO, content strategy, email marketing, media buying and similar relate to ultimately drive these metrics where you want them to go.
Test & Learn: When we think of digital marketing, we often go straight into A/B testing. There's so much more to test and learn methods than straight A/B tests. You can use testing strategies to get branded vs. non-branded unit economics, market appetite for your products, test landing pages, full funnel and attribution. You can test markets, channels, spend allocation/media mix, devices, and so much more!
SEO: Understanding how platform algorithms work and how to boost search ranking through SEO expertise and content strategy is top of mind when scaling.
MarTech Stack: Automation tools and marketing tech stack is something startups often forget to use to support their busy teams. Simplify your life and find ways to invest in marketing tech stack tools across efforts.
Start with the basics: Find basic wins. Low hanging fruits. I often see founders breaking their heads over ways to grow and scale forgetting their network, word of mouth, and PR. Apply the 80/20 rule there.
