George Bonaci

George Bonaci’s core operating system: growth is science, and most marketers are bad at science — come in with a blank slate, form hypotheses, and run experiments at high velocity, because copy-pasting a playbook from a past company “generally doesn’t work.” Assume the majority of bets fail; “if they’re not failing, honestly they’re probably not doing their job well.”

When a channel works, ideally take it toward saturation quickly — graph the response curve rather than blindly jumping from $10K to $200K, because “most things saturate probably more slowly than people expect” and most startups get to the asymptote too slowly. Macro saturation can take a really long time to hit CAC: new products, geographies, channels, and halo effects keep resetting the curve.

Alpha in growth = doing what no one knows about or what everyone is convinced won’t work. Direct mail — dismissed as “junk mail to people’s homes… that absolutely won’t work” — became one of his biggest channels because nobody was doing it and it could reach 200,000 people tomorrow for parallel experiments. Today’s underappreciated pick: B2B influencer marketing, run like scaled outbound to 10,000 micro-influencers. Most polluted channel: paid search — “you’re paying a tax to Google.”

Velocity beats rigor, but with a floor: “if you’re just doing a bunch of sloppy things… you’re not going to actually learn anything.” His cautionary tale — changing everything at once on a decaying homepage 3x’d conversion in weeks and saved the quarter, but “we never actually knew what did or didn’t work” and had to unwind changes after later A/B tests.

On hiring: always skew junior and hire for potential — smart generalists who can think from first principles and do math (engineers, ex-finance, ex-consultants), while he has personally stayed away from profiles shaped by years at much larger companies. The most expensive irreversible founder mistake: “hiring for experience because they don’t know any better.” Test candidates with a messy real-world Salesforce dump, and know what good looks like before you send it.

A good leader should know how to do everyone’s job “but poorly” — the poorly part is important, because if you do it better than your hires, you hired wrong and you’ll micromanage. Invest in management deliberately: Samsara shipped leaders a box of 15 business books, one per month, with structured discussion and required practice.

AI lowers the technical bar but doesn’t automatically create alpha: he no longer thinks growth hires need to be nearly as technical as before, and thinks AI “helps uncreative people more” — but budget-allocating AI “almost by definition… just going to give you incremental gains on things you’re already doing.” Having AI interview 50 industry insiders and synthesize alpha is “really difficult… at least at the state of AI today, but maybe not in a year.”

He changed his mind on brand in the last 12 months: Gong invested in completely unmeasurable brand work and it showed up in inbound — once at scale, “if you’re not investing in brand… you’re going to screw yourself over in the future.” And on “build it and they will come”: “absolutely not… that is antithetical to everything we stand for.”

🔗 Original source & video: George Bonaci, VP of Growth @Ramp: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever |E1264