The How Things Grow Podcast Shamanth Rao

How Things Grow will take a break for now. As the more perceptive of you might have noticed, a lot of our energy has recently shifted from How Things Grow to our other podcast The Mobile User Acquisition Show. While the longer form profiles that we got to do in How Things Grow were very fun and satisfying, it’s just been hard to run two shows while we run the business that pays our bills. For now, How Things Grow will take a break - and we aren't sure when we’ll be back (although of course, a...

My guest today is Liam Martin - and this is a conversation about a topic that is near & dear to my heart - remote work. Liam is one of the world’s foremost experts on remote work, having started a remote-only company more than a decade before it became cool to do so. He founded Time Doctor and Staff.com, doing some tremendously impactful work around productivity for remote work before founding the Running Remote conference, a real-life, non-remote conference about remote work. Liam has se...

My guest today is Hila Qu. Hila is the former VP of growth at Acorns - and there are very many reasons I’ve so admired her work. Hila had a background in biology - and with nothing in her background that was relevant to growth, she started work at GrowthHackers, where she not only picked up the methodology of growth from Sean Ellis but also became very very proficient at experiment-driven growth. She wrote the series of articles ‘A growth practitioner’s 90 day plan’, which she herself used fo...

My guest today is Noah Rosenberg, the founder and CEO of Narratively. Narratively is a publication that I’ve both written for - and have been very very impressed by for some of the pioneering work they’ve done. Narratively very much defined a niche for themselves in pioneering long-form human interest journalism in an age of diminishing attention spans. They not only continued to bring out original long-form stories - but also developed a unique monetization model of a content studio that has...

My guest today is Jabari Johnson, the founder of COLORS Worldwide, a live events company that produces parties and music events across 45 cities in the United States. This is a fascinating conversation - both for Jabari’s personal story as well as for his insights on scaling a live event and filling up rooms and halls - at scale. From his earliest days when he hustled to interview stars like Nicki Minaj and Justin Bieber before they became famous to how he thoughtfully considers pricing and m...

My guest today is Jon Hook, the CRO of Homa Games, the publishers behind hit hypercasual games like Tower Color, Tiny Cars, Balls vs. Lasers - and more. Jon has held a myriad of roles in mobile marketing before Homa - including being a co-founder of the mobile marketing agency Odyssey Mobile, the Head of Mobile & Digital Investment at MediaCom - and VP EMEA for Brand and Agencies at AdColony. In today’s interview, we dive into the fascinating world of hypercasual games. If you’ve eve...