Sean Ellis

Newport Harbor High School

University of California, Davis

Harvard University

New York University

Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

Author Hacking Growth, Interim VP Growth

Laguna Beach, California, United States

The Bounce app connects people (primarily travelers today) to stores, restaurants, and hotels for an affordable, safe place to store their luggage or backpack for a few hours or days. Now over 9000 small businesses on the platform have earned millions of dollars in incremental revenue offering storage space (more locations worldwide than Taco Bell!). In most cities, your Airbnb is within a 5-minute walk of a Bounce location. So instead of sitting around in a coffee shop until mid-afternoon check-in babysitting your luggage, you can pay $5.90/day to leave it at a Bounce location and explore the city.
            

    
    

    
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Bounce

Interim VP of Growth

A weekly podcast where I interview leaders from the world's fastest-growing companies to uncover what is truly driving their breakout success.  Generally, it is a function of strong product/market fit, passionate teams with a strong sense of mission and rapid cross-functional experimentation to accelerate customer acquisition, conversation, engagement, and monetization. But every business is different, so every interview highlights something that the company is doing uniquely well to drive their breakout success.

Click below to listen.
            

    
    

    
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The Breakout Growth Podcast

Host Breakout Growth Podcast

Partnered with Oleg Yakubenkov (former data scientist at Facebook) to offer GoPractice, a program for learning data-driven product growth that combines simulator-based learning and live weekly sessions with cohort participants.

The GoPractice Simulator replicates our experiences building growth engines from the ground up and helps develop the skills and experience for participants to truly understand and unlock growth at companies at any stage. Learn more at GoPractice.io

GoPractice, Inc

Co Creator

Published by Crown Business (a division of Penguin Random House) Hacking Growth is the definitive playbook on driving breakout growth using growth hacking. Hacking Growth is helping drive growth transformation for companies around the globe and is available in 16 languages. My co-author on the book was Morgan Brown (Facebook, Shopify). Get your copy here: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Growth-Fastest-Growing-Companies-Breakout/dp/045149721X">https://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Growth-Fastest-Growing-Companies-Breakout/dp/045149721X</a>

Hacking Growth

Author

Guest lecturer in Jeffrey Bussgang and Jeffrey Rayport's class on Launching Technology Ventures at HBS 2017.

Also guest lecturer in Mark Roberg's Entrepreneurial Management class at HBS 2020, 2021, 2022.

Harvard Business School

Guest Lecturer

SeanEllis.me

Worldwide Keynote Speaker

Andela has raised $381M from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, SoftBank Vision Fund, Spark Capital, and several other notable investors.

Andela was founded in Nigeria to connect brilliance to opportunity. It is based on the idea that brilliance is evenly distributed around the globe, but opportunity tends to be concentrated in the wealthiest countries. Companies ranging from startups to the world’s largest enterprises use Andela to tap into the best engineering and product development talent worldwide.
            

    
    

    
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Andela

Interim VP Growth

As companies scale, we generally see functional silos emerge. These silos cause significant breakdowns in a cross-functional alignment, which is a critical component of growth success.

Over the last few years, I have been able to refine an ideal approach to realign the full company around growth and ignite a high-velocity testing program. Until recently the program was offered onsite to companies around the world. It has now been modified to be delivered over multiple sessions remotely.

Breakout Growth Workshops

- Acquired 2018] Led GrowthHackers from founding to acquisition in late 2018. GrowthHackers combines a SaaS solution for managing rapid growth experimentation with a community of growth professionals. Also runs the annual GrowthHackers Conference in San Francisco.

GrowthHackers

Founder and CEO

- Acquired 2016] Built Qualaroo into the leading voice of customer solution for websites generating millions of dollars in recurring revenue. Customers included Uber, Starbucks, Spotify, Burger King and Intuit. Profitable SaaS business when it was acquired in 2016.

Qualaroo

- Acquired 2021] Mavenlink delivers enterprise-class Software as a Service (SaaS) to successfully manage and scale projects, revenue, and profitability.

Mavenlink was acquired in 2021 by Accel-KKR.

Mavenlink

Board of Directors

- Acquired 2013] Backed by Khosla Ventures, SignNow became the leading iPhone app to sign documents. Held board seat until company was acquired in 2013 by Barracuda Networks.

SignNow

During the six months working with Webs, worked with CEO to diagnose and resolve issues that were preventing Webs from reaching its full growth potential.  By the end of the six month engagement, growth had greatly accelerated relative to the six months prior to our engagement.  This was achieved without a significant increase in marketing spend.  Webs was acquired by VistaPrint for $117.5m in 2011.

Webs

Interim Growth Lead

Lecture on metrics driven customer development in Steve Blank's entrepreneurship course.
<a href="http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/faculty/blank.html">http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/faculty/blank.html</a>

University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business

First marketer at Lookout, a mobile security software company that now protects over 50 million mobile devices.  Worked with CEO to build the foundational growth processes and systems to drive scalable growth in the Android ecosystem. Lookout achieved a $1 Billion+ Valuation in 2014.

Lookout

Head of Growth (Interim)

First marketer at Dropbox.  Worked with CEO for first six months after private beta ended to build a strong growth foundation based on data, experimentation and customer passion.  We also had the goal of making data and experimentation an important part of the ongoing Dropbox culture.  Dropbox was able to leverage this foundation to become the fastest SaaS business to ever reach a $1B revenue run rate.

Dropbox

Prior to my joining the Eventbrite team, it was still a small company that had experienced relatively moderate growth over the preceding two year period. I joined the team in 2008 to work with the CEO to introduce a more systematic approach for unlocking rapid growth. One of the first things we did was instrument detailed analytics and funnel tracking and began conducting qualitative research to understand what was preventing faster growth.  With this information, we were able to significantly improve the funnel conversion rates of event organizers and help them drive more successful events.  This increased our conversion rates of event organizers and expanded their LTV, which made it much easier to scale aggressive positive ROI customer acquisition.

During this six-month interim growth role, one of my key goals was to help the team create a culture of data-driven growth experimentation. Eventbrite achieved a $1B valuation in early 2014 and listed on NASDAQ in 2018.
            

    
    

    
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Eventbrite

Interim Growth Executive

Led LogMeIn's marketing from launch to NASDAQ IPO filing (filed Jan 2008). Today LogMeIn is valued at several billion dollars and is one of the top 10 SaaS companies in the world.

Overcame early challenges of scaling a pioneering freemium model with rapid data driven experimentation throughout the conversion funnel. Early marketing team included design, engineering, analysts, DBAs, and marketing management. Accelerated growth by improving ARPU with additional premium services and aggressively scaling customer acquisition campaigns with an average payback time of 3 months. This significantly reduced the need for dilutive funding leading up to the Jan 2008 IPO filing.   
            

    
    

    
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LogMeIn, Inc.

Founding Team and Vice President, Marketing

Following NASDAQ listing, transferred to Europe to run international operations with offices in four countries outside the USA. Successfully streamlined operations prior to the acquisition by Vivendi Universal in 2001.

Uproar

President International

My first angel investment was in Uproar's 1995 seed round one year after graduating from college.  I joined the company full-time six months after investing. Uproar reached a billion-dollar valuation as a public company and was acquired by Vivendi Universal in 2001.

Since that time I have made angel investments at the seed stage in several startups including Ring (acquired by Amazon), Connectifier (acquired by LinkedIn), Bitium (acquired by Google), LogMeIn (IPO then acquired by private equity), Cirrus Logic (acquired by private equity), Recurly (acquired by private equity), Brightedge, Teamable, and Stronghold.

I am no longer making angel investments, instead reserving angel funds to exercise advisory shares.
            

    
    

    
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Angel Investor

Worldwide leader in online games and NASDAQ IPO by 2000.  Valuation exceeded $1 billion.

From humble beginnings as an Eastern European founded startup, we competed in a space originally dominated by giants such as Sony Station (Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune), Microsoft Game Zone, Yahoo Games and several Silicon Valley founded startups.  By the time we were acquired by Vivendi Universal, Uproar had become the 8th largest website in the world in terms of total usage time and the number one game site.

Our innovative growth programs included the web's first viral widget which spread to over 40,000 websites.  Among all publicly traded Internet companies in 2000, Uproar had the lowest cost of acquiring registered users.
            

    
    

    
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Vice President, Marketing

Hoping to avoid a normal mundane job, I moved to Budapest, Hungary directly after college to try to do something interesting with my career. Hungary was emerging from its communist days and seemed to have many interesting opportunities for an ambitious, young college grad. I move to Hungary with very little cash and no professional contacts. Within a short time, I was hired in a commission-only sales job at New World Publishing (publisher of Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest Business Journals) selling advertising to tech clients.  After struggling for the first few months to make a sale, I became top-grossing sales executive across three markets by cold calling companies throughout Europe and facilitating innovative advertising arrangements between computer hardware vendors and their resellers.

I earned and saved enough commissions to make a significant angel investment in 1995 in an Internet company. The company, Uproar, eventually listed on NASDAQ with a peak valuation of over $1 billion. I left New World Publishing to join the Uproar team in 1996.
            

    
    

    
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