Social+Capital Partnership, the venture capital company established by ex-Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya has named Ray Ko as its first Growth Partner, TechCrunch reported. As a permanent operational partner in that role, he will be aiding startups craft and develop for optimal growth. Before his appointment as Growth Partner, he served as the firm's Entrepreneur in Residence or EIR, the report said.
Ko formerly worked at Facebook as the Director of Growth and Analytics under Palihapitiya that attributes to his knowledge about growth and product development. As an EIR, he worked to advise firms like Remind 101, an education messaging app, on helping them make changes to the product so that it could improve its user base and engagement, the report said.
Remind 101 and other firms gained from Ko's advice that the venture capital firm determined that he should be a partner whose role would be to exclusively teach young companies the discipline and framework necessary to optimize growth. Ko told TechCrunch that his role is to let the startups view growth in a meaningful way. He added that his main objective is to teach firms how to remain committed to a method of thinking around growth and then putting that process to action on their own, the report said.
Ko and Social+Capital Partnership believes that growth boils down to product and data and coming up with a service that customers and users can use and be happy with. Their aim is to allow startups to experience real growth and not merely a temporary jump that will allow them to increase valuation for the next financing round, the report said.
Ko will be working with five to six firms each week in his new, permanent role. He will be sharing values as well as a process to drive and more importantly, sustain their growth. He is currently collaborating with Brilliant, CreativeLive and other portfolio firms of Social+Capital, the report said.
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