Interview with Stephanie Wei, Former VP of Marketing at NerdWallet

This article is part of a series revealing the stories of early employees from the most successful tech companies of the past few years. You’ll walk away having learned about what these individuals experienced, what they wish they knew, and the advice they’d give to others joining high-growth startups. Key takeaways are at the top and you can find the full interview below. 

This interview is with Stephanie Wei. Stephanie joined NerdWallet in 2012 as one of the first employees. As the VP of Marketing, she helped the company grow to over $100m in revenue and visitors. Below is an edited version of a conversation he had with us here at Compound. 

Note: If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution to manage your personal finances, Compound can help. We can help you diversify concentrated stock positions, optimize company equity, plan asset allocation, and more. Request access here and we’ll be in touch.

Key Highlights

• On how to create high quality content – “We always started from first principles: if I was answering this question from scratch, and I had the smartest person that I knew providing the answer, what would they say about it? Creating content from that perspective will help you make something that’s a fundamentally different experience than what’s out there. Most companies have to monetize and so their content pushes monetization instead of having a genuine, authentic answer.”
• On the importance of focus – “Extreme focus is what the early culture was all about. Even today when I ask founders what their biggest goal is, they give me five different answers. Tim’s was pure essentialism – laser-focused on driving certain metrics.”
• On negotiating equity compensation – “One way is to approach the founder and ask them: what metrics would I have to hit where you would happily give me this amount of equity? It’s a great way to reduce zero-sum thinking into more of an abundance mentality. It’s asking, “What’s a world in which you win and I win?” Then you can get the founder to articulate what success looks like for them.”
• On finding channel-market fit – “There’s a bit of an awkward period where companies don’t know what the next channel is going to be, so you wouldn’t necessarily want to hire a full team at that point. Instead I hired a small team of scrappy, generalist growth markets to create hypotheses, design tests, and iterate to an answer. None of them had deep channel expertise, but they were very hypothesis-driven and had good intuition around what the answer could be.”

How would you describe NerdWallet’s early culture?

To give a bit of context, the founder Tim Chen was a finance guy. He worked at a long-short equity hedge fund before starting NerdWallet and his personality was very metrics-focused. He knew what it would take to win. Reflecting on the early days and what made us successful, I would say this maniacal focus on pushing certain metrics was the most important. 

To put things in perspective, finance is a very expensive vertical in advertising. The cost per click was something astronomical like $30 or something. From the outset we knew we had to win in organic search – it was almost an obvious conclusion to him. He tasked all of the early employees with pushing one or two metrics max, and back in 2012 the metrics that mattered most were link building and high quality content that genuinely helped users. 

So extreme focus is what the early culture was all about. Even today when I ask founders what their biggest goal is, they give me five different answers. Tim’s was pure essentialism – laser-focused on driving certain metrics. 

What rituals did you practice that might seem ordinary but had an outsized impact on NerdWallet’s success?

NerdWallet was different from a lot of tech companies – at the beginning, we didn’t have any fancy investors. We were bootstrapped for a long time. We were outsiders. Tim was from finance in New York, and so the early team was his extended network. None of us really worked in Silicon Valley before. 

We needed to bond as a team, so as cheesy as it sounds, having (optional) Friday happy hours really helped us gel as a team. We didn’t have a brand name or were a buzzy startup. People didn’t know anything about us and we bonded over that. It was a really good tradition to relax and have fun together that we continued on even as the company scaled.

One of NerdWallet’s main growth drivers was content. What makes content high quality?

It’s funny, I see this problem with the companies I advise today. And it sounds challenging but it’s really not. If you think about a term or a topic and you literally Google the term, you’ll find pretty good resources out there but a lot of the time there’s not a full and satisfying answer like you might expect. 

We always started from first principles: if I was answering this question from scratch, and I had the smartest person that I knew providing the answer, what would they say about it? Creating content from that perspective will help you make something that’s a fundamentally different experience than what’s out there. Most companies have to monetize and so their content pushes monetization instead of having a genuine, authentic answer. 

We stuck with this strategy at NerdWallet. We knew the user journey: people asked questions on Google and trusted the best answer. Financial topics are complex and they sometimes required longer answers or tools embedded into the posts. We had the best answers and so we would win. 

Once SEO was working, how did NerdWallet scale their marketing?

In the early stages, it was all about getting SEO right. We did that through high quality content and link building. Once we had that working, we needed to figure out how to reach out to our users instead of just capturing their demand. How would we reach people who aren’t already looking for us?

This second stage was using experiments to test which channels would work. If you zoom out to 100,000 feet, there are only 3-5 scaled channels. Since we had already figured out search, we worked backwards from those channels and ran tests based on what we had already learned. 

There’s a bit of an awkward period where companies don’t know what the next channel is going to be, so you wouldn’t necessarily want to hire a full team at that point. Instead I hired a small team of scrappy, generalist growth markets to create hypotheses, design tests, and iterate to an answer. None of them had deep channel expertise, but they were very hypothesis-driven and had good intuition around what the answer could be. 

What advice would you give to early employees that is different from advice for founders?

The main benefit of being an early employee is having a deeply rooted authentic sense of the company-first mentality. You adopt this mentality of wanting to see the company succeed and are invested in the outcome. 

I’ve managed a lot of people over the years and I think people are often (rightfully) angsty about their positions, promotions, tasks, or roles. And that makes sense. But the biggest thing to keep in mind is that we need the company to succeed. The most important thing is that the company does well, and maybe it means that you move into roles where you can help that outcome the most even if it’s not your favorite thing. 

I remember going from having a small team to scaling it to another level. I hadn’t done much hiring before and now I was doing at least 15 interviews per week. It was hard because interviewing is such an art. We built a process that included case studies so that the asymmetry of information was reduced. But during that time I relied on a lot of people in the Silicon Valley community to answer my basic questions. What was a product marketer and why do you need them? Scaling an organization like that had a long-lasting impact on me. 

How did you think about equity compensation when you started at NerdWallet?

When I received my offer at NerdWallet, to understand my equity I did a bit of scenario planning. If the company reaches this valuation, what will my outcome be? But honestly I didn’t know much. I joined when I was pretty young and I didn’t know I had to exercise my options. I just knew the company was a rocket ship. 

Luckily the founder and more senior people had high integrity and helped me work through it. They told me that when we raised a Series A, the 409A valuation would increase and so would the amount of taxes I’d have to pay. I hadn’t heard about that before and just remember rushing to exercise (and even borrowed money from my mom to do so). And obviously that was a risk because I didn’t know if the company was going to work out, but it was the best way to reduce taxes. 

What advice would you give to someone negotiating a job offer?

At the beginning when people give you equity (or compensation as a whole) they don’t really know what level you are at, especially if it’s an early-stage startup. So what happens if you are unsatisfied with your compensation?

One way is to approach the founder and ask them: what metrics would I have to hit where you would happily give me this amount of equity? I literally asked my founder, “What would I have to do to either increase our valuation or accelerate our valuation?” Either make it bigger, or get there faster. What does that look like and what are those metrics?

 It’s a great way to reduce zero-sum thinking into more of an abundance mentality. It’s asking, “What’s a world in which you win and I win?” Then you can get the founder to articulate what success looks like for them.