GMT003: Sylvia Ng – VP of Growth and Product at 500px

In this episode, Ramli interviews Sylvia Ng. Sylvia is the VP of Growth and Analytics at 500px. A lot of people look up to Sylvia for her knowledge and experiences with growth process, growth hacks, frameworks, start-up and a lot more. Learn about the different skills and attitudes needed as a growth marketer, importance of failures, and culture  through Sylvia’s journey.

“Everything is interconnected. There is input, there’s output.”– Sylvia Ng

About Sylvia

Sylvia is the VP of Growth & Product at 500px, a premier online community for discovering, sharing, buying and selling inspiring photography. Home to 7M+ photographers and 65M+ photos, 500px recently closed a $13 million expansion round and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz.

Prior to 500px, Sylvia held roles at Google, eBay, ScribbleLive, and OANDA. At Google Sylvia led a cross-functional team of “data hackers” on their Global Center of Excellence for SMB marketing. At eBay she worked on user acquisition and retention programs, including optimizing eBay Canada’s $7M internet marketing program and contributing to eBay’s Best Match sort algorithm.

Sylvia has a Masters in Predictive Analytics from Northwestern and looks forward to discussing all things data and growth with the GrowthHackers community.

Show Notes
  • 2:25

    How Sylvia ended up where she is right now

  • 3:10

    Given the opportunity to work in eBay

  • 3:52

    Started marketing and analytics infrastructure from scratch

  • 4:30

    Joined Google with her previous team working on automising the funnel for Adwords in Google Analytics

  • 6:00

    Working with large databases

  • 6:40

    What is 500px

  • 8:00

    How Sylvia’s engineering background helped in solving marketing issues

  • 8:43

    Seeing the world as an engineer vs traditional marketer

  • 10:18

    Difference between a traditional marketer and growth marketer

  • 11:41

    Critical skills that marketer of tech companies should have

  • 12:43

    What it means to be data-driven

  • 15:11

    What is the growth process of 500px looks like

  • 18:00

    Dealing with failures

  • 19:30

    Having someone accountable for business results

  • 20:12

    Culture needed to be cultivated in a growth team

  • 23:43

    What is Growth Mindset

  • 25:25

    What characteristics and skills Sylvia looks for on people

  • 28:43

    Some examples of growth experiments

  • 31:12

    What’s next for Sylvia

  • 33:25

    Thoughts about Gender diversity

  • 35:15

    Advice to those interested on Growth Marketing

Links

Music By The Passion HiFi www.thepassionhifi.com

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *