Danny Martinez: what you can learn at eBay, Airbnb, and multiple startups

From investment banking to growth, and why a data guy loves talking to customers.

Danny Martinez has one of the most enviable CVs in tech. Nearly three years at eBay, four at Airbnb, before two head of growth stints in earlier-stage startups.

Danny has been working for almost fifteen years, and when he started, Growth wasn't a discipline at all; let alone an understood one.

Danny and I sat down recently to discuss his career journey, how he ended up in Growth, and lessons along the way.

"The career advice at the time was: you've done maths and computer science, go and become a banker or a software engineer."

Danny was amongst the first in his family to go to university. Studying maths and computer science clearly set him up well. But he had no idea what he wanted to do afterwards. Without close family members with experience to guide him, he took the career advice of going into investment banking.

"It was not fun at all," he says. "All the stereotypical things you see on TV about investment banking – that's what that job was."

This was early 2013 with the culture of tech and startups in its ascendency. He knew he needed a change.

"I became super fascinated by what at the time was called 'disruptive tech'. And so I applied to Google, eBay, Facebook, and Dropbox to see who would take a gamble on me."

From eBay data analyst to Airbnb

Danny went through mutliple rounds of interviews for a data analyst job at eBay.

"'All I really needed,' this hiring manager told me, 'was a good SQL data analyst.'"

While the non-technical interviewers had given him the green light, he knew he'd flunked the SQL test.

He got the job though and when asked later why, the hiring manger said 'you gave the only answer to that SQL test I'd have accepted.'

"I told him 'I completely failed it. I was awful. But I learn quickly, I'm a harder worker, so give me a chance."

Danny spent three years in a variety of roles across data and analytics, finance, and financial planning and analysis (FP&A).

But he'd soon have an experience that would change his career again.

"I was on holiday in Venice having tried this new thing called Airbnb. We got there and the host said: 'what do you like? What are you about? Tell me what you want to do.'

"He then told us what tourist traps to avoid, where the locals hang out, and it was great."

Inspired, Danny immediately went home and put his spare room on Airbnb himself.

"I came across Airbnb and just fell in love with it at the very first moment"

After that, it was a no brainer. Danny cold-emailed a few dozen people working in the UK office. One responded.

"He gave me such a hard time because I had a tie on in my LinkedIn profile picture, but he gave me a chance and he was hiring for a data job."

Danny went in as a data analyst, and again moved between roles in from sales operations to a chief of staff style role.

After four of the best years of his career, he wanted something smaller. First, he wanted some time off, and booked to go travelling. It was February 2020. A month later travel plans were cancelled and the job he had lined up for his return looked uncertain.

How a data analyst looks for a job

Back into the job market sooner than expected, Danny started looking for a job.

"I kind of mapped out everyone in my network. I thought these are the key people that are going to be able to hook me up or offer me a job. These are the people that are super connected.

"I'm quite an analytical person, so that was like a fun exercise. By the end of it I had 15-20 names, called them all up and explained the situation."

That search ended in a role at marketplace Prolific. But the exact specifics of the role were kept open and to be designed.

"I'd realise what I always loved was the mixture of data and commercial, and someone told me 'that's Growth'."

The founder I was talking to said "we do have a growth team that's a data analyst and a user researcher, but if you want to grow that function then great."

He spent two years there, followed by a shorter stint at Incident before moving into fractional, advisory, and investor work. Danny now coaches on SYSTM, which is how I first met Danny during my time coaching there a few years ago.

Growth: the misunderstood function

One thing I always like to ask other growth people is how they define it.

"It's a misunderstood function," Danny replies. I agree.

"It depends whether you're talking to a US or European company. My preference is more for the US version."

"In the US, it's more like product: you take a funnel, you optimise the heck out of it and really focus on activation and retention. That's my preference for growth roles."

"It's that intersection of data, marketing, and depending on the company, product as well."

Prolific was the closest thing to a true growth role he had.

"There, we've got great product market fit, we've got great retention that's growing, but we need to figure out how to get it to grow even faster. And that was a fun challenge. We had hockey stick growth during the pandemic, but what are we going to do after that?"

Generalists should solve early problems before specialists come in

During one phase of the pandemic, a story had emerged in the Economist which said that lots of people wanted curfews to remain in cities post-pandemic.

An FT journalist had called this out due to the quality of survey data beneath it.

Someone on Danny's team saw this as an opportunity. They re-ran the survey, using the FT journalist's desired constraints and shared the results. That produced FT coverage, but also in the Economist and other sources too.

"For me, growth is about just figuring out all these things."

It turned our conversation to the many times Danny has tried things out that he openly admits he had no experience in.

Later on, the founders were considering hiring a sales team.

"I said rather than hiring a head of sales, let's prove out the motion that you can get traction with generalists."

Danny admits he had no sales experience but the results were pretty powerful.

"We eventually hired someone who had been doing sales all her life, and when she saw our benchmarks, she was impressed."

Danny tells me in his process, they didn't know what they were doing. But they created hypotheses, convinced the team they could do it, and then went and tried a bunch of stuff. When they found winning avenues, they repeated.

For me, this reflects a wider conversations in startups: do you hire specialists or generalists. And even at a company founding level, do you need the experience in what you're building, or is being an outsider advantageous?

When we did this interview, Danny was exploring a startup idea in a space he had no direct experience in.

"I see myself as a 33 year old intern because that's essentially what I'm doing. Go really deep, understand the problems from the inside, and try to understand it as much as I can."

Based on how well he approached the sales team, it feels like this can be a strong route to success.

Hit a ceiling? Talk to customers

One story Danny told me was about a ceiling they had hit at Prolific. Activation wasn't as high as they thought it could be, and every solution so far had been tactical – "a lot of the thinking was 'people just need a discount.'"

In the end, Danny started speaking to speak to customers. Specifically those who dropped out of that activation journey.

At the time Prolific were going through SYSTM (where Danny now coaches). "One of the things Matt and Nopadon talk about is 'don't just accept what people tell you as the answer. Go deep, ask them for context. Understand what they're trying to do at the time.’"

What came out of those conversations was that there was anxiety around the final build of the surveys. They often ran into the thousands of pounds and so it brought with it huge stress that they were 'doing it right.'

"We realised we needed to build multiplayer mode. That's essentially how GitHub works. If you're about to submit a change to the code base and you fuck up, you're in hot water right?"

"But with GitHub, rather than doing that, you do a pull request, somebody reviews it, and then finally it makes its way to the codebase. That kicked off a lot of the product thinking about collaborations."

Despite Danny's decade-long experience as a data analyst, he recognises how much faster it is to just speak to customers.

Closing thoughts

Danny got into growth around the same time I did. And while he went in via the data and product side, and I did via the marketing side, so much rang true to me.

It's interesting that today with growth more understood, journeys in will likely be less random. But there were universal truths I've found with some of the best growth people I've ever worked with.

The best share Danny's curiosity and humility. Asking questions, recognising what you don't know. Those are vital growth traits.

But also understanding both that data and human side. The analytical, and more creative. Being as comfortable in a spreadsheet as running a customer interview.

Thank you again to Danny for his time.