Awesome People - Ep 94
International expansion, ops leadership, in the weeds, mentorship
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Please meet James Hu, Your NFT-Native Ops Leader 📊
Most recently James led OpenSea’s internationalization product — this included everything from research to go-to-market. You could say he’s the leading expert in global NFT dynamics. James partnered with every team at OpenSea to push the boundaries of NFTs (pun intended!).
Prior to OpenSea, James was an executive at Ula, the hypergrowth Indonesian e-commerce startup backed by Sequoia, Tencent, and Jeff Bezos. He led biz ops, geographic expansion, and managed a P&L. He's also trusted by McKinsey and Twitter’s biggest NFT accounts.
Outside of work, James is fairly nomadic. He’s visited 50+ countries and has experience working in five major regions.
You can hire him to lead special projects, especially in business operations, product strategy, and geographic expansion. He’s also available to consult on NFT strategies.
The more ambiguity, the better. James thrives on establishing structure and taking ownership in hyper-growth environments.
Want an intro to James? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
James was gracious enough to share some pro-tips with us here✨
A great Head of Business Operations can be one of the most impactful hires for an early-stage startup. To succeed, a biz ops leader must:
understand the business well
have strong cross-functional oversight
be a top-notch manager
What makes a great business operations manager?
Roll up your sleeves
It’s important to empathize with customers and employees. You must get into the weeds. That may look like:
crunching data
answering support tickets
interviewing customers
observing customers use your product
It’s not glamorous, but it’s necessary.
When I first joined Ula, I was new to both e-commerce and Indonesia. At Ula, retailers bought goods to sell in their stores, and we delivered them. I spent my first two weeks as a field salesperson. Armed with a month of Bahasa lessons and a co-worker to translate, I visited Ula’s customers in wet markets for 6 hours a day. After sweating through two hot and humid weeks, I intimately understood our customers’ needs and how they use our products.
One day, while eating lunch with a customer at her street stall, I had an epiphany. A salesperson from a competitor drove by on his motorcycle hawking crackers for sale. Our customer’s son bought some in bulk. The son’s impulse purchase was a completely different behavior than Ula’s preplanned purchase approach.
I pitched the motorcycle idea to Ula’s leadership, and the next month we set up our own motorcycle canvassers to drive around markets, hawking goods for impulsive buyers. Turns out, this was an efficient way to acquire customers, who eschewed our intentional buying approach. It netted us a cool 10% increase in new customers weekly at a low marginal cost.
Being in the weeds with customers yields incredible ROI. It helps fine-tune existing products and develop new ones.
Bring teams together
Business and product leaders often only have time to focus on their teams. As a result, cross-functional leadership meetings happen too infrequently.
Enter Business Operations: the generalist function that helps identify, prioritize, and coordinate cross-team opportunities.
At OpenSea, we all acknowledged that internationalization was an important and fast-growing trend. However, internationalization didn’t fall cleanly on any team, and there was no clear playbook. Fortunately, I was already working closely with multiple teams and saw the opportunity to lead the cross-team effort.
To kick off a cross-team effort, start by aligning stakeholders. Meet with each stakeholder to prioritize initiatives, collect ideas, give feedback, and spot cross-team gaps. This helps build a strong plan and get buy-in. Then, get each team to deliver parts of the strategy. Establish a weekly task force to monitor progress on committed initiatives.
Internationalization at OpenSea is a work in progress. I’m glad cross-functional teams are working together to drive it forward.
Invest in people
The ideal Business Operations team is lean and filled with generalists. Ideally, team members join a different function after 3-9 months. Without turnover, business operations risks becoming a stagnant cost center with diminishing business impact and influence.
At Ula, I mentored 5-7 members at a time. I wanted them to succeed when they left the Business Operations nest. Mentorship takes many forms. Some of my favorite tactics include:
Create consistent safe spaces: Weekly 1:1s ensure team members receive prompt and ongoing feedback. Take a genuine interest in team members’ work and create a space for them to ask for help.
Source development opportunities: Source a variety of projects to help people develop a well-rounded toolkit and build cross-team relationships.
Provide continuous mentorship: Find roles for team members on other teams so they can continue their development.
Nothing brings me more joy than seeing Business Operations alumni on different teams, collaborating closely to enhance the connective tissue across the organization.
Want an intro to James? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
As always, please let me know if you have any questions and if you want an intro to James!
Stay awesome,
Founder of Awesome People Ventures & Talent
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Awesome People Continued 🤩
Recent Features
Joe, Your Fractional Head of Ops — was the co-founder and COO of a YC-backed company, Tyltgo. They created a same-day delivery marketplace for SMBs. Before that, he led Uber Eats’ Canadian expansion. He managed marketplace ops across millions of monthly deliveries.
Akhila, your part-time Web3 Technical Product Manager — Most recently, Akhila worked at Coinbase for 2.5 years and launched Coinbase Prime APIs. Prior to that, she was an Ethereum core developer.
Kassen, your Technical Product Manager & Community Builder — She worked on community initiatives at Crypto, Culture, & Society (CCS), the first product partnership at 0xStation, and scalability for Cloud AI at Google.
Want intros to anyone here? Lmk and I’ll connect you!