Club Friday Q&A: A Tech Expert on The Secret to Diversifying the Industry
By STACY LEE KONG
Image: LV Imagery
This newsletter was brought to you by Growclass, an award-winning growth marketing course and kind, smart community of marketers and entrepreneurs. Underrepresented Canadians can now apply for a full scholarship to their online 6-week Growth Marketing Certification for class starting Sept. 9.
I don’t actually remember how Sarah Stockdale and I connected, but I knew immediately that our vibes—and perhaps more importantly, our values—were aligned… which is why I’m excited to help shine a spotlight on Digital Marketing Skills Canada (DMSC), a partnership between her growth marketing training company, Growclass, and the Canadian Marketing Association and Jelly Academy to provide skills training for groups that are traditionally underrepresented in the tech industry. But because Sarah is Sarah and I’m me, we also talked about bigger questions around diversity in tech, the flaws in capitalism and simultaneous need to figure out a way to work within this system, and how she knows that what she’s doing is working. Read on for our whole chat!
Can we start with a very basic question? What exactly is growth marketing?
Growth marketing is just modern marketing! It's non-traditional marketing that lives at the intersection of product and data. Interestingly, this is the number one Canadian job right now; it has been on the rise for the last two years on LinkedIn. And right now, the breakdown in that role is around 20% women and around 80% men.
How did you get into growth marketing?
I graduated from [Toronto Metropolitan University, then Ryerson] with a master’s in professional communication and was offered two jobs, one at a Bay Street PR agency, and one at a small accounting software company called Wave. It was a three-month contract, it was no money—but I took that one, because I thought they might actually let me do something interesting. At the time, startups weren’t a cool thing, and this was a very traditional tech startup. But they raised $21 million in Series A funding three months into my contract, so I got to stay and actually have a real job. And that was my first growth marketing role, though at the time I didn't know that's what it was.
I helped build that growth team by stumbling my way through it—going to events and trying to find mentorship, because there was no education for this at the time. Then I got recruited to a San Francisco startup called Tilt, which was acquired by Airbnb in 2017. While I was there, I got to build one of the biggest campus ambassador programs ever; we had 6,000 students in seven countries. It became a cult campus brand—people got tattoos. We did a tour with The Chainsmokers. It was a very college brand, but it was so much fun. We built a very cool community and a lot of those people are heads of growth of companies now because they got excited about tech. But, we were all so excited about our work that we started burning out very quickly. Actually, the day we got acquired was at the exact same day that I quit. I decided I didn't want to go work for Airbnb and started consulting instead.
Where does Growclass come in?
Growclass actually started as an experiment. After Tilt, I had built a consultancy with a few other people, and we were still seeing a lot of the problems that we experienced when we were coming up. There was such a disgusting amount of sexism. All the people who were running these companies were white men, all the people executing the work were women and underrepresented people who were not benefiting from the salaries or the equity that the people in leadership positions were getting. So, the path to get rich was only reserved for people who looked a certain way and had a certain kind of experience.
At the same time, people were really struggling to find talent. I had also struggled to find good growth talent [in previous roles], so I had recruited people out of university and trained them. So, I knew the problems that the companies I was working with were experiencing, I knew how to train people and I realized that there was a way to break down some of the bullshit that we were seeing in the hierarchies of tech companies. We could create a path to more economic power, which is something I personally care a lot about.
We live under capitalism and it's imperfect. At the beginning of our courses we acknowledge how work is kind of broken, the system that we work under is kind of broken and the goal is always going to be to change the system. But in the meantime, how do we get people closer to security under that system that we work in? A lot of the time, it’s just helping them make more money. Growth marketing manager roles pay really well. It's the fastest growing job title on LinkedIn two years in a row, and it’s also the fastest growing job title in Canada. So it's in demand. It puts you at a spot at a company where you’re helping generate revenue, so it's one of the most secure spots that you can have. But, the other thing that you need for it is a network and the ability to use the language people use for these roles, which is often very acronym-heavy, so we’re trying to make sure that people can navigate those systems and give them additional support. Most of us didn't grow up with a rich uncle Bob who's grown companies and signed equity agreements, so how can we give you the experience of having that person who can navigate this stuff for you? We're trying to be rich Uncle Bob, and provide people with a network that can connect them to opportunities.
What happens when you don’t have women or underrepresented groups in these growth marketing roles?
There are selfish corporate reasons to have diversity. Statistically, companies that have diverse representation in their leadership, and specifically on their sales and marketing teams, perform better. So, if you have all guys you went to a frat with at Western as your executive team, your company is more likely to fail than it is if you have diverse representation, because you will have better ideas, better spread of life experience and better connection to your customers. Usually you are not only selling to 30-year-old white men, so if your entire marketing team looks like that, you are not going to be able to empathize and market well to your customers.
And there’s a whole host of reasons that aren't just selfish capitalist reasons. I came up in a period of time where I was one of the only women on these teams, and that experience sucked. Not only are we not hiring enough diverse people for these roles and giving them equity, but when they're there, they don't feel comfortable and it’s not a good workspace for them, which means they will leave. Which also means they may not be there long enough to vest those options. So, we also want to have more economic power, and we want to find good places to work, or to create those places ourselves.
What are the reactions from the companies where you’re placing Growclass alumni?
It's been oddly positive. Women are seeing an average salary increase of 26%, racialized folks are seeing an average salary increase of 44% and 2SLGBTQIA+ folks are seeing an average salary increase of 34%.
This disconnect is so fascinating to me, though. We see these systemic issues play out over and over again, in every industry, all the time. But we’re also seeing people like you who are coming in trying to solve the problem, and finding the companies you work with to be receptive. Why do we still see these systemic issues at play if they are interested in hiring diversely?
I think it's a network and community effect more than companies being magically open to diversity. We have thousands of people in our alumni community who are already working in these places and they are opening the doors. I wouldn't say there's magic sauce in the course, though we help with confidence and with hard skills, and we also offer two one-hour career and executive presence coaching sessions to help you show up better in your interviews. Oftentimes you are the person standing in your own way so if you're not applying for the senior level job because you've already decided it's too senior, then you can't get that salary increase. But if we can get you in front of someone who can help resolve some of that and build that confidence, then maybe you will apply for the job, and maybe you'll get it. But the community is mostly connecting each other to these roles.
Your values and politics are obviously the underpinning for Growclass’ approach. Why is that important to you?
I think there's saying you do the work and then doing the work, and I’m not interested in saying I do the work, right? If these are the things that I care about, and I'm going to show up every day for those things, then when it becomes hard to show up for those things, that’s when it’s the most important time to show up. I would much rather stand up for people who have less of an ability to stand up for themselves because I am white and that's a whole lot of privilege. I have to use it for something.
When we bring cohorts of students in, I’m like, there are no assholes here. It's just such a good, lovely, supportive group of people. And it's hard to curate that when you don't necessarily stand for anything specific. Anyone can be attracted to your work, but if you stand for something specific, you're going to attract a very specific type of person to your community, and that is going to make running that community a better experience for you and for your team.
How did the Digital Marketing Skills Canada partnership come about?
Darien Kovacs, the founder of Jelly Academy, contacted me about being part of a consortium with Jelly and the Canadian Marketing Association to put together a proposal for this funding that very specifically focused on women and underrepresented people. When Darien reached out to me with the idea, we’d never had a government program before. We had been doing our own scholarship of $100,000 a year worth of education, but we never had a partner in that, so I didn’t anticipate that this would actually ever come to fruition. But when it did at the end of 2023, it was the most exciting thing because everyone's objectives are well-aligned; the Canadian government wants to see people in higher-paying jobs and wants to help people in a very challenging economic landscape, specifically people who have been underrepresented.
And it's working. We're seeing these people add money to their salaries, they’re helping Canadian companies with the skills that we're giving them and I'm going into my Canadian government PR mode right now, but we're helping grow the economy, and we're also specifically focused on groups of people who haven't had these opportunities in the past.
Tell me more about how you know it's working!
We don't have a ton of data yet because we just started this program in January and our first graduates were in March, but we are seeing the salary increases that I mentioned before. And in our most recent cohort graduating at the end of June, 81% are women, 68% are underrepresented people, 24% are Indigenous, 23% are gender non-conforming, and 16% are from the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.
How were you able to find such a diverse group of people when growth talent can be a challenge to find?
The talent is there. I think it's hard to find diverse people to be part of a program if you haven't built a reputation as a company that supports these individuals. We have four years of doing that, so that gave us the community to go to and say, ‘We have these incredible scholarships and these are incredible partners in Canada that are already supporting these groups who we can partner with,’ to make sure that the opportunity can be seen, because if people don't know it's there, then it's really hard to apply for it. So the more we can make sure diverse communities know, the more incredible talent that we can bring out. And not just diversity from an identity perspective, but also provincially diverse people, because a lot of these programs over-index on Ontario, and we have a huge breadth of folks coming from all over Canada. Because if we just injected 500 people from Ontario into [this industry], that is not helpful in terms of diversity.
What’s next for Growclass?
I want to do this every day. I want to do as much of this work as possible. I would love to work with other governments that are looking to stimulate their economies and other programs inside of Canada that we can do this with. I do think as we're seeing with the recruitment, there's a huge financial barrier to this education and being a premium course company, we offer tons of our own scholarships, but in order to access the type of people who can really benefit from the work that we do, we need partners. So, we want to do more of this work because we know how to do it. And it works—we have the data to prove it.
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