Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 NewBank is bigger than Coinbase Robin Hood, a firm, SOFI, and lemonade combined. 80 to 90% of NewBank's growth is through word of mouth. We're not trying to be incrementally better. We are trying to be fundamentally different. We want our customers to love us fanatically. It feels like NewBank is one of the historically most successful companies that launching new business lines. We built a lending product.

Starting point is 00:00:23 We built an investments product. We built an insurance product. We built a series of small business products. We rarely scale a business. projects until we know the Sean Ellis score hit the threshold that we find really compelling. I want to talk about strategy. Kevin Sistram in the early days of Instagram, I heard him say it at a conference. We may not be right, but at least we are clear. Even if your strategy isn't right, you have a very clear idea of what was supposed to be happening. Where do you think all this

Starting point is 00:00:50 goes in the future? Why not have the company that reinvents banking come out of Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Bogota? Today, my guest is Jack Dugel. Jagg is chief product officer at NewBank, which is one of the most under-the-radar monster businesses that you'll ever come across with a fanatical user base and a really unique approach to building product. Before NewBank, Jag was Director of Product Management at Facebook, leading monetization of video and third-party content, including news, gaming, and influencer content. Prior to Facebook, he was Senior Vice President of Product and Strategy at Quantcast and Group

Starting point is 00:01:27 Product Manager and Head of Strategy for Display Ads at Google, which was Google's second largest business at the time. In our conversation, we cover how to build products that people become fanatical about, how to develop a strategy, category design, product line expansion, the future of fintech, and tons more. With that, I bring you Jack Dugel after a short word from our sponsors. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS.

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Starting point is 00:04:19 Mercury, the art of simplified finances. Mercury is a financial technology company at a bank, banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolved Bank and Trust members FDIC. Jag, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Lenny, I'm honored to be here, a big fan of the show, and look forward to the conversation. So thanks for having me.

Starting point is 00:04:44 I'm even more honored. Thank you for being here. I want to start by sharing just some facts about New Bank that I think are going to blow people's minds. I think a lot of people in the U.S., especially are sleeping on New Bank. And I think this is going to help people that are listening pay even more attention to the stuff we're going to talk about

Starting point is 00:05:00 and the lessons we're going to share. So one, New Bank, is bigger than Coinbase Robin Hood, a firm, SOFI, and lemonade combined. 80 to 90% of NewBank's growth is through Ward of Mount. Three, New Bank has more customers than Bank of America, which is one of the four big banks in the U.S., while also only operating in three countries in Latin America. That's right. And then also you guys held the Guinness World Record for the World.

Starting point is 00:05:34 world's largest simultaneous unboxing for a credit card that you launched at some point, although I think somebody beat that record. Is that accurate? I believe that is correct. We've recently set a new world record for the first underwater credit card for an transaction. So we're always looking for some fun, some fun things to do there. I like that that's a record no one can break because it was the first one. That's a sneaky way to get a record. That's hilarious. So my sense is the reason that New Bank thrived and made it is there's this obsession with building a product that customers are fanatical about the stat that I shared of 80 to 90% of growth is word of mouth. And this idea of growing

Starting point is 00:06:15 through word of mouth in this way is the dream of every company, whether your consumer business, B2B, a bank, especially, very unlikely that you grow at this rate through word of mouth. So I want to try to help people learn from what you guys have figured out about how to drive such massive word of mouth growth. And maybe just to start from the product perspective, How do you build a product team and a product development process that enables you to build a product that people get fanatical about and just want to tell all their friends about? Yeah, I think there are a few things that are the fundamentals of making that happen. And to be clear, a lot of this predates my joining the company a little short of five years ago. But I think is an incredible story and as part of what inspired me to join.

Starting point is 00:07:01 But first, I would say, really think hard and tap into a very deep pain point. The large incumbent Brazilian banks were amongst the most profitable in the world. They were also amongst the most hated in the world. And my personal experience with that is early in my career, 20 years earlier in the late 90s, I had done a consulting project in Sao Paulo. And I remember walking to lunch one day with the client, I was a friend of mine, and we were going to classic Churas Korea in Sao Paulo. And we were walking by his bank branch. And we were at a stoplight and he basically said, that's my bank and I hate them.

Starting point is 00:07:49 It was 1997. And it always stuck in my head. It stuck in my head for 20 years later when Debe first reached out to me. So we were tapping into a deep paint poem can go into exactly why, but that was, I think, one thing. The second thing that I would say, and this is very intentional from David and Ed and Chris, our founders, is we have a culture at New Bank, which is the most alive in our employees' minds that I've ever experienced, having worked at Google and Facebook and other places like that. I would bet that probably 80 to 90% of our employees could recite the five values to you if you stopped them in the hall. It's not just on the wall somewhere.

Starting point is 00:08:31 And the first of those values is a very peculiar phrase, a word strung together. We want our customers to love us fanatically. And I remember when I interviewed at Newbank for the first time and actually flew down to Sao Paulo, I remember seeing that phrase and thinking, these are my guys. These guys are taking this seriously. And a lot of my interview process from my side was really vetting if that was real or if that was a sign on the wall. So I think you start with the intent that you are going to make your customers love you. And there are a million reasons operational convenience, short-term financial viability,

Starting point is 00:09:19 which is a real thing when you're a venture-funded startup, and number of reasons why you can compromise those things on the edges. In a decision sort of day-to-day, minute-to-minute, we can cut the edges, cut the corner here on that. And look, I don't think we have been perfect on that, but we try very hard. And when there are hard decisions to be made,

Starting point is 00:09:44 we buy us in favor of the customer, the customers love, will they want to tell their friends and neighbors and family about it? And so I think that's the heart of it. Once you get those things right, the deep pain point and a culture that is maniacal about making your customers fanatical, then you start to do the tradecraft of product development. You make sure that you focus on customer discovery before you start building. You make sure that that discovery is focused not simply on asking the customer, but on innovating on their be firm. You make sure that you take techniques from all over the place, from Proctor and Gamble to Google to you name it, of maybe you can't ask the customer to tell you what massive new innovation they

Starting point is 00:10:40 would love. You've got to observe them and find pain points even when they aren't noticing it. And then you build, as you build, you commit to measuring whether they in fact love the product, not fooling yourself about that, and iterating like crazy over and over and over again until you get it just right. So those are some of the principles. But I think the tradecraft follows the focus on finding a real deeply held, emotionally held pain point, and a culture that says that's your North Star. Amazing. There's so many threads there I'm going to follow. First of all, I want to go back to the values. You said there's five. You mentioned one. Can you just quickly share the rest?

Starting point is 00:11:30 You know, the five, I'll mention them in the order that most resonate with me. First, we want our customers to love us fanatically. Second, we are hungry and we challenge the status school. Third, we build strong and diverse teams. Fourth, we pursue smart efficiency. And one that is that is in many ways underlying all of it is we think and act like owners, not renters. We do what is right even when no one is telling us to do it. And we have many instances of our employees sort of taking that degree of extreme ownership as they build products and get them launched. Okay, and then going back

Starting point is 00:12:17 to this idea of building product people love fanatically. You talked about how there's this the number one principle, and it's going to be on everyone's minds when they're building. It's like built products, people love fanatically. Talked about you index towards if you had to make a decision, we're going to do something people love.

Starting point is 00:12:33 Is there anything more you could share about just how you operationalize this? For example, is there like designer views or just like you come in or head of design comes in like, is this helping customers love us fanatically? Like what's in the systems and processes of how you operate that allows you to build that other than just cool? Everyone has to remember this.

Starting point is 00:12:51 This is what we're trying to do. Yeah, we do a few things. And again, I don't want to also overstate that, you know, we've achieved some kind of nirvana. We honored many of these things in the breach sometimes. But we have a series of techniques that we've, you know, bag, borrowed, stolen from other places, some of which we've invented on our own, but some examples. We love the Amazon mock press release technique. Explain to me before we've put a single engineer on the project, not explain to me actually, explain to the intended customer why they should care. Because if you

Starting point is 00:13:31 can't tell me in two paragraphs why the customer you're building this for should care, then it's still work to do. So that's one technique. We do have, product and design reviews several times a week where we're asking ourselves that question, why is this great for the customer? Why is this fundamentally different for the customer? How does this redefine the category that we are thinking about on the dimensions of quality, on the dimensions of complexity, on the dimensions of price, and usually on the dimensions of all three of those at the same time and breaking some of the trade-off constraints that you often wrestle with and seeing if that's possible, which isn't always possible, but we frequently

Starting point is 00:14:23 reach for that and sometimes find it. And then there are the things you do after you've built and launched the product, whether it's alpha, beta or a later stage, the measurement stuff. And some of your previous guests have talked about product market fit and how do you, measure we actually it's strange because you know i was sitting here in silicon valley for for you know well over a decade i land in sao paulo when i first joined new bank and the small product team at the time is telling me about this thing called sean ellis score and we recently had sean visit us in sao paulo and talk to all of the product managers and designers but we are are amongst the most fanatical followers of his methodology anywhere in the world

Starting point is 00:15:10 we rarely scale a project, a product we've launched, until we know the Sean Ellis score and we know that it's hit the threshold that we find really compelling. Can you describe the actual score in the approach? Yeah, the Sean Ellis score is a really simple methodology used by lots and lots of companies that a gentleman named Sean Ellis popularized well over a decade ago, which basically ask your customers at each stage. And at each stage, you have a small number customers, then a larger group and growing over time. But at each stage, you ask them, how disappointed would you be if this product went away? And what Sean has said is that if at least 40% of your

Starting point is 00:15:57 customers are not very disappointed, not just a little disappointed, but very disappointed, It has sort of essentially a three-point scale, not disappointed, somewhat disappointed, very disappointed. If at least 40% are not very disappointed, you haven't reached product market fit. Now, we've had to do some things in New Bank. Brazilians are a culturally happier group than the global average. So for us, our threshold isn't 40%. We've generally moved it up to 50%. I don't believe we have product market fit unless 50% of Brazilians are telling us they would be very disappointed

Starting point is 00:16:32 because Brazilians are inherently polite. I'm more polite and more optimistic than average. So we make our own little tweaks and adjustments. But we find that to be very, very helpful. As a company, this extends beyond product, we are addicted to our NPS score. And we reach for world beating net promoter scores as a company and product vertical by product vertical as well.

Starting point is 00:17:02 we are maniacal about tracking how we do. And again, we compensate for some cultural biases and we make sure that we hold ourselves to a high bar. But there are been, for example, in Mexico, we've recorded an NPS when we launched the first couple of years of 94, 95, right? That's absurd. I've never heard of it. Yeah, which is way better than we got in Brazil,

Starting point is 00:17:26 but our NPS scores skew in the 70s, 80s, and occasionally 90s. And when they dip down, even one or two points, like, that's a reason for alarm. And we try to figure out why and we try to make sure that we make the iterations. So those are things we build in. Those are the things we build in. I'm glad you got into this. I was going to get into how you measure this stuff. So what it sounds like is the Sean Ellis survey is used kind of as you iterate and kind of launch towards launch.

Starting point is 00:17:56 And then NPS is maybe post-launch to see how people like the product. NPS is post-launch. We also look at metrics like churn to make sure that we're not building a leaky bucket. And that's part of this viral customer acquisition loop that we've built. We want to make sure we're building products that are great enough that our customers will tell their friends. And we don't have to invest as much in marketing to drive our growth. And that only works if the customers you get, you retain. I have built earlier in my career products that have leaky buckets, and that's a very frustrating

Starting point is 00:18:34 treadmill to be on. So I am personally maniacal about making sure that the bucket doesn't have a hole in the bottom. So on this Sean Ellis piece, which is really interesting, because I think it's something a lot of people can adopt if they're trying to build products, people love, and also that succeed. Is this like a goal for every project and like, I don't know, the strategy or the one-pageer it's like, or is it just implied? Okay, we're not going to, we're not going to, we're going to move past this gate if 50% less than 50% of people are not very disappointed. Is that how it's kind of operationalized? Yeah, we basically operationalize it. We don't have it as a hard and fast rule that is, you know, in black and white. But essentially, that's the question people know

Starting point is 00:19:12 they're going to get in any product review. That's a post-launch, you know, post-data kind of product review is, what's the Sean Ellis score? How do you know that customers love it? Not just like it, but love it to the degree that they're going to tell their friends about it. That's pretty baked in culturally at this point. This is an incredible insight and I think it explains a lot of the success you guys have had because that's a very high bar. Like many people run the survey and getting getting it to pass like 20% is very hard. Like very, like you have to be very disappointed if this new product they've never used

Starting point is 00:19:44 goes away. That's a high bar, right? Most people are like, ah, whatever, I don't need this thing. And you're saying you look for 50% of people feeling very disappointed if this new thing they've never used before and goes away. Yeah, that's right. There are several sort of on the newer side of products that we're launching now. We're at borderline 50. And my push to the team is what are the three, four, five things you need to build to really get decisively beyond 50? And what are the segments or cohorts where it is above 50 and what is that telling us versus the cohorts where it's, you know, lower than that. So we put a lot of analytical effort and a lot of depth of thinking to, you know, we were in a product review several years ago and our lead designer, who's ex-Google, ex-Facebook, we were in a review together and the team was saying,

Starting point is 00:20:40 we think this is good enough for launch. And he used the phrase, which both Christian, Kara, one of our co-founders and I have now adopted, which is good enough isn't good enough. Is it great enough? Is it great enough? Because that's the bar, particularly for some of our ten pole. products, but we try to apply it largely across the board. A lot of companies, not just in Brazil or Latam, but everywhere, spend a ton of money on marketing. Their VC budgets, VC funding

Starting point is 00:21:09 basically goes to Google and Facebook. And I've spent a lot of my career taking that money on board for Google and Facebook. But it is a much better scenario if that's a small portion of what you're doing and the main portion of what you're doing is actually investing in making the product great, that you don't have to do that. Is there an example of a project that comes to mind that was kind of below that bar, and then you pushed it above where here's the thing we were missing? Yeah, I'll give you one that we're wrestling with right now. We have a product called Assistenti di Pagamentos, payments assistant.

Starting point is 00:21:43 Payments assistance. Paying bills, it's right now only launched in Brazil. We haven't yet launched it in Mexico and Colombia. Paying bills in Brazil is quite complex. There are four different ways, four different payment rates, rails, different payments have to go, you know, that different payments use. From the mobile payment system that has that has exploded in Brazil the last three years called PICs, that's become fairly world famous in the fintech world, to more standard and some more archaic rails as well.

Starting point is 00:22:16 So if you're a customer, you've got to keep track of your bills like we all do. You've got to keep track of which rail. You've got to collect your bills. You've got to make sure they are, that you pay them. And some of the rails actually aren't that reliable. So you've paid it. It doesn't go through. And the consequences for not paying a bill is getting reported to the credit bureau and becoming what is called negativado, having a negative mark on your credit report. And that can be a big deal for the average customer. And so this was a real deep pain point. And as we launched a product in a, you know, Reed Hoffman style, you know,

Starting point is 00:22:53 if you are not embarrassed by V1, you've waited too long. As we've done that last year, we found that a very interesting pattern. We had a decent Sean Ellis score, borderline 40, I forget the exact number, but basically in that ballpark.

Starting point is 00:23:13 But we found that customers who had, there was a small cohort of a customer base, who had more than four plus commitments registered. And even more so within that small cohort, an even smaller bozai cohort, who had more than four commitments on at least two of the four rails. And there, Sean Ellis score hit 70.

Starting point is 00:23:39 Oh, wow. And we're like, okay, the key is, we need to consolidate across these rails, not have them one by one. And we need to make it easy for customers to onboard multiple bills across multiple rails. And then the automation takes over and people see the real benefit. Because there are ways. On the surface, if you said to the average person anywhere, you know, any sort of developed country,

Starting point is 00:24:10 we're going to have a bill auto pay. That's on the face of it, not necessarily exciting. But if you build it right, it is actually. actually a fundamentally different experience rather than incrementally better experience. And that's what we've done. We've systematically made dozens of iterations on the product to allow customers to in one go do multiple bills across multiple rails and make that tiny bullseye cohort that we had, a segment that we had, a larger and larger proportion of the customers who are trying.

Starting point is 00:24:47 And by the way, that's a journey still underway. We have a whole roadmap for the next year of lots of small quality adjustments that we're going to make. And we're seeing some great feedback. We're now over 10 million monthly actives on that product when we were struggling in the hundreds of thousands about 15 months ago. That is a really interesting insight there of just using the score and survey to narrow in on who actually loves this the most and see if there's something there. Is that something that you generally do? Or is that just like, oh, wow, that came up in this exam. We do that fairly frequently.

Starting point is 00:25:22 When we did our, we have a high-income rewards credit card. It's called Ultra Violetta. We went through a similar process where at launch, there were many different customer segments. But there was one that really loved the product. And it was not surprising. There were the ones where the customers spent enough each month that they got the fee waiver. and then all of the other benefits that we had built in really resonated. Whereas if you were paying the monthly fee,

Starting point is 00:25:52 those other benefits were not quite as exciting or didn't quite compensate. So we've done this several times, and we've started recently combining it with trying to get very agile in getting that feedback from that bullseye segment. So we've told many of our product managers and designers over the last two years, years, don't worry about surveying 1,000 customers, taking three weeks serving a thousand customers, getting a bunch of cross tabs, or even at the end of which, it's very hard to read the real fine-grained customer feedback. So we just tell them, call Teneville. Pick up the phone yourself.

Starting point is 00:26:31 Don't have, ask a researcher to come up with a plan, to go do the research to then summarize it, to then bring it to you, which has so many degrees of distance built in. You pick up the phone. phone, call 10 of them, and nine times out of 10, by the time you've made your fist call, you could predict what customers, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 are going to tell you. And then you know what it is that is the gap or what it is that is truly resonating that you want to double down on. So we're constantly trying to iterate in small ways, the ways to get really that voice of the customer straight line into the people who are building the product. I love this advice. I imagine as a PM that is,

Starting point is 00:27:13 extremely scary to go call a customer. Most people don't do that. By the way, do you actually, operationally, is it actually a call or do you recommend the email? What do you actually recommend they do? We literally pick up the phone. Okay. Pick up the phone.

Starting point is 00:27:27 Because you can get tone of voice. You know, Brazilians and Mexicans are incredibly expressive. There is a degree of real fine-grained sense that the statistics never tell you. And it's very aligned with design thinking, and there's a lot of literature around how this works well. And I wouldn't say we're doing it especially to the best practice scientific. We're just like just make the call, make it as simple as unobtrusive with as little overhead as possible to make sure the voice of the customer is coming directly into the teams that are building.

Starting point is 00:28:09 Jeff Bezos had this quote on this Lex Friedman podcast where if you're, If you have data and you have an anecdote, usually the anecdote is right. I love that. That sounds exactly right to me. To make it even more tactical for the surveys you run, is there any tool you find? Like, how do you actually collect this data? Is there anything interesting there you could share of just like how to operationalize collecting this data? You know, we've used a series of tools.

Starting point is 00:28:32 Many of the main survey vendor tools, we still use many of them. But we don't standardize or find one that dramatically changes. our life beyond the mindset of we are going to make sure that this product has product market fit before we scale it. One of the things I've seen throughout my career as a product manager and CPO, we live with it today at New Bank every month, is the pressure on the relying product manager to scale the product that the entire company, the entire executive team, the entire management chain, has been counting on.

Starting point is 00:29:14 We're launching this thing. Asi Stanchi, Apagomantos. We all wanted to scale. We all are very excited about it. We had the product review six months ago, and we thought, this is going to be amazing. And the pressure on that product manager to scale a product is immense. And the job of the product manager, in many instances, is to say no.

Starting point is 00:29:34 And one of the things I try to say frequently within the walls of Newbank is we are not going to take a small problem and scale it, because if we do that, we end up with a big mess. If something isn't working at small scale, no problem, especially if we have a strong hypothesis and a lot of ways of getting good customer feedback. We iterate, we iterate, we iterate, we get it right. And then once we get it right, scaling, if you do it right, in many cases, takes care of itself because the customer is now excitedly telling their friends. Whereas you can pour a lot of money and a lot of effort. And when you have a big app like New Bank or places like Google and Facebook, you can make any product look great for months, if not years, because you have

Starting point is 00:30:20 such a large customer base. You can always get them to try it with all sorts of basic techniques. But you're bouncing a dead cat. And then you've got a real big mess to untangle when the thing is much, much larger. So we try to be pretty disciplined about that. And that's a lot of what the Sean Ellis does, is to bring science to some of that art. of making that judgment call. This point you made about it's the PM's job to push back and stop bad things from happening. I think is such an important one. A lot of PMs are just told here, build this thing, and they kind of know this is not going to work. This is a bad idea. But either they don't think

Starting point is 00:30:56 they should be pushing back or they are not good at it. From the PMs you've worked with that are good at convincing and pushing back, like we should not do this yet. Do you have any tactics or ways of communicating that you found effective for pushing back to, like you said, all this pressure that's coming down on that. One of the things I've learned, you know, relatively later in my career, I wish I'd learned it, you know, decade earlier, decades earlier even, is how important culture is. And we've talked about the five cultural tenets, but this idea of we are owners, not renters, you're an owner of that product as the product manager or the lead engineer or the lead designer

Starting point is 00:31:35 or in fact anyone on the team. If you really don't think it's going to work, don't tell me what I want to hear. It's incumbent on you. It's expected of you as an owner to tell me the bad news and tell it to me early. Even when it's convenient, even when there's a promotion at stake,

Starting point is 00:31:55 these dynamics get very real, very quickly, then look, I don't think it's going to work and here's why, or it's not working and here's why. Or we should kill it and here's why. The second thing I would say is senior leaders at companies that have gone, especially startups that have scaled well, you usually have people who have been in that boat, who have seen products that weren't working, who have killed them or have pivoted them pretty dramatically. And there's a lot of respect for someone who has a real clarity of thought and brings a high bar and is not simply going with the flow. So I think that's the main thing is bringing that ownership mindset, and the second is bringing clarity and bringing data and understanding that most senior executives in whichever company are strong willed and bring strong opinions. That's part of the job description.

Starting point is 00:32:58 That's okay. It is your job, whether product or design or engineering or whatever function as a leader, to, if you think you are practicing for one of those senior jobs, it's sort of, let's say, a mid-level, then it doesn't come miraculously when you get a C-suite title. It's something that's going to be practiced. And it's something that is expected. And I think that's not a just-a-new-Bank thing.

Starting point is 00:33:27 Certain cultures promote it better than others, but I think it's pretty universally important. And so I would just encourage people to try it, understand the tradeoffs, understand the challenge, articulate the other side. But if you genuinely believe it's not yet ready to scale your product, at the end of the day, the big mess is a thing you're still going to hold. And we're all going to forget that we told you to scale the thing. We're all going to still blame you at the end of the day. So you might as well bite the bullet earlier, pivot it when it's easier to do. and it will work out better in the end.

Starting point is 00:34:09 I want to come back to one more thread, and then I'm going to go in a different direction. You talked a bit about just all about talking to customers, finding innovative ideas, not just listening to what they're telling you. There's this whole skill of user research and interviewing customers and finding the pain point, figure out what to build.

Starting point is 00:34:28 Do you have any just, I don't know, tips or tactics or lessons you've learned about just how to do this well? How to uncover the pain point and then figure out what to actually build when you're interviewing customers. I will share a couple of thoughts, but I will tell you as a preface that it is arguably the area right now that I still wrestle with. I still think I and we are not doing it as well. I've never seen it done quite as consistently great as it could be. and I think it's an area for where like design thinking and a lot of the design function can help us. But it's very, very, it's one of the areas of greatest inconsistency that I see in product development.

Starting point is 00:35:13 Having said that, a couple of things that I see that we sometimes do really well at Newbank and other times we miss on one dimension or the other. First off, per your Jeff Bezos anecdotes, the anecdote usually trumps the data. And there are many times when I see teams that are, you know, doing very sophisticated analysis, and they've sort of forgotten what the question is or what the conclusion they can draw from it truly is. So never lose sight of the value of the customer. words and the anecdote. That's one. The second one that I believe very, very strongly in is I think teams often skip the step of clearly, very, very clearly working very hard to be super crisp in articulating their hypothesis. If you don't have a hypothesis, you're going to spend a lot of

Starting point is 00:36:18 time researching. You're going to get a lot of data back, qualitative anecdotal or quantitative, and you're not going to know what to make of it because it's not either validating or invalidating your hypothesis because there isn't a hypothesis. So it just becomes an interesting conversation. The third one is I've got a hypothesis. I've got it really crisp. And now the pitfall is I've fallen in love with my hypothesis. I'm a lawyer for my hypothesis. I'm not a judge of whether the hypothesis is right or not right. So I think that's another common pitfall. I've fallen into that one too many times. to count. And then the last thing I would highlight is even when you have a strong hypothesis and you're actually in the mode of doing the research, observe more than ask questions,

Starting point is 00:37:11 if you can, ask indirect questions, more than direct questions. Would you love this product? Excited product manager has been working for two months on a design. You're searching for the problem more than the solution. You're searching for, you're looking indirectly and asking from multiple directions the same question rather than trying to find a yes. They love the thing you've been thinking about and sweating on for a long time. And if you can, observing is better than asking, although that's a tricky, that's a tricky skill. Those are the things that I, that I look for. With the hypothesis point,

Starting point is 00:37:54 just to make sure people understand your suggestion there is before you start talking to customers doing your research as a PM or just anyone on the team

Starting point is 00:38:01 essentially have a perspective on what you think is going to be true. Is that how you think about it? Exactly. Have a point of view on what you think the customer will say

Starting point is 00:38:13 that will lead them to be really excited about your product. That way you will get very clearly or yes, bang the table, excitement. And you will know when you're getting that reaction. Is there an example that, just to make it even more concrete?

Starting point is 00:38:28 Because I imagine many PMs are kind of feeling like they have to be unbiased and just like, let's see. Let's see if this is something we should do. And I don't want to bias anyone against it. Is there a quick example of a hypothesis? One of the famous examples that's somewhat hypothesis related and somewhat observation related is the invention of the swift. from Procter & Gamble, right? The people hate mopping and they will do it

Starting point is 00:38:58 and they won't even realize how painful an experience it is because they've just developed the workarounds and they just deal with the burden. But if you observe very granularly what the problems are, then you can see where the problems are. And so bring a strong hypothesis to that this is a real problem, even if customers aren't telling you its problem because they've just sort of gotten used to it.

Starting point is 00:39:21 So that's one. We have a hypothesis at New Bank. I'll give you one that's live. We have a hypothesis at New Bank that the joint bank account, I was doing some research on this just last week. The joint bank account was invented in the early, it's actually hard to say, but it was invented depending on what source you believe in the late 19th or early 20th century. And it was basically invented coincident with the social movement, sort of the women's liberation,

Starting point is 00:39:55 social movements before women in the U.S. were legally allowed to vote, where women were not allowed to open a bank account without their husband's prior approval. That is the era from which the joint bank account that we still live with today came from. It's 120 to 150 years old. I don't think it's surprising. Our hypothesis is it's not surprising. that that artifact, that that product is not made for the modern customer. That it is easier for me to share a Spotify playlist with my wife or my daughter

Starting point is 00:40:36 than it is for me to share a savings goal just mechanically. So we're going into a product development cycle that says there is a new social banking arrangement that is not about tweeting and it's not about social, very broadly defined. It is about our financialized or inherently social, and it is very hard to share with my spouse, with my kids, with my parents who might be helping me pay for my child's education as an example, use case. It's a very strong hypothesis. But when you go into the research with the customer, you don't try to sell them.

Starting point is 00:41:22 You try to see if they're experiencing pain points. And it becomes very hard when you're in. And they say something a little bit in the direction of what you hope they would say to not be like, jump in with a lot of excitement and then get into more of a cell mode with them and almost try to sell against your idea, push back. against your idea. Make the customers sell you in the interaction. And you play the devil's advocate. So those are the kinds of things we search for as we build products. That sounds like a great idea. I believe in this hypothesis. Today's episode is brought to you by One Schema,

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Starting point is 00:42:46 an awful experience in so many products. Customers get frustrated by useless messages like error online 53 and never end up getting started with your product. One schema intelligently corrects messy data so that your customers don't have to spend hours in Excel just to get started with your product. For listeners of this podcast, OneSchema is offering a $1,000 discount. Learn more at oncechema.co slash letty. I want to talk about strategy.

Starting point is 00:43:14 I know that you have a very strong perspective on how to think about strategy, and approach strategy. This is something that everyone always wants to get better at. Every PM is always told. You want to build your strategic thinking muscles, and this is really important to your career. I'd love to hear your take and how you approach

Starting point is 00:43:31 developing strategy and your advice to folks. I will randomly admit I bring a bias. I spent almost a decade at the beginning of my career right after college working in a strategy consulting firm. Right. So I bring a bias, which is to some degree, certainly for the length of time I did it, an unusual background for a product manager.

Starting point is 00:43:52 When I first showed up at Google, it took me a couple of years to realize my job was not to produce a nice PowerPoint. It was to ship code, and I was doing a poor job of that for at least the first 12 to 18 months. But I think there is almost a countervailing dogma in Silicon Valley or in tech companies more generally. that strategy is easy and execution is everything. And I think that's probably because there are a small number of companies that get the strategy right, but the legendary companies that we all know about not only got the strategy right, but then executed it really crisply. What we don't hear about are the companies that got the strategy wrong, never got even

Starting point is 00:44:39 into the conversation, and all of their great execution was multiplied by zero. Great execution multiplied by a poor strategy is a waste of everyone's time. And because the strategy isn't clear, you can waste a lot of time executing years and years against something that was destined never to work. One of my favorite quotes from the Valley was from Kevin Sistram in the early days of Instagram. I heard him say it at a conference. This is pre-the-Facebook acquisition. music, I don't know how old he had just left Googling, he was probably been 20 some years old.

Starting point is 00:45:18 He said, we may not be right, but at least we are clear. And what I love about that is, even if your strategy isn't right, and it will never be exactly right, because no plan ever is, you will have a clearer read on if you are going off course because you have a very clear idea of what was supposed to be happening. And so I think being very clear in your strategy is really important. You've had some great guests on the podcast. Richard Ruhmelt is one of my absolute favorites. He's written a couple of books, one called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy,

Starting point is 00:45:56 Another More Recent One called The Crux, where he does a great service to the world by even more than describing what strategy is, focusing at the beginning about what strategy isn't. Strategy isn't an ambitious goal. It's not an aspiration. It's not a set of financial outcomes. It is a coherent plan for how you would apply your strengths in a leveraged way against a core important problem. That's a very, very rough paraphrase of the way he thinks about the world. And I find that we often confuse strategy with a vision, a broad idea.

Starting point is 00:46:38 a very, very broad, vague aspiration. New Bank strategy isn't we want to be the world's largest neobank. We do, but that's not an interesting way to dimensionalize the problem. In 2014, we had millennial, middle-class urban Brazilians who hated paying credit card fees and we're not able to get credit in the first place because they were too young and without a credit history. And we could offer them not just a lower-priced credit card, but a no-fee credit card, which was an emotional thing.

Starting point is 00:47:20 That fee got people angry. And we could do that because we were branchless and digital. Now, that is a coherent description of a very specific problem for a very specific set of customers with a very specific solution based on a very specific advantage. By the way, all of this predated my, this has got nothing to do with me. I wasn't there. But that's what I mean. Strategy is very specific. It's very detailed. It's very locked in. And working backwards from that, I think is really, really important. And if you get that strategy

Starting point is 00:47:55 right, it informs the minimal set of activities you need to do to get traction and to win. Whereas if you don't have that degree of coherence, you're trying to serve all the customers. Maybe we should go to Mexico prematurely. All sorts of things happen and your execution gets very diffuse and you can't even tell why you're not getting traction across the company. Whereas strategy allows focus and it allows a much more rapid read of whether your focused bets, your concentrated bets, are actually working. You've had some investors on your podcast over the years and they will tell you that concentration is what builds wealth. Diversification is what preserves wealth. And you're a startup, you're not trying to preserve anything. You're trying to build something. It requires concentrated

Starting point is 00:48:53 bets, not hedging. And because you're concentrating bets, those bets are high stakes. You need to be very, very clear on what bet you're making and why you think it's going to succeed. When you work with PMs on your team and in the past that are trying to get better at this muscle and following this advice that you're sharing of strategy, what do you find most helps them build this muscle? Is it just doing it over and over and over and over? Is it, you know, reading good strategy, bad strategy, practicing it? What do you find is most helpful in helping you build this muscle as a PM? One is taking it seriously. It's a little bit like what we talked about with Newbanks culture. First, you've got to want the customer to love you fanatically is

Starting point is 00:49:31 something that you value. After that, I think frameworks really help, whether it's good strategy, bad strategy, whether it's play to win from a relatively recent guest of yours, Christopher Lockhead, who I really admire, whether it's where to play, how to win from Roger Martin, which is a phenomenal book about it. He's coming on the podcast in a few weeks. Is he? He's fantastic. And having those frameworks, all of which in many ways, if you synthesize them, are getting at the same thing around focus, around a clear understanding of the customer, around not trying to be, in the words that we literally have them on New Bank coffee mugs, we're not trying to be incrementally better. We are trying to be fundamentally different. These are all very similar ideas expressed in slightly different ways. Once you understand the frameworks and you distill them, then it's about practicing them.

Starting point is 00:50:30 And practicing them is scary. Hedging is appealing. Hedging means you don't have to make choices. Hedging sounds smart. Concentrating all your bets is the thing the desperate people do. Startups are desperate entities because they're burning. cash in almost every instance. But successful startups, the ones that become profitable, I'm very wary having, you know, giving the places I've worked of the successful company with one or two

Starting point is 00:51:07 monster products and New Banks now in that fortunate position that starts to get conservative, that starts to forget that focus, concentration, customer obsession are every bit as important, that even though the company won't go bankrupt if products three, four, five, and six don't succeed because products one and two are monster cash flow drivers, that's a slow path to death. And so practicing that discipline and having, and I use this word very intentionally,

Starting point is 00:51:47 having the courage to make those hard choices and to concentrate the bets is, which goes against, by the way, a lot of what's taught in business school and a lot of PMs are MBAs, is really important. And then it's a matter of you get better the more you do it. And you get more practiced and more grooved and more principled in how you get to a methodology, the more you do it. Did you say the mugs at NewBank Save be fundamentally different? The product team, a little over a year ago, we put together some Schwed, which was

Starting point is 00:52:28 fundamentally, I have a mantra within the company since roughly the time I joined, which is we're in the business of being fundamentally different, not incrementally better. Again, it goes back to only fundamentally different gets customers to tell their friends, incrementally better. And by the way, there are certain features. I don't want to overstate the case. There are certain features. There are certain features where you're in the incrementally better business, not every single thing of the hundred things you launch in a year can be fundamentally different. But we're searching for those anchors that are going to be fundamentally different all the time around which you build some sustaining innovation as well. But we are in the fundamentally different business, not the incrementally

Starting point is 00:53:08 better business. I love that. And that's a great segue to where I wanted to go, which is, I know you're a big fan of category design. You mentioned Christopher Lockhead, former guest. This is actually one of the more common debates on this podcast of do people believe in we should be creating our own category or should we not? Is that a terrible idea? It is a good idea. It feels like you're in the camp of this is actually very good and important. I'd love to hear your perspective and also just like how New Bank did this. You know, Lenny, literally earlier in this week, I was listening to your podcast with, I believe it's Todd Jackson, Nick's Gmail product leader and now venture capitalist and you guys had a very interesting discussion about it. And I think he took largely the

Starting point is 00:53:53 other side of the argument that you go in a category where customers are already spending money. It's hard to argue with that fairly robust logic. I will tell you how I think about it. It forced me to think about where are the nuances in how I believe. I think overall, particularly in a company level, successful companies are typically in the fundamentally different business. new category business. Google was in the new category business. Netflix, Airbnb, you can go down the long list, Salesforce, et cetera, et cetera. That's really important. In New Bank's case, we were the first, and it is actually not that important that we were the first, but we were very intentionally trying to build a branchless bank based on the

Starting point is 00:54:47 rise of the smartphone in Brazil and Latin America at that time, the sort of rapid inflection. And a branchless bank that could bring, as David likes to say, put a bank branch in your pocket where at the time access was the big problem and that you could do that on a digital cost structure that allowed you to essentially disruptively price across the board was the thing that led to the massive wave of success, multiplied by, unlike almost everywhere else in the world, including in the U.S., where the answer was, we're going to do the bank account first. New Bank's answer was, no, we're going to do credit first. Credit is 10 times harder and a hundred times more risky because you get credit wrong

Starting point is 00:55:37 as a young company that doesn't know how to do it yet. You've blown everything up. The money's never coming back. Those two, again, concentrated bets defining a new category where I think the key to our success. Now, there are times when you're trying to go into an adjacent market. We've recently gone into a market called Consignado in Brazil, which is secured lending for government employees, very stable job, easier to underwrite against their salary. at a much lower interest rate. That's a market that's existed

Starting point is 00:56:19 for a couple of decades in Brazil. And our job was to go in there and we believe we've built something that is fundamentally different. It wasn't digital. It went through middlemen. We built it D to C and we've been able to price it very,

Starting point is 00:56:33 to undercut the pricing pretty dramatically. So even within an established category, we've tried to build a fundamentally different experience. But there are also times when, look, it's not quite me too, but the differentiation is a bit more incremental. But at the company level, I think it's absolutely imperative to be designing your own category, so you can then dominate it in defining your own category. And even when you're entering a place where customers are spending money, I think going in

Starting point is 00:57:05 with a mindset that says this is going to be a bit better. And I think Todd would probably agree with this, given the way he described it, you should try to be reinventing that category, even if you're not inventing that. Amazing. I like this battle we're forming here of people on two sides of this debate, and I'm excited to see where it goes over time. It feels like the do not create a category side is winning so far in terms of volume. But there's a lot of passion from this other side. I'm happy to be on the contrarian side. Okay, there's a few more things I want to touch on before we wrap up. It feels like New Bank is one of the historical.

Starting point is 00:57:42 historically most successful companies are launching new business lines. I think you guys are maybe like 10 years old. And how many products slash business lines are there at this point? It depends on how you categorize it. I would say we have roughly a dozen to 20 core point lines. That's wild. Our story started as a Brazil. We were a Brazilian credit card monoliner in an app and all the rest of it.

Starting point is 00:58:10 Around the time, slightly before, but around the time, I joined the phase two of the company, the mandate of what we were trying to do, which has really been the story of the last five years, is we're going to go from a Brazilian credit card company to a full solution Latin American bank, which meant we launched five new products. We launched a bank account, which allowed us to go from being a secondary banking relationship to increasingly a primary banking relationship, about half of our 90 plus million customers are now we are the primary relationship. We built a lending product. We built an investments product. We built an insurance product. We built a series of small business products. While we were doing that, we were

Starting point is 00:58:54 also making the leap to prove, despite a lot of skepticism, that our business model was exportable and not a unique Brazilian phenomenon. So we launched into Mexico and launched into Colombia. and now we are starting to take the full suite of products and go beyond credit card in Mexico and Colombia as well. So depending on how you look at that matrix, we are a dozen plus products. And we're working on the phase three of our products, which is moving beyond financial services. We've launched an e-commerce marketplace within our app, which is perhaps a bit counterintuitive if you're coming from the U.S. and we're also envisioning a world where banking is, again, to use the phrase that we love at New Bank, fundamentally different than it has been in the last 100 years. And we believe that social technologies, self-driving and AI technologies can build a just completely different experience where we're not building a bank branch and putting it in your pocket.

Starting point is 01:00:02 we're building a personal banker, which today, I don't know, 10 million people around the world have access to and you've got to have a lot of money to do it. We believe that job can be done, that we believe that job can be democratized ultimately to all 8 billion people on the planet. And we believe it can be done better for those 8 billion, even than the 10 million are getting today. But that's a lot of work. And that's, you know, to use Christopher Lockhead and his co-authors, language, that's the new category that we are trying to define over on a global basis.

Starting point is 01:00:39 It's going to be a tiny little banker to fit in your pocket. Tiny little person. That's it. I want to follow on this thread, but before we get there, so in terms of adding new product lines and business units, watching how new bank has done this, is there something you've learned about just how to do this well? Like I'm imagining there's a spreadsheet

Starting point is 01:00:58 where here's all the things we're going to do in the future. here's how we're thinking about all the factors of all new businesses we can launch. Is there anything there you've seen of just like, wow, that's a really smart way of thinking about the sequencing slash where to expand next that you think other folks can learn from? I wish I could tell you that there was this predestined master plan that was so scientific. The reality is smart people around the table with a culture of robust debate and real candor about the pros and cons is sort of how we went about it and a constant reexamination of how things are going, what's going well, what's not going well, what's taking

Starting point is 01:01:43 off, what's not yet taking off, what are the principles by which we're making these decisions has been important. Some of these things are obvious. If you're running a bank, a bank account is probably a good product at some stage. But a lot of it in terms of sequences, and when we invest where some of it's obvious, you know, what's the TAM and and what do, where is a customer paying. But a lot of it is art and a lot of that resolution of the art and the debate comes from a fairly robust debate. So I'm avoiding your question because I have a, I have no good answer. Just a lot of complicated decision making. But I think what's interesting is coming back to your very early lesson is using the gate of, is the

Starting point is 01:02:30 hitting this 50% of people, be very disappointed before launching feels like a key. Yeah, that's the one thing is we don't scale. We try not to scale big problems. And so we try to solve our problems when things are small. Our ultravioleta are sort of higher income rewards-based credit card. We launched, it happened to be, I think it was July 4th, 2021 was the launch date. So it's easy for me to remember. We started scaling. scaling it two to two and a half years later. In the meantime, we were in the lab figuring out, where is the product market fit? Why is it not resonating? Oh, it's resonating with these guys. What do they particularly love? Let's iterate there. And now we're at a point in the last

Starting point is 01:03:14 six to nine months where we can start scaling aggressively, learning some of the credit dynamics that are different and reinventing some of those methodologies. And there's a second phase of scaling that will come. But yeah, one form of distraction we don't get into is fixing massive problems that we've overscaled before they were ready. That's a bit of an overstatement, but nothing's quite that clean, but generally true. Coming back to your thoughts on the future of fintech and in Lantam especially, you talked about how the vision is essentially a banker in everyone's pocket. Is there anything more there, of just like, where do you think all this goes in the future in terms of fintech banking for people in Lansdam and then globally?

Starting point is 01:04:04 Yeah, you know, there are a handful of principles called them hypotheses that we believe. And there are, I should be super clear, unproven hypotheses that will take years for us to prove out. And I'm sure there will be pivots along the way as we learn that things aren't quite the way we would have hoped at the beginning. But first off, the idea that banking should be holistic, that we need to provide a full solution across what we call the five or six financial seasons of someone's life, right? We spend, we save, we invest, we borrow, we protect, et cetera. And that's a lot of what we've been working on for the last handful of years. So one is we want to be a full solution bank. second, something we have started, we have had some real success in on the business side.

Starting point is 01:05:01 We've made some mistakes on the technical side that we are iterating through is we are trying to build. And some might argue this is, I'm overstating a bit, but just to be clear, we are trying to build what we believe is the first global bank on a single code base. I come from a world, places like Google and Facebook. Google, my first product management experience. I was not allowed to launch unless my product was ready for 40 countries and 40 languages. I believe language number 40 was Finnish. So we were always making sure the thing worked in Finnish. And there are good reasons why global online advertising worked that way.

Starting point is 01:05:47 It was a great principle by Google. When you get into fintech and into banking, where the regulations are very local, where the stakes are much higher that you serve the right 300 by 250 ad, there is a lot of pushback on that kind of, we're just going to scale this everywhere, sort of mindset. And so how do you marry those two things? There are global banks like city or Santander. A lot of them have been built up through acquisition. A lot of them are on distinct code bases and technology infrastructures. We believe there's a lot of leverage if you can build a global bank on a single code base. That's another principle that we are trying to make real.

Starting point is 01:06:33 The third is that social mechanics around your financial life, not in general, not another WhatsApp, not another Twitter, and self-driving automation, why do I have to remember to pay this bill every month? Why do I have to remember to save for my child's university education every month? Why can't I keep my life goals really well organized, which is almost impossible to do? My wife and I open up different bank accounts at different banks just to try to do that job, which is talk about customer workarounds. How do we make the life cycle of managing your financial life exponentially easier leveraging these technologies and then using AI, which is an overhyped term right now, but AI to sort of turbo boost these tasks.

Starting point is 01:07:38 We have a phrase we started using at New Bank, which I really like. David first introduced it. Customers everywhere around the world live harshly unoptimized financial lives. I think that's true, regardless of income level, regardless of geography, regardless of sort of life stage of where people are at. If you have a young child, it is very hard to keep track of all the things you should be doing. You should be opening a savings account of a specific kind of this tax advantage in this way. These are, these are, these are, these are, are imminent. These are problems that should be solved and should be solved soon and can be automated and can be where insights can be brought to bear for customers who are not super sophisticated

Starting point is 01:08:28 in their level of financial education, which, by the way, is almost all of us. Some of the people who think they're the most sophisticated are the ones who burn the most money in casinos that they call the not market. And so these are some of the principles around where. we are envisioning the next phase. What if there were someone right next to you who could tell you what the smart move was to make today at this life stage? You've just had a child. You've just gotten married. You've just bought a house. You just want to remodel, whatever it might be. We think the technology is there or thereabouts to be able to do that. Why not have the company

Starting point is 01:09:08 that reinvents banking come out of Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Bogota? Why does it have to be to come out of San Francisco, New York, or London, we see no reason why it can't, it can't be us. So we're going to give it a whirl. Amazing. I love all of this. I can't wait for this to be real. You mentioned AI. So I just have a couple more questions.

Starting point is 01:09:28 You mentioned AI. We have a recurring segment on the podcast called AI Corner. So let's walk over to AI Corner. All right. Usually I ask how you use AI in your day-to-day and your team, just like what are the tools and things you find useful to help your team operate with AI and tooling. but I'm also curious just how you're integrating AI into the product. You might touch on this a little bit,

Starting point is 01:09:47 but just how AI is going to supercharge the stuff that you're building. We use some of the tools that everyone is using these days. You know, our ring-fenced version of chat GPT and some of the standard tools. We're using them in some of the obvious initial wave ways. how can we improve our customer experience? If you're fanatical about customers, you're fanatical about customer experience and New Bank has always been that way.

Starting point is 01:10:19 How can we make it even better while we're also making it more efficient? So we're doing all of those things as part of our coming up the learning curve in the last 18 or so months. And then we're starting to think about what are the ways in which we can build AI-native products.

Starting point is 01:10:41 And I will not be, pretend to you that we've cracked that code, but a former boss of mine spoke a while ago, Fiji Simo, who's now the CEO, Instacard, but she was talking about the evolution when she was the product lead for Facebook ads back when the big migration from the desktop to mobile was happening. And she talked about we needed to become mobile native. And by analogy, companies today need to figure out

Starting point is 01:11:16 what does AI native mean? Not how do we append AI at the corners of the product, but how do we build it at the heart? What would you design

Starting point is 01:11:25 if these tools existed from the start? I mean, Facebook's migration to mobile is a phenomenal example of that pivot.

Starting point is 01:11:35 And they like to joke, and I wasn't there at Facebook at the time, but they like to joke at Facebook, even seven, seven, eight years later when I joined about the company had IPOed and needed to find a business model.

Starting point is 01:11:46 Fiji was sort of responsible for making that happen. And the core of it was bringing this mobile native mindset. So we are trying to think through what is an AI native mindset in financial services? What would that look like? And that requires analysis as much as an allergy. And we are very much in the middle of that process and we don't know all of the answers. The metaphor of a, what if everyone in the world, regardless of their income or wealth, had a private banker sat next to them that they could turn to whenever they needed to, is a good metaphor. And so we are using that metaphor and seeing where it takes us.

Starting point is 01:12:33 Let's now move on to a different corner, failure corner. This is another recurring segment on the podcast. Is there a story you could share of a time in your career where you failed, where something went wrong, ideally really wrong, and how that impacted and helped you in your career, kind of a lesson you learned from that experience? There's a pretty seminal story for my career that ultimately ended in failure and that I had to sort of rebuild from. I had done strategy consulting for just shy of 10 years.

Starting point is 01:13:11 I decided I was going to go to grad school. I was going to pivot my career into public policy and politics. I was at the Kennedy School of government at Harvard. And a year into that, a friend of mine had had the startup he was working at get acquired by Google. This company was premised on the idea that you could bring AdWords, AdSense style advertising. to the terrestrial radio market. And Google, one of Google's perhaps the biggest diversification bet Google was working on at the time, beyond search and display, which were up and running, was let's go disrupt TV radio and print 2006.

Starting point is 01:13:58 My friend convinced me to drop out of grad school, both the Kennedy School and business school, I'd done a year of the Kennedy School. I was one credit short. And in business school I had done a week of, and move out here to California and join Google. First off, the premise of the hypothesis proved to be wrong, or at least harder than we thought, and in the following way.

Starting point is 01:14:35 Terrestrial radio or Frat Matter TV advertising, broadcast media advertising works very differently. It serves actually a different market. It serves brand advertising top of funnel kinds of goals as opposed to the bottom funnel that Google really knew well. So that was one piece. There were all sorts of technical methodologies like reach and frequency that are really important that we simply didn't know about. We were determined to run an auction. We have patents to our name to this day that were, how do we bring auction methodologies to work in a broadcast medium, some very interesting technology. At the end of the day, one of the things that you really needed was a surplus of inventory, of ad inventory, which there actually isn't that much of, relatively speaking, compared to online.

Starting point is 01:15:32 the other thing that is true is the people who control that inventory are not nearly as fragmented. So when you're negotiating with NBC or CBS or Clear Channel, they have much more leverage than in the online world of, you know, bloggers and small websites. So the fragmentation wasn't there. The methodology was different. It was going to be a tougher slog. and in the meantime, Google made actually a very smart bet, and this was a pivot on Google's part based on a lot of learnings from the failure on the one side and some of the success happening on the side of YouTube.

Starting point is 01:16:12 In the meantime, Google had acquired YouTube. And somewhere along the way, and this was over multiple years, Susan Wigiski and the leadership team of Google and Google Ads in particular, came to the conclusion that rather than than Google chasing TV, let's have TV come to Google, i.e. YouTube. And we've seen what's happened in the ensuing 15 years where cord cutting and all of the rest. And now the ad, online digital ad methodologies that Google is best in the world at can be applied in a much more straightforward way. But I was collateral, me and some of the teams I was a part of, we were collateral damage in that evolution.

Starting point is 01:16:59 There was a point where, you know, Google did a small layoff and it was largely concentrated in my group of this acquisition. Along the way Google acquired YouTube, Google also acquired DoubleClick, and DoubleClick served all of the brand advertising online. And a couple of years later, well, firstly at the time, I was within weeks of being laid off, having dropped out of two grad schools, and moved 3,000 miles away. West. That felt really crappy. There's

Starting point is 01:17:30 a great song from around that time, which is a mashup from Coldplay and Jay-Z of Lost. You should listen to the lyrics. Just because I'm losing doesn't mean I've lost is literally the first line. And I would have that on repeat at that time.

Starting point is 01:17:50 Within a couple of years, within a year, probably, a year and a half maybe. I was also, that was around the time I was getting married. So it was a lot going on. It turns out that within a year sort of post a double-click deal, Google decided, look, with YouTube as an anchor asset and some other things and the double-click acquisition, there was a technology now pretty well established 15 years later called real-time bidding, and we were going to bring the search auction methodology across the entire web for all

Starting point is 01:18:26 of display advertising. And we were going to use that core underlying infra to be able to build not just a spot market, direct response advertising, but a futures market, which could apply to brand advertising. And we were going to use that disruptive vector, something fundamentally different, not just incrementally better, to essentially dislodge Yahoo from owning brand advertising online. And I ended up getting that mandate. Because I had learned a lot about how brand advertising worked 12, 18 months earlier. So that was a fairly spectacular failure. The acquisition, by the way, ended up in arbitration, big lawsuits, depositions,

Starting point is 01:19:13 and it was messy from all sorts of angles. So we all worked our way through that. And then in the end, we ended up building what is even still today, I believe Google's second largest business, which is a display advertising business. But that transition was messy, excruciatingly difficult from a strategy perspective, as we talked about earlier, but from a emotional toll as well and figuring out your way, given I was new to product management, I was new to Silicon Valley, I was new to Google, I was new to advertising, and I had no idea whether I was ever going to be good at it or not.

Starting point is 01:19:52 Do you think the lesson there is basically that song just because you're losing? Doesn't mean you've lost or that you're a loser and just keep going? Yeah. I mean, bloody-mindedness is a dramatically underrated quality as we over-intellectualize from strategy to execution and all the other things. Sometimes persistence is key and persistence while still being clear-eyed about what the odds of success are is also. so key. Jag, we've covered everything I was hoping to cover and more. Before we get to a very exciting lightning round, is there anything that you'd love to leave listeners with or share kind of as a last tidbit? I would just summarize a couple of core points. I think the idea of perseverance and being

Starting point is 01:20:45 very clear about what you're trying to achieve and how much it is worth to. you and how much you're willing to fight for it while also being very open and transparent to feedback that you're getting from people from the market about whether what's working and what's not and knowing what parts to let go and what to hold on to really tightly is an important lesson. I think the other thing that I would just, you know, emphasize again is, and this goes a little bit back to the debate you're trying to frame up, on a new category or existing category. I think within that debate,

Starting point is 01:21:29 there's really a synthesis that says, and I think most people would agree, if you're trying to break through as an insurgent, you cannot fight on the ground that the incumbents have stand firm. You have got to find a disruptive vector, and that means searching hard for what is fundamentally different

Starting point is 01:21:51 so that it breaks through the noise and the volume of the noise has just gone up so much in the last 15 years that I think that's even growing in importance. Incrementally better doesn't get you there. It doesn't get you there unless you have that hook. I love that you summarized your key takeaways. Something I've been wanting to do and I might ask every guest to try to summarize what they've shared because that is incredibly helpful. with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready i am ready let's do it first question

Starting point is 01:22:27 what are two or three books that you recommend in most to other people the business books uh one is play to win um i think that is a great modern strategy book that takes a lot of what's happened in the digital world and summarizes it summarizes it really well um second one that i would highlight which i think is a good non-digital world summary and really distillation of the essence of strategy. And as you mentioned earlier, he's coming on your podcast soon from Roger Martin, is where to play and how to win, which I think is a classic. And then, you know, as I mentioned, I went to study public policy and politics back 15 years ago.

Starting point is 01:23:13 One of the ultimate startups and one of the ultimate startup stories in my mind is the story of Singapore. And there's an autobiography of the founding prime minister of Singapore from 1965 till he retired. He passed away a couple of years ago, Lechuan Yew. His book about the story of being kicked out, Singapore being kicked out of Malaysia as a tiny, in business terms, sub-scale little country with no natural resources is, I think, incredibly inspiring. His book is called From Third World to First. And I think it's a great story that in many ways is a parallel to what startups try to do, which is essentially go from third class to first.

Starting point is 01:24:06 And it's a very tricky ride and requires a ruthless honesty about where you stand and what it will take to succeed. And it usually gets prudified up when told in retrospect. But it is messy every step of the way. And I think it's an awesome, it's an awesome unapologetic summary of like what it takes to achieve greatness in a very different sphere than we're used to talking to. I love that. I definitely want to read that now.

Starting point is 01:24:40 Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? There's the great series that my wife and I watched fairly recently on HBO called The Gilded Age, which really shines a very interesting light on how technology, this is from the late 1800s, 19th century, how the technological changes disrupts both the economic world and the world of wealth, but also the social dynamics in a society. It's fascinating because we're living through a new gilded age right now, and we're seeing a lot of those dynamics,

Starting point is 01:25:23 but Tobor charged on social media. So extra, extra exciting. Good times. Do you have a favorite product that you have recently discovered that you really like, either an app, some physical, anything that's bringing you joy? I was listening to your podcast with Christopher Lockett, and it was on the treadmill when I was doing it. And in the middle of it, he mentioned a product around the idea of category design.

Starting point is 01:25:56 I forget what question you asked him. And he mentioned the loamy, which is your kitchen countertop composter. And my 13-year-old daughter has been, who is very, you know, very, idealistic and has been on us to do composting for over a year now. And we bought a loamy. And we just did, we just did our fifth batch of soil last night. And it works exactly as advertised. And it is fantastic. And I get a great amount of joy as does the whole family actually in doing the right thing and doing it in a modern way. and doing it in this accelerated time frame overnight.

Starting point is 01:26:46 And it's really a new category of product of a kitchen appliance that I remember Christopher talking about that creating countertop space is a precious asset. And we are happy we did it. So that's a very recent last three-week story. This makes me so happy. I also think Chris is going to be his favorite episode of all my podcasts. A lot of love for him. That's incredible. I got to get me one of those. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often think about, come back to share with friends or family that's been useful in work or in life? In work, in the very narrow confines of work, I've used it at probably at least a dozen times in this podcast, which is about par for me for an hour and a half at work.

Starting point is 01:27:38 we're in the business of fundamentally different, not incrementally better. I think that's the core motto. And I think it works in a slightly modified way for life as well. You know, you live, you build the life you want to build. And it's not going to be checking the boxes that everyone wants you to to check there was a time when I was at a consulting firm and I was a partner and I dropped out to go back to grad school and people thought I was crazy. Then there was a time when I dropped out, you know, like to the horror of my parents, I dropped out of Harvard like what the hell was I

Starting point is 01:28:26 thinking to come out to Silicon Valley. And that went, as we talked about, pear shape within weeks. There was a time when I left Facebook to, not that long ago, four years ago, to go join this crazy Sao Paulo-based bank. What did I know about banking? What the hell did I know about Brazil, really? If you're not clear on what it is you are trying to do, and if A and B, if you are not willing to tolerate failure, then you're just checking the boxes of someone else's expectations. And so fundamentally different is important. Now it's a luxury good. You got to be, you've got to be, it's easy for some of us who live in, you know, the Bay Area and in Silicon Valley to, and so I'm very conscious of that, that it's a privilege and it's a luxury good. But I think everyone should

Starting point is 01:29:20 strive for their version of. I love that you extend that idea not to just business, but also your life. I didn't even think that it goes that far. Final question. I know you have to run really soon, but I can't not ask about this. Apparently, you were convicted of smuggling mangoes at some point in your life. Can you share that story? Yes. As I mentioned, I grew up in Trinidad in the Caribbean. And outside my brother in my bedroom was a mango tree that was abundant and spectacular quality set of mangoes.

Starting point is 01:30:00 And here in the U.S., and I can speak very definitively for California, the mangoes are subpar. Forget about incrementally better. They are simply subpar. An American, I don't think, realize what a good mango actually is and what a joy it is to behold. So every time I would go home, I would try to bring mangoes back. And one time, coming through Miami International Airport from the Caribbean, I had a dozen mangoes wrapped in newspaper, slipped in between my clothes, and I hadn't counted on the fact that this was several months before 9-11. But I hadn't counted on the fact that the U.S. Department of Ad Culture had got smart to the fact that if people are coming from the Caribbean, they are bringing in food.

Starting point is 01:30:55 That is a given, and they're going to try to smuggle it by. So they ran the entire plane through agricultural inspection. The guy looked through the x-ray machine and said, you've got 11 mangoes in your bags, sir, in which point I knew I was caught. And I said, well, you missed that one. I could see the picture. I said, you missed that one. It's actually 12. I ended up on a agricultural watch list, but then 9-11 happened.

Starting point is 01:31:21 And there were three or four years where as a management consultant, so I was at an airport twice a week. I you know those you used to get on your ticket S S S S S which they said was random Every flight for three years I was flagged for a Special screening Because of my love of mangoes

Starting point is 01:31:42 So So It was worth it Mangos are Misunderstood Underepreciated fruit So If you grow up in the Caribbean

Starting point is 01:31:55 You can't You can't. It's hard to go without top quality mangoes, and so I still struggle here in Cali. I hope you've been rehabilitated from your life of crime. I have been rehabilitated, and one of the great things about working with the Brazilian companies, the quality of mangoes in Brazil are top-knots. So I get to partake fairly regularly these days. It's unfair. I am going to ask you for here some mango recommendations. Jag, I've kept you long enough. I feel like this podcast episode was definitely not incrementally better. it was certainly fundamentally different.

Starting point is 01:32:26 Thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find you if they want to reach out and maybe follow up on stuff? And how can listeners be useful to you? Thank you. Lenny, I really enjoyed it. I appreciate it.

Starting point is 01:32:36 Very kind words. Best place to find me is probably on LinkedIn, Jagdougal, a relatively unique name, fairly easy to spot and find there. And I am all, looking for stories and for opportunities. I'm always looking for stories of fundamentally different, so I would love to hear those, especially when they're done against the odds or when there's a more

Starting point is 01:33:06 convenience or easy choice. And we are in the business of building the world's first social and self-driving AI powered bank, which sounds like a lot of MBA gobbly duke, I know, but Silicon Valley buzzwords, but we mean it. And so anyone who wants to join what we call the purple revolution, our brand color is purple,

Starting point is 01:33:33 love to hear from you wherever you are in the world, because we have people everywhere. And if they're interested, is it like NewBank.com slash careers? I believe that's right. Yes. Amazing. By the way, do you have a color, a name for your purple brand color?

Starting point is 01:33:49 we call that we our customers call the little purple credit card the Hoshino Hosho in Portuguese means purple. Hoshino basically means little purple card and there was actually a moment, a point when there was a risk because of some regulatory issues

Starting point is 01:34:13 that were happening in Brazil in 2016 where there was a chance that New Bank would have to shut down and it turns out the central bank, our customers call the central bank and said, you cannot let this happen. And from that day, one of the engineers said when it was just 100 or so people,

Starting point is 01:34:31 the future is purple. And we have t-shirts all over a new bank saying the future is purple. So that's part of our origin story. I'll let you go. Jag, you're awesome. I feel like this is going to help a lot of people. Thank you so much for being here. Lenny enjoyed it so much. Thanks a lot. Great to chat. Bye, everyone.

Starting point is 01:34:53 Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast)

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