Transcript for:
Fintech and Strategy with Jag Dugall at Nubank

new bank is bigger than coinbase Robin Hood affirm Sofi and lemonade combined 80 to 90% of new bank's growth is through W 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 new bank is one of the historically most successful companies of launching new business lines we built a lending product we built an Investments product we built an insurance product we built a series of small business products we rarely scale projects until we know the Sha Ellis score hit the threshold that we find really compelling I want to talk about strategy Kevin cyrm 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 goes in the future why not have the company that reinvents banking come out of sou Paulo Mexico City Bogota today my guest is jag dugall jag is Chief product officer at new bank 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 new bank Jag was director of product management at Facebook leading monetization of video and thirdparty content including news gaming and influencer content prior to Facebook he was senior vice president of product and strategy at quantcast and group product manager and head of strategy for 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 dogall 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 helps the podcast tremendously this episode is brought to you by work OS if you're building a SAS app at some point your customers will start asking for Enterprise features like samle authentication and skim provisioning that's where work OS comes in making it fast and painless to add Enterprise features to your app their apis are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features today hundreds of companies are already powered by work OS including ones you probably know like versel webflow and Loom work OS also recently acquired warrant the fine grain authorization service Warren's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube this enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases if you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other Enterprise features like single sign on skim or user management you should consider work OS it's a drop-in replacement for azero and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free check it out at work os.com to learn more that's work.com this episode is brought to you by Mercury Mercury knows your financial operations are complex it doesn't have to be this way I've been a super happy customer Mercury for over a year now and it's honestly hard to imagine a better online banking experience can exist most Founders and finance teams have to couple together a patchwork of tools to reconcile transactions from different sources work extra hard just to get a holistic view of cash flow and have maps to company priorities and struggle to get answers from platforms that all speak different languages Mercury knows that there's an art to simplifying this complex patchwor with new bill pay and accounting capabilities you can pay bills faster stay in control of company's spend and speed up reconciliation the end result is the Precision control and focus that startups need to transform how they operate apply in minutes at mercury.com and join over 200,000 ambitious startups like mine that trust Mercury to get them to perform at their best Mercury the art of simplified finances Mercury is a financial technology company not 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 big fan of the show and uh look forward to the conversation so thanks for having me I'm even more honored thank you for being here I want to start by sharing just some facts about newbank that I think are going to blow people's minds I think a lot of people in the US especially are sleeping on Eubank and I think this is going to help people that are listening pay even more attention the stuff we're going to talk about and lessons we're going to share so one new bank is bigger than coinbase Robin Hood affirm Sofi and lemonade combined 80 to 90% of new bank's growth is through W of Mount three new bank has more customers than Bank of America which is one of the four big banks in the US 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'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 that is correct we've recently set a new world record for the First underwater credit card transaction so we're always looking for some fun some fun things to do there uh 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 this idea of growing through Word of Mouth in this way is the dream of every company whether your consumer business B2 be a bank especially very unlikely that you grow at this rate the 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 other their friends about yeah I think there are a few things that are the fundamentals of of making that happen and to be clear a lot of this predates my joining the company about a little short of five years ago but I think is an incredible story in part of what inspired me to join 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 sou Paulo and I remember walking to lunch one day with the client um who was a friend of mine and we were going to Classic churas Kia in sou Paulo and we we were walking by his bank branch and we were at a a stoplight and he basically said that's my bank and I hate them it's 1997 and it always stuck in my head it stuck in my head for 20 years later when you know toid first reached out to me so we we were tapping into a deep pain po can go into exactly why but that was I think one one thing the second thing that that I would say and this is very intentional from from d 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 and the first of those values is a very peculiar set of peculiar phrase set 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 sou 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 uh shortterm Financial viability which is a real thing when you're a venture funded startup um any number of reasons why you can compromise those things on the edges and in a decision sort of dayto day minute to minute ah we can cut the 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 when there are hard decisions to be made we bias in favor of the customer the customers's love will they want to tell their friends and and 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 finanical then you start to do the the the the tradecraft of product development you make sure that you focus on customer Discovery before you start building you make sure that that Discovery uh is is focused not simply on asking the customer but on innovating on their 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 they would love you've got to observe them and find their pain points even when they aren't noticing it and then you you build as you build you 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 the focus on finding a real deeply held emotionally held paino and a culture that says that's your nordstar amazing there's so many threads there I'm going to follow first of all I want to go back to the values so you said there's five you mentioned one can you just quickly share the rest you know the five I'll I'll mention them in the the order that that you know most resonate with me first we want our customers to love us fanatically second we are hungry and we challenge the status quo 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 um and we have many instances of of our employees sort of taking that degree of extreme ownership um as they build products and get them launched okay and then going back to this idea of building products people love fanatically you talked about how there's this the number one principle and it's going to be in everyone's mind when they're building is like build product people a fanatically talked about you index towards if you had to make a decision we're going to do something people love is there anything more you could share about just how you operationalize this for example is there like design reviews where just like you come in oread of design comes in like is this helping customers love us fanatically like what what's in the systems and processes how you operate that allows you to build that other than just cool everyone has to remember this this is what we're trying to do yeah we do a few we do a few things and again I I don't want to also overstate that you know we've achieved some kind of Nirvana we we honor many of these things in the breach sometimes but we we have a a a series of of techniques that we've you know begged borrowed stolen from other places some of which we've in 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 can't tell me in two paragraphs why the customer you're building this for should care then is still work to do so that's one Technique we do have product and design reviews um several times a week uh 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 um on the dimensions of quality on the dimensions of complexity on the dimensions of of price uh and usually on the dimensions of all three of those at the same time uh and breaking some of the tradeoff constraints that you often wrestle with and seeing if that's possible which which isn't always possible but we but we we frequently uh reach for that and sometimes find it and then there are the things you do after you've built and launched a product whether it's Alpha Beta or a later stage uh the measurement stuff um and you some of your previous guests have talk 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 sou Paulo when I first joined newbank and the small product team at the time is telling me about this thing called sha Ellis score and we recently had sea visit us in sou 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 we rarely scale a project a product we've launched until we know the Sha Ellis score and we know that it's hit a threshold that we find really compelling can you describe the the actual score in the in the approach yeah this the Shaun Ellis score is a really simple methodology used by lots of lots and lots of companies that that a gentleman named Sean Ellis uh popularized well over a decade ago which basically asks your customers at each stage and and at each stage you have a small number of customers then a larger group and and growing over time but at each stage you ask them um how disappointed would you be if this product went away and what Sean has said is that if at least 40% of your customers are not very disappointed not just a little disappointed but very disappointed he has sort of a potentially a three-point scale uh 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 newbank Brazilians are a um 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 they would be very disappointed because Brazilians are inherently polite um and more more polite and more optimistic than average so we make our own little tweaks and adjustments but we find that to be very uh 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 and we we are maniacal about tracking how we do and again we we we compensate for some cultural biases and we make sure that we hold ourselves to a high bar but uh there have been for example in Mexico we've recorded an NPS when we when we launched first couple of years of 9495 right so that's AB I've never heard yeah which is way better than we got in Brazil but our NPS scores skew in the 70s ' 80s and in occasionally 990s and when they dip down even one or two points like that's a reason for alarm and we we try to figure out why and we try to make sure that we we make the iterations so uh those are the 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 Sha Ellis survey is used kind of as you iterate and ex kind of launch towards launch 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 uh 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 treadmill to be on so um so I am personally maniacal about making sure that the bucket doesn't have a hole in the bottom so on this sha 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 pager it's like or is it just implied okay we're not gonna We're not gonna 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 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 Shaun Ellis score how do you know that customers love it not just not just like it but love it to the degree that they're going to tell their friends about it that's that's pretty big tin culturally at this 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 to past like 20% is very hard like very like you have to be very disappointed if this new product they've never used 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 goes away yeah that's right there are several sort of on the newer 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 beyond 50 and what are the 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 we put a lot of analytical effort and a lot of depth of thinking to you know we were we were in a product review several years ago and our lead designer um uh who's ex Google and ex Facebook um we were in a review together and and the team was saying we think this is good enough for launch and he used the phrase which both uh Christian Cara 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 10p products but 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 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 project that comes to mind that was kind of below that bar and then you pushed it above where you're like 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 assisten gagos payments assistant paying bills in it's right now only launched in Brazil we haven't yet launched it in in Mexico and Colombia paying bills in Brazil is quite complex there are four different ways four different payment rails different different payments have to go you know that the different payments use from the mobile payment system that has that has exploded in Brazil over the last three years called PX that's become fairly world famous in the fintech world to more standard and some more uh archaic rails as well 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 got to collect your bills you 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 negativ ad 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 the product in a you know read Huffman style you know if you've if you are not embarrassed by V1 you've waited too long as we as we've done that uh last year we found that a very interesting pattern we had a decent Sean Ellis score um borderline 40 I forget the exact number basically in that ballpark but we found that customers who had there was a small cohort of the customer base who had more than four plus commitments registered and even more so within that small cohort an even smaller book ey cohort who had more than four commitments on at least two of the four rails and their Shan Ellis score hit 70 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 and 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 we're going to Auto you know we're going to have a bill autopay that's on the face of it not necessarily exciting but if you build it right it is actually a fundamentally different experience rather than incrementally better experience and uh 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 segment that we had a larger and larger proportion of the customers who are trying and uh and and by the way that's a journey still underway we have a whole road map for the next year of of lots of small quality adjustments that we're going to going to make and we 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 would came up in this exam we we do that fairly frequently when we did our we have a a a high income rewards credit card we it's called ultraviolet 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 they were the ones that the C 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 um resonated um whereas if you were paying the monthly fee those other benefits were were not quite as exciting um 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 bulli segment so we've told many of our product managers and designers over the last two years don't worry about surveying a th customers taking three weeks surveying a thousand customers getting a bunch of cross tabs all even at the end of which it's very hard to read the real fine grain customer feedback so I'm we just tell them call 10 of them pick up the phone yourself 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 of distance built in you pick up the phone call 10 of them and nine times out of 10 by the time you've made your fist call You can predict what customer 67 8 9 and 10 are going to tell you and then you know what it is that is the gap or what it is 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 lined into the people who are building the product I love this advice I imagine as a PM that is extremely scary to go call a customer most people don't do that um by the way do you actually operationally is it actually a call or do you recommend the email what you actually recommend they do because we literally pick up the phone okay pick up the phone okay great because you can get tone of voice you know Brazilians and Mexicans are incredibly expressive um there is there is a degree of real fine grain sense that the statistics never tell you yeah and it's very aligned with you know 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 as little overhead as possible to make sure the voice of the customer is coming directly into the teams that are building Jeff Bezos had this quote on his Lex Freedman podcast where if you're if you have data and you have an anecdote usually the anecdote is is right I love that that that's 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 just like how to operationalized collecting this data you know we we've used a series of tools uh many of this the the main survey vendor tools we still use many of them but we don't standardize or find uh 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 and and CPO we live with it today at new bank every every month is the pressure on the line product manager to scale the product that the entire company the entire executive team the entire management chain has been counting on we're launching this thing asy Stan pagamentos 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 uh to scale product is immense and the job of the product manager in many instances is to say no and you know 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 newbank or places like Google and Facebook you can make any product look great for months if not years because you have such a large customer base you can always get him to try it with all sorts of basic techniques but you're bouncing a dead cat and uh 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 Sha Ellis does is it 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 they should be pushing back or they are not good at it from the PMS you 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 them 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 talked about the five cultur Al tenants but this idea of we are owners not renders you're an owner of that product as the product manager or the lead engineer or the lead designer or in fact anyone on the team um if you really don't think it's going to work don't tell me what I want to hear 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 um you know 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 who have you know pivoted them pretty dramatically and there's a lot of respect for someone who has a real Clarity of thought and a 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 that's okay it is your job whether product or design or engineering or or whatever function as a leader to if you think you are practicing for one of those senior jobs at sort of let's say a mid-level then you got to it doesn't come miraculously when you get a a seite title it's something that's going to be practiced and and and it's something that is expected and I think that's not a just a new bank thing certain culture promote it better than others but um but I think it's it's pretty uh universally important and so I would just encourage people to to try it understand the trade-offs 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 owe 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 uh and it'll work out better in the end I want to come back to one more thread and then I'm going to go in a different direction uh 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 paino figure out to build build you have any just I don't know tips or tactics or uh 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's it is arguably the area right now that I still wrestle with I still think we I and we are not doing it as well I've never seen it done quite as consistently great as it could be um um and I think it's an area for where like design thinking and a lot of the design function can help us um but but it's very very it's one of the areas of greatest inconsistency that I see in product development having said that a couple of things that I see that we sometimes do really well at newbank and other times we we we miss on one dimension or the other first off per your uh your Jeff Bezos uh anecdote uh 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's words and the anecdote that's one the second uh 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 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 P I've fallen into that one too many times to count and then the last thing I would 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 if you can ask indirect questions more than direct questions would you love this product right excited product manager has been working for two months on a on a design you're searching for the problem more than the solution you're you're you're searching uh for you're looking indirectly and asking in mult 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 uh those are the things that I that I look for with the hypothesis point just to make sure people understand your suggestion there is before you start talking to customers doing easy researches as a PM or just anyone on the team 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 that is that that will lead them to be really excited about your product that way you will get very clearly or 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 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 is there a quick example of a hypothesis one of the famous examples that's that's somewhat hypothesis related and somewhat observation related um is the you know the invention of the Swiffer from propor and gamble right the people hate mopping and they the they will do it 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 you can you can see where the problems are and so if you bring a strong hypothesis to that this is a real problem even if customers aren't telling you it's a problem because they've just sort of gotten used to it so that's one um we have a hypothesis at new bank I'll give everyone that's live we have a hypothesis at newbank that the joint bank account I was doing some research on this just last week uh the joint bank account was invented in the early it's actually hard to say but but it was invented depending on where you what source you believe in the late 19th or early 20th century and it was basically invented coincident with the social move sort of the women's Liberation social movements before women in the US were legally allowed to vote um where women were not allowed to open a bank account without their husbands prior approved that is the era from which the joint bank account that we still live with today came from it's 20 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 that it is for me to share uh 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 financial lives are 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 you try to see if they're experiencing pain points and it Bec very hard when you're in and they say even a 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 customer sell you in the interaction and you play The Devil's Advocate so that those are the kinds of things we we uh um we search for as 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 the embeddable CSV importer for SAS customers always seem to want to give you their data in the messiest possible CSV file and building a spreadsheet importer becomes a never-ending sync for your engineering and support resources you keep adding features to your spreadsheet importer but customers keep running into issues 6 months later you're fixing yet another date conversion Edge case bug most tools aren't built for handling messy data but one schema is companies like scale Ai and pavee are using one schema to make it fast and easy to launch delightful spreadsheet import experiences from embeddable CSV import to importing csvs from an SFTP folder on a recurring basis spreadsheet import is such an awful experience in so many products customers get frustrated by useless messages like error on line 53 and never end up getting started with your product one schema intellig ly 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 one schema is offering a $1,000 discount learn more at on schema. c/y I want to talk about strategy I know that you have a very strong perspective on how to think about strategy how to approach strategy this is something that everyone always wants to get better at every Pi is always told you want to get build your strategic thinking muscles and is really important to your career I'd love to hear your take and how you approach developing strategy and your advice to folks I will readily admit I bring a bias I spent almost a decade at the beginning of my career right after college working at a strategy consulting firm right so I bring a a bias which is an to some degree certainly for the length of time I did it an unusual background for a product manager 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 um but I think there is almost a counterveiling 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 into the conversation and all of their great execution was multiplied by zero great execution multiplied by a 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 uh years and years against something that was destined never to work one of my favorite quotes from The Valley um from Kevin cyrm in the early days of Instagram I heard him say it at a conference this is pre the Facebook acquisition he was like I don't know how old he had just left Google he was probably I don't know 20 some years old 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 cuz no plan ever is you will have a clearer read on if you are going off course because you kind of H 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 um you've had some great guests on the podcast um Richard rumelt is one of my absolute uh favorites he's written a couple of books one called good strategy bad strategy another more recent called the Crux where he 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 going to apply your strengths in a leveraged way against a core important problem that's a very very rough paraphrase of of the way he thinks about the world and I find that we often confuse strategy with a vision a broad idea a very very broad vague aspiration new bank strategy isn't we want to be the world's largest Neo Bank 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 were 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 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 uh working backwards from that I think is is really really important and if you get that strategy right it in 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 suro the customers you maybe we should go to Mexico uh 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 bets not hedging and because you're conc in bets those those bets are high stakes you need to be very very clear on what what bets 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 p one is taking it seriously it's a little bit like what we talked about with new bank's culture around first you got to want the customer to love you fanatically is 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 re relatively recent guest of yours Christopher lockhead who I who I really admire um whether it's where to play how to win from Roger Martin which is a phenomenal book about he's coming on the podcast in in a few weeks is he he's he's he's fantastic and um 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 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 in in slightly different ways once you understand the Frameworks and you distill them then it's about practicing them and practicing them is scary hedging is hedging is appealing hedging means you don't have to you don't have to make choices um hedging sounds smart uh concentrating all your bets is the thing the desperate people do and startups are desperate are desperate uh 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 monster products and new bank's now in that fortunate position that starts to get conservative that starts to forget that Focus concentration customer uh Obsession are every bit as important that even though the company won't go bankrupt if products three four five and six don't don't succeed because product one and two are are 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 um intentionally Having the courage to make those hard choices uh and to concentrate the bets is which goes again by the way a lot of what's taught in business school and a lot of PMS are are are mbas is really important and then it's a it's a matter of you get better the more you do it and uh and you get more 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 uh at new bank save be fundamentally different my the product team um a little over a year ago uh we we put together some schwag which was 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 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 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 me mentioned Christopher lockhead uh former guest this 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 is a good idea uh 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 ex Gmail product leader and now venture capitalist and you guys had a very uh interesting discussion about it and I think he he took largely the other side of the argument that you go in a category where customers are already spending money and I 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 and how I believe I think overall particularly at a company level successful companies are typically in the fundamentally different business they're in the new category business Google was in the new category business Netflix Airbnb you you can go down the the long list Salesforce uh etc etc um and that's really important in new bank's case we were the first and it is actually is not that important that we were the first but we were very intentionally trying to build a branchless bank based on the 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 D likes to say a bank branch put a bank branch in your pocket where a 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 the massive wave of success multiplied by unlike almost everywhere else in the world including in the US 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 and credit is 10 times harder and and a 100 times more risky because you get credit wrong as a young company that doesn't know how to do it yet you blown you've blown everything up the money's never coming back those two again concentrated bets defining a new category were 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 for couple of decades in Brazil and our job was to go in there and we believe we built something that is fundamentally different it wasn't digital it went through middleman we built it D to C and we've been able to price it very uh to undercut the pricing pretty dramatically um 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 designed finding your own category so you can then dominate it into finding your own category and even when you're entering a place where customers are spending money I think going in 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 category amazing I like I like this uh battle we're forming here of people on two sides of this debate and I'm excited to see where it goes over time feels like the uh do not create a category side as winning so far in terms of volume but uh there's a lot of passion from this other side I'm happy to be on the contrarian side with okay there's a few more things I want to touch on uh before we wrap up um it feels like new bank is one of the historically most successful companies of launching new business lines I think you guys are maybe like 10 years old and how many products business lines are there at this point it depends on how you categorize it but I would I would say we have roughly a dozen to 20 cortic lines um that's wild our story started as a Brazil we were a Brazilian credit card monol liner in an in an app and and all the rest of it around the time slightly before but around the time I joined the 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 was 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 uh 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 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 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 depend on how you look at that Matrix we are you know a dozen plus uh products and we're working on the phase three of our products which is um moving beyond Financial Services we've launched a an e-commerce Marketplace within our app um which is perhaps a bit counterintuitive if you're coming from the us and we're also envisioning a world where banking is again to use the phrase that that we love at newbank fundamentally different than it has has been in the last 100 years and we believe that social Technologies self-driving uh and AI Technologies can build a a just completely different experience where we're not building a bank branch and putting it in your pocket we're building a personal banker which today I don't know 10 million people around the world have access to and you got to have a lot of money to to do it we believe that job can be done that we believe that job can be democratized ultimately to all eight 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 that's a lot of work and that's you know to use Christopher lockhead and his co-authors um language that's the new category that we are trying to Define over on a global basis 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 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 cander about the pros and cons is is sort of how we went about it and a constant re-examination of how things are going what's going well what's not going well what's taking off what's not yet taking off um 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 is probably a good product at some stage but uh but a lot of it in terms of sequencing and when we invest where some of it's obvious you know where's what's the Tam and and and and what do where's the customer paying but a lot of it is Art and a lot of that resolution of the art and the debate comes from from a fairly robust debate so I'm I'm avoiding your question because I have a ter I have no good answer just a lot of complicated uh decision- making but I think what's interesting is coming back to your very early lesson is using the Gate of is this hitting this 50% of people be very disappointed before launching feels like a key yeah that's the that's the one thing is we don't scale we try not to scale big problems uh and so we we try to solve our problems when things are small our ultravioleta our our sort of uh higher income rewards based credit card we launched it happened to be I think it was July 4th 2021 one was the launch date so it's easy for me to remember we we started 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 six to nine months where we can start scaling aggressively um learning some of the credit dynamics that are different uh and and Reinventing some of those methodologies and 's a second phase of scaling that will come but uh yeah we we one form of distraction we don't get into is fixing massive problems that we've over scaled before they were written that's a bit of an overstatement but uh but nothing's quite that clean but uh but generally true coming back to your thoughts on the future of fintech and in Lam especially you chat you talked about how the vision is essentially a banker in everyone's pocket is there anything more there just like where do you think all this goes in the future terms of fintech banking for people in Lance and then globally yeah you know there are there are a handful of principles call 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 the idea that banking should be holistic that we need to provide a full solution across what we call the the five or six Financial seasons of someone's life right we spend we save we invest we borrow we protect Etc 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 we've made some mistakes on the technical side that we are uh iterating through is we are trying to build and and some might argue this is I'm overstating a bit but 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 manager 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 um and there are good reasons why ad you know Global online advertising worked that way 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 than that you serve the right 300 by 250 ad there there is a lot of push back on that kind of uh we're just going to scal is everywhere sort of mindset and so how do you marry those two things there are Global Banks like City or sent and there a lot of them have been built up through acquisition a lot of them are on distinct code code bases and and Technology infrastructures we believe there's a lot of Leverage in you can build a global bank on a single code basis that's another principle that we are trying to make real 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 um 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 um 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 um how do we make the life the life cycle of managing your financial life exponential Al easier leveraging these Technologies and then using AI which is an overhyped term right now but AI to sort of turbo boost these these uh these tasks we have a phrase we started using at new bank which I I really like the D first 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 uh 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 that's tax advantage in this way these are these are these are imminent these are problems that should be solved and should be solved soon uh and can be automated and can be where insights can be brought to bear for customers who are not super sophisticated 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 stock market and so uh so these are some of the principles around which 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 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 that reinvents banking come out of sou Paulo Mexico City Bogota why does it have 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 g to give it a whir 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 you mentioned AI we have a recurring segment on this 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 touched on this a little bit but just how AI is going to supercharge the stuff that you're building we use some of the the tools that everyone is is using these days um you know our our you know uh ring Fest ring fenced version of of chat GPT and and 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 how can we make it even better while we're also making it more efficient so we're doing whole of those things is part of our coming up the learning curve in the last 18 or or or or so so months and then we're starting to think about what are the ways in which we can build AI native products and I will not pretend to you that we've cracked that c but a former boss of mine uh is spoke spoke a while ago um Fiji Simo who's now uh the CEO instacart 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 what does AI native mean not how do we append AI at the at the corners of the product but how do we build it at the heart what would you design if these tools existed from the start I mean Facebook's migration to mobile is a phenomenal example of that of that pivot and they like to joke and I wasn't there at Facebook at the time but they like to joke at Facebook um even seven eight years later when I joined about the company had ipoed and needed to find a business model and Fiji was sort of responsible for making that happen and the core of it was was bringing this mobile mobile native mindset so we are trying to think through what is an AI native mindset um INF Financial Services what would that look like and that requires analysis as much as analogy 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 their income or wealth had a private Banker s sat next to them that they could turn to whenever they whenever they needed to is a good metaphor and so we are we are using that metaphor and seeing where it takes us let's uh 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 there's a pretty seminal story for my career um uh that that ultimately ended in failure and that uh that I had it just had to sort of rebuild from um I had done strategy Consulting for just shy of 10 years 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 uh at Harvard and um a year into that a friend of mine had had his 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 large 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 my friend convinced me to drop out of grad school both the Kennedy School and business school um I had done a year of the Kennedy School I was one credit short and uh and business school I had done a week of and move out here to California and join Google first off the premise of the the hypothesis proved to be wrong or at least harder than we thought and uh in the following way terrestrial radio or frap 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 back then so that was one piece they were all sorts of technical uh 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 um some very interesting technology at the end of the day one of the things that you really needed was a surplus of inventory of inventory which there actually isn't that much of relatively speaking compared to online 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 CLA Channel they have much more leverage than in the online world of you know bloggers and uh 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 In the meantime Google had acquired YouTube and somewhere along the way and this was over multiple years Susan wiu jisy and the leadership team of of of Google and Google ads in particular came to the conclusion that rather than Google chasing TV let's have TV come to Google IE 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 we were collateral damage in that Evolution there was a point where you know Google did a small layoff and it was largely concentrated in my group um of this acquisition along the way Google acquired YouTube Google also acquired double click and double click 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 move 3,000 miles west that felt really crappy there's a there's a a great song from around that time which is a a mashup from Coldplay and Jay-Z is 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 um within a couple of years or within a year probably year and a half maybe um I was also that was was around the time I was getting married so it was a lot going on um it turns out that within a year sort of post a double click deal Google decided look with YouTube as a as an anchor asset and some other things and D the double click acquisition there was a technology now 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 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're 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 that mandate because I had learned to 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 uh arbitration big lawsuits um depositions and it was messy from all sorts of uh angles um so we we all worked our way through that and then in the end we ended up building what is even still today today I believe Google's large second largest business which is the the display advertising business but that transition was messy excruciatingly difficult from a strategy perspective as we talked about earlier but from a 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 do you think lesson there is is basically that song just because you're losing doesn't mean you've lost or that you're a loser and just keep keep going yeah I mean bloody-mindedness is a dramatically underrated qual quality um as we you know over intellectualize um from strategy to execution and all the other things uh sometimes persistence is key and persistence while still being cleare eyed about what the odds of success are is also key Jag we've covered everything thing 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 I would just summarize a couple of core points I think the the idea of perseverance and being 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 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 the debate you're trying to frame up um on on new category existing category I think within with with within that debate there's really a synthesis that says and I think most people would agree if you're trying to break through as a as an Insurgent you cannot fight on the ground that the incumbents have stand firm you have got to find a disruptive Vector uh and that means searching hard for what is fundamentally different so that it breaks through the noise and the noise 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 um 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 uh 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 what are two or three books that you recommended 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 Happen in the digital world and summarize it summarizes it really well um second one that I would highlight which I think is a really good non-digital World summary and simp and really dist ation 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 I went to study public policy and politics back 15 years ago one of the ultimate startups and one of the ultimate startup stories in my mind is the story of Singapore and there's a autobiography of the founding prime minister of Singapore from you know 1965 till he retired he passed away a couple years ago Le on you um his book about the story of being kicked out Singapore being kicked out of Malaysia as a tiny in business terms subscale 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 and it's a very tricky ride and it requires a a ruthless honesty about where you stand and what it will take to succeed and it usually gets prettified up when told in retrospect but it is it is messy every step of the way and I I think it's an awesome it's an awesome Unapologetic summary of like what it takes to to achieve greatness in a very different sphere than we're used to talking to I love that I I definitely want to read that now uh next question do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed there's a the great series that my wife and I watched fairly recently um on HBO called the Gilded Age which really shines a very interesting light on how technology this is from the you know late 19 late 1800s 19th century how the techn technological changes disrupts both the economic world and the world of of wealth but also the social dynamics in a society and it's it's fascinating because we're going through we're living through a new guilded age right now and we're seeing a lot of those Dynamics but TBO charged on 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 I think I forget what question you asked him and he mentioned the Lomi which is your kitchen countertop composter and my 13-year-old daughter has been uh who's you know very idealistic and has been on us to do composting for over a year now and we bought a Lomi and we we I just did we just did our fifth batch of soil last night and uh 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 and uh it's really a new category of product of kitchen appliance that uh I remember Christopher talking about that uh creating creating countertop space is a precious asset and we we we happy we did it so uh that's a very recent last three weeks story this makes me so happy uh I also think Chris this is gonna this gonna be his favorite episode of of all my podcasts a lot of love for him that's incredible I gotta I gotta 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 you know narrow confines of work I've used it it probably at least a dozen times uh in this podcast which is about car for me for an hour and a half at work H we're in the business of fundamentally different not not incrementally better um I think that's that's the core car core motto and I think it's it it works it works in a in a slightly uh 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 four of my parents I dropped out of Harvard like what the hell was I thinking to come out to Silicon Valley and that went as we talked about pearshaped within weeks there was a time when I left Facebook to not that long ago four years ago to go join this crazy sou 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 got to be it's easy for 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 should strive for their version of it 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 uh apparently you were convicted of smuggling mangoes at some point in your life can you share that story yes uh as I mentioned I grew up uh in Trinidad in the Caribbean um and outside my brother in my bedroom was a mangle M tree that was abundant and spectacular quality set of mangoes and here in the US and I can speak very definitively for California the mangoes are are subpar forget about incrementally better they are simply subpar and Americans 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 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 911 but um I hadn't count on the fact that the US Department of Agriculture had got got smart to the fact that if people are coming from the Caribbean they are bringing in food 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 bag sir at which point I knew I was caught and I said well you missed that one I could see the picture you missed that one it's actually 12 I ended up on a agricultural watch list but then 911 happened and there were three or four years where as a management Consultants I was at an airport twice a week I you know those you used to get on your ticket ssss which they said was random every flight for three years I was flagged for a special screening um because of my love of mangoes so uh so it was worth it um mangoes are are are misunderstood underappreciated fruit so uh um if you grow up in the Caribbean 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 at this point I have been rehabilitated and one of the great things about working with a Brazilian company is the quality of mangoes in Brazil or top knot so I get to I get to partake fairly regularly these days it's unfair I am GNA ask you for your samingo recommendations Jag I've kept you long enough I feel like this podcast episode was definitely not incrementally better it was certainly fundamentally different thank you so much for being here two final questions where can folks find you if they want to reach out maybe follow up on stuff and how can listeners be useful to you thank you um Lenny I really enjoyed it I appreciate it very kind words um best place to find me is probably on on on LinkedIn Jag dugall um a relatively unique name fairly easy to spot and find there and um I am always looking looking for stories and for opportunities I'm always looking for stories of of of fundamentally different so I would love to hear those um especially when they're done against the odds or when there's a more convenient 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 NBA gobl duok I know but Silicon Valley um buzzwords but but we mean it and so anyone who wants to join the what we call the purple Revolution our brand color is purple um love to hear from you wherever you are in the world because uh because we have people everywhere and if they're interested is it like new bank.com careers I believe that's right yes Amazing by the way do you have a color a name for your purple brand color we call not we our customers call uh the little purple credit card the hosino hosho in Portuguese is means purple hosino basically means little purple card and there was actually a moment uh a point when there was a risk because of some regulatory issues 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 uh our customers called the central bank and said said you cannot let this happen and from that day one of the engineers said when it was just a hundred or so people the future is purple and we have T-shirts all over New Bank saying the future is purple so that's 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 Great to chat bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast 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 podcast.com see you in the next episode