Agoda

Subversive · Nov 27

How Preply Built the World’s Largest Language Learning Marketplace

Simon spent eight years there, starting with marketing backend automation that created search ad keywords across 50 languages, handling hundreds of millions if not billions of keywords. The culture was extremely quantitative, which he later had to balance at Preply.

Lenny's Podcast · May 22

Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26)

It paid a psychologist $5,000 per PM candidate for a six-hour assessment. Its hotel payments device used $50 Android phones, took six to nine months to launch because of licenses, and COVID emptied the hotels right after thousands had adopted it.

Tips

• Ship small things fast and avoid six-to-twelve-month projects▶ 1:21:40Agoda's hotel payments device took six to nine months to launch because of licenses, and COVID hit just after thousands of hotels had adopted it.
• Choose a job by overlap with your strengths, not your weaknesses▶ 20:28Mayur used a six-hour psych assessment at Agoda, a Ray Dalio style strengths assessment (about $50) combining self and peer ratings, and the book Strengths Finder 2.0.