Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and first principles thinking | Ayo Omojola

cash app as a team we really cared about what we could do that was different and better than what else existed in Market being different is not enough because very easy to build a thing that's different from what exists today because you just have to look at what existed and build something else being better is not enough because it's also easy to say hey I'm going to make this thing better and just charge you more money for it it has to be better than what to say in a way that matters to the end user and for us for a long time it was when someone says hey why are you better than venmo I'd be like try and send me a dollar that I can use now and there's only one app you could do it with welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products today my guest is Ayo omanjula IO

co-created and scaled Square's popular Cash Card alongside the hugely popular cash app he's currently Chief product officer at Carbon Health one of the biggest and fastest growing Health tech companies in the world he's a former founder he's on on the board of pinwheel and he's an angel investor in companies like Mercury bank Fair modern Treasury and dozens of other startups in today's episode we dig into lessons from building and scaling the cash card and the cash app the importance of differentiation when you're building a consumer product or any sort of product how to successfully build a startup within a startup how to succeed in both fintech and in health Tech Plus my favorite part of the conversation a handful of incredibly insightful and practical principles and philosophies around hiring team building leadership and going deep on problems IO is such a fascinating human and leader and I am

excited for you to learn from him with that I bring you IO a modula after a short word from our sponsors this episode is brought to you by Microsoft Clarity a free easy to use tool that captures how real people are actually using your site you can watch live session replays to discover where users are breezing through your phone where they struggle you can view instant heat maps to see what parts your page users are engaging with and what content they're ignoring you can also pinpoint what's bothering your users with really cool frustration metrics like rage clicks and dead clicks and much more if you listen to this podcast you know how often we talk about the importance of knowing your users and by seeing how users truly experience your product you can identify product opportunities version wins and find big gaps between how you imagine people using your product and how they actually use it

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having me I have a feeling this is going to be a really fun conversation as doing a little research on you ahead of this chat and I found this interesting thing that you did in the past where I found you answered over a hundred questions on quora about people trying to ship stuff and mail stuff and I have no idea what's going on there and so tell us what is going on in 2015 I'd been at cash flow for about a year you know I had massive burnout from my last company went through I see kind of like did hard pivot imploded a little bit stuff kind of picked up sold company eventually and my brother who's my co-founder and I had this idea and I think it was I think it was actually from Printing and mailing my section 83b for something that I'd done and I was like why is there why can't I just like go on the internet and like do this um and so I had this idea to build an application where you could give it a

document and an address and we would print the mail it from you for you and it was right around when wob was founded uh which is obviously like this Printing and mailing API so we built this thing called mail form I think it's like one of the top consumer Print and Mail things on the internet actually I'm sure many people will listen to this well I've used it before and then we have to figure out how to grow it and this is the way that I actually learned how to do SEO was running around the internet trying to find ways to tell people that we did this so they would find us um and we actually ended up like funny as it turns out we ended up building a whole sort of SEO like content infrastructure around it that has really you know impacted my thinking but all the answers on quora were me just trying to get people like you know if you remember like 2014 core was like this massive thing so all the Instagram core were me

trying to get people who might be thinking about the problem that we were solving to realize that we exist that was my guess it was it going to be either user research on the space of shipping and mailing things there was a growth tactic and it clearly is the second you're saying this product still exists that some people can still use yeah yeah it exists a lot of people use it like we have many big customers that you've heard of and like use I won't say their names because I don't know if they want me to do that but like you know um I would say like there are a couple of large like delivery tech companies that use us to mail 10.99s W-2 forms what have you holy moly okay and this is just a side project of yours yeah what are many amazing let's talk about your

cash app experience which I imagine was a pretty transformative period in your career and you from what I understand you had a major impact on the success of the app and the business that was built there to give folks a bit of scale and understanding of this of just the cash app in general can you just briefly talk about how big was it when you joined like the scale of the app and then whatever you can share about just the scale today so uh when I joined cash app was probably sub 50K actives like people moving money today I think it's north of 50 million actives on a monthly basis with all different types of money Movement Like Bitcoin and P2P card stocks and I think it's something like north of 70 or 80 million actives on an annual basis wow okay great what I want to talk

a bit about is the cash app to me is a rare example of a huge consumer app success story I've been Angel Investing for a while now and I've just learned how rare consumer apps work like they never work and this one worked even within a big company you'd think that there's a huge chance of something working if they have the support of a big company and the platform things like that still they almost all fail and so what I'm curious about is what do you think you all did most right one to launch it successfully in the consumer space and then two to keep it growing and scaling to where it got today my perspective is that and I think this is a people don't like this kind of answer the thing cash app did right was like 10 things not one like it was there were like 10 things that actually Best in Class like insane Talent density insane Focus very strong at fraud a lot of a lot of um the way like Brian and Dustin and Jesse

and down G like tried to organize team and look you know with Jack support was just really firewalls from the rest of square the hero customer was a consumer enough the merchants so it was like you know literally in a hundred percent of trade-offs the consumer's needs came first and with that that's a very very hard thing to do like inside a company like it made people angry actually um really insane focus on design um incredible like depths in in this is the thing that I think you will appreciate but it's very hard to appreciate just like as a you know consumer of things people would be like hey what's the difference to you and venmo and the only reason you would ask that is if you just hadn't thought about it for for a second now today there's like a lot of conversions on features like you know sort of demo sort of caught up on a lot of things but at the time like then we didn't have push the debit then we

didn't have an instant like for for like three or four years in the United States the fastest and lowest cost way to move money in the country between any two people who had bank accounts was cash out and I think that kind of changed in 2017 when people know Apple cash Etc kind of came out and launched a lot of things and so I think actually it's possible that having done only one of those things will all catch up might have been successful but I think that the reason it's differentially successful in the market today is the compound effect of all those

things what are some of the lasting lessons that you take to other consumer apps that you're like carbon health for example or Founders that you work with because all those things are amazing hard to replicate sometimes is there stuff you extract from them like here's something that I'm gonna do at any time I'm building a consumer app is it like the design lead component is there anything else along those lines this is the thing I struggle with um I saw on Twitter somebody say this comment that like a lot of times when people describe their success to you what they're really saying is like this is my lottery ticket number so to be honest before I go down this diatribe I don't actually know which of things are replicable I just know like kind of what I believe to be true and you know I'm trying some some work and so on et cetera so I think cash up as a team we really cared about what we could do that was different and

better than what else existed in Market and for us for a long time it was instant it was and if you look at all the products like you'll see this sort of theme of like you know when you cash out there's an instant option when you get a when you get a cash card we issue your card to you instantly when you sell stocks money is available instantly when you sell Bitcoin money is available instantly like literally there's no like ah circle circle Crossing it's like available to spend and I think there's something actually lasting about the concept of instant because they're still in the world today are like lots of businesses and processes that are like asynchronous but not for any reason other than that's just the way the world is so I think that's like one thing that's kind of narrow and then I I would say another thing that I think is really broad is just being really crisp about why what you're doing is different and better

than what exists today and it's it's like being different is not enough because very easy to build a thing that's different from what exists today because you just have to look at what exists today about something else and being better is not enough because it's also easy to say hey I'm going to make this thing better and just charge you more money from it for it and so I think that there's like you know different like you optimize for doing a thing that's different it has to be better than what exists today and it has to be better than what to say in a way that matters to the end user or to the buyer like kind of depending on where your Market is and then like after all that it also you have to be in a domain that matters because it's very easy to get those three right like to build like a really like how do I say this a thing that's different I'm better than what exists today in a way that matters to end users could

also just be art which is is just like art is a complex thing to scale and so you have to like then also get the economics right get the entire pipeline of like how you ship how you build how you talk about it all that stuff has to has to work as well I

think there's some really great lessons there just to kind of mirror back what you're saying just differentiation in this case ends up being really important and if you're trying to disrupt someone doing something like say venmo like you can't just be a better venmo you have to be different and it sounds like instant was the differentiator in this case for a long time yeah yeah or or rather it was the cut through the Clutter differentiator there were like actually like a lot of other sort of long tail of things that we were doing that was different but it was like instant was the thing where you know when someone says hey why are you better than venmo I'd be like try and send me a dollar that I can use now and there's only one app you could do it with and I think the other element of this that connects to something I'm working on on in the newsletter is when you're trying to find a big idea especially in B2B but in this

case it works in BBC it's just it needs to be important and it's a matter like you can it can be a better thing that nobody values highly yeah because then you will make money in B2B and b2c people won't even use it yeah so these are really

great you mentioned in passing when we were preparing for this that block was trying to kill the cash app for a lot of time earlier I wouldn't say I wouldn't say like block was trying to kill a ketchup I think that there were many many people who worked there that absolutely like and I mean it's the nicest way identities we're tied with with square being a merchant business believe that the investment in cash app was could have been better deployed elsewhere didn't want to work on consumer there was just like a myriad of and then like I'm sure people who are their time would say like we probably also made a mistake and didn't communicate well and didn't sell it well and so on but there was a crazy amount of friction I'll put it that way it wasn't like just it wasn't like you know a thing I will 100 give Brian credit for is he was really effective at making sure that we had a shot zooming out for a moment and

thinking about just square and block and how they operate as a product company and as a business is there anything that you've taken away from that experience that you bring with you to where you are now which I want to talk about next I don't know necessarily if this was intentional I guess it was probably just like a a consequence of Square going through going public and trying to be sort of a rigorous financial institution I think when you are in a large organization trying to do a actually new thing I I think small teams are better than big ones period and forcing the teams to be like super sort of thoughtful about like hitting milestones and and actually adding value because like there's this thing people say about like hey this startup within Starbucks I think it's fake and the reason I think it's fake is because like when you're a startup you actually worry about paying the people who work for you

and when you are inside the company you just don't and there's just a difference between like having that existential fear of are we gonna be here tomorrow and not so I think it consequence of not having that existential fear is that it's easy to just be like hey I need more resources and the organization has some habits around how you acquire resources and if the leadership of the of the uh is the leadership building the new thing happen to be good at that you can have growth in a you know new projects people size that doesn't match the new Project's success and potential and and I think that actually ends up it ends up being attacked over time that's a really

good point I didn't think about asking about that but in this case it was a startup within a company that did well and I also agreed it rarely works and it did here what is what is it do you think that was so Central to make you work you know you just talked about it how would you summarize just like here's the thing everyone should do when they're maybe starting something small within a big company that's new there are some macro things where I do believe we were children or Fortune like mobile Etc um when I joined cash app a lot of the people working on it were fairly tenured both at Square and just like in their careers and had like done sort of really meaningful things and as a consequence I do I do think there's like there's a thing I haven't quite been able to articulate well but there's something around like a small tightly knit Senior Team super focused on a problem and the smallness means just like less

Paradise communication and then the title unit means a lot more Trust and then I think like Brian was obviously just he'd been at Square for a long time with the organization always a color operator around there new like Talent like who was good that he wanted to you know run on board and I think that combination of things uh like like well not my guess is there are other things but I think like without that thing it would actually have been really really difficult I think that's an awesome lesson just like a small trusted team that has seniority and Leadership trusts to operate and not just like hey what the hell are you doing it's time to yeah time to yeah time to ship faster the cash out team stayed super senior for a long time um and you said small how small would you was it slash what do you recommend when you say it should be a small team for something like this you know a lot depends on the thing there I don't think

there's a One-Shot answer when I joined cash up was like 11 or 12. and it wasn't much more than that for like a year um and even I I forget how big it was when I left but like we had real scale in a real business before we had a real head count I guess is the way I would say and like kind of had to fight for every every account and I think the headcount this morning was a Sarah Friar thing from Square she's just you know really really disciplined about making sure that if you were trying to bring people on and spend the company's money you really Justified it

I think that's a really good takeaway let's transition to talking about what you're currently doing carbon health you went from consumer fintech to consumer health Tech first of all just real quick just how did that transition happen was that something you planned or is that just like you went on exploring that's where you ended up uh there's more more I went on exploring that's where I ended up I think um I'd say there's there's maybe three parts there's one part where um when I was exploring there's this guy Russell friend who now works at Carbon who had he introduced me to like a third of my network in Silicon Valley and the nicest guy and basically he said hey there's this guy who's amazing he was founder of udemy and now he says come to call carton Health his name is Aaron you need to talk to him and I was like sure and and Airline met and Aaron is brilliant and also had a this crazy way of explaining a complex

problem in a way that made the solution obvious and so it was like he was like oh yeah like here's how we're gonna do it and here's you know the thing you spent like two and a half hours together and then at the end I was like oh yeah like this is obviously somebody's used to build this thing and then I think the second part was I think everyone's the hero in their own story I'm no different so like I think when I when I left cash app and when I was thinking about to do next I was thinking of starting a company and doing all this stuff and one of the muscles that like we really just spent a lot of time building cash app was going really really deep into like the regulatory sort of wallpaper of the problems we were trying to solve and so we you know we would have sessions where we'd be sitting in a room like product engineering legal compliance Etc with some regs literally blown up on a projector screen and a session of text

highlighted and being like hey what does this really mean okay what if we build a product this way what if we structured money movement this way Etc and so I casted myself instead as hey what if what if I could be good at regulated businesses instead of just good money um and that was that was the that was the way that I tied the two together there are a bunch of like other sort of very personal like ego things like I want to build teams as well mostly Founders um I both my parents were doctors and I've been through some sort of uh scary experiences in the healthcare system so there was just like a part of it that was about sort of mission and background but the career part was really about how to use Stitch two things together and I I also wanted to learn there's there's this thing that happened in my like fourth year at Cash app where I was like oh there's other things that we have to build that would be amazing

if we actually build it uh which is what pinwheel the company I'm on the board of actually is I was like hey we got to build like this platform for payroll it's like you know the last giant money movement thing that hasn't really come to the needle in a long time and I couldn't get the organization convinced about it which is what it is um A and B I was like oh I want to have that Insight how can I have that Insight of like what the second thing is faster the second time around and I am sad to report that three years in a carbon I've not had it yet you got a lot going on I I am not surprised so I was gonna ask what draws you towards regulated highly regulated Industries being a cash app and I like that you already went there basically just found that that's maybe the thing that you could get really smart at and that applies to a lot of different markets that's an interesting uh insight about yourself like this could be the

thing that I I get good at yeah yeah or differentially better at than other

people you kind of like mentioned this off to the side this idea that you like to hire founders and can you speak more to that just like why yeah what that means in your day-to-day and then maybe how your team looks today is that is it mostly Founders or some large yeah I think team looks today about half and half so I had this experience going through YC where and and just like kind of growing up in my career in Silicon Valley uh where I knew about the founders who were like absolute beasts like incredible people could do amazing things and they would bounce off organizations they would be like all right I'm gonna go work at Amazon and just like not last and when I was a cash app I went through a bunch of hiring processes where I was like Hey like we should try to hire you know some fires to do this like look at these companies Etc and a thing that would happen that and this this part really isn't about

finders though the founder is like one way serverless happens but I think it would happen quite often is by the time you get us as a hiring manager you get a bunch of resumes to look at like you post a job a bunch of people apply you're partnering with a with a sorcer by the time you get a bunch of resumes to look at they've screened out everyone that doesn't just like fit inside a box and it's like you know at Google Facebook Amazon Microsoft Apple and then at certain set of schools um and then a certain type of experience Etc and so what happened is like if you just happen to not look like that profile I don't even see you and I would say hey like I would like to hire some non-traditional candidates here who were like Founders or whatever and I would just like never get it it was almost like the machine just worked a certain way like there was an algorithm and the algorithm was Upstream

of me and I have this belief that these sort of these people that I'd seen many of whom have now gone into their companies that are doing quite well would be incredible value add like basically if you if you could just it's kind of like if you just hold on to a rocket for a little bit it can take you like pretty far and and so this is one of the things I talked to Aaron about actually early on when I joined carbon and I would literally in the job posting I'd be like if you've been a Founder before even if your Starbucks failed please apply to this because like you think this I think common among Congress too is uh there's like this sort of imposter syndrome that is goes hand in hand with the chip on the shoulder and so we like car my team's much longer now than it was but like I I probably I think the whole time that I'm in a carbon hired about 50 Founders and I I'm actually 100 certain the thesis

was right and I think it just came with costs that were kind of theoretical at the time and I I and I didn't uh and I now that now they're real I think like the two big costs are if there's any waste or [ __ ] in your organization like they [ __ ] see it right away and call it out and so there's this like you have to like they're they're just these scenarios where I'd just be like I just have to sit and listen somebody tell me all the things that we're doing wrong so there's there's one that's just like a it's a it's a way to cut through [ __ ] that's that's one cost and I think the second cost is uh and and I I say cost as in like it is not better for the organizations you have these people who come in they're incredible and you really can only keep them for like two or two and a half years and events of happening is they're just like oh like I wanna you know they're obviously if you're gonna be person

starts coming to you're like super ambitious so they're like I'm gonna go around team somewhere else I'm gonna go try some other thing I'm gonna go build a company and so it's kind of like a a team that I think is differentially higher output but also differentially higher attrition on the market got it I was going to ask about the cons and I like that you uh shared them already because I imagine working with a lot of Founders adds a lot of stress too yeah I mean it is it is quickly awesome like I love it and I think I think the the unexpected Pro also is I do think it like levels up the team like people in a team that is like very founder dense really likes it and we ended up over time at Carbon like there's lots of people who founded companies here in multiple functions not just product today's episode is brought to you by element I just recently discovered the stuff actually from another podcast and

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while we're on this topic of team building and hiring do you have any other lessons and approaches that you found to be effective in hiring or team building just general rules of thumb or philosophies my biggest thing I say of all time is when you're hiring you pick the people that they pick when so you're you're actually like there's there's these people there may many people on the team who the time between when I first met them and the time when they joined the team was like months there was one person who was like a year and a half almost and so the way that operationalized that is like I'm meeting people all the time and I'm just like hey like if I meet somebody I want to work with I'm like hey how can I like add value to your life so you will consider me that somebody who you would like to work with one day so that when the time comes and there's an opportunity for us to work together

you're actually open to it as opposed to just some guy that you met on a zoom one time and I would say that's like the biggest the biggest thing is just like trying to be like like one of my core philosophies in life is that everybody wants something and most the time it's not something you have to give or you can connect them to but if it is something that you have to give or you can connect them to it's criminal not to actually it's like imagine you like just imagine you like having a conversation with somebody and that person knowing that you want something having it there's no cost for them to give to you and they just don't do it how crazy is that and so like I think you know the way that I sort of bring this life is if I meet somebody who I want to work with I'm like straight up with them about it and I'm like hey I hope we can find a way to work together one day in the meantime it looks like the things you

want are not to work with me right now but they look like this category of things which I'm aware of can I connect you to this person this opportunity what have you um and it's it's not my thing like actually rusted this for me when I joined when I like can't still come back for the first time he was like Hey I'm not gonna invest your company I think it's stupid but hear all these people who might go meet them and that was like transformational for me and and it it has turned out that over a long enough time Horizon it does come back you just don't hold the cards close to Jeff just give them away is there a story or an example of that that comes to mind of you doing that for someone else now it's a little bit of a professional Hazard because I'm an angel investor and so I do this for a lot of like my Founders but I probably made 600 intros last year and that probably drove like at least one person signed up somewhere

as an advisor a couple people took some jobs um a bunch of Angel Investors invest in companies a couple of companies found found leads for around like I think it's I'm like I'm not special in this way by the way like a lot of people do this it's just I'm very aggressive about it and you're also connected to a lot of people as you've shared like because of all these things you've done and the fact that you prioritize this I think it's a really cool combination of you really prioritize connecting and helping plus you know a lot of people from all the work that you've done and there's this element you just shared which is just like give people things that they want because I'm a reasonably good Mac maker except in love never once never once introduced to people who dated I also think in m0 zero for some some denominator I don't even know um I'm Gonna Keep fishing in this pool of kind of philosophies of how you build

product and then we'll come back to

carbon health I was reading something that you wrote about how you're really big on understanding the thing like going deep on stuff just generally as a product leader and as a as a collaborator can you just talk about your approach there and where you apply that philosophy this I took away from cash app there was um when we're working on the cash card the very first you know remember so this is like 2015 2016. the very first iteration of the cash card the head of design catch up this guy Robert Anderson is amazing designer please hire him if you can um had like this design he was like hey I have a design you know like we're gonna do this thing and we I'm like great I get some sketch files maybe PDFs pre-figma we mailed them to like some card vendors and the things they send us back are like like you would put this out as the product in your life in the world like what are you doing and um

and the consequence Brian was like Hey like we just need somebody to go figure out how to get this thing made and so I ended up spending a long time just going to different card manufacturing factories around the country to figure out like having cards get made like what are the possibilities is there like new tech we can take advantage of well the people even talk to us is the thing we're talking about impossible and we ended up doing like at the time there was a I wouldn't say like super new it had been on the Chase Sapphire for you for a few years but it wasn't on mainstream cards yet this concept of laser engraving and it turns out that like the machine that you use to make laser engraved cards has like thousands of combinations of settings which all create like a different physical effect like you can increase power setting and get and literally burn the plastic you get kind of a red rough

texture and you could like decrease power settings and you know decrease the aperture you get like a really fine smooth consistency and this is like again a thing that I I learned um we went through between plastic the overlay the paper the envelope and the like finishes easily a thousand combinations before we got to like the first version of cash card that we shipped and there's a team still there still doing like literally physical card objects that are not the same as anything that exists in Market this is like go into differentiation thing and then like a lot of the stuff we did around like our regulatory work around prepaid you know uh building digital wallet Etc made me realize that like a thing that would happen very frequently is you want to work on something and you go talk to an expert and usually for most people an expert is not like hey the most expert person in the world because like that's a very very

hard thing to know who that is especially when you're not an expert usually an expert is the most tenured person in the world in the domain that you're questioning and like the level like the the both the length of tenure and the depth of experience actually it like can can vary very wildly from a person person and so what happened is like you go ask somebody something and they'll give you an answer which is like the thing that they believe to be true they're not lying and it's not malicious and it's just [ __ ] wrong um and you just have to keep pushing till you get to an answer like I don't really know how the right way to articulate this all the way but it's kind of like you you can't stop till you get to the end and this is one of the reasons why being in a domain that matters is really important because that's a very very expensive activity to do if you're in a if you're in a small town environment

so uh the the like way that I apply that today and I'm sure people at Carmen will tell you this is I end up asking lots of questions that people think don't matter because I'm like Hey we're trying to optimize something and usually what I find is when you're trying to optimize something for the first time they have an optimized before you actually have to re-measure it you have to re-instrument it you have to like rebuild all the queries all the like visuals Etc from scratch you have to look at them like 15 different ways and then every time some two things like our incongruent you have to like go and figure out why and it's just like tedious work and in in regulated Industries and I think this is my guess is this will end up being true in almost any complex environment with a lot of variables that are kind of con like and the more sort of constrained by physics they are like I think actually the more this

matters um you just you you can't avoid the details you just have to get into them and like if you don't you can still do well but it's actually more than likely

Fortune than skill you said you ask these questions that don't matter as an example recently because that's a really interesting concept um of just a question you asked or questions you like to ask that are just like God damn it why is yeah yeah I have there's like one from like yesterday where um there is a field in a database table that tells you why payment was made and there's a bunch of of values in that field that are very articulate like hey this payment was made because it was copay this payment was made because um it was the patient was visiting without insurance right and there's like a field that is empty there's a value that's just null and we we use null as like hey like the way the null is described is after a claim is adjudicated and complete and the patient has a balance we we leave that field blank if we're charging if we're just billing the patient for their balance the problem with that is

if there is any other exceptional reason why a payment might occur and we're in a complex environment we have over 120 clinics there's a lot of humans who can press the pay button in a bunch of different places you will not know if it's included in that field in that like null value field and so it's just this like one of those things where like I'm in the middle of a slack with with a colleague who's like why are you asking this question and I'm like I just need us to put residual balance in that field if that's what it's for that's all I'm asking um so I do that a lot and I you know I think people hate it did they actually go ahead and do that where they we're in the middle of it right now you're in slack okay right okay I love this

so I made a list of the kind of these lessons and I really like this area we're diving into of just your kind of philosophies to work in life so just the ones I wrote down is the importance of going deep and doing the thing yourself and not trusting that somebody's in response is the end like I love the way you phrase it if don't stop until you reach the end yes idea of helping people if you can connecting people in the power of that hiring Founders and working with Founders and clearly the story just told is very founder mentality of just like going to the warehouse and trying 100 different cards is there more here what else have you found to be an important approach to leadership or product building or things along those lines yeah can I can I say one one caveat about the first one I think you wrote down um it's not that you have to do everything yourself is that the person who you trust in the execution role

they they have to become the expert they have to be like they can't stop till they hit the end and I don't know I I think like so much in in all these places where you know scrumptious people are trying big things so much value is lost when the person in the execution role isn't really in command of all the details and is like and and so I think like it's just the reality is like you can't to do ambitious things you have to work with people I can't do everything myself and I I know that I just the the real lesson there is it's not like I have to just somebody has to um and you and you know they have to know that that's like what that what you're holding on account before and that you trust them to do that and the organization is trusting them to do that as well how do you actually operationalize that it sounds like part of it is higher Founders who naturally want yeah the thing well is there

anything else in terms of how you set up the team or like this person has power to do the things that need to be done is it like an autonomy perspective is there anything else you do that allows for that in a product team in a company it's like a trust but verify and I think it's just almost never enough for someone to say I can't do it because X person said it is I can't do because we are contractually obligated to to do this another way and if we do not honor the contract these will be the consequences like and you know another thing I like to do kind of along this is like okay articulate to me what actually will happen if we don't do it this way like what will break like is it gonna find us is the patient gonna be you know I mean like because in my mind there are many things that are used as excuses because some person's understanding of how some regulatory thing works from like their

last job is being applied here where you're literally creating a worse experience for your consumer for your patient I'm like why would you like if we are not here to try and make the experience better for them why are we even here let's come

back to carbon health for a bit and just have a couple questions that I wanted to touch on one is just about starting a company in health care and health tech there are so many companies that launch every day every week trying to make the healthcare industry better in various ways but for all these reasons I don't know the incentives are off there's regulatory capture there's things take a long time things just like often don't work carbon health is an example of something that is working really well what is your advice often to Founders who want to go after the health care space as a tech company do you what what do you need to know what should you do right do wrong what is your address so one thing I would say in healthcare that fortunately unfortunately I think is true is very often the way to make things happen is Network dependent not necessarily about the Merit of the thing itself so it's just like there's like

companies that exist because the founders know the CEO of every major pair in the country and so there's just like a deal they can get or data they can get that's like not available in any other context so I think I think there's just a thing there of understanding of that's the business that you're in um I think in Aaron and Caesar's case and carbon because we're direct consumer we're not trying to sell its payers we're not trying to solve employers um and Aaron obviously just hugely successful consumer person uh starting the largest education platform on the planet at udemy like there was actually really really good found in Market fit he was like a person who had like very very technical and had a ton of DTC um uh success doing another thing that was DTC but there are businesses like I'm there's a company that I'm I recently invested in working with where the founders incredibly very technical and

not super high on network and a thing and and so like a lot of what I try to do with them is like hey you need to start to talk to this person and then also this is like a really crisp specific use case that you need to like optimize around and and maybe I'm wrong who cares like I'm just some guy what doesn't matter what I think it doesn't have to be what I think it just has to be crisp and using that as a way to like because the more crisp it is the easier it is going to be for you to know who the decision maker and the organization you need to get to is because I I just find like I'm sure you see this in B2B businesses so much there's just so much leverage in knowing the person in the place who actually has their finger on the button versus trying to like Network your way in and people don't want to spend their social capital introducing you to like this apartment or they've just got like

19 other things going on so I think like that Network thing is just the thing that like sticks in my mind that when I see like a lot of healthcare Tech startups swings through the soup a lot of it is about there's some organization to have to navigate to get to the right decision maker and they have to do it a hundred times and so much of it is like just waiting for the guy who promised me the intro to make the intro

that is really good and practical advice before we wrap up I I want to give you a chance just to like describe carbon health for folks that may not be familiar with it just like what is it how where can you use it how do you sign up who's it for yeah yeah yeah oh great yeah very very happy to do this ad it is a paid ad because Carmen Health pays me um so where no one's paying me I'm losing it I'm paying you prestigiously yes and wisdom and insights and your attention exactly so carbon is a an extremely vertically integrated healthcare provider based in the United States by extremely integrated what I mean is we build around the clinics the providers work the carbon and we build around the software and we run the entire operation and it's all like full stack in-house and when I say like we build our own software it's like where how you book how you pay the like literal buttons that the provider presses to like say hey Lenny

has Lenny's blood pressure looks good all of that is software that we build in-house all the way from front from like the patient clicking book an appointment on google.com to um the claim being sent to the shirt we build the whole thing full stack ourselves we have I want to say 130 clinics around the country I believe we're in about 17 States we do virtual care I think we're one of the biggest healthcare providers in California and we do both urgent care and primary care and the thing that gets me super excited about carbon is a lot of the experiences we build are the things that as a consumer you believe should exist in healthcare so we you know uh I want to say last year we launched this diabetes program where you slap on a continuous glucose monitor you link it to carbon and it streams your blood glucose measurements directly into our EMR natively and your providers can see it and like interact with you around

it they can help intervene they can tell you like you know new dietary lifestyle choices to make and we're going to do that with every device at some point on some scale and you don't have to pay 200 a month to use it 200 years sorry

amazing well with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round I've got six questions for you I'm gonna go through them pretty quick we'll see what comes to mind no pressure you can skip them too if you want you ready yeah what are two or three books that you recommend most to other people three body problem children of time trilogy and uh Stormlight Archive are these all sci-fi books the third is fantasy and good clarification uh great amazing I'm reading an epic sci-fi book right now called the fire fire in the Deep oh dude amazing okay yes so something that's gonna really piss you off I don't think I'm a spoiler don't no spoilers I'm almost done it's not a spoiler um the story is not finished um there's like additional books that aren't done yet yeah and I don't even know if they're being written it's brutal it's okay I find that the first book except for the three body problem or the first book is

the worst book I feel like with this and the many of these books the first one is like I'm just gonna stop I think at the first one was my plan so so I'd say uh the other two are in my opinion very clever explorations of types of intelligence excellent timing for um yeah studying uh what might happen with AGI great I love this I love where this is going next question what's a favorite recent movie or TV show War of the Worlds was exceptional is that recent yeah there's there's one that I think I think that it was a three season thing just ended maybe last year um and it's like it's like a kind of more modern take and it's just very thoughtful and it's sci-fi but such deep drama I also love succession but I'm still I haven't gotten through season two yet man it's this season is incredible I know I know you gotta get that I know I had to mute it on Twitter because I was like you guys are ruining it for me oh

man that's impossible to avoid you just have to delete your Twitter account I think is the only strategy there's an amazing um Twitter account called No context succession and they just love it yeah they love it Random clips but it's gonna totally my favorite my favorite succession to me is is the Kendall on the phone it would be good to connect it would just be good to connect just like such a metaphor for life interesting very subtle oh I see what you're saying that feels so appropriate to you IO just connecting people it's like the core of your being I can see why you love that Meme next question what's a favorite interview question that you like to ask when you're hiring and interviewing this one's not super crisp it's it's like there's kind of two sides to the question it's like a tell me something you did that worked out but not for the reason that you thought it would work or tell me something you did that was a

good decision that didn't work like what tell me a bad decision that worked out or a good decision that did not is lucky I think the way to friend it um and it's it's a lot of like my process is just teasing out introspection it's just like are you a person who is reflective about like the decisions you've made and why they work and why they did not and incorporating that into your model so you make different decisions final question do you have a pro tip for mailing something or shipping something from your experience helping everyone on quora mail and ship stuff I'd say I'd say my biggest hack is like if you're doing anything local where you're just like taking something point to point Uber can do it for you like I I literally set somebody cookies recently and I was like oh like a guy showed up in my house I gave him back cookies and like somebody my friend texted me like a you know a couple hours

later I was like thank you that is a hack IO this was amazing you're an amazing human I really appreciate making time for this thank you for being here two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to reach out learn more maybe ask you follow-up questions and how can listeners be useful to you I'm uh on Twitter at uh a y underscore o and I write at conley.kunle.app and the way listeners can be useful to me is to tell me what I'm wrong about I love that just be like hey you said this thing it's false here's an example of why I'd love that I love these uh answers to this question because people love to leave comments on YouTube and so we will see what comes in we'll see what the YouTubers what did I just sign up for we'll find out here we go yeah all right well thank you again so much for being here and uh bye everyone awesome thanks for doing this thanks for having me 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 lennysquodcast.com see you in the next episode