Ayo Omojola: evaluation

Transcript context

…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 it's very easy to build a thing that's different from what exists today, because you just have to look at what exists today 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 exists today 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 betting on Venmo?" I'd be like, "Try and send me a dollar that I can use now," and there was 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 Omojola, Ayo 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 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. Ayo is such a fascinating human and leader, and I am excited for you to learn from him. With that, I bring you Ayo Omojola, 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 life session replays to discover where users are breezing through your flow and where they struggle, you can view instant heat maps to see what parts of 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. Microsoft Clarity makes it all possible with a simple, yet incredibly powerful set of features. You'll be blown away by how easy Clarity is to use, and it's completely free forever. You will never run into traffic limits, or be forced to upgrade to a paid version. It also works across both apps and websites. Stop guessing, get Clarity. Check out Clarity at clarity.microsoft.com. This episode is brought to you by ECO. Last month, ECO users earned an average of $84 in cashback rewards. How? With ECO, the future of personal finance. ECO is the update to a misaligned financial system, providing an app that works just like your bank, but removes almost all of the middle men, helping even the best money optimizers optimize in less time, automatically. What if you earned rewards for paying your rent, or got rewarded for ordering food and shopping online? Or even earned rewards for saving each month.…

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