Ayo Omojola: preference

Transcript context

…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 going to do any time I'm building a consumer app"? Is it like the design-related component, is there anything else along those lines? This is the thing I struggle with, I saw on Twitter somebody say this comment, that 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 the things are replicable. I just know kind of what I believe to be true, and I'm trying... Some of it worked, some of it not, et cetera. So I think Cash App, 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, and if you look at all the products you'll see this sort of theme, of when you cash out there's an instant option. When you get a cash card, we issue your card to you instantly. When you sell stocks, money's available instantly. When you sell Bitcoin, money's available instantly. Like literally, there's no like, "Oh, circle, circle, circle processing," it's like, "Available to spend." And I think there's something actually lasting about the concept of instant, because there 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 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 like, being different is not enough, because it's very easy to build a thing that's different form what exists today, because you just have to look at what exists today and build 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 for it." And so I think there's like, different... 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 exists today in a way that matters to the end user, or to the buyer, depending on what your market is. And then after all that, it also... You have to be in a domain that matters, because it's very easy to get those three right, to build like a really... How do I say this? A thing that's different and better than what exists today, in a way that matters to end users could also just be art. Which 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 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.…

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