YouSaid · the spoken record

Ayo Omojola

lines on the record: 60
first: 2023-05-14
most recent: 2023-05-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“On Twitter at AY underscore O, and I write at Konle.app, K-U-N-L-E.app. And the way listeners can be useful to me is to tell me what I'm wrong about, all that. Be like, hey, you said this thing, it's false. Here's an example of why. I love that”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like I literally set somebody cookies recently and I was like, oh, like a guy showed up in my house and gave him back cookies and like somebody, my friend texted me like, you know, a couple hours later, I was like, thank you.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This one is not super crisp. It's like there's kind of two sides to the question. It's like 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 tell me a bad decision that worked that or a good decision that did not is like, I think the way to frame it. And it's a lot of my processes just teasing out introspection. It's just like, are you a person who is reflective about 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 next time?”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love it My favorite succession meme 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.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one that I think that it was a three-season thing just ended maybe last year. And 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.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it streams your blood glucose measurements directly into our EMR natively, and your providers can see it and interact with you around it. They can help intervene. They can tell you 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.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How you book, how you pay, the literal buttons that the provider presses to say, hey, Lenny's blood pressure looks good, all of that is software that we built in-house, all the way from front, from like the patient clicking book and appointment on Google.com to the claim being sent to the insurer. We build the whole thing full stack ourselves. I want to say 130 claims 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 I want to say last year we launched this diabetes program where you slap on a continuous glucose monitor, you link it to carbon.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So carbon is an extremely vertically integrated healthcare provider based in the United States. By extremely vertically integrated, what I mean is we build around the clinics. The providers work for 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 around software, it's like.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 just waiting for the guy who promised me the intro to make the intro.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 just find I'm sure you see this in B2B business 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 department or they've just got like 19 other things going on So I think that network thing is just the thing that sticks in my mind that when I see a lot of healthcare tech startups swinging through the soup, a lot of it is about”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we're direct to consumer, we're not trying to sell to payers, we're not trying to sell employers, and Aaron obviously just hugely successful consumer person starting the largest education platform on the planet at Udemy. There was actually really, really good founder Market Fit, who was like a person who had very, very technical and had a ton of DTC success doing no thing that was DTC. But there are businesses, like there's a company that I recently invested I'm working with where the founder is incredible and very, very technical and not super high on network and a thing. And so a lot of what I try to do with them is like, hey, Nita started to talk to this person. And then also this is a really crisp specific use case that you need to optimize around. And maybe I'm wrong. Who cares? Like I'm just some guy. What does 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.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one thing I would say in healthcare that fortunately or unfortunately I think is true is very often the way to make things happen is network dependent, not dependent. 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 there's just a thing there of Understanding if that's the business that you I think in Aaron and Caesar's case in a carbon.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The patient going to be, do you know what I mean? Like, because in my mind, there are many things that are used as excuses because some persons understanding of how some regulatory thing works from 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?”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 it because we are contractually obligated To do this another way. And if we do not honor the contract, these will be the consequences. And another thing I like to do kind of long this is like, okay, articulate to me what actually will happen if we don't do it this way? Like what will break? Like, are they going to find us?”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The person in the execution role isn't really in command of all the details and is like, and so I think like it's just the reality is like you can't do ambitious things you have to work with people. I can't do everything myself and I know that I just the real lesson there is it's not like I have to just somebody has to and you and they have to know that that's like what does that what you're holding them account before and that you trust them to do that and the organization is trusting them to do that as well”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, can I say one caveat about the first one I think you wrote down? It's not that you have to do everything yourself. It's that the person who you trust in the execution role. They have to become the expert. They have to be like, they can't stop till they hit the end. Know, I think, like so much in all these places where super ambitious people are trying big things, so much value is lost when”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problem with that is if there is any other exception or 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 That like null value field. And so it's just this one of those things where I'm in the middle of a slack 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. So, I do that a lot. And I think people hate it.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's like one from like yesterday where. There is a field in a database table that tells you why a payment was made And there's a bunch of values in that field that are very articulate, like, hey, this payment was made because it was copay. This payment was made because the patient was visiting without insurance, right? And then there's like a field that is empty. There's a value that's just null. We use Null as like, hey, the way Null is described is To acclaim is adjudicated and complete. Patient has a balance. We leave that field blank if we're charging, if we're just billing the patient for their balance.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 small time environment. So 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 for the first time, they haven't optimized for it, you actually have to remeasure it. You have to reinstrument it. You have to like rebuild all the queries, all the visuals, et cetera, from scratch. You have to look at them like 15 different ways. And then every time two things like are incongruent, you have to like go and figure out why. And it's just like tedious work. And 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 like, and the more sort of constrained by physics they are, like I think actually the more this matters, you can't avoid the details. You just have to get into them.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made me realize that 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 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 both the length of tenure and the depth of experience actually can vary very wildly from person to person. And so what happened is like you go ask somebody something and they would 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 is just fucking wrong. 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 can't stop till you get to the end. And this is one of the reasons.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went through. Between plastic, the overlay, the paper, the envelope, and the finishes, easily a thousand combinations before we got to the first version of Cashguard 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. Go into differentiation thing. And then a lot of the stuff we did around our regulatory work around prepaid, you know, building digital wallet, et cetera”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Figure out how do cards get made? Like what are the possibilities? Is there like new tech we can take advantage of? Will the people even talk to us? Is the thing we're talking about even possible? 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 a few years, but it wasn't on mainstream cards yet, this concept of laser engraving. And it turns out that the machine that you use to make laser engraved cards has thousands of combinations of settings which all create like a different physical effect. Like you can increase power setting, get and literally burn the plastic. You get kind of a red rough texture. And you could decrease power settings and decrease the aperture. You get like a really fine, smooth consistency. And this is, again, a thing that I learned.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This I took away from Cash App. There was when we were working on the cash card, the very first, so this is like 2015, 2016, the very first iteration of Cash Guard, the head of design cash hubs guy Robert Anderson, an amazing designer. Please hire him if you can, had this design. He was like, hey, I have this design. We're going to do this thing. And I'm like, great. I get some. Sketch files, maybe PDFs, prefigma. We mail them to like some card vendors. And the things they send us back are like. You would put this out as the product in your life in the world, what are you doing? And the consequence, Brian was like, hey, 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.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 my founders, but I probably made 600 intros last year. And that probably drove like. Least one person signed up somewhere as an advisor. A couple people took some jobs. A bunch of angel investors invest in companies. A couple of companies found leads for around. I think it's, I'm not special in this way, by the way. A lot of people do this. It's just I'm very aggressive about it.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No cast for them to give to you, and they just don't do it. How crazy is that? And so I think 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. It's not my thing. Actually rusted this for me when I came to Stilkin Bay for the first time. He was like, hey, I'm not going to invest in your company. I think it's stupid. But here are all these people who might go meet them. And that was like transformational for me. And it has turned out that over a long enough time horizon, it does come back. You just don't hold the cards close to jesters. Give them away.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 thing is just like trying to be like one of my core philosophies in life is that everybody wants something. Most of 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 are taving a conversation to somebody and that person knowing that you want something, having it.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My biggest thing, and I say with all time, is when you're hiring you pick the people but they pick when. So you're actually like there's these people, there are many, 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 I 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?”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it is unequivocally awesome. Like, I love it. And I think the unexpected pro also is I do think it levels up the team. People in a team that is very found or dentist really likes it. And we ended up overtime carbon like there was lots of people who founded companies here in multiple functions, not just profit.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're just like, oh, I want to, you know, they're obviously, if you're going to be a person that starts coming to you, you're like super ambitious. So like, I'm going to go around Team somewhere else. I'm going to go try some other thing or I'm going to go build a company. And so it's kind of like a team that I think is differentially higher output, but also differentially higher attrition on the margin.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to There are just these scenarios where I'd just be like, I just have to sit and listen to somebody tell me all the things that we're doing wrong. So there's one, it's just like a way to cut through bullshit. That's one cost. And then I think the second cost is, and I say cost as in it is not better for the organizations. You have these people come in. They're incredible. And you really can only keep them for like two or two and a half years. Ends up happening.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 star has failed, please fly to this. Because you think that's, I think, common among founders too is there's this sort of imposter syndrome that goes hand in hand with the chip on the shoulder. My team is much taller now than it was, but like I probably, I think the whole time that I'm in a carbon. Hired about 50 founders and I'm actually 100% certain the thesis was right, and I think it just came with costs that we're kind of theoretical at the time, and I now, now they're real. I think the two big costs are If there is any waste or bullshit in your organization, like they fucking see it right away and call it out. And so there's this like.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would say, hey, I would like to hire some non-traditional candidates here who are founders or whatever. And I would just 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 had this belief that 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 could just, it's kind of like if you could just hold on to a rocket for a little bit, it can take you like pretty far.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a single would happen that, and this part really isn't about funders, although founders like one way serverless happens. But I think what happened quite often is by the time you get 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 source. 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 and then a certain type of experience, et cetera. And so what would happen is like if you just happen to not look like that profile, I don't even see you.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Team looks today about half and half. So I had this experience going through YC where, and just like kind of growing up in my career in Silicon Valley, where I knew a bunch of 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 going to go work at Amazon and just like not last. When I was a cash I went through a bunch of hiring processes where I was like, hey, we should try and hire some founders to do this. Look at these companies, et cetera.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, which is what Pinwheel, the company on the board, have actually is. I was like, hey, we got to build this platform for payroll. It's like, you know, the last giant money movement thing that hasn't really kind of moved the needle in a long time. And I couldn't get the organization convinced about it, which kind of is what it is. A and B, I was like, oh, I want to have that insight. Can I have that insight of like what the second thing is faster the second time around? I am sad to report that three years in a carbon, I have not had it yet.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Regulated businesses instead of just good money. And that was the way that I tied the two together. There were a bunch of other sort of very personal ego things. I want to build a team that was mostly founders. Both my parents were doctors, and I've been through some sort of 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 do you stitch two things together. And I also wanted to learn.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of wallpaper of the problems we were trying to solve. And so we would have sessions where we'd be sitting in a room, like product engineering, legal, compliance, et cetera, with some regs literally blown up on a projector screen and a section of text highlighted and being like, hey, what does this really mean? Okay, what if we build the product this way? What if we structure money movement this way, et cetera? I casted myself instead as, hey, what if I could be good at?”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he was like, oh, yeah, like, here's how we're going to do it. And here's the thing we spent like two and a half hours together. And then at the end, I was like, oh, yeah, this is obvious somebody should just 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 I think when I left Cash App, when I was thinking about what to do next, I was thinking of starting a company and doing all this stuff. And one of the muscles that we really just spent a lot of time building Cash App was going really, really deep into the regulatory.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was more I went on exploring. That's where I ended up. I think I'd say there's maybe three parts. There's one part where I was exploring 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 a sky who's amazing. He was founder of Udemy, and now he starts company called Carbon Health. His name is Aaron. You need to talk to him. And I was like, sure. And Aaron and I 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.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know really disciplined about making sure that if you are trying to bring people on and spend the company's money, you really just fight it.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot depends on the thing. I don't think there's a one shot answer. When I joined Cast Hub, I was like 11 or 12. And it wasn't much more than that for like a year. And Even, I forget how big it was when I left, but we had real scale and real business before we had a real headcount, I guess is the way I would say it. And love it. Kind of had to fight for every headcount. And I think the headcount discipline was a Sarah Freyer thing from Square. She's just.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that combination of things, like Mike, well, not my guesses. There are other things, but I think like without that thing, it would actually have been a really, really difficult.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some macro things where I do believe we were children of fortune, like mobile, et cetera. 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 done some really meaningful things. And as a consequence, I do think there's like, this is a thing I haven't quite been able to articulate well, but there is something around a small, tightly knit senior team super focused on a problem. And the smallness means just like less pairwise communication. And then the tightening it means a lot more trust. And then I think Brian was obviously just, he'd been at Score for a long time with the organization while I was a color operator around there, knew talent, like who was good that he wanted to Bryan on board.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think a 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 is a leadership building the new thing happen to be good at that, you can have growth in a new project's people size that doesn't match the new project's success and potential. And I think that actually ends up, it ends up being attacked over time.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know necessarily if this was intentional. My guess is it was probably just like 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 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 actually adding value because there's this thing people say about like, hey, this started within startup with anything'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 instead of becoming, you just don't. And there's just a difference between like having that existential fear of are we going to be here tomorrow and not.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say Block was trying to kill the catch up. I think that... There were many, many people who worked there. absolutely like, and I mean this in the nicest way, identity is retied with Square being a merchant business. Believe that the investment in cash app could have been better deployed elsewhere. Didn't want to work on consumer. There was just like a myriad of, and then I'm sure people who are there town would say, like, we probably also made mistakes in 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 a thing I will 100% give Brian credit for is he was really effective at making sure that we had a shot.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Long time. Yeah. Yeah. Or rather, it was the cut through the clutter differentiator. There were like actually a lot of other sort of long tail of things that were doing those different, but it was instant was the same where when someone says, hey, why are you better than Memo, I'd be like, try and send me a dollar that I can use now.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than what is to say in a way that matters to the end user or to the buyer, like kind of depending on what your market is. And then after all that, it also, you have to be in a domain that matters. It's very easy to get those three right, like to build a really, how do I say this a thing that's different. 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 then also get the economics right, get the entire pipeline of how you ship, how you build, how you talk about it, all of that stuff has to has to work as well.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 proceeds 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 from 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 from 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.”
2023-05-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source