YouSaid · the spoken record

Mayur Kamat

lines on the record: 100
first: 2025-05-22
most recent: 2025-05-22
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

“I want to use my banging app every day. There's some bit of magic which I didn't have that much contribution yet. I made it a little bit simple and seamless, but the magic was there before. And so if you're in Europe, you're looking for a new bank account, N26.com.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, this one other thing being old, is I was one of the first users of LinkedIn. So LinkedIn.com/slash my ear. Early basis of Facebook, so facebook.cometh or n26.com, mk at n26.com. If you're especially curious about how we do stuff here, we are hiring. We're growing really fast. As I said, banking is a great business to be in. We're not going to go out of flavor for the next few thousand years. So if you're thinking of a career, you're thinking about Spain or thinking about Berlin just a whole different interesting lifestyle and different kind of product thinking. Please reach out on any of those channels. If you're in Europe, download or try in 26, like we go by the motor, love your bank. Our founders say that people would rather go to a dentist than to a bank branch. And that's why we build this. We truly feel like for an everyday bank hold, just use the app and you feel like.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That probably comes close second, but that cheap get down to a. walk down and have an incredible meal for a dollar like nothing comes closer to banko”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bangkok, no question. Barcelona comes closer for some, but Bangkok, you can have a three Michelin star like one of the top five restaurants in the world, spend like $500 a meal, or you can have a $1 street food stirred orkin rice with basil. Incredible. Just the spectrum of entire, the cheapest food you can think about, the most expensive food you can think of in that same like one kilometer walkable area, having like thousands of these literally just the density of food, like no one comes closer. Barcelona has an incredible restaurant, like the best restaurant in the world is like a block away from here. It's called Desrutar. It takes like two years to get on the wait list there. But it's on one end of the spectrum.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One I kind of relates to the themes we talked about is there's no right or wrong decision, they're just low and fast decisions. Now, there are some extreme caveats to that around doing something that might kill your user, like healthcare or military or even compliance, which can kill your company. Don't use it. But everywhere else, in general, goes back to the strategy thing we talked about as well. A lot of the times if you make a wrong decision, if you make it fast enough, you would know it was wrong and you would correct it and you would still do it faster than thinking months for the right decision. So for anything that's reversible, anything that's not going to get you in jail or kill your company, no right or wrong decisions, just slower, fast decisions.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is just magical. The first time that AI saw a use case, again, I said nothing so far that makes me a better CPO right now. But as an artist or at least the bachelor artist, it's just incredible that you can think of something, put it down there, and you can actually see what would a professional singer and a band and a musician, if they were to compose it, what it would look like. So that's probably the most wild I have been by technology in the recent times, the Suno.com, their onboarding FlowS and their growth product is if I were the PM on Suno, I would do things a lot differently. But the core tech is magical.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like in the top It's like Bible study. I can tell why. Like, I have got three messages right now to take my anxiety by reading Bible today. And one of the time I was feeling slightly anxious. So maybe there's some magic there. But one am that I would just like for personal, so I used to write in Hindi, I used to write poems growing up as a kid. And that was just now this app Sono.com, I can make songs from them. And they are incredible songs. At least I think so. Nobody else thinks it so far. But just the fact that you can write something and now you have a song.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, product should I spend most of my time using banking and trading products. And I would give a plug here. If you're in Europe, try N26 or even revel you at incredible product. If you're in the US, Robin Hood, just the motion design they have done and the onboarding is just a joy to use, whether you use it for banking or trading or just for their card. Just find the product design in motion, especially as we touch and swipe incredibly dull. Anything that Nikita Beard launches, so I just downloaded Bible study or Bible chat. Yesterday”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I need to watch the white lotus because everybody keeps bringing it every time I tell them I'm from Thailand and I haven't seen it yet. So I'm behind on my mean culture a little bit.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I saw that kind of TV shows usually I watch to kind of give a downtime. So usually I watch this periodic shows The House or Big Bang Theory and stuff. The one I saw recently that kind of shook me a little bit was adolescents. Again, it's a tough topic around teenage mental health and violence in schools. And just the way it was shot, like I would see the first episode, even if it's not your genre because it's shot in a single camera motion and the whole episode for an hour was no cut. The camera just keeps moving. And it's just makes like a bizarre feeling than watching it, irrespective of this topic, which is also pretty intense, just visually you feel different. And if you're emotion sick like me, like you really feel different. That's wonderful. I would watch that”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the potential paths is you just do well on your job and then you find meaning elsewhere. This book is probably an incredible structured way of thinking around it. What is your wealth in terms of your health, your physical health, your mental health, your relationship health, your community, and your wealth that you're generating financial wealth? And how do you think holistically? Because at the end of the day, you are what you optimize for, right? If you optimize for financial wealth, you will become wealthy, right? But you might not be wealthy in a full spectrum manner. The strengths finder 2.0, I said very early on, still an interesting book to just think about how you would think about your strengths. But again, if you don't want to read the book, I would just do one of these kind of online quizzes for it. But the five kinds of wealth.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one that I read most recently, so I'm generally don't read a lot of books because I read a lot of content, like small content. And tweets and subtexts and discords and WhatsApp messages. And so book takes a mindshare shift for me to go read a book. The one I read most recently, which I thought was pretty amazing. And a lot of overlap with what I said today, the five kinds of wealth.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a kind of a self fulfilling prophecy at that point. But just keep looking for overlapping superpowers all the time. And not just in professional life, like in even the transcends beyond, maybe even for relationships and stuff, like folks who are extremely complimenting strengths and who are superpowered to feed each other, make for great life partners. So there's maybe that analogy can be extended beyond your career.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To summarize, it depends on the audience. A lot of the folks who probably listen to it are coming in from a perspective of like, hey, how does this help me be better at my job tomorrow than I was today? And for them, I would say, again, if you're truly working in areas where you think you're optimizing your strengths and having fun, just keep doing it. And just keep that as your kind of North Star as you look at new pieces. When you talk to new companies, try and evaluate the overlap of superpowers. What is your superpower? What is the company's superpower? Will they feed each other? If you get a very strong resonance there, I think that would be a great career step irrespective of whether it's in Bangkok or Spain or however the compensation is going to be because truly you will find that you grow much faster because it's”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but then I said, you know what? We should still, because I used to work for an Android enterprise team before. I'm like, what if we just made it an enterprise product? Let me at least write the spec for it on, hey, what would we do differently for, I still called it Hangout Square Enterprise, they rebranded it later. But that was my salvaging moment for, but from the sense, I mean, the Hangout stream invented WebRTC. Now every single communication in the world happens on WebRTC. So if you think from the cultural and technological impact that the Hangouts team had is insane, right? This tool we are using, every single breeding product, every single WhatsApp voice calling, video calling, like every Zoom, everything runs on WebRTC. So from a technology side, I think that was a pretty massive. Well, that the team came up with that.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was like after we built the hangouts, they're like, okay, this is not going anywhere. We're going to start this new product called Aloe, which also didn't work.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was incredible. We had thousands of hotels use it. And then COVID hits and then there's literally nobody going to hotels anymore. But it took us like six, nine months because of the licenses. And so to launch it, it in hindsight probably, I mean, you couldn't have thought of COVID with that sense, but still the amount of time it took to launch the product was something we could have done better. So learnings from most of it is don't take too long to launch. Don't take too long to validate your hypothesis.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you know, it is not a high frequency activity. You book once, then you book six months later. And most of the time, people would not come to a Goda. They would just go to Google and go to some other website. So we wanted that touchpoint that stayed with them. And without payments would be a great avenue to do that because that's something you do every day. And again, we did it in the Goda style. So we did an experiment. We started very small and literally went to the mall and bought these $50 Android devices where we ran our software that people would”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Six months a year because you just generally don't have control over the macro. Things just move way more faster. And that's probably cemented my kind of now product philosophy of just doing small things very quickly, spending most of the times doing that. You still launch big products, but even over there, we try and kind of get early signals as soon as possible. But because Ragoda, like one of the big projects we launched was we wanted to control the payments infrastructure for all the hotels. And we thought if we had that device in the hotels desk. So not only for bookings made online, but for everything that happens at the hotel, if we control that infrastructure, not only would we make money, but we had a touch point with the users that went beyond booking the travel.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Premise that certain companies can never succeed at certain type of products, right? Like Microsoft with mobile or Google with social or Facebook with enterprise, it's just the DNA of the founder actively acts against you succeeding there. I would have said Google with Enterprise as well, but then Sundar came and Larry was no longer the CEO. And that's when the enterprise took off. They literally had to change the CEO to kind of win in certain segments. Then again, I worked in Nagoda during COVID. So travel company during COVID, Binance during its probably most tumultuous area of compliance and government scrutiny. So a lot of missteps there around externalities. I think one of the main kind of learnings from that is just don't take on projects that are going to be”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, from the product side, like my probably most spectacular failure was the first PM on Hangouts. And if you ask Mikhail, he will probably say he was my boss then. It was an effort size I've never seen before or after in my career. We had thousands of people working for me. We had entire power from Google. We had Larry literally sitting with us saying, we can do anything we want Chrome to do. And we still didn't manage to build a great messaging product. So when I look at Pure product sense product decision making was, there's several reasons now I had luxury of 15 years to analyze that on solving for the wrong audience, solving for the wrong DNA of the company. I have this.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes. But again, hopeful to, I'm generally not a big fan of the thing that I call a little bit jaded, like you have tools now that you write a few things and they make a long essay for it. And then you have tools that compress long essays into a few words. You could have just said few words in the first place, right? And saved the whole round trip. It's like a reverse zip. Remember when we had zip and it was a game changer, but there was a big file, you needed to send over slow network, so you compressed it and sent it and then expanded it. We're doing the reverse now, right? We have a small thing. We make it big and then send it over and somebody's making it small. But on these three areas, if you're at all scale companies, like if you don't have a great tool for developer productivity, you're not looking at like essential basic LLM bots for deflecting customer service and you're not looking at patterns around user transactions.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredible set of advancements across these three areas, developer productivity, customer support, and fraud. But for me personally, I'm like, what would I use that suddenly makes me a better CPO? I'm still struggling a little bit over there. But it's... It's not really, I don't think we need something at that level. Because largely what still remains the domain of humans is decision making and taking the brunt of the impact of what decisions you make. Because I would love to blame AI for some of my bad decisions. That's not why the thing can still still still.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question to ask there, but for solving the bottom 70 percentile problems, why is my card decline? Why is there a hold on Mechan? What happened to the replacement card I shipped? Why has it not arrived? Basic questions, AI automating now almost 60, 70% of that customers getting that real feedback, game changer. And the last one is on just on fraud and being able to just understand patterns better on real customers versus not. And Binance, we had this product where users could exchange crypto with each other. I could pay you Bitcoin and get Thai bathroom return. Huge amount of fraud. And they're using AI just to understand language patterns or fraud search versus not fraudsters. So again, as a company level, there is”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The copywriting market is really well done over there. If you ask me across N26, but even when we did this at Binance or at Agoda, there are three areas where AI is complete game changer. One is on coding. Again, you can use whatever latest tool for prototyping or not, most value, especially for the companies I have worked at, which are fairly large companies, very large code bases, having some sort of co-pilot that's integrated with your repositories. Rough data may be somewhere between 18 to 25% productivity boost for a developer, which is fairly massive, right? So that's one category, game changer. Customer support, game changer, whether we should do it at scale or not, that's a different kind of more ethical slash human.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still haven't found a game changer for me personally, something that I use right now, and I'm a little bit not sure that am I not doing something right, whether other people are, or I'm a little bit too jaded for it. But we have a lot of, we have Gemini across the world. So for meeting nodes and stuff, works great, especially for folks who don't meet it. Use a tool called writer for copywriting and UX teams, especially because we are operating in Europe across several languages, so being able to generate that very quickly, especially”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is like keep your, you should have plenty of open spaces on your calendar, a full calendar is a badge of shame, not a badge of honor.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Long term monthly daily active user. That could be something I focus on for a month because we're running a lot of experiments on early onboarding scrolls, early rewards, early incentives, early loyalty program. And at some point, it might be like, oh, the team's got it. Like I've given all my, what I could do there. It's functioning. We have great QMs. I trust their execution on this. Let me just go focus on some of the compliance challenges that we have or fraud issues that we have in France. Those kind of being able to kind of, the only way that works for me is I keep a very free calendar because you cannot do this without that. If you have hundreds of meetings, hundreds of one-on-ones, daily standard, there's a lot of recurring meetings. You just can't find time to go work on high leverage problems. So that would be my kind of other stuff.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was his product area that CZ was working on. And there was that mutual respect there that, hey, we know this thing and he's going to say no to me because probably not a good idea. So that humility and the tension to detail is required to work on the high leverage problems. A lot of the high leverage problems are not, as I said, not strategy decisions. They are not leverage markets to go after and stuff. A lot of them are like, why is this thing not working as well as it needs to be? A lot of time the devil is in the details. And you need to be over there. So I think combining that, knowing what is high leverage or not, and two, both having the humility and the patience to be able to go dig deeper and solve that. And some of them are like quick ones. Like if I'm looking today at, let's say, how many of our signed up users convert into a long-term”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm like, how's it going to go on? Don't worry about it. Just tell me about the engineers. So, again, he moved his desk to where that product means had. And for the next three months, he was the product manager on that scrum. So he would come to my product team meetings, give us update on what's happening with the SEO Scrum, and then an hour later, I would be in the leadership meeting giving my update to him. And truly, he was operating at saying this is high leverage area for the company. It's high leverage for my yards. It should be high leverage for me. I'm the best person to do it. I'm going to be in the details and do it. CZ, same at Binance. There are a lot of products that he would just run himself. There were very few people at Binance who would say no to CZ. But one of my lead PMs who worked on the products that CZ worked on, he would tell them no all the time. It would just baffle all the other executives. Like, how is he saying no to CZ? And none of us are doing it because, hey,”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could, then we could get them to download our app. That was the hypothesis. So I present at the executive team meeting to Alex, like, hey, I want to have a tool. I want to hire a product manager, focus purely on SEO. And because I think that's like one of our highest leverage areas right now. And Alex is like, hey, the whole white page is I built based on SEO. People who type people's name, the first thing used to be a white page's link, I'm like one of the best people in the world to work on SEO. I'm like, yeah, so he's like, let me run this product. Like, okay, what do you mean? It's like, no, I will be the product manager for this, for however long you need it.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That combines that with what we talked before about details. And a little bit, I think I didn't mention it, about the humility that you need to have to be work in the detail. A lot of the times, especially later in your career, you're like, hey, this is about, this is beyond me, this is below me. Why do I need to do that? Like I have so many PMs or data analysts or somebody should do it. Like, why is it, why would I do it? And that was kind of, again, just a quick story there. I remember we were trying to figure out our growth channels and we found out that, hey, we are kind of really tapping out on paid, on social, on referrals. But SEO was something we just hadn't worked on for a while. We're building a caller ID app. And what we wanted to do was when somebody types a phone number in Google, we want to be the first link to say, hey, is this a spam call or not? Or is this whose number it is?”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's all the other desks were like fixed, but he had a moable desk, right? And he would move his desk to one of the departments which he think had the highest leverage opportunity. And he would sit there at that desk in that department till that either problem was solved or the opportunity was realized. And then he would literally move his desk and then go to product or tag or finance. And that was his way of like you could literally visualize him working on the highest leverage problem by his desk moving.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was interesting for me, my first executive roles was Google, I was a product manager, I joined what was white pages back then as a VP of product. It was my first kind of. And white pages, Alex, Algarden, Seattle, Owning Legend, three companies, all Unicons now, very good personal friend and mentor. But what was truly interesting when I joined it, they're like, okay, this is your desk. This is the product area. So we had two offices. This is when everybody worked in office five days a week, right? And I'm like, okay, where does Alex sit? And he's like, oh, he's sitting with accounting rate. I'm like, I didn't think about it because I thought his office is near accounting. Then I find out he doesn't have an office. He has a floating desk.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is true for no matter what level of career you are in, but you have finite amount of time and largely you have more problems than you have time to solve them. The question is which ones you work on. And this becomes even harder. Like, let's say you're a CPO now because all of them are important. Otherwise, they would not come to you in the first place. The question is, is which one do you work on? And the principle is simple. Like you work on problems that have a 10x positive or a negative impact. I mean, the number can be 10, 5, 3, 100, depending on binance it would be 100. Some companies might be 3. In most mint companies, one of two problems is a growth problem or a compliance problem. Because both of them can have a negative or positive 10x impact. And that's what you focus on, right? That's what you spend bulk of your time.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every year journey. And so that's something to calibrate, especially later in your career, that it's extremely hard if you like the job and don't like the location or vice versa because they usually come as a package deal now. You see this in Bangkok now where there's not that many great tech companies. And if you're at Agoda and you're doing really well, but it's just one company, you just don't have options. And especially if you love Bangkok, which is a great city, probably my vote for the best place to live in the world. That's a struggle. You love the city, but if you need to move your career ahead, you need to go somewhere”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because there's enough companies there. You're not going to run a ceiling at some point. Bay Area, there's no ceiling, right? You can keep growing. The challenge now is that if I'm in Bangkok and I'm working at Avoda, at some point I need to find a new job or because let's say I'm at the CPO level, I want to be CEO now. A good already has a CEO. So I need to find be a CEO somewhere else. Guess what? That company's not going to be in Bangkok. Now I have to mow and mow my whole family, right? to Singapore, which I did. Then you hit somewhere over there. Oh, then you hit another CNE. Now you need to move back or go somewhere else to Thailand, which I did. And then you're like, oh, maybe there's a great opportunity in Europe, which will give you like a whole different scale. Then you need to move to Spain, which I did. So this, at some point, your family's like, what's happening? It turned out to be one step to go from A to B is now just a...”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world truly is. It just makes you a better stakeholder when you talk to the Leagueum team, when you talk to compliance team, when you talk to marketing. So I think those are all the pros. The compensation could be the con. The other big con is that today if you're in Silicon Valley, I spent 15 years in Seattle. I worked at four companies. I could change jobs and stay in Seattle.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But as I said before, don't optimize for compensation early in your career or even middle part of your career. So if you follow that advice, it will not matter because you will have kind of something unique to offer, even if you come back to the US later, having kind of worked in different, having understanding, especially if you're in fintech where the actual laws are different in different countries. And that one you truly do not appreciate working in the US, even at Google and stuff, when we would launch products, I would be like, oh, the lawyers, they're just making life difficult. But the menu now have a true appreciation of how different.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially if we have built that early reputation, you get to work at some of the best companies when you go abroad. And so that's a hit to compensation, at least initially, for sure. Nobody pays anywhere close, especially here in Europe.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are the pros that come with, as I said, when you move, most of the time you're building products that are global, especially if you're based in the US. Very few times you're building product that just work in the US. Now, that's not true for a lot of the countries. Like in India, a lot of products are only designed for Indian market. A lot of products in China only designed for Chinese market. But from the US, you're designing product for the world. And a lot of the times you don't experience the same constraints or you don't empathize with the user at the same level because you just haven't lived that user's life. So in terms of just being able to calibrate yourself on what a global product might look like, being able to live in different places and understanding some of these constraints firsthand, definitely a pro. You get to, as I said,”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An incredible growth story. And that tells you like you really don't need, from a strategy perspective, to do something completely different if you can truly compound your growth by optimizing every single thing really, really well.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you could be doing things that you're great at and kind of add to your career. And then Agura just turned out to be just like almost like a boot camp for understanding how an experimentation-based product culture might work. Because before that, I worked at Google. I worked at startups. My whole frame-to-fame was like building big stuff. And Aghara just taught me a lot of the growth comes with incredibly small things done faster. So it's part of booking holdings. So if you heard of booking.com, it's $170 billion company. And what's interesting is that 10 years ago, it was a $10 billion company which sold Flights, hotels, and cars. Like 10 years later, it still sells flights, hotels, and cars. It's 170 billion dollar company.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only reason I ended up taking the job was, hey, Bangkok's a hot place. I mean, my daughter might not have asked them there, and we might have some help in the house. So we could probably balance some of the things that are really not adding value to our life right now. And that was the hypothesis there that we would be, I can do a lot more on work because I was literally not able to focus as much on it, but everything else that was happening. And as I said, everything on experimentation, we just hit a home run on all the hypotheses. My daughter, like the heat cured, asked me just having a support structure allowed us just as a family to spend a lot more time with each other and allowed me a lot more time to work and be on my career when I'm not doing dishes and not doing laundry and not throwing up the trash and not mowing the lawn. There's just so much hours that show up in the day.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Find great opportunities elsewhere. I mean, I've been a little bit privileged that some of these opportunities have found me like N26 here in Europe or Binance before in Asia where I wasn't really in that super talent dense area in the first place. But like Lux not a great strategy, right? So if you're planning for it, I would say build it, build your early career in the US and then honestly, when we moved to Thailand 2018, it wasn't a, at that point, I didn't think I was making a great professional decision. We were just struggling in the US with both me and my wife working, both our kids in Seattle with Tymi. My daughter had asthma at that time. And she was just constantly sick. And it was a struggle for us to kind of manage both work and life. And when I talked to Agoda, I'd never heard. Of the company”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of the magic of Silicon Valley, not at the same scale, but getting better. If you're in finance, maybe there is London, Singapore and Asia has now at least not as much new innovation, but each of the big companies has a presence there. So at least secondary talent densities there. Those would be your options if you're if US is not available early in your career. And in some ways it helps define you, right? If you work at Microsoft or Google or OpenAI or some of these companies that become brands later, it's something you can take with you when going back to the second part of your question is if you decide to move, having that experience and that brand and that kind of achievements there can help you kind of make this.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I would say early career, you want to be in intensely talented, dense areas for all the reason that we mentioned before, finding the high growth companies, finding the networks that will make you successful. There's no, for general tech, there's no better place than West Coast of the US. Now, everybody doesn't have the option, especially now with the immigration policies and so forth. I mean, things were always hard. They seem extremely harder now. So you may not have that option, but if you do have that option, I would encourage everyone. There's no better place than West Coast to start your career. There's some exceptions for crypto. I would say Dubai is very strong, very great, has a really high density there. But again, it's a very industry specific. Bangalore, if you're Indian, has managed to recreate.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lower prices, which was super hard to get last year. So being able to kind of build products that complement the macro also gives you that kind of additional kind of balancing act that you don't get in typical single focus companies. So I think it's a combination of a few of those things, being able to get great talent, being able to kind of train them now more so, especially around experimentation and just see all the how you can build a product portfolio that complements each other, but also naturally hedges against each other. Just gives you a better kind of well balance way to operate.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make money on deposits when interest rates go down, spending increases, so we make more of your money on interchange and investments. So it's a very self-hedged business. That lets you kind of go through the troughs and the peaks kind of better than most companies. And that understanding that how do you build naturally hedged products is probably another kind of reason why it just influences how you make decisions and how do you kind of scale your core product portfolio. Just one example, like for longest port, like about a year and a half ago, we were largely a bank with a card, right? And that was we were the first mobile bank and that was a big enough market. But in the last year or so, we have just fleshed out that product portfolio. We have a big lending portfolio now. We launched savings last year. We invested heavily in savings because the interest rates were high. It was a super amazing tool to attract new users by offering high interest rates. But as the interest rates are going down now, which is investing heavily in lending, because now you can get loans.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because a lot of people have more than one bank account. So you never run out of target addressable market. It's as big as it can get, which means that there's no upper round on how much, because at some point, like if you're, I don't know, building in kind of an AI code generator, your market is capped and maybe developers or people want to be developers. Or you're building, I don't know, AWS. It's a massive market, but it's still like all the company that need online hosting. Look at banking, everybody needs. And the fact that it's oldest or the second oldest, depending on how risky you are or not, profession known to man, right? It is a self-hedged product. When things get tough on one side of our business, the interest rates, let's say, go high, spending goes down.”
2025-05-22 · Lenny's Podcast · Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source