You are listening to 20 Product with me, Harry Stebbings.
Now 20.
Product is the monthly show where we sit down with the best CPOs in the world to discuss how they build fricking, amazing products and product teams.
Today, we have one of the most respected product leaders in Europe joining us, Fernando Fanton.
He's held role of CPO at both Monzo and Just Eat, two of the biggest from Europe.
He previously led product and tech at Rappi, one of Latin America's most valuable startups.
And today Fernando's CPO at Property Finder, one of the biggest breakout unicorn from the MENA region.
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You have now arrived at your destination, fernando dude.
It's so good to have you on the show now.
Before we dive into all things product, i do just want to start on tennis.
In your early years i hear you were fantastic, so can you just take me to playing tennis in your early years and how it shaped your mindset on performance and discipline?
I used to love tennis.
I played tennis all my life, like six hours a day, until I was 17 and realized I'm not going to be good as Federer, which I got to meet, by the way.
It's a different story.
And I realized if I know number one, I don't want to play, which is a big mistake, by the way.
I regret it to this day that I quit playing tennis.
Why?
To this day.
The sacrifice is what it is.
Like the sacrifice of the pushing yourself to find the wall and say I'm not good enough, and then keep going.
To me, it's not only the best thing for sports, it's the best thing in life.
You know what I mean?
Because sooner or later in life as well, they're doing great, something's going to happen to you.
A loved person will have a disease, which is super tough, right?
My father died when I was young.
And if you don't have that attitude of I hit a wall and it's all about how I rise above it instead of always being negative and pessimistic?
Oh, I'm not good enough, right.
Oh, these guys are better.
Federer wasn't that good, but was, of course, great.
But at 16, he wasn't the Federer you know today.
But if you look at the levels he found, is the mentality primarily, right?
Of course he's talented, but all talented at that level.
It's not like Nadal is not talented.
It's not like the Ojovic is not talented.
They are all like insanely talented.
If you look at the number one players in the world, in any sports, it's the mind.
Jordan, Federer, Nadal, Ronaldo.
You think Messi's chill?
They're not chill, right?
They're like freaks, competitive guys It's all about their own improvement.
They see a problem and they improve.
My son, now he's eight, is playing football.
I got obsessed with him because he has the same mentality.
He works so hard and he's like, it's wrong.
Do this.
And he does it.
Doesn't complain.
Because I was always thinking, I'm not good enough.
I don't have the talent.
I don't have the money.
It doesn't cost a lot of money.
I'm not going to be good enough.
What if I fail?
What if I'm not top 10?
What if I'm top 100?
And instead of thinking all that shit, I would just wake up in the morning and practice.
It's why I hate visions.
You know, everyone's supposed to have a vision, a vision for a company, a vision for their life.
When I started the podcast, I had a vision that I would be an associate at Balderton Capital in five years time.
In five years time, I was managing $200 million with my own fund.
Point being, if I'd succumbed to my vision, I would have constrained my ability.
And actually, my point with you is like, you let your vision prevent your next year's success.
I did.
And I think it's always the worst thing on your mind because you don't know where it's going to go.
The same at work, right?
Like you're in a company.
Just make the company better.
Make the people work better every day, right.
It's a Kaizen idea of every week.
That's why I love this weekly review, right?
Instead of monthly.
Every week is better.
You cannot predict what I'm going to be in a year.
It compounds 53 times, right?
So if you do it every day, it compounds 365 times.
So if you're every day looking at yourself in sports or health and you're trying to be better, or at work, the truth is your vision whatever you thought you will be is so far away from where you're going to be in a year or two that is a bit pointless.
You know, in tennis, of course, you say, I want to be number one.
But when you're 10 years old, what is the point of that?
The likelihood is 0.001%.
And everybody comes in and says, you're crazy.
Don't do that because the likelihood of success is so tiny.
And instead of thinking all of that, it's like, I want to be, I love playing tennis.
I love doing VC.
I love entrepreneurs.
I want to be with entrepreneurs.
That's all I want to do.
I realized that maybe 10 years ago because of the energy, the passion.
What I thought is, how can I be better helping entrepreneurs every day?
And people say, what do you want to be?
Who cares?
Do you blame your surroundings for not pushing you more when you are young and impressionable and believe you're not good enough?
Do you believe that your parents should have been the ones saying you can, you can, you can, you should.
To be fair, my mother, right?
I didn't have a father at the time, but my mother was super supportive.
It was more like my fear of, you know, not being good enough for her because it costs a lot of money.
She didn't have money, right?
She worked 100 hours a week for no money and I have to pay for tennis or the guilt that I felt.
I felt if I'm not good enough...
It wasn't for her.
It was myself kind of creating the barrier instead of just, you know, enjoying it.
Actually, I look at founders and I see a lot of them have some issues with their families.
They have something to prove, a tip on your shoulder, right?
Doug Leone always says we look for the broken ones, the misadjusted ones.
Yeah.
The most exceptional people, you won't find as many that are normal.
What you find is the ones that have good backgrounds are more emotionally stable, right?
So if you have a good family, good parents, and you then struggle for money, then you're more stable emotionally.
Stable doesn't mean the amazing people are a bit crazy, right?
Jordan is not a normal person, right?
Michael Jordan.
Elon Musk is not a normal person by any means of the imagination.
A lot of the founders I've met are exceptional in many, many ways and flawed in many others.
How were you, when your father died, seven?
How did that change you?
Uh, i don't remember much, but it changes everything, truthfully.
Right, because first of all, you have this beautiful concept of what life is and then all of a sudden it all falls apart.
Right, your family falls apart.
You see your mother kind of crying and struggling And I remember thinking a few things.
The first thing I remember is when people really have bad luck like this what is the job of everyone else?
Are they supposed to help you or should they keep doing their own thing?
And you see both kinds of people in that moment.
You see the people that they're not mean.
They try, but they have so much going on in their own lives, right.
And they keep doing their own thing.
They come maybe the first week or the first two weeks or the first month.
And I'm not... saying they're bad.
They're not bad at all.
They just have their own kids and their own life.
And they have a very small amount of people, I think, but very exceptional that are truly, truly service-oriented right.
That they just want to help with nothing for them, right?
They just literally want to help.
And I remember thinking, oh, I want to be one of those people.
Because there's some moments that folks just need some help.
And in my case, were my aunts, which just help.
Nothing for them.
They didn't have money.
They just helped.
And it was like, oh, my aunts are amazing.
They just want to help.
There's nothing for them.
It's not transactional.
And the other thing that I learned is that wisdom is much stronger on the pain than on the happy moments.
So I think you become much wiser when you go through some difficult moment than when you're happy.
I think happy is more like you should enjoy it and it's great, but I don't feel wisdom comes from it, honestly.
I think wisdom truly comes where Something bad happens.
And then you know, you realize, oh shoot, you know, things are not what I thought it would be.
Your values change dramatically.
I remember thinking money doesn't have any meaning.
Who cares about money at that time?
So, I mean, you know what I mean?
It's a very strong kind of reset.
The hard thing then, as a parent, is if wisdom is born from pain and suffering, how do I make wise children without pain or suffering?
Well, they should have a bit of pain and suffering, in my opinion.
I have that discussion with my wife all the time.
I don't want them to go to private school.
And she does.
And of course, they're going to private school because she wants to.
But I honestly don't want to.
And I said, sorry, two go to private school, two go to public school.
Because I really push for it.
And she's not happy with it.
So I'm pretty sure they're going to four go to private school soon.
But my little son, Adrian, goes to public school.
And one day, he got beat up.
Because public school, nobody cares, right?
I'm like, fine, he got beat up.
And then he stood up, clean, and the next day, dealt with it.
What is the big deal?
They're going to get beat up sooner or later.
I think as long as there's no anxiety, anxiety about money is not good.
Anxiety about, do I have enough food for next month?
Where do I live?
Do I have enough for rent?
I don't think that's good for kids.
So just stay away from that.
But I think the rest...
I don't want them to eat sushi, right?
I don't want them to want to be in a taxi.
And where's the point?
Take a bus.
This is not a big deal.
And then when you take a taxi, you're like, oh, I'm in a taxi.
When you have sushi, it's like, I have sushi.
And it's, you know, life is all about that kind of that staircase.
And I met a lot of folks with a lot of money that are, you know, just don't appreciate anything.
It's funny.
My mother asked me on a walk the other day.
She says can you name anything that gets worse with money?
Anything at all.
And I came back and I said, yes, one thing, family.
I know many billionaires.
I know no happy billionaire families.
I know many more poor people, much happier.
Yeah.
And Argentina has very strong family ties, right?
And, you know, there are no wealthy people.
So everybody's helping each other.
So I like it.
It's very Italian.
You mentioned like crazy and like outlier people often being crazy.
A lot of CEOs like your TS at Monzo, not crazy.
Is there a point where the crazy is no longer a good CEO?
That's a great question, actually.
Somebody has started something from zero.
And if you're a startup, you basically want to do something that goes against.
You know reality in a sense.
Nobody thought about it before.
Most of people tell you you're crazy, it's not going to work, right?
I tell ten people your idea, nine tells you, really?
It's not that smart.
And then you go through an insane amount of pain.
I don't think people realize.
I mean, I'm a founder, not successful like these guys, but you know, we have a company.
We kind of started by Microsoft, we went there and then I have another company.
So I tried many times with mild success, I'll say.
And I don't think people have any clue of the level of pain that you put yourself through.
Sometimes I say like being a founder is like choosing to have a kid and you don't know if it's going to live or die right.
Which is a very dramatic way of saying it.
Because a lot of folks will see the company as close to their child.
You have friends in a cup table and everybody, early employees that put their life and trust in you.
So I see all these founders really struggle, not in person, on their own.
And other people get how much, right?
And then, when the company gets to a certain size, I think you want somebody who's a bit more risk adverse, which is not a bad thing.
You want to protect the value and be a little more steady in the ways you improve things.
Which is a different skill set, in my opinion.
Property Finder, Monzo, Rappi, Just Eat, amazing names.
Would you say that you're a founder?
Well, not for those companies, right?
They have a very clear founder.
Would you say you are founder DNA as a person?
Well, I would like to think of myself as a founder, right?
That's definitely the highest aspiration.
That's the people that I admire the most outside of Roger Federer and guys like that.
I love sports, which I don't think is that different, actually, right?
I think they're founders of themselves.
I tried being a founder, and then over time I realized I have kids.
I know that the first couple of years of starting a company are incredibly painful.
Finding pro-market fit looks very sexy on paper.
In reality, I don't think people realize you're two, three years with nothing.
Some days you feel like you're the worst, most stupid person in the planet.
It's not fun.
And I have it done at Carvey, which is the Brazilian company, and I've done it in my first company as well.
Remember my first company.
Sometimes they have money for the bus, so I have to sneak in into the bus.
It's not fun, right?
And then everybody goes to a new job and looks at you like, oh, I have this cool job.
How are you guys doing?
And you're like, well, you know, we're finding product market fit wasn't even a term back then.
Really, it was like, well, you know, we're starting, we're trying.
You don't make any money.
You feel like the worst, right?
You truly do.
Like your ego is like negative.
But I still think it's the most valuable maybe thing a person can do, because imagine how boring the world will be without founders.
You know, Lloyds were still the most important bank in the UK.
That wouldn't be fun, right?
Monster is much more fun and exciting than that.
Same for all the new companies.
Do you think that quest for product market fit has changed today?
In a world where you can clone and copy so much more efficiently and we're seeing companies reach 100 million in AI in a year has the quest for product market fit changed?
Do you think?
I think it does.
We were just in Property Finder using a lot of AI tools to prototype and we're testing it and putting it in front of users in a day, literally.
So I think it's much easier, because a lot of companies used to fail even just to put something meaningful together.
That's interesting.
So what are you doing?
What tools are you using and how are you using it?
So you use either Lavable or Revlit or Auth.Zero.
I think it's the latest one from Y Combinator.
But there are tools that are used for prototyping and some have better code output than others.
And what we realized is now we want the tool, prototyping tool whose code output is the closest to what our team actually uses internally.
Because now the designer gives it back to the engineer and says can you reverse, engineer this so we can put it live.
And I think we just changed the agent page on Property Finder in a week or two and it started literally with a lovable design.
And then sent it back and the engineer said no, can you use another tool, because the code is not great for us.
And so they try another tool and they send them the output of that tool and they use that to reverse engineer.
So if you think about it before you have an idea or a concept, and a lot of people even fail to put anything meaningful in front of a user to learn the reaction.
So I think that problem goes away and a lot of people will be able much more to test things easily and cheaply.
Do you think you lose design in that stage?
If you think about mock-ups, for example, as a core, do you actually just skip that entirely and go straight to prototyping?
We're seeing a little bit of that, right?
But the exciting thing for me is that the designers were super passionate about it.
Because, if you think about it, if you're mission-oriented, you just want a job, family set, to make a dent in an area right?
So probably if I were to make a dent in property and fintech right in the region.
We want to change how it's done.
So if everybody anchors on that concept, if you do the design or not, or AI does it for you, who cares?
It's literally the journey towards the superior solution that makes a difference in the industry and in people that you care about.
And I found designers are super happy embrace that.
And a smaller amount that a bit kind of second guessing, like, oh, what is my role?
My role is to create a Figma.
What is it?
But I think it will move very fast.
Do you think we'll have more or less engineers in five years time?
I remember when I was in Microsoft, even like 20 years ago, I used to do so many boring things like copying code and, you know, unit testing.
I always thought, man, I was paid quite well even back then.
I honestly thought, I am overpaid.
Now, I used to work with Jan Stroostrup.
I don't know if you know him.
He was the inventor of C++.
He used to be in .NET back in the day.
And I went to one of his presentations, and he was not being overpaid, right?
I mean the level of abstraction.
He used to think like languages, meta languages, right random compiler.
It was like seeing, I don't know, Van Gogh, right?
Painting.
So it made me think, oh, I'm grossly overpaid.
This guy is most, I don't know how much they pay him, but it's underpaid.
So I think everybody, everything should move in that direction.
So there should be less of the folks that are just doing mundane things and hopefully creativity together with it works more.
If they will do something repetitive, it will go away, right?
So in the sheer numbers, I think there will be more amazing engineers in the new world that do impactful things, but the sheer amount might be less.
Do you think product teams change meaningfully in their structure?
Yeah, everything changes.
Everything changes.
I always thought of engineering teams or teams in a way that you just put the team that you need to be successful.
Some cases, only engineers.
Some cases, maybe only data people.
Some cases, it's 10 engineers and one product person and one designer.
And I always tell me oh, in Microsoft it was more engineers, less product manager, or the other way around.
It depends on the problem you're trying to solve, right?
If having the requirement that everybody has to code adds value to the solution, then you don't have product managers.
Now, how it primarily makes sense, why?
Because you're relieving yourself from that constraint.
Well, not everybody has to know how to code in production.
Do you think we have PMs in five years' time?
People often say to me, oh, the PM function's dying.
Is it dying?
No, I don't think so.
I think all the teams become smaller and more productive and more cross-functional, right?
So everybody has a bit of a prototype.
Everybody looks at the code.
PM is creative.
If a PM is like the connective fabric between different functions of product.
I don't think that's the PM.
Okay, what is the PM?
We have a very simple rule in Microsoft, which was if you know how to play chess and play guitar, you will be a great PM.
Because it's the creative side together with the analytical side.
Chess is a great proxy for analytical capability.
And playing instruments is an amazing proxy for creativity.
And I always saw PMs as kind of the best combination of that, right?
So if you grab three or four engineers, which some of them don't tend to be tan creative, this person can really make that team go up one notch in creativity.
I never saw PMs as the ones that do the backlog.
I think it's a European thing, in my opinion.
I never saw it in Microsoft.
It was somebody that didn't have to code all the time.
In Microsoft, everybody knew how to code, but you didn't have to.
So you can spend time with the customers more.
You can let your brain go out a bit more into a stratosphere and think creatively.
And engineers were fixing bugs and doing all the hard work.
So I don't think that goes away.
But I think, of course, you need fewer people to create the same output.
Now, if you look at all the products in the world today, they're mainly crap.
Why are they mostly crap, do you think?
There are many reasons.
One is some of them cannot put together a team to build something decent.
Other ones, they put the team, they don't have the capital.
There's not a barrier.
The third or the most common to me is a lot of them don't care enough, right?
So maybe they think the product, you fix it once and then you never change it.
Oh, you fix the product.
What are you going to do now?
What do you mean?
You're obviously always improving the product.
Which is the reason why I think it's utterly ridiculous that we think that companies will create their own internal products and have 170 internal products and that you won't buy SaaS anymore.
Do you remember when there was that statement about oh, you won't buy SaaS because you'll just create your own version of it?
Yeah.
What, and you'll do maintenance on 170 different products?
No, look, there might be some SaaS stuff that is not valuable, of course.
Sure.
But in reality, if there is valuable... Totally.
You know, it's not core to what you do, why would you do it?
And so they build it and they don't think to improve it often enough.
Product in itself is always should be moving, right?
The phone of two years ago is not the phone today.
That's what I love this example.
Like I was saying, this phone from London, you could argue the iPhone is done two, three years ago.
And this guy from nothing phone come in and they're like, look at me, right?
My son is crazy about it.
It has the things on the back.
The design is super clean.
Somebody cared again.
That's what I thought.
Somebody cared about the phone users.
Again, to think a better experience and nothing is good enough, right?
It's never good enough.
It's a good enough concept?
To me, it's a very negative one, right?
What do you think is great design?
Well, monzo is definitely a great design.
Walk, or chief designer is, i think, one of those creative, brilliant people.
When you met her, you just know there's some people you meet and you know, just think differently.
And in the case of monzo at least, was that connection to the emotion.
It's simple, always better.
I'm not sure.
I love whoop, the device.
I don't think it's simple, the UX, like at all.
But in that case, you want to draw the person into the complexity, right?
You want to get into the details.
So I don't think simple is always better, but unnecessarily complex, definitely not the solution.
I whoop I like because I think it's, Complex, but with a purpose.
It's trying to draw you to understand how your body works and what you should do.
Do you think beautiful design and speed of execution are at odds?
And what I mean by that is you're right, Monzo is a beautifully designed product.
But in the same time, Revolut outshipped the shit out of Monzo on new products.
Yeah, we're getting to that point.
No, I don't think so.
I think it's different.
And I don't know the Revolut example so much.
But I think Monzo, in my opinion, and from the outside now it's the most principled company I've ever seen.
Why?
They're principled, right?
So when I came in, it was a little more traditional.
And improve it.
And I think you look at it more about trust and emotion and only do things when you truthfully can back it up 100.
And you're so proud about the solution.
I think in banking has an extra value, right?
Because some of the products, you know, a Nobel for you and me, right?
They want to trade some weird thing or a meme coin is really about people's financial lives.
And most of the people really have Not that much money, right?
I'm not saying months in general.
So the bank, you need to trust it.
It's a very important part of your life.
The payments go through it.
Your balances are there.
The way I like to think about it.
Imagine that you should be able to cross-sell anything you want if you make a product.
You should be able to cross-sell any product and be very proud of what you're selling.
So now imagine in a banking scenario, you want to cross-sell something to any user.
And some of these users is a mother with two kids and struggling to find a job.
Will you cross-sell anything?
All the things that some other competitors have, right?
Where you cross-sell meme coins, stuff like that.
I wouldn't.
And if you put that bar of not failing to even one customer and doing something that is not in their best interest, I think that the bar of what a principal company is rises quite a bit.
Do you not think that is arrogant, to assume that you should be the arbiter of justice on what is in their best interest versus what is not?
There will be a single mother who wants access to that meme coin and will make money from that meme coin.
Correct.
And they will find the tools to do that.
You will find some product out there that sells meme coins.
You would.
But the bar is higher, right?
The bar of...
What you're offering to people, somebody has to hold the bar really high.
And what doesn't meet it, somebody else will offer it.
You will find a lot of financial tools or toys that you can buy Minkons all over the internet.
But I think it's arrogant to not allow crypto, but to allow stock investing.
For the majority of people, they don't know shit about stocks.
They don't know shit about crypto.
It's the same.
It's a gamble.
One way of looking at it.
Yeah, does product change when you're building with trust as a paramount principle?
And if you think about the different products you've worked on, which is amazing variety?
So like a just eat versus a monzo, or even a rappy versus monzo.
As you said, trust at the center, with monzo versus a rappy not so much at the center, is it?
No, it's true.
Each product is different, right?
And there's ones that have a high emotional connection, a high level of trust.
And that's the product itself.
You think about what is a bank, right?
A bank manages risk.
So the financial system of Europe or the UK has a regulator and has banks that are a part of it.
The money is with the banks, right?
It's not anywhere else.
So the whole idea of you manage risk Of course, you manage risk in a very compelling and smart way.
That's what banks are in the end.
Monzo was the first and only one.
Maybe that said, we're going to do that and be good for customers and have values and be trustworthy, because all the other ones were not, which is amazing to think that that was innovation, but that was the innovation.
It's a bank that is a win-win for people, for the people, and it was such a novel concept, which is amazing to think about.
In the food delivery space, which I've done before.
You just want the food to get in there on time, be hot and, if there's a problem, to get your money back.
It's simpler because it's just food.
But it has aspects of trust as well, right?
That you have to have folks with five good hygiene and all the things.
So there's always a quality, but I think it's the levels for sure.
We mentioned the crypto and the stock.
On the new product side as a product leader.
Today, when you think about what to build versus what not to build, How do you determine between attractive we should do it versus attractive, but not at core?
It's a distraction.
Two things.
First, the mission.
So to give you an example of Property Finder, the mission is to make living great for the region.
It's a beautiful mission.
I think missions are very important.
There's a lot of things to think about a product.
It has to be easy to use, easy to understand.
It has to scale.
And then at the end, it has to be sustainable financially, right?
So it's all kind of the levels that you have to think about.
But the most important one is, does it make sense if it works and might not work for the mission?
As simple as that.
That's how I think about it, at least.
If it's truthfully worth pursuit to fulfill the mission.
I would like to try it in small scale, first right.
Because the scale comes later and profitability comes later.
And try it and just see what the users say.
Is it that meaningful for the users as we thought it would be?
And if it is, then you scale it.
So let the users make the decision.
I try to let the users make a decision as often as I can.
I don't know where you're going to go with that.
Let's say in areas that are less regulated, for sure.
And then you scale it up.
And to make the first decision, just go after the mission.
Just pursue the mission aggressively because that's really the only reason the company exists.
Before we actually do that, testing and letting users guide us.
I had Gustav from Spotify on the show and he said talk is cheap and so we should do more of it.
When you think about internal discussion around new product build.
How do you think about the effectiveness of dictatorship no, we're not doing that versus the importance of having discussion.
Well, that's a great point.
I would agree more on the discussion bit.
I think it's a false dichotomy, right?
If you make a decision, what is the cost of having a conversation for three hours about it?
Very low compared to building anything.
So what I always like to tell people is, well, look, if anybody agrees, let's sit down.
I'll talk to you the entire weekend.
And they might convince me.
In many cases, it happens.
Or as a team, right?
It's not me.
It's a team.
And more often than not, this works because people are going to be listened to.
And sometimes really the conversation is the values, the intelligence you're creating throughout the conversation.
I think the most amazing thing is the opposite.
A lot of people make decisions and don't talk about it at all.
So what is the point in that, really?
What is the quality of a decision if you don't like at least two opposing views to have a conversation?
And what is the cost of speaking in a group for three hours for a new product?
Like, zero.
It's nothing.
Developers will go and spend a month building it.
I like to think it's always the sports, right?
I'm a big fan of the All Blacks and the famous rules of the All Blacks.
And I do think to me the best way to run any company is really close to what the best sports teams does, right.
All the rules that All Blacks have about empowering, about being humble but raising the bar, and about treating everybody the same but being decisive.
They apply right.
So I think dictatorship...
Somebody has to make a decision in the end, which is different than being a dictatorship.
You said let users guide you.
How do you think about the Henry Ford?
I build what people want.
I build faster horses versus I'm going to tell you what you want, because you don't see it yet.
When I say people guide you, it's not they telling you what to do.
It's putting it in front of them and let them try it.
Let's see if the impact in their life is as big as you thought it will be.
In the case, I'm pretty sure at one moment, Henry Ford gave the car to somebody and they loved it.
Get somebody to drive the car as quickly as you can.
Back then.
You need those visionaries, because building a 4T assembly line I'm pretty sure was quite an investment.
But for us, now with AI, you can test it so quickly and so easily.
Just let them try it and see.
They will tell you if they love it or not.
How quickly do you know when a new product is a flop?
I think it depends on the case.
It's a mistake sometimes to drop it too early because iteration sometimes does make a difference.
You know it's a flop when you deliver exactly what you wanted and it just doesn't resonate.
What's the most prominent flop that you've been a part of?
There's a lot of products we launched in Carvey or in Rappi that we thought were going to be amazing and didn't.
What in Rappi did you think would be amazing?
That wasn't the super app concept of we can do this and that and that so awesome.
And people are like, well, I can use three different apps for it and I'm fine.
And I think we were losing the, we were missing the glue between them.
And I still see a lot of super apps making that mistake.
Again, most likely Rappi fixed this by now.
If you make three experiences and not connected, the fact that in the same app doesn't mean anything.
So there has to be more to the experience than just having the experiences in the same UX or the same customer support.
What would you have done differently than knowing all that you know now?
The way I think about it now is whatever experience you add should improve the retention of the whole.
So let's say you're doing, I don't know, like Bolt or any of these guys.
You're doing mainly taxi, and then you're adding food.
Karim does this as well, and many others.
And you keep adding stuff, right?
Because you want to get really more output from that user or create more value, or whatever you want to say.
The more things you add, the more you should retain that user, right?
And frequency should go up.
What that means is that each experience have to be good enough for the experience to be additive to the platform instead of subtracting.
So you say, I use it for a taxi and now I order groceries.
Oh my God, why did I do this before?
You know, I should have always done this before.
It shouldn't be like, that's a bit crap.
Nobody gives you a price because you do cars and groceries at the same time.
There should be something special.
You know, the user better, the experience is better because you have the drivers.
You know what I mean?
There's something that the user should discover.
Oh, I should do it again with them.
Loyalty, because it's amazing.
Sometimes you wish to do things and look, all the things we can do.
Look at me.
And the user is like, good for you, but doesn't really translate to their experience.
What moment has been the single biggest change for your product mindset from an experience?
I think the beautiful thing about product is that it's a bit closer to the user.
We did a lot of research and you kind of know.
It's hard to estimate if you're in a niche or if you are in a big market.
And for me it was a bit the opposite.
In the case of Monzo was when we did this one cent campaign at the end of the year, which is, if you enroll, you have one cent the first day, two cents, the second day, three cents, the third day and it's 600 pounds by the end of the year.
It's an automated way of saving, right?
And we have some extra things.
I thought, cool, that's going to do well, but I didn't think it was game-changing.
And then the success it had, it was ridiculous.
Why when you study it?
Because I think in my opinion that's my own assessment is, when you do something that has a few things together, one is something that the users feel is good for me, right.
It's truthfully a good habit to create, like going to the gym.
And then you do something to help them break that kind of laziness they had to do it.
So, for example, they don't want to say because it's just too much time and effort and you do an extra kind of lottery at the end of the year or something right.
They can earn some money.
You're kind of pushing them, helping them to do something that is good for them.
So it's almost like you're doing both things.
This is something good for you.
And now I'm going to help you to actually do it.
You know, like your trainer goes and says, do this exercise every day and it's good for you.
And then he gets you to do it and then you realize it's good for you.
That's so much more impactful when they're combined.
So to me, that was a huge realization of...
Wow, it can be so much more impactful than whatever the numbers predicted because of that emotional component.
When you're seeing somebody that is truthfully helping you to be better.
Do you think about how do I bring emotion into product?
Yeah, all the time.
You do?
All the time.
How do you do that?
So I think about it a lot in marketing and in social copy.
Obviously, I'm a marketer.
VCs are glorified marketers, me on steroids.
I think about very much the words that I use and the tone that I use them in to convey emotion in marketing.
How does that work in product?
In product, it's similar, right?
I think you want to have some sort of haptic feedback when somebody is good for you, right?
Monzo was a famous case of the things that pop up.
All these kind of things that are telling you it's a good thing for you, like immediate feedback.
One thing that I always notice with traditional fintechs I know you've seen it, you know I won't name them, but the classic you get an email and you're afraid.
I know it happens to you, but I get an email for traditional banks or traditional credit cards.
I feel literally anxious because it's a fraud, it's not fraud, they want my money.
What is it, right?
And everything, the tonality of it is off, the messaging is off.
It's for them, not for me.
You know what I mean?
They want me to do something for them, not for me.
And of course, property finder now and months before, it's the opposite.
Clearly, the emotion is always, we're here for you.
And the emotion is always a positive one.
Something bad happened, how are you going to get back on track?
That's why I love the health apps.
Because your health goes up and down.
But let's say you stop training for a month.
I come back and say, let's get back on the horse.
So it's always a positive feedback.
I think whoop, again, does a good job of that.
It doesn't hit you in the head.
No, you haven't slept yesterday.
I know, right?
I have four kids.
I haven't slept.
But it's like, oh, if you do three hours today, you're going to be back on track.
And you know, it's always that kind of emotional support to some extent, because we're emotional beings in the end.
I think you mentioned fitness several times.
The thing that's important is consistency.
You mentioned weekly reviews earlier.
How do you structure weekly reviews?
Are they the same time?
Who comes?
Who sets the agenda?
What do you want to get out of them?
What makes a good one?
Yeah, I love the DoorDash angle, which is a bit what took into Rappi a few years ago, right?
What they took into Rappi, and I learned a lot from them.
And it's really a combination of transparency, data, and weekly rhythm.
The basic concept is imagine you have a startup.
You say there's one thing you remember the classic startup there's one thing we can do, and only one thing.
It's classic.
And the founder says it, and everybody does it, and you feel like a rock star.
And then you have a corporation, and they manage by proxy.
OKRs, which I'm not a big fan of at all.
It's a whole different conversation.
Or any proxies you might like, the business plans and the excels with prioritizations, which I never do, and all these proxies because I don't know how to communicate, is more than one thing.
WBR is one of the 10, 20 things that matter to media objectives.
Who is the responsible?
It's called DRI, direct responsible individual.
And that's the actual person doing it.
It's not the executive, you know, three levels up.
It's the person who knows what they're talking about.
And then they will write what's happening, why is it happening, what are we doing about it?
And if one of the things is red, what is our job?
Help them.
It's not hit them in the head, which is the other thing I dislike.
The classic company corporations will spend years hitting in the head somebody and then oh, it's not good.
Let's fire them and bring somebody back.
And then 10 years passed and nobody's accountable.
Everybody's accountable, right?
So if it's red, it's my fault.
It's the CFO's fault.
It's the CEO's fault.
It's everybody's fault.
Do you not want one person to feel more accountable?
Well, the ERI obviously will feel more accountable, but it's not.
It's always the company.
It's like the All Blacks, right?
The All Blacks lose the World Cup, and what do you say?
What is the value of saying, hey, it was you, dude.
It was you.
The All Blacks lost.
Argentina won the World Cup.
France lost, right?
It's just the team lost.
Do you not think it's important to feel pressure?
It's like Nick from Ravalute.
I love Nick.
I think he's a great leader.
There are different ways of leadership, by the way.
TS, I think, is a great, great leader in a different way.
Do you not think fear and pressure are a great way to lead in terms of effectiveness?
Yeah.
I think the truly superb people don't need fear, and they put more pressure on themselves than anyone else.
Do you think Nick's a truly great leader?
I don't need as well, if I'm honest.
I think what Revolut has done and what Monzo have done are both 0.11% on the success.
People say Monzo's too nice a culture.
That's a bad thing.
If that's the word thing they say about Monzo, then it's a good thing.
But it's like intellectual and nice.
It's comfy.
No, I get, look, I work in investment banking in Goldman Sachs.
So I get your point.
I don't think that the best companies in the world require that.
I think the best people are self-motivating and they're the harshest critics of themselves.
I think the whole company should be held accountable to your point.
I think the company should be held accountable to high standards and high goals and high ambition right.
I don't imagine Tony Nadal saying to Rafael Nadal like dude, I'm going to make you fear that you're going to lose the final of Roland Garros.
He didn't want to lose the final of Roland Garros.
Nobody had to tell him.
The more people you get like that, they are the harshest critics.
I do believe the company itself should put a high bar for the company, right?
I just don't believe on the, you know, hitting on the head.
I think that's more for average companies.
What did you believe that you now no longer believe?
I used to think about individualism a bit more when I moved to the US in the 2000s.
When I moved to the US, it's a very individualistic country, right?
And you always think, oh, I can do whatever I want.
It's just up to me.
If I work hard enough, I study hard enough.
And then Argentina is much more of a communal thing, right?
It's always what we do, right?
It's everybody together.
So when I moved to the US, I thought, oh, no, they're right.
It's all about me and what I can do.
And then you realize that it's not true, right?
It's both things.
I have to be the best that I can be myself, go into the gym study, work hard so that I can contribute more to the team.
And then the team output is higher.
And if I happen to be in a great company, the company will be higher and I will take a benefit from that.
I think that this idea that we live in a vacuum is a bit naive.
It's nice to feel it on their 20s, because you feel like that.
And early 30s, you would feel like that too.
We all feel like we can save the world on our own, right?
And then, when you get older, you realize that you depend on many more factors and people and the government and the companies you're in.
What do product builders not see about leading product that they should see?
I think for me, it's much more about the energy that you're bringing to the company.
You should always graph what you're doing and try to raise it.
Now, if the company is doing 8x, you want to see what is the next level in the product, in the energy of the individuals.
And you feel this.
You feel people that are motivated and energized and Their head is going like crazy and they are self-motivating and they're doing things on the weekend because they want to, not because you're forcing them.
And you see it, right?
And then magic happens a little bit.
And we've all been part of teams like that.
A small team, you're like, something magical happening here.
And everybody, the summation of all of us is higher than even what we thought it could be.
So to me, product is always a bit of that, right?
You have to be ensuring that everybody rises and the product rises with it, well beyond what you can think on your own.
When you have a product flop, what do you do to prevent really dejected teams?
This beautiful phrase of no effort goes wasted.
So if you work really hard and you work a lot with customers and you ship something and you didn't work, you learned.
And sometimes I tell you, well...
Let's say we do something and we realize it's not the answer.
Well, it's not the answer for us.
It's not the answer for the competitors either because it's not a thing.
So great.
Now we know that's not the answer.
Let's go and find where the answer is.
What was a product flop from Monza and what did you learn?
Pretty much most of the things we've done at Monza have always been successful.
Really?
I can't think of one myself.
I have to invite somebody else to tell you, but honestly, I cannot think of one.
Do you think you tried enough then?
Should I ask that question?
Look, there is a process to it.
You could always argue you can do more.
I still believe that Monzo is the best new bank experience in any country.
Personally, I'm biased, of course, but better than Nubank in Brazil and Brenda Revolut in the UK.
Obviously, it's just in one country now, but when the world sees it, I still believe it's the best proposition out there.
Do you think Monzo will be a $100 billion company?
I hope so.
I don't think there's a reason why not to, but time will tell.
Too many variables to judge.
Do you believe the future of banking in that case will be like very few neobanks that rule across continents, or we continue to see regionalized winners?
I'm not the bank expert here, but there is a lot of steps to get to a level of Monzo or Revolut or Nubank.
It's not easy.
It's not easy to get the scale, being so savvy with regulators, with the processes, capital.
I don't think you have 100 like that.
So I think over time, there is a reason for them to expand.
When you have real scale, you often have slowness, apathy in some cases.
How do product teams slow down?
I don't know if product teams, but I think record version is a real thing.
What's that record version?
No, risk.
Ah, risk aversion.
Risk aversion, right?
It's a case where the more you have, the more you have to lose.
The startups, you have nothing.
And you see this in big companies, 100 billion dollar company, 40 billion dollar company.
There is a lot to lose all of a sudden.
So I think it's human nature.
How do you remove that?
It comes from the top in general.
When you say it's okay to fail, let's go fucking big.
Yeah.
And you put the processes to ensure, look, you know, banks cannot fail, right?
So it's a different definition of failure.
But you have to draw the line to say that we need defining what the future is, right?
And the future is not the same as now.
You have to do something different.
So it's a little more of not being content to where you are and always trying to be the one defining what's next.
Does the world change a lot in product when the quality of the customer experience and the output of your product is determined by a third party?
And what I mean specifically by that is you mentioned a lovable earlier, fantastic product, amazing outputs.
The quality is determined by the quality of the model.
When Cloud4 was released, it went significantly up.
That is a fundamental change to product.
Can you imagine if I said to you hey, there's going to be some externality and for your Monzo product it's going to get way better and it's got nothing to do with you?
So good luck.
But I'll tell you when it's released sometime in Q3, Q4.
Does the world of product change in that way?
Well, I think there have always been platforms like LLMs now, and I think the difference is that LLMs are a bit more full-stack than before.
If you think about it, OpenAI can be both iOS and Google Cloud or Amazon services together.
And I don't think we've seen how many years you have to go back to feel that way.
A product depends on iOS for the experience, if you use the face recognition.
So there's always that platform angle that hopefully elevates everybody, and iOS did that.
There's a lot of things you could do with iOS that you couldn't do on the web, and that's why everybody moved towards the native app experience.
Remember, it was a big thing a few years ago, or 10 years ago.
The same with the cloud, right?
Cloud always initially was like it's going to be cheaper.
And it wasn't cheaper, but it was faster right.
Much faster innovation by developers when they did it.
Now combine the two and I'm a huge believer in open AI will be massive personally, because I think it's full stack.
You have B2C.
It's a very, very powerful combination.
And it will be both now, right?
It will be iOS plus Amazon Web Services.
So everybody will depend on that platform.
It's the right thing to do, because you couldn't do it on your own.
You cannot build open ai or the lm model on your own, so i don't think it's a dichotomy in that sense.
I believe that the question would be can you add value enough that there is value in that layer versus what the models will do on their own?
That would be the question for all these companies as they come along.
What i will ask them and i don't know what are you actually doing?
What are you actually doing is the user experience, is the learning, is the fine tuning doesn't seem to be a thing anymore.
So what is it?
What is the secret sauce?
And why do users prefer Lavable versus Coursera or all the new ones that will pop up?
There will have to be something.
You're hiring a product team, okay?
It's fucking hard to hire product people.
And most CEOs actually don't know how to hire product people.
If I start with your advice to me, you're an angel in my company.
Number one, what questions do I ask in a product interview?
What do you want to know?
I can feel it almost right away.
Why?
What do you feel?
I think the first thing I look at is you have to believe of what like light on their eyes.
Ideally.
There are some people that there's no light on their eyes, like almost like no excitement, not kind of.
I do want to see some sort of creativity or, you know, the lights of excitement of what you can build for a good problem.
I think you need to have that.
And then you want to, you know, again, the creative side, right?
And then you want to check the analytical, very simple, which is, you know, just make sure that they're not just purely a crazy creative right.
Although you want some of them, but also can actually have to break down a problem, right?
In steps, the way consulting has done it for many, many years.
So can they kind of abstract our abstract thinkers?
Can they think in abstractions and then quantify it and break it down and say okay, you do this, you do that.
Now, I think with AI, maybe you want to be more outlier-based, like a crazy creative, and then a mathematician make more sense, because you can glue them together more easily, right, with JudgeGPT and all the things.
So that could be an outcome.
Do you need to be an amazing writer?
Quite a few people have said on the show that you need to be a great writer to be great at products PRDs, clarity of communication.
I don't think I've ever done a PRD myself, except the first few years in Microsoft, if I'm honest.
But I do believe you need to be able to communicate your thoughts, right?
And writing is always the best test.
So, if you cannot write a one-pager, which is what I get my folks to do, which is write a one-pager of why you're doing, why and what is the plan.
And if you cannot do that and now Judge, BD can do it for you.
But you should be able to articulate your thoughts ideally, right.
Because you have to communicate to engineers and the designers, right?
So I do believe that's important.
We'll see if it continues to be as important as before, but it's a classic thing, right?
The PM has to be able to synthesize a bit what the customer's needs are, what the hypotheses are for solving them and what the plan is to get there.
It kind of makes me think of like great leaders are able to bring people along with them for a journey.
Where are you not great as a leader?
I'm already with four kids, so, you know, it's a long conversation.
I'm not asking your wife, I'm asking you.
It will be a whole day of podcast.
I think personally, being fully honest, I have ADHD very clearly myself, right?
So... like very, very clearly.
I think I'm more accepting of it now.
But you know some people get mad because How has your acceptance of it changed?
The treatment?
I think it's good to say it because a lot of people used to get really pissed off with me.
Hey, you see this person, you left the room two minutes before he finished.
And I have no recollection of myself doing that, right?
Or, you know, somebody say hi and then say hi back.
And I have no recollection of seeing that person or, you know, forgetting something, for example.
And what I noticed for the idea is people take it very personally because it's emotional.
And when you say, I didn't remember it, I think it's bullshit.
Because if it was important, you will remember it.
So it was really hard before because people don't understand.
I think it's bullshit when you're telling them, no, I truly forgot.
So now I think you try to be more open because at the end there is no value in hiding things, right?
So you say look, I forgot, and I left the meeting two minutes before because in my mind we were done.
In my mind I was done and I wasn't having the awareness, the social awareness, of people still in the meeting.
At the end, the most honest you are, the better.
I have more confidence in myself now.
You know, when you're younger you're trying to kind of hide your flaws a bit more because you don't want to be judged.
As you get older and have some success, you're like whatever.
This is me, and the most honest I am, the better.
I can't remember who said it.
I can't remember if it was Johnny Ive or Steve Jobs or one of the greats.
But they said that focus is saying no to even really great opportunities.
What really great opportunity did you say no to that you think about most?
A lot.
I think one of the ones I thought a lot was MercadoLibre 14 years ago.
Opportunity to join MercadoLibre 14 years ago was in a really good position.
I get to Marcos.
And I thought this is an amazing team, the best team I've ever seen from Stanford, smart driven, great culture in Argentina.
I'm like, my God, this is the best job ever.
And it just didn't work out because at that time I still wanted my family to be in the US or Europe.
And I said no and obviously then I thought it would be successful.
But I remember I bought 50000 or something or some number, not a small number and I kept it and it's 40 times until today.
So I'm like, shoot, that was a great opportunity.
There are not many like that, right?
40x.
I also wish I was invested even more, even though at that time I thought okay, that's a big investment for this small company in Latin America.
Now I'm like, my God, I should have invested a bit more.
What is a great product for a user that you think is a bad investment?
So like Twitter.
As a user, I think it's a great product.
Yeah.
Phenomenal.
Shit investment.
I would not like to be in it as a business.
That's a great point.
I mean, everything that cannot achieve scale struggles to monetize, of course, right?
You could argue Twitter could be more aggressive monetizing, if you wish.
So I think there's always.
If a great product is there, I will argue it should be able to be a good investment, unless the value is just for society.
I struggle to think of one, to be honest.
Maybe something too niche.
I really hope these guys from nothing are successful, right?
Because it's hard to make a phone at scale that is great and not expensive.
So I don't know if it's going to turn out or not, but it's definitely a great product.
How important is time to value?
You have a new user for PropertyFinder.
How important is it that within 30 seconds, they get value versus no no no, we will get a questionnaire.
We'll understand them, we will create a curated experience for them, but we need to understand them first.
I think it's super important.
Time to value.
I think it's important because people are quite lazy.
And not in a bad way.
I'm saying we obsess about our products, right?
You obsess about your company.
I obsess about Rappi, Monzo, Property Finder.
I think about it all the time.
And users just have a purpose, a reason to use it.
They're not thinking about your product all the time.
So the time you have to make an impression is very little.
You can't miss it.
It's a huge cost to miss it.
I believe that you want to have value very quickly and then build from that.
I think the mistake is to not build from it.
You know what I mean?
When I have your attention and I show you value very quickly.
And now you know who I am.
Have I invested enough over time to take it to the next level?
I think that's where the problem is.
I think it's very obvious that you don't have that many chances to make a first impression with products and you better deliver value as soon as you can.
I think time to value is a good litmus test for need of customer.
What I mean by that is like, you know Noom I don't know if you know Noom, the weight loss management app, which is one of the most successful weight loss apps and provide kind of curated diets and fitness plans and everything in between.
They literally have 50 questions that you have to answer before you can even sign up.
The time to value is appalling.
The investment required is shit.
But it's a conviction and litmus test for the consumer need.
It pays off.
And obviously what they will have is a funnel which much more drop off for very engaged users right.
So it might actually work.
I think whoop is similar in the sense to use the same example.
Like it takes seven days to see any result, right?
It takes seven days to build the advice, let's say the baseline, but they do a really good job getting you there.
And to your point, you know, you're feeling that, oh, okay, it's worth the wait.
People don't like wait for the reliability.
Yeah look, I'm not trying to sell Whoop here, but I But Whoop's a really interesting one because it brings up a fantastic product principle that's very difficult to understand, which is how do I create a product for super users amazing athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo, but also my mum and me and just normal people?
It's a great product.
And you have to, again, get the Christian of each one of us, right?
So what is it that relates to you that will make you do that investment?
So my question is how do you create a product for power users that can also be for more normal users?
There's two opposite things.
First you said If you have 50 questions and you deliver the answer, I think that clearly you're going through a segment of people that will put down an effort.
And they actually, as they're going through, they like the depth of what you're going through.
And it's similar to I don't know if you've ever gone to a doctor or something and there's one that comes very cautiously.
I say, oh, you're fine.
And they leave and you're like, they didn't even know what I had.
And other ones that take the time to really ask you questions about your life, your private life.
Now, you react well to the latter because for you it's very, very important.
So you're looking for that, actually.
So the product, to some extent, is the questionnaire.
So the fact that they're taking the time to ask you 50 questions is kind of the product.
Because it's the same time when you meet a great mentor and you can see they invest time on you and you really care about it.
You really like the fact that they're asking deep questions.
And so I think it's part of the product itself to go 50 questions.
Sure.
But how do you create, forgetting the question on boarding there, how do you create products that amazing, amazing product lovers will love, as well as everyone?
There will be property finder and there'll be people who have 50 properties and know everything about property buying and you need to create a great product for them and me, moving to Dubai for the first time and buying my first house in Dubai.
It's a very difficult problem to solve, right?
And what I think people confuse sometimes is there's the argument sometimes you fulfill the needs of a hardcore customer and you don't really have to do much more.
They're already there.
And then when you go to what is called the adjacent customer, you make it a bit easier for that person to even go through that journey.
And the way I think about it is, Let's say you're deep in property management.
It's part of your persona, your personality.
What do you do?
Oh, you know, I have 10 properties and I manage them.
And you feel really good about yourself.
So if you have a person that just want to do one, you still have to get them in that journey.
And you see great products do this.
You buy one, hey, Duolingo does this, right?
The person that first starts at rank number whatever, and you still don't know anything about the language, but they make you feel like you're in that journey right.
To be the person that can say, I speak five languages.
You can visualize yourself, oh, I want to speak two languages now.
If I only continue to do a lingo for the next, who knows, one year or two years.
So I think that journey applies to both.
The error is to give the experience that's super complex to the person that's just getting started right.
So it's progressive, right?
There's a concept of progressive onboarding or progressive learning.
So I think the progressive experience is an important one.
Unless you want to shut them down, which is I don't care about the casual person that goes to Dubai.
Just really want the 50 property.
And then you should be very opinionated about that, which is a bit your example before.
Just don't want the casual user.
There's no way the casual user would put the effort of somebody who manages 50 properties.
But if I want to get him in that journey, I need to give him a taste of what that feels like.
Just Eat has obviously been outplayed.
It hasn't moved with the times.
What's a lesson from that from a product perspective for you or from a business perspective?
Well, I've been out of Just Eat for many, many years.
Sure.
But working in Rappi as well, which is kind of the next generation provider in many respects.
Yeah.
Well, I think the ambition of Rappi was always bigger, which is a bit of what I noticed in Latin America versus Europe, if you tell me now, right.
Like if you pick somebody in Rappi or iFood or MercadoLibre, the energy and the passion of those people is, in my experience 2 3x, if not more, of what I see in the average here in Europe.
Wow.
And you see it.
It's not just a culture because the Brazilians are more, you know, happier people, but I think it's a mix of being proud and humble and appreciated more the opportunity you know what i mean like in latin america you don't have that many opportunities to be in a company like that so you see that the people that are there they have the t-shirt on you can see it they're so proud of that company and what you don't realize is the effort companies decay or products decay because the interest wanes from within you know the passion to do the effort the really difficult things to fix it just nobody cares anymore if nobody's looking at your performance management You cannot replace that with passion.
And then you see that our team they're like, passionate and they want to be the best and they are proud of what they do.
And they know that they're so grateful of the opportunity to be in MercadoLibre or iFood or Rappi.
That is a different motivator.
They know they love it.
They are there and they're proud of what they're doing.
They're not like, well, it's a job and my career.
I hate when people talk about titles.
I found it a lot in Europe or in the UK.
Like, what is my title?
How many people you managed?
You know, that's clearly the wrong proxy.
Instead of the passion of what you're doing is okay, I have a title and I jump in the career.
I get a bit more of a salary and you know.
To Europeans, what the least?
You've seen LATAM, you've seen Dubai now, and you've seen Europe.
You can generalize, right?
There are people here that were like crazy and amazing companies and so forth.
In average.
Obviously the joke a little bit is you know it's a beautiful continent Spain, south of France, and you know people like to enjoy it.
And I think it's been a bit wealthier.
The difference is that America has been third world for many, many years and there are not that many opportunities in those countries.
I think there's still more here.
And you're also poorer.
I was quite afraid of being poorer when I was in Argentina.
There's no safety net.
There's no safety net in Brazil.
If you don't have money, you're really in a bad place if you don't have a good job, truthfully.
And you see that.
What does that actually mean?
It means, whether it's education, all the services, education or healthcare, or where you live, is much more dangerous, right.
So you're left to your own devices much more and you get exposed to things that obviously are not great.
So you will see more energy for people to get out of that situation.
I think Europeans, it's a bit more, the delta is not so strong, right?
It's always like, oh, I'm doing well.
If I put much more effort, what is the return, right?
And it's still doing fairly okay.
You don't have that in Latin America.
There's a safety net here.
There's a safety net and I think the historical wealth.
The problem people don't realize that thing doesn't last forever.
Argentina was very wealthy 100 years ago and it went away.
Did Rappi raise too much too soon?
I think Skip the Dishes, which is a company we bought in Just Eat with great founders which are now in Neo Financial.
They were so good because you're in Manitoba in Canada.
I remember we bought the company because nobody was able to travel there from anywhere else, because nobody got to the plane that was a turboprop to Manitoba.
So nobody bothered to even go and meet them.
And we did with Just Eat and with David.
And they were amazing.
And they never raised money.
So they were so efficient.
And they have thought every single little cranny of the onboarding experience for partners and drivers that at the time and I think it's true it was the best we've ever seen including, in my opinion, everyone else.
And it was really because the need is what drives innovation, right?
You don't have the money.
You better come up with an idea on how to do it anyways.
I think money always creates a little more laziness, right?
Because there is always a way to buy something.
Obviously, the problem is when people give you money, you most likely take it.
But I'm not so sure that a lot of money is a good thing.
I haven't seen it myself.
When you look at Dubai in 10 years, is it a financial technology center as they plan?
Is it a Miami, which is a fleeting place for taxes?
What does Dubai look like in 10 years?
I've only been there for two months, so big caveat.
But I think it's much more than in Miami.
I think the energy, how progressive the government is in the plans for the future.
To me, it's like a city or a country that is a startup.
The customer are the people that want to live there.
I think I mentioned before, you go to get your license, it's a happiness center.
I don't know anybody in any other country.
You go to get a license and feels like a happiness experience.
And I love it because I'm one of the people that thinks everything is a product.
We're all users of a product.
And I think pretty much everything is a product, with few exceptions.
Country is a product, if you think about it, particularly if you think, in their case, that immigration is free right.
So you can choose to go there and get a visa.
It's a product, right?
So what is the value proposition of the country?
And they seem incredibly self-aware of that and treating you as a customer and make sure that the experience is truthfully delightful.
And they're always thinking for, again, two months in, What is ahead?
What is the future?
And you can see again that kind of excitement about the future when you talk to the people anywhere.
The future is better than the past, which to me is mainly the only reason to be alive, right?
And you don't see it everywhere.
The future is going to be better and we're going to do all these amazing things and we have all these ideas.
So to me, it's like a startup and a city startup.
And I personally am very bullish about where it goes from what I've seen.
Dude, I want to ask you a quick fire.
So I say a short statement, you give me your thoughts.
Does that sound okay?
Yeah.
Which product most recently was like a wow consumer moment for you?
For me, Duolingo.
The beauty of haptics for them and how they integrate that and the vibrations with new levels.
There's something about the kids, right?
Because these two products like Duolingo, my daughter is a fanatic of it.
And she learned Spanish much better than I could ever taught her.
And I know Spanish.
My son is a fanatic of nothing, right?
And then you think, why are the kids react so well to this?
And there has to be something about the less bias towards the past, more open to true innovation.
I remember my daughter bugs me to give her the phone for Duolingo to not miss the streak.
Like she's like, dad, I don't miss my streak.
I'm number three.
My friend is number five and this is number seven.
And she drives me crazy until I give her the phone and do it.
And my son drove me crazy to get him the phone.
I believe that they're less biased and they can experience amazing products sooner than us, because we are still stuck on.
You know, I learned Spanish the old way and I use a traditional phone.
You've been at Property Finder for a couple of months.
Monzo, Rappi, Just Eat.
Which one's the best CEO?
I think all successful companies have amazing CEOs, right, in my experience.
And you can't compare them truthfully.
You can't.
They're so different.
If you could invest in one.
I think Simon is one of a kind, for sure.
In Latin America, there are not many people like him.
What's your biggest parenting advice?
My brother just had a new baby, his first baby.
What would you advise him having his first?
Oof, I can't really talk about this one.
First one is to enjoy it, particularly when they're young, because it goes really quickly.
And the second one is that you cannot predict how the kids are going to come out, or how they're going to behave, or their personality, or whatever you do, they will choose their own path.
You should not have a vision of who you want them to be, but rather just help them along the way.
Because each one, even if you teach them the same things, will deviate quite a bit and chart their own path very quickly.
What would you say to someone graduating university today entering the workforce?
Take advantage of the first few years, right when you don't.
You know, i hiring a lot of grads now in property finder.
They're not expensive, they don't need the money really, so they should live within their means and learn and just learn.
And these three four three, four years, does the value of a cs degree go up or down?
I think physics, to me, always goes up.
Physics?
Yeah, I always felt that way, even for CS.
I always felt that physics and math are the cornerstone of computer science.
Like JavaScript is great, but I don't feel that I think that's an implementation of something.
Whether physics and math, I think, change your brain quite a bit.
So I would still suggest people to learn as much as they can, either the creative side or physics and math.
Would you encourage your children to go to university?
No.
Why?
I think that by then, I encourage them to learn.
And if university happens to be the way, great.
And if it's not, there might be new ways of doing it that traditional universities that are very stuck on the past don't provide.
Final one.
What do you believe that most around you most vehemently disagree with?
I think what I said before, right, that the value is in growing through the difficulty.
It's not the success.
It's not all the things you thought were important.
You forget very, very quickly.
If I think my career path, when I first went to Microsoft, I thought, oh, my God, I made it.
Nobody cared after that.
But you know, taking care of myself, like you know, health wise, or my friendships, or my family with my mom.
It's much more important because you literally never know what's going to happen.
And I think we are all too much in the milestone game.
And only when you get older, you realize it doesn't make sense, but it's one of those things.
It's very useful.
You're never going to do it when you're younger, and when you're older, it doesn't matter.
I don't know if people will follow that or not.
Dude, I so appreciate you joining me.
I love the way this show didn't actually have an intro.
I don't know if you noticed, but there was a moment at the beginning where I was like this is too good.
I'm just going to keep rolling.
So thank you so much for joining me, man.
My pleasure.
Thank you so much for having me.
My word, I so enjoyed that.
One of my favorite things about doing the show is just the very natural conversations that unfold without the schedule, without planning.
It makes it so much more special.
Fernando was incredible there.
Just loved having him on.
You can find that episode also on Spotify.
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