Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and thinking from first principles | Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health, Cash App)
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cash out as a team, we really cared about what we could do that was different and better than what else existed in market. Being different is not enough because very easy to build a thing that's different from what exists today because you just have to look at what exists and ain't built something else. Being better is not enough because it's also easy to say, hey, I'm going to make this thing better and just charge more money for it. It has to be better than what it's to say in a way that matters to the end user. And for us, for a long time, it was when someone says, hey, why are you better than me? I'll be like, try and send me a dollar that I can use now. And there's only one happy to do it with. Welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Ayo Omangela, Ayo co-created and scaled Squares popular cash cart alongside the hugely popular cash app. He's currently Chief Product Officer at Carbon Health, one of the biggest and fastest growing health tech companies in the world. He's a former founder, he's on the board of Pinwheel, and he's an angel investor in companies like Mercury Bank, FAIR, Modern Treasury, and dozens of other startups. In today's episode, we dig into lessons from building and scaling the cash card and the cash app, the importance of differentiation when you're building a consumer product or any sort of product. How to successfully build a startup within a startup? How to succeed in both FinTech and in HealthTech? Plus, my favorite part of the conversation, a handful of incredibly insightful and practical principles and philosophies around hiring, team building, leadership, and going deep on problems. Ayo is such a fascinating human and leader, and I am excited for you to learn from him. With that, I bring you Ayo Omangela after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Microsoft Clarity, a free, easy-to-use tool that captures how real people are actually using your site. You can watch life session replays to discover where users are breathing through your flow and where they struggle. You can view instant heat maps to see what parts of your page users are engaging with and what content they're ignoring. You can also pinpoint what's bothering your users with really cool frustration metrics, like rage clicks and dead clicks, and much more. If you listen to this podcast, you know how often we talk about the importance of knowing your users, and by seeing how users truly experience your product, you can identify product opportunities, version wins, and find big gaps between how you imagine people using your product and how they actually use it. Microsoft Clarity makes it all possible with a simple yet incredibly powerful set of features. You'll be blown away by how easy Clarity is to use, and it's completely free forever. You'll never run into traffic limits or be forced to upgrade to a paid version. It also works across both apps and websites. Stop guessing, get clarity. Check out [email protected]. This episode is brought to you by Eco. Last month, Eco users earned an average of $84 in cashback rewards. How? With Eco, the future of personal finance. Eco is the update to a misaligned financial system, providing an app that works just like your bank, but removes almost all of the middlemen, helping even the best money optimizers optimize in less time automatically. What if you earn rewards for paying a rent? Or got rewarded for ordering food and shopping online? Or even earn rewards for saving each month? And then imagine if you got rewarded again, just for getting rewarded. With Eco, you can spend at some of your favorite merchants and automatically get 5% cashback, plus Eco's APY rewards look more like $80, not $0.80. And then there are Eco points, the world's first open reward system. You earn them whenever you do almost anything in the Eco app. Eco was working to make these points the most rewarding points ever, so it pays to be early. Sound to get to be true? Go to eco.com/lenny, sign up for an onboarding, and find out why it isn't. Lenny's podcast listeners who attend an eco welcome session will get an exclusive 4% APY on deposits over $1,000. Learn more at eco.com/lenny. That's eco.com/lenny. IO, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. I have a feeling this is going to be a really fun conversation as doing a little research on you ahead of this chat. And I found this interesting thing that you did in the past where I found you answered over 100 questions on Quora about people trying to ship stuff and mail stuff, and I have no idea what's going on there,
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