20Product: Should We Kill the PM Role Entirely | How Does Product Design Change Most in a World of AI | How Do Monzo Build Product Today: What Works, What Does Not | Why Most Product Sucks and What Makes Truly Great Product

Fernando, dude, it's so good to have you on the show. Before we dive into all things product, I just want to start with tennis in your early years. I hear you were fantastic, so can you take me to playing tennis in your early years and how it shaped your mindset on performance and discipline?

I used to do a ton of tennis. I played tennis all my life, six hours a day until I was 17, and then realized I wasn't going to be as good as Federer, whom I got to meet, by the way. That's a different story. I realized that if I'm not number 1, I don't want to play, which is a big mistake, by the way. I've regretted it to this day that I quit playing tennis.

Why?

1. The Mindset Behind Performance

To this day. The sacrifice is what it is. The sacrifice of pushing yourself to find the wall and say, “I'm not good enough,” and then keep going, to me, is not only the best thing for sports; it's the best thing in life.

Because sooner or later in life, when you're doing great, something is going to happen to you. A loved one will have a disease, which is super tough. My father died when I was young. 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. These guys are better”—then you're going to struggle.

Federer wasn't that good, but he was, of course, great. At 16, he wasn't the Federer you know today. But if you look at the levels he reached, it's primarily the mentality, right? Of course, he's talented and all, but they're all talented at that level. It's not like Nadal isn't talented. It's not like Djokovic isn't talented. They're all insanely talented.

If you look at the number 1 players in the world in any sport, it's the mind. Jordan, Federer, Nadal, Ronaldo. You think Messi is chill? They're not chill. They're freaks—competitive. It's all about their own improvement. They see a problem, and they improve.

My son, who's now 8, 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. He doesn't complain. I was always thinking, “I'm not good enough. I don't have the talent. I don't have the money.” It 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?” 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?

Yeah.

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 5 years' time. In 5 years' time, I was managing $200 million with my own fund. Point being, if I'd succumbed to my vision, I would've constrained my ability.

Yeah. Yeah.

My point with you is, 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 is true at work: you own a company, so just make the company better. Make the people work better every day. It's a Kaizen idea: every week is better. That's why I love this weekly review instead of a monthly one. Every week is better. You cannot predict what you're going to be in a year. It compounds 53 times, right? If you do it every day, it compounds 365 times.

If every day you're looking at yourself in sports or health and trying to be better, or at work, the truth is, your vision—whatever you thought you would be—is so far away from where you're going to be in a year or 2 that it's a bit pointless. In tennis, of course, you say, “I want to be number 1,” but when you're 10 years old, what is the point of that? The likelihood is 0.001%. Everybody comes in and says, “You're crazy. Don't do that,” because the likelihood of success is so tiny.

Instead of thinking all of that, it's like, “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 and the passion. What I thought was, how can I be better at helping entrepreneurs every day? People say, “What do you want to be? This?” Who cares?

Do you blame your surroundings for not pushing you more when you were young and impressionable and believed you weren't good enough? Do you believe that your parents should've been the ones saying, “You can, you can, you can. You should”?

To be fair, my mother was super supportive. I didn't have a father at the time, but my mother was super supportive. It was more my fear of not being good enough for her, because it cost a lot of money. She didn't have money. She worked 100 hours a week for no money, and I had to pay for tennis, so I felt guilty. I felt that if I wasn't good enough, it wasn't her—it was me creating the barrier instead of just enjoying it.

But I do believe, of course, that if you look at the most exceptional people, not many come from very stable or amazing backgrounds. I look at founders and see that a lot of them have some issues with their families. They have something to prove, a chip on their shoulder.

Doug Leone always says, “We look for the broken ones, the misadjusted ones.”

Yeah. Among the most exceptional people, you won't find as many who are normal. What you find is that the ones who have good backgrounds are more emotionally stable. If you have a good family, good parents, and you didn't struggle for money, then you're more stable emotionally.

Being stable doesn't mean amazing people have to be crazy, right? Jordan—Michael Jordan—is not a normal person. Elon Musk is not a normal person by any stretch of the imagination. A lot of the founders I've met are exceptional in many, many ways and flawed in many others.

How old were you when your father died?

7.

How did that change you?

2. Wisdom Through Pain

I don't remember much, but it changes everything, truthfully. First of all, you have this beautiful concept of what life is, and then all of a sudden it all falls apart. Your family falls apart. You see your mother crying and struggling.

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? You see both kinds of people in that moment.

You see people who aren't mean. They try, but they have so much going on in their own lives, and they keep doing their own thing. They come maybe the first week or the first 2 weeks or the first month. I'm not saying they're bad. They're not bad at all. They just have their own kids and their own life.

Then you have a very small number of people, I think, who are truly, truly service-oriented. They just want to help, with nothing in it for them. They literally just want to help.

I remember thinking, “I want to be one of those people,” because there are some moments when folks just need some help. In my case, it was my aunts who just helped. There was nothing in it for them. They didn't have money. They just helped.

It was like, “Oh my God, my aunts are amazing. They just want to help.” There's nothing in it for them.

You know, it's not transactional. The other thing that I learned is that wisdom is much stronger in the pain than in the happy moments, right? I think you become much wiser when you go through a difficult moment than when you're happy. I think happiness is something you should enjoy, and it's great, but I don't feel wisdom comes from it, honestly.

I think wisdom truly comes when something bad happens and then you realize, “Oh, shoot, things are not what I thought they would be.” Your values change dramatically. I remember thinking, “Money doesn't have any meaning. Who cares about money at that time?” 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, right? I have that discussion with my wife all the time. I don't want them to go to private school, and she does. Of course, they're going to private school because she wants to.

I said 2 should go to private school and 2 should go to public school because I really pushed for it, and she's not happy with it. So I'm pretty sure they're going to have all 4 go to private school soon. But my little son, Adrian, goes to public school, and one day he got beat up because, in public school, nobody cares, right? My wife's like, “Oh.” I'm like, “Fine, he got beat up.” I think he stood up clean and dealt with it the next day. It was, “What is the big deal? You're going to get beat up sooner or later.”

I think as long as there's no anxiety, that's fine. Anxiety about money is not good—anxiety about whether you have enough food for next month, where you live, or whether you have enough for rent. I don't think that's good for kids, so just stay away from that. But the rest of it, I don't want them to eat sushi, right? I don't want them to take a taxi. What's the point? Take a bus. This is not a big deal.

Then, when you take a taxi, you're like, “Oh, I'm in a taxi.” When you have sushi, it's like, “Ah, I have sushi.” Life is all about that kind of staircase. I met a lot of folks with a lot of money who just don't appreciate anything.

It's funny. My mother asked me on a walk the other day, “Can you name anything that gets worse with money? Anything at all?” I came back and said, “Yes. One thing: family.”

Oh, yeah.

I know many billionaires. I know no happy billionaire families.

It is tough.

I know many more poor people who are much happier.

Yeah. Argentina has very strong family ties, right? There are no wealthy people, so everybody's helping each other. I like it. It's very Italian.

3. When Founders Stop Leading

You mentioned that crazy and outlier people are often founders. A lot of CEOs, like your TS at Monzo, are not crazy. Is there a point where the crazy is no longer a good CEO?

That's a great question, actually. If somebody has started something from zero and you're a startup, you basically want to do something that goes against reality, in a sense. Nobody thought about it before. Most people tell you, “You're crazy. It's not going to work,” right?

If you tell 10 people your idea, 9 tell you, “Really? That's not that smart.” Then you go through an insane amount of pain. I don't think people realize it. I'm a founder, not as successful as these guys, but we have a company that got acquired by Microsoft. We went there, and then I had another company. So I tried many times, with mild success, I'll say.

I don't think people have any clue about the level of pain that you put yourself through. Sometimes I say being a founder is like choosing to have a kid, and you don't know if it's going to live or die, right? That's a very dramatic way of saying it, because a lot of folks see the company as being close to their child. You have friends in the cap table and early employees who put their life and trust in you.

I see all these founders really struggle, mostly on their own. I don't think people get how much they struggle. When the company gets to a certain size, I think you want somebody who is a bit more risk-averse, which is not a bad thing. You want to protect the value and be a little steadier in the ways you improve things. That's 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 in front of them.

Sure.

But would you say you have founder DNA as a person?

I would like to think of myself as a founder, right? That's definitely the highest aspiration. Those are the people that I admire the most, outside of Roger Federer and guys like that, because I love sports. I don't think it's that different, actually. I think they're founders of themselves.

I tried being a founder, and over time I realized I have kids. I know that the first couple of years of starting a company are incredibly painful. Finding product-market fit looks very sexy on paper. In reality, I don't think people realize you're 2 or 3 years in with nothing. Some days you feel like you're the worst, most stupid person on the planet. It's not fun.

I've done it at Kärvy, which is the Brazilian company, and I've done it in my first company as well. I remember that in my first company, sometimes I didn't have money for the bus, so I had to sneak onto the bus. It's no fun, right? 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, we're finding product-market fit.” It wasn't even a term back then. You would say, “Well, we're starting, we're trying.” You don't make any money. You feel like the worst. You truly do. Your ego is negative.

But I still think it's maybe the most valuable thing a person can do. Imagine how boring the world would be without founders. If Lloyds were still the most important bank in the UK, that wouldn't be fun, right? Monzo's much more fun and exciting than that. The same goes for all the new companies.

4. AI Reshapes Product Building

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 ARR in a year, has the quest for product-market fit changed, do you think?

I think it does. We were just at Property Finder using a lot of AI tools to prototype, testing them and putting them in front of users literally in a day. I think it's much easier, because a lot of companies used to fail even just to put something meaningful together.

That's interesting. What are you doing? What tools are you using, and how are you using them?

You use either Lovable, Replit, or Auth.0, I think is the latest one from Y Combinator. There are tools that you use for prototyping, and some have better code output than others.

What we realized is that now we want the prototyping tool whose code output is closest to what our team actually uses internally. The designer gives it back to the engineer and says, “Can you reverse-engineer this so we can put it live?”

I think we just changed the agent page on Property Finder in a week or 2, and it started literally with a Lovable design. Then we sent it back, and the engineer said, “No, can you use another tool? The code isn't great for us.” So we tried another tool, sent them the output of that tool, and they used that to reverse-engineer it.

If you think about it, before, you had an idea or a concept, and a lot of people even failed to put anything meaningful in front of a user to learn their reaction. I think that problem goes away, and a lot more people will be able to test things easily and cheaply.

Do you think you lose design at that stage? If you think about mockups, for example, as a core—

Yeah.

Do you actually just skip that entirely and go straight to prototyping?

We're seeing a little bit of that.

Yeah.

Right? But the exciting thing for me is that the designers were super passionate about it. If you're mission-oriented, you just want to—Jaws famously said, “Make a dent in that area,” right?

At Property Finder, we're going to make a dent in property and fintech in the region. We're going to change how it's done. If everybody anchors on that concept, whether you do the design or not, or AI does it for you, who cares? It's literally the journey toward the superior solution that makes a difference in the industry and in the people that you care about.

I found that designers are super happy to embrace that, and a smaller number are second-guessing it. They're asking, “Where 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 fewer engineers in 5 years' time?

I remember when I was at Microsoft, even 20 years ago, I used to do so many boring things, like copying code and unit testing. I always thought, “Man, I was paid quite well even back then. I honestly thought, ‘I am overpaid.’”

I used to work with Bjarne Stroustrup. I don't know if you know him. He was the inventor of C++, which used to be in .NET back in the day.

I went to one of his presentations, and he was not being overpaid, right? I mean, the level of abstraction he used to think at—languages, metalanguages, runtime compilers—it was like seeing Van Gogh painting. It made me think, “Oh, I’m grossly overpaid. I don’t know how much they pay him, but he’s underpaid.”

I think everything should move in that direction. There should be fewer people who are just doing mundane things, and hopefully creativity will work more together with it. If it’s something repetitive, it will go away, right? So, in sheer numbers, I think there will be more amazing engineers in the new world who do impactful things, but the sheer amount might be less.

Do you think product teams change meaningfully in their structure?

Yeah, everything changes. I always thought of engineering teams, or teams in general, as: you just put together the team that you need to be successful. In some cases, it’s only engineers. In some cases, maybe it’s only data people. In some cases, it’s 10 engineers, 1 product person, and 1 designer.

People always tell me, “Oh, in Microsoft it was more engineers and fewer product managers,” or the other way around. Well, it depends on the problem you’re trying to solve, right? If you have the requirement that everybody has to code and that adds value to the solution, then you don’t have product managers. Now, hiring product managers makes sense. Why? Because you’re relieving yourself from that constraint. Not everybody has to know how to code in production.

Do you think we have PMs in 5 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 teams become smaller, more productive, and more cross-functional, right? So everybody does a bit of a prototype. Everybody looks at the code. A PM is creative.

If a PM is like the connective fabric between different product functions—

I don’t think that’s a PM.

Okay, what is a PM?

We had a very simple rule in Microsoft: if you know how to play chess and play guitar, you will be a great PM. It’s the creative side together with the analytical side. Chess is a great proxy for analytical capability, and playing an instrument is an amazing proxy for creativity.

I always saw PMs as kind of the best combination of that, right? If you grab 3 or 4 engineers, some of whom don’t tend to be creative, this person can really make that team go up 1 notch in creativity. I never saw PMs as the ones who do the backlog. That, I think, is a European thing, in my opinion. I never saw it that way in Microsoft.

It was somebody who didn’t have to code all the time. In Microsoft, everybody knew how to code, but you didn’t have to. So you could spend more time with customers. You could let your brain go out a bit more into the stratosphere and think creatively, while engineers were fixing bugs and doing all the hard work.

I don’t think that goes away. But, 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 that some of them cannot put together a team to build something decent. Others put together a team, but they don’t have the capital. That’s not enough. The third, and the most common to me, is that a lot of them don’t care enough, right?

Maybe they think you fix the product once, and then you never change it. Or you fix the product and think, “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 companies will create their own internal products, 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 that is valuable—

Totally.

—you know, it’s not core to what you do, why would you do it?

And so they build, and they don’t think to improve it often enough.

A product in itself should always be moving, right? The phone of 2 years ago is not the phone today. That’s why I love this example. I was telling him about this phone from London. You could have argued that the iPhone was done 2 or 3 years ago. And this guy from Nothing Phone came in, and he was 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 about phone users again and thought about a better experience. Nothing is good enough, right? It’s never good enough. This “good enough” concept, to me, is a very negative one.

What do you think is great design?

Well, Monzo definitely has great design. Our chief designer is, I think, one of those creative, brilliant people. When you meet her, you just know. There are some people you meet and you know they think differently. In the case of Monzo, at least, it was that connection to emotion.

Is simple always better?

I’m not sure. I love WHOOP, the device. I don’t think the UX is simple at all. But in that case, you want to draw the person into the complexity, right? You want them to get into the details.

I don’t think simple is always better, but unnecessarily complex is definitely not the solution. I like WHOOP because I think it’s complex with a purpose. It’s trying to draw you in to understand how your body works and what you should do.

5. Trust Over Shipping Speed

Do you think beautiful design and speed of execution are at odds? What I mean by that is, you’re right: Monzo is a beautifully designed product. But at the same time, Revolut outshipped the shit out of Monzo on new products.

Yeah, we’ll get into that part. No, I don’t think so. I think it’s different, and I don’t know the Revolut example that well. But Monzo, in my opinion—and from the outside now—is the most principled company I’ve ever seen.

Why?

They’re principled, right? When I came in, it was a little more traditional: “Let’s ship things, and let’s not break things, but ship things and learn and iterate over time,” and improve it.

I think they look at it more in terms of trust and emotion, and only do things when they can truthfully back them up 100% and are so proud of the solution. I think banking has an extra value, right? Some of the products are not built for you and me. They want to trade some weird thing or a meme coin.

It’s really about people’s financial lives, and most people really don’t have that much money. I’m not saying most people in general. With a 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 is: imagine that you should be able to cross-sell anything you want in any product you make. You should be able to cross-sell any product and be very proud of what you’re selling. Now imagine, in a banking scenario, that you want to cross-sell something to any user, and some of these users are mothers with 2 kids who are struggling to find a job.

Would you cross-sell all the things that some other competitors have? Would you cross-sell meme coins and stuff like that? I wouldn’t. If you put that bar at not failing even 1 customer and not doing something that’s not in their best interest, I think the bar for what a principled 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 for 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 that bar really high. What doesn’t meet it, somebody else will offer.

You will find a lot of financial tools or toys that you can buy meme coins with all over the internet.

But I think it’s arrogant not to 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.

It’s one way of looking at it. Yeah.

Does product change when you’re building with trust as a paramount principle? If you think about the different products you’ve worked on, which is an amazing variety—a Just Eat versus a Monzo, or even a Rappi versus a Monzo—as you said, trust is at the center with Monzo, versus a Rappi, where it’s not so much at the center. Is it?

No, it’s true. Every product is different, right? There are products that have a high emotional connection and a high level of trust, and that’s the product itself.

If you think about it, what is a bank, right? A bank manages risk. The financial system of Europe or the UK has a regulator. Banks are a part of it. The money is with the banks, right? It’s not anywhere else. So the whole idea is that you manage risk. Of course, you manage risk in a very compelling and smart way.

That’s what banks are in the end, right? Monzo was the first and maybe only one that said, “We’re going to do that, be good for customers, 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: a bank that is a win-win for people. It was such a novel concept, right? Which is amazing to think about.

In the food delivery space, which I’d done before, you just want the food to get there on time, be hot, and, if there’s a problem, get your money back. It’s simpler, right? It’s just food. But it has aspects of trust as well, right? You have to have folks with good hygiene and all the things. So there’s always a quality component, but I think there are levels, for sure.

6. Building For The Mission

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 core—it’s a distraction”?

Two things. First, the mission. 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 are a lot of things to think about in 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 financially sustainable, 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 it might not work—for the mission? As simple as that.

That’s how I think about it, at least. If it’s truly worth pursuing to fulfill the mission, I would like to try it at small scale first, right? Because scale comes later and profitability comes later. Try it and just see what the users say. Is it as meaningful for the users as we thought it would be? If it is, then you scale it.

So let the users make the decision. I try to let the users make the decision as often as I can. I 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. To make the first decision, just go after the mission. 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 a new product build, how do you think about the effectiveness of dictatorship—“No, we’re not doing that”—versus the importance of having discussion?

Wow, that’s a great point. I would agree more with 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 3 hours about it? Very low compared to building anything.

What I always like to tell people is, “Well, look, if anybody disagrees, let’s sit down and I’ll talk to you the entire weekend.” 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 just want to be listened to, right? Sometimes, really, the conversation is the value—the intelligence you’re creating throughout the conversation.

I think the most amazing thing is the opposite. A lot of people make decisions or don’t talk about it at all. So what’s the point in that, really? What is the quality of a decision if you don’t lay at least 2 opposing views out to have a conversation? And what is the cost of speaking in a group for 3 hours for a new product? Like, zero. It’s nothing. The developers will go and spend a month building it.

I like to think it’s always a sport, right? I’m a big fan of the All Blacks and the famous rules of the All Blacks. I do think, to me, the best way to run any company is really close to what the best sports teams do, right? All the rules that the All Blacks have are 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—is different from being a dictatorship.

You said, “Let users guide you.” How do you think about the Henry Ford quote, “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 them telling you what to do. It’s putting it in front of them and letting them try it. Let’s see if the impact on their life is as big as you thought it would be.

In the case of Henry Ford, I’m pretty sure at one moment he gave the car to somebody and they loved it. Get somebody to drive the car as quickly as you can. Back then, you needed those visionaries because building a Model T 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, right? And see. They’ll 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 are a lot of products we launched in Carview or in Rappi that we thought were going to be amazing and didn’t land.

What at Rappi did you think would be amazing that wasn’t?

The super-app concept that we can do this and that and that—it’s so awesome. And people are like, “Well, I can use 3 different apps for it and I’m fine.” I think we were missing the glue between them.

I still see a lot of super apps making that mistake. Again, most likely Rappi has fixed this by now. If you make 3 experiences that are not connected, the fact that they’re 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, then, knowing all that you know now?

The way I think about it now is that whatever experience you add should improve the retention of the whole. Let’s say you’re doing, I don’t know, Bolt or any of these guys. You’re doing mainly taxis, and then you’re adding food. Careem does this as well, and many others.

You keep adding stuff, right? Because you want to get more output from those users 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 has to be good enough for the experience to be additive to the platform instead of subtracting. You say, “I use it for a taxi and now I order groceries. Oh my God, why didn’t I do this before? I should have always done this before.”

It shouldn’t be like, “That was a bit crap.” Nobody gives you a prize 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 say, “Look, all the things we can do. Look at me.” And the user’s like, “Good for you,” but it 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, but it’s hard to estimate if you’re in a niche or if you’re in a big market. For me, it was a bit the opposite.

In the case of Monzo, it was when we did this one cent campaign at the end of the year. If you enroll, you have one cent the first day, two cents the second day, three cents the third day, and it’s £600 by the end of the year. It’s an automated way of saving, right? And we had 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?

In my opinion, and this is my own assessment, when you do something that has a few things together, one is that it’s something the users feel is good for them, right? It’s truly a good habit to create, like going to the gym.

Then you do something to help them break the laziness they had about doing it. For example, they didn’t want to save because it was 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 do something that’s 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 actually do it. You know, like your trainer goes and says, “Do this exercise every day, and it’s good for you.” And then 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: wow, it can be so much more impactful than whatever the numbers predicted because of that emotional component, when you’re seeing somebody that’s truly helping you to be better.

Do you think about how to bring emotion into product?

Yeah, all the time.

You do?

All the time.

How do you do that? 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 very much about 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 equivalent of haptic feedback when something's good for you, right? Monzo was a famous case of the things that pop up. All these kinds of things are telling you it's a good thing for you—immediate feedback.

One thing that I always notice with traditional fintechs—I don't know if you've seen it. You know, I won't name them, but the classic thing is, you get an email and you're afraid. “Is it fraud? It's not fraud. They want my money. What is it?” Right? Everything—the tonality of it is off. The messaging is off. It's for them, not for me. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

They want me to do something for them, not for me. And, of course, at Property Finder now and at Monzo before, it's the opposite. Clearly, the emotion is always, “We're here for you.” 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. Let's say you stop training for a month. I come back and say, “Let's get back on the horse.” So there's always positive feedback. I think Whoop, again, does a good job of that. It doesn't hit you in the head: “You haven't slept yesterday.” I know, right? I have 4 kids. I haven't slept. But it's like, “Oh, if you do 3 hours today, you're going to be back on track.” It's always that kind of emotional support, to some extent, because we're emotional beings in the end.

7. Running Weekly Reviews

I think you mentioned fitness there 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 of what they took into Rappi a few years ago, right? I learned a lot from them. 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.” Do you remember the classic startup? “There's one thing we can do, and only one thing.” It's classic. The founder says it, and everybody does it, and you feel like a rock star.

Then you have a corporation, and they manage by proxy, right? 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 Excel sheets with prioritization, which I never do, and all these proxies.

A WBR is: What are the 10 or 20 things that matter to meet your objectives? Who is responsible, which is called DRI—direct responsible individual? That's the actual person doing it. It's not the executive three levels up. It's the person who knows what they're talking about, and then they will write what's happening, why it's happening, and what we're doing about it.

If one of the things is red, what is our job? Help them. It's not hitting them in the head, which is the other thing I dislike. Corporations will spend years hitting somebody on the head and then say, “Oh, it's not good. Let's fire them and bring somebody back.” Then 10 years pass and nobody's accountable. Everybody's accountable, right? So if it's red, it's my fault, the CFO's fault, the CEO's fault. It's everybody's fault.

Do you not want one person—

To help them.

—to feel more accountable?

Well, the DRI obviously will feel more accountable, but it's not. It's always a 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 and... It's like Ian, Nick from Revolut.

Yeah.

I love Nik. I think he's a great leader. There are different ways of leadership, by the way.

Yeah.

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?

I think the truly super 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 know Nik as well, if I'm honest. I think what Revolut has done and what Monzo have done are both 0.111% on the success.

People say Monzo has too nice a culture.

That's a bad thing. If that's a word they say about Monzo, then it's a good thing.

But it's intellectual and nice. It's comfy.

No, I get it. Look, I worked in investment banking at 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, high goals, and high ambition. I don't imagine Toni Nadal saying to Rafael Nadal, “Dude, I'm gonna make you fear that you're gonna 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, the harshest critics they are. I do believe the company itself should set a high bar for the company, right? But I just don't believe in hitting people 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, the US was a very individualistic country, right? You always think, “Oh, I can do whatever I want. It's just up to me. If I work hard enough, if I study hard enough...” Argentina is much more of a communal thing, right? It's what we do, right? It's everybody together.

So when I moved to the US, I felt, “Oh, no, they're right. It's all about me and what I can do.” 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 to the gym, study, work hard, so that I can contribute more to the team.

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 this idea that we live in a vacuum is a bit naive. It's nice to feel it in your 20s, because you feel like that. In your early 30s, you would feel like that, too. We all feel like we can save the world on our own, right? Then when you get older, you realize that you depend on many more factors and people, 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 grab what you're doing and try to raise it. Now, if a company's doing 8×, you want to see what that next level is in the product, in the energy of the individuals.

You feel people who are motivated and energized, whose heads are going like crazy, and who are doing things on the weekend because they want to, not because you're forcing them. You see it, right? Then magic happens a little bit, and we've all been part of teams like that. In a small team, you're like, “Something magical is happening here.”

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?

There's this beautiful phrase: no effort goes wasted. If you work really hard, work a lot with customers, ship something, and it didn't work, you learned. 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 Monzo, and what did you learn?

Pretty much most of the things we've done at Monzo have always been successful.

Really?

I can't think of one myself. You have to invite somebody else to tell you. But honestly, I cannot think of one.

Do you think you tried enough, then?

Should I TS 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 neobank experience in any country. Personally, I'm biased, of course, but better than Nubank in Brazil and better than Revolut in the UK.

Obviously, it's just in 1 country now, but when the world sees it, I still believe it's the best proposition out there, personally.

Do you think Monzo will be a $100 billion company?

I hope so. I don't see a reason why not, but time will tell. Too many variables to judge.

Do you believe the future of banking, in that case, will be very few neobanks that rule across continents, or will we continue to see regionalized winners?

I'm not the bank expert here, but there are a lot of steps to get to the level of Monzo, Revolut, or Nubank.

It's not easy. It's not easy to get the scale, to be so savvy with regulators, processes, and 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 and apathy in some cases. How do product teams slow down?

I don't know about product teams, but I think risk aversion is a real thing.

What's that? Risk aversion?

No, risk. Risk aversion.

Ah, risk aversion.

Risk aversion, right, is a case where the more you have, the more you have to lose. In startups, you have nothing. You see this in big companies—a $100 billion company, a $40 billion 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, right?

You say, “It's okay to fail. Let's go fucking big.”

Yeah. And you put processes in place to ensure—look, banks cannot fail, right? So it's a different definition of failure, but you have to draw the line to say that we need to define what the future is, right? The future is not the same as now. You have to do something different. So it's a bit more about not being content with 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? What I mean specifically by that is, you mentioned Lovable earlier. Fantastic product, amazing outputs. The quality is determined by the quality of the model. When Claude 4 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 or Q4.” Does the world of product change in that way?

Well, I think there have always been platforms like LLMs now. 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 Web Services together, and I don't think we've seen that; you have to go back many years to feel that way.

A product depends on iOS, right, for the experience. You know, if you use their Face ID, the face recognition. So there's always that platform angle that hopefully elevates everybody, and iOS did that, right? There are a lot of things you could do with iOS that you couldn't do on the web, and that's why everybody moved toward the native app experience. Remember, it was a big thing a few years ago—

Mm.

—or 10 years ago. The same with the cloud, right? The cloud initially was always 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 that OpenAI 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, and it's the right thing to do because you couldn't do it on your own. You cannot build OpenAI, the LLM model, on your own.

So I don't think it's a dichotomy in that sense. I believe that the question will be, can you add enough value that there is value on 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 would ask them—and I don't know—is, what are you actually doing? What are you actually doing? Is it user experience? Is it learning? Is it fine-tuning? It doesn't seem to be a thing anymore. So what is it? What's the secret sauce, and why do users prefer Lovable versus Cursor or all the new ones that will pop up? There will have to be something.

8. Hiring Product People

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.

Mm.

If I start with your advice to me, you're an angel in my company. Number 1, what questions do I ask in a product interview? What do you want to know?

I can feel it almost right away, right?

Why? What do you feel?

I think the first thing I look at is that they have to have a little light in their eyes, ideally. There are some people who have no light in their eyes, almost no excitement. I do want to see some sort of creativity and the light of excitement about what you can build. For a good product manager, I think you need to have that.

Then you want to check the creative side, right? And then you want to check the analytical side, very simply, which is just making sure that they're not purely a crazy creative, right? You want some of them, but they also need to be able to break down a problem in steps, the way consulting has done it for many, many years. Can they abstract? Are they 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. A crazy creative and a mathematician make more sense because you can glue them together more easily, right? With ChatGPT and all the other tools. 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 in the first few years at Microsoft, if I'm honest. But I do believe you need to be able to communicate your thoughts, right? Writing is always the best test. If you cannot write a one-pager, which is what I get my folks to do—just write a one-pager: what you're doing, why, and what the plan is—and if you cannot do that, now ChatGPT can do it for you, but you should be able to articulate your thoughts, ideally, right?

You have to communicate to the engineers and the designers. 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 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 that great leaders are able to bring people along with them for a journey. Where are you not great as a leader?

Yeah, I'm married with 4 kids, so you know, it's a long conversation.

I'm not asking your wife. I'm asking you.

It would be a whole day of the podcast. I think, personally, being fully honest, I have ADHD, very clearly. Very, very clearly. I think I'm more accepting of it now, but 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 left the room 2 minutes before it finished.” And I have no recollection of myself doing that, right? Or somebody says hi, and you didn't say hi back, and I have no recollection of seeing that person. Or forgetting something, for example.

What I noticed about ADHD is people take it very personally because it's emotional. When you say, “I didn't remember it,” they think it's bullshit because, like, if it was important, you would remember it. So it was really hard before because people don't understand. They think it's bullshit when you are telling them, “No, I truly forgot.”

And so now I think you try to be more open because, in the end, there is no value in hiding things, right? So you say, “Look, I forgot, and I left the meeting 2 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.

In the end, the more honest you are, the better. I have more confidence in myself now. When you're younger, you're trying to 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 more honest I am, the better.

I can't remember who said it. I can't remember if it was Jony 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. One of the ones I've thought about a lot was the opportunity to join Mercado Libre 14 years ago. I was in a really good position. I got to meet Marcos, and I thought, “This is an amazing team, the best team I've ever seen.” They were from Stanford—smart, driven, with a great culture in Argentina. I was like, “My God, this is the best job ever.”

It just didn't work out because, at that time, I still wanted my family to be in the US or Europe. I said no, and obviously I thought it would be successful. I remember I bought 14 years ago for $15,000—$50,000 or something, or, I know, 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? 40×.

I also wish I had 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? Say, 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. Everything that cannot achieve scale struggles to monetize, of course, right? You could argue Twitter could be more aggressive at monetizing, if you wish. So I think there's always a...

If a great product is there, I would argue it should be a good investment unless the value is just for society. I struggle to think of one, to be honest. Maybe something too niche, like Nothing. I really hope these guys 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 Property Finder.

Yeah.

How important is it that they—hey, within 30 seconds, they get value—versus, “No, no, no, we will get a questionnaire, we'll understand them, and we will create a curated experience for them”?

Yeah.

“But we need to understand them first.”

I think time to value is super important, right? I think it's important because people are quite lazy, and not in a bad way. What I'm saying is, you have a purpose, a reason to use it. We obsess about our products, right? You obsess about your company. I obsess about Rappi, Monzo, and Property Finder. I think about them all the time.

But 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, and you can 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, right? I think the mistake is not building from it. You know what I mean?

When I have your attention, 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 the need of the customer. What I mean by that is Noom—I don't know if you know Noom, the weight-loss management app, which is one of the most successful weight-loss apps. They provide curated diets, 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 consumer need.

It pays off. Obviously, what they will have is a funnel with much more drop-off among very engaged users, right? So it might actually work.

I think Whoop is similar, to use the same example. It takes 7 days to see any result, right? It takes 7 days to build the advice, let's say, the baseline. But they do a really good job getting you there. To your point, you're feeling, “Oh, okay, it's worth the wait,” right?

People don't like Whoop for the reliability.

Yeah. Look, I'm not trying to sell Whoop here.

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—

Mm.

—amazing athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo—

Yeah.

—but also my mom, and me, and just normal people?

It's a great product. And you have to, again, get the Cristiano in each one of us, right? So what is it that relates to you that will make you make that investment?

So my question is, how do you create a product for power users—

Yeah.

—that can also be for more normal users?

There are 2 opposite things. First, you said that if you have 50 questions and deliver the answer, clearly you're going through a segment of people who will put down that effort. As they're going through it, they like the depth of what you're going through.

It's similar to going to a doctor. There's one who comes very casually and says, “Oh, you're fine,” and leaves, and you're like, “They didn't even know what I had.” Another one takes the time to really ask you questions about your life and your private life. You react well to the latter because for you it's very, very important. So you're looking for that, actually.

To some extent, the product is the questionnaire. The fact that they're taking the time to ask you 50 questions is kind of the product, because when you meet a great mentor and can see they invest time in you, you really care about it. You really like the fact that they're asking deep questions. So I think it's part of the product itself to go through 50 questions.

Sure, but forgetting the questionnaire onboarding for now...

Yeah.

How do you create products that amazing product lovers will love as well as everyone? There will be Property Finder users, and there will be people who have 50 properties—

Yeah.

—and know everything about property buying.

Yeah.

And you need to create a great product for them, and for me, moving to Dubai for the first time and buying my first house in Dubai.

It's a very difficult problem to solve, right? What I think people confuse sometimes is the argument that you fulfill the needs of the hardcore customer, and you don't really have to do much more. They're already there. 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.

The way I think about it is, let's say you're deep in property management. It's part of your persona, your personality. So what do you do? “Oh, you know, I have 10 properties and I manage them.” You feel really good about yourself.

If you have a person who just wants to do one, you still have to get them into that journey. The great products do this. You buy one, and they say, “Hey, you did it.” Duolingo does this, right? The person who first starts at rank number whatever still doesn't know anything about the language, but they make you feel like you're in that journey, right?

You can become the person who can say, “I speak 5 languages.” You can visualize yourself: “Oh, I speak 2 languages now. If I only continue doing Duolingo for the next, who knows, 1 year or 2 years...” So I think that journey applies to both.

The error is to give the experience that's super complex to the person who's just getting started, right? So it's progressive, right? There's a concept of progressive onboarding. I think the progressive experience is an important one.

Unless you want to shut them down, in which case you should be very opinionated about it: “I don't care about the casual person who goes to Dubai and just really wants one property.” That's a bit like your example before. You just don't want the casual user. There's no way the casual user will put in the effort of somebody who manages 50 properties. But if I want to get them into that journey, I need to give them a taste of what that feels like.

9. Product Cultures Decay From Within

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 kind of—

Yeah.

—the next-generation provider in many respects.

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 ask me now, right? If you pick somebody in Rappi, iFood, or Mercado Libre, the energy and passion of those people is, in my experience, 2 or 3X greater.

Wow.

You see it. It's not just a culture because Brazilians are happier people. But I think it's a mix of being proud and humble, and appreciating the opportunity more. You know what I mean? In Latin America, you don't have that many opportunities to be in a company like that.

You see that the people who are there have the T-shirt on. They're so proud of that company. What you don't realize is the effort. Companies decay, or products decay, because the interest wanes from within. The passion to make the effort, to do the really difficult things to fix it—nobody cares anymore.

If nobody's looking at your performance management, you cannot replace that with passion. Then you see the other team: they're passionate, they want to be the best, and they're proud of what they do. They know that they're so grateful for the opportunity to be in Mercado Libre, iFood, or Rappi.

That is a different motivator. They love it. They're 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 find it a lot in Europe or in the UK. “What is my title? How many people do I manage?” That's clearly the wrong proxy.

Because instead of the passion for what you're doing, it's, “Okay, I have a title and a jump in my career. I get a bit more of a salary and...”

The UK.

At least you’ve seen LatAm, you’ve seen Dubai now, and you’ve seen Europe.

You’re going to get in trouble. You can’t generalize, right? There are people here who were at crazy and amazing companies and so forth. On average, obviously, the joke is that it’s a beautiful continent—Spain, the south of France—and people like to enjoy it, and I think it’s been a bit wealthier. The difference is Latin America has been third world for many, many years, and there aren’t 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, right? 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 that whether it’s education, all the services—education or healthcare—or where you live, it’s 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 from people to get out of that situation.

I think in Europe, it’s a bit more—the delta is not so strong, right? It’s always like, “Oh, I’m doing well. If I put in 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 is that 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 SkipTheDishes, which is a company we bought at Just Eat with great founders who are now at Neo Financial, was so good because they did it in Manitoba, in Canada. I remember we bought the company because nobody was able to travel there from anywhere else, because nobody got on the plane, which 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 had thought through every single little cranny of the onboarding experience for partners and drivers at the time. And I think it’s true: it was the best we’d 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 anyway.

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.

Totally.

I haven’t seen it myself.

When you look at Dubai in 10 years, is it a financial technology center as they plan, or is it a Miami, which is a fleeting place for taxes? What does Dubai look like in 10 years?

Look, I’ve only been there for 2 months, so big caveat. But I think it’s much more than Miami. I think the energy, how progressive the government is, and the plans for the future—to me, it’s like a city that is, or a country that is, a startup, right? The customers are the people who want to live there.

I think I mentioned before, when you go to get your license, it’s a happiness center. I don’t know anybody in any other country where you go to get a license and it feels like a happiness experience. And I love it because I’m one of the people who thinks everything is a product. We’re all users of a product, and I think pretty much everything is a product, with few exceptions.

A 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 a country? And they seem incredibly self-aware of that and treat you as a customer and make sure that the experience is truthfully delightful.

And they’re always thinking—for, again, 2 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. It’s always, “The future is better than the past,” which to me is mainly the only reason to be alive, right? It’s like… And you don’t see it everywhere.

The future’s 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.

10. What Matters Beyond Success

Dude, I want to ask you a quick-fire. I’ll say a short statement, you give me your thoughts. Does that sound okay?

Yeah.

Which product most recently was a wow consumer moment for you? For me, Duolingo.

Duolingo.

The beauty of haptics for them and how they integrate that—the vibrations with new levels.

There’s something about the kids, right? Because these 2 products… Like Duolingo, my daughter is a fanatic of it, and she learned Spanish much better than I could ever have taught her, and I know Spanish. My son is a fanatic of nothing, right? And then you think, okay, why do the kids react so well to this?

And there has to be something about them being less biased toward the past, more open to true innovation. I remember my daughter bugs me to give her the phone for Duolingo so she doesn’t miss the streak. She’s like, “Dad, I cannot miss my streak. I’m number 3. My friend is number 5, and she’s number 7.” And she drives me crazy until I give her the phone and let her do it.

And my son drove me crazy to get him the phone. I believe that they are less biased, and they can experience amazing products sooner than us because we’re 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.

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, you can’t compare them truthfully. You can’t. They’re so different.

If you could invest in one.

Oh, I think Simon is one of a kind, for sure. In Latin America, there aren’t many people like him.

What’s your biggest parenting advice? My brother just had a new baby—well, his first baby. What would you advise him, having his first?

Oof. I can really talk about this one. First, 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 turn out, or how they’re going to behave, or their personality. 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. 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’re… You know, I’m hiring a lot of grads now, right, at 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 the 3 or 4 years—

Does the value of a CS degree go up or down?

I think physics, to me, always goes up.

Physics?

Yeah, I’ve always felt that way. Even for CS, right? I always felt that physics and math are the cornerstones of computer science. JavaScript is great, but I don’t feel that… I think that’s an implementation of something. Whereas physics and math, I think, change your brain quite a bit. So I would still suggest people 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 would 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, which are very stuck in the past, don’t provide.

Final one. What do you believe that most people around you vehemently disagree with?

I think what I said before, right? That the value is in growing through the difficulty. It’s not success. It’s not… All the things you thought were important, you forget very, very quickly.

If I think about my career path, when I first went to Microsoft, I thought, “Oh my God, I made it.” Nobody cared after that. But taking care of myself, health-wise, or my friendships, or my family, with my mom, is 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 do 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, so 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 gonna keep rolling.”

Yeah.

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.