🧵💀 As @pmarca says “There is no substitute for knowing what you’re doing.”
I’m convinced that most product managers / designers have no idea what to build and have instead created a bunch of process to mask this failure. I count myself in this group at times in my career 👇🏽
So there are just two types of projects. Projects where a person who Knows What To Build tells you and everyone builds it. And projects where you have to hit a metric and it doesn’t matter what you build as long as you hit it. Let’s call them Type 1 and Type 2 projects.
Jul 29, 2021 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Yep, we just invested in @ArcBoats the "Tesla for Boats". Why?
- Repeat founders + team from SpaceX, TSLA & Boeing
- Electric is a 10x for every part of boating: no maintenance, cheaper, quicker, and unlocks access to protected waters
-Aerospace design practices & A+ software
👇🏽
When I learned that two of the best engineers from Credit Karma (Mitch Lee) and SpaceX (Ryan Cook) were teaming up to build the "Telsa of boats", I was intrigued to say the least. Today, say hello to Arc Boats: arcboats.com
Apr 28, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
1/n Financial services are often though of as a zero sum game - there's a fixed pie and therefore “winning” is finding clever ways to take a bigger piece of it.
But the intersection of tech and finance has actually been characterized by positive sum outcomes - a bigger pie!
2/n Let's talk about negative sum (where both parties are worse off as a result) v. zero sum (where one party must lose so that another can win) v. positive sum (both parties are better off) situations in financial services, and why the fintech approach is so important.
Feb 26, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
💥 New post today on three key lessons I learned at @Creditkarma in moving from a generalist consumer internet PM to a specialized consumer fintech PM: a16z.com/2020/02/26/fin…
Lesson 1: Segment users based on credit, income, or another financial attribute that can be instrumented and targeted. In a world where everyone’s financial choices are deeply personal PMs need some way to simplify and group consumers + target in AB tests.
Oct 18, 2019 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
1/5 Though there may be some discussion to be had on long term market dynamics for Neobanks, perspectives like this seem to miss the point. It’s not about neobanks having better underwriting or technology per se:
qz.com/1728419/point-…2/5 I believe Neobanks will acquire customers by redistributing profit pools like overdraft ($32bn/year) back to consumers, which incumbents will struggle to match b/c it’s short term profit destroying for them (thus hard to prioritize internally).
Sep 24, 2019 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Customer acquisition has never been harder and many of us product-oriented founders have struggled here - it’s rare to have a superpower around customer acquisition *and* product craft. If you’re thinking about this here are five ideas to chew on: a16z.com/2019/09/24/how…
Payroll - Being in the flow of payroll makes it seamless to support products like earned wage advance and robo-saving as well as makes extending loans less risky (less risk of default when payments are automatically deducted from the paycheck).
Mar 3, 2019 • 15 tweets • 9 min read
@dlprager@davidu I have a million thoughts here which are probably best discussed over a coffee and whiteboard, but here are a few things to chew on:
@dlprager@davidu 1. The core loop is (of course) that consumers build credit for access to financial products and the way they manage those financial products drives their score and access to future financial products.
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