Building products that delight customers | Adam Nash (Daffy, Wealthfront, LinkedIn, eBay, Apple)
Adam Nash is the co-founder and CEO at Daffy, a platform that makes it easier to donate to charities and non-profits. Before Daffy, Adam was the President and CEO at Wealthfront, where he scaled the company’s assets under management from $100M to over $4B. Adam has also held leadership and technical roles at Dropbox, LinkedIn, eBay, and Apple. — In today’s episode, we discuss: Why founders should build platforms, not apps The importance of “delighting” customers How Daffy is disrupting donor-advised-funds Lessons on strategy from LinkedIn How to think about leadership transitions — Referenced: Andy Rachleff: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachleff/ Bill Gates: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamhgates/ Daffy: https://www.daffy.org/ Daffy’s 2023 Year in Review: https://www.daffy.org/resources/year-in-review-2023 eBay: https://www.ebay.com/ Jeff Weiner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffweiner08/ Reid Hoffman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman/ Robinhood: https://robinhood.com/ Ryan Roslansky: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanroslansky/ The Innovator’s Dilemma: https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Clayton-M-Christensen/dp/0062060244 Tim Cook: https://www.apple.com/leadership/tim-cook/ Wealthfront: https://www.wealthfront.com/ — Where to find Adam Nash: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamnash/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/adamnash — Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:08) Why the last 10 years have been less disruptive (06:15) Why we think about luck wrong (08:39) How eBay survived the dot com bubble (14:37) The value of building platforms, not apps (22:18) What made LinkedIn successful (27:31) Good company strategy = good product strategy (30:58) Setting LinkedIn’s strategy in 2009 (36:41) Why KaChing didn’t work (40:56) Pivoting to Wealthfront (43:23) Universal lesson on customer acquisition (45:11) Treating growth like a product problem (49:01) Advice on successful leadership transitions (54:20) How to delegate moral authority (60:24) The problem with metrics and customer requests (66:41) Apple’s approach to “delighting” customers (69:16) The 70/20/10 rule you’ve never heard about (70:29) How Daffy ships “delight features”