Building Products with Intentional Design for Customer Delight

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.

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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

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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/

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Where to find Adam Nash:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamnash/
• Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/adamnash

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Where to find Brett Berson:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
• Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson

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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

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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”