Jag Duggal: How We Scaled Nubank to 80M Users; Google's Brutal Hiring Practices | E995

I joined Google, and Google's famous for the fact that Larry literally looked at every hiring packet, including resume. They- I, 12 years after graduating college, had to provide my SAT scores to Google. I had to go find them. I had to provide my college transcript, which everyone did. It was a very credential-driven place, which it- which was accounted for a lot of the talent density there, but also led to blind spots. You know, Google, just take another example. Google, I was one of the last product managers hired into Google who did not have a computer science degree, and because of that computer science requirement to be a, a product manager, people like Kevin Systrom weren't allowed to be product managers at Google, right? So, he went off and founded (laughs) a, a little company called Instagram.

Jag, I am so excited for this show today. I've heard so many great things from many different people with different stories, uh, but especially the main man, David Velez. So, thank you so much for, for joining me today, my friend.

I'm so excited to be here, Harry. I'm a huge fan of the show, as you know.

That is so kind of you. But, uh, I, (laughs) when I spoke to David, he asked, um, the first most important question. You went from a cushy job at Meta working in the Valley to working for a Brazilian fintech that no one really knew about at the time. "Why did you do it?" He asked. (laughs)

(laughs) Well, as, as he well knows, Daveed is an extraordinarily persuasive guy. So, that's the first thing. The first conversation I had with Daveed, I li- when he asked me towards the end, "Would you ever consider moving to Sao Paolo?" I thought, (laughs) I sa- I said, "Daveed, the obvious, uh, answer is no," and this is a crazy request, but he's a very persuasive guy, 'cause when I gave him that answer, he said, "Well, there are people working here who are far more definitive than you are, so we should keep chatting."

(laughs)

Um, Doug Leoni played a part in, in, in persuading me. But the, the larger, the larger reason is I had spent the previous almost 15 years, uh, at that t- point, working in, at Google, at Quantcast, at Facebook, basically in media tech and ad tech, as it was the center of what was happening in Silicon Valley, and had come to realize that I had a ringside seat to the great disruption story of the previous 15 years, and that was amazing, intellectually incredibly interesting. But I was- I had developed a toolkit that I was applying to serve what is effectively the richest billion people on the planet, the US, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and what Daveed and Nubank offered was the chance to take that same toolkit and apply it to, roughly speaking, the bottom half of the global income pyramid. I had grown up in the Caribbean, so roughly speaking, depending on how you count the, the English-speaking Caribbean, I am, I am roughly Latin American. And the opportunity to apply to the bottom half of the income pyramid the toolkit I had gotten in my, roughly speaking, home region was really, was really, really exciting. It also came, the second reason that, a- and the thing that became clear to me as I started talking with Daveed and the Nubank team, was that media tech and ad tech had kind of played itself out. And I had, I had been on both sides. I had worked for Google and Facebook. I had worked for a, a challenge- a challenger startup, but the game had kind of consolidated.