How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise)

26:44And then we add our margin on top and that's our price. And when you look at this and you analyze it, you'll find obviously there are 20 % of customers generating 80 % of the costs. And what you do is you get those 20 % you give them a rise because they should cover their costs and you drop the price for everyone else. And then the team works really hard on reducing these costs down. And then you move into a different segment in the market as the price costs come down. Does that make sense, Lenny? Yeah, essentially charge the heavier users more to counteract less frequent users and Essentially that drives a word amount Totally, but it's down to this level of if a customer if an Australian customer calls up asking where is my transfer that cost of that Cool gets allocated back to the ADG BP route if a Brazilian business needs like 20 documents in order to be verified before we can give them a count the cost of identifying check list customers goes back there.

27:43So that at a very atomic level starts happening. So yeah, as you said, the more expensive customers end up paying what they cost. And it sounds like the more expensive markets indeed, and the more expensive, systemically expensive markets. So let's get to that. So what are the costs? So if you're looking at a P &L, there's just three costs at transaction level. You've got people costs. You've got the cost of risk, realized risk, and then you've got partner fees. And so if you've got this mission of moving the world's money for almost nothing or zero as close to zero as you can, you've got to invest as much of your cash flow in engineering to try to engineer away these three problems.

28:29So just take me through briefly about, and remember, we're trying to do this 10 times better than anyone else. So how do you, how do you really step change the experience on each of them? I'll cover a couple with you. So let's do the risk one first. It says two risks we have. We have an effect risk. We come to why you see a rate. And then you may send us the money a little later. If you're like moving and many have done as you can't usually move it instantly. I take you two, three days to move it. Rates locked. Could move against us. We do some money. So that cost, if you look back, So we halved that cost like over the last few years and you can kind of imagine through understanding that it's the product that generate exposure and limiting it and bunch of algorithms behind that.

29:16But the more inspiring stuff is the people costs and the partner costs go through each of these while at the time. So the people costs are customer service team, operations teams. But I like to think of that as the cost of poor quality. So you bring up customer support if you're personal clear. You hire lots of people in the back office if you have an automated it. We get like 20 % improvement. The young years we're doing that. But come back to your question. How do you step change that? How do you do a 10x better experience? I'll share with you a story from Singapore. It's quite a fun one. Because we went to Singapore about six, seven years ago.

29:56And we asked for a license. We had 20 ,000 people on the wait list, also saying, why is this coming from Singapore? Wow. And we went there, we asked the ring, and they'd say, can you give us a license? They gave us a license. But they said, you have to physically meet every single customer. A great face to face. And this happens. This is a grammar like their banks that people use or people go into banks usually. You get face to face verified when you have a banking on. You don't need to do this in Australia and the UK and other countries around the world. In Singapore, if you're licensed, you need to do this.

30:37We actually sent a small team out to Singapore and we opened that office and they were here. The customers, like you went through this pretty sleek load, they got invited in to come see the team. They're saying, a customer has hated it. great and it was really expensive right obviously yeah but the magic was we got we got the customer's not to complain to us but to complain to the government it took a year of lobbying any year of like building like doing something unscathed all effectively before we got the world's first EKYC license so you could take a selfie picture of your ID and then you could get verified And that's what I call it, 10X vendor experience that anyone else in the market and that lead to advocacy and word of mouth of the back of it.

31:27And that's that loop of getting your customers to help was also one of the learnings of word of mouth. Was the product team involved in that on the ground stuff or was it like? Yeah, I mean, so we generally we, when we go on to having a running of functional teams, but this is a verification team. And the team that actually would verify the docs, when you sent it to us, they went out to Singapore and verified the on -site face to face. So the fun bit here is how, like, why would a customer help a company? Right. And it's just one of the other learnings on where to mouth, like the way I think about this is that the rational reasons why people recommend, which we've covered.

32:10But then these emotional ones as well, softer ones, people would call brand. I prefer to call it on the mission. So we tore our mission, which is to make the world's money move. InstaLia the touch of a button for almost nothing. It was a very personal thing. It was like an internal company thing to think our customers cared about it. And then we rebranded like eight, nine years ago. That's rebranded and we broke our mission and sent it to our customers. We got more new customers from that email being forwarded around than any other kind of marketing. And when you've, I show this when I talk to a conference, this email broke all the rules of marketing.

32:51You didn't have a call to action. You didn't have a button to sign up. You don't have anything in it, but people just forwarded around saying you should check out waste. And it's not all of the customer base, but there was a proportion of the customer base that this resonated in. And I think it's the authenticity within which they could see that we would genuinely try to bring the prices down. Was it a scheme to help us grow faster? He's kind of where he started out. He was actually genuinely because founders, they were really upset about how much it cost to be money. They found it wise to solve that problem, and they're still really passionate about solving that problem.

33:31And you could see that was insisting, flows through the whole company, because we got to, when you look at ways, where people are visas and immigrants and people that have worked and lived around the world and struggled with this problem without passionate about solving it. And so they wanted to help us solve it. So the second part of being of this word of mouth engine is for us, we managed to get this mission thing to work. So somehow we emotionally connect our cause. And then I see you going taking a step back, getting 10x better on price is through our customers helping us do it, which gets us even chief We said, freexable customers that man, craze, this flywheel, that spits right.

34:11What a flywheel you guys have built. This reminds me a lot of different things. One is you talked about how there's like the reality of things people need and then there's this like soft, fuzzy stuff that's harder to quantify. Actually, the framework just like that on that product they talked about of instant booking, I kind of built a roadmap around the reality of what people actually need in order to feel comfortable guests booking instantly. And then there's I call it the perception like what are their fears about letting guests book instantly and There's a lot of work to just like convince them.

34:42You think you're gonna get all these guests that are really Scary or whatever but in reality never happens like it's really rare something bad happens And if it does we're gonna cover it So I think it's a really cool framework when you're trying to get people to adopt something is think about What do they actually need and then how do you convince them of the things that are just in their head? And it sounds like the win there was kind of the sharing your mission and your values as a business. Yeah, it just sounds again very tweet, right? And like tweet, like, it sounds very cool for it. So like, he's never going to work.

35:11But I think it's also been there, been video sent to these there, right? People are passionate about making that experience work for both sides of the marketplace. It's kind of clear. So I'm kind of taking a step back personally, very passionate about customer and let gross. And how that turns into shareholder value. So right, taking a step back, we're kind of every business I've ever worked in, it's always got these two lists, and lists are things to do for your customers, and then it's got a list of things to do to make money. And generally do everything you need to do to make money, you do two things with a customer lesson, you go customer -led business.

35:50All right. And then neat thing about why is I'm pretty sure, you'll see the same thing on Airbnb is we just had one list, which is this list of things that you need to do to make customers happy and is prioritized by impact on the really hard things. If you do these really hard things, they have an incredibly bad for customers, their heads on your gross, and on your shareholder body. That is really interesting. Every review was not quite like that. It's actually become more like that with a lot of just like was build awesome products and not focus on experiments as much. So that's really interesting that peritization basically at wise came from what are people telling us?

36:26I guess let me ask actually how did you know what the impact would be on customers? How did you decide? Is it like frequency of how often people request it? Is it we need all the cost and so we're just going to purchase the things that lower prices most? Definitely on the journey at the beginning you're into split testing. Right? Let's try to take a pass and it test on price. So you've systemically dropped the cost. Imagine we dropped the cost the question is, do we drop the price? Do we pass the all -no to customers and then we keep some of it? And the split testing on the price thing, if the split test is going to mean you end up with more revenue, you drop the price by 10 % and there happened to be that day more than 10 % more customers in the market.

37:12So what they saw the price at £1, but they see the price at 90p. I'd say, I'm not going to buy it. This is pretty hard to do this. But this word around conviction is one I use a lot. Build this conviction. That price is what matters. Through this incremental split test, you will take a long time to go there. But at some point, you actually have got enough conviction. There's one strategic bet at the heart of ways. is that is, if we have the lowest cost platform, and it's really fast and really high quality, the world's volume will switch to us. And just marginally getting there step -by -step and trying to trap the incremental return, it's actually slower.

38:00And there's a point that comes that you go, I feel really comfortable investing in price, I feel comfortable investing in speed, because I know it's gonna pay back. And not necessarily this month, but eventually it will. And I need to make gains in all three levers in order to get there. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. So essentially in that track of work instead of everything that you did to reduce price There wasn't like an experiment to see what impact does this have on growth or revenue instead It's just we know reducing prices gonna help us grow and so we're just gonna track how much we're cutting price And that's like essentially the goals.

38:32Imagine we're just cut the price by some amount Find a way to make it this much cheaper every say quarter year Yeah, that's it you're gonna and that conviction and it is cool That extends to our product management approach on the UX. So this is great line for you using internally, sure you've heard it, you can't split test your way to love. So this experiment led product management approach where you throw a bunch of things on the wall and then you see what sticks. And generally we don't advocate this. Obviously it's a bit of it that happens, but generally don't advocate it. Mainly because engineering is expensive and you can actually figure out what matters to customers through other means, some of the techniques we've taught and built it.

39:21There's a story I like to share. I had a product manager at join our referral friend T, Barrel Gross team and invite team. And after corner I said, so what are you going to build? And he's like, I'm going to test everything. with Testolandipage and its subject line and the test program. So I don't know yet to like run through all the tests, then I'm going to come back and tell you what I'm going to build. So now I'm going to do this. I'm going to give you three weeks. I've got to pick one thing to change. But you're going to go talk to people and get quantitative insights and build your own gut feel around what matters.

40:02And then launch it and submit test it and see if it works. But this thing of building conviction on what matters. And I watch how teams slowly build this. And you need a data that to make sure it doesn't become a hubris. That enables you to make much bigger changes than just experimenting away. And it forces you to get clear on what actually is the problem solved here and how do I solve it really, really well? Does that make sense? Then do you disagree? It's a bit provocative. Some people are pretty strong at the experiment, but let approach. No, there's many ways to do it. There's no right way.

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41:53Again, for special access to skip the waitlist, go to masterworks .art slash Lenny. So what I'm hearing essentially, the experimentation culture, it's instead of just run, test everything that you're thinking about throughout a bunch of ideas and say how they go, it's more, let's just decide, we believe in this idea and let's go bigger there and run an experiment, maybe not even, is that roughly how you think about it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And is that something that you've seen yourself in practice elsewhere? It's interesting how many parallels there are to hear me because this is what Airbnb's doing now.

42:27There's been a shift recently where instead of everything is a very dated experiment driven, it's very just like let's build really great products that the founders are really excited about and what the execs are hearing from people. They just build things that are awesome and launch them and we believe things will grow. And their review is doing great. Yeah, the challenge of this is because it does become this who is the thing of where it's like, okay, someone's opinion, right? See, it'd be, I think it's X, right? And everyone thinks they kind of Steve Jobs type things. Yeah. That's right. You have some way of using data to kind of get this conviction and show why this is what we should do, but try to learn how to build that fast.

43:11The CME is like different. So it's less product manages with me saying, hey guys, I think his eggs, it's generally data driven quality safety insights driven as well. Yeah, like personally, I would always index tours running experiments just to put this out there. But I think in this case, that makes sense where you just know we need to do these three things, just make it cheaper, make it faster. Like you don't need to maybe test every idea there. Probably the main downside of not testing everything is you may be hurting things along the way. And you may not know it. I mean, yeah, to be definitely do it to see you right, But there's a very different thing to when you look at the from a sample size perspective you want to do a beta and understand the negative impact is a whole -out group that's smaller than a test to get a significance like it's quite divine the criteria to know whether something is breaking is generally a different thing to say is this a material material result in a test yeah and along those lines the other benefit of experimentation is you know the impact and so team members can understand.

44:14Here's what I did this quarter this year. How do you think about just like performance reviews and people's impact and that kind of yeah. It's a good one. This one is definitely an ongoing debate. So I generally ask teams what's their impact right? So every quarter, every team what's the sound of Christopher what did you ship and I didn't ask happy people used it was the impact on volume etc. And we have analysts teams that can ask to this either way, pre -polished analysis, all kinds of techniques or all through splitter. We generally have this. The debate is where the analysis slows us down and we wouldn't make a decision off the back of the analysis.

44:53And then this generally is what you said, where the team needs a validation. Many for themselves and maybe a little performance but not too much. And so there were ways in which you can maybe get some read on it that isn't quite as strong as a split test, which reducing these things. It's more just getting some, you can understand that people worried when you do split tests, they slow down the release of something. But in order to get an impact, if you know you're not going to roll it back, then, okay, she just rolled it out and tried to reduce the needs for their validation. I think that there's an interesting correlation between products that grow through word -amout and less need to experiment with everything.

45:40Airbnb is also actually 70 % of growth as word -amout from the last step that I heard. And then you think about all these social consumer apps. They mostly grow through people sharing with their friends. And a lot of them come from just the founders' intuition of what a great product is going to be. I think about Snapchat and recent mobile social apps. And so I think maybe there's something there about just like as a founder, trusting your gut more often. And but then it becomes difficult as you grow, you have to delegate and then you have to trust people on your team making the right decisions.

46:11I guess is there anything there that you've learned about just like trusting individual product teams to make decisions that you can't for sure know or positive or negative without running experiments? So, I mean, we, as I say, we, almost everything we do, we have some way of understanding the impact so that's always that. We definitely have things where the team does something where a crystal I would say this is just crazy. There's no one's going to use this and then we have a culture where people encourage to do these things. If they believe in it, they're an example then. Yeah, a couple. So the one one thing that my head of my CEO always talks about is a currency converter.

46:58So like the White homepage is a pretty good currency converter. There's a lot of traffic on currency converter. So you keep ways, like now it's a little bit hidden on send. It's there. It's pretty cool. I see it at the bottom there. Yeah, it's like, yeah, but but but if you Google currency converter, there's tons of traffic, right? And that that Convert from the White's homepage obviously is includes our price and lets you sign up. And so like, should we build the currency converter? Should we try to capture this traffic? Is it more effective to try to push our own product there? And you can kind of understand why it was Christos, you know what I mean?

47:37It was like this is a crazy idea. And the founder and the SIO team went out and built it and it's like huge. All right, in terms of visits, I think we've got a currency converter. to app out there, it was a lot of forth out there. And yeah, people discover wise through that as an example of traffic for the same. A good example of one of those things where, yeah, the founder had a founder said, no, or much of that idea, kind of went ahead and did it anyway. Awesome. I'm just thinking about broadly, all the things we've been talking about. There's a couple of things that were floating around in my head.

48:12One is, reminds me of Amazon where Jeff phases kind of realized, like there are things that are going to be always true with Amazon. People always want cheaper prices, the one faster shipping, I think there's something else. And it feels like you guys found the same sort of thing. Like what are the three things people always want with a money transfer product and let's just make those as incredible as possible and your eyes make them 10 times better than what anyone else has out there. Tony, the business one example is relevant. I'm using a lot when we talk to investors in the market. The public kind of helps validate this low cost cutting price story.

48:53What's interesting is what changed though. So we started with transfers where we got to a count and then we got to enterprise. So just how what changed was we realized with a count. If you just have to move $10, you're not going to download and happen to do it. If you do it once, you're just going to do it in your bank. And so that was a little bit of the insight behind building the Waze account. And we kind of focused on there's a real problem with international banking. So really good example is for businesses. So if you're a business say in, say a business in Europe, you got a customer in Australia.

49:32and you want to get paid, you send them an invoice in your own, and someday somebody's going to turn off your account, you're like, I don't know, right? They paid you an AUD, you got changed by three banks of the way through, you don't know, and it's what you'd love to do, is it moist them in AUD and get AUD and you might even have people need to pay in AUD, so you'd be cool to keep it there. But you can't Australian bank account, I found out, you need to fly to Australia, you need to incorporate a business in Australia, you go to bank with all those papers and then they will give you an Australian bank.

50:05Right. So with why is he can get an Australian bank account number with three clicks? Anyone can and any business can and you get an Australian balance at a US and a UK and a Swiss balance. And this is killer for businesses to receive money internationally. And then the next big jump we did and for consumers to take to people like if all of your bank King is in the US, you probably shouldn't use Ways. But if you're somebody who uses another currency a lot, then you probably should use us as your primary bank. There's some people, for example, who live in one country and get paid another currency.

50:41And this is Ways is great as an account for managing that. And we found with that, we got about, like, as we launched the account in markets, it was about, you know, like a 20 to 30 % more volume, cross -border volume coming through to come into wise from that market. Just a good example of how, what's up price, what's the speed, you could argue is kind of ease of use, but we had to kind of evolve it. You know, let's get to the next touch of the market. Does that make sense, Lenny? Absolutely, and it all just comes back from what would be the theoretical ideal situation for people transferring money, say, from Australia.

51:16And what I'm hearing is just like, find all the little friction points they get in the way. In this case, you're like, okay, we'll create you an Australian bank account and you don't even worry about it. Yeah, exactly. And so now then you have all these other problems because we got like about 12 and a half billion dollars in deposits now, just like a time. And the next problem customers are at is like, I want to return. Right? And we don't quite deliberately don't have a banking license. You have to figure out how we can we go to solve that. So we we now put customers money in government bonds, US bonds.

51:47And when you pay with your card, it dynamically sells those bonds. And that's how we give you an interest rate in like around about 5 % right now given where bond rates are. Yeah, interest rates are quite high for better or worse. Zoom me out a little bit for folks that are starting to like their wheels are turning, they're like, okay, I want to think about word of mouth, driving word of mouth. I'm going to go, look at my survey results. I'm going to figure out these pillars that are driving word of mouth. I'm going to think about how to make things 10 times better. Just like broadly, for someone that's starting to approach this, what would you say to them?

52:21How should they approach this? Any major learnings at a higher level of just like how to drive word amount for a product? I think it just comes back to talking to customers and this question we've come back to, like what would it take to make it 10x better? And then you get caring your head what it would take. And then it's usually the thing that everyone's looked at before. And so that's the thing that's impossible. One more example is like on their partner side, like so rather than find a cheaper bank for a banking partner, you think, or the cheapest banking partner is the central bank, correct?

53:03And imagine you're a startup, how the hell do you get a bank account at the central bank? But that kind of thinking, we now have a bank account at the bank of England, the national bank of Singapore, all back up Australia and each of these was as hard as getting that face -to -face verification thing. It took years of lobbying and all kinds of stuff to go in order to make it happen. But it's setting your goal all the way up there. That's what enables you to build a tenix better product. That's what gets you to the word about. The first step is getting super clear on what's the problems that my customers are carrying about, worrying about.

53:37And then once you're clear now, like, as you said, how could I solve that completely? and what's the best it could possibly be. And then the hard bit is figuring out how to move that. Well, a lot of these things you're talking about are just, they sound like they are either impossible, like no way we're gonna achieve that. Or really, really hard. And a lot of companies and a lot of founders, teams are just like, okay, we're not ever gonna create a bank here. We're not gonna be able to create a bank and I don't Australian bank account forever. What is it about your culture or approach to these problems that you think that's unique to wise, that's like, no, we're gonna spend three years figuring this out because it's that important.

54:15I think it's too bad. So one is like, definitely the founders have this philosophy that unless you're doing something hard and new, it's kind of a waste of time. So I think that that also kind of runs through the culture. So it's quite a rude away. You think what people do in ways? Like, come and just like play around with a few things. So you're like, no, actually, the culture of the product team is like, we're super incentivized to do the hard things. That's what's rewarded. And that's quite hard, you know, to create the air cover. You can imagine like them in the early days or months when growth was slow when people like turn on the money tabs in marketing and you're trying to keep focus on plugging away of these hard things.

54:57It's quite hard also to get there. They manage with cover and it's like the teams keep doing this. And then it's also hard just to turn up to work and really keep, you can imagine being in Singapore or verifying customers face to face thinking. This is going no way, this is going no way, this is going no way, and it suddenly changes rates. That, that's what progress very much feels like at voice. And we try to recognize that and create a culture that enables that. It feels like there's also just a lot of patients for these things. There isn't like, we need to hit this quarterly goal. We're creating banks in Singapore yet.

55:29Yeah, exactly. Awesome. The other kind of like metaphor that's rolling around my head is something Seth Godin talks about. I don't know if you've heard of this guy. he's marketing guru and is this concept that you want to build something that's remarkable because if something is remarkable it'll spread and you think about the word remarkable, something worth remarking about which essentially is word of mouth. And so that's his kind of mission and his advice to people is build something remarkable, something people want to remark about. And clearly you all have been doing that. And that's actually a good segue to where I wanted to go, which is around how you structure your team and how you incentivize the team, organize teams to achieve all these sorts of things.

56:08So maybe just broadly, because there's something unique to how you think about work structure, incentives, goals, things like that, in order to achieve these really hard things. There's two unique lenses on this. One is in the macro structure, and one is in the micro structure. To the macro level, if you look at international, actually international banks, they don't really exist. Not sure if you've moved around between countries for say you open a bank account with Citibank in the US and then you go to Citibank in the UK, your Citibank account doesn't exist in the UK, it's going to Citibank in the UK and over in Citibank account.

56:46It actually turns out with some of these banks to move money between your bank accounts is an international transfer, it's like it's crazy. So when you take a step back and look at how the market looks, you have one end international banks, which are local tech stacks. So they, there's a core banking system in the US and one in the UK and one in Europe, say for city bank or for HSBC. But they have deep local integrations. So they directly integrated in the payment system, CD Bank in the US got relationships with the federal reserve, etc. Other end of the spectrum, you got something like PayPal.

57:22So it's tech company. It's got a single global tech stack. It doesn't run additional version of PayPal in Australia than to the US. But it doesn't have deep connections. It hasn't got five central bank accounts, right? It hasn't got any of that. And I'd like to think of in the middle, he got wise, where we have a single global tech stack and we have deep local infrastructure. And now from a technological perspective, like, just take a step back and pick through this. This is actually non -tribal to figure out how to design. So let's take something like the onboarding flow. So we have global product teams, one part of product teams called global product teams.

58:03So we have a single onboarding flow that will give you a wise account. It's the same code that runs, whether you're in Brazil, New York or Australia. The regulation in Australia in Brazil is really different. And it isn't black and white, maybe country, right? So there's like a bunch of like you get like a bunch of these you just shouldn't do until the letting people get so because people who shouldn't get access to to accounts and then you can need to check these people using it and different different jurisdictions have completely different requirements. Example is is Japan you can take a picture of that.

58:41Front's the ID the back of the ID and the side of your ID. So the only country in the world that you have to do this. Wow. Now imagine you're the product manager for onboarding and someone tells you design the onboarding to give somebody a bank. Just imagine gathering all the requirements from every country in the world because there's no, there's very little similarity. You can't just say I take the US and copy it somewhere else. It's very, very, very different. It take forever to try to get that and then normalize that into a domain model and try to figure out how you're going to just structure the data around this.

59:13So it then becomes like, what is the organization structure that enables us to discover what the domain model, let's call it that, for the onboarding flow should look like. And you end up with a global product team that owns overall KPIs around conversion rate, et cetera. And you have local regional teams that own the conversion rate and the cost to do KYC for their market. And they contribute to the global product code base. So we have wheat products. ownership where anyone can make co -change and pull requests and these guys owing the vision in the center but the only way that vision can evolve is by getting the feedback from these guys in the market as they're constantly pushing stuff forward and through that process like like artefacts start to merge in where other markets are like Japan and slowly you start splitting off that and creating sub -tipes for it and slowly the model emerges from that and so with this structure the thing to optimize for is a really hard one that from the every global business has is how do you get this collaboration to work between the local and the global?

1:00:17But unlike every other business, you kind of most businesses solve this, probably as you know, is you have, you usually have the US and then you have international law. And international is usually a bum tight where everyone's arguing to get their think prioritized. That's right. Whereas here, you kind of letting the local teams commit directly to the co -base and then this global team's got this challenge of doing this and we over time create sub teams around parts of the regionalization of the structure around different objects as they emerge. But that broadly speaking is the first problem, like the global problem.

1:00:50And the other bit with us is this is quite unique to us because most FinTechs out there usually in one market. And that's like you take Robin Hood, it was in the US, it came to you, the UK, there were back to the US, you take Monzo, only the UK, N26, only in Europe, up in Australia, China, maybe the US. And that's because their home markets are so big, And one regulator is a ton of work to manage. And the second complexity we have is we have all these markets we have to be in because we're international by default. So a lot of my think is where do we take that into a term that is competitive advantage and which customer base really needs that, which is what zooms a sin to that positioning on the international account?

1:01:32It just comes back to again, again, again and again, doing the hard thing, knocking people sucks off and it feels like that's the formula for wise. Yeah, you're more on this. So that's one bit on structure. So this global local thing. And the second one has been a bit more of a journey. So when we started early on, we ran in autonomous, independent teams, all focused on KPIs. And these KPIs rolled up to make it cheaper, make it faster, make it easier to use. You can imagine like a KPI tree and teens around It's their KPIs and every quarter they talk through how they move their KPI, etc. This kind of worked.

1:02:10And the way we ran our planning is every quarter every team would stand up and talk through his plan, get feedback from other teams and then move on. This worked until we got to 30 teams. You go from doing this afternoon to doing it in two days and like, it's just like, whoa. So we started heading towards the Spotify model where we group the teams in squads and into try. types. Today, I think that autonomy is at the squad level. So the squad so around products, so we'll have a wise account squad, a business squad, a wise platform, my enterprise product squad, you have a Northam squad, then itself the North American product, and Latin squad, etc.

1:02:54And then financial current fighting, etc. And inside those squads, you've got the teams and the squad, like, imagine you have the direct set for the wise account, you can have a vision for the account, you're going to say where it's going, you could keep your team's arms trapped against it, the teams aren't off doing whatever they want. They kind of need to be on track versus the overall vision. And you're accountable for the results of that squad. And squad to entourage the tribe provides overall leadership. And it's slight, it's a light touch strategy on the squads. And that's more or less a structure and how we've evolved towards it.

1:03:26Is there anything else along the word of mouth concept that you think would be useful for people to share either how you think about it. Team structure anything else. As one tiny bit I'll share, which was around marketing and referral. This is super interesting for me. So we've been running it like Airbnb. We've been running referral program for 12 years. And after 12 years, you kind of tested everything anyway. And like I said, by this point, you have literally tested everything. So when somebody comes up with something that has like a 300 % increase, like, oh, what? That's super interesting.

1:04:01What just happened? Well, I'm excited to end. Yeah, I'll share this one because it's interesting. So we run many, like, variants of a friend, where you'll get different kinds of benefit. We've tried chocolate, we've tried money, we've tried $200, $500, $10, you get some, I get some money, like all kinds of things. More or less headed towards a $3 for a hundred dollars, generally, it's like a sweet spot. Anyway, it's a pretty creative PM there. Yeah. And it was again talking to customers and he spotted this thing which was pretty cool, which is when you do a transfer with wise at the end to get this email, the email says, well then you have to say your money is there, the other person says account and you saved $10 on this transfer.

1:04:49And he got this insight which was pretty awesome. He realized that people believed they saved money, but they did believe the number. And he then thought, what would it take to get them to believe the number? That seems right. And so the thumb bit was the approach. So then him and the designer sat there, and they sketched out an alternative email, and they went down to coffee shop downstairs, they showed it to people, and they said, they just asked them when they thought, and they kept it's rating it to late, got to a graph. And this graph is like this, when you go through a money transfer thing, it pops up in places, behind the compare button.

1:05:29And this graph shows with your bank, when you send, how much is in the rate? Hidden as if this is how much you're sending, this is how much they're taking the rate in a fee. This is how much you can see in the fee, because the fees are hidden in the rates, but banks. And this is with wise. And they iterate the to the point that people looked at like, oh my God, I'm never using my bank again. This number, this is crazy. Then they put this graph on the success page, where you did a transfer. So you save this and put a share button in it by any of your friends' buttons, and that's what really drove it.

1:06:07And when you fast forward to today, we've now got, so it's actually quite hard. So we now have, I think, about 70 bank accounts around the world. So I think, like, the top three accounts banks in the world, where we log on to every day, and then we log to the price and the code to a bunch of different routes into a file. You can imagine a hard day. So I think I personally have about 17 of these still. He might not even know about the world to help the team get going. That's kind of one of the biggest word of mouth growth or referral insights. So I've got to this comparison thing maybe Tom marketing many to our homepage just when everywhere up from that And you said that that like three acts of the sharing rate Yeah, that's really extra sharing rate when do we always had the share button after you completed a transfer but putting that there with With this graph and that kind of got me to this curious and you take of this on this definition of product marketing where where customers use the product and they think they got this value, but when they actually know the value they get.

1:07:16So we got this on speed as well, where we do an instant transfers and customers wouldn't know it was instance. So when you get into the transfer, there's like a wizzy animation at the end and you kind of know the money is in the other person's account ready to spend. And again, you see a big jump in referral rate when that happens, but people need to know it's happened. And closing this data between what you've done and what's perceived to be done is what a cool product marketing within the product. And that is on right at this point I've learned. That's an awesome insight. It comes back to this framework we talked about of reality and perception kind of in a flip way instead of getting people to adopt something.

1:07:50It's to appreciate the work you've done to make it remarkable, to make them understand how remarkable it really is. Yeah, that was it. And that's something I'm continuously learning about Yeah, as we as we go as well. That is extremely interesting. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, I know you also do a bunch of charity work and I wanted to give you a chance to share what you're doing there. Thanks, Annie. Let's hear the essentially came out of angel investing. It's probably the way to say it. So I Invested in startups, generally fintechs, mission -led founders, word -of -mouth type stuff, all the stuff we've been talking about that I'm passionate about.

1:08:24I is less investing more helping and and yeah, I just get in through the angel route. And then over time, I've realized the thing I'm most passionate about is market failures. So generally I find that, you know, the invisible hand means most human needs get fulfilled by the market. And there are a few things that don't. And I've, there's a couple of exciting startups out there like who work really hard in the space. A couple that are a beam in the UK working on homelessness, affinity, and neo -banking garner. And so this type of thing is stuff I'm most passionate about. So if any of you, any of you listed this out there, know anyone doing anything of that kind, trying to solve these kinds of hard problems, definitely reach out, always kids talk.

1:09:14Awesome. And I'm going to link to those two you mentioned in the show notes, just in case people want to check them out. With that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Let's go for it. Let's do it. What are two or three books that you recommend in most to other people? Two ones at the other end of this fact from. So one is, it sounds terribly pretentious. Crime and punishment and the other one is Midnight's Children by Selman Rusty. I read a lot. I'm very passionate about reading a fiction mainly. I don't read, not features like too much like work. And so I generally need to read before I go to bed to decompress my brain.

1:09:53It's generally escapeous type stuff. But curious for you to think of this, for me, authors are people that create people with words. You know, like an, you say an artist is a good artist if it's a good likeness to somebody, but imagine like you create somebody with words and that person feels real. So they have insight into the human condition. And what's amazing is if you learn something about what it means to be human from reading that. So like that end of the scale, like Dostomysky, Kramer -Padishman where this guy killed somebody and they just like, he eats him up. It's pretty amazing book.

1:10:30It's not as heavy as his sounds, but that book's like that, pretty awesome. So I recommend that a lot. And the other end of the scale is like sometimes you read a book and there's a single sentence each word has been just stitched together and like it's like again a work about and they're rusty it's like probably the pinnacle for me and mid -night children which is about partition in India which is pretty through a metaphor it's pretty pretty amazing it's a beautiful answer what is a favorite recent movie or TV show oh gosh I know I don't think I TV but we yeah we'd rent a Bobby by the kids that one.

1:11:10I love probably the last one. I just watched that too. So good. Oh, good. You can actually stream it now. I don't know when this comes out, but it just, it's all out. Yeah, you can watch it at home. But it's not a match. I think it's like 20 bucks in the US. Oh, geez. What is a favorite interview question you like to ask candidates when you're interviewing them? Yeah, it's an idea to ask two, I got down to asking just two questions over time. The first one's probably my favorite, which is what is it that most of the time? for straights. You're not about why, instead of why you're leaving, what for straights, you're the most about where you're working right now.

1:11:44And this is as people, people always tell you why they want to join ways or join whatever company you're coming to and that's not that interesting, but what's interested try and figure out is what they're running away from. And usually there's something broken there that's really wound them up, but what's more interesting is they've been unable to fix it. And so, in asking this question and probing, you kind of get quite good at getting a sense of like, what is the limit? What's the thing they found? And what do they get stuck with? And you kind of say, okay, you go running to that here every day, every week, or you should be fine.

1:12:21And that's that's kind of why I asked that question. I love that. What is a favorite product? You recently discovered that you really like. I recently switched to arc and browser. That's what I used. Yeah, the onboarding flow was mind blowing. That's exactly how I felt. I had the tweeter pattern. Yeah, I sent it to my onboarding team, Irran, and what I loved about it is it's clearly like if you could try to use arc with the same way you use crow, you'd just get really frustrated. So they, they know, but if you use it the way they want you to use it, it be amazing. So for figuring out how to get people to engage it, you need to do it.

1:13:01Use this fundamentally differently. They managed to almost get me to use it the right way. So still struggling a little bit with it, but that's, I thought was really clever. Awesome choice. We had Josh, the CEO the browser company of New York, it's called on the podcast. And if you're interested in learning about ArcStory, definitely check out that episode. All right, next question. What is a favorite life motto that you'd like to repeat most to yourself that you'd like to share anything come to mind? The thing that defines success is the speed of which you pick yourself up. I love that. And that's the thing that I hold onto most because you can get knocked a lot in a high -growth company and it's obviously quite, obviously, knocks you when someone says no to an offer, when somebody leaves the company, when a product doesn't work, because you think it's shared, when you get pushback from a partner.

1:13:55But yeah, if you kind of like lose four hours being like spinning around there or you try and figure out, okay, this happened. How do I move forward and just learning how to shorten that time has probably been that one of the most important jetties to me. That was an awesome answer. One final question. Is there a fun cultural ritual at wise that has stuck around for well. This one, my two would love to say so from the early days we got everyone together from all around the world once a year. I actually did it twice a year. And the founders are from Estonia, we still have like we have 5 ,000 people now as we have still have about 1 ,800 in Estonia.

1:14:39So it's cheaper to fly over to Estonia. So in the old days when it was going to The Winter Estonia is not fine, right? But summer in Estonia is amazing, and we still do this. And the finest bit about this is, I have a side hustle DJ. I get to DJ there. And it's quite fun and embarrassing for my kids, because technically I'm now DJ in another country. International DJ. So that's it. That's my side hustle. Amazing. That's how I introduce myself to my 17 year olds friends. So yeah, do you have a DJ name? Is there a QR check out on Spotify? No, no, you can't cheat me on Spotify. They think, but yeah, it's so private.

1:15:18All right, maybe Burning Man, you could see your performance next year. Maybe. Milan, thank you so much for being here. We talked a lot about Word of mouth. I feel like this episode is going to spread 100 % through Word of mouth. Can't wait for people to listen to it. Two final questions. Working folks finding online if they want to reach out. And how can listeners be useful to you? You can find me online on Twitter, NLNP, and always love to hear product feedback by email, by tweet, by LinkedIn, generally by tweets best. Easiest for me to pick up from my team to reach into directly, so hit me up that way.

1:15:54Most use for me, yeah, product feedback. And as I said, people working on other people working on hard problems that need help, do reach out. Amazing. NLN, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for your time. Take care, Lenny. Bye everyone.