Adam Nash (Daffy) - Making Great Products

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series, brought to you by Stanford eCorner and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

SPEAKER_2 (0:07)

I am so thrilled to kick off a new year of ETL with Adam Nash. And again, if you can, please be quiet, because any small conversations we can hear up here. So even if you feel like you're whispering, we can hear you up here. So give your undivided attention if you can to the front. And there's a reason why you should, because I can think of nobody more appropriate to kick off a new year of ETL than Adam. And that's because Adam has seen more vantage points, more, a wider variety of different lenses of entrepreneurship through different functional roles than almost anybody in Silicon Valley.

He is old enough to be wise and still young enough to be dangerous and has a breadth of experiences. So Adam is most famous right now for his current role, is as the CEO of Daffy. How many people have heard of Daffy? Well, later in life you will. So Daffy has unlocked literally $2 billion of assets of flowing money from donors to philanthropies. And it's the modern donor advised fund built to help people be more generous, more often. Daffy has grown into one of Fast Company's most innovative companies. As I've mentioned, it's recently passed $2 billion in charitable assets, and it's become one of the top 10 largest DAFs by number of accounts, making it one of the fastest growing DAF platforms in the country. Prior to this, Adam was the CEO and president of Wealthfront. How many people have heard of Wealthfront?

Okay, awesome. Well, if you're interested in money, you should check out Wealthfront.

Once you get to saving money, try checking out Wealthfront. It's an amazing automated personal asset management platform. That's a public company that's valued at a billion and a half dollars. But Adam began as an engineer, which is why this is a homecoming in the School of Engineering. Adam got his bachelor's degree and his master's degree in computer science from Stanford. He was literally in your seats. Well, maybe not your seats. They weren't as nice, I think, as when Adam was here back then. But this is a full circle moment because when Adam was here, ETL was just a relatively new initiative out of STVP. Today, we have the father of STVP is here, Tom is here, Tom Byers, and Adam took one of Tom's classes when he was here at Stanford, which I think foreshadowed the life that was to come. After Stanford, Adam became a software engineer at Apple as well as Preview. He then gets an MBA from Harvard Business School. He comes back and then he takes on the role of venture capitalist. He works as an associate at Atlas. He's continued that role as an investor today. He's one of the most prolific angel investors and he's funded companies like Figma, and Gusto, and even one of the speakers we're going to have this quarter loyal, is an Adam backed company. But Adam is probably most famous in the valley for being one of the valley's top product thought leaders. Adam was the VP of product at LinkedIn, the VP of product and growth at Dropbox, and the head of product at eBay. So really we could have a whole season, a whole quarter of Adam and in fact Adam does that. He has his own class. He's a teacher at Stanford. He's an adjunct. So you can take Adam's class if you like what you see, if he has room. But we asked Adam today to scope down a talk given the time.

And so I think Adam today is going to be sharing some of his insights into product leadership. So without further ado, please welcome Adam Nash.

SPEAKER_4 (3:29)

My test is good.

Adam Nash (3:30)

Everyone can hear. Well, I can't say wow, this is a full room. Very excited to be here. As was mentioned, it was about 30 years ago that I was sitting, once again, not in this room because I don't think this building was here, but in ETL and listening to Luminaries talk about their careers and how they thought about founding companies and building great products and technology. So it's really a delight and an honor for me to be here today.

Unfortunately, I don't know if anyone warned you. There's some folks here who are taking my class this quarter, but if they didn't warn you in advance, I'm not actually that funny. I don't know if I can pick up a real late afternoon session. I'll do my best, but I'm slightly amusing, two beers in funny, not really. But I'll do my best because actually this is an important topic and one that's really near and dear to my heart. I want to talk about product leadership today. Like I said, when I was in school, I was an engineer. I got my bachelor's and master's here in computer science. If you knew me then, I loved getting into the detail on weeds. My big claim to fame like my senior year was working on this animation library that could actually do 30 frames per second of sprites on the Macs back then. I know it's hard to imagine that that was a hard problem, but you literally had to hand tune the assembly language to blitz at that speed, to line up with the 64-bit boundary on the memory bus. Anyway, the point is, I care a lot about that. Then I discovered this unfortunate truth, which is that, what is the point of making something run in 30 milliseconds, if it takes the humans using it 30 minutes to figure it out or longer? That led me down a path of actually focusing here, my graduate degree on human-computer interaction and really studying design and understanding how people interacted with technology in general. Ironically, that also led me to finance because it turns out a lot of the ways that people deal with technology overlap, with the ways that people deal with money. If you think about it, it makes sense. Money and technology are all ones and zeros, dollars and cents. Humans turn out to be more complicated. But then I learned another truth, which is that, well, you can have amazing engineering and do things that weren't possible before. You can do fantastic design and come up with a product that really solves a need that people can meet and works for them. But if you don't wrap it in a great business, you get to do the one-oh, you'll do the one-one, but you probably won't get to the two or the three. And we all know in software that you have to get to at least three versions before it kind of doesn't suck. So fundamentally, I became very obsessed with this process of how do people come together, that mix of engineering, design and business, to actually build great products and great businesses. And so it turns out I've spent most of my career on this. And so today I'm in a limited amount of time, I'm gonna share with you five lessons that came to me about product leadership. Over the years, I'll try to cite the different companies where they happened. But this entire talk is really about product leadership and how those three things come together, right? Engineering, design and technology. And for those of you in the room who dream of being founders someday or leading companies or just building amazing products, I hope it'll help you do a better job of that going forward.