Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast) artwork

Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

May 16, 2024

Jag Duggal is chief product officer at Nubank, a decacorn neobank founded in Brazil. It’s valued at over $30 billion, is bigger than Coinbase, Robinhood, Affirm, and SoFi combined, has 100 million customers (more than Bank of America!
Speakers: Lenny Rachitsky, Jag Duggal
**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
NuBank is bigger than Coinbase, Robinhood, Affirm, SoFi and Lemonade combined. 80 to 90% of NuBank's growth is through word of mouth.

**Jag Duggal** (0:10)
We're not trying to be incrementally better. We are trying to be fundamentally different. We want our customers to love us fanatically.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:17)
It feels like NuBank is one of the historically most successful companies at launching new business lines.

**Jag Duggal** (0:22)
We built a lending product, we built an investments product, we built an insurance product, we built a series of small business products. We rarely scale a project until we know the Sean Ellis score hit the threshold that we find really compelling.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:35)
I want to talk about strategy.

**Jag Duggal** (0:36)
Kevin Systrom in the early days of Instagram, I heard him say it at a conference, we may not be right, but at least we are clear. Even if your strategy isn't right, you have a very clear idea of what was supposed to be happening.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:49)
Where do you think all of this goes in the future?

**Jag Duggal** (0:51)
Why not have the company that reinvents banking come out of Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Bogotá?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:01)
Today, my guest is Jag Duggal. Jag is Chief Product Officer at Nubank, which is one of the most under-the-radar monster businesses that you'll ever come across with a fanatical user base and a really unique approach to building product. Before Nubank, Jag was Director of Product Management at Facebook, leading monetization of video and third-party content, including news, gaming and influencer content. Prior to Facebook, he was Senior Vice President of Product and Strategy at Quantcast and Group Product Manager and Head of Strategy for Display Ads at Google, which was Google's second largest business at the time. In our conversation, we cover how to build products that people become fanatical about, how to develop a strategy, category design, product line expansion, the future of fintech and tons more. With that, I bring you Jag Duggal after a short word from our sponsors. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.
This episode is brought to you by Work OS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and skim provisioning. That's where Work OS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by Work OS, including ones you probably know, like Vercell, Webflow and Loom. Work OS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine grain authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, skim or user management, you should consider Work OS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com.
This episode is brought to you by Mercury. Mercury knows your financial operations are complex. It doesn't have to be this way. I've been a super happy customer of Mercury for over a year now, and it's honestly hard to imagine a better online banking experience can exist. Most founders and finance teams have to couple together a patchwork of tools to reconcile transactions from different sources, work extra hard just to get a holistic view of cashflow and have maps to company priorities, and struggle to get answers from platforms that all speak different languages. Mercury knows that there's an art to simplifying this complex patchwork.
With new bill pay and accounting capabilities, you can pay bills faster, stay in control of company spend, and speed up reconciliation. The end result is the precision control and focus that startups need to transform how they operate. Apply in minutes at mercury.com and join over 200,000 ambitious startups like mine that trust Mercury to get them to perform at their best. Mercury, the art of simplified finances.
Mercury is a financial technology company that bank banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust members FDIC.
Jag, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Jag Duggal** (4:38)

74 more minutes of transcript below

Feed this to your agent

Try it now — copy, paste, done:

curl -H "x-api-key: pt_demo" \
  https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000651996090

Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and any agent that makes HTTP calls.

From $0.10 per transcript. No subscription. Credits never expire.

Using your own key:

curl -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
  https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000655785654