Hey Listener,
I’m thrilled to share my latest interview with Adam Nash, the Co-Founder and CEO of Daffy, a fintech company dedicated to making charitable giving more accessible and impactful.
Adam has a full-stack background in managing, designing, and engineering products, having held key roles at companies such as Dropbox, LinkedIn, and eBay and recently as CEO of Wealthfront.
Highlights
👉 The multidisciplinary approach to innovation in technology he developed in his career where His experiences span notable companies such as Apple, LinkedIn, and Dropbox.
👉 The importance of combining engineering, design, and business insights and how he used his diverse skill set to drive innovation.
👉 Adams career advice: How to be fluid and adapt roles to create impactful solutions.
👉 We get tactical in designing to promote a desired behavior. It’s fun to talk shop with a CEO with excellent design taste.
Adam’s latest venture
Daffy stands for the Donor Advised Fund for You. It’s a unique platform inspired by the belief that everyone should have a straightforward way to put money aside for charity, much like a 401(k) for retirement.
Daffy is designed to automate the giving process, making it easier for people to commit financial resources to causes they care about.
Highlights include:
💪 Daffy’s mission to help people be more generous by simplifying the giving process
🔥 How their latest launch of Daffy Campaigns campaigns encourages more people to donate.
✌️ How Daffy leverages technology to create a communal space for philanthropy.
I admire Adam’s passion for helping others. His belief in the power of technology to create positive change was evident throughout our conversation. He offered deep insights into how integrating diverse disciplines can lead to groundbreaking innovations.
Thank you for tuning in, and I hope you find as much value in this conversation as I did.
Best,
Caden Damiano
caden@hey.com
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Actionable Takeaways
Innovation Doesn’t have to Mean “New”
Adam highlighted how different types of innovation, such as interdisciplinary approaches, can lead to new insights and capabilities.
"I've always believed there are different flavors of innovation and different paths. Many sensationalize the path of that new invention, but another type of innovation is interdisciplinary. It brings insights, perspectives, and frameworks from different fields and applies them somewhere new."
"I've tended to gravitate towards bringing innovation or frameworks from one area to another. For me, it's always been fascinating how differently a designer can look at a problem than a talented engineer. And, of course, you add a business or a financial background into it or strategic framework, you might even get another way of looking at things."
Adam Nash
Action Tip
Instead of trying to innovate by being first, innovate by remixing from other industries and inventions. Real innovators are connecting the existing dots that others don’t see.
Read “How Innovation Works” by Matt Ridley to learn how most innovation is not version 1 of an idea.
Why Adam set up a Design team at LinkedIn
He recounts pitching Reid Hoffman the formation of a design organization when he was head of product during the LinkedIn IPO days.
"When I met with Reid Hoffman...one of the things we talked about was, if this product is going to get to scale, that design viewpoint—you’re going to want a horizontal team at the company that really pulls it all end-to-end together."
"I’ve always believed...If you really want to create products and services that connect with people, you’re designing for people."
Adam Nash
Action Tip
Don’t ignore information architecture, intuitive navigation, and feature discoverability in your products. Having a solid design team moves metrics by allowing people to discover the value of your products naturally.
Develop a taste for design by scrutinizing every object or software you interact with, and ask questions like:
“Why did they do this that way?”
“Why does this not feel like it is working?”
“Why do I like this?”
3. Simplifying Philanthropy: Daffy aims to democratize charitable giving by providing a user-friendly platform that automates the process and offers tools like campaigns to amplify impact.
"Most people don't have the time to sit around and think about what good they could do with their money, with the resources they've built. The idea of how much can I afford to give? Daffy helps simplify that."
"Why can't people just make a decision on how much they want to put aside every year for charity? And then we can automate the rest. Put it in this great tax-free account, grow it for them, and help them put in an environment where they can be inspired by others."
Adam Nash
Action Tip
Success in things like money, business, and relationships is mostly making one decision and sticking to it for a long time.
It’s taking responsibility and following through with mundane tasks even if you don’t want to.
Vanilla software tries to automate tasks.
Move a record to this list.
Save a task.
Software of the future will take on automated responsibilities.
Pay your bills.
Execute primary research.
4. Emotional Solutions: Adam discussed the significance of addressing the emotional aspects of financial decisions to design better solutions.
"A lot of personal finance is about the fact that thinking about a problem like retirement is very difficult when it's half a century away...Great financial advisors...find ways of talking to people through this, and in software, we've discovered ways to help people do this more."
Adam Nash
Action Tip
The product usually fails when the interaction design concept is misaligned.
Make sure to align the concept of your internal problem framing with how someone interacts with your product.
For example, a marketplace concept for a financial app might be wrong; “I need money automation, not connecting with buyers and sellers.”
Former Wealthfront CEO on Innovating Across Disciplines, Building Emotional Connections in Product Design, & Empowering Charitable Giving EP 123