Venmo
When I first met the Venmo team, the product was a pay-by-text service.
To pay a friend, you texted a 5-digit number "Pay John $5.00". It was simple but not intuitive. When the iPhone and Android app stores came along, it gave the company a chance to rethink the whole experience.
I worked directly with Iqram and 3 engineers to design the first iPhone, Android, and web apps for Venmo. The app quickly became as ubiquitous as Uber or Twitter, and the rest is history.
I played a modest part in Venmo's success. The hardest work were the financial aspects: compliance, working with banks, operating in every US state, and fighting fraud.
But building the mobile apps with Jesse, Iqram, John, and Matt is a career highlight. We spent many weeks thinking about the minutiae of interactions: how to confirm a payment, how to trust friends, even what it should feel like musically to get money from a friend. Venmo has a lightness and simplicity that persists in its DNA today, and that's rooted in our work more than a decade ago.
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