Keep pulling the thread on Mayur Kamat.
Binance grew to a peak valuation of approximately $400 billion within five years with only 2,000 employees.
Binance was founded in 2017 and became the number one crypto exchange by volume within six months, surpassing established competitors like Coinbase.
Despite having the full backing of Google and thousands of employees, the Google Hangouts project failed to create a great messaging product.
At one point, Binance's founder and CEO, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), had approximately 55 direct reports, creating a very flat organizational structure with only one level between most employees and the CEO.
Booking Holdings grew from a $10 billion company to a $170 billion company over a decade primarily through optimization and experimentation, without fundamentally changing its core product offerings of flights, hotels, and cars.
The Google Hangouts team invented the WebRTC protocol, which is now the foundation for most real-time communication technologies on the web, including products like Zoom and WhatsApp.
At Binance, the Head of Product's top-line KPI was trading volume, which was measured in trillions of dollars on a monthly basis.
To maintain rapid execution speed, Binance's globally distributed leadership team met every single day, including weekends and holidays, ensuring no decision was blocked for more than 24 hours.
A bug in Apple's iOS 4 caused a 1,000x load increase on Google's servers by forcing every user's device to re-sync their entire Gmail inbox.
At Binance, the employee bonus structure was highly variable, with potential payouts ranging from 0% to 500% of base salary, strongly incentivizing performance on KPIs.
Mayur Komet believes that 90% of an executive's lifetime compensation is earned in the last five years of their career, making early-career salary optimization a poor strategy.
Mayur Komet asserts that fintech product management is uniquely challenging because it requires satisfying two distinct customers: end-users and regulators, whose needs are often in conflict.