Johnny Quach is the CPTO at Hostelworld Group where he leads 120 people over a variety of functional areas. Previously, he was at Airhelp, a Y Combinator startup from 2014, where he helped scale the company from 400 to 800 people while creating over 400% growth over his 3 years there. He is passionate about making big impact — fast.After only six months at Rocket Internet, he launched three companies from scratch, operating across Germany, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Brazil, Malaysia, and the UK.Fun Facts: He was a professional poker player for 2 years, his dance team won America’s Best Dance Crew Season 2, and he was a Master ranked Starcraft 2 player”.

Topics:

The evolving role of product managementStrategic recommendations on building a robust product visionCollaboration of Project Management and Product Management teams

Episode transcription:

Thank you for listening to Ivy podcast, where we feature weekly leadership conversations with thought leaders and industry experts. Now here's your host bread, OB arrow.

[00:00:55]Fred Obiero: [00:00:55] Hello and welcome to the Ivy podcast. My guest today is Johnny Quach, he is the chief product officer at hussle world. Hey Johnny. Good to have you on

[00:01:07] Johnny Quach: [00:01:07] Glad to be on, happy to be here.

[00:01:09] Fred Obiero: [00:01:09] Johnny is sitting in Lisbon, Portugal. What's the time difference, Johnny? I'm on the East coast of Florida

[00:01:16] Johnny Quach: [00:01:16] Right about now it's probably 2:30 PM. So I'm on the UK time zone.

[00:01:22] Fred Obiero: [00:01:22] Oh, great. For all listeners that may be unfamiliar with Johnny, he has speaking events that he's had posted out on YouTube. So if you've got an opportunity, feel free to go and take a listen to him. I personally listen to a few of them and they are very interesting. I liked the one you talked about AI in the travel industry. So maybe that's a topic for a future podcast.

[00:01:45] Johnny Quach: [00:01:45] Absolutely. I think in general technology is really changing the world. That's an obvious statement, but I think people don't realize how much of the world has already kind of run. And machine learning is really just one aspect, but there are so many other kinds of big innovations happening. And I think the thing with technology is when it innovates faster than its predecessors. So that rapid pace of changes it's just creating all kinds of opportunities in the world that some people are taking advantage of and others, and there's still many pockets of things to do, I think.

[00:02:16] Fred Obiero: [00:02:16] Great. So Johnny, tell us about yourself and a little bit about your role at hustle world.

[00:02:22] Johnny Quach: [00:02:22] Yeah. So I actually started my career as a videogame designer. I went to school for graphic design and concept art. So I mainly focused on actually producing drawings and illustrations and monsters and cars for video games.That was my kind of passion when I was a kid. So I worked in video games as an assistant kind of concept artist for about a year. So I didn't really find it to be super fitting to what I wanted to do. Long-term so I ended up actually starting a t-shirt company for about a year with a good friend. After about a year, we ended up hitting each other. And from there I actually took, which is very common for your first startup of any type, and after that I took the kind of designs that I had and I made a portfolio out of it. And I started working in fashion for about eight or nine years. And in fashion I worked for a bunch of skate surf companies Quicksilver, Roxy, rip, curl icon, all kinds of stuff. And just right at the end of 2007 or something like that I decided I wanted to do something a bit more independent. So then I started playing poker professionally because I thought that would give me the most financial freedom as well as freedom to live, where I am. But the funny thing about starting your own busines