043 Duarte Garrido
VP Growth Marketing, Volt
Duarte Garrido is Co-Founder and CEO of dojo. - an AI tool that “unifies marketing data under a single intelligence layer, with an integrated system of AI Agents working for you”. Full disclosure: I’ve added dojo to our martech stack at Kuda and it’s awesome. Before founding dojo, Duarte was VP Growth Marketing at Volt.io, and Global Head of Omnichannel Marketing and Social Media at Standard Chartered.
“My first thought when reading this question was: it isn’t - we’ve made it hard.”
The interview
What’s your coffee ritual?
Since going tee-total 5 years ago, coffee is pretty much all I have left. So I poured (pun intended) all my previous geekiness on beer and wine into it. In short, I do Japanese cold drip coffee, prepared the night before and left slow-dripping overnight. My weirdest kink is I drink my coffee cold - even in winter.
What was your first marketing job?
First marketing job might have been distributing Chocapic dressed as a giant Pico (the mascot - it was big in the 90s) during a burning-hot Lisbon summer when I was 14. My first proper marketing job was running the social media department at Sky in London. Both involved trying to predict human behaviour in loco, but one was slightly less sweaty.
What finance apps do you have on your home screen?
I love Monzo, enjoy Revolut, tolerate PayPal and Wise, and bet big on PensionBee UK.
Which newsletter, podcast, or book do you recommend most?
Lenny Rachitsky’s, always. The pod and the newsletter. Also anything Scott Galloway does and, for my personal life, I’m big on ZOE. As for books, I’m mostly into comics and business books. Anything with the Silver Surfer or marketing / GTM in it.
What’s an underrated growth channel in fintech?
I would have to split between B2B and B2C. For B2B, brand is still massively underrated - but maybe not for long. In B2C, I think community is still the most underrated. Monzo wrote the playbook though - people should just follow it.
What keeps you up at night?
Right now? Everything. As an early-stage founder building a vertical AI company, everything is a source of caution and concern. Everything is new, everything is untested, and what got us here is unlikely to get us there. It’s also exciting, and a time for learning and creating new, better ways of working. That’s what balances my serotonin.
What’s one fintech brand (other than your own) that’s getting marketing right?
Fintechs are learning to excel at brand. I think Kuda’s a great example of that. As is PensionBee UK, Yonder and many others. But I have a soft spot for Monzo. Always will have. They know how to pull all the right levers - brand and performance. All they’re lacking is dojo.
Why is marketing so hard?
My first thought when reading this question was: it isn’t - we’ve made it hard. And while I believe that’s true - that we’ve overcomplicated marketing with deterministic cadences, workflows, useless dashboards and a fixation with personalization and tracking - the reality is that it is still complex mostly because of its data. Marketing data is enormously complex. It is much, it is varied, it is unstructured, it is messy. To the point where similar metrics have different semantics. But the biggest reason why marketing is so complex is that it is non-linear. It is very hard to predict. It has brand and delayed variables that have to operate within the same wavelength as linear performance variables. So it becomes really hard to see how all of it fits together, and interoperate together. Thankfully, we’ve built a solution for that.
Whose answers to the above questions would you most like to read?
I would love to hear the thoughts of Megan Bowen. She’s built an amazing agency in Refine Labs, and is a voice in marketing I’m always happy to hear.