Competition, Intensity & Building a $115 Billion Global Bank | Nik Storonsky, Revolut

All right, I had to tell them to start recording immediately because even the conversation we were just having, I was like, oh, we're going to have a lot of fun today. I texted my partner, Rob. I was like, I think me and Nick are going to do a masterpiece because I've been hearing about you from other founders for years about like this guy is super competitive. He moves excessively fast and he's a conqueror. Can you explain like how you view competition and like what you're trying to do in the world? I was extremely competitive since I was six years old, so it was always in a competitive sports or competitive Olympics as well. And for me, it was always a natural desire to be number one in whatever I choose to do. Right. Like if I choose to play a game, I need to be number one. And then I'm extremely pissed off if I'm number two. So I always had this character. You think the competitive drive came from sports? What sports were you playing? I was doing a lot. I was doing kind of, you know, swimming, boxing, a lot of sports in childhood. I think it's more like a character genes combination that you get. Some people are extremely competitive, some people are not competitive at all. So how do you look at the competition? I heard this. We were talking earlier. It was one of the most hilarious quotes where somebody actually like, oh, you want to expand the bank into the United States, right? And are you coming for Jamie Dimon's lunch? And you go, I'm coming for his dinner. I mean, the idea was that, you know, lunch is always something small and dinner is usually in the US, much larger and in Europe as well. So the coming for dinner meant, you know, not only going for retail business, but also for enterprise as well. Also potentially for investment banking, because it's also possible to disrupt investment banks. How so? I mean, it's still very manual, still very expensive. I mean, it's all possible to make it all much cheaper as well. Why not? OK, so explain, because I think a lot of people that are going to be listening to this don't understand what Revolut is today and where you're trying to go. So explain what you're doing, like the state of the business now and then what you're trying to do moving forward. So maybe I started with 12 years ago with what we started. So I started with a simple cut, which allowed you to spend money abroad at interbank rates, avoiding effective banking fees and with good FX rates. And then at a later stage, I expanded into other products, into credit, wealth and trading, crypto, business accounts. We also build a lot of non-financial services business. So as a result, now we are a large digital bank providing all the services the banks provide, plus providing a lot of services on top of it. For example, you can book stays with us, you can buy e-sims and so on. And then the idea is to build a large global bank, which is number one in at least 100 countries. That's what we are trying to do now. So right now we're live in 30, probably 38 countries, in majority of them we have banking licenses. And then we are slowly expanding 10, 15 new markets every, I would say, one to two years. Okay. So this goes back to, again, we just hit on how this conversation started. You're super competitive. You say these like little lines, right, that you're like, you just drop there, but like you're just like, oh, I want to build the number one bank in 100 different countries. You understand that's a wild thing to say and an ambition, and I don't think you say it casually like, oh yeah, I just want to be number one in 100 countries. You actually mean it. So go into how this, what is your inner monologue in terms of competition and how you view this game that you're playing? Yeah. Basically, mentally for me, if I've chosen to do this game, as I said before, I need to be a number one in it. And right now there is a huge opportunity in the world where we have many countries and then in each country have 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 banks, they're all very fragmented. Basically there is a unique chance in the world to build a global bank, which provides much better services and products at a much better price in every single country. And then effectively to optimize, to compete with these banks, to drive prices on their products down, to improve customer experience, to save customers time as well, because you don't need all these physical branches for banks and so on. But you guys say more about this ambition or this competitive drive that you have. So how does it manifest in your life every day? Do you wake up with just a burning desire to achieve mission success, or are you looking yourself in the mirror and just like, I'm not doing enough? What is happening? I'm interested in you, the entrepreneur, and then we'll talk about the business. But this is a fascinating part for me. Well, basically it's a banking business and the way I view it, okay, if I've chosen to be in this business, I need to be number one in it. And obviously there are tens of thousands of banks in the world. And what it means to be number one, okay, it means to be number one in country, one, two, three, four, and so on. Let's say it's a hundred countries. And then in terms of competition, how I look at competition, I mean, to be honest, I don't really look at competition. I look at kind of myself, right? And then what would I do to beat up myself, right, to outcompete, to outsmart somehow. And the philosophy is very simple. So every day you need to be like almost hundred percent every day. And then even if you lose to competition, then you can't really blame yourself because every day you're at hundred percent. Right. So I think, you know, that's the mentality that will help you win, most likely. I love this. Have you spent any time with Toby Luke, the founder of Shopify? I don't know yet. OK, so he was on the show where I'm actually recording with him in like another like two weeks. But he says he likes to take the view that he's a corporate raider, that somebody now has bought Shopify. It's him. And he's like, what the hell was the previous management doing? How would I essentially improve every single element of what this previous management was, even though it also is him? So you said basically the same thing. It's like, well, OK, you can't really control what your competitors do. I control what I do. Let me analyze how I'm doing. And then how would I beat me, you know, from the outside? Yeah, that's part of the game as well. Why do you think you have this opportunity to be number one? Like, what do you see that you're doing wrong that you think that you can do better? A lot of them, they're not founders, that's number one. Right. So they're there only for three, four years at best. They just collect their bonuses and the cash rate. And then they might, you know, optimize certain parity metrics. But I mean, they they are not really 10x people. Right. So they are. I mean, they're just there for their bonuses, effectively for three, four years. As a result, they don't really do bold decisions. They always play in defense. They never play in the fence. I have a different style. Right. So, yes, of course, I play defense as well. But I always think, OK, what I can do more. Right. Which industry I can go, like which product can I launch and so on. So it's like, you know, always pushing myself, pushing myself to do more. Why do you think it's important that you're competing against non-founders? I mean, it's much easier to compete, not against founders. Right. If I would be competing with all the banks and they were all founder led as a world, we would all have, you know, much better products by now. So that's not happening. Right. Yeah. Say more about the difference between your perspective between a founder and a professional CEO. Well, professional CEOs, ultimately, their goal is not to improve organization. Right. The ultimate goal is to protect their job. So they are by definition. They make suboptimal decisions for the company because they think about themselves and they think about the companies as two entities. Right. I think about myself as a company, as a one entity. Right. Like I do everything what is good for the company. And I never kind of try to diverge myself what is good for me. This should be different to what is good for the company for me is the same. So I have like a hundred percent alignment with the company. Yeah. I heard you say something like your entire life is work. It's like ninety nine point five percent of your time is dedicated to your built to building your business. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also, when we speak with regulators, they're all kind of, yeah, but, you know, growth is not a good mentality and so on. And the answer is very simple. Every time when you think as a regulator, I'm excessive risk taker, it's completely wrong, right, because I'm the only one motivated for this company to succeed and to survive. Right. And that means I'm actually not going to take stupid, excessive risk compared to professional CEOs or professional votes because there's no separate. This is what I hate when I was like, oh, it's just business. It's not personal. It's like no such thing with founders. Yeah. Yeah. So this is another thing that surprised when I started reading about you was originally you you set out to like not be regulated. And there was something about you saying this is like the worst mistake you ever made. Can you talk about what happened and how you learned this lesson? Yeah, basically, when we go up so many customers and then we apply for banking license, the entity with the zero customers is less risky compared to an entity with millions of customers. And then the regulator eyes, they become, you know, much more risk averse to you. Right. Because for them, it's much easier to give a license to a company with zero customers, because maybe they will have zero customers in three, four, five years time. Right. If you give a bank a license to a company with five, 10 million customers and something goes wrong, right, then the regulator will be to be blamed. Why were you not regulated before? What was the state of the business when you applied for the banking license? What were you doing before? Well, we simply got e-money license payment licenses. So we were just moving money, much lighter licenses. Yes. Yeah. And then the idea was a banking license. Back then it was three, four years to get. While e-money license you can get within one year. So obviously, as a founder, you want to do things faster. So that's why we went for e-money license. Then we got a lot of customers and then we moved to banking license. And then it became almost impossible because we're very, very large. I think in the history of UK, it never happened before that a company with seven or eight million customers in the UK applied for a banking license. So was that a difficult process? Like what happened? It took us almost five years to get a banking license in the UK. Yeah. OK, so what would you do differently before? You would have tried it like what you I think the way you put it is like regulation. It's not a moat. That's not the right word to do. But it's like there's a huge benefit to actually getting yourself regulated. Is this correct? Is this the way you thought about it? It's like there are pros and cons to build a large business. It's a must. Right. Because if you want to really compete with banks, you need to get trust from customers. They need to put salaries in. They need to put a lot of their wealth in their accounts. They need to start trading stocks with your ETFs and so on. So they need to trust you. And then in their minds or I mean, they trust banks. What do you think the American like fintech companies are doing wrong about this? To build a very large business, to capture large market share. It's just unavoidable. So I think in the US, a lot of companies started like Chime Cash Shop. It was simple before 10, 12 years ago. They all never went for a banking license. I think it's a big mistake. So they could never become a large business. Because explain why they can't become a large business without it, though. Just because they are not a bank, right? They can target certain niche audience, certain cohorts of customers. I don't know, low income and so on. But they can never go to prime audience, right? And they can never become a prime bank account without a banking license. But why do you think that relegates them to being a small company? Well, just because, yes, early adopters want 2% of the population will try them. Maybe it will go from early adopters to their friends, family and other like, you know, 2%. So 4% of the population when you want 40, 50, 60, 70%. For example, in Ireland, we have 80% micro penetration. In Ireland? Yes, four out of five adults use Revolet accounts. OK, how did that happen? Slowly, I think a combination of a lack of competition, very bad banks. They have only four banks, which are bad. Plus a very small country with a lot of people living outside of Ireland as well. So I think altogether, it led to us being 80% of the market. If you look at other markets, for example, in the UK, we're about 20% penetration. France is 20%. Spain, several markets are 30, 40% penetration. So it is possible to go to 60, 70, 80 as Ireland shows. But for it to be a bank. So I'm very curious, like when you're going into a new market and you said there's just bad banks, just like low competition here. Like what are you seeing that they're doing wrong? Well, they're stuck in a limbo of professional management who are extremely risk averse. As a result, there is zero lack of or zero intention to innovate. And then all the resources are spent on protecting what they have already. Right. So, for example, you can have a very old legacy third-party core banking system. Obviously, you need to change it to your own or to some new provider. But then banking management will never do it because it reduces risk. Right. Because you need to migrate customers, you know, something might go wrong and they never take a risk. Right. So that's the problem. Plus, on top of it, because a lot of them, they are not technical, so they don't really understand how to do a lot of technical things. As a result for them, our default choice is to not do anything for regulators and for legacy banks. Because doing anything is risky in an industry where you lack certain skills, certain technical skills. And banking is about, it's not only about regulation, it's also about building tech. And I think all these people are very bad at building tech. I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, RAMP. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world. And one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. RAMP helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on RAMP cuts their expenses by 5 percent. And one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling costs can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. 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So one of your advantages as you see it is you're competing against non founders. You're competing against a professional CEOs and these professional CEOs are not technical, so they actually can't invent technology so therefore they cannot innovate and that's what you're attacking. Yeah, exactly. They just don't even think about building products, right? Because they just don't feel it. They don't use it. They don't or they don't know how to do it. They're just professional managers. I think it's very important for to build successful business. You need to obviously be a great manager, like a very tough manager with very in details and be a very good product person as well. To know how to build and turn the product tech regulation compliance people altogether. It's like a machine, right? So there are inputs and then the whole machine should produce you right output, which is amazing product that people use. Okay. Explain how you're building this machine. I mean, we need to visualize in your head or kind of, you know, what are the inputs in this machine and what do you want to achieve? What are the goals, right? And then, and this is obviously your organization, your structure, your people, how you build product, what do you want to build? Then you effectively observe kind of, you know, the whole structure working, the whole product being built and you always interfere, right? If something goes wrong and then you kind of change certain parts of the machine. For example, uh, one of the starters, uh, it was a very small team, 10, 20, 30 people. We hit the bottleneck when, uh, kind of team, team grow, but then speed slow down, machine stop working. So what I did, I just ensure that we're having a lot of very small independent team who just work on the same platform, right? And then speed increased because people, people work was paralyzed. So the work on different products, different features, uh, using the same tools and they were all independent. But then again, we hit bottleneck with a regulation compliance. Again, I build another muscle in the machine, which is the reg affairs, government affairs department and so on. So they, they had to produce in a certain outcomes. And we hit again, a bottleneck with a hiring fast or enough good people. Again, we build a lot of process for recruitment, targeting the best people. So it's, it's kind of, you know, moves in circles, right? You, you, you build something, then you hit the bottleneck, right? You identify the problem, you solve the problem. You go again. And so now you're adding another essentially like skill to this machine. That is your company. You were, before you started Revolut, you were doing, you were a trader, right? Yeah. I heard about what you just described before, where it's like you have a, I don't even know if you call them bets. Like you'll have like 20 different ideas or like small teams working on 20 different ideas, right? At the time. Explain how these teams are structured and like how your previous career as a trader influenced the way you're building and managing your company. I think what was useful as a trader was risk management and then quantifying everything. Because unfortunately in banks or in other organizations, a lot of things are evaluated based on their people's intuition, which in a lot of cases is simply wrong, right? So in order to evaluate correctly what is done and what is not done, you need to have a metrics, you need to have KPIs. Wait, are you saying dumb or done? Done, done. Okay. Metrics and KPIs that actually kills politics with an organization because look, everything is transparent, right? You as a individual contributor, you as a manager, do you achieve your metrics? Do you achieve your goal, right? Why you haven't achieved it. So it doesn't matter what you say. I mean, there are objective numbers. I think it's extremely important to have as a part of the machine. When I worked in the bank, they didn't really have it. So they had the professional CEO and they had a lot of politics with an organization. And I think it's just simply wrong how people run general businesses. Okay. So explain like setting these little bets up. I mean, to be honest, it's pretty simple because we were always high velocity for the company when we released all the features, all the products. And then at certain point of time, I decided to install a discipline in building bets because we're building a lot of things, but we're not really tracking how they were performing. So we simply build a staging process. When first there is a kind of, you know, decision to produce a bet, it can be bottom up or top down. Then there is a discussion called committee, whether it makes sense to produce the bet. And then if the decision is made, we fund the bet. So we separate a team of up to 10 people, front end developers, back end developers, designer, product owner, sometimes data scientist, operation manager. And then they build a new product within nine to 18 months. And then when they launch the product, we simply look at the growth of the product in terms of gross profit. And because we've done it for the last 10 years, we already have our launch, say 50 bets. And then we know that our top 10 bets, they grow, say 10, 20% month on month, and they produce 1 million GP, 2 million GP, 3 million GP each month consecutively. And then if we release a bet and then we see that this bet is historically in cohort of bottom 25% of all the bets, we simply sunset it. So we instill discipline when we're not really running businesses, which are not growing very fast. And then bets which are growing very fast, we're actually doubling down, right? So we give them more teams. One team becomes second team, three teams, four teams, five teams, and then it becomes department, then it becomes a major P&L alliance. So I think this process just in a very disciplined to always filter out things that don't work out. Even myself, I kind of, you know, I don't really trust my intuition in terms of which products to build, which products not to build, because historically I was wrong so many times. And I think only approach which like completely algorithmic, right? Top bets you've continued to fund, bottom bets you just cut, like within 18 months. This is a traitor in you. Exactly. There's a lot of what you're saying reminds me of Bezos. And the way he describes this, all these, like, obviously, these disparate bets that he would place inside of Amazon when he was obviously building the company. And he has a great line where he's like, you need to pour gasoline on the promising sparks. So your whole thing is I'm going to cut the bottom, but then the top performing, do you have a percentage is 10% top? It's usually up to 25%. Okay, and you're just now we know scale it up. Okay. And you're dedicating a lot more money and resources. Why is it important at the very beginning before it's unproven to cap the team size of 10? It's not necessarily 10. It can be a bit more. It just depends how complex is the product. But it should not be more. Generally, it should not be more than 10 people. I guess as a rule of thumb, okay, you need probably two, three backend developers. You need to, in our case, because we also produce mobile apps, you need to have two to four frontend developers. So three to four backend developers, one product owner, one designer, that gives you 10 people. Is the way you're structuring these teams changing because of AI now? Yes, that's actually a thing now that I'm kind of trying to change. Because last 10 years, I think I optimized a lot how you direct people, how you build organization around people, around their strengths and weaknesses, like avoiding politics, putting KPIs and so on. That's actually avoiding people's weaknesses, right, with AI. Structure needs to be rethought, to be honest with you. I think the team should not be 10 people anymore. It should be two people, three people at best, because one developer can do frontend, backend, can even do data science as well. So it should be rethought. Can you give me a download of your thoughts about how AI is changing the way that you're running your company? Well, many things, and I think we're just in the beginning. So we automated customer support. So 90% of all customer support team is automated now. We're doing the same. Before it used to be 5,000 people plus. Now it's much less. Obviously, engineering is automated as well. We increased speed of engineers by 30%. Translation, cross-selling as well, done by LLMs now. A lot of things. But I think the ultimate goal is, at least a bet for us now, is to be able to build a full-stack AI employee. I think it's completely doable with current technology. So it's not like a chat tool or another interface where you tell what to do and then it produces something. No, it's more like AI employee, which can join calls with you, which have email, which have Slack account, which have access to all internal back office system and can do work. So I think that's kind of the ultimate goal that, I mean, sooner or later, you know, majority of companies will come to. Yeah, you keep mentioning over and over again, like, I don't know if you use the word bureaucracy. I don't think you did, but you hate politics. You want to minimize that. You want like data. You're much more like, just, I don't care what you say. It's like, did we hit the numbers or not? And is this growing or not? What's your organization structure? You just have a shitload of direct reports. Like Alexander Wang was sitting in that chair like two weeks ago, and he has some crazy shit, like 200 direct reports. Yeah. So like, what's your, how are you organized? So I have about 50, 51, 52. Relative, I'm not even gonna speak. Well, I speak when my director was, but I also go deeper, right? I go down to individual contributor in, in, in important projects. So I can speak directly with design or product owner with a developer. Philosophy is very simple, right? So whenever you hire a smart, self-guided people, you don't really need to manage them. So you just need to show them direction and then ensure that they're all synchronized. So it's like an IMA, right? So you need to ensure that all people are using the same standardized equipment, right? That's what you need in the company as well. You do not need every single team or department to reinvent their own bicycles, right? Or their own weapons. Now it has to be the same standard approach. And then if someone invents, you know, some additional kind of tool or additional instrument, which allows us to move even faster, then we need to standardize it across all, all the teams and departments. And that's what I, what I do very well. I'm, I'm very good at supporting our innovation in one team or one department, and then actually spreading it across the whole company. Can you give me an example of you spotting an innovation and spreading it through the other departments? For example, recently it was we, for design, we always use the Figma. Right now, I supported that one team is actually producing designs much faster using LLMs. And then instead of actually designing in a certain interface, or the probably they simply uploaded our design system on the code level to LLM. And then they prompt to produce certain flows based on our design system. As a result, the whole design is not really a frame in Figma, but it's like a live interface on your laptop or on your simulator. So you can click through things, it reacts and so on. But the most important thing, you can do it three, four times faster compared to doing frames in Figma or screens in Figma. And then I'm pushing the whole system to all designers now. Have you spent any time like reading about like entrepreneurs like from the past at all? Yeah, of course. Yeah. Like anybody stick out that that you admire you studied? Yeah, of course. I read books about Henry Ford. I'm glad you said Henry Ford, you're sitting there talking about like, you're building machine, you're like observing these innovations in all different parts of your machine, and I need to make sure that it's spread throughout this entire machine. That's like Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, he would travel around the world. Now we obviously technology could proliferate, you know, somebody could tell you about it, you say it online or whatever, he'd have to like physically go and travel to the factories because they're building physical stuff. And I'm like, Oh, wait, this idea in Britain, I take, I'm gonna take back to America. And that's the way he, Carnegie, Ford did this too, but Carnegie specifically, sounds exactly like you where he's just like, I don't care if it's a 5% improvement in 1% of our business. Like if there's a better way to do it, we are going to do that. And he was moving against usually older competitors that would not invest in technology. And in fact, when they found out that he was spending so much resource on it, they thought he was fucking crazy and actually gave him because he ran that company for 30 years. It actually gave him this compounding advantage that by the time, like his competitors could never catch up. He was like so far ahead. But it's like you were thinking very similar to Carnegie and what you were just describing. I think it's super important. It's just building a machine which moves fast and which achieves the goals. And then if you if you support innovation and certain part of the machine, you need to spread it as fast as possible. Yeah. And so this idea that you you kind of hate like managers that just pass along like what to do, correct? You've eliminated them from your company. Yeah, exactly. I've seen so many by now, last last 10 years, I just simply what they do, okay, they take information from their individual from individual contributors and pass it to, I don't know, stakeholders, right? I mean, it's like, what was it? What's the value add, right? Did you change the direction of the team? No, I mean, they know what they're doing. Okay, did you bring any innovation? Did you identify the easiest way to achieve the roadmap? Right? No, not really. But I mean, what was the job like, you know, just, you know, taking numbers from them, passing to myself. I just don't get it. You prune your team is what I've heard, and you're searching for, I think, what you call self-guided missiles? That's all self-guided people, yeah. It's almost like a founder and employee form is what you're going after? I always joke that, you know, self-guided people are like self-guided missiles, right? So you've got brilliant people, you don't even need to tell them what the goal is, so they self-identify the goal and then they self-reach it, right? So they're like self-guided missiles, which also identify the goals. Then people who are good but not excellent, you need to tell them the goal, and then there, without any kind of iteration, they will reach the goal. Average people, you tell them the goal, and then you need to spend weekly iterations with them to direct them, to tell them what to do, and then they will reach the goal, right? So you spend management time. That's what I don't want. And then below average people, okay, you gave them the goal, you spend time on them, and then most likely they will not hit the goal, right? So that's the problem. So in order for you to have as many direct reports as possible, you just need to minimize management time spent on each of them. Let's just assume you've gotten rid of all your below average people anyways. How do you identify the average people and then do you just fire them as well? I do, yes. Like a lot of people I know who are very good executives, they struggle with this. Why do you think they struggle? I think it's just, you know, they much more care about being empathetic to other people rather than caring about winning. So I think if you're much more weighted in terms of winning, right, your empathy to other people is at second place, and then you will do right decisions even if they are tough decisions. And then people who are kind of, you know, more empathetic or less attached to being a winner, then they might prioritize being number two or number three or number four rather than prioritize getting better people in their team. Have you heard how Elon speaks about this? No. So he would tell the people, like the people managing the engineering team, he's like, if your engineers like you, you're not doing the right job. And his whole thing was exactly that. He's just like, we're here to win, we're here to achieve the goal, and then how people feel is like completely secondary to that. Yeah, exactly. That's more how you think. I think it's very important, whatever you hire an executive for, you observe executives, like people who are very likable by their direct reports. They might not be the right people. I think the best executives, they're very tough, right? Well, they might be likable, right? But then likable is never the goal for the executives. The goal is to achieve the goal, right? With the minimum number of resources spent. So they're the best. Say more about this, because I heard this. You like large outcomes that come from small inputs. You just said something like that just now. Achieve the goal with the minimum amount of resources. Yeah. So it's almost like an art to, I know you don't think of yourself as an artist, for sure, but there is an art. You're trying to, it's not just you want to win, you also want to win the right way, where it's like, you could win and you just expended way more resources than somebody else. It's like, no, I want to try to find the minimum input possible for the large outcome. Yeah, exactly. If you think what founders do, what entrepreneurs do, what great executives do, okay, they have the goal, they need to reach end to end. So what it means, okay, they need to identify direction, where to go, and then they need to build something within this direction with a minimal number of resources spent. Do you see a lot of waste in the American entrepreneur ecosystem though? I think there is too much money, right? A lot of founders, they think money is free, which is probably almost free in California, because you can raise so much money at ridiculous valuations and then just spend. So I think there is a different culture of trying to solve problems with money rather than with your brains. Explain to younger entrepreneurs that are going down that path why that's not the right move. Well, for example, you're into B2B business, right? And then you kind of, you know, set up a company, you have your first sales first, say 1 million ARR, and then you decide to scale it and then suddenly decide to hire expensive VP of sales, who will hire, you know, 50 salespeople to sell your product. You need to find a way to start selling a product cheaply, build a system, and then simply feed additional employees into the system, so you always have, you know, great payback. Starting big, hiring a very expensive VP of sales, who will hire also a very expensive team, it's a wrong decision. Okay, so essentially, like, they remove the constraint from money, therefore they're not developing the skill set that constraints make you. If you're going to survive under the set of constraints, you actually have to be good, you actually have to be talented, you actually have to be resourceful, and they're essentially papering that with money. And it might work for the short term, but long term, they're going to get beaten by somebody like you. I mean, if we are in the same industry, then yes, but I mean, in many cases in the US, it's not that competitive, right? Wait, that's a wild statement. Why would you say in the US it's not that competitive? I feel other people would feel it's the most competitive environment. What do you see as a European? I mean, Europe is even less competitive. So you're saying it's not China? China is competitive, yeah. So China is 9 out of 6, right? And then even if you're good in Europe, or even if you're good in the US, I mean, how can you outcompete the people who work 9 to 10, 6 days a week, right? Plus they have very good education, technical education, so it's very hard. When I started, I started in the coworking space with 140 companies. Within five years time, only three companies survived. They all worked on the weekends. Within 10 years, only two companies survived out of 140. So I think working on weekends is a must if you want to survive, purely statistically. Okay, so working seven days a week is one thing, but working 9 to 9 or 10 to 10, what is the actual culture? Well, I work like this, right? You're the founder. I don't know a single founder that's like, no, I'm on PTO. I understand that. And then, yeah, my direct reports, like absolute majority of them, they work like that, right? They might be like a bit less alignment for direct reports of my direct reports. But still, I think out of all European companies, we're probably one of the hardest working. And I think we're also one of the hardest working companies if you include the US as well. I want to know what you think, like the entrepreneurs that have this California tech culture and operating system, what do you think they're doing wrong? You said there's just too much money. They're not that competitive. No, everything else that seems is there. There is an ecosystem. Donald is very good. You go to great universities plus, or like a lot of experts coming to study in these universities, people are rather hardworking. But the culture when there's too much money, and then people choose to spend a lot of money on the problems, I think it's the wrong culture. Because they're not actually solving the problem, the underlying problem? I think it's just a lot of waste, number one. And then you're not really developing yourself as an entrepreneur. It's so easy to close the problem with the money. If you have an unlimited amount of money, you just throw money here, here, here. But then you're not prepared for the future when for some reason money can disappear. That's a very interesting take. You're not developing yourself as an entrepreneur. Yeah. Give me examples of how you developed yourself. Well, what we started, if you look at the unit economics of the business, we started with a negative gross margin. And the negative gross margin continued for the next three, four, five years until we optimized it to up to 80% of positive gross margin. And then if you look at why is that? So in our business, if you look at Europe, everything is extremely kept and regulated compared to the US. For example, interchanges, 20 base points versus 100% in the US. Credit card rates are kept in the majority of countries. Credit is very limited. You cannot really freely give credit to many people. It's very difficult to set up a bank in Europe, going country by country. Because even if you have a bank in Europe, you cannot be a primary bank because the regulation doesn't allow you to start issuing local accounts unless you stop a local branch of the bank. You have to have a physical location. I mean, let's say you need to have an office, you need to have local connectivity, local regulation, and so on. So you go country by country and it takes a lot of time, a lot of resources as well. So different languages as well. And you had to do all of this. Yes. Plus very tough employment laws in many countries. And yes, it's very easy, right? I mean, it's like employment as well. In Europe, it's not like that. So you need to be very careful how you hire, who you hire. So all this together is actually producing an environment which is not very profitable, right? And very difficult to build a company. And then even in that environment, we kind of succeeded, right? But then we succeeded because we spent a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of brainpower to optimize on every single problem. If I was in the same business in Brazil or like in the US or maybe in other countries in Mexico, certain aspects would be much easier. If you look at unit economics, credit is so much easier to give. Interchange is not kept. Technically, this difficult environment in Europe actually taught us how to build business in a very competitive landscape. You see what I mean? Okay. So if you were surviving in this very difficult environment, now you have a skill set that people that did not have to go through that, and now you have to compete head to head with them in, let's say, like America, they're going to be very hard to compete with. You're going to be very hard to compete with because they haven't developed the same skill sets and they didn't know how to do it. Okay. That makes perfect sense. I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book, Zero to One. The quote says, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places. And they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. That is exactly what Applovin has done with their advertising platform. Applovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers in mobile games. Applovin allows you to capture undivided attention. Applovin ads are full screen videos that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on Applovin in minutes. You set the goal and Applovin achieves it. No complex setup, no expertise needed. And Applovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results scale to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day and increase their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on Applovin. And you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com. You've said some very interesting things about investors that I want to talk to you about, because it's really important. This show, the whole idea was just like, I think entrepreneurs are the most important people in the world. The idea that somebody has an idea and it doesn't exist and they do determination, agency, aggression. They make something that didn't exist that started in their mind real. And in your case, you're in 40 countries or whatever the case is, thousands of employees. How many customers? Tens of millions. From an idea that you had when you were, what, in your late 20s? It's absolutely incredible. I think that's a miracle to me. And yet a lot of the discussion that takes place that what founders say about investors in private, they do not say in public. And so we were talking earlier, because I saw this clip of you where you compared investors to football cheerleaders. Can you explain why you made that comparison? Well, basically, I gave this history before. So when I started the company, it was 12, 13 years ago. Back then in Europe and in the UK, it was extremely difficult environment to raise money. Simply, there were not that many VCs around and then they were all more like private guys, like extremely aggressive, extremely legalistic. So to raise money, you had to sign a lot of bad conditions in your shareholder agreement, liquidation preferences, both seats, or like, you know, reducing your voting rights as a founder and so on. So these people basically think that because of them, the company was kind of created because they gave money and that they are entitled to a large part of its success. So that's the mentality of like, you know, quite a few investors that invested very early on, like in my company, for example. I think it's kind of largely wrong, this mentality, because getting money from LPs is extremely easy. Wait, getting money, you said? Getting money from, because their business is very simple, right? Okay, they have LPs, they collect money from them, and then they invest in startups, and then they have a business model of 220, right? So it's so much easier compared to building a real operational business from scratch, because they never use their own money, right? They don't really need to work hard. I mean, there is competition, but competition is just, you know, for getting deals. So I think their job is so much easier. That's number one. And then number two is, back then there was, you know, almost no competition compared to what is now in VC circles. And back then there was basically this opinion that we as VC will help you run the company, the company will be successful because we'll give you advice, you know, how to run a company. Relatively, like almost none of them, they ever build any company, right? So they just raise money from LPs, so they invested their money in many companies. And sometimes they have both sides, sometimes they don't. But having both sides doesn't teach you how to run a company at all, right? You're just an observer. As a result, you have all these people with a lot of power, right? Because they give you money, they put certain conditions and shareholder agreement. And then they also have this mentality that they can't tell you what to do as a founder, right? And that's, in my experience, was very dangerous. And I had many cases in the past when certain VCs, I mean, the advice was simply wrong for the company. So I think, you know, my advice to entrepreneurs would be, even if you raise money from VCs, try to pay a lot of attention to shareholder agreement, right? And then to ensure that they're purely from VC. Financial players, they have no right, no voting right, no seat at the table at decision-making, super important, because if something goes wrong, right, you effectively have cheerleaders who look at the match and then they try to play this match instead of professional players and that's always a disaster. Why did you say some of the advice they gave you was dangerous? I mean, one of the advices was, OK, you know what, you need to hire an experienced executive. You know, now it doesn't work. When I started, first five years, I had probably 50-plus experienced executives, or I kept only two, right, within one year. It just doesn't work. Why is that? Why experienced executives, you know, almost never work out? It's the same as football players, right, they have their prime. And in reality, I mean, there is a prime age and it doesn't mean they became less good. I think they changed their priorities, right, plus probably they became less good, plus things changed, times changed, competition changed. So people who were good before, who had a past track record of being good before, they might not be good in your company for the future, that's number one. It's extremely naive to think so. And then, number two, there is also a negative selection bias, right? If you think of people who are extremely good, like, for example, how I hire people, I look at their track record of achievement, and then they need to be top 1% of compared to their peers in terms of their career progression. And then I try to pick up them when they are 25, 30 years old, so they continue on the same trajectory in Revolute. Whoever you're hiring, experienced executive, relatively there is a negative selection bias because people who are extremely good, they already made it, right? I don't know, they're either probably running their own businesses, or they're retired or something else. And then people who don't have this extreme career progression, who you hire as experienced executive, they just, you know, by definition, are less good compared to people with extremely fast career progression who are already not in the market. Okay, so you found basically the advice they gave you to be completely the opposite of what you should have been doing, based on what you just said? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then, yeah, a lot of advice, you know, they think that certain people in the company are good because they experienced, well, I think I'm really opposite. And then one of them, he's actually quite a good investor, he was forcing me to fire my best person because he was too hardcore. So a lot of relationships. Who do they think wins? Yeah. This guy needs to work nine to five, okay? So how did this, like, tell me more about this, like, you obviously fought back, the guy didn't get fired, what happened? I mean, of course, of course, I didn't fire him. I said no. That's it. Okay, well, that's it. And the guy- You take it or leave it. Yeah. And then what, did you have a fight with the investor? Like, what happened? Yeah. Yeah. And so how'd you settle it? You had all the power? Like, what happened? I fighted with him. They had a collision of, you know, many investors, but, you know, they stepped back. Okay. So how'd you get them to step back? Well, I think, you know, pretty early on, I realized that, like, quite a few of VCs, they are not very operational, and they can be actually dangerous for the company if they have enough power. So every single investment route, they just, you know, remove four VCs. So it took, you know, most years. So now I don't have any VCs on the board. I think that's the best. You always need to have operators rather than VCs on the board, people who actually build business who know how to do things. Your mindset reminds me a lot about Travis Kalanick from Uber. He was on the show, and I think it was like one of the clips that went, like, got millions and millions of views was on this, where he just actually thinks that, like, just doing no harm is an excessively high bar for a VC. He said something like, over 90% of VCs, they can't even not fuck things up. Not much. He's like, not even be helpful. They just can't not fuck things up. And then he said, like, 1% in his experience have been actually helpful. And his thing, which he would tell entrepreneurs, I think he said on the show, is just like, tell them to give you the money and go away. That's how you think. I'm Elisabeth. And yes, ensuring shareholder's agreements, they just don't have any powers. Yeah, I will make you richer. You just leave me alone. It's basically. Yeah. You also set up your own, I don't know if you call it a VC fund. Like what is this? Yes, it's a VC fund. It's basically. What's it called? First of all, quantum light. Okay. So explain what you're doing. This is funny. I just picked up on this now because you are analyzing like the legacy banks. You're like, I'm not like, look at all the obvious mistakes they're doing. Some of that came to experience, right? Hard fought experience. The way they're doing it doesn't make sense. I'm going to show you a different way to do it. Yeah. Basically, the idea was in, I think it was 2022 or 2023 when I came up with this idea. And the idea came actually from my personal pain, from a fight with an investor. It was actually one of their big names. They entered or they invested in Revolut. It was, I think just after COVID or during COVID when all the stocks went up, they invested at 33 billion valuation. So basically they had legal right to not to allow us changes in shareholder agreement because they were like, you know, less investor, blah, blah. So you had a bunch of these bad experiences with VCs. You're going to start your own VC fund. Explain how your fund is different. Yeah, VC fund. So basically I had this fight and then, you know, I was extremely pissed off and I thought, you know what? I also need to commit with VCs in their business because they're so bad. And out of my frustration, I started the fund as well. And then the idea was basically to invest not based on the human judgment, but based on their science and based on their machine learning models, statistical investment is number one. Number two, actually help with founders with operational advice, playbooks that we developed at Revolut, how to hire people, how to do performance management, how to do product expansions and so on. And then finally help them sell their product as well because we are a large enterprise. We are buying, you know, from a lot of vendors and having us as a client helps to sell into other enterprises or potentially sell to our customers as well, our Revolut customers. So I think overall, plus my personal advice, obviously, so I thought overall the package was so much better compared to purely financial players, VCs. You just said your personal advice as well. So like, are you just making concentrated bets? Is this like another thing where you're doing 20 or 50 at a time or you're just like concentrating money behind a handful? It's again, it's statistical investment, right? So it's based on machine learning models. So the way it works, our model selects 30, 40 companies to invest over two, three years and then puts equal amount of money in each startup. So we started with a fund, a Series B fund. So it's close, it's fully invested. It produced now like 56% IRA. And you started like 250 million or something, right? We started 250 million, yes. The first fund, so now it's like 56% IRA. We started investing second fund now, which is 500 million. So it's Series C now companies, again, based on the model. Also very high return. I think it's the top 5% of funds in the world now in terms of returns. We'll probably do a large fund as well for a late season. Where's the money coming from? It's different LPs. So initially I started 20% was my own money. So I put 20% of it or 25% of it. And then the rest came from other founders. Second fund, we already got quite a few institutional players as well. I've never heard of somebody building a bank, compare themselves to like Meta. So I'm going to get into that in one second. But you don't do anything like fucking half-assed or like small, right? You're just like, okay, I started 250, now you're just going to see how far you can take this. Is it going to be like a, you know, a giant like Renaissance technologies kind of thing? Well, obviously the goal is to build something large, like BlackRock, but in private markets. Again, we'll see if we get there. But I think idea and approach makes sense because you now have a lot of data on startups and then you can apply all this machine learning models to identify the best ones. And then models predicted, so for example, one of their signals we'll look at, we'll look at who invested in the company, who's investing. And we'll look not only in the fund performers who invest in the company, but down to the partner level. And then we'll also look at the age of the partner. And there are, you know, very interesting things when I look at this variables as age of the partner. And then you'd rather not invest in companies where partners who are investing are older than 40 years old. So the best cohorts are 30 to 40 years old of young partners who are investing, they're the best at identifying good companies. Same as with executives as well. So there's a certain prime age when you need to look at. Again, there are many variables, right? Age is not only one thing, right? But statistically speaking, that's what you need to look at. And is this a separate company from Revolut? Yes, completely separate. Okay, so completely separate. And you have somebody else running it? Yeah. Okay, so tell me something about helping them sell their product as well. Talk about like the early days of like marketing. I heard you spent nothing on marketing for the first like five or seven years? Yes, first seven years it was completely organic. Plus COVID also hit. And in 2021, I remember a company was six, seven years old, COVID hit and like our revenues went down, I think 70%. And back then, we were not in banking business, we were still kind of, you know, e-money with a travel card. So it was very heavily related to or correlated with travel business. And then as COVID hit, travel business completely gone. So we had to survive or somehow, we kind of optimized a lot during that time. Okay, but explain why you decided to start spending money on marketing. Because like, I go to Europe, and it's like, I feel like I'm blanketed with your ads, I see your stuff everywhere. Now it makes perfect sense after talking to you. It's not like, oh, yeah, I'm going to do like a little bit here, a little bit there. It's just like, once I find something works, I just, you know, essentially go scorch, scorch earth on it. Yeah, basically, the way I think about marketing, so I haven't done it for six years, seven years, I just didn't have time, plus we didn't have enough resources. But when I started doing it, I went really, really deep. So basically, I started with who we need to hire to run a proper marketing machine, not like here and there, but scientifically, right? Where we need to invest money in marketing with a proper return. And then my idea was very simple. Who are the companies with the largest marketing spend, and who are extremely cautious with their marketing spend? Where is the, you know, very low margin of error? And back then it was gaming companies, right? Gaming companies had a lot of marketing spend, performance ads, or certain companies were also doing a lot of above the line campaigns. The gaming companies were doing well or not? Gaming companies were the largest spending companies in the world on marketing. So if you look at their budgets, it could easily be, you know, one billion plus. I know a lot of them are going to Applovin. Yeah. Applovin is going to print like six billion in profit this year. Yeah, it's like amazing, yeah, yeah. So I ended up, you know, hiring, you know, extremely good person who started running Marketing Revolut. And then we also, then, oh, one of the things that I let you go on, like, am I understanding you're, so you're studying how gaming companies are advertising, or you just want to know what they were spending? The idea was, who are the best professionals who know how to spend money in marketing, right? And then the idea is that these professionals will work in gaming companies because they have the largest budgets. Got it. So that's how I got my first, well, actually, second, first one, I fired. He wasn't from gaming. Probably VC's cousin asked you to hire him or something. And anyway, we went very deep into, you know, performance marketing, LTVs, payback. And then recently, we also started doing, because we got a banking license. And then what we realized, or what I realized quite early on is all about trust, right? If you're a digital bank, you don't have branches, people don't see you physically, they trust you less by definition compared to HSBC, Lloyds, JP Morgan, Chase, and so on. Then, okay, how you build trust, how you arbitrage, effectively, performance marketing spend, because in performance marketing spend, you pay per impression. And then there are a lot of spaces in the physical world, which you can buy, which will also produce impression, but at a much cheaper price compared to the digital world. So for example, we bought probably now 50% of all airports in Europe, right? Like in almost 50% of airports in Europe now have ads, right? Again, because of a simple math. How many times a year people travel, right? How many times a year they're in the airport? How many impressions we produce? How much will it cost us? Right? There is arbitrage to performance marketing. And then similar ideas to other places in the physical world, for example, we started now doing our equivalent of legacy branches, what we call a called Rev Store, right? Rev Experience. So we set up first shop in Barcelona, again, arbitraging impressions of in physical world versus the digital world, because how many people pass every year our shop? What is the shop though? I mean, it's more like a revolut experience, so it's not a real banking legacy branch. You come in and then you experience all our products, it's all done in a very modern way, like Apple type of store, but for Revolut. And then the idea is that we just generate impressions for people which pass the street who come over as well. Like a lot of companies advertise in airports, and it's just like, oh, it's up on the screen maybe for 30 seconds or whatever, it might be one billboard. It's like, I'm walking for like two minutes, and it's still, I'm like enclosed, there's like a huge, like I'm in a cocoon of Revolut ads. How did you come up with that idea too, though? Just buying full airport. I can't think of another company that I've seen do this, and I think it's actually a really smart move, more people should do that. I may not use your services, but I definitely know you exist and what you do. You essentially are aiming for ubiquity, is the way I was thinking about that when I was walking to the airport. Yeah, in my mind, we're just paying for impressions much cheaper in physical world compared to digital world. It's not just like paying for impressions though, because like, you know. I mean, building trust as well. I think the trust thing was actually one of the most... most interesting insights. And you said a lot of interesting shit today. But I think there's something about the ubiquity of it. It's not just one sign saying, this is Revolut and this is what we do. It's like entire hallways, like you're just walking and I'm being surrounded by this. It's like, I'm telling you, I can't think of another company. This is before I even thought of having you on the show. It's just like, this is actually really good idea. I'm not gonna walk past this and not know this company exists. One of the last things I wanna talk to you about goes back to this grandiose ambition you have. I think people that may have not known you before this pick up on you're like super competitive. I mean, I love the fact that you were like, kind of got pissed off at VC's like, all right, well now I have to compete with you because you made me so mad. But I've never heard anybody else building a bank. One, you said there's really no true global bank and you wanna be the first one. So I like the level of ambition. But then you compare just like, we wanna be a global technology company. And I think you might have mentioned a few companies, but the one I remember was like a global technology company like Meta. Explain that, the connection between what you're building, which made people think that maybe like even a boring, you know, business has been around for, banks have been around for a long time, but that's not the way you're viewing what you're building. Yeah, basically our idea and our goal is to generate enough cash flow from this business to be able to fund like really big bets, which can consume a lot of capital, right? Like for example, I would love to go into LLMs as well to build our own models. And we're in fact, you know, build our own transactional model called Pragma. So it's LLM, but all transformer based on transactions rather than the words. But I would love even to go deeper, right? To kind of build our own data centers, to train our own model, all the models to kind of, you know, to do a lot deeper tech compared to what we do now. But then, you know, it requires a lot of investments, right? And a lot of cash flow. So basically to build a large business so that it produce so much cash flow, that it is possible to fund some kind of, you know, moonshot bets, which might not necessarily produce P&L in the next, you know, three, four, five years. Are these moonshot bets unrelated to like financial services? Yeah, most likely, yeah. Because I mean, in financial service, I mean, what else can we do? I mean, almost everything is invented already. So we just, like ultimately, we're just rewriting legacy products, right? So we're building the same financial products, but we're building them much cheaper and much nicer compared to old ones. Plus we're putting them under one umbrella in one app. So it's all very convenient. Plus we also innovate on top. So they're all kind of, you know, interconnected with each other, talk to each other. But ultimately, it's the same old banking, but done in a new way, right? So what I really love to do is to go out of it and then do something that was never done before. Inside the industry? In all industries, yeah. All industries? More like in my tech industry. Have you like shared publicly, like some of these like moonshot ideas or you're like keeping inside the company, like? For now, all these ideas I just have in my head. And then I just know that we don't have enough resources and time to build them. But I hope, you know, in three, four, five years time, we might have enough resources to build them. Pragma is a foundation model trained on our transactional data. As I said, we have 30 million transactions every day. So we have billions and billions of transactions. And then it is possible effectively to train a transformer-based model on transactions. And then use it in like almost any aspect of our financial services. So it can be anti-fraud model. It can be a credit model. Potential can be investment model and so on. When you launch here, why would I want to use your bank as opposed to like J.P. Morgan? So J.P. Morgan is a very local, gives you a U.S. bank account plus U.S.-based products. If you ever have exposure outside of U.S., we are a banking partner because we do everything what J.P. Morgan does for you in the U.S. Plus on top of it, we provide all the global assets. You can have global accounts with us. So being in the U.S., you can open an account in Europe, Australia. You can send money instantly between all countries and so on and so forth. So instead of giving you local-based financial products, local-based benefits with points, we give you effectively global exposure. So that's our proposition. Plus on top of it, it's much nicer in terms of interface plus much cheaper compared to J.P. Morgan. What's the difference way that you make money compared to the way they make money? They are much more credit-focused compared to us. We are much more substitution-focused plus transaction business plus commission-focused. What are you doing on the credit side? Are you just selling all that off? Credit is just standard products, credit cards and loans. Selling them off or not yet now because it's still a very small portion of our balance sheet. So you think your advantage relative to the legacy banks is you're more of a technology company? Our advantage is tech. And then if you think about banks in the past, whenever they expanded country to country, they just bought all the banks. As a result, they have many systems in many countries. They don't really control anything. To produce any report takes months to extract data from different systems. Our advantage is that we have just standardized one system, one ledger across many countries. As we go from one country to another country, we do not need to write things from scratch. We just adjust configuration of our software. And then, for example, onboarding UK, we adjust certain configs to change onboarding to US or to change onboarding to Mexico and so on. So it becomes one product which is highly configurable. We do not need to build another bank, another country from scratch. As you do it, you obviously need much less people to maintain it compared to 10 banks in 10 countries. As a result, there is economy of scale, so we can sell products much cheaper compared to other banks. Plus, the whole institutional knowledge, how you build product, how you do marketing, and so on. So you apply the same knowledge in any new country. And I think, over time, it can become an unstoppable machine, right, because it provides much better products and services at a much better price compared to local banks. Over time, I'm building an unstoppable machine. That's a great place to end. Thanks, Nick, for the time. It was awesome. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.