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In short: Revolut's founder on running a company with 50 million customers: quantified goals cascaded to every person, direct reports who reach goals "like a self-guided missile", and an expensive lesson about experienced executives. Most of the rest is specific to banking: licences, regulators, the US market, an IPO and his machine-learning venture fund.
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🎙️ 20VC with Harry Stebbings · 👤 Nik Storonsky · ⏱️ 46 min · 📅 December 2, 2024 · ▶️ Watch on YouTube
🧠 Key ideas
- Quantified goals, cascaded to everyone. Five or six company goals a year, each quantified, then cascaded to departments, teams and individuals. The host has heard Revolut described as one of the most KPI-led companies.
- Excellent people set their own goals. Excellent: choose the goal and reach it alone, "a self-guided missile". Strong: need the goal, then deliver without you. Average: need weekly iteration. He keeps only the first two as direct reports, and has more than 40.
- You'll know within three months. Most good hires perform from week one to four; if someone isn't delivering after three months, most likely they never will.
- Experienced executives were his most expensive mistake. Pushed to hire "experienced professional managers" to scale, he hired about 55 through executive recruiters and ended up firing around 50. He prefers execution-oriented people to "talk-oriented" consultants.
- Before hiring a role you've never hired, interview the whole market. He was "terrible" at first hires in areas he didn't know (compliance, recruitment, people). Now he first interviews as many people in the field as possible to learn how the job is done, then chooses.
- Speak to regulators yourself. He was told to put a "grey-hair banking CEO" in front of regulators; it was bad advice. The founder who built the product explains it plainly and with data. And get a banking licence before you have millions of customers.
- Many small bets, then scale the winners. About 10 people, one to one and a half years and £2–3 million per bet; 27 bets in about three years: roughly five great, five or six failures, the rest in between. Winners get more teams based on revenue in months one to four.
- Brand marketing he can't measure. Once purely performance-driven, he now buys brand assets like airport jet bridges, as long as they stay a small share of performance marketing.
📑 Chapters
00:00 · KPI-based leadership
01:34 · Building and hiring the team
05:21 · Leadership, first hires and resources
08:22 · Brand marketing
09:10 · The banking licence and regulators
12:34 · Crypto and the US market
18:19 · Product bets: what worked and what didn't
24:58 · Private banking and Revolut in three years