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

Alright, 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 text 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's 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 and I was 60 years old, so I was always in a competitive spots or competitive Olympias as well. And for me, I 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 assuming boxing, a lot of sports in the childhood. I think it's more like a character, jeans combination that you get, you know, 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 for somebody, actually, like, "Oh, you want to expand the bank into the United States, right? And are you coming for Jamie Diamond's lunch?" And you go, "I'm coming for his dinner." The idea was that lunch is always something small and dinner is usually in US much larger than in Europe as well. So they're coming for dinner, not only getting for retail business, but also for enterprise as well, also potentially for investment banking, because it's also possible to disrupt investment banks. I mean, it's still very manual, still very expensive, I mean, it's so possible to make it all much cheaper as well, why not? Okay, so explain, because I think a lot of people that are going to be listening to this don't, they're not going to understand what revenue it is today and where you're trying to go. So explain what you're doing, the state of the business now and then what you're trying to do moving forward. So maybe I started with Tony as a give, 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 effects rates. And then at later stage, I expanded to other products and to credit, wealth and trading, crypto, business accounts, we also build a lot of non-financial services business. So the result now, we are a large digital bank providing all the services that 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-scenes 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 where 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, say, one to two years. Okay, so this goes back to, again, we just hit on how this country started. You're super competitive. You say these little lines that you just drop there, but 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 in an ambition and I don't think you say it casually. Oh yeah, I just want to be 100, number one in 100 countries. You actually mean it. So like go into like how this, like, what is your inner monologue in terms of like competition and how you view, like, this game that you're playing? Yeah, basically, mentally, for me, if I chose them to do this game, right? And as I said before, I need to be a number one on issue. And right now there is a huge opportunity in the world when we have many countries. And then in each country, I have 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 banks, they're all very fragmented. Maybe there is a unique chance in the world to build a global bank, which provides much better services and products at the 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 customer's time as well, because you don't need all these physical branches for banks and so on. Will you say more about this like this ambition or this like competitive drive that you have? Like, how does it manifest in your life every day? Like, you wake up, which is like a burning desire to achieve mission success? Are you looking yourself in the mirror and just like, I'm not doing enough? Like, what is happening? Like, I'm interested in you, the entrepreneur, and then we'll talk about the business. But like, this is a fascinating part for me. Well, basically, it's our banking business and the way I view it, okay, if I chose them to be in this business, I need to be a number one on issue. And obviously there are tens of thousands of banks in the world. And what it means to be a number one, okay, it needs to be a number one in country, one, two, three, four, and so on, and say it's hundreds of countries. And then in terms of competition, how 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 out-compete, to out-smart somehow, and the philosophy is very simple. So every day, you need to be like almost 100 percent every day, and then even if you lose to competition, then I can't really blame yourself because, okay, every day, you're at 100 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 Lucas, the founder of Shopify? No, not yet. Okay, so he was on the show, 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 reader. 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? You know, it also is him, so you say basically the same thing. It's like, well, okay, you can't really control what your competitors do, I can control what I do. Let me analyze how I'm doing, and then how would I beat me, you know, from the outside? Let's probably get into that. 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 only for three four years. At best, they just collect their bonuses and the search right, and then they might, you know, optimize it on parity metrics, but I mean, they are not really 10X or 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 need to do ball decisions, they always play in defense, they never play in defense. I have a different style, right, so yes, of course, I play defense as well, but I always think, okay, what I can do more, right, which industry I can go, like, which product can I launch, or, and so on, since, like, you know, always pushing myself, pushing myself to do more. Well, I do think it's important that you're competing against non-founders. I mean, let's say, I'm much easier to compete not against founders, right, if I would be competing with all the banks and they were all found a lead, as a world, we would all have, you know, much better products by now, so that's not happening, right? Yeah, yeah. Say more about the difference between, in 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, with definition, they make suboptional decisions for the company, because they think about themselves and they think about the companies as two entities, right, I think about myself as the company, as a one entity, right? Like, I do everything what is good for the company, and I never kind of tried 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, 100% alignment with the company. Yeah, I heard you say something like your entire life is work, it's like 99.5% of your time is dedicated to your build to building your business, correct? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Also, what we, what we speak, we'll regulate is they're all kind of, yeah, but, you know, growth, or it's not a good mentality, and so on, and my answer is very simple. Every time when you think as a regulator that 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 CEO, also professional goals, 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 there's 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 out several million customers and then we apply for bank license, the entity with zero customers is less risky compared to an entity with millions of customers. And then in a regulator eyes, they become, you know, much more risk-takers 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, ten 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 immonialized payment licenses. So we were just moving much lighter licenses. Okay. And then the idea was banking license back then was three, four years to get while immonialized you can get within one year. So obviously as a founder, you want to do things faster. so that's why we're here. went for email license, then we got a lot of customers and then we moved to bank license and then it became almost impossible because we're very, very large. A thing in history of UK, it never happened before that company with seven or eight million customers in UK applied for bank license. So was that difficult process like what happened? It took us almost five years to get a bank license in UK, yeah. Okay, 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, 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 a lot of 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 and you just start trading stocks with your ETFs and so on. So they need to trust you and then in their minds are, 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 US a lot of companies started like chime, cash shop, it was simple before 10 to 12 years ago, they all never went for bank lessons, nothing is a big mistake. So they could never become a large business because. Explain why they can't become a large business without it. Just because they are not a bank, right? They can target certain niche audience, certain co-hosts of customers, I don't know, low income and so on, but they can never go to prime audience, right? They can never become a prime bank account without the bank lessons. But why do you think that really leads them to being a small company? Well, just because yes, early adopters want 2% of population will try them. Maybe it will go from early adopters to their friends family, another like 0%. It's a 4% population when you want 40, 50, 60, 70%. For example, in Ireland we have our 80% micro penetration. So for all the foreign? Yes, for all the five Edels use relative accounts. Okay, how did that happen? Slowly, I think a donation 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 80% of the market. If you look at other markets, for example, in the UK, where about 20% penetration, France is 20% in Spain, certain markets are 30%, 30% penetration. So it is possible to go to 60, 78% as Ireland shows, but for it you need to be a banker. So I'm very curious when you're going into a new market and you said there's just bad banks, there's low competition here. What are you seeing that they're doing wrong? Well, this stuck in the limbo of professional management, who are extremely risk-reverse, 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. 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 introduces risk, 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 of 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 not all about regulation, it's also about building tech. I think all these people are better 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%, 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, and we see that in the Ramp data too. 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You're competing against non-founders. You're competing against professional CEOs, and these professional CEOs are not technical, so they actually can't invent technologies, so therefore they cannot innovate. And that's what you're attacking. Yeah, exactly. They just don't even think about building products, because they just don't feel it. They don't use it. They don't know how to do it. They're just professional managers. I think it's very important to build successful business. You need to obviously be a great manager, like a very tough manager, be 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 all together, it's like a machine, right? So there are inputs, and the whole machine should produce you right output, which is amazing, probably the people use. Okay, explain how you're building this machine. I mean, you need to visualize in your head kind of what are the inputs in this machine, and what you want to achieve, what are the goals for it, and then inputs is obviously your organization, your structure, your people, how you build product, what you want to build, and then you effectively observe kind of the whole structure working, the whole product being built, and you're always into fear, right? If something goes wrong, I don't know, you kind of change certain possible the machine. For example, one of the starters, it was a very small team 10, 20, 30 people, we hit the bottleneck and kind of team grow, but then speed slowed down, the machines stopped working. So what I did, I just ensured that we have, you know, 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 they work on different projects, different features using the same tools, and they were all independent. But then again, we hit bottleneck with regulation compliance. Again, I build another muscle in the machine, which is the regga phase, government affairs department, and so on. So they had to produce in certain outcomes, and we hit again bottleneck with hiring, fast enough good people. Again, we build a lot of processes for recruitment, targeting the best people. So it's kind of, you know, moves in circles, right? You build something, then you hit the bottleneck, right? You identify the problem, you solve the problem, you go again. So now you're adding another, essentially, like, skill to this machine that is your company. You were, before you started, you were doing your trader, right? Yeah. I heard about what you just described before, it was 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? It's time to 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, uh, uh, risk management, and then like quantifying everything, or because they're a functional, unfortunately, in, in banks or in all organizations, a lot of things are, 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 matrix, you need to have KPIs. Wait, are you saying down or done? Done, done. Okay. Oh, I'm going to say down as well, yeah. Matrix and KPIs that are actually kills politics with an organization because look, everything is transparent, right? US individual contributor, user manager, do you achieve a message, do you achieve a 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, then they had a lot of politics with an organization. And I think it's just simply wrong how people are on generally 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 a lot of fish, so a lot of products, and then at certain point of time I decided to install a discipline in building bets because we were building a lot of things, but we were not really tracking how they were performing. So we simply build a staging process when first there is kind of in a decision to produce a bet. We can be bottom up, up, down, then there is a discussion called committee where they make sense to produce the bet, and then if decision is made, we found the bet. So we separate a team of up to 10 people, front end developers, back end developers, design a product owner, sometimes data scientist, operational manager, and then they build any product within nine to 18 months, and then when they launch the product, we simply look at growth of the product in terms of growth profit. And because we've done it for the last 10 years, we already have launched say 50 bets, and then we know that our top 10 bets, they grow say 10, 20 percent mountain mountain produce, I don't know, 1 million GP, 2 million GP, 3 million GP, each month consecutively. Then if we release the bet, and then we see that this bet is historically in cohort of bottom 24 percent of all the bets, we simply sunset it. So we are still disciplined when 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, nine becomes department, then becomes a major penal lines. So I think this process is just very disciplined to always filter out things that don't work out. Even myself, I don't really trust my intuition in terms of which products to build, which probably it's 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 the tree in you. Exactly. There's a lot of what you're saying reminds me of bases, 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 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? It's 10% top. It's usually 25% for all of us, and then you're just now, we know, and you're dedicating a lot more money and resources. Why is it important at the very beginning before it's unproven to to cap the team size of 10? It's on the side of 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 roll of thumb, you need probably two, three back end developers in our case because we also produce map alops, you need to have two to four front end developers, so three to four back end developers, one for the owner, one designer that gives you 10 people. Is the way you're searching these teams changing because AI now? Yes, that's actually, I think now that I'm kind of trying to change because the last and the last, I think I optimize a lot how you direct people, how you build organization around people around this, something like weaknesses, like avoiding politics, putting KPIs and so on. That's actually avoiding people's weaknesses, right, with AI. Straction needs to be a method to balance you. I think the team should not be 10 people anymore. It should be two people, three people, the best, because one developer can do front end back end. Can I even do data science as well? So it should be a method. Can you give me a download of your thoughts about how AI is changing the way that you're running a company? Well, many things and I think we're just in the beginning. So we automated customer support, it's a 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 can create speed of engineers by 30% translation, cross selling as well done by LLM now. A lot of things, but I think ultimate goal is at least a bet for us now is to be able to build like full stack AI employee. I think it's completely doable with current technology. So it's not like a chat tool or another like interface where you tell what to do and it produces something. No, it's small like AI employee, which can join calls with you, which have email, which have Slack account, which have access to all internal pick-off system and can do work. So I think that's kind of another ultimate goal that I mean it's similar to a majority of companies will come to. Yeah. You keep mentioning over and over again. 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 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 going or not? What's your organization structure? You just have a shit load of direct reports, like Alexander Wang was sitting in that chair like two weeks ago and he had some crazy shit like 200 direct reports. I don't know. Yeah. So how are you organized? So I have about 50, 51, 52, really dear, I'm not even going to speak, well, I speak one of my direct reports, but I always give it deeper, right? I give it down to individual contributors in pattern projects, so I can speak directly with design or product owner, with the developer philosophy is very simple, right? So whenever you hire 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 are 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 don't need their 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 the teams and departments. And that's what I do very well. I'm very good at sporting or innovation in one team or one department and then actually spreading it across the whole company. Can you give me an example of you starting innovation and spreading it through the other departments? For example, recently we for design, we always used Figma, right now I supported one team as actually producing designs much faster using LLMs and then instead of actually designing in a certain interface or 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 you admire, you studied? Yeah, of course I read books about entrepreneurs fault. I'm glad you said Henry Ford, you're sitting there talking about like your 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 can proliferate, you know, somebody can tell you about it, you see it online or whatever. He'd have to like physically go and travel to the factories because they're building physical stuff. Oh, wait, this idea in Britain, I take, I'm going to say 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 resources on it, they thought he was fucking crazy and actually gave him, because he ran a company for 30 years. He 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, you were thinking very similar to Carnegie and where you were just describing. I think it's super important. It's just building a machine, which moves fossil, which it shows the girls. And then if you, if you spot innovation and so don't bother the machine, you need to spread it. That's possible. Yeah. And so this idea that you, you kind of hate like managers that just pass along like what to do, correct? I've eliminated them from your company. Yeah. Exactly. I've seen so many by now, last, last 10 years, just simply what they do, they take information from their individual contributors and they pass it to, I don't know, stakeholders, right? I mean, it's like, well, it was a very, very ad, right? Did you change the direction of the team? No. I mean, well, they know what they're doing. Okay. Did you bring any innovation? Did you identify their easiest way to achieve the roadmap? Right? I don't know, not really, but I mean, it was also a job, like, you know, just taking numbers from them passing to myself. I just don't get it. Keep pruning your team. team is what I've heard. And you're searching for, I think, what you call self-guided missiles. - That's a 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, self-guided missiles, right? So you've got brilliant people. You don't even need to tell them what the goal is. 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 they are without any kind of iteration. They will reach the goal. Everysh people will 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 everysh people, okay, you gave them the goal, you spend time on them, and then most likely they won't have a hill to go, right? 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, at least 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 think if you're much more weighted in terms of winning, right? Your empathetic to other people is a 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 and less attached to being a winner, then they might prioritize their being number two, number three and 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 or you observe executives are like people who are very likable by their direct reports. They might not be the right people. I think the best executives are very tough, right? Well, they might be likable, right? But then likable is now the goal for executives. The goal is always to achieve the goal, but the minimum number for us to spend. So they're the best. The same way about this, because I heard this, you're like small, you're like large outcomes that come from small inputs. You just said something like that just now. Like achieve the goal with the minimum amount of resources. - Yeah. - So it's like almost like an art to like, I know you don't think of yourself as an artist, for sure. But like there is like an art, you're trying to like, it's not just you want to win. You also want to win like the right way, where it's like you could win and you just expanded way more resources than somebody else. It was like, I want to try to find a minimum input possible for large outcomes. - Yeah, exactly. If you think what fathers, what entrepreneurs, what are like great executives do, okay, they have the goal they need to reach or 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 of the minimum number of resources spent. Do you see a lot of waste in the like the American entrepreneurial ecosystem though? I think there is too much money right there. A lot of fathers, they think money is free, which is probably almost free in California because you can raise in or so much money at the ridiculous valuations and then just spend. So I think there is a definite culture of trying to solve problems with money rather than with your brains. - Explain to young 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, a set up a company, you have your first sales, first, say, one million ARR. And then you decide to scale it and then suddenly decide to hire expensive VP of sales, who will hire another 50 sales people to sell your product. You need to find a way to start selling a product cheaply, build the system and then simply feed additional employees into the system. So you always have a no great payback. Starting big hiring and a very expensive VP of sales, who will hire also very expensive tumor and so on 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 on this, this doesn't have constraints, you actually have to be good, you actually have to be talent, you actually have to be resourceful. And they're essentially papering that with money. And it might work for 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, for what, I mean, in many cases in the US, it's not that competitive for it. - 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, the Europe is even less competitive. - Yeah, it's not China, China, China is competitive, yeah. - So China is 96, right? Even if you are good in Europe, or even if you are good in the US, I mean, how can you out-compete the people who work nine to nine? Six days a week, right? Plus, they have very good education, technical education. So it's very hot. When I started, I started working 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 steady speed. - Okay, so working seven days a week is one thing, but working nine to nine or 10 to 10, like, what is the actual culture? - Well, I work like that, right? You're the founder, and I don't know a single founder that's like, no, I mean, I'm on PTO, like, I understand that, I'm talking about your land, my dark reports, like absolutely majority of them, they work like that, right? They might be like a bit less alignment for my dark reports. But still, I think out of all European companies, we're probably one of the hottest working. And I think we're also one of the hottest working companies, if you agree, as well. - I want to know what you think, like, the people, the entrepreneurs that have this like California tech, like, culture and operating system, what do you think they're doing wrong? You said, there's just too much money. They're not taking it. - No, everything else seems there is there, right? There is an ecosystem, don't as they're good, you go to, you know, great universities plus, like a lot of expats, you know, coming to study in this university, people are rather hardworking, but the culture, you know, there's, you know, too much money, and then people spend, choose to spend a lot of money on the problems, I think it's wrong culture. - Because you're not actually solving the problem, the underlying problem? - I think it's just sort of the waste number one, and then, you're not really developing yourself as an entrepreneur. It's so easy to kind of, you know, close the problem with the money. If you have unlimited number, or unlimited amount of money, and you just, you know, throw money here, here, here, but then you're not prepared for the future when, you know, for some reason the money can disappear. - That's a very interesting take. You're not developing yourself as an entrepreneur. - Yeah. - You make examples of how you develop yourself. - Well, what if we start, if you look at the unit economics of the business, we started with a negative gross margin. A negative gross margin continued for next three, four, four years, until we optimize it to up to 80% of positive gross margin. And then if you look at why is that, right? So in our business, if you look at our Europe, everything is extremely kept and regulated compared to the US. For example, interchange is 20 base points versus 1.5% or in the US, creative categories are kept in majority of countries. Like, credit is very limited, right? You can not really freely give credit to many people. It's very difficult to actually set up a bank in Europe, giving country by country, because even if you have bank allowance in Europe, you cannot be a primary bank because with the regulation, that's the law you to start issuing local accounts unless you stop a local branch of the bank in a country. - In a physical location. - I mean, I mean, you need to have an office, you need to have local connectivity, local regulations. Also, you go country by country and 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, very easy, right? I mean, employment will in Europe is not like that. So you need to be very careful how you hire, who you hire. So all this together is actually produced environment, which is not very profitable, right? And very difficult to build a company. Then, even in that environment, we kind of succeeded, right? But then we succeeded because we spend a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of kind of, you know, brain power to optimize on every single problem. If I was at 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 the economics. Credit so much easier to give. Interchange is not kept. Technically, these difficult environments in Europe actually taught us how to build business in a very kind of competitive landscape. You saw 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 keep head-to-head with them, and let's say like America, they're going to be very hard to compete with. You're going to be very heard to compete with because they haven't developed the same skill sets and they didn't go - Yeah, yeah. - 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 Apploven has done with their advertising platform. Apploven connects you with over a billion potential new customers in mobile games. Apploven allows you to capture undivided attention. Apploven 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 Apploven in minutes. You set the goal and Apploven achieves it. No complex setup, no expertise needed. And Apploven 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 Apploven. And you can do that by going to apploven.com. That's apploven.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, like they make something that didn't exist that started in their mind real. And in your case, you're in 40 countries or whatever cases, thousands of employees, how many customers, tens of millions, like from an idea that you had, you know, when you were what, in your late 20s? - It's not just on Apploven. - Yeah, 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 traders. - Yeah, can you explain why you made that comparison? - Well, basically, I gave this like three before. So what I saw at the company was 12, 13 years ago. Back then, in Europe and in the UK, it was extremely difficult environment to respond to. Simply, there were not that many VCs around and then there were all more like private sector guys, like extremely aggressive, extremely legalistic. So to raise money, you had to sign a lot of bad conditions and even 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 less part of its success. So that's the mentality of like in quite a few investors, that invested their own like in my company, for example. I think it's kind of a leisurely wrong with this mentality because they're getting money from a piece. It's extremely easy. I was getting money, you should get a getting money from, because their business is very simple, right? Okay, they have a piece, 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 receive their own money, right? They don't really need to work hard. I mean, there is competition, but competition is just enough 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 almost no competition compared to what it 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. Relative, like almost none of them, they ever build any company, right? So they just raise money from a piece, they invested their money in many companies and sometimes they have both things, sometimes they don't, of having a boss it or doesn't teach you how to run a company at all, right? You'll just observe. As a result, you have all these people with a lot of power, right, because as they give you money, they put some conditions and share how they agreement. And then they also have this mentality that they can tell you what to do as a founder, right? And that's in my experience was very dangerous. And I have many cases in the past when seven VCs, I mean, the advice was simply wrong for the company. So I think you know, my advice entrepreneurs would be, even if you raise money from VCs, try to pay a lot of attention to share how they agreement, right, and then to ensure that they're purely financial players that they have no right, no voting right, no seat at the table, a decision-making, super important. Because if something goes wrong, right, you effectively have cheerleaders, you know, look at the mesh and then they try to play this match, you know, instead of professional players, and that's always disaster. Why did you say some of the advice they gave you was dangerous? I mean, one of the advices was, okay, you know what, you need to hire experienced executives. You know what, 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, the age it doesn't work. Why is that? Why experienced executives, you know, almost now work out, is the same as football players, right, they have their prime. Like, reality, I mean, there is a prime age, and like, it doesn't mean they became less good, I think they changed their priorities, right, plus probably became less good, plus things changed, times changed, competition changed. So people who were good before, who had, you know, passed track record of being good before, they might not be good in your company for the future of this number one. It's extremely naive, two things are, and then, number two, the results are negative for selection bias, right? If you think at people who are extremely good, like, for example, how I hire people, I look at their track record of achievement, and they need to be a top-owned percent 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 the same trajectory in a revolute. Whenever you're hiring experienced executives, or, really, there is a negative selection bias, because people who are extremely good, they already made it, right? I don't know, they either problem running their own businesses, or they retire, or something else, and then people who have this extreme career progression, who you hire as experienced executive, they just are not very definitionless, 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. - Okay. - Then there are, yeah, a lot of advice, where they think that certain people in the company are good, because they experienced, while 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 hot-core. - So a lot of relationships. - Yeah, it's just, yeah. - All the guys need to work nine to five, okay? So 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, I'm certain. - Okay, that's it, and the guy would have had-- - You take it a little bit, yeah. - And then what did you have a fight with the investor, like what happened? - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, and so how did you settle it? You had all the power, like what happened? - I fight it with him, and then, even though they had the collision of many of us, but you know, they stepped back. - Okay, so how did you get the step back? - Well, I think, you know, pretty early on, I realized that, like, quite a few, or VCs, they are not very operational, and they can make sure they're dangerous for the company, if they have enough power. So every single investment route, they just, you know, removed VCs. So it took, you know, both of us, so now I don't have any VCs. On the both, I think that's the best. - You always need to have at the right, this route, and VCs on the both, people who actually build this scope, or not how to do things. - Your mindset reminds me a lot about Travis Kalinick 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 VCs. He says something like, over 90% of VCs, they can't even, not fuck things up, not much. He's like, not even be hopeful. 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 our entrepreneurs and take his set on the show, is just like, tell them to give you the money and go away. That's how you think. - I mean, those are the best on the, yes. He's showing, she'll hold his agreement, so they just don't have any boroughs. - Yeah, I will make you richer. You just leave me alone. It's basically, you also set up your own, I don't know if you call it a VC fund. Like, what is a VC fund? - So basically, what's it called, first of all? - Comptum light. - Okay. - Swim, what you're doing, this is funny. I just picked up on this now because you were 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 gonna show you a different way to do it. - Yeah, basically, the idea was in, I think it was 2022 or 2023 when I came out with this idea and the idea came actually from my personal pain, from my fight with the investor. It was actually one of their big names. They ended all the investment revolute. It was, I think, just after COVID, during COVID, when all these things went up, they invested 33 billion in 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 search your own VC fund, explain how you're finding different. Yeah, VC fund, so basically, I had this fight and then, you know, I was extremely pissed off from the authority, you know, what I also need to compete 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, till the last, not based on the human judgment, but based on their science, based on their machine learning models, statistical investment, it's number one. And number two, actually, help with founders with the operational device, playbooks that we developed, the travel, how to hire people, how to do performance management, how to do product expansions. 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 devices, or potential sell to our customers as well. Right now, our relative customers. So I think overall, plus my personal device, obviously. So I thought overall, the package was so much better compared to purely financial players, VCs. You just had your personal device as well. So like, are you just making concentrated bets? Is this like another thing we're doing 20 or 50 at a time, or are you just like concentrating money behind a handful? It's, again, a statistical investment for us is 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 closed, it's fully invested. It produced now like 56% IRA. And you started like 250 million or something, right? We started to 50 million years, so our first fund. So now it's like 56% IRA. We started investing second fund now, which is 500 million. So it's a series C now, companies. Again, based on the model, also very high return. I think it's top five percent of funds in the world now in terms of returns. We'll probably do a large fund as well for elites. Where's the money coming from? It's different old piece. 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 founder already got quite a few institutional players as well. I've never heard of somebody building a bank to compare themselves to like meta. So I'm gonna 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 gonna see how far you can take this. It's gonna be like a giant like Renaissance technology is kind of thing. Well, obviously the goal is to build something large, like black crock, button, private markets. Again, we'll see if we get there. What I think idea and approach makes sense. Because you now have a lot of data on startups. And then you can apply all these machine learning models to identify the best ones. And then models participated. So for example, one of their signals we look at we look at who invested in the company, who is investing. And we look not only in the fund, performance who invested in the company, but down to the partner level. And we'll also look at the age of the partner. And then there are very interesting things when we look at this variable as age of the partner. And then you draw them not investing companies where partners who are investing are older than 40 years old. So the best cohorts are 34 years old of young partners who are investing, they're the best at identifying good companies. The same as with executives as well. So there's a certain prime age when what you need to look at. Again, there are many variables, right? The age is not only one thing, right? But statistically speaking, that's what we need to look at. - And is this a separate company from Revolut? Or is this company a separate company? - Okay, so completely separate. And you have somebody else running it? - Yeah, okay. - You just think about helping them sell their product as well. Talk about the early days of marketing. I heard you spent nothing on marketing for the first five or seven years? - Yes, first seven years it was completely organic. Plus COVID also hit. And 2021 I remember a company was six, seven years old. COVID hit and our revenues went down, I think, 70%. And back then we were not in banking business where we're still kind of, you know, in money with a travel card. So it was very heavily related to, or related with travel business. And then as COVID hit, travel business completely gone. So we had to survive or somehow, we kind of optimize a lot during that time. - Okay, explain why you decided to start spending money on marketing. 'Cause I go to Europe and it's like, I feel like I'm blankated 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 gonna do a little bit here, a little bit there. It's just like once I find something works, I just, you know, essentially go scorch, scorched earth on it. - Yeah, basically the way I think about marketing. So I've shown down it for six years, certainly years. I just didn't have time, plus we didn't have enough resources. But then 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 term. 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, you know, very low margin of error? And back then it was gaming companies, right? Gaming companies had a lot of marketing spend, a few months out, so the companies were also doing a lot of above the line or campaigns. - Did gaming companies 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 bin plus one bin plus. - I know, a lot of them are going to Apploven. (laughing) - Yeah. - Where did the Apploven's gonna print like six billion in profit this year? - Yeah, it's like an amazing year. - Yeah, yeah. - So I ended up, you know, hiring, you know, extremely good person who started running a marketing everywhere with you. And then we also, then, or one of them, we can start, like you go on. Like, am I understanding you're studying how gaming companies are advertising? Or you just wanna 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. - Oh, I got my first election second, first one. - I fired. - He wasn't from big gaming gaming. - Probably VC's cousin actually hired him or something. (laughing) - And anyway, we went very deep into, you know, performance marketing, LTVs pay back. And then recently we also started doing, because we got a banking license and then what we realized or what I realized are quite early on is all about trust, right? Well, 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 HBC, alloys, GP, 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 a physical world, which you can buy, which will also produce impression, but a much cheaper price compared to a digital world. So, for example, we bought probably now 50% of all airports in Europe, right? Like in almost 50% of airports in Europe will 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? Now, there is arbitrage to performance marketing. And then, similar ideas to other places in physical world, for example, we started now doing an equivalent of legacy branches. What we call a cult ref store, right? Rev experience. So, we set up first, first shop in Barcelona. Again, arbitrage impressions of in physical world versus the digital world. Because how many people pass every year our shop? What is it, Milo? Like what? It's more like a revenue experience. So, it's not a real banking legacy branch. You come in and then you experience all our products sold down in a better modern way. Like Apple or a type of store for everything. And then the idea is, which is generate impressions? For people which pass the street will come over as well. Like a lot of companies advertise an airport. And it's just like, oh, it's like, it's up on the screen maybe for 30 seconds or whatever, it might be one billboard. It's like, you walk, I'm walking for like two minutes and it's still, I'm like enclosed. There's like a huge, I'm in a cocoon of revenue 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 of more people should do that. It's like, I mean, I use your services, but I definitely know you exist and what you do. Like, you essentially are aiming for ubiquity. It's the way, like, I was thinking about that when I was walking to the airport. Yeah, in my mind, we're just paying for impressions much cheaper compared to physical roles compared to digital roles. But it's not just like paying for impressions, though, because, you know, I mean, building trust as well. Yeah, I hear the trust thing was actually one of them. and most interesting insights, and you said a lot of interesting shit today. But like, I think there's something about the ubiquity of it. It's not just one sign saying, you know, this is revolving this 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 it on the show. It's like, this is actually a really good idea. I'm not gonna walk past this and not know this company exists. One of the last things I want to talk to you about those rectus like grandiose, like ambition you have, I think people that may have not known you before this, pick up on your super competitive. I mean, I love the fact that you were like, kind of got pissed off of EC's like, I will not have to compete with you 'cause 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 want to be the first one. So I like the level of ambition. But then you compared just like, we want to 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 Metta, explain that. The connection between what you're building, which many people think maybe like even a boring business has been around for a long time. But that's not the way you're viewing what you're building. - Yeah, basically idea and the 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 LLM's as well to build our own models in a way. We're in fact in a build our own transactional model called Pragma. So it's LLM, but all transform our base and transactions are all in the world. But I would love even to give a deeper right to kind of build our own data centers to train our own models to kind of do a lot deeper tech compared to what we do now. But then it requires a lot of investments, right? And a lot of our 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 a moonshot bets which might not necessarily produce purely on the next three, four, five years. - Are these moonshot bets unrelated to like financial services? - Yeah, most likely, yeah. 'Cause I mean 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 all the 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 are all kind of interconnected with each other, talk to each other. But ultimately, it's the same old banking but done in a new way, right? What I really love to do is to go out of it and do something that was never done before. Inside the industry. In all industries here? - All industries. - More like in tech industry. - Have you like shared publicly like some of these moonshot ideas or you're like keeping inside the company? Like for now, or these ideas, I just have, you know, 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 such, 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. It can be anti-fraud model. It can be a credit model. Potential can be investment model and so on. - You watch here. Why would I want to use your bank as opposed to like, GP Morgan? - So GP Morgan is a very local, gives you a US bank account plus US-based products. Or if you ever have exposure outside of US, we're a banking partner because we do everything what GP Morgan does for you in the US. Plus, on top of it, we provide all the global assets. You can have global accounts with us. So being in the US, you can open 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 let's say the position plus on top of it is much nicer in terms of interface plus much cheaper, what's the difference with the way you make money compared to the way they make money? - They are much more creative focused compared to us. We are much more subscription focused plus transaction business plus commission focused. - What are you doing on the credit side? Are you just selling all that off? Credit to just standard products, credit cards and loans. Selling them off or not yet know? - Okay. - 'Cause still we are a 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, when they expanded country to country, they just bought all the banks. There was always have many systems and many countries that don't really control anything to produce any report, takes math, takes straight data from different systems. Our advantage is that we have just standardized one system, one leg across many countries. As we go from one country to another country, we do not need to write things from scratch. We just, it just configuration of our software. And for example, onboarding UK, we just don't can fix 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 and another country from scratch. As you do it, you obviously need much less people to maintain it compared to 10 banks and 10 countries. As a result, there is an 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 reply the same knowledge in any new country. And I think, you know, with time, it can become an unstoppable machine, right? Because it provides a 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 next for the time, it's 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 have 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.