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'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 since I was 6 years old. So it was always in competitive sports or competitive olympiads 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. Yeah, in the childhood. I think it's more like a character and genes 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 where somebody asked you 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."
[laughter]
I mean, the idea was that, you know, lunch is always, you know, something small and dinner is usually in the US much larger than in Europe as well. So like coming for dinner means, 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.
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?
Okay, so explain because like I think a lot of people that are going to be listening to this don't like, they don't, they're not going to understand what Revolut is today and where you're trying to go. So like 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 start with 2 years ago with what we started. So I started with a simple card 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 built a lot of non-financial business. So the result now we are a large digital bank providing all the services that banks provide plus providing a lot of services on top of it. For example, you can book stays with us, you can buy eSIMs and so on.
And then the idea is to build a large global bank which is number one in at least 100 countries. And that's what we are trying to do now. So right now we're live in 30, probably 38 countries. In the majority of them we have banking licenses. And then we are slowly expanding 10-15 new markets every, I would say, 1 to 2 years.
Okay, so this goes back to again, we just hit on how this country started. You're super competitive. You say these like little lines, right? That you're like, you just dropped there. But like you just like, oh, I want to build the number one bank in 100 different countries.
You understand that's a wild, wild like thing to say and an ambition. I don't think you say it casually like, oh yeah, I just want to be 100, you know, top number one in 100 countries. Like 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've chosen to do this game, right? And as I said before, I need to be 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 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.
Can you say more about this like this ambition or this like competitive drive that you have? So like how does it manifest in your life every day? Like you wake up with just like a burning desire to achieve mission success? Are you looking at 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 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 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on. Let's say it's 100 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, sir. Every day you need to be like almost 100% every day. And then even if you lose to competition, then you cannot really blame yourself because okay, every day you were at 100%, right? So I think, you know, that's a mentality that will help you win. Most likely.
I love this. Have you spent any time with Tobi Lutke, the founder of Shopify?
Okay. So he was on the show. I'm actually recording with him in like another like 2 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 basically 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, 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?"
Yeah, let's probably give it away.
Why do you think you have this opportunity to be number one? Like what do you see that they're doing wrong that you think you can do better?
A lot of them they are not founders. That's number one, right? So they are only for 3, 4 years at best. They just collect their bonuses and that's it for it, and then they might, you know, optimize certain parity metrics. But then they are not really 10x people, right? So they are, and they're just there for their bonuses effectively for 3, 4 years. As a result, they don't really need to do bold decisions. They always play in defense. They never play in offense. I have a different style, right? So yes, of course I play defense as well, but I always think, okay, what can I do more, right? Which industry can I get? 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 result, we would all have, you know, much better products by now. That's not what's happening, right?
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 the organization, right? Their ultimate goal is to protect their job. So they, 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 and the company as 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 it's 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 building your business, correct?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also, when we speak with regulators, they're all kind of, yeah, but you know, growth or it's not a good mentality and so on. And then my answer is very simple. Every time when you think as a regulator that I'm an 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 boards.
Because there's no separate... This is what I hate when everyone's like, "Oh, it's just business. It's not personal." It's like no such thing with founders.
So, this is another thing that surprised me when I started reading about you was originally 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 got 7 million customers and then we applied for a banking license, the entity with zero customers is less risky compared to an entity with millions of customers. And then in the regulator's eyes, they become, you know, much more risky 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 3, 4, 5 years time, right? If you give a banking license to a company with 5, 10 million customers, and something goes wrong, right? Then my 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 on...
Much lighter licenses, yes.
Yeah. And then the idea was banking license back then was 3, 4 years to get, while e-money license you can get within 1 year. So obviously as a founder, you want to do things faster. So that's why we went for e-money license. And then we got a lot of customers, and then we moved to banking license, and then it became almost because we were very, very large. I think in the history of the UK, it never happened before that a company with 7 or 8 million customers in the UK applied for a banking license.
So, is that a difficult process? Like what happened?
It took us almost 5 years to get a banking license in the 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 is not a moat. That's not the right word, 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 you, ETFs and so on. So they need to trust you, and then in their minds, I mean, they trust banks.
What do you think the American companies are doing wrong about this?
To build a very large business to capture large market share, it's just unavailable. So I think in the US, a lot of companies started like Chime, Cash App, 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, the low income and so on. But they can never go to the prime audience, right? And they can never become a prime bank account without the banking license.
But why do you think that relegates them to being a small company?
Well, just because yes, early adopters, 10 to 20% of the population will try them. Maybe it will go from early adopters to their friends, family and another like, you know, 2%, so 4% of the population. While you want 40, 50, 60, 70%. For example, in Ireland we have 80% market penetration. So four out of five... Yes.
Four out of five adults use Revolut accounts.
Slowly. I think a combination 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 all together 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 limbo of professional management who are extremely risk-averse. As a result, there is zero lack of... zero intention to innovate. And then all the resources 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 introduces 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 are not technical, so they don't really understand how to do a lot of technical things. As a result, for them the default choice is to not do anything for regulators and then for legacy banks because doing anything is risky in an industry where you lack certain skills, so certain technical skills. And banking is about... it's not only about like regulation, it's also about building tech. And I think all these people are very bad at building tech.
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So, one of your advantages as you see it is 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 technology, so therefore they cannot innovate.
And that's what you're attacking.
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... They don't know how to do it. They're just professional managers. Thing is very important for... to build a successful business, you need to obviously go to be a great manager, like 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 then the whole machine should produce you the right output, which is an amazing product that people use.
Okay, explain how you're building this machine.
I mean, you need to visualize in your head 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 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, 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, when we started, it was a very small team, 10, 20, 30 people. We hit a bottleneck when kind of team grew, but then speed slowed down. Machine stopped working, so what I did, I just ensured that we have, you know, a lot of very small independent teams who just work on the same platform, right? And then speed increased because people's work was parallelized. So they work on different products, different features using the same tools. And they were all independent. But then again, we hit a bottleneck with regulation compliance. Again, I built another muscle in the machine, which is reg affairs, government affairs department, and so on. So they had to produce certain outcomes. Then we hit again a bottleneck with hiring fast enough good people. Again, we built a lot of process for recruitment targeting the best people.
So it kind of, you know, moves in circles, right? You build something, then you hit a 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. Before you started Revolut, you were doing... you were a trader, right?
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 a 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 there are, fortunately or unfortunately, in banks or in other organizations, a lot of things evaluated based on 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 metrics, you need to have KPIs.
Wait, are you saying dumb or done?
I'm not going to call myself dumb.
Metrics and KPIs that actually kills politics within an organization because look, everything is transparent, right? You as an 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, then they had a lot of politics within 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 release a lot of features, a lot of products. And then at a certain point of time, I decided to install 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 built a staged process when first there is kind of, you know, a decision to produce a bet. It can be bottom-up or top-down. Then there is a discussion, call it committee, whether it makes sense to produce the bet. And then if a 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 9 to 18 months. And then when they launch the product, we simply look at growth of the product in terms of gross 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% month on month and they produce, I don't know, 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 the 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, then becomes a department, then becomes major P&L lines. So I think this process is just, you know, 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 the only approach which is like completely algorithmic, right? Top bets you continue to fund, bottom bets you just cut like within 18 months.
There's a lot of what you're saying reminds me of Bezos and the way he describes 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 of the 10% top? Usually...
Up to 25% of all the guys.
Okay, and then you're just now we know...
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. Like 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 back-end developers. You need... in our case, because we also produce mobile apps, you need two to four front-end developers. So three to four back-end developers, one product owner, one designer, and it 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, you know, 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. But actually avoiding people's weaknesses, right? With AI, structure needs to be a result of... 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 front-end, back-end, can even do, you know, data science as well. So it should be a result.
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. I think we are just in the beginning. So we automated customer support, about 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 increase 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 bit for us now is to be able to build like a full-stack AI employee. I think it's completely doable with our current technology. So it's not like a chat tool or another like interface where you tell what to do and then it produces something. No, it's more like an AI employee which can join calls with you, which have email, which have Slack account, which have access to all internal back office systems, and can do work. So I think that's kind of, you know, the ultimate goal, but 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 like 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 organizational structure? Do you just have a shitload of direct reports? Like Alexander Wang was sitting in that chair like 2 weeks ago, and he had some crazy [__] like 200 direct reports.
So like what's your... how are you organized?
So I have about 50, 51, 52. In reality I'm not even speak... well, I speak with my direct reports, but I also go deeper, right? I go down to individual contributor in bottom projects. So I can speak directly with designer, with product owner, with 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're all synchronized. This is like a nightmare, 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 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 supporting 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 was we... for design, we always used Figma. Right now, I spotted that one team is actually producing designs much faster using LLMs and then instead of actually designing in certain interface of the product, 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 from the past at all?
Like anybody stick out 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 a 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, obviously our technology can proliferate, you know, somebody can tell you about it, you see it online, whatever. He'd have to like physically go and travel to the factories because they're building physical stuff. And like, "Oh, wait, this idea in Britain, I'm going to take it 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 what he was spending so much resources on, they thought he was [__] crazy and actually gave him... because he ran a company for 30 years, it actually gave him this compounding advantage that by the time his competitors could never catch up. He was like so far ahead. But it's like you were thinking very similar to Carnegie in what you were just describing.
I think it's super important to... you're just building a machine which moves faster, which achieves the goals. And then if you spot innovation in a certain part of the machine, you need to spread it as fast as possible.
Yeah, and so this idea that 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 10 years. I just simply... what they do, okay, they take information from individual contributors and then they pass it to, I don't know, stakeholders, right? I mean, it's like what's their value add, right? Did you change 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's your job like, you know, just taking numbers from them and passing them 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.
The 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 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 a self-guided missile which also identify the goals. Then people who are good, but not excellent, you need to tell them the goal and then 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 spent time with them, and then most likely they will not hit the goal, right? So that's a 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 issue.
Why do you think they struggle?
I think it's just, you know, they much more care about being empathetical 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 and less attached to being a winner, then they might prioritize their 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?
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."
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 there are, they're very tough, right? Well, they might be likable, right, but then likable is never the goal for executives, right? The goal is always to achieve the goal, right? With the minimum number of resources spent. So they're the best.
Say more about this because I've heard this, like you like small... you 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.
So it's like almost like an art to like... I know you don't think of yourself as an artist for [laughter] 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 expended way more resources than somebody else who's like, no, I want to try to find the minimum input possible for 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?
