The Ledger
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Storonsky: Revolut paid $2M for 55 executive hires and fired 50
“I think I hired like, you know, 55 through executive recruiters, paid like, you know, two million in fees. I ended up, you know, firing 49 or 50 of that, so it's such a waste of money.”
O'Driscoll: Revolut's valuation stems from fat, inefficient European banks
“Because the European banks, unlike the American banks in general, are so crappy. There's a reason that Revolut's worth a hundred and fifteen billion, because the incumbent European banks were fat, dumb, and happy, and making margin off their customers.”
Mignot: Building venture-backed hyper-growth startups requires seven-day workweeks
“If you look at the most incredible companies in the past, you know, you look at Revolut, you look at Deliveroo, all of these companies, the amount of work that these founders and these early teams put in was tremendous. I mean, it was seven days a week, you kn…”
Lemkin: VCs should sell Revolut and Chime private shares immediately
“I would probably sell Revolut and Chime right now.”
Storonsky: UK public markets cannot compete with the US due to liquidity
“I just don't understand how the product which is being provided by UK can compete with the product provided by US. It is less liquid, so it's much worse compared to US. Plus it's much more expensive because it pays some duty, right? So it's like, it's just not…”
Storonsky: Hiring experienced professional managers to scale is a dead end
“Well, I never believed it, but I was forced to believe that, you know, in order to scale the company to hire experienced professional managers, that's a dead end.”
Le Nel: Growth marketing fails when operators rely on channel dogma
“I think it's when you start bringing a little bit of belief. I think the less you believe in, the Better it is, you know. I have no belief in anything, you know. I have no belief in anything. Like, it's true, you know, because... Well, I don't necessarily beli…”
Le Nel: Focusing on CAC leads to acquiring the worst customer cohorts
“There's no CAC discussion. We only talk about ROI. Because if you talk about CAC, you'll always acquire the worst cohorts.”
Stebbings: Revolut's Nik Storonsky Is the Best Founder Out of 1,000
“Nick Staronsky from Revolut. I've interviewed a thousand founders. He's the single best founder I've ever interviewed, and it's because he runs 26 product experiments at once. He gives them two million dollars, tells them to run for a year. Every single week h…”
Scaleups acqui-hiring failing YC startups for AI talent is no longer viable
“When rippling is hoovered up 30, and owners hoovered up 20, and Revolut's hoovered up 10, you just, that strategy worked three years ago. Like, it's too late. Like, everyone is just sitting there hitting refresh, hoping these smart YC companies fail so they ca…”
Revolut Will Outvalue Robinhood in Its Next Funding Round
“It's our fintech provider, Revolut, which has stolen the show, and I think on the next round will be considerably more valuable than Robinhood.”
O'Driscoll: Non-lending fintech giants like Revolut threaten banking economics
“At some point we're going to have to deal with the fact that the largest bank by market cap Doesn't do much lending, and that's actually going to be a real problem in the aggregate because the whole point is of banking is to recycle savings into lending.”
Siemiatkowski: Nubank will outperform Revolut in US expansion
“I think I have to go with David. Because I think, ah, Nick's challenge right now might be that he is so distributed. I mean, he's trying to go for the whole world, right? I mean, he's launching in Dubai. He's launching in India. He's launching everywhere. You …”
Chang predicts Revolut will become a trillion-dollar company
“I think of a trillion dollar company.”
Gibson: Baseline work pace at Revolut is 11 to 12 hours daily
“Try and work about maybe like 11, 12 hours a day with a bit of exercise in the middle, that sort of thing. I found, I mean, that's eight years in. That's my kind of marathon pace, I would say. And then when we need to work harder, we can.”
Revolut Back-Tests Interviewers Based on Hired Employees' Performance Reviews
“We gather these data points for the people that they do hire. So we know the performance reviews that those people go on to get, and then we can basically back test the interviewer and give them scores. And you see the distribution of outcomes of the people th…”
Storonsky: Products should not fund downstream features until onboarding is optimized
“Until we've got a really good funnel that is obviously meets all the requirements that we have to meet, there's no point spending money on everything that comes after it. You need to have that top of funnel. You're just leaving money on the table.”
Stebbings: Revolut's Nikolay Storonsky is the best founder he has interviewed
“Honestly, Jesse, I've interviewed a thousand of the biggest founders of our time. Nick is the best of all of them. Period. Hands down.”
Stebbings: Revolut's Nik Storonsky is the best founder I have ever interviewed
“I have all the founders that I've interviewed, and I've interviewed, you know, Jason, me and you'both interviewed thousands, 100,000 He's the best I've ever met.”
Mignot: Revolut is better than any US neobank
“They're, you know, they can be as big, if not bigger than anyone in the world, and I think Revolut is probably, you know, one of, if not the best neobank in, in the market in, in many ways. It's, I think, better than anything, you know, in the U.S., for exampl…”
Stebbings: Revolut Out-Shipped Monzo On New Product Releases
“Revolut out-shipped the shit out of Monzo on new products.”
Tenev: Revolut is more impressive than Chime due to product velocity
“I think I'm more impressed by Revolut. You know, Revolut's got product velocity, international scale strong founder, you know, impressive guy.”
Stebbings: Revolut will likely reach a $100B to $150B valuation
“I think everyone is realizing now that Revolut will quite likely be at least a hundred billion dollar company and likely a hundred and fifty billion.”
Stebbings: Revolut is a great buy even at a $45B–$60B valuation
“Whereas like people think forty-five billion or sixty billion new round is pricey. I would buy the shit out of Revolut right now.”
Storonsky: Early UK crypto rules caused 99.9% false-positive transfer blocks
“When we received our crypto license, like several years ago in UK, there were certain rules attached to it, which actually caused Kind of 99% false positive. So, for example, a person wants to send money in crypto to another account, and then we will block thi…”
Storonsky: Uncontrolled secondary share sales prevent successful primary capital raises
“As soon as you don't have control, so then every time when you try to raise a primary round, you're competing with all these early investors who want to sell at a large discount because, I mean, they made so much money. And they're okay to exit, you know, as s…”
Storonsky: Revolut obtained its Mexican banking license ahead of Nubank
“So we got a banking license in Mexico, a head of new bank.”
Storonsky: Revolut launches products even when internal committee opinion is split
“So the way we think about what to launch, what not to launch, we just have a committee of people who've done it before, who launched products before, and they have our opinion. And so when everyone is positive, we launch things. When everyone is negative, we d…”
Antoine Le Nel increased Revolut's CAC to drive higher ROI
“So what I've done by, I've been arriving at Revolut is that I increased CAC significantly, but I improved ROI significantly too.”
Le Nel: Revolut sets targets so high the company never reaches them
“We never reach our targets, you know, because our targets are much greater than what we, than what we're achieving.”
Antoine Le Nel: Growth is driven by granular execution, not moonshots
“They fish for the moonshot and so on, while actually it's just down there being excellent in the execution in everything you do at the lowest level of granularity.”
Le Nel: Decisive binary choices outperform prolonged debates despite false positives
“If we say yes, it's yes. If we say no, it's no. And then we move on. And there are some false positive, you know, into it. You know, there are definitely some false positive, where we may say yes, and it should have been a no, and we said no, it should have be…”
Grady: Passing on Segment and Revolut Series A rounds were terrible mistakes
“I met both of them at the Series A, and both of them told me the entire story in like five or 10 minutes. And it was super clear. And at the end of the five or 10 minutes, I couldn't think of any questions to ask because they had already answered any question …”
TransferWise couldn't figure out Revolut's free FX cross-selling strategy
“So that was always like the secret sauce, which I think, you know, like for a long time, competitors couldn't really figure out. I think Transwise couldn't really figure out like, how can we give it away for free and still make more money than them?”
Uber, Airbnb, Meta, and Revolut didn't use event tracking early on
“I actually think that if you look at Uber, Airbnb, Meta, they don't use events, or at least not in the early days. We didn't use events at Revolut.”
Revolut hired young, driven talent over pre-existing skills
“Nick basically looked at, looked for very young people, very driven people, very smart people. That was basically the main requirements, right? The thinking was kind of like, you know, we can teach people skills. We can't teach them the right behaviors or atti…”
Blomfield: European neobanks N26, Revolut, and Monzo failed initial US expansion
“N-twenty-six has failed, Revolut's failed, Monzo's, the first go's failed”
O'Driscoll: Revolut has more compounding upside than Stripe due to European TAM
“On a TAM basis, a plus or minus a hundred bill, there's just more compounding in those five hundred million exploited Europeans.”
Revolut Is Strategically Better Positioned Long-Term Than Robinhood
“I, I'm a Robin Hood user because I'm in the US, so I'm going to say Robin Hood, but I do think Revolut is very well positioned. Honestly, it's really hard. Maybe Revolut. It's a close, it's a, that's a close one.”
O'Driscoll: Revolut Generates $4.5B Revenue and $1.5B Operating Income
“And it's the same bet with Revolut. They raising at a hundred and something, they're doing what? Four and a half billion in revenue, you know, 1.5 billion in operating income, which is fricking amazing.”
Chernin: Revolut initially spent 99% of its AI inference budget on OpenAI
“We have the customer of Revolut. And when we started working with them, I think 99 percent of their budget, inference budget was in closed models in OpenAI.”
Browder: US startup ambition and outcomes are 100x larger than UK's
“One huge negative is the scale of ambition in the US is a hundred times bigger. The most successful companies in the UK are in the, like, tens of billions range, like Revolut and great outcomes like that. In the US, it's in the trillions, and it's just an orde…”
Siemiatkowski: Klarna operates proprietary payment rails capturing itemized receipt data
“We have our own payments network. Just like Amex, we have our own Rails. Every time you shop with Klana, the information that flows on the rails isn't just the amount that you purchase for. It's the exact products. We have the full digital receipt.”
Siemiatkowski: Fintechs target market share from legacy banks, not each other
“Whose market share are we eating? You know, Barclays, you know the Wells Fargo's, the Capital One, those are the companies that we are going after, right? So I don't really see there's a big conflict between us. It's more the incumbents that are going to lose …”
Siemiatkowski: Klarna's 110M customer base is nearly double Revolut's 65M
“Klarna has a hundred ten million customers worldwide. Revolut now has 65, right? So I'm twice the size in number of customers.”
Alan Chang: Fast execution requires small independent units and replacing underperforming teams
“Have small teams yeah, small teams operating in the independent units and give them very clear goals and let them execute. And, you know, what you should do is monitor those teams and if they do well, let them be. If they don't do well, replace the team.”
Revolut Founder Nikolay Storonsky Stated His Goal Was to Beat JPMorgan
“I asked Nick, like, what's, what's your ambition? Like, what keeps you motivated? And at the time he's, you know, worth quite a bit of money already. So, you know, what gives us, what drives him, right? And he told me he wants to beat JP Morgan.”