Nik Storonsky
Co-Founder & CEO, Revolut. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@nstoronsky ↗revolut.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Nik Storonsky is the co-founder and CEO of Revolut, a British financial technology company. Before launching Revolut, he worked as an equity derivatives trader at Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse, and later founded the venture capital firm QuantumLight.
1shows
2appearances
55statements
4resolved
1supported
2contradicted
25%fully supported
30said about them ↓ Everything Nik Storonsky said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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.”
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 management consultants proves your internal employees are incompetent
“Because if you look at all these management consultants, they come to you with a nice presentation explaining how to get things done. A reality here is when you start hiring management consultants to help you run the company, that means your employees are 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.”
Storonsky: Traditional bank CEOs use vague jargon to hide tech incompetence
“The problem with traditional banking CEOs, they are not tech-driven at all. And then they rather speak in the very vague jargon to hide their incompetency or their limited knowledge in tech-related matters.”
Storonsky: Founder age 25 to 35 is the sweet spot for success
“If you look at statistics, so 20 to 25 is actually quite negative. Like, too early is a negative then 25 to 30 is, is okay. 30 to 35 is the best age. After 35, I mean, there is a clear negative correlation with the success. So sweet spot is 25 to 35 for founde…”
Storonsky: An imbalanced, hyper-focused life is necessary to achieve your goals
“Majority of people believe that our balanced life allows you to be happy and achieve your goals. I think in the reality, a disbalanced life allows you definitely to achieve your goals, so more kind of imbalanced you are, more focused on your goals, sacrificing…”
Storonsky defines top talent as 'self-guided missiles' who hit goals independently
“Another way I define people who are excellent, strong, average, or below average is pretty simple. So, They should be like a self-guided missile, right? So excellent people, they select the goal themselves, when they press the button, then they reach the goal …”
Storonsky: Secure a banking license before acquiring customers when building a bank
“Oh, what I really learned is it's so whenever you want to build a bank, you'd rather get a banking license before you have customers. So that's kind of, you know, key lesson, because as soon as you have many customers, millions of customers, tens of millions o…”
Storonsky: Founders should speak to regulators directly, not delegate to bankers
“What I really found is, is actually very bad advice, right, because whenever you speak with regulators yourself, whenever you explain exactly in plain English what we do, how we do it, because you build it yourself, or I build it myself, right, I can explain i…”
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: Partnering with sponsor banks slows down US fintech innovation
“Because they don't want to be regulated, they need to partner with a bank to use their license and use their platform. As soon as you partner with a bank and use their license, use their platform, you need to follow their processes, which are not automated, wh…”
Storonsky: Debit-only US neobanks offer weak value propositions
“Because you're not a bank, you're not able to use your balance sheet or your deposits, so you cannot really do credit cards efficiently, and the U.S. Is a credit-driven market and whatever a customer spends with a credit card, bank receives actually much more …”
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…”
Storonsky: Global banking market will consolidate into a few tech-driven players
“Yeah, I think with time, in five years time, you, you'll see much less number of banks, and there are few global players.”
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: Quantum Light's AI model outperforms 95% of VCs on backtests
“We trained machine learning models on the startups, selecting the best startups. And then the machine learning model actually amazingly outperforms. 95% of VCs out there on, on backtest.”
Storonsky: The retail trading boom is a permanent shift, not a bubble
“So that's why I think, you know, there is a fundamental shift, and it's not gonna go away.”
Storonsky: Underperforming new hires rarely improve after their first month
“Well, majority of people are, you see them performing strong or excellent after three, four weeks, right? So they hit the ground running on week three. Majority of them, they actually from week one. So generally, if you see a person is not performing for one, …”
Storonsky: Founders have zero skill assessing candidates in unfamiliar domains
“Because reality, if you never kind of, you know, worked with the designers, You have zero skills to hire designers. You never worked in the reg affairs or government affairs. You have zero skills to assess who is good, who is not. So in order to first learn th…”
Storonsky: Revolut's largest cost is marketing, followed by personnel
“When I look at our costs, I think our top cost is actually marketing now, and then the second cost is people.”
The other half of the tape: Nik Storonsky's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 24 times in 8 episodes across the shows. 6 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 13James Gibson 5Jason Lemkin 4
Statements about Nik Storonsky, by other people (6)
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.”
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 …”
Storonsky demands Revolut maintain its eight-year growth rate despite scale
“Nick has set for me and for us to continue the level of growth that we've had over the last eight years I've been there. We're trying to continue to grow at the same rate despite being at a much larger scale and with all the complexities that comes with that.”
Mignot: Nik Storonsky targeted building a company larger than JPMorgan Chase
“Like, you know, eventually he thinks, he's convinced there is, there will be one global money app, and that he can be that one global money app that could be better, you know, bigger than, you know, when we first met, he wanted to be bigger than JP Morgan.”
Revolut demanded 'special forces' level execution at maximum speed
“To put it, as Nick put it, we're like special forces. We go in, we don't fuck up. So it had that mentality that every meeting, every design catch up, every marketing campaign, essentially anything you do is perfectly executed at all times. At the maximum speed…”
Gibson: Revolut founders Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko join weekly business-wide reviews
“And then once we're really confident in them, they get bubbled up to, we do a overall business one once a week, which is, this is the final output. This is going to be built. And that's the one then that Nick or Vlad occasionally join, and they'll then have th…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 24
2026 9 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
- Canva Slashes Growth | Talent Exodus at Google | Revolut's $50B CEO Package | Musk's $55B Terrafab
- Fuse CEO Alan Chang: The Revolut Playbook of Speed & Ownership, Why Founders Aren’t Ambitious Enough · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- SpaceX Launches Largest Ever IPO | OpenAI Files to Go Public | Uber Cuts 23% of HR · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 13 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
- 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson
- Deel CEO, Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Robinhood Founder & CEO, Vlad Tenev: Robinhood’s $85BN Resurgence & Tokenizing SpaceX & OpenAI · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- TS Anil, CEO @Monzo: From Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS, To $1BN in Revenue | E1254 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Nik's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Revolut | 2 | 55 | 25% 1/4 | full record on 20VC → |