Val Scholz
Head of Growth, Kittl. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
Val Scholz is the Head of Growth at Kittl and the former Head of Growth at Revolut. He helped scale companies including VEED, Simple, and Busuu, assisting Revolut in reaching its first 10 million users.
1shows
1appearances
43statements
13resolved
7supported
3contradicted
54%fully supported
Everything Val Scholz said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Startups without product-market fit can exit for $400M via traffic arbitrage
“Even if you don't have product market fit, you can sell a business for four hundred million, you know, because if you're just good enough to generate constantly more traffic and it's cheaper to generate or buy traffic than the money you're making, the business…”
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?”
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…”
Mixpanel and Amplitude create most data issues for tech companies
“Mixpanel, amplitude, didn't really change for like probably 1520 years which usually creates most of the issues in a company.”
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.”
Building product-led growth starting with paid marketing rarely works
“I don't think you can, it's really hard to build a product led business if you start with paid marketing.”
Revolut grew fastest in Ireland, Romania, and Poland, not the UK
“So if you think about Revolut against Monzo, right, like the markets we grew the fastest wasn't the UK. It was Ireland, it was Romania, Poland.”
Over 90% of Revolut's B2C customers came from referrals
“So for example, like 90% of the customers, B to C customers that Revolut ever acquired came through referrals.”
Revolut achieved a £9 CPA versus £250 for traditional banks
“So I think back in the days we had a CPA of around nine pounds, which was like, compared to banks that had like 250, it was quite low.”
Over-optimizing a single product is the biggest mistake founders make
“I think it's actually the biggest mistake that founders do, that they over optimize their product.”
Revolut's growth team avoided hiring traditional marketing majors
“Also like, for example typically in growth, we didn't look for people that studied marketing.”
Managers know if a new hire will fail within a week
“I think you have a gut feeling pretty quickly. Probably a few days. Majority of people after a week, you're basically like, okay, that's not gonna work.”
Revolut belongs in the top 0.01% alongside SpaceX and Meta
“I think what a lot of people forget is that Revolut is like that company that's at the 0.01%. You know, it's like a SpaceX, Facebook Meta. I think all these companies are very similar.”
Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky held 70 to 80 one-on-one meetings weekly
“Nick, for example, had 70, 80 one-on-ones a week. So basically like every product team sync, Nick was it. In it. Every design team think Nick was in it.”
Nik Storonsky's relentless meeting cadence created Revolut's top operator alumni pool
“I think it's the reason why there's so many talented people coming out of Revolut.”
Revolut user surge stretched customer support wait times to four weeks
“Suddenly KYC times, right? Went from three minutes to, or a minute, right, to suddenly like two weeks. Customer support waiting lines went from, I don't know, 10 minutes to four weeks.”
Kittl is looking into automating partnership manager negotiations using AI
“Yeah, I mean, we are thinking, we are looking into, like automating partnership manager negotiations, because suddenly you can scale it up to a million partnerships managers.”
Revolut is a superior product to Monzo
“I think Monzo is just a, it's a more modern bank, like Revolut is a financial ecosystem.”
Revolut had to cap sign-ups due to referral loop speed
“One thing we've done at Revolut was essentially engineer how fast or how short it takes for new people to invite their peers and their friends, which actually worked really well to a point where we had to cap how many people actually Sign up.”
Revolut increased user payment activation rate from 30% to 90%
“In the early days, like we had maybe an activation rate of so basically like new users that actually make a payment, it was maybe like 30, 35%. Like when I left, it was around 90%. So, like, nine out of 10 people actually made a payment.”
Revolut was founded after Nik Storonsky lost 10-15% on exchange fees
“And when he went to Vegas and took some money to play poker they took away around 10 to 15% because of the currency exchange. And because he was like, look, I mean, I trade hundreds of millions of dollars without paying any fees. He was like, hey, maybe there'…”
Canva drives higher web traffic volume than Adobe
“So I think Canva nowadays is much larger in terms of volume generated to the website than Adobe.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Val's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 20VCLEDGER | Head of Growth, Kittl | 1 | 43 | 54% 7/13 | full record on 20VC → |