The Ledger, every show

“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.”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“So I've got 40 plus reports.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“So we got a banking license in Mexico, a head of new bank.”

“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…”

“Yeah, I think with time, in five years time, you, you'll see much less number of banks, and there are few global players.”

“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…”

“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.”

“So that's why I think, you know, there is a fundamental shift, and it's not gonna go away.”

“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, …”

“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…”

“When I look at our costs, I think our top cost is actually marketing now, and then the second cost is people.”

“Some use cases are definitely valid. For example, stable coins or enabling instant money transfers through stable coins. Competing with SWIFT on corresponding banking system. Yeah, it's actually very valuable.”

“So basically, first we need to roll out our U.K. Bank so go through all these mobilization conditions, and then put our U.K. Customers on the bank. As soon as we get it done, it actually unlocks us or our ability to apply for license in the U.S.”

“I think it was too early. Now we have a lot of customers, and then a lot of customers actually have a lot of balances with us. Some of them have, you know, millions on our accounts. So I think it's time to build the product making for people with a lot of liqu…”

“And then hopefully to have I would say, 30 to forty million delective people. So now we're here, we're around ten million delective people.”

“So right now we have our penetration of market share. I would say it depends from five percent to sometimes 70%. On average, I would say 10%. So if we manage to go from 10% to 30, 40% market share in our top 10 markets, so there will be already probably four X…”

“Well, because they don't allow your banking licenses, right?”

“A lot of investors, they are A following the crowd very often, and B they're very emotions driven, right? Sometimes they like the founder, sometimes they don't like the founder, they don't like the founder, they don't invest. So it's not very scientific.”

“Statistics clearly show that top universities STEM degree, have a much more positive correlation with the success of the company. And obviously it's not for, like, any other professional there, but particularly for startups, I mean, it is important.”

“U.S. Companies, they always win Europe, and I almost never see an exception, so I think it'll be very cool to tick this box.”

“99% of time is, is, is a lot of pain, right? Because reality, what happens is, even if you have organization then all the unpleasant problems that no one else solves, and it goes into me, and I ended up doing all this, you know, shitty jobs, right? Solving pro…”

“So I've got a couple of friends who build very large businesses, and some of them, they never used VCs and they just print cash those businesses. So I think, you know, in some ways they are much better compared to me.”

“US, most likely, yeah.”

“I think they build Cool products. They built cool brand, and they managed to stay outside of scrutiny, right? Because they produce so much money. They're huge monopoly. They charge a lot. And they're still a, they kind of great company, right?”

“When you do, like, you know, five, 10 trades a day based on intuition, sooner or later you realize the world doesn't work on the intuition, so you need somehow to plan it in a better way rather than your intuition.”

“Well, I think you need to be realistic, right? You yourself, you need to have a track record of achieving goals. To be able to evaluate how difficult is this particular goal, right? In your head, you already need to have a playbook or a template how you would …”

“As soon as we get trading license, We'll add all the products that we have on the Revolut for US market.”

“It can take up to two years in terms of capital. Again, it depends how fast you want to go, but again, I would budget 10 to twenty million dollars, well, properly capitalizing entity in the market and hiring team, making sure country scales.”

“If you add on top of our marketing, I'm pretty sure we can outgrow any local competitors in the majority of countries.”

“So our view is we optimize as much as possible gross profit. So we minimize costs, we optimize revenues on the one side, then we generate profits, and then all the profits we invest in marketing.”

“So I want to be a global business, and to be either number one or number two in every single country where we're in.”

“For example, recently we started buying AirPods jet bridges and I personally believe IR on it is amazing but, you know, we clearly cannot measure it”

“So usually, so out of 27 bets that we launched last two and a half, three years, like amazingly worked probably, let's say five. Five, six didn't work at all, and the rest is just, you know, somewhere in the middle.”

“Surprisingly, they, like, on month one, month two, month three, they always, you know, go up. So they don't have doubts.”

“Well, I asked it actually myself many, many times, and I have two answers, right, because A like what else to do, and B, I just need to do something, right, otherwise it's very boring.”

“Well, today I just give people goals. I always quantify goals so they are measurable, and then I let them reach these goals. Simple there. And then, you know, if things are going smoothly, I can see on a weekly basis during business reviews or during one-on-on…”