Nik Storonsky is one of the most hardcore and competitive founders I’ve ever talked to. He’s the founder of Revolut, a $115 billion company, and wants to be the number one bank in 100 countries. When someone asked Nik if he was coming for Jamie Dimon's lunch, he said “I’m coming for his dinner.” “We want to dominate, otherwise what’s the point?” He removed every VC from his board, and when one investor pushed him too far, he started his own fund to compete with them. Nik has a lot of ideas on talent, product design, marketing, constraints, and what makes founder-led companies special. This is a fascinating conversation about competition, speed, and building a machine-like company. 0:00 Coming for Jamie Dimon's dinner 2:04 Building the #1 bank in 100 countries 6:12 Why founders beat professional CEOs 8:45 Revolut's biggest mistake 12:47 Why legacy banks can't innovate 17:20 Running a company like a machine 20:28 Funding winners and cutting losers like a trader 23:31 How AI is changing Revolut's team structure 25:23 50 direct reports and spreading innovation fast 29:59 Hiring self-guided missiles 33:31 Too much money makes founders weaker 37:38 What Europe's constraints taught Revolut 41:08 Why VCs are like football cheerleaders 49:28 Starting a fund to compete with VCs 54:28 From zero marketing to buying Europe's airports 1:00:21 Funding moonshots like a global tech company 1:03:58 Building an unstoppable machine Includes paid partnerships.

Based. Not many founders/CEOs have the balls to do brand marketing. Most just live in a perpetual cycle of performance ads. @NStoronsky on @davidsenra’s podcast. “If you’re a digital bank, you don’t have branches. People don’t see you physically, so they trust you less by definition compared to HSBC, Lloyds, JP Morgan Chase." "So how do you build trust? In performance marketing you pay per impression, and there are a lot of spaces in the physical world you can buy that also produce impressions, at a much cheaper price. We bought almost 50% of all airports in Europe. Simple math. How many times a year people travel, how many times they’re in the airport, how many impressions we produce, how much it costs us. There is arbitrage to performance marketing.”

Kenn Ricci. Flexjet. Tomorrow!

Jeff Bezos said you need to pour gasoline on promising sparks. Nik Storonsky says this is exactly how he makes bets on new products at Revolut: “We know that our top 10 bets, they grow 10-20% month on month.” “If we see that a bet is historically in the bottom 25% of all the bets, we simply sunset it.” “We instill discipline when we're running businesses which are not growing very fast. And then bets which are growing very fast, we're doubling down.

Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky says the best employees are like “self-guided missiles.” “You don’t even need to tell them what the goal is. They self-identify the goal, and then they reach it.” “Average people, you tell them the goal, and then you need to spend weekly iterations with them. So you spend management time. That’s what I don’t want.” “The best executives are very tough.” “Likable is never the goal for executives. The goal is always to achieve the goal with the minimal number of resources spent.”

Revolut founder Nik Storonsky says one of his investors tried forcing him to fire his best person: “He was forcing me to fire my best person, because he was too hardcore.” “Of course I didn’t fire him. I said no.” “Pretty early on I realized that quite a few VCs, they are not very operational, and they can be actually dangerous for the company if they have enough power. So every single investment round, we just remove VCs.” “Now I don't have any VCs on the board. I think that's the best. You always need to have operators rather than VCs on the board, people who actually build business and who know how to do things.”

The full episode is extreme: davidsenra.com/episode/nik-s…

Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky on why it’s easier for founders to build great businesses than professional CEOs: “Professional CEOs optimize certain metrics, but they’re not 10X people.” “They're just there for their bonuses effectively for 3-4 years. As a result, they don't make bold decisions. They always play defense. They never play offense.” “Professional CEOs, ultimately their goal is to protect their job. They think about themselves and the company as two entities. I think about myself and the company as one entity.” “It's much easier to compete against non founders. If I would be competing with all the banks and they were all founder-led, as a world, we would all have much better products by now. That's not what's happening.”

Some of my favorite photos from my conversation with @NStoronsky, co-founder and CEO of @Revolut. Episode is out tomorrow.

Does @RickRubin have a self-critical voice playing in his head while he works? "Never." "What it usually is, is it starts apprehensive when we start, because it could be anything. So at first it's scary." "I know I'm patient and I know I'll wait until it's great." "As soon as there's a glimmer, as soon as I hear something that's good, then I relax." "Once something lands, whatever it is, I relax. Okay, we have at least a direction to move in. It doesn't mean we stay in that direction forever. But having a direction is better than not having a direction."