00:12:47 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
[00:12:47] S0: So I'm very curious, like, when you're going into a new market and you said there's just bad banks, just like low competition here. Like, what are you seeing that they're doing wrong? [00:12:56] S1: Well, they they they stuck in limbo of professional management who are extremely risk averse. As a result, there is zero lack of... Zero intention to innovate. And then all the resources are spent on protecting what they have already. Right? So for example, you can have a very old legacy third party core banking system. Obviously, you need to change it to your own or to some new provider, but then banking management will never do it because it introduces risk. Right? Because you need to migrate customers, you know, something might go wrong. And they never take a risk. Right? So that's the problem. Plus on top of it, because a lot of them, they are not technical. So they don't really understand how to do a lot of technical things. As a result, them, our default choice is to not do anything for regulators and then for legacy banks. Because doing anything is risky in an industry where you lack certain skills, so certain technical skills. And banking is about... It's not only about, like, regulation, it's also about building tech. And I think all these people are very bad at building tech.
00:14:12 · David Senra
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00:16:19 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
Deal is trusted by over 40,000 companies and growing fast. Learn how they can help your business by going to deal.com/senra. That is deal.com/senra. So one of your advantages as you see it is you're competing against non founders, you're competing against professional CEOs, and these professional CEOs are not technical. So they actually can't invent technology, so therefore they cannot innovate. And that's what you're attacking. [00:16:42] S1: Yeah, exactly. They just don't even think about building products. Right? Because they they just don't feel it. They don't use it. They don't they don't know how to do it. They're just professional managers. I think it's very important for... To build successful business, you need to obviously be a great manager, like a very tough manager, be very in details, and be very good product person as well. To know how to build and turn the product, tech regulation compliance people altogether. It's it's like a machine. Right? So there are inputs and then the whole machine should produce you right output, which is amazing product that people use. [00:17:19] S0: Okay. Explain how you're building this machine.
00:17:21 · Nik Storonsky
[00:17:21] S1: I mean, you need to visualize in your head or kind of, you know, what are the inputs in this machine and what do you want to achieve? What are the goals? Right? And then inputs is obviously your organization, your structure, your people, how you build product, what do you want to build. And then you effectively observe kind of, you know, the whole structure working, the whole product being built, you always interfere. Right? If something goes wrong, and then you kind of change certain parts of the machine. For example, when we started, it was a very small team, 10, 20, 30 people. We hit the bottleneck when kind of team team grow, but then speed slowed down. Machine stopped working. So what I did, I I I just ensured that we have, you know, there... A lot of very small independent team who just work on the same platform. Right? And then speed increased because people people work was paralyzed. So they work on different products, different features using the same tools, and they were all independent. But then again, we hit bottleneck with regulation compliance. Again, I build another muscle in the machine, is the reg affairs, government affairs department, and so on. So they they had to produce certain outcomes. And we hit again the bottleneck with hiring fast enough good people. Again, we build a lot of process for recruitment, targeting the best people. And so on. So it's kind of, you know, moves in circles, right? You build something, then you hit the bottleneck. Right? You identify the problem, you solve the problem, you go again.
00:18:47 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
[00:18:47] S0: So now you're adding another, essentially, skill to this machine that is your company. Before you started Revolut, you were a trader, right? [00:18:57] S1: Yeah. [00:18:57] S0: I heard about what you just described before, it's like you have I don't even know if you call them bets. You'll have 20 different ideas or small teams working on 20 different ideas at the time. Explain how these teams are structured and how your previous career as a trader influenced the way you're building and managing your company. [00:19:15] S1: I think what was useful as a trader was risk management and then quantifying everything. Because unfortunately, banks or in other organizations, a lot of things are evaluated based on their people's intuition, which in a lot of cases is simply wrong. Right? So in order to evaluate correctly what is done and what is not done, need to [00:19:42] S0: have a metrics and have KPIs. Wait. Are you saying dumb or done?
00:19:42 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
[00:19:42] S0: have a metrics and have KPIs. Wait. Are you saying dumb or done? [00:19:45] S1: Done. Done. Okay. Dumb. What are the grammars? Dumb as well. Yeah. Metrics and KPIs that actually kills politics within an organization because, look. Everything is transparent. Right? You as a individual contributor, you as a manager. Do you achieve your metrics? Do you achieve your goal? Right? Why you haven't achieved it? So it doesn't matter what you say. I mean, there are objective numbers. I think it's extremely important to to have as a part of the machine. When I worked in the bank, they didn't really have it. So they had the professional COO and they had a lot of politics within an organization. And I think it's it's just simply wrong how how people are on general businesses. [00:20:28] S0: Okay. So explain, like, setting these little bets up. I mean, to