00:14:12 · David Senra
[00:14:12] S0: I wanna tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world, and one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%. And one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling costs can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. And we see that in the Ramp data too. The median company running on Ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp, you should too. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade. And one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other a players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, Eleven Labs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deal. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of Eleven Labs has a great description of the value Deal can give your company. He said, we built Eleven Labs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world.
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
00:20:28 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
[00:20:28] S0: Okay. So explain, like, setting these little bets up. I mean, to [00:20:33] S1: be honest, it's pretty simple because we were always high velocity for the company when we released a lot of features, a lot of products. And then at certain point of time, I decided to install discipline in building bets because we were building a lot of things, but we were not really tracking how they were performing. So we simply build a staging process when first there is a kind of, you know, decision to produce a bet. It can be bottom up or top down. Then there is a discussion called committee, whether it makes sense to produce the bet. And then if if decision is made, we fund the bet. So we separate a team of up to 10 people. Front end developers, back end developers, designer, product owner, sometimes data scientist, operation manager. And then they build a new product within nine to eighteen months. And then when they launch the product, we simply look at growth of the product in terms of gross profit. And because we've done it for the last ten years, we already have launched, say, 50 beds. And then we know that our top 10 beds, they grow, say, 10, 20% month on month and produce, I don't know, [00:21:37] S0: 1,000,000 GP, 2,000,000 GP, 3,000,000 GP