00:52:35 · Nik Storonsky, David Senra
[00:52:35] S1: It's different LPs. So initially, started... 20% was my own money. So I put 20% of it or 25% of it. And then the rest came from other founders. Second founder already got quite a few institutional players as well. [00:52:49] S0: I've never heard of somebody building a bank compare themselves to like Meta. So I'm gonna get into that in one second. But you don't do anything like fucking half assed or like small. Right? You're just like, okay, started two fifty. Now you're just gonna see how far you can take this. Is it gonna be like a giant Renaissance technologies kind of thing?
00:53:06 · Nik Storonsky, David Senra
[00:53:06] S1: Well, obviously, the goal is to build something large like BlackRock, but in private markets. Again, we'll see if we if we we get there. But I think idea and approach makes sense because, like, you now have a lot of data on startups. Then you can apply all these machine learning models to identify the best ones. And then model is pretty sophisticated. So for example, one of their signals we look at, we look at who invested in the company, who is investing. And we look... We look not only in the fund performance who invest in the company, down to the partner level. And we'll also look at the age of the partner. And there are very interesting things when I look at these variables as as the age of the partner. And then you'd rather not invest in companies where partners who are investing are older than 40 years old. So the best cohorts are 30 to 40 years old of young partners who are investing. They're they're they're they're the best at identifying good companies. Same same as with executives as well. Yeah. So so there's a certain prime age when you... What what you need to look at. Again, there are many variables. Right? Of Age is not only one thing. Right? But statistically speaking, that's what Angelica. [00:54:23] S0: And is this a separate company from Revolut or [00:54:24] S1: is Yes. It's company separate. [00:54:25] S0: Okay. So completely separate. And you have somebody else running it? [00:54:27] S1: Yeah. Okay.
00:54:27 · Nik Storonsky, David Senra
[00:54:27] S1: Yeah. Okay. [00:54:28] S0: You said something about helping them sell their product as well. Talk about like the the early days of like marketing. I heard you spent nothing on marketing for the first like five or seven years? [00:54:39] S1: Yes. First seven years it was completely organic. Plus COVID also hit. And 2021, I remember our company was six, seven years old. COVID hit and like our revenues went down, I think, 70%. And back then we were not in banking business. We were still kind of, you know, e money with travel card. So it was very heavily related to... Or correlated with travel business. And then as COVID hit, travel business completely gone. So we had to survive or somehow we kind of optimized a lot during that time. [00:55:17] S0: Okay. But explain you you... Why you decided to start to start spending money in marketing? Because, like, I go to Europe and it's just like, I feel like I'm blanketed with your ads. I see your stuff everywhere. Now it makes perfect sense after talking to you. It's not like, oh, yeah. I'm gonna do, like, a little bit here, little bit there. It's just like, once I find something I just, you know, essentially go skirt, skorch earth on it.
00:55:17 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
[00:55:17] S0: Okay. But explain you you... Why you decided to start to start spending money in marketing? Because, like, I go to Europe and it's just like, I feel like I'm blanketed with your ads. I see your stuff everywhere. Now it makes perfect sense after talking to you. It's not like, oh, yeah. I'm gonna do, like, a little bit here, little bit there. It's just like, once I find something I just, you know, essentially go skirt, skorch earth on it. [00:55:36] S1: Yeah. Basically, the way I think about marketing, so I haven't done it for six years, seven years. I just didn't have time, plus we didn't have enough resources. But then when started doing it, I I went really, really deep. So basically, I started with who we need to hire to run a proper marketing machine. Not like here and there, but scientifically, Where we need to invest money in marketing with a proper return. And then my idea was very simple. Who are the companies with the largest marketing spend and who are extremely cautious with their marketing spend? Where is, you know, very low margin of error? And back then it was gaming companies. Right? Gaming companies had a lot of marketing spend, performance ads, or certain companies were also doing a lot of above the line campaigns. The gaming companies are doing well or not? Gaming companies were the largest spending companies in the world on marketing. So if you look at their budgets, it could easily be 1,000,000,000 plus on I
00:55:36 · Nik Storonsky, David Senra
[00:55:36] S1: Yeah. Basically, the way I think about marketing, so I haven't done it for six years, seven years. I just didn't have time, plus we didn't have enough resources. But then when started doing it, I I went really, really deep. So basically, I started with who we need to hire to run a proper marketing machine. Not like here and there, but scientifically, Where we need to invest money in marketing with a proper return. And then my idea was very simple. Who are the companies with the largest marketing spend and who are extremely cautious with their marketing spend? Where is, you know, very low margin of error? And back then it was gaming companies. Right? Gaming companies had a lot of marketing spend, performance ads, or certain companies were also doing a lot of above the line campaigns. The gaming companies are doing well or not? Gaming companies were the largest spending companies in the world on marketing. So if you look at their budgets, it could easily be 1,000,000,000 plus on I [00:56:34] S0: know a lot of them are going to Applovin. Applovin is going to print like 6,000,000,000 in profit this Yeah. Like amazing. Yeah. [00:56:43] S1: Yeah. Yeah. So I ended up hiring an extremely good person who started running marketing at Revolut. And then we also Before I [00:56:54] S0: let you go on, am I understanding you're so you're studying how gaming companies are advertising? Or you just wanna know what they were spending?
00:56:54 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
[00:56:54] S0: let you go on, am I understanding you're so you're studying how gaming companies are advertising? Or you just wanna know what they were spending? [00:57:00] S1: The idea was who are the best professionals who know how to spend money in marketing. Right? And then the idea is that these professionals will work in gaming companies because they have the largest budgets. Got it. So that's how I got my first... Well, actually, second, first one. I fired. He wasn't for big gaming gaming. [00:57:18] S0: Probably VC's cousin asked you to hire him or something.