Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:00:09 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:00:09] S0: Welcome to Inc's The Founders Project with Alexa von Tobel. I'm Alexa, the founder of Learnvest, author of New York Times bestselling book, Financially Fearless, and second book, Financially Forward. I'm also the founder and managing partner of Inspired Capital, a venture firm focused on the entrepreneurs of the future. Each week, we sit down with a top founder to share their story of guts, inspiration, and drive.
00:00:30 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:00:30] S1: Hi, everybody. I'm your host, Alexa von Tobel. This week, I want you to meet Nik Storonsky, co founder and CEO of Revolut, the world's first truly global financial super app that helps people get more out of their money. Nik launched Revolut in 2015 to transform the way we spend and transfer money abroad. Since then he has put Revolut on the path of becoming the world's truly global bank, changing the way we do all things around money. Revolut has more than 18,000,000 customers worldwide who make more than 150,000,000 transactions a month. The company operates in over 35 countries and has been valued at almost $35,000,000,000 Before Revolut, Nik was an equity derivatives trader at Credit Suisse and Lehman Brothers, where he traded over 2,000,000,000 across various option swaps and FX instruments. Nik holds degrees in applied physics, mathematics and economics. He's an avid kite surfer, mountaineer and champion swimmer. Let's welcome Nik. Hi Nik. I'm just so excited to talk to you about Revolut for many, many reasons, but I just want to start with the basics. For everyone listening, how do you describe what Revolut is? And where was the moment for you to actually go and launch this business back in 2015?
00:01:35 · Nik Storonsky, Alexa von Tobel
[00:01:35] S2: Revolut is a one stop financial solution for all your needs that you need as a customer. So we give you bank accounts, we give you the ability to transfer money, give you the ability to borrow money, to lend money, to invest, to trade crypto, to trade stocks. So instead of having many, many apps, many, many providers, we give you everything in one app at best price, or for free. So it's amazing user value proposition compared to any other banks out there. Plus, top of it, we are global. So what it means in practice that you can open an account in The US, but you can also send money in seconds to people in Australia, Japan, Europe. You can also have local accounts in Europe, local accounts in Australia. So we provide you a global banking solution for all your needs. [00:02:22] S1: So the vision that you just described is, by the way, as a customer, as somebody who studied the category for a long time is exactly what I personally want. Where did you start? Right? Because you can't say, I'm going to go build everything for your wallet in one app. And oh, by the way, it's also global. How did you think about chipping away this vision? And as you thought about playing chess on the strategy, like what were the pieces that you felt like had to start that had to come first?
00:02:22 · Alexa von Tobel, Nik Storonsky
[00:02:22] S1: So the vision that you just described is, by the way, as a customer, as somebody who studied the category for a long time is exactly what I personally want. Where did you start? Right? Because you can't say, I'm going to go build everything for your wallet in one app. And oh, by the way, it's also global. How did you think about chipping away this vision? And as you thought about playing chess on the strategy, like what were the pieces that you felt like had to start that had to come first? [00:02:47] S2: Yeah, in reality, I couldn't claim this, you know, from the beginning I wanted to do exactly this product. So initially in 2015, I started as a simple card which allowed you to spend abroad and send money abroad with zero fees and zero... Well, not zero, but interbank FX rates. That allows you to save as a customer $50 to $100 on every $1,000 that you spend. That's a huge saving. So we launched this product and then it kind of became popular and then we slowly started adding other products. So that's the story. [00:03:21] S1: As you started to think about which currencies and regions would be most critical to your success, how did you think about the strategy for that piece of the puzzle?
00:03:21 · Alexa von Tobel, Nik Storonsky
[00:03:21] S1: As you started to think about which currencies and regions would be most critical to your success, how did you think about the strategy for that piece of the puzzle? [00:03:30] S2: Well, to be honest, we were not that sophisticated back then. For me it was my first serious business. And I was just trying things. So I tried opening several countries. I tried multiple products. And then some things worked, some things don't. So I wouldn't claim that we have very kind of sophisticated strategy in defining which countries to go. We were just trying things, playing around and hoping that things would work out. [00:03:54] S1: One of the things that I've admired most about you from afar is you guys release products exceptionally fast. At a clip that I don't know of any startup that has released products as quickly and feature sets as quickly as you can. Tell us a little bit about not only what drives that, but also your strategy around just releasing features as quickly as you can.
00:03:54 · Alexa von Tobel, Nik Storonsky
[00:03:54] S1: One of the things that I've admired most about you from afar is you guys release products exceptionally fast. At a clip that I don't know of any startup that has released products as quickly and feature sets as quickly as you can. Tell us a little bit about not only what drives that, but also your strategy around just releasing features as quickly as you can. [00:04:16] S2: So basically, with time, we learned how to work fast and deliver fast things that we want. So we have pretty well defined playbooks, how to build stuff, and then we have very well defined tools how to build things. So ultimately, with every single product that we build, we're not building it from scratch. So effectively, we build, we build the platform with a lot of modularized components on top of it. And then to build every new product, we're not really building from scratch. We're just combining these companies together. That's how we're releasing. So, there is no magic in it. I think it's just the way we work. And plus, on top of it, obviously, desire to build things. Rather than building wild things and polishing, polishing, polishing. We are a pretty entrepreneurial company and want to try things. Trying things when you have all these tools plus the platforms that we have is easy and cheap.