00:34:29 · David Senra, Micky Malka
[00:34:29] S0: Say more about Silicon Valley losing the ability to build beautiful things. [00:34:32] S1: So if if you if you think about the last fifteen years, the incentive systems and every metric of success was wired on scale, grow, go bigger, have a more nuance, more work. But it wasn't about building beautiful products. We have when was the last time you bought something, a technology product that you loved? And you were like, wow, this is beautiful. [00:35:04] S0: I don't even wanna tell you it's embarrassing, the answer. It was a Dyson vacuum cleaner. [00:35:08] S1: That's great. But... And and by the way, Dyson comes up a lot when I ask this question. Also, the Airwrap. Yeah. Yes. [00:35:17] S0: If you have a daughter or any woman in the house, like, they're obsessed with Dyson's products. [00:35:22] S1: Somebody in your team here was showing us they still carry the iPhone The SE. Yeah. Right? The small iPhone. Why? Because it's beautiful. It was one of the first ones designed in a different way. So we have lost that ability. And because we have given a price and a reward for efficiency, algorithm, compounding of those things, and we have put aside how it makes you feel. In this world where technology is taking over a lot of our lives in the way we're going, more than any time in history, we're gonna need that feeling back again. How it makes you feel. And it's not just the brand with a TV commercial, that's the point I'm less worried about. It's more about what's authentic, what's beautifully designed, and what does it make you feel when you are around it.
00:35:22 · Micky Malka, David Senra
[00:35:22] S1: Somebody in your team here was showing us they still carry the iPhone The SE. Yeah. Right? The small iPhone. Why? Because it's beautiful. It was one of the first ones designed in a different way. So we have lost that ability. And because we have given a price and a reward for efficiency, algorithm, compounding of those things, and we have put aside how it makes you feel. In this world where technology is taking over a lot of our lives in the way we're going, more than any time in history, we're gonna need that feeling back again. How it makes you feel. And it's not just the brand with a TV commercial, that's the point I'm less worried about. It's more about what's authentic, what's beautifully designed, and what does it make you feel when you are around it. [00:36:14] S0: It's the perfect time that you're bringing this up because right now, literally, a few hours this morning and the last few days, I've been rereading this biography of Jony Ive. I think it's called, like, Jony Ive, the genius behind Apple's greatest products or something like that. All he talks about is feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling. He didn't think computers were for him. He thought they were ugly and tacky. He starts using a Mac. This is years before he even working at Apple, and he's just like, oh, there's a human behind this. You can tell there's an actual human that cares behind this. All he talks about, he's talking about redesigning hairbrushes and about how it makes them feel, to your point.
00:36:14 · David Senra, Micky Malka
[00:36:14] S0: It's the perfect time that you're bringing this up because right now, literally, a few hours this morning and the last few days, I've been rereading this biography of Jony Ive. I think it's called, like, Jony Ive, the genius behind Apple's greatest products or something like that. All he talks about is feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling. He didn't think computers were for him. He thought they were ugly and tacky. He starts using a Mac. This is years before he even working at Apple, and he's just like, oh, there's a human behind this. You can tell there's an actual human that cares behind this. All he talks about, he's talking about redesigning hairbrushes and about how it makes them feel, to your point. [00:36:47] S1: And I think that if we don't bring that back, the founders that will do that will win. And the founders that don't have that ability, they don't have a chance. [00:36:56] S0: Right before you came over, I was on the phone with my our mutual friend Neil Mehta. And he keeps telling me about Nick from Revolut. Right? And we were talking about some unrelated stuff. And I go, oh, I'm about to see Mickey Malka. He's like, you gotta ask him the conversation we had if he if he remembers because he he said you invested way before he did. I think he's done now the last, like, two or three rounds. But I think he remembers calling you and passing on Nick. Can you tell... Like, why do I keep hearing about Nick? And, like, what do think makes him so special?
00:37:27 · Micky Malka
[00:37:27] S1: You gotta understand Nick for how he grew up and who he is, to understand who he was. Funny enough, I was in London a few weeks ago because they finally got their bank license approved. And there was a chancellor there and some public officials speaking, and Nick was there with Vlad, the cofounder. And I I was looking at my phone, I was remembering when was the first time that we had we had handshake our Series A. Mhmm. And it was literally that same day ten years before. Oh, wow. And so I I went to them and I showed them the phone and said, ten years ago we were drinking vodka shots because were in the rush to do the RRA round. And what was it about him from day one? First, the name Revolut stand for who he was. He wanted to truly create a revolution in in money. Like, there was nothing in the middle about it. He had come to London. He had left Moscow. He was a trader. He was frustrated with how complex it was to move money, how difficult and how expensive and how unfair it was for everybody in the system. And he says, fuck it. I gotta change this. So that core DNA was there from day one. And then it went... He lived it every single day. He he will wake up every day and go swimming. He will work in the office. We were the first one to arrive, the last one to leave, and the first one to arrive the next day again. And he will swim and stay fit and just relentlessly focus on getting this mission moving forward. And people just either competed with him at that level because it was a performance that I have... A level that I execution that it was just a machine. There was nonstop. I just have this mission, I have to do it in my lifetime.
00:39:24 · David Senra, Micky Malka
[00:39:24] S0: I'm glad you said the machine because I think that's what Neil described. He's like, he's like a fucking Terminator. [00:39:29] S1: But that was that was Nick in his late twenties. That was who he was then in late twenties. Now, the Nick of today, ten years later, he's he's gotten better. He's gotten better because now he can lead. He can lead by example. He can lead by mission. He's a missionary also now. He can lead by taste. He has very strong opinions on how things need to go. He still has 20 people that report to him. And he will work seven days a week. And then every number of weeks, take two weeks off. Like, you can see that his behavior of work is fine tuned to who he is now compared to who he was before. So consistency, what what what I like to do is when we back these teams, we try to understand the DNA of the founder. And we try to understand what drives them and how do they work. But more importantly, we wanna see if that DNA reflects in the offices, in the team, in the people, in the way they talk, in the way they they they move. And you still go to the Revolut offices, is like in now in, I don't know, 15, 20 countries. And I've been to the the one in The Middle East, in Barcelona, in London in the last year and a half, you still breathe that DNA still there. So that's what keeps it going. It's a very special way that you gotta understand the founder really well to know, because each org is very different. [00:40:53] S0: So when you say you wanna understand the founder's DNA, how do you go about understanding that?
00:40:53 · David Senra, Micky Malka
[00:40:53] S0: So when you say you wanna understand the founder's DNA, how do you go about understanding that? [00:40:57] S1: You gotta spend time with them. And you gotta ask them all the questions and you gotta build a level of trust where, honestly, you don't have to talk about business that much. What kind of level of trust you gotta... How do you build that trust to talk to them in a way where they feel that they can trust you back? That they can call you when they cannot sleep at night? Those are the things that you gotta... I spend most of my time and the team at Ribbit spend most of the time doing, which is building that level of understanding and relationship, so we know how they behave. Once you know how people behave, then everything's fine, because you will see consistency or they will break it. [00:41:35] S0: Explain why it's important to you to be the person that they call when they have problems. Like, you just used an example of like when they can't sleep at night.