00:24:32 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:24:32] S1: And as you describe this, it's funny how you're... I think you guys are at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from Palantir in terms of how easy it is for you to get feedback. They build stuff for, like, the government and for, like, Airbus where employees would never use a product like that or need a product like that. You guys are getting paid in Revolut, using Revolut to pay for things and constantly in the product. And so I could see why there's less of a need for something like a forward deploy engineer. Okay. Amazing. Let's talk about hiring then. Is there is there anything unique about how you approach hiring, sourcing, looking for people, what you look for in people that you think might be contributing to your alumni being so successful down the road?
00:25:12 · Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:25:12] S0: I think everyone is striving for talented, skillful, smart people, and experienced people. Revolut values way more raw intellect and this unquenched hunger to build things rather than experience. So let let let me maybe, you know, like, bring an example. Imagine... We we all saw this. Like, you hire a great, experienced professional with amazing regalia of achieving a lot of things. But then what I see in product, the adoption curve is usually longer than in other functions. Because product owners, by definition, are the ones who are the experts in that domain, and they know those intricacies of how product is built and how it's used. So what we see from these professionals is they still take a lot of time to ramp up. And sometimes they also take time to adapt to new culture, or worse, they just rest on their laurels. But you already have, like, super inflated expectations, and usually their compensation is, by the way, quite high, and which adds up to these expectations. So... And I myself, after conducting maybe four or 500 interviews with product owners at Revolut, I I also see this. Unfortunately, professionals with a lot of years of experience from established companies, they don't have this this strong urge to change status quo, which, by the way, will require, toil, tears, and sweat. And that's why what... Even if a candidate doesn't have a lot of years of experience, but they love building things, They've done it. They worked with engineers. Maybe, by the way, maybe in their own startup, or one of the best profiles that I've seen is a tech cofounder. So I think that's that's probably the best way to boost career is to, you know, to to go and to found something, work in a startup, build things yourself or with a very small team, work in all different areas. Because in a startup, you have to work in all different areas. And then these kind of people, they really thrive at Revolut. And even if they don't have a lot of years of experience, they actually attack a specific problem. They they have a sense of what can cause customer pain, and they are very fast moving to solve it quickly. And then that's how they get appreciation from everyone around. Team starts respecting these people because they solved some specific problem, and then they take another problem. They solve it, and then they take another.
00:28:28 · Dmitry Zlokazov, Lenny Rachitsky
And that's how they grow in the company. [00:28:33] S1: Essentially, what I'm hearing is you're... You hire kind of more junior or super high raw intellect driven, passionate, how do you describe, hungry people. And this explains why so many people have so... Get promoted so much more that leave Revolut because they start... They're earlier in their career, and you help them learn all these skills, ownership, depth, understanding, working complex environments, building amazing products. So this all makes a lot of sense. Is there anything you figured out about where to find these people? Because this is the dream. Hire amazingly smart people that are super driven that nobody knows about yet and then make them awesome. Where... What... Have you found anything about, like, where to source and find these folks? [00:29:14] S0: So the the way we work, we have weekly catch ups with the recruitment team. So essentially, they they are also a team that runs in sprints. So we... Every every sprint, we define what do we want to focus on, which areas, which companies. One of the great sources is actually looking into products and apps that we love ourselves. So if someone built a great product, then it's likely a high performer. So usually, like, we we provide some great products in specific areas that are more important for us to to the sourcing team, and they just try to source targeting those companies. It could be also different areas. It could be even schools, like good schools, and so it varies from sprint to sprint.
00:30:05 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:30:05] S1: That makes sense. There's a... Gokul had this really good piece of advice. I think it was on the podcast. If not, he tweeted about it. Where, know, you look at, like... There's, like, successful companies, but then there's also, like, what function in that company is the is the key to their success. And so you wanna go, like, a company a for sales, company b for customer support, cuss... Cuss... Company c for design. And so it sounds like that's kind of the way you guys think about a little bit. Yeah. Very cool. Okay. We're... I love how we're uncovering, and we're uncovering this mystery. This entire episode is brought to you by Stripe. Every single one of the Forbes top 50 AI companies that has a product in the market today uses Stripe to monetize it. $1,400,000,000,000 flows through Stripe annually, which is equivalent to over 1% of the entire global GDP. And Stripe isn't just a payments platform. They also have a product called Stripe Billing, which powers billing for companies that you may have heard of: OpenAI, Anthropic, Figma, Atlassian, and over 300,000 other companies. Stripe Billing lets you bill and manage customers no matter your pricing model, from simple recurring billing, to usage based billing, to sales negotiated contracts. Collect and retain more revenue, automate revenue management workflows, and accept payments globally. Use Stripe to handle all of your payment related needs, including billing, revenue operations, checkout flows, or simply launching or inventing new business models. Learn all the ways that Stripe can grow revenue for your business at stripe.com. Let me go in a different direction and see if there's more to learn here. When it comes to running your teams, is there something that is kind of fairly contrarian in how you approach running the product team that is maybe now not how other companies operate that you think is key to your success?
00:31:51 · Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:31:51] S0: I've changed in how I operate after I joined Revolut. Probably because Revolut is a founder led company, and probably it's because Sofled. And also because my role is quite spread across many things. So my role at Revolut is leading product function across company, but also leading retail, which is a core part of Revolut's business. And it's very easy to be spread thinly across all those domains and catching up with 50 or 70 projects that are are being executed simultaneously, which would mean that, you know, you will just spend your entire week just just catching up on statuses, not really adding value to anyone. But but it's also, you know, it's also scary to not do it. Because what if there are some things going wrong, right, and you and you won't be able to stop it or steer in a in a better direction? So I think that's why also a lot of managers, especially in senior positions, they they kind of stay high level, and they don't go very deep into details. But so how we do differently at Revolut is to go very deep into details, we take maybe seven or 10 projects, which are most impactful for customers right now, and we go super deep into them. Like, really, really deep sitting with engineers, like, check... Like, reading code level and understanding, okay, how how it's built exactly and what's what's the underlying issue. And you could think that... Okay. But what what about others, like, let's say, 50 or 60 items, right, that are being executed? But the thing is that it actually... It's counterintuitive, but it works really well because, first of all, teams, they talk to each other. There are formal and informal ways of communicating through meetups or just, you know, meeting in the office. And they know which areas are being scrutinized right now and, like, which team is being scrutinized. And it also gives information on what are the current priorities in the company. But in addition, it's signaled to other teams that if they are not proactively executing things on the expected level, paying attention to all the details and being meticulous in all those details, especially in quality, they will be the ones that will will be reviewed to a such deep level, like next next phase, next cycle. So as a result, it also builds a great discipline.
00:35:01 · Dmitry Zlokazov, Lenny Rachitsky
And since Revolut is such a high concentration of very ambitious people who thrive for being best versions of themselves and grow. And it's very important for them to prove that, you know, they can they can deliver great things and build next, like, great company. As a result, they do everything to operate autonomously. And when you start diving deep into details, like, you see that everything is fine. You see the modus operandi, and you can understand, okay, if this team is on good track or not on good track. And if it's not on good track, it means that it probably will be one of your next areas of focus. [00:35:53] S1: Okay. So what I'm hearing is there's... You said there's 50 to 60 things kind of projects being built at [00:35:58] S0: closer to a 100, actually. [00:35:59] S1: Okay. Okay. So there's, like, a 100 things happening at any point, like features being built, products being launched. And you... And this is you and the founders choose seven to 10 to focus on, or is it just you? [00:36:13] S0: No. It's just it's just me. Right. [00:36:15] S1: Just you. Okay. And and then... And by the way, do you have, like, a leadership team that you're a part of with, like, a design lead, or is it just you basically at the top? [00:36:22] S0: So the way it's structured, my responsibility is product function. We also have a head of design function. It's also part of my team. But then all the other functions, they are separate, like engineering and data function. And all of them report directly into a CEO.