David Senra - Competition, Intensity & Building a $115 Billion Global Bank | Nik Storonsky, Revolut

Episode Date: October 25, 2026

Nik Storonsky is the co-founder and CEO of Revolut, a digital bank valued at $115 billion that is available in 38 countries. A former trader, he started Revolut with a card for spending abroad without bank fees and expanded it into a full-service bank with the goal of becoming number one in 100 countries. Nik explains why founders have an edge over professional CEOs, how he runs Revolut like a machine, and why he funds product bets algorithmically, doubling down on winners and cutting losers. He discusses hiring self-guided people over experienced executives, what Europe's regulatory constraints taught him, why he keeps VCs off his board, starting the Quantum Light fund, buying ads across Europe's airports, and how AI is changing the way Revolut is organized. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/nik-storonsky Made possible by Ramp: https://ramp.com Deel: https://deel.com/senra AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Coming for Jamie Dimon's dinner (00:02:04) Building the #1 bank in 100 countries (00:06:12) Why founders beat professional CEOs (00:08:45) Revolut's biggest mistake (00:12:47) Why legacy banks can't innovate (00:17:20) Running a company like a machine (00:20:28) Funding winners and cutting losers like a trader (00:23:31) How AI is changing Revolut's team structure (00:25:23) 50 direct reports and spreading innovation fast (00:29:59) Hiring self-guided missiles (00:33:31) Too much money makes founders weaker (00:37:38) What Europe's constraints taught Revolut (00:41:08) Why VCs are like football cheerleaders (00:49:28) Starting a fund to compete with VCs (00:54:28) From zero marketing to buying Europe's airports (01:00:21) Funding moonshots like a global tech company (01:03:58) Building an unstoppable machine Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, I had to tell them to start recording immediately because even the conversation we were just having, I was like, oh, we're going to have a lot of fun today. I text my partner, Rob, I was like, I think me and Nick are going to do a masterpiece because I've been hearing about you from other founders for years about this guy is super competitive. He moves excessively fast and he's a conqueror. Can you explain like how you view competition and like what you're trying to do in the world? I was extremely competitive since I was six years old. So it was always in a competitive spots or competitive Olympians. as well. And for me, it was always a natural desire to be number one in whatever I choose to do, right? Like if I choose to play a game, I need to be number one. And then I'm extremely pissed, pissed off if I'm number two.

So I always had this character. You think the competitor drive came from sports? What sports were you playing? I was doing a lot. I was doing kind of, you know, swimming, boxing, a lot of sports in childhood. I think it's more like a character, jeans, combination that you get. You know, some people, are extremely competitive, some people are not competitive. So how do you look at the competition? I heard this, we were talking earlier. It was one of the most hilarious quotes where somebody asked you like, oh,

you want to expand the bank into the United States, right? And are you coming for Jamie Diamond's lunch? And you go, I'm coming for his dinner. I mean, the idea was that lunch is always, you know, something small and dinner is usually in the US much larger and in Europe as well. So coming for dinner meant, you know, not only going for, retail business, but also for enterprise as well, also potentially for investment banking,

because it's also possible to disrupt investment banks. How so? I mean, it's still very manual, still very expensive. I mean, it's all possible to make it all much cheaper as well. Why not? Okay, so explain because I think a lot of people that are going to be listening to this don't, like they don't, they're not going to understand what Revolut is today and where you're trying to go. So like explain what you're doing, like the state of the business now and then what you're trying to do moving forward? So maybe I started with 12 years ago with what we started. So I started with a simple cut, which allowed you to spend money abroad at interbank rates,

avoiding effective banking fees and with good effects rates. And then at the latest stage, I expanded into other products, into credit, wealth and trading, crypto, business accounts. We also build a lot of non-financial services business. So the result, now we are a large digital bank providing all the services that banks provide, plus providing a lot of services on top of it. For example, you can book stays with us, you can buy e-sims and so on. And then the idea is to build a large global bank, which is number one in at least 100 countries.

That's what we are trying to do now. So right now we're alive in 30, probably 38 countries. in majority of them we have banking licenses. And then we are slowly expanding 10, 15 new markets every, I'll say, one to two years. Okay, so this goes back to, again, we just hit on how this country started. You're super competitive. You say these like little lines, right, that you're like, you just drop there. But like, you're just like, oh, I want to build the number one bank in 100 different countries.

Yeah. You understand that's a wild, like thing to say and an ambition. And I don't think you say it casually. say it casually, like, oh, yeah, I just want to be 100, you know, top, number one in 100 countries. Like, you actually mean it. So, like, go into, like, how this, like, what is your inner monologue in terms of, like, competition and how you view, like, this game that you're playing? Yeah, basically, mentally, for me, if I chose them to do this game, right? And as I said, before, I need to be in number one. And right now, there is a huge opportunity in the world

where we have many countries, and then in each country, I have 10, 20, 30, 30, 40, 50, 50 banks. they're all very fragmented. Basically, there is a unique chance in the world to build a global bank which provides much better services and products at a much better price in every single country. And then effectively to optimize,

to compete with these banks, to drive prices on their products down, to improve customer experience, to save customers time as well, because you don't need all these physical branches for banks and so on. But you say more about this, like this ambition

or this competitive drive, that you have. So, like, how does it manifest in your life every day? Like, you wake up with just, like, a burning desire to achieve mission success? Or you're looking yourself in the mirror and just like, I'm not doing enough? Like, what is happening? Like, I'm interested in you, the entrepreneur, and then we'll talk about the business. But, like, this is a fascinating part for me. Well, basically, it's a banking business. And the way I view it, okay, if I chose to be in this business, I need to be number one in it. And obviously, there are tens of thousands of banks in the world. And what it means to be number one, okay, is to be number one in country. One, two,

two, three, four, and so on, and say it's a hundred countries. And then in terms of competition, how I look at competition. I mean, to the only, I don't really look at competition. I look at kind of myself, right, and then what would I do to beat up myself, right, to out-compete to out-smart somehow. And the philosophy is very simple. So every day you need to be like almost 100% every day. And then even if you lose to competition, then I can't really blame.

yourself because, okay, every day you're at 100%. Right. So I think, you know, that's the mentality that will help you win, most likely. I love this. Have you spent any time with Toby Lucke, the founder of Shopify? No, not yet. Okay. So he was on the show. I'm actually recording with him in another like two weeks.

But he says he likes to take the view that he's a corporate raider, that somebody now has bought Shopify. It's him. And he's like, what the hell was the previous management doing? How would I essentially improve every single element of what this previous management was, even though it also is him. So you said basically the same thing. It's like, well, okay, you can't really control what your competitors do, I control what I do,

let me analyze how I'm doing and then how would I beat me from the outside? Yeah, that's part of the game is earlier. Why do you think you have this opportunity to be number one? What do you see that they're doing wrong that you think that you can do better? A lot of them, they're not founders. That's number one, right? So they're there only for three, four years at best. They just collect their bonuses and the search, right?

And then they might, you know, optimize certain operating metrics. But, I mean, they are not really 10x people, right? So they are, I mean, they're just there for their bonuses, effectively, for three, four years. As a result, they don't really need to do bold decisions. They always play in defense. They never play in the fence. I have a different style, right? So, yes, of course, I play defense as well, but I always think, okay, what I can do more, right?

Which industry I can go? like which product can I launch for and so on. So it's like, you know, always pushing myself, pushing myself to do more. Why do you think it's important that you're competing against non-founders? I mean, it's much easier to compete not against founders, right? If I would be competing with all the banks and they were all founder-led, as a world, we would all have, you know, much better products by now. So that's not what's happening, right?

Say more about the difference between, in your perspective, between a founder and a professional CEO. Well, professional CEOs, ultimately, they're going. is not to improve organization, right? The ultimate goal is to protect their job. So by definition, they make suboptimal decisions for the company. Because they think about themselves and they think about the companies as two entities, right? I think about myself and as a company, as a one entity, right?

Like I do everything what is good for the company and I never kind of try to diverge myself what is good for me. this should be different towards good for the company. For me, it's the same. So I have like 100% alignment with the company. Yeah, I heard you say something like your entire life is work. It's like 99.5% of your time is dedicated to building your business, correct? Yeah, yeah. Also, when we speak with regulators, they're all kind of, yeah, but, you know, growth.

It's not a good mentality and so on. And my answer is very simple. every time when you think as a regulator that I'm excessive risk taker is completely wrong, right? Because I'm the only one motivated for this company to succeed and to survive, right?

And that means I'm actually not going to take stupid excessive risk compared to professional CEOs or professional votes. Because there's no separate... This is what I hate when I was like, oh, it's just business. It's not personal.

It's like no such thing with founders. Yeah, yeah. So this is another thing that, surprise, when I started reading about you, was originally, you set out to not be regulated. And there was something about you saying this is like the worst mistake you ever made.

Can you talk about what happened and how you learned this lesson? Yeah, basically when we got several million customers and then we applied for banking license, the entity with zero customers is less riskier compared to an entity with millions of customers. And then the regulator is,

they become much more risk-averse to you, right? Because for them, it's much easier to give a life. to a company with zero customers because maybe they will have zero customers in three, four, five years time, right? If you give a bank license to a company with 5, 10 million customers and something goes wrong, right? Then I regulate it to be blamed. Why were you not regulated before? What was the state of the business?

When you applied for the banking license? What were you doing before? Well, we simply got e-money license, payment licenses. So we were just moving money. Much lighter licenses, yes. Okay. Yeah. And then the idea was banking license, banking license,

back then was three, four years to get, while e-money lies you can get within one year. So obviously, as a founder, you want to do things faster. So that's why we went for e-money license. Then we got a lot of customers, and then we moved to bankie-lise, and then it became almost impossible because we're very, very large. I think in the history of UK, it never happened before that a company with seven or eight million customers in UK applied for banking license. So was that a difficult process?

like what happened? It took us almost five years to get a bank license in the UK. Okay, so what would you do differently before? You would have tried it, like, what you, I think the way you put it is like regulation, it's not a moat. That's not the right word to, but it's like there's a huge benefit to actually getting yourself regulated. Is this correct?

Is this the way you thought about it? It's like there are pros and cons to build a lush business. It's a must, right? because if you want to really compete with banks, you need to get trust from customers. They need to put salaries in. They need to put a lot of their wealth in their accounts. They need to start trading stocks with your ETFs and so on.

So they need to trust you. And then in their minds, I mean, they trust banks. What do you think the American, like, fintech companies are doing wrong about this? To build a very large business, to capture large market share, it's just unavoidable. So I think in the U.S. A lot of companies started like chime, cash up. It was simple before 10, 12 years ago. They all never went for banking license.

I think it's a big mistake. So they could never become a large business. Explain why they can't become a large business without it, though. Just because they are not a bank, right? They can target certain niche audience, certain cohorts of customers, I don't know, low income and say on. But they can never go to prime audience, right? and they can never become a prime bank account

without a banker license. But why do you think that relegates them to being a small company? Well, just because, yes, early adopters, one two percent of population will try them. Maybe it will go from early adopters to their friends' family and other like 20 percent, so four percent of population, when you want 40, 50, 60, 70 percent.

For example, in Ireland, we have 80 percent micromanetration. So four out of five adults use relevant accounts. Okay, how did that happen? Slowly, I think a combination of lack of competition, very bad banks. They have only four banks, which are bad, plus very small country with a lot of people living outside of Ireland as well. So I think altogether, it led to us being 80% of the market. If you look at other markets, for example, in the UK, where about 20% penetration,

France is 20% Spain. Certain markets are 30, 40% penetration. So it is possible to go to 67 to 80 as Ireland shows. But for it, you need to be a bank. So I'm very curious, like, when you're going into a new market and you said, there's just bad banks, just like low competition here. Like, what are you seeing that they're doing wrong? Well, they're stuck in limbo of professional management who are extremely risk-reverse. As a result, there is zero lack of zero intention to innovate.

and then all the resources are spent on protecting what they have already, right? So, for example, you can have a very old legacy third party core banking system. Obviously, you need to change it to your own or to some new provider, but then banking management will never do it because it reduces risk, right? Because you need to migrate customers, you know, something might go wrong. and they never take a risk, right? So there's a problem. Plus, not overfitter, because a lot of them, they are not technical,

so they don't really understand how to do a lot of technical things. As a result for them, our default choice is to not do anything for regulators and then for legacy banks. Because doing anything is risky in an industry where you lack certain skills, so certain technical skills. And banking is about, it's not only about regulation, it's also about building tech. And I think all these people are very bad at building tech. I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp.

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He said, we built 11 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. Deal is trusted by over 40,000 companies and growing fast. Learn how they can help your business by going to deal.com forward slash Senra. That is deal.com forward slash 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 technologies, so therefore they cannot innovate. And that's what you're attacking. Yeah, exactly. They just don't even think about building products, right? Because they just don't feel it.

They don't use it. 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 very tough manager, be very in details, and be a very good product person as well, to know how to build and turn the product. Tech regulation, compliance, people altogether. It's like a machine, right?

So there are inputs, and then the whole machine should produce you right output, which is amazing, probably that people use. Okay, explain how you're building this machine. I mean, you need to visualize on your head. are 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 you want to build. And then you effectively observe, kind of, you know, the whole structure working, the whole product being built, and you always

interfere, right, if something goes wrong. And then you kind of change certain paths of the machine. For example, when we started, it was a very small team, 10-20, to 30 people, we hit the bottleneck when kind of team grow, but then speed slowed down. Machine stopped working. So what I did, I just ensure that we have, you know, a lot of very small independent team who just work on the same platform, right? And then speed increased because 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, which is a reg effect. as government, affairs department, and so on. So they had to produce in a certain outcomes. And we hit again a 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 kind of moves in circles, right? You build something. Then you hit a bottleneck, right? You identify the problem. You solve the problem. You go again. And so now you're adding another, essentially, like, skill to this machine that is your company. You were, before you started Revolut, you were doing, you were a trader, right?

Yeah. I heard about what you just described before, where it's like you have a, I don't even know if you call them bets. Like you'll have like 20 different ideas or like small teams working on 20 different ideas, right? At the time, explain how these teams are structured and like how your previous career as a trader influenced the way you're building and managing your company. I think what was useful as a trader was risk management and then quantifying everything. because fortunately, unfortunately, in banks or in all organizations,

a lot of things are evaluated based on their people's intuition, which in a lot of cases, it's simply wrong, right? So in order to evaluate correctly what is done and what is not done, you need to have metrics, you need to have KPIs. Wait, are you saying dumb or done? Done, done, done. Okay. Well, in grim as well, dumb as well, yeah.

metrics and KPIs that actually kills politics with an organization because, look, everything is transparent, right? You as an 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 have as a part of the machine.

When I worked in the bank, they didn't really have it. So they had the professional CEO. and they had a lot of politics within an organization. And I think it's just simply wrong how people run generally businesses. Okay, so explain, like setting these little bets up? I mean, to 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 a certain point of time, I decided to install discipline in building beds

because we're 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 kind of, you know, decision to produce a bet. It can be bottom up, top down. Then there is a discussion, call it committee, whether it makes sense to produce the bet. And then 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 9 to 18 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 10 years, we already have launched, say, 50 bets. And then we know that our top 10 bets, they grow, say, 10, 20% month and month. And they produce 1 million GP, 2 million GP, 3 million GP, each month consecutively. Then if we release a bet and then we see that this bet is historically in cohort of the bottom 25% of all the bets,

we simply sunseted. So we instill discipline when we're not really running businesses which are not growing very fast. And then bets which are growing very fast we're actually doubling down, right? So we give them more teams, one team becomes second team, three teams, four teams, five

teams, then it becomes department, then it becomes a major pin alliance. So I think this process is just in a very discipline to always filter out things that don't work out. Even myself, I kind of, you know, I don't really trust my intuition in terms of which products to build, which products not to build, because historically I was wrong so many times. And I think only approach which, like, completely algorithmic, right? Top bets you continue to find, bottom best you just cut, like within 18 months. This is a traitor in you. Exactly. There's a lot of what you're saying

reminds me at Bezos. And the way he describes us all these, like, obviously these disparate bets that he would place inside of Amazon when he was obviously building the company. And he has a great line where he's like, you need to pour gasoline on the promising sparks. So your whole thing is I'm going to cut the bottom, but then the top performing, do you have a percentage is 10%? It's usually up to 25% of all the way. And then you're just now we know. You just scale it up.

And you're dedicating a lot more money and resources. Why is it important at the very beginning before it's unproven to cap the team size of 10? It's not necessarily 10. It can be a bit more. It just depends how complex is the product. But it should not be more. Generally, it should not be more than 10 people.

I guess as a rule of thumb, okay, you need probably two, three back-end developers. You need to, in our case, because we also produce mobile apps, you need to have two to four front-end developers. So three to four backend developers, one pro-owner-one designer, that gives you 10 people. Is the way you're structuring these teams changing

because of AI now? Yes, that's actually, I think now that's how I'm kind of trying to change. because last 10 years, I think I optimized a lot how you direct people, how you build organization around people, around their strength and weaknesses. Like avoiding politics, putting KPIs and so on. That's actually avoiding people's weaknesses, right?

With AI, structure needs to be rethought, to be honest. I think the team should not be 10 people anymore should be two people, three people at best because one developer can do front-end, back-end, can even do data science as well. So it should be a result. Can you give me a download of your thoughts about how AI is changing the way

that you're running your company? Well, many things, and I think we're just in the beginning. So we automated customer support. So 90% of all customer support team is automated now. We're doing the same. Before it used to be 5,000 people plus. Now it's much less. Obviously, engineering is automated as well.

We increase speed of engineers by 30%. Translation, cross-examination. cross-selling as well done by LLMs now. A lot of things. But I think ultimate goal is at least a bet for us now is to be able

to build like full-stack AI employee. I think it's completely doable with current technology. So it's not like a chat tool or another like interface where you tell what to do and then it produces something.

No, it's more like AI employee which can join calls with you, which have email, which has Slack account, which have access to all internal back office system, and can do work. So I think that's kind of the ultimate goal that, I mean, soon or late, you know, majority of companies will come to. Yeah, you keep mentioning over and over again, like, I don't know if you use the word bureaucracy. I don't think you did, but you hate politics, you want to minimize that. You want

like data, you're much more like just, I don't care what you say is like, did we hit the numbers or not and is this growing or not? What's your organization structure? You just have a shitload of direct reports? Like Alexander Wang, was sitting in that chair like two weeks ago. And he had some crazy shit like 200 direct reports. Oh, really? Yeah. So like what's your, how are you organized?

So I have about 50, 51, 52. Raleity, I'm not even speak. Well, I speak with my direct report, but I also go deeper, right? I go down to individual contributor in important projects. So I can speak directly with design or product or not with a developer. Philosophy is very simple, right? So whenever you hire a small. self-guided people, you don't really need to manage them. So you just need to show them

direction and then ensure that they're all synchronized. So it's like an armor, right? So you need to ensure that all people are using the same standardized equipment, right? That's what you need in the company as well. You not need every single team or department to reinvent their own bicycles, right, or their own weapons. Now it has to be the same standard approach. And then if someone invents some additional kind of tool or additional instrument which allows us to move even faster, then we need to standardize it across all the teams and departments. That's what I do very well. I'm very good at supporting innovation in one team or one department and actually spreading it across the whole company. Can you give me an example of you spotting an innovation and spreading

it through the other departments? For example, recently it was we for for design, we always used Figma. Right now, I support that one team is actually producing designs much faster using LLMs. And then instead of actually designing in a certain interface or the product, they simply uploaded our design system on the code level to LLM. And then they prompt to produce certain flows based on our design system. As a result, the whole design is not really a frame in Figma, but it's like a live interface on your laptop or on your simulator. So you can click through things, it reacts and so on. But the most important thing, you can do it three, four times faster

compared to doing frames in Figma or screens in Figma. And then I'm pushing the whole system to all designers now. Have you spent any time reading about entrepreneurs from the past at all? Yeah, of course. Yeah. Like anybody stick out that you admire or you studied? Yeah, of course. I read books about Henry Ford.

I'm glad you said Henry Ford. You're sitting there talking about, like, you're building a machine. You're, like, observing these innovations in all different parts of your machine. I need to make sure that it's spread throughout this entire machine. That's like Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie. He would travel around the world. Now we obviously technology could proliferate. You know, somebody could tell you about it.

You say it online or whatever. He'd have to, like, physically go and travel to the factories because they're building physical stuff. And I'm like, oh, wait, this idea in Britain, I'm going to take back to America. And that's the way Carnegie. Ford did this too, but Carney specifically sounds exactly like you, where he's just like, I don't care if it's a 5% improvement in 1% of our business. Like, if there's a better way to do it, we are going to do that. And he was moving against usually older competitors that would not invest in technology.

And in fact, when they found out that he was spending so much resources on it, they thought he was fucking crazy and actually gave him, because he ran that company for 30 years, it actually gave him this compounding advantage that by the time, like his competitors could never catch up. He was like so far ahead. But it's like you were thinking very similar to Carnegie in what you were just describing. I think it's super important. It's just building the machine, which moves fast, which achieves the goals. And then if you support innovation and certain part of the machine, you need to spread it as fast as possible.

Yeah, and so this idea that you kind of hate, like, managers that just pass along, like, what to do, correct? You've eliminated them from your company? Yeah, exactly. I've seen so many by now, the last 10 years. It's just simply what they do. They take information from their individual, from individual contributors and then they pass it to, I don't know,

stakeholders, right? I mean, it's like, what was available at, right? Did you change the direction of the team? No. I mean, well, they know what they're doing. Okay, did you bring any innovation? Did you identify their easiest way to achieve the roadmap, right? No, not really, but I mean, what's your job?

Like, you know, just, you know, taking numbers from them passing to myself? I just don't get it. You prune your team? is what I've heard. And you're searching for, I think, what you call self-guided missiles? Yes, self-guided people, yeah.

It's almost like a founder and employee forum, is what you're going after? I always joke that, you know, self-guided people are like self-guided missiles, right? So you've got brilliant people. You don't even need to tell them what the goal is. So they self-identify the goal, and then they self-reach it.

So they're like self-guided missile, which also identify the goals. Then people who are good, but not excellent, you need to tell them the goal. And then they are without any kind of iteration, they will reach the goal. Average people, you tell them the goal, and then you need to spend weekly iterations with them to direct them, to tell them what to do, and then they will reach the goal, right? So you spend management time.

That's what I don't want. And then below average people, okay, you gave them the goal, you spend time on them, and then most likely they will not heal the goal, right? So that's the problem. So in order for you to have as many direct reposts as possible, you just need to minimize management time spent on each of them. Let's just assume you've gotten rid of all your below average people anyways. How do you identify the average people and then do you just fire them as well?

I do, yes. Like a lot of people I know who are very good executives, they struggle with this. Why do you think they struggle? I think it's just, you know, they much more care about being empathetical to other people. rather than caring about winning. So I think if you are much more weighted in terms of winning, right? Your empathy to other people is at second place

and then you will do right decisions even if they are tough decisions. And then people who are kind of more empathetic or less are attached to being a winner, then they might pretext being number two or number four rather than pretext getting better people in their team. Have you heard how Elon speaks about this?

No. So he would tell the people, like the people managing the engineering team, he's like, if your engineers like you, you're not doing the right job. And his whole thing was exactly that. He's just like, we're here to win, we're here to achieve the goal, and then how people feel is like completely secondary to that. Yeah, exactly. That's more how you think.

I think it's very important. Whatever you hire an executive or you observe executives, like people who are very likeable by their direct reports, they might not be the role. right, people, I think the best executives there are very tough, right? Well, they might be likable, right? But then likable is now the goal for the executives. The goal is always to achieve the goal, right, with the minimum number of resources spent.

So they're the best. Say more about this, because I've heard this, like, you like small, large outcomes that come from small inputs. You just said something like that just now. Like, achieve the goal with the minimum amount of resources. Yeah. So it's almost like an art to, like, I know you don't. think of yourself as an artist for sure.

But there is like an art. You're trying to like, it's not just you want to win. You also want to win like the right way. Where it's like you could win and you just expended way more resources than somebody else. It was like, no, I want to try to find a minimum input possible for a large outcome. Yeah, exactly. If you think what founders are what entrepreneurs are what are like great executives there, okay, they have the goal.

They need to reach end to end. So what it means? Okay, they need to identify direction, where to go. and then they need to build something within this direction with a minimal number of resources spent. Do you see a lot of waste in the American entrepreneurial ecosystem, though? I think there is too much money, right? A lot of founders they think money is free,

which is probably almost free in California because you can raise so much money at ridiculous valuations and then just spend. So I think there is a definite culture of trying to solve problems with money rather than with your brain. explains to younger entrepreneurs that are going down that path why that's not the right move well for example you you're into B2B business right and then you kind of you know set up a company you have your first sales first say one million error and then you decide to scale it and then

suddenly decide to hire expensive VP of sales who will who will hire and now like in a 50 salespeople to sell your product you need to find a way to start selling a product cheaply, build the system, and then simply feed additional employees into the system. So you always have great payback. Starting big, hiring a very expensive VP of sales, who will hire also very expensive team as a wrong decision. Okay, so essentially, like, they remove the constraint from money,

therefore they're not developing the skill set that constraints make you, if you're going to survive under the sub constraints, you actually have to be good, you actually have to be talent, you actually have to be resourceful. And they're essentially papering that with money. And it might work for in the short term, but long term, they're going to get beaten by somebody like you.

I mean, if we are in the same industry, then yes. But in many cases, in U.S., it's not that competitive, right? Wait, that's a wild statement. Why would you say in the U.S. it's not that competitive? I feel other people would feel it's the most competitive environment. What do you see as a European? I mean, Europe is even less competitive. Yeah.

So you think China? China is competitive, yeah. So China is 9 and 6, right? And then even if you are good in Europe or even if you are good in U.S., I mean, how can you out-compete the people who work nine to nine? Six days a week, right? Plus, they have very good education, technical education. So it's very hot.

When I started in a co-working space with 140 companies. Within five years' time, only three companies survived. They all worked on weekends. Within 10 years, only two companies survived out of 140. So I think working on weekends is a must if you want to survive. Purest the discipline. Okay, so working seven days a week is one thing, but working nine to nine or ten to ten,

like what is it, what is the actual culture? Well, I work like that. You're the founder of that. I don't know a single founder that's like, no, I'm on PTO. Like, I understand that. I'm talking about your group. Yeah, my direct reports,

like absolutely majority of them, they work like that, right? They might be like a bit less alignment for direct reports of my direct reports. But still, I think out of all European companies, we're probably one of the hardest working. And I think we're also one of the hardest working companies, if you include yes, as well. I want to know what you think, like, the people, the entrepreneurs that have this, like, California

tech, like, culture and operating system. What do you think they're doing wrong? You said there's just too much money. They're not that competitive. No, everything else is seems there, is there. There is an ecosystem. Talent is very good. You go to great universities plus. Like a lot of expats, you know, coming to studying these universities. People are rather hardworking. But the culture when there's too much money, and then people choose to spend a lot of money on the problems,

I think it's a wrong culture. Because they're not actually solving the problem, downer-line problem? I think it's just a lot of waste, number one. And then you're not really developing yourself as entrepreneur. It's so easy to kind of feel. you know, close the problem with the money. If you have an unlimited amount of money,

I mean, you just throw money here, here, here. But then you're not prepared for the future when, you know, for some reason, money can disappear. That's a very interesting take. You're not developing yourself as an entrepreneur. Yeah. Give me examples of how you developed yourself. Well, what we started, if you look at the unit economics of the business,

we started with a negative gross margin. And the negative gross margin continued for next three, four, five years until we optimize it to up to 80% of positive gross margin. And then if you look at why is that, right? So in our business, if you look at Europe, everything is extremely kept and regulated compared to US. For example, interchanges, 20 base points versus 100% or in US. Credit card rates are kept in the majority of countries.

Credit is very limited, right? You can not really freely give credit to many people. It's very difficult to effectively set up a bank in Europe, giving country by country. Because even if you have a bank in Europe, you cannot be a primary bank because with regulation, that's allow you to start issuing a local accounts

unless you stop a local branch of the bank. You have that physical location. I mean, you need to have an office, you need to have local connectivity, local regulation. And so also you go country by country and takes a lot of time, a lot of resources as well.

So different languages as well. And you had to do all of this. Yes. Plus very tough employment. laws in many countries. And the U.S. is very easy, right? I mean, it's like employment as well. In Europe, it's not like that.

So you need to be very careful how you hire, who you hire. So all this together is actually produced environment, which is not very profitable, right? And very difficult to build a company. And then even in that environment, we kind of succeeded, right? But then we succeeded because we spend a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of kind of, you know, brain power to operate.

optimize on every single problem. If I would start the same business in Brazil or like in the US or maybe in other countries in Mexico, certain aspects would be much easier. If you look at unit economics, credit is so much easier to give. Interchange is not kept. Technically, this difficult environment in Europe actually taught us how to build business in a very competitive landscape. Okay, so if you were surviving in this very difficult environment, now you have a

skill set that people that did not have to go through that, and now you have to commute head-to-head with them in, let's say, like, America, they're going to be very hard to compete with. You're going to be very hard to compete with. Because they haven't developed the same skill sets and they didn't go through that stuff you did. Okay, that makes perfect sense. I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book zero to one. The quote says, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places.

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You've said some very interesting things about investors that I want to talk to you about because it's really important. This show, the whole idea, was just like I think entrepreneurs are the most people. important people in the world, the idea that, you know, somebody has an idea and it doesn't exist, and they, through determination, agency, you know, aggression, like, they make something that didn't exist that started in their mind real. And in your case, you have, you know, you're in 40 countries or whatever cases, thousands of employees, how many customers, tens of millions, like, from an idea that you had, you know, when you were what, in your late 20s?

To Jonathan. Yeah, it's absolutely incredible. I think that's a miracle to me. And yet a lot of the discussion that takes place that what founders say about investors in private, they do not say in public. And so we were talking earlier, because I saw this clip of you, where you compared investors to football cheerleaders. Yeah.

Can you explain why you made that comparison? Well, basically, I gave this history before. So what I saw the company was 12, 13 years ago. Back then in Europe and the UK, it was extremely difficult the environment to raise money. Simply, there were not many VCs around, and then there were all more like private active guys, like extremely aggressive, extremely legalistic. So to raise money, you had to sign a lot of bad conditions in the shareholder agreement, liquidation preferences, boat seats, like, you know, reducing your voting rights as a founder and so on. So these

people basically think that because of them, the company was kind of created because they gave money and that they are entitled to less part of its success. So that's the mentality of like, you know, quite a few investors that invested very early on, like in my company, for example. I think it's kind of leisurely wrong, this mentality because there's, I don't know, getting money from LPs, it's extremely easy. Wait, getting money, you said? Getting money from, because their business is very simple, right? Okay, they have LPs, they collect money from them,

and then they invest in startups, and then they have a business model of 220, right? So it's so much easier compared to building a real operational business from scratch, because they never is with their own money, right? They don't really need to work hard. I mean, there is competition, but competition is just, you know, for getting deals. So I think their job is so much easier.

That's number one. And then number two is, back then there was almost no competition compared to what it is now in VC circles. And back then there was basically this opinion that we as VC will help you run the company. The company will be successful because we will give you advice, you know, how to run the company. Relity, like almost none of them, they ever build any company, right? So they just raise money from LPs. They invested their money in many companies.

And sometimes they have boss-suits, sometimes they don't. But having a boss-it doesn't teach you how to run a company at all, right? You are just observer. As a result, you have all these people with a lot of power, right, because they give you money, they put some conditions in shareholder agreement. And then they also have this mentality. that they can tell you what to do as a founder, right? And that's, in my experience, was very dangerous.

And I had many cases in the past when serving VCs. I mean, the advice was simply wrong for the company. So I think, you know, my advice to entrepreneurs would be, even if you raise money from VCs, try to pay a lot of attention to sharehold agreement, right, and then to ensure that they're purely financial players that have no right, no voting right, no seat at a table at decision-making, super important.

Because if something goes wrong, you effectively have cheer leaders who look at the match, and then they try to play this match instead of professional players, and that's always disaster. Why did you say some of the advice they gave you was dangerous? One of the advice was, okay, you know what, you need to hire experienced executive. You know what? Now it doesn't work. When I started first five years, I had probably 50 plus experienced executives, I kept only two, right? Within one year, it just doesn't work.

Why is that? Why experienced executives almost never work out? It's the same as football players, right? They have their prime. Like, reality, I mean, there is a prime age. And like, it doesn't mean they became less good. I think they changed their priorities, right? right, plus probably became less good.

Plus, things changed, times changed, competition changed. So people who were good before who had in a past track record of being good before, they might not be good in your company for the future. That's number one. It's extremely naive to think so. And then number two, there is also negative for selection bias, right? If you think at people who are extremely good, like, for example, how I hire people, I look at their track record of achievement, and then they need to be top 1% of compared to their peers in terms of their career progression.

And then I try to pick up them when they are 25, 30 years old, so they continue on the same trajectory in a revolution. Whenever you're hiring experienced executive, relatively there is a negative selection bias, because people who are extremely good, they already made it, right? I don't know, they either probably running their own businesses or they're retired or something else. And then people who ever have this extreme career progression, who you hire is experienced executive. They just see by definition less good compared to people with extremely fast career progression who are already not in the market. Okay, so you found basically the advice they gave you

to be completely the opposite of what you should have been doing based on what you just said. Yeah, exactly. Okay. And then a lot of advice when, you know, they think that certain people in the company are good because they experienced, well, I think I'm really opposite. And then one of the ones,

of them. He's actually quite a good investor. He was forcing me to fire my best person because he was too hardcore. So a lot of the situations just... Who did they make wins? Yeah. This guy needs to work nine to five. Okay. So how did this, like tell me more about this. Like you obviously fought back, the guy didn't get fired? What happened? I mean, of course, of course I didn't fire him. I said no. That's it. Okay, what that's it? And the guy... You take it to leave it. Yeah. And then what did you have a Did you have a fight with the investor? Like, what happened?

Yeah, and so how did you settle it? You had all the power? Like, what happened? I fighted with him and then, yeah, even though they had a collision of, you know, many investors, but, you know, they step back. Okay, so how did you get him to step back? Well, I think, you know, pretty early on I realized that, like, quite a few of VCs, they are not very operational, and they can be actually dangerous for the company

if they have in the power, so every single investment route, they just remove VCs. So I took, you know, most seats. So now I don't have any VCs on the board. I think that's the best. You always need to have operators rather than VCs on the board, people who actually build business who know how to do things. Your mindset reminds me a lot about Travis Kalanick from Uber.

He was on the show. And I think one of the clips that went, like, got millions of millions of views, was on this, where he just actually thinks that like just doing no harm is an excessively high bar for a VC. He says something like over 90% of VCs, they can't even not fuck things up. Not much, he's like, not even be helpful.

They just can't not fuck things up. And then he said like 1% in his experience have been actually helpful. And his thing, which he would tell entrepreneurs and think he said on the show, it's just like, tell them to give you the money and go away. That's how you think.

I mean, those are the best. And yes, insuring shareholders, they just don't have any powers. Yeah, I will make you richer. You just leave me alone. It's basically... Yeah. You also set up your own...

I don't know if you call it a VC fund. Yes, it's a VC fund. So basically... What's it called, first of all? Quantum Light. Okay. Explain what you're doing. This is funny.

I just picked up on this now because you were analyzing, like, the legacy banks. You're like, I'm not... Look at all the obvious mistakes they're doing. Some of that came to experience, right? Hard-fought experience. The way they're doing it doesn't make sense. I'm going to show you a different way to do it.

Yeah, basically, the idea was in... I think it was 20-22. or 2023 when I came out with this idea. And the idea came actually from my personal pain, from my fight with the investor. It was actually one of their big names. They entered or the investment in the revolution. It was, I think, just after COVID, during COVID.

When all the stocks went up, they invested at 33 billion valuation. So basically, they had legal right to not to allow changes in sharehold agreement because they were like in the less investor blah blah so you had a bunch of these bad experiences with with vCs you're going to start your own VC fund explain how your fund is different so basically I had this fight and then you know I was extremely pissed off and I thought you know what I also need to compete with VCs in their business because they're so bad and out of my frustration I started the fund as well and then the idea was basically to invest not based on a human judgment

but based on their science and based on their machine learning models statistically, statistical investment. It's number one. Number two, actually help with founders with operational advice, playbooks that we developed, how to hire people, how to the performance management,

how do product expansions. And then finally, help them sell their product as well because we are a large enterprise. We are buying, you know, from a lot of vendors, having us as a client helps to sell into other enterprises

or potentially sell to our customers as well. our revenue customers. So I think overall, plus my personal advice, obviously. So I thought overall the package was so much better compared to purely financial players, VCs. You just had your personal advice as well. So like, are you just making concentrated bets?

Is this like another thing where you're doing 20 or 50 at a time? Or are you just like concentrating money behind a handful? Again, it's statistical investment for us based on machine learning models. So the way it works, our models selects 3040 companies to invest over two, three years. And then it puts an equal amount of money in each startup. So we started with a fund, a Series B fund. So it's close. It's fully invested.

It produced now like 56% IRA. And you started like 250 million or something, right? We started to 50 million years. We were the first fund. So now it's like 56% IRA. We started investing second fund now, which is 500 million. So it's Series C in our companies. Again, based on the model, also the first.

very high return. I think it's top 5% of funds in the world now in terms of returns. We'll probably do a large fund as well for a late year. Where is the money coming from? It's different LPs. So initially I 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 fund we already got quite a few institutional players as well. I've never heard somebody building a bank compare themselves to like meta. So I want to get into that in one second. But, you know, You don't do anything like fucking half-assed or like small, right?

You're just like, okay, I started 250. Now you're just going to see how far you can take this. This is going to be like a giant like Renaissance technologies kind of thing? Well, obviously the goal is to build something large like BlackRock, but in private markets. Again, we'll see if we get there. But I think idea and approach makes sense because you now have a lot of data on startups. And then you can apply all this machine learning models to identify the best ones. And then models pre-sticated.

So, for example, one of their signals will look at, we look at who invested in the company, who is investing. And we look not only in the fund performance who invest in the company, but down to the partner level. And then we'll also look at the age of the partner. And there are very interesting things when you look at this variable as Asia 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, 40 years old

of young partners who investing, they're the best that identify good companies. So same as with executives as well. So there's a certain prime age what you need to look at. Again, there are many variables, right? Of course. Age is not only one thing, right?

But statistically speaking, That's what you need to look at. And is this a separate company from Revolut? Yes, company is separate. Okay, so completely separate. And you have somebody else running it? Yeah. Okay.

You said something about helping them sell their product as well. Talk about the early days of marketing. I heard you spent nothing on marketing for the first like five or seven years. Yes, first seven years was completely organic. Plus COVID also hit. And in 2021, I remember a company was six, seven years old. COVID hit. and our revenues went down, I think, 70%.

And back then, we were not in banking business. We were still kind of e-money with travel cut. So it was very heavily related to or related 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. Okay, but explain why you? you decided to start to start spending money in marketing. Because, like, I go to Europe, and it's 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 going to do like a little bit here, a little bit there. It's just like once I find something works, I just, you know, essentially go scorched earth on it. 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 when I started doing it, 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, right, 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 spent and who are extremely cautious with their marketing spent? Where is, you know, very low margin of error?

And back then it was gaming companies, right? Gaming companies had a lot of marketing spent, performance arts, or certain companies were also doing a lot of above the line or companies. 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, you know, 1 billion plus. And a lot of them are going to App Lovin. Yeah.

Apple One is going to print like $6 billion in profit this year. Yeah, it's like amazing, yeah. So I ended up, you know, hiring an extremely good person who started running marketing market who started running marketing revolution. And then we also went... Before I let you go on. Am I understanding you studying how gaming companies are advertising? Or you just want to know what they were spending?

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 I 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 gaming gaming. Gaming. Probably VC's cousin asked you to hire him or something. And anyway, we went very deep into performance marketing, LTVs, payback. And then recently we also started doing, because we got a banking license, and then what we realized, what I realized, quite early on, is all about trust. If you're a digital bank, you don't have branches, people don't see you physically. They trust here less by definition compared to HSBC, Lloyds, GPMorgan, Chase, and so on.

then okay how you build trust how you arbitrage effectively performance marketing spend because in performance marketing spend you pay per impression and then there are a lot of spaces in a physical world which you can buy which will also produce impression but it much cheaper price compared to the digital world so for example we bought probably now 50% of all airports in Europe, right?

Like in almost 50% of airports in Europe we now have ads, right? Again, because of simple math. How many times a year people travel, how many times a year they're in the airport, how many impressions we produce, how much it costs us, right? There is arbitrage to performance marketing.

And then similar ideas to other places in physical world, for example. We started now doing equivalent of legacy branches, what we call it, called Rev Store, right? Rev experience. So we set up first shop in Barcelona, again, arbitrage impressions of in physical world versus the digital world.

Because how many people pass every year our shop? What is the shop, though? I mean, it's more like Revolute experience. It's not a real banking legacy branch. You come in and then you experience all our products. It's all done in a very modern way, like Apple type of store, but for Revolute. And then the idea is that we just generate impressions for people, which pass the three. to come over as well.

Like a lot of companies advertise in airports, and it's just like, oh, it's up on the screen maybe for 30 seconds or whatever. It might be one billboard. It's like, you walk, I'm walking for like two minutes and it's still, I'm like enclosed. There's like a huge, like I'm in a cocoon of Revolut ads. How did you come up with that idea too, though?

Just buying full airports. I can't think of another company that I've seen do this. And I think like it's actually a really smart move more people should do that. It's like I may not use your services, but like I definitely know you exist and what you do. Like, you essentially are aiming for ubiquity

is the way, like, I was thinking about that when I was walking to the airport. Yeah, in my mind, we're just, you know, paying for impressions much cheaper compared to, in physical world compared to additional role. It's not just like paying for impressions, though, because, like, you know.

I mean, building trust as well. I hear of the trust thing was actually one of the most interesting insights, and you said a lot of interesting shit today. But, like, I think there's something about the ubiquity of it. It's not just one sign saying, you know, this is a revolution,

and this is what we do. It's like entire hallways. you're just walking and I'm being surrounded by this. I'm telling you, I can't think of another company. This is before I even thought of having you on the show. It's just like, this is actually a really good idea. I'm not going to walk past this and not know this company exists. One of the last things I want to talk to you about goes back to this, like, grandiose, like, ambition you have.

I think people that may have not known you before this pick up on your super competitive. I mean, I love the fact that you kind of got pissed off of VC's like, all right, well, now I have to compete with you because you made me so mad. But I've never heard anybody else building a bank. One, you said there's really no true global bank, and you want to be the first one. So I like the level of ambition. But then you compare just like, we want to be a global technology company. And I think you might have mentioned a few companies,

but the one I remember was like a global technology company like meta. Explain that, the connection between what you're building, which made people think that maybe like even a boring business has been around for, banks have been around for a long time. But that's not the way you're viewing what you're building. Yeah, basically, our idea. And their goal is to generate enough cash flow from this business to be able to fund like really big bets, which can consume a lot of capital, right?

Like, for example, I would love to go into LLMs as well to build our own models. And we're in fact, you know, build our own transactional model called Pragma. So it's LLM, but all transformers based on transactions rather than words. but I would love even to go deeper, right, to kind of build our own data centers to train our own models to kind of, you know, to do a lot deeper tech compared to what we do now.

But then, you know, it requires a lot of investments, right, and a lot of cash flow. So basically, to build a large business so that it produce so much cash flow, that it is possible to fund some kind of, you know, moonshot bets. which might not necessarily produce P&L in the next three, four, five years. Are these moonshop bets unrelated to, like, financial services?

Yeah, most likely, yeah. Because, I mean, in financial service, I mean, what else can we do? I mean, almost everything is invented already. So we just, like, ultimately, we're just rewriting legacy products, right? So we're building the same financial products, but we're building them much cheaper and much nicer compared to all the ones. Plus, we're putting them under one umbrella in one upper.

So it's all very convenient. Plus, we also innovate on top. So they're all kind of interconnected with each other, talk to each other. But ultimately, it's the same old banking, but done in a new way. Right. So what I really love to do is to go out of it and then do something that was never done before. Inside the industry? In all industries, yeah.

All industries? More like in tech industry. Have you like shared publicly, like some of these like moonshot ideas? or you're like keeping inside the company like for now or this idea is I just have you know in in my head and then I just know that we don't have enough resources or time to to build them but I hope you know in three four five years time we might have enough resources to to build them Pragma is a foundation model trained on our transaction data as a search

we have 30 million transactions every day so we have billions and billions of transactions. And then it is possible effectively to train a transforming-based model on transactions and then use it in like almost any aspect of financial services. It can be anti-fraud model. It can be a credit model, potational can be investment model and so on. When you launch here, why would I want to use your bank as opposed to like JPMorgan? So JPMorgan is very local, gives you U.S. bank account plus U.S. based products. If you ever have exposure outside of US, we're a banking partner because we do everything what GP Morgan does for you in the US. Plus on top of it, we provide all the global

assets. You can have global accounts with us. So being in the US, you can open account in Europe or Australia. You can send money instantly between all countries and so on and so forth. So instead of giving you local based financial products, local based benefits with We give you effectively global exposure. So that's value position. Plus on top of it is much nicer in terms of interface, plus much cheaper compared to JPMorgan. What's the difference way that you make money compared to the way they make money?

They are much more credit-focused compared to us. We are much more subscription-focused, plus transaction business, plus commission focused. What are you doing on the credit side? Are you just selling all that off? Credit, they're just standard products, create cars and loans. Selling them off or not yet now? Okay.

because it's still very small portion of our balance. So you think your advantage relative to the legacy banks is you're more of a technology company? Our advantage is tech. And then if you think about banks in the past, whenever they expanded country to country, they just bought other banks. As a result, they have many systems in many countries. They don't really control anything to produce any report. It takes months to extract data from different systems.

Our advantage is that we have just standardized one system, one leisure across many countries. As we go from one country to another country, we do not need to write things from scratch. We adjust a configuration of our software. And now, for example, onboarding UK, we adjust seven configs to change onboarding to US or to change onboarding to Mexico and so on.

So it becomes, you know, one product, which is highly configurable. We do not need to build another bank, another country from scratch. As you do it, you obviously need, you know, much less people to maintain it. compared to 10 banks and 10 countries. As a result, there is an economy of scale,

so we can sell products much cheaper compared to other banks. Plus, the whole institutional knowledge, how you build product, how you do marketing, and so on. So you replay the same knowledge in any new country. And I think, you know, over time, it can become an unstoppable machine, right?

Because it provides much better products and services at a much better price compared to local banks. Over time, I'm building an unstoppable machine. That's a great place to end. Thanks, Nick, for the time. It was awesome. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review.

And make sure you listen to my other podcast founders for almost a decade. I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.