Revolut's Chief Growth Officer on The Growth Playbook Revolut Used to Scale to $2.2BN in…

with me, Harry Stebbings. Now 20 growth is a monthly show where we sit down with the best growth leaders on the planet to reveal their tips, tactics, and strategies. And today, we bring you one of the best growth leaders from one of the fastest growing companies, Antoine Le Nel, chief growth and marketing officer at Revolut, one of the fastest growing fintechs on the planet. Prior to Revolut, Antoine spent an incredible seven years at King, the makers of Candy Crush, overseeing the continuous expansion of the world’s most famous mobile game where he was VP of growth.

I think first of all, everyone thinks there was, a huge amount of luck. I think the idea that what King did really well, I think they’ve tested extensively everything. So it was a volume game, you know, at some point. They understood they understood that super quickly saying you need to try as much as you can. At some point, something will pick up. And I think they did that super, super, super well. And I think then there was this super fast pace.

I remember we were launching a game like every quarter, pretty much we were launching a game and not everywhere, all of them were successful, but just like the pace at which we were producing games, releasing the games and so on, I think we did that super, super well.

probably has changed over time at King. I think at the beginning, we were cutting things very quickly. As time went, we started to wait longer and not say, oh, you know what? Give it another chance. Give it another chance. Give it another chance. You know? And I think that’s the whole point on when and that’s how you probably can measure the agility of the organization is how quickly you kill projects versus how many

driven organization I’ve ever been in, in the sense that really data was driving the organization. If you take the thing literally the company was driven by data. I think it was so powerful that at some point we just went way too far in the sense that for example when we were launching games sometimes we were probably looking more at the data than the game itself. You know? It’s like you can have meetings and then you just look at the numbers and you’re like, well Is that wrong?

That’s the big difference. For example, with Revolut, I think we’re a lot more product driven, which means we spend more time looking at the product than looking at the data. Is the data not an input? Exactly. It’s an input. It is an input. At King, it was at some point, it was the only decision maker. It was very black or white and the data was was the decision maker. And I think we we pushed it probably a little bit too far in this space and not spending maybe the right amount of time on the user experience and on just the quality of the product itself.

mean, product and growth is very different. Alright? So I think product should be more about art and a bit less about science when growth should overwrite on science.

performance gives you a huge competitive advantage because it is a complex thing. And if you do it really well, it makes a huge difference, you know, to your to your company growth. So that is the power of performance marketing and the performance marketing is is very deep. And I don’t know many

changed a little bit, but not so much fundamentally. It is still the same game. It’s still a bidding war, you know. Now it’s true. It’s getting a little bit more complex because you’re losing some attribution and so on. So you need to be a little bit smarter in your measurement framework. So but you just need to I mean, you reinvent yourself every other year. You have to reinvent the whole measurement framework and so on. But at the end of the day, the game is still the same game.

You know? It is the same it’s the same bidding war. You just have impressions. You need to go to the highest bidder and that’s it.

what it is. I remember, you know, so I came from a place at King where we were we were later from a maturity perspective, you know, like, I mean, we had launched many games and so on. The business was doing fantastic, and we were more in an optimization place where I remember at some point we were running, like, maybe a thousand AB tests in parallel and so on. It’s like like, it was it a machine, you know, the machine was really optimizing everything. And I remember when I arrived at Revolut, there was not much AB testing.

And for me, I was like shocked at it. I was like, what? I mean, like, you got to do that. And then then I discussed with people and so on. I realized is that, you know, there’s a good reason as well why you don’t want to do AB testing. The first thing, product managers, they they do AB testing to get an idea of what the right product is. If you’re a good product manager, you don’t need an AB test. You should be able to know what is the right product.

The second reason is because at Revolut, we wanted to do like 10x. Everything is 10x and so on. You don’t need an AB test to measure a 10x. You know, you do it, you see goes up, it’s good, you know. And the third reason is that AB testing increasing your type to market. Because if you AB test, you first need to do your AB test, then you see which one wins, and then you launch. And then, I mean, when I joined Revolut, most of the time was like, no.

I mean, you just launch. You know? You’ll see. You know? You’ll see if it works. You know? You just you just get there. You know? While while at King, I remember it was I mean, you were AB testing every single week on this small element. What if we change just this or just that? And then you had multivariate testing and everything was super, super, super optimized and so on. But it’s not at the same we’re not in the same place from a life cycle perspective. You know, it was much later.

I mean, we get there, you know, some point at Revolut when it would be more about optimizing than creating.

we have a great team of founders that are heavily involved in the business, which really is giving the, is giving the temple, the momentum to to to the whole to the whole company with the exact same approach and the exact same mindset since day one. And and I think that’s quite remarkable. The the consistency of the approach 10 after launch, you know, still the same still the same mindset and so on. And I think that’s extremely powerful.

Yeah. I mean, thing with with what we build, we build an engine which is a combination of many, many things, meaning there’s no, because you have two types of growth. You have the growth that are made of, let’s say launches, let’s say marketing campaigns and like some coup, like you make a big marketing coup and then back you get the spike and so on. There’s none of that at Revolut. I mean, if anyone, I mean, you’re probably gonna ask me, what is the one thing that really worked at Revolut?

Can’t tell you, it’s a combination of so many things in the growth engine. And because they all add up, when you look at the growth of Revolut, it’s just very steady and it’s steady and it’s accelerating week after week, you know, we just monitor every week. The acceleration keeps on going just because the engine gets more and more optimized as we are progressing. And for now, we definitely don’t see the limit even in our mature markets, you know, which is quite crazy.

organization is very, very flat and we are making sure that every team is as self sufficient as possible. And that’s what really build the agility. If you’re self sufficient in building what you have to build, you just go, you know, with with it and we run more quarterly cycles and so on and we have a very high pace, but because there’s no interdependencies between the different things that we build, at the end of the day, we are splitting the companies as many startups as possible. I know like big organizations will say, oh, you know, those are silos, people are not collaborating, etcetera, etcetera.

You know, you need to always find the right balance between coordinating things while giving the right amount of focus. And I think that’s what we doing pretty well at Revolut where every team has a huge amount of autonomy and a focus to really go

And what did you learn? I mean, on the marketing side, there’s been some some campaigns, for example, that we’ve been running in some in some countries where we’ve been using some creatives that were quite generic. And after two weeks, we saw it was a disaster and we just cut it off. Know, we don’t wait for the campaign to to finish. You say, like, you know what? This is just not happening. This is just there’s there’s no way this will this will pick up. And you just cut it, you know, while maybe in other places, you would just have continued and say, you know what?

We’re here and then we’ll do the retrospective at the end of it. So no. I mean, it’s not working. It’s not working. You just cut it, you know, and fine. Your TV campaign that was supposed to run, let’s say, for three months, well, after two weeks, it’s is not working, you just cut it and then you move on, know, it’s fine.

where you have multiple components that all play together. I’ll you a very simple example. I look at it quite the famous full funnel, you know, that everyone says. So you have the upper funnel, the mid funnel and the lower funnel. And the growth engine is when you manage to get those three elements working together. So at the end of the day, the growth engine is when you make sure that you have the lower funnel that works like a fishing net, grabs all the conversions that ultimately mid and upper funnel are feeding you with.

And that’s where all of that works in perfect synchronization so that at the end of the day, it’s all being grabbed by the lower funnel. That is the engine. When then you find the right balance between those different elements that optimize the the overall the overall the overall thing. What is the right balance? Well, depends on the maturity of the market. I think the more mature, the more you will be able to do some upper funnel. The less mature, the more you focus on the on the conversion on the conversion itself.

There’s no one truth. It evolves. You know? It’s a living animal, you know? What’s the hardest thing about constructing a growth engine? It is the measurement framework. That’s for sure. You live in a world, especially in tech, where people do things that they can measure. Alright? There’s always this bias, you know, there’s always this bias. And at the end of the day, your competitive advantage will always come from your ability to measure more than your competitors. Cause then suddenly you’re going to do that. So for example, at King, what we cracked, we cracked the TV measurement framework way before everyone.

And therefore we were the only company running TV. What do you mean you crack the TV measurement framework? So we were able to have some good level of attribution between TV and the downloads to be able to really know how much we could attribute to our TV activities. And because we managed to get that, then we were one of the very first companies to actually make that work. I think this is a very good example. The other good example is iOS, performance marketing on iOS after scan.

And you have companies that know how this works and therefore they can measure it and therefore they can scale. And you have all the other ones that I mean, really struggling and so on. At the end of the day, they spend maybe two, three times more on Android versus iOS, you know, which is a nonsense, you know. When should you start thinking about building a growth engine? At the very, very, very beginning. All right. At the very, very beginning, because know what you, what, because the growth engine is not only paid marketing, you know, include virality, you know, virality, the whole variety aspect is part of the growth engine.

This is the, even below the lower funnel, you basically have virality. So you need to build this block super, super early on and then you start going into the lower funnel and then you go up.

very good question. I think the way I like it is that the product team builds the variety engine and growth operates it. So you build something that is with parameters and then you let growth playing with it, you know, because usually growth will have better analytical framework to measure the ROI and the efficiency of it. While product will have a better product vision and UX aspect into building it. So they build the experience and growth operates it. I think that’s worked for me.

you start bringing a little bit of belief. I think the less you believe in, the better it is. I have no belief in anything. I have no belief in anything. You’re so French.

Well, don’t necessarily believe more in brand than in influencers than in this and so on, you know. I mean, I mean, whatever works, works for me, you know? And I think there are some people that believe in things and as you know what formula one, it got to work. We got to be on a formula one wing. It got to work. It’s like, why? Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not sure. Yeah. Fine. But like you see, like, this is I think this is where it starts to break down is when you come up

I’ve brought my playbook from King to Revolut, but I’ve significantly changed it. I mean What did you change most? Well, so for example, the upper funnel, I was never a big fan of upper funnel. I thought that was very difficult. Sorry.

That’s the brand marketing, let’s say. So the brand marketing. I was not sure about what that was bringing and so on. Neither is the brand marketing team,

And then came I I came at Revolut, and we did not start it at all with any brand marketing and so on. And now we are testing it. We’re doing more of it, and it really works. Do know it works? And

So what we do in airport, which is pretty cool, is that so we do the advertising on jet bridges and so on. You know, if you’re if you’ve been to Rome Airport and so on, for example, we’ve launched something really cool there. But next to it, we put vending machines. So you have vending machines in the airport to collect your Revolut card. So you just go on the vending machine, you press the button and you just get the card, know. So it’s anonymous, I mean, unlinked card.

You just take it, you scan the QR code, create the account and then the card is automatically linked. Then I can really link all my activities and get a huge ROI from what I do. Wow. Mean, that’s pretty good for attribution. That’s pretty good, right? But it’s the same, you know, like as well, do a lot of, we do some influencers and so on, know, but like, what matters is how you manage your attribution, you know, and I think we’re pretty good at at getting the attribution done and knowing what works, what doesn’t work.

Many things don’t work, and then but at least I know what works and what doesn’t work. What’s been the biggest flop? Like, you look at it and you’re like, oh. The biggest flop I mean, there’s been some influencers that just didn’t work at all. Like, I mean, it was the early days and we tried to to do something that we thought was cool and so on. I think doing some big brand campaigns with some, let’s say, some celebrities that are just not necessarily super good with social media, let’s put it this way.

That just doesn’t work. You know? So

know? You just learn.

Yeah. So investing more in this this in this brand campaign was was the big thing and really identifying the ability that the brand marketing can improve your conversion metrics. That was quite an insight which has worked, which has worked really well that is making us do more of it. Can I ask what’s in the mid funnel? The mid funnel, this is where at least the way I look at it, it’s the place where you can run some level of attribution, but you have a strong halo because of the high reach that you get and you can develop as well some deeper content.

Alright? So performance marketing is basically banners and or super short videos, you know, like six seconds and so on. So you don’t really build anything in terms of, let’s say product awareness, brand consideration, like ability and so on. You don’t build any of that. So what you say is that right away you play the full funnel because you have a big branding impact, but you are revenue generator right away, you know, which is the exact opposite as the Formula One thing where there’s no revenue, there’s nothing, you know, it’s like it’s pure brand and so on.

And that’s what I call a bit mid funnel. It’s activities that help you do a bit of everything. Like suddenly you do some brand, but at the same time you do conversion and you drive revenue, you know? So you take it all. And then, sorry, lower funnel. Lower funnel is what specifically? It’s mostly like performance marketing, affiliates, the referral program, and stuff like that. This is where you really drive and you have a full attribution, meaning you know exactly what you pay for.

no, no, no. I’m a strong believer of specialists. People should be experts in what they do and generalist marketers are good in managerial positions, but not at doing things necessarily, you know. And that’s why we have people who are experts in mid funnel, experts in lower funnel, experts in upper funnel and so on. But very, very few people have another site of all of it, very few people.

You start from scratch again and so on. And

Well, it all depends on how connected is the market with the previous ones. If tomorrow I was to launch, I don’t know, in Taiwan, it would be difficult, you know, like things will take more time. It all depends on the the on the type of market and the proximity with where Revolut is because, obviously, our brand is getting bigger and international and so on. So that’s a market where we’re not in, but we already we already have some awareness.

Well, I think it’s actually both. So so because it’s exactly that. It’s exactly that. You have those two factors playing against each other and it’s about which one is stronger than the other. And then, hey, unfortunately, it really depends on the market. You know? So some markets, the the the brand is becoming so big that actually you start getting more organic and it’s becoming like super organic and then the growth engine is feeding itself and then it just goes while others and it’s linked as well to the amount of competition that you have in the market where actually because you have a diminishing return curve where it suddenly gets more expensive to get the next one and the next one and the next one.

I think it really depends on the competitiveness of the market.

was the first thing that I By what? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s the first thing that I brought from King because at King, we never talk about CAC,

have, but there’s no CAC discussion at Revolut. Only talk about ROI because if you only, if you talk about CAC, you’ll always acquire the worst cohorts because you just always go downhill. So what I’ve done by, I mean, arriving at Revolut is that I increased CAC significantly by improved ROI significantly too. So because what you realize is that you’re not here to get the cheapest users, you’re here to get the best users. And And sometimes you gotta you gotta pay more.

You need to get as granular as possible, and you may have some channels, you know, I don’t know, like, for example, TikTok and so on, where maybe the the cohorts you get from there are not as good as what you can get, for example, from Instagram or other places. But you so the CAC is irrelevant. CAC is irrelevant. You know? Because I if I was to give CAC targets, then we would only do maybe TikTok, for example. And that doesn’t make any sense. Right? Because I I won’t get my I won’t get my ROI.

So we never look at CAC. Is that hard for a team to adjust to? No. I don’t. I mean, I don’t think so. I mean, it’s only about it’s only Well, about to stomach

Yeah. But I mean, the thing is because we go gradually, very quickly, if you build good analytical models, you know very quickly whether the cohorts you’re acquiring are the good ones.

I mean, and and that’s why the growth is exponential exponential because because today I know a lot more than a year ago or than two years ago. So my models are better. So I know better where the good cohorts

Really? Why would London versus Birmingham would be closer than London versus Paris? There’s no reason. The the the country definition beyond language is completely arbitrary.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s fair, but you adapt your model depending on the product that you sell. You know, we’re not selling the same product necessarily in the same market, so you can cut it down at the product level. But then at the end of the day, if it’s a debit card, it’s a debit card. And if it’s FX, it’s FX. How do you choose which markets to go to? Well, we want to be everywhere. Like, the objective for us is to be in every single market.

I mean, we don’t say we want to be there and not there. No. We want to be everywhere. So we just take the list and we try to see which ones are probably easier, quicker, and so on. But at the end of the day, we want to be we want to be everywhere. Which market was the worst or hardest? And what did you learn from it? If I park China, obviously, which

It’s

Yeah. Yeah. Come

Founder mode. So so let’s park China for a second. And you see, that’s that’s the thing that I’ve seen as well. My experience at King was the most important. I think the idea of localization is completely overrated. I don’t believe in localization. That we saw in at King, it was the same creative working globally everywhere with one exception, Japan. Japan is different. I have to say, Japan is a different beast. You know? But the rest is the same. It’s one global market. And I think that the consumer interest, what people are clicking on is the exact same thing.

The extra extra performance you would get by being a lot more localized is not worth the effort. And that’s what we are seeing. I mean, like, I mean, at King, and we see that the same, you know, at at Revolut. I mean, we became number one in Romania and Norway with the exact same strategy, same I mean, the same thing, you know, like and people say, oh, it’s Europe. Yeah. But, I mean, if you’ve been to Romania and Norway, you would realize it’s not exactly the same culture and the same country.

People say

The strategy at Revolut, it’s it’s very simple, you know. Obviously, we want people to use us as a primary bank. We don’t need everyone to do it now. That’s the big difference with, let’s say, any other banks. When you decide to move from HSBC to Barclays, you make a conscious decision that I’m moving there. While Revolut, we’re more, we’re like a snack. So you want to take a bite, you know, so you try Revolut and then maybe because you go on holiday, you know, and you need a car to go on holiday.

Okay, fine. Then you come back from holiday and say, oh, well, you know, maybe I want to do a bit of trading and stuff, know, I buy some ETFs and so on. Then you buy some ETFs. So, oh, then, I mean, that’s a bit of savings. Okay. Maybe I can put a bit of savings. And then you go little by little and then you reach a point. Maybe, I mean, for some people it can take six months. For some people it can take three years and so on.

And you say, you know what? I actually have everything I need here. And then

Yeah. But come and try us. But but, you know, come and try us. Just use it maybe when you go on holiday and that’s fine. You know, that’s fine. And then maybe at some point, I’ll be able to convince you with some specific products, some specific anything that ultimately will take you there. But like the idea is not to say, okay, by H two twenty twenty five, everyone will have to be a primary. No. Everyone takes at at your own pace, you get there, you know, and and and and it’s fine.

Three things, I’d say, obviously. So the first thing is the volume of users, you know, that we’re getting. The second thing is the ROI at which we are acquiring them. What’s the payback in months? And the last one is out of the people that are with us, bit on that journey, you know, that I was explaining, I mean, how they’re progressing towards becoming a primary user. Payback wise, how has that changed over time? It doesn’t necessarily change. I think, again, it it it all depends on on the it’s a market by market thing in some ways.

We’re very standardized. So it’s very stable. It’s very stable. We haven’t changed much. What’s the hardest thing about your role today, Antoine? It’s it’s a bit what I was saying about the living animal of the growth engine. I mean, we’ve built an engine that is working today, but it doesn’t mean that it’s gonna work forever. You know? You need to progressively evolve it pieces by pieces. That’s very difficult. You know? When you know something works and you need to keep iterating so that you make sure it keeps working and you keep being one step ahead of everyone.

That’s difficult. You know, it’s it’s always this idea, you know, of the cow getting eaten from the back, you know, and you and and you and you realize really late that actually, I mean, you’re gone. You know? Staying on top of it, even though it’s working really well, never be complacent about the success we have. You know? We we rarely look back at Revolut. We’re never happy about our success. You know? It’s very rare we reach our targets. You know? We never reach our targets, you know, because our targets are much greater than what we than what we’re achieving.

So I think it’s If you never set targets that can be hit, does it not just lead to bad morale? At at the end of the day, you know, between the way this works and the way Google does OKRs, you know, where we know, I mean, OKRs, I mean, you know the theory about OKRs, you should always be around 80% of achievement. It’s the same it’s the same thing. You know? So you need to be ambitious but realistic.

Yeah. Well, we have a very it’s extremely standardized, extremely processed. We work on weekly cycles. In the growth team we have, I don’t know, I think it’s twenty, twenty five different teams, you know. 25 different teams. Yeah. Yeah. Because we work as a matrix, you know. So you have the channel people and then you have the local people and all of those are teams, you know. And then we run so I run a weekly business review for all those teams. So I meet all the teams every week.

And those are mostly so obviously, we review numbers, but it’s more like problem solving sessions, you know. We bring a problem and we try to solve it together. And then they have a week, they solve it. And then we we reiterate the week after, we reiterate, we reiterate. I think the power of a very short cycles is that there’s no time wasted in presenting in the sense that if you had a meeting on, I mean, only once a month and so on, you would actually spend I mean, we know how teams are, you know, they spend the the last two, three days just preparing the presentation for the exec.

It’s a waste of time. Such a potion. While when you run it every week, I mean, they’re not preparing the meetings. So you just start the meeting. So, okay. So where are we at and so on? You know, you prepare a lot less, you know, the the meeting and you just you just bring the the Jira board and you just bring, the dashboard and you just you just look at it and then you just try to solve the problem, you know, with no with no with no specific preparation.

And then you iterate, you iterate, you iterate, and then you get very regular feedback. So you don’t get surprised like you work on something for a month and then you get at some point said, no, that’s not the right direction you need to go. So you course correct things very, very quickly.

Yeah. But then I I have only I don’t have ad hoc meetings. So there’s already a meeting for every topic. So if you want to talk about something, there is already a meeting for you to talk about it. It’s not like those agendas that look very different every week. You know? Like, my agenda looks exactly the same. I probably have my agenda until the end of year and mid next year and so on. It’s already set. I know exactly what I’m gonna do. And then you just repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.

as well, that’s those meetings are important, especially when we are remote working because it helps connecting and it’s the place where you drive the culture. Even though you may not participate in that meeting, you see how it’s happening. You see the expectations. You know? You understand what we are trying to achieve and how we’re trying to deliver and so on. So it’s a great way for you to understand how things how things are working. Are you

yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they can tell you. Yeah. Yeah. I’m very I’m very transparent. I think that’s the power of of Revolut, and and that’s the same, I mean, with Nik and so on. I mean, like, we are working in full transparency. There’s no surprises at Revolut. Because if you take a decision and the decision is no, and then and then you can appeal in a way, you know, to try to negotiate to make it yes, like every companies do, you know, and then and then and then you add up time, you add up those ad hoc meetings, or let’s do another meeting to to really look at it and then do another one and so on.

No. If we say yes, it’s yes. If we say no, it’s no, and then we move on. And there are some false positive. You know, there are definitely some false positive where we may say yes and it should have been a no, and we said no, it should have been a yes. So I’m not saying it’s perfect. It’s not perfect at all. You know? But at least we move a lot faster. And, yes, there are there’s there’s some cost in terms of false positive, but it’s a lot more it’s a lot more powerful.

Yeah. Yeah. Because you don’t add up time. You go quicker. And then Do not lose creativity. But I don’t think creativity is necessarily a No, because you iterate so much, you create more because you do more. You know, like for example, if I need to do an ad, but then if I spend three months talking about it instead of a week, I might only run two ads a year. Well, if I only talk about it for a week, I can run four a year. So I can iterate more.

So I think, yes, maybe the inception time is shorter, much shorter, you know. So maybe, yeah, there’s less discussion bouncing back and some bouncing ideas and so on. But because you do a lot more, at the end of the day, you get you get more stuff done. I think from a creativity perspective, it still works.

It’s interesting, you know, because when you look at it, even local fintechs, they’re not that big. No. I mean, your Chime is probably one of biggest things. Yeah. I mean, Cash App is but it’s not that big, you know, when you consider the size of The US. You know? It’s really

I think there is negative correlation between the maturity of the economy and the penetration of fintech. Take the other example, Germany. Germany, like like like like, there’s no I mean, like the penetration of fintech is Germany is extremely low, extremely low, you know, as as well. Why Why is that? While if you look at the penetration of fintech in India or in in Pakistan or in in some places in Africa, in Indonesia and in all those places, it’s like way more mature. You know, you have a lot more, you know, from a penetration perspective.

Why? You know, it’s a bit like, you know, in telecoms, penetration of mobile actually went super high because ultimately what they did, the jump generation, they’d never built any ADSL cable, etcetera, etcetera. You know, it’s like, you know what? Screw it. We’ll just

That that

that I What’s bad

remote? What about I mean, like the human the the the the human contact, you know, I think as well. I mean, at some point, you need to you need to be with people and so on, especially when you’re early on in your career and so on. For some people, it doesn’t doesn’t work, you know, be alone at home and so on.

A few things that are very good. You get a lot more efficient in the way you’re running meetings. Meetings are a lot more efficient when you run when you when you run things when you run things remotely, meaning you can actually have meetings of fifteen minutes or thirty minutes. You know? It works. You know, a meeting of fifteen minutes remotely works. In the real world, it doesn’t work. Meeting of, meeting of fifteen minutes. The second aspect, I feel like it’s a great equalizer versus physical meetings in the sense that dominant people get flattened out by the video conference system.

Like, for example, I do have I know I have a dominant nature. So where I sit in the room matters. And then the presence you can have physically, you know, in a meeting room matters, you know, because we talk a lot about diversity and so on. I think that the the diversity aspect that is a bit overlooked is introvert versus extrovert. And I think in the world of remote, I think it gives a much stronger chance to introvert people, more introvert people to have a deeper impact in meetings compared to in real life.

The system into where you raise a hand to talk, you don’t really raise a hand in a physical meeting. You know? Like, some people just don’t get the opportunity to say what they want to say in a physical meeting, you know, because it did not happen. You know? People people tend to cut off each other, etcetera, etcetera. So sometimes the dynamic one can be quite quite polluted. While when you’re on the video conference, press the button to raise their hand, and then people will let you, you know, speak in a very polite way and so on.

So I think that works really well. That is the best invention.

Well, yes and no. So because the way we work, the postmortem, I have all my business review as I was mentioning, but then I have the same ones as one on ones with the lead of every single of those business review that I use as feedback session of the previous business review.

Yeah. Ultimately, you know, it’s it’s a loop where I use business review where I give a lot of my inputs. I use my one on ones to receive the feedback from what we talked about. And that’s this way I have a touch point pretty much every other day with all my team leads, etcetera, etcetera, you know, whether it’s in a meeting or whether it’s in one on one, and then we close the loop so that we do have the feedback loop.

Yeah. I mean, that’s the objective. Yeah. Because is it right after the meeting? Well, mean, as it’s every week, it’s either before or after, you know, it’s like because if it’s one or two day before, one or two day after, it’s like it’s more you don’t see us before or after. It’s just a cycle, you know? It’s like so you get always the feedback loop.

Well, it’s it’s like a case study. We tell you, okay, I have this problem. I mean, it can be a marketing marketing campaign, campaign, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Etcetera. And And then then we we ask the candidate, what do you think the problem is and how would you solve it and so on. So it has nothing to do with what you’ve done or seen in the past, but it’s more about how do you decompose and simplify the problem. Because at the end of the day, every problem is quite simple.

You just need to slice it at the right level of granularity so that suddenly a big problem just becomes 10 small problems, and then you solve them one by one, and then you get there. And you don’t try to find the miracle solution by being Einstein and supercomplexified. No. I mean, there’s no there’s no need for that. Just do it simple. Keep it simple.

I think they hire generous people to run stuff. So they end up running many things in a pretty average way. So it’s better to do less and deeper than try to have a lot of breadth and do many things in a just okay ish way. And then they hire growth managers, which I I I have no idea what a growth manager is. They manage growth. Yeah. But, like yeah. But what is growth? What is growth? Is it virality? Is it performance marketing? Is it some brand marketing aspect?

What is it? Is it pricing?

huge advocate of the second one. I give you a a very simple analogy. You know? Look at Yusenbold. Everyone remembers Yusenbold. Alright? But he was not winning by much. He was not winning by 10x. He was winning by a hundredth of a second and so on because he was able to optimize the departure or this, etcetera, etcetera. So he was not 10 x better than everyone, but at the end, everyone thinks he was 10 x better than you see what I mean? And it’s because growth is a bidding war.

Alright? It’s a bidding war. It’s about whether you’re able to bid above everyone else on all the different channels, you know, at the end of the day. The question is, how are you able to bid above everyone, and how do you optimize every single step so that you’re the winner takes it all in growth, the winner takes it all. And that’s why it’s ultimately because you optimize every single part of either the funnel, either the creative, either your bidding strategy, etcetera, etcetera. It’s every single element that’s like small increment of 1% here, 2% there, etcetera, etcetera, that add up to put you on top of the waterfall

take it all.

So they they fish for for the moonshot and so on while actually it’s just down there being excellent in the execution, everything you do at the lowest level of granularity. And once you have everything that’s that’s why, you know, I was saying, if someone asked me, what is the success of Revolut? It’s a million things. What have you not

I mean, I think we are still very much at the beginning of building our brand marketing. I think we are still a very young brand. That’s probably the biggest work that we have ahead of us is to find the right way to position the brand and inspire people. That’s the biggest What does great brand mean to you? So first of all, about brand. The question is, where does brand fit? Is brand a marketing thing or a product thing? Because a lot of people think about brand on marketing.

And I give you two examples out of sample of two, which is King and Revolut, the brand was much bigger before a single dollar of marketing was spent. So the brand had nothing to do with marketing. That’s a huge brand before putting any any penny.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think

between. I think in the early days, it’s definitely more a product thing. And then it becomes with maturity a bit more of a marketing thing. But I think we take too much of a shortcut putting brand in marketing and saying, well, you know what? Brand is marketing problem. I think it’s not. It’s about, as you said, it’s the user experience. You know? It’s like how the product make you feel and so on. And then what marketing does, marketing is just an amplifier or a catalyst into it.

You know? We just try to amplify whatever it makes you feel. I just make it bigger, feel it more, and so on. But at the end of the day, it’s still the product that is starting the journey. The brand journey is starting there.

most today and why them? I mean, you mentioned Apple. I mean, obviously, is great brand because they’ve done something that is quite amazing. I mean, Apple and as well some of the luxury brands like Le Vuitton and so on, which is quite amazing that they’ve developed a luxury positioning for mass market.

people fuck up with brand? Yeah. I think the biggest fuck up that I see, especially more in the early days of startups is that you can hear founders that say, my product is great, but then marketing is rubbish because they don’t let people know how great my product is and I have no brand awareness, so I need to invest in the brand and so on to to boost my growth. And I I always reply, well, if your product was so good, people would know about it.

You believe

Well, I think investing in brand in the early days is the worst decision you can make. Because you should just put it all in product early? Yeah. You put in product and then you drive conversion and so on. But starting building top of the funnel and trying to build brand and so on in the early days, I think is a mistake. And saying that what is hindering your growth is your brand awareness, I I think is a mistake. You know? Like, there is a correlation between brand awareness and product penetration, you need to think about where the causality is.

Is your penetration driven by brand awareness, or is your brand awareness driven by product penetration? And in the early days, I think the causality is the other way around. And then at a later stage, you can start because you need to open the funnel and so on because you need to go into new segments. Because once you’ve highly penetrated one segment, you need to go to another segment. And then you can start using some brand marketing and so on to build something a bit different to continue the growth.

I think in the early days, actually, your brand awareness is driven by your product penetration

other way around.

The crypto exchange was a great was a great product. I mean, it’s doing good, I did not necessarily pick up the way we wanted.

That works. Especially now as part of the, you know, with the the ultra subscription.

I mean, UK, France, and those markets is working really well. What’s the best thing that you get from it? Well, you get so you get this, but as well, you get better interest rates as well on some of your saving accounts. You get a free subscription to to Feet, to to other type of services. I mean, you like playing chess, chess.com platinum is coming for free and so on. So get a lot of add ons on top on top of that. It’s all for £600 a year.

All for £600 a year.

now as well, when you launch RevPoints, you know, the loyalty program, which is giving you miles and so on. And it’s almost it’s much stronger once you I mean, depending on which plan you’re on, and that drives a lot of loyalty. You’ve

It’s his resilience. It’s his ability to focus. He mastered the helicopter view where he’s flying around everything, and then when he sees a problem, he lends. And he lends, and then he cracks it. And then he goes deep, deep, deep, deep, deep. And then once it’s solved, takes off again, flies around, sees where there’s another problem, lands, dig, dig, dig, fix it, and then starts again and

his approach of managing of managing my teams, what we said about Beating them weekly. Yeah. I mean, like like the whole problem solving thing. The whole we are all here to solve problems. I’m not going in meetings to hear how good you’re doing, which is what most meetings are about in corporate in the corporate world. You know? You get you bring the exec so that you do a nice presentation about how good your latest campaign was, and then you move to the next one. And then at the end, the diary of an exec is just that everyone is like, oh, wow.

We’re amazing and so on. And that’s really not that is that’s yeah. Of course, it’s important to see what’s working well, but I really want to know where the problems are. We can find a solution collectively, you know, into into solving it. That’s the thing that is is very, very powerful.

I think variety is a lot more difficult than what it used to be.

I think people are less keen to share compared to before. Before, they were more keen on sharing to everyone. I think it’s a little bit different nowadays.

Yeah. Has

Yeah. But by variety, I mean, like me telling you what to do, you know, and so on, you know, through not just word-of-mouth, but through that, it’s a bit much bigger.

the world of growth? I would change platforms. I think there is a lot of bullshit on privacy where they use as well sometimes this pretext to just reposition their platform as a brand platform. And because it’s brand, you just spend whatever you want

100%. Because whether you sell it or not, it’s a huge perception shift. It’s legit. Are you worried

license will inhibit speed? I mean, we’re working with different banking license, you know, across the world. We got the the one in Mexico and so on. It’s just business as usual.

Because they’ve managed to go very, very, very deep in a huge market. That’s quite remarkable what they’ve done. It’s really, really cool. And now now they are on Mexico, they are getting some very nice growth. But what they’ve done in Brazil is truly impressive.

I so hope you enjoyed it. You can find the full episode on YouTube by searching for 20 VC. But before we leave you today,