20Growth: Revolut's Chief Growth Officer on The Growth Playbook Revolut Used to Scale to $2.2BN in Revenue | How Revolut Launch and Grow Products | Why the Best PMs Don't Need A/B Tests & Why CAC is a BS Metric with Antoine Le Nel AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

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Episode: 20Growth: Revolut's Chief Growth Officer on The Growth Playbook Revolut Used to Scale to $2.2BN in Revenue | How Revolut Launch and Grow Products | Why the Best PMs Don't Need A/B Tests & Why CAC is a BS Metric with Antoine Le Nel

Author: Harry Stebbings
Duration: 00:56:41

Episode Shownotes

Antoine Le Nel is the Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Revolut, one of the fastest growing fintechs on the planet. Prior to Revolut, Antoine spent an incredible 7 years at King (Makers of Candy Crush) overseeing continuous expansion of the world's most famous mobile game as VP of Growth.

10 Questions with Revolut’s Chief Growth Officer: Why does Antoine believe that the best product and growth teams do not need to do A/B tests? Why does Antoine believe the best growth teams do not believe in anything? What growth tactics have worked best for Revolut? What did they learn? What have been the biggest growth flops? How did that change their approach? Why does Antoine believe localisation in product is BS and overrated? Why does CAC never come up at Revolut? Why do they not believe it is a metric to focus on? What metrics do they focus on instead? What does Antoine mean when he says “growth is a bidding war”? How does one win the “bidding war” today? Why does Antoine believe the best growth teams focus on optimisations and 1% gains not moving the needle for a company? What are the single biggest mistakes growth teams make today? What used to work that no longer works? What growth tactic is most effective but also most under-utilised? How can startups take advantage of this?

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
If you're a good product manager, you don't need an A-B test. You should be able to know what is the right product. I think the less you believe in, the better it is. I have no belief in anything. I have no belief in anything. There's no CAC discussion.

00:00:13 Speaker_02
Why? We only talk about ROI. Because if you talk about CAC, you'll always acquire the worst cohorts. I think the idea of localization is completely overrated. Growth is a bidding war. It's a bidding war.

00:00:25 Speaker_02
It's about whether you're able to bid above everyone else.

00:00:28 Speaker_00
This is 20 Growth 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.

00:00:38 Speaker_00
And today, we bring you one of the best growth leaders from one of the fastest growing companies, Antoine Lanel, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Revolut, one of the fastest growing fintechs on the planet.

00:00:49 Speaker_00
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.

00:01:00 Speaker_00
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00:01:10 Speaker_00
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00:01:23 Speaker_00
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00:01:35 Speaker_00
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00:01:48 Speaker_00
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00:01:57 Speaker_00
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00:02:09 Speaker_00
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00:02:27 Speaker_00
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00:02:42 Speaker_00
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00:02:54 Speaker_00
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00:03:07 Speaker_01
You have now arrived at your destination. Antoine, I am so excited for this. First, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. Now, we have many mutual friends, mostly also hailing from your start at King.

00:03:19 Speaker_01
So I want to start with that. When you look at the insanely successful growth of Candy Crush, what did King do well that was instrumental to the success and growth?

00:03:29 Speaker_02
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.

00:03:42 Speaker_02
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.

00:03:54 Speaker_02
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.

00:04:06 Speaker_02
I think we did that super, super well.

00:04:07 Speaker_01
The thing you have to get very good at, though, is cutting when you see the data isn't showing signs. How long is enough data, or how much data is enough data to know that it wasn't working?

00:04:15 Speaker_02
I think that's the thing that 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 longer. Oh, you know what? Give it another chance. Give it another chance.

00:04:27 Speaker_02
Give it another chance. That's the whole point, and that's how you probably can measure the agility of the organisation, is how quickly you kill projects versus how many more chances you're giving to them.

00:04:38 Speaker_01
So if testing and speed of iteration and testing was something that you did very well, what was something that King really messed up?

00:04:44 Speaker_02
It's definitely the most data-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.

00:04:55 Speaker_02
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.

00:05:07 Speaker_02
You know, it's like, you can have meetings and then you just look at the numbers and you're like, is that wrong? That's the big difference, for example, with Revolut.

00:05:15 Speaker_02
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.

00:05:28 Speaker_02
It was very black or white, and the data was the decision maker. I think 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.

00:05:46 Speaker_01
If you were to say, between art and science, growth, numbers, ratio, what is it for you? 50-50? 70-30?

00:05:54 Speaker_02
I mean, product and growth is very different. So I think product should be more about art and a bit less about science, when growth should overwrite on science.

00:06:04 Speaker_01
In terms of performance marketing, I spoke to many from King, and they said, you've got to ask him, what did he learn about performance marketing and its limitations?

00:06:13 Speaker_02
First of all, performance marketing, mastering performance marketing 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.

00:06:25 Speaker_02
So that is the power of performance marketing. And the performance marketing is, it's very deep.

00:06:31 Speaker_01
And I don't know many people who know all of it. How have you seen that change over time? Because when you were doing that at King in the early days, versus today, when it's so much more polluted, crowded, expensive, how's it changed?

00:06:43 Speaker_02
Well, it has 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.

00:06:54 Speaker_02
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.

00:07:04 Speaker_02
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.

00:07:12 Speaker_01
You know, that's what the game is. You have King, as we said there, incredibly iterative, data-driven culture, data-driven company to the extreme. What's the biggest difference between King and Revolut? I think that's what it is.

00:07:23 Speaker_02
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.

00:07:35 Speaker_02
where I remember at some point we were running like maybe 1,000 A-B tests in parallel and so on. It was a machine. The machine was really optimizing everything. And I remember when I arrived at Revolut, there was not much A-B testing.

00:07:47 Speaker_02
And for me, I was shocked at it. I was like, what? I mean, you've got to do that. And then I discussed with people and so on. And what I realized is that there's a good reason as well why you don't want to do A-B testing.

00:08:00 Speaker_02
The first thing, product managers, they do A-B testing to get an idea of what the right product is. If you're a good product manager, you don't need an A-B test. You should be able to know what is the right product.

00:08:11 Speaker_02
The second reason is because at Revolut, we wanted to do like 10x, everything is 10x and so on. You don't need an A-B test to measure a 10x. You do it, you see it goes up, it's good.

00:08:20 Speaker_02
And the third reason is that A-B testing increasing your type to market. Because if you A-B test, you first need to do your A-B test, then you see which one wins, and then you launch.

00:08:29 Speaker_02
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 A-B testing every single week on this small element, what if we change this or just that, and then you had multivariate testing, and everything was super, super, super optimized, and so on.

00:08:50 Speaker_02
But we're not in the same place from a life cycle perspective. It was much later. We'll get there at some point at Revolut when it will be more about optimizing than creating.

00:09:01 Speaker_01
When we were just chatting before, you said that being at Revolut is like founder mode on steroids. I think it was your description. Why so?

00:09:09 Speaker_02
I mean, we have a great team of founders that are heavily involved in the business, which really is giving the tempo, the momentum to the whole company with the exact same approach and the exact same mindset since day one.

00:09:26 Speaker_02
And I think that's quite remarkable, the consistency of the approach 10 years after launch, you know, still the same mindset and so on.

00:09:36 Speaker_01
And I think that's extremely powerful. I was thinking beforehand, you said the real question with founder mode is actually how long you can keep it up.

00:09:43 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:09:43 Speaker_01
And saying how Nick's dedication today is just as much as it was when you joined. Absolutely. Is incredible. But I don't think people actually ask the question of the sustenance of the founder mode. Today, we are building a growth engine with Revolut.

00:09:55 Speaker_01
I mean, the numbers are just insane. And it seems to be getting quicker. Yeah, it is. It is. It is. Can we just start there actually? I spoke to so many people, investors in the business, and they're like, Harry, it's meant to slow down.

00:10:08 Speaker_01
They're getting faster and better. How?

00:10:12 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, the thing 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 some coup, you know, like you make a big marketing coup, you know, and then you get the spike and so on.

00:10:34 Speaker_02
There's none of that at Revolut, you know? I mean, if anyone, I mean, you're probably gonna ask me, what is the one thing, you know, that really worked at Revolut? I can't tell you, you know?

00:10:42 Speaker_02
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?

00:10:53 Speaker_02
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.

00:11:06 Speaker_01
Your product velocity is insane. How do you have such high product velocity?

00:11:11 Speaker_02
So the 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 it.

00:11:27 Speaker_02
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.

00:11:41 Speaker_02
I know big organizations who say, oh, those are silos, people are not collaborating, et cetera, et cetera. You need to always find the right balance between coordinating things while giving the right amount of focus.

00:11:54 Speaker_02
I think that's what we're doing pretty well at Revolut, where every team has a huge amount of autonomy and of focus to really go very fast in what they do.

00:12:04 Speaker_01
When one's not working, do you cut it? Do you give it more time? What does that look like? No, we cut quite fast. We cut quite fast. Yeah, yeah. When something's not working. What did you try that didn't work as planned and you cut?

00:12:16 Speaker_02
And what did you learn? I mean, on the marketing side, there's been some campaigns, for example, that we've been running in some countries where we've been using some

00:12:24 Speaker_02
creatives that were quite generic, and after two weeks we saw it was a disaster, and we just cut it off. We don't wait for the campaign to finish. We're like, you know what, this is just not happening. There's no way this will pick up.

00:12:39 Speaker_02
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.

00:12:46 Speaker_02
At the end of it, say, no, I mean, it's not working, it's not working, you just cut it, you know, and fine.

00:12:51 Speaker_02
Your TV campaign that was supposed to run, let's say, for three months, well, after two weeks, it's just not working, you just cut it, and then you move on, you know, it's fine.

00:12:57 Speaker_01
You mentioned growth engine when you started, that enables Revolute to continue growing so fast. What actually is a growth engine? I know it sounds strange, but we often hear it. What does that actually mean?

00:13:08 Speaker_02
A growth engine is where you have multiple components that all play together. I'll give you a very simple example. I look at it quite the famous full funnel, you know, that everyone says. So you have

00:13:21 Speaker_02
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.

00:13:28 Speaker_02
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.

00:13:41 Speaker_02
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.

00:13:50 Speaker_02
That is the engine, when then you find the right balance between those different elements that optimize the overall thing. What is the right balance? Well, it depends on the maturity of the market.

00:14:02 Speaker_02
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 conversion, on the conversion itself. There's no one truth. It evolves, you know, it's a living animal.

00:14:14 Speaker_02
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.

00:14:27 Speaker_02
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, because then suddenly you're going to do that.

00:14:38 Speaker_02
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 cracked the TV measurement framework?

00:14:49 Speaker_02
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.

00:15:01 Speaker_02
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.

00:15:13 Speaker_02
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 are really struggling and so on.

00:15:23 Speaker_02
At the end of the day, they spend maybe two, three times more on Android versus iOS, which is nonsense. When should you start thinking about building a growth engine? At the very, very, very beginning, all right? At the very, very beginning.

00:15:37 Speaker_02
Because you know what you would... because the growth engine is not only paid marketing, you know, I include variety, you know, the whole variety aspect is part of the growth engine. This is the even below the lower funnel, you basically have variety.

00:15:52 Speaker_02
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.

00:15:59 Speaker_01
Given Virality's bait-in, should growth teams be part of product teams? Should they be standalone teams?

00:16:04 Speaker_02
That is a very good question. I think the way I like it is that the product team builds the Virality engine, and growth operates it. So you build something that is with parameters, and then you let growth play with it.

00:16:21 Speaker_02
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.

00:16:37 Speaker_02
I think that works for me.

00:16:39 Speaker_01
What are the most common ways that growth engines break down?

00:16:43 Speaker_02
I think it's when 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.

00:16:59 Speaker_01
But like, it's true, you know, because... What does that mean, I have no belief in anything?

00:17:03 Speaker_02
Well, I don't necessarily believe more in brand than in influencers, than in this and so on, you know? I mean, whatever works, works for me, you know?

00:17:13 Speaker_02
And I think there are some people that believe in things, and then, you know what, Formula One, it got to work. We got to be on the Formula One wing. It got to work. It's like, why? Yes, maybe, I don't know. Sure, yeah, fine.

00:17:25 Speaker_01
But you see, I think this is where it starts to break down, is when you come up with just like... But this kind of goes against everything that we're told of like the courage of your conviction and being opinionated and standing for something and playbooks.

00:17:39 Speaker_01
The value of experienced operators is they bring a playbook, Antoine. So they know what works.

00:17:46 Speaker_02
So 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.

00:18:01 Speaker_01
Sorry, I'm really naive. I'm a venture capitalist for a living. What is in the upper funnel?

00:18:06 Speaker_02
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.

00:18:15 Speaker_01
They're hoping no one notices.

00:18:17 Speaker_02
And then I came at Revolut, and we did not start it at all with any brand marketing and so on. And now we're testing it, we're doing more of it, and it really works. Do you know it works?

00:18:28 Speaker_01
And do you know what bit works? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. I mean, it really works. It really works. But the hard thing is, do you know whether it's being on a billboard or being on an F1 car that works? Because the attribution is limited.

00:18:39 Speaker_01
How do you know it works? You have multiple ways to look at it.

00:18:43 Speaker_02
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 if you've been to Rome airport, and so on, for example, we've launched something really cool there.

00:18:54 Speaker_02
But next to it, we put vending machines. So you have vending machines in the airport to collect your RevLoot card. So you just go on the vending machine, you press the button, and you just get the card, you know?

00:19:04 Speaker_02
So it's an anonymous, I mean, unlinked card. You just take it, you scan the QR code, it creates 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.

00:19:19 Speaker_02
Wow, I mean, that's pretty good for HP. Yeah, it's pretty cool, right?

00:19:23 Speaker_02
But it's the same, you know, like, as well, we do a lot of, we do some influencers and so on, you 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.

00:19:37 Speaker_02
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? The biggest flop, I mean, there's been some influences that just didn't work at all.

00:19:48 Speaker_02
Like, I mean, it was the early days and we tried to do something that we thought was cool and so on.

00:19:54 Speaker_02
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. So it's, you just learn, you know, you just learn.

00:20:09 Speaker_01
Okay, so what did you change then from the King playbook? You said there about kind of the upper funnel, and I interrupted you saying, what is the upper funnel? What did you change from that playbook with King to Revolut?

00:20:19 Speaker_02
Yeah, so investing more in this brand campaign 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 really well, that is making us do more of it.

00:20:37 Speaker_02
Clarence, what's in the mid funnel?

00:20:39 Speaker_02
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.

00:20:56 Speaker_02
So, performance marketing is basically banners 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, likeability, and so on.

00:21:11 Speaker_02
You don't build any of that.

00:21:12 Speaker_02
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.

00:21:27 Speaker_02
And that's what I call a bit meat funnel. It's activities that help you do a bit of everything, like suddenly, you do some brand, but as well, at the same time, you do conversion and you drive and you drive revenue, you know, so you take it all.

00:21:41 Speaker_02
Sorry, lower funnel. Lower funnel is what specifically? It's mostly like performance marketing, affiliates, the referral program, you know, and stuff like that.

00:21:50 Speaker_02
You know, this is where you really drive and you have full attribution, meaning you know exactly what you pay for.

00:21:55 Speaker_01
In growth teams, are there people who are specialized in each segment? Do you expect people to be skilled at all three?

00:22:02 Speaker_02
No, no, no, no. I'm a strong believer of specialists. People should be experts in what they do. And generally, marketers are good in managerial positions, but not at doing things necessarily, you know.

00:22:16 Speaker_02
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 an oversight of all of it. Very few people.

00:22:29 Speaker_01
When you start a new market, I think one thing that people don't see enough is just, and Revolut is crushing internationally, crushing. When you start a new market, does that whole funnel start again? What does that growth plan look like?

00:22:43 Speaker_01
Yeah, you start from scratch.

00:22:44 Speaker_02
You start from scratch again and so on.

00:22:46 Speaker_01
Do you notice it gets easier to acquire customers with each subsequent market or not?

00:22:51 Speaker_02
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.

00:23:03 Speaker_02
It all depends 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 there are some markets where we're not in, but we already have some awareness.

00:23:16 Speaker_01
You said the brand's getting bigger, it definitely is. Does CAC get lower over time as brand amplifies word of mouth increases or does it get higher as you saturate target market and you move to the fringes of your ICP?

00:23:33 Speaker_02
Well, I think it's actually both. 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, unfortunately, it really depends on the market.

00:23:46 Speaker_02
You know, so some markets, the brand is becoming so big that actually you start getting more organic, and it's becoming like super organic. And then the

00:23:56 Speaker_02
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.

00:24:13 Speaker_02
I think it really depends on the competitiveness of the market.

00:24:16 Speaker_01
I think the other thing that's so smart, though, is there's less of a focus or reliance on CAC if you can expand the other end of the funnel, which is your LTV. I don't believe in CAC.

00:24:27 Speaker_02
And that was the first thing that I brought from King, because at King we never talk about CAC.

00:24:34 Speaker_01
Why? This is what most growth teams and marketing teams talk about.

00:24:37 Speaker_02
I am, but there's no CAC discussion. Why? We only talk about ROI. Because if you talk about CAC, you'll always acquire the worst cohorts, because you just always go downhill.

00:24:48 Speaker_02
So what I've done by arriving at Revolut is that I increased CAC significantly by improving 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.

00:25:03 Speaker_02
And sometimes you gotta pay more. You need to get as granular as possible.

00:25:08 Speaker_02
And you may have some channels, you know, I don't know, like, for example, TikTok and so on, where maybe the cohorts you get from there are not as good as what you can get, for example, from Instagram or other places, but you

00:25:20 Speaker_02
So the CAC is irrelevant. CAC is irrelevant, you know, because 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 won't get my ROI. So we never look at CAC.

00:25:34 Speaker_02
Is that hard for a team to adjust to? No, I mean, I don't think so.

00:25:38 Speaker_01
I mean, it's, it's only about it's also you have to stomach that for a while, which is kind of interesting, because you have to accept paying higher tax without seeing the higher ROI for a little bit of time.

00:25:52 Speaker_02
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.

00:26:00 Speaker_01
How do you know?

00:26:01 Speaker_02
I mean, and that's why the growth is exponential. 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 are, and how much I'm ready to pay.

00:26:14 Speaker_01
Are those models transferable on a country by country basis? Yeah, they are.

00:26:19 Speaker_02
Why would London versus Birmingham would be closer than London versus Paris? There's no reason. The country definition, beyond language, is completely arbitrary.

00:26:31 Speaker_01
Sure, I didn't know if London versus Brazil could be different. Brazil has very different ways of paying for things, they have different ways of bulking payments.

00:26:39 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, that's fair, but you adapt your model depending on the product that you sell.

00:26:46 Speaker_02
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?

00:26:57 Speaker_02
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.

00:27:03 Speaker_02
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 everywhere. Which market was the worst or hardest, and what did you learn from it?

00:27:17 Speaker_01
If I park China, obviously, which is a very different market. It's quite a difficult one, I can imagine. Yeah, it's a difficult one. It's not an easy one to get your hands around. It's only a billion, two. Come on, Nick.

00:27:29 Speaker_02
Found them both. So let's talk China for a second. And you see, 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.

00:27:41 Speaker_02
That we saw 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. But the rest is the same. It's one global market.

00:27:56 Speaker_02
And I think that the consumer interest, what people are clicking on is the exact same thing. The extra performance you would get by being a lot more localized is not worth the effort. And that's what we're seeing.

00:28:07 Speaker_02
I mean, like, I mean, at King, and we see that the same, you know, at Revolut, I mean, we became number one. in Romania and Norway with the exact same strategy, I mean, the same thing, you know? And people say, oh, but it's Europe.

00:28:21 Speaker_02
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.

00:28:26 Speaker_01
People say the most important thing for Revolut to prove out is its ability to be the primary account, and the percent of primary accounts is still low. How do you think about focusing on that versus being everywhere to everyone?

00:28:40 Speaker_02
The strategy at Revolut, it's very simple. 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.

00:28:50 Speaker_02
When you decide to move from HSBC to Barclays, you make a conscious decision that I'm moving there, while Revolut, we're like a snack.

00:28:59 Speaker_02
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 holidays.

00:29:08 Speaker_02
Oh, well, you know, maybe I want to do a bit of trading and stuff, you know, buy some ETFs and so on. So then you buy some ETFs. So oh, then I mean, there's a bit of savings. Okay, maybe I can put a bit of savings.

00:29:18 Speaker_02
And then you go little by little, and then you reach a point. 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.

00:29:28 Speaker_01
And then I'm moving there, you know? So I'm not saying, I mean... It's pretty much what happened to me, actually. And I started buying crypto on Revolut. I started trading on Revolut.

00:29:37 Speaker_01
And then I saw, actually, the interest rate options that you guys had on the premium premium. I was like, oh, fuck, that's pretty good. Yeah, I think that's the part. But that's a really interesting change in the adoption of bank accounts. Yes, totally.

00:29:48 Speaker_01
We're not asking people to say, hey, change bank. You're like encouraging promiscuity.

00:29:53 Speaker_02
Yeah, but come and try us. But come and try us. Just use it maybe when you go on holiday. And that's fine. That's fine.

00:29:59 Speaker_02
And then maybe at some point, I'll be able to convince you with some specific product, some specific anything that ultimately will take you there. But the idea is not to say, OK, by H2 2025, Everyone will have to be a primary.

00:30:11 Speaker_02
No, everyone takes... At your own pace, you get there, you know, and it's fine.

00:30:16 Speaker_01
So what's the North Star metric for you then? When you look at the numbers, when you look at the analytics, what's the, like, are we doing a good job determinant?

00:30:24 Speaker_02
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,

00:30:37 Speaker_02
put on that journey you know that i was explaining i mean how the progressing to what's becoming a primary user payback wise how's that changed over time it doesn't necessarily change i think again it it all depends on the 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

00:30:59 Speaker_02
What's the hardest thing about your role today, Antoine? 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 going to work forever.

00:31:11 Speaker_02
You need to progressively evolve it piece by piece. 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.

00:31:26 Speaker_02
You know, it's a, it's always this idea, you know, of the cow getting eaten from the back, you know, and you and you and you realize really late that actually, 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,

00:31:53 Speaker_02
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?

00:32:00 Speaker_02
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 70, 80% of achievement.

00:32:10 Speaker_02
It's the same thing, you know? So you need to be ambitious, but realistic.

00:32:16 Speaker_01
Reaching 80% of your target, that's good. You said there about kind of making sure that you're not the cow that gets eaten from behind. How do you do meetings with the growth team? What does that look like?

00:32:26 Speaker_01
Is it like a weekly brainstorm where like you throw shit at the wall and get creative? How does that look in terms of the ideation amongst the growth team?

00:32:33 Speaker_02
Yeah, well, we have a very, it's extremely standardized, extremely processed. We work on weekly cycles. In the growth team, we have, I think it's 20, 25 different teams, you know. 25 different teams? Yeah. Because we work as a matrix, you know.

00:32:49 Speaker_02
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.

00:33:00 Speaker_02
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.

00:33:11 Speaker_02
And then we reiterate the week after, we reiterate, we reiterate.

00:33:15 Speaker_02
I think the power of very short cycles is that there's no time wasted in presenting, in the sense that if you had a meeting only once a month and so on, you would actually spend, I mean, we know how teams are, you know, they spend the last two, three days just preparing the presentation for the exec.

00:33:33 Speaker_02
It's a waste of time. While when you run it every week, I mean, they're not preparing the meetings. So you just start the meetings. Okay, so where are we at?

00:33:41 Speaker_02
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.

00:34:00 Speaker_02
So you don't get surprised, like you work on something for a month, and then you get at some point to know that's not the right direction you need to go. So you course-correct things very, very quickly.

00:34:09 Speaker_01
How many of these meetings do you have? Twenty, twenty-five a week, yeah. Twenty to twenty-five a week? And they're half an hour each? Yeah. You must be like constantly in these meetings.

00:34:18 Speaker_02
Yeah, but then 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.

00:34:27 Speaker_02
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 going to do.

00:34:38 Speaker_02
And then you just repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.

00:34:40 Speaker_01
How many people are in the team on the other end? Well, it depends. Depends on one, but between 10 and 40. That's a lot. How do you do like idea synthesis, idea discussion? I mean, shit, you've got 40 people at sometimes on a call.

00:34:52 Speaker_02
Yeah, but you know, 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.

00:35:03 Speaker_02
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're trying to achieve and how we're trying to deliver and so on.

00:35:14 Speaker_02
So it's a great way for you to understand how things are working.

00:35:18 Speaker_01
Are you able to be fully honest and true with all 40 there?

00:35:21 Speaker_02
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They can tell you, yeah. I'm very transparent. I think that's the power of Revolut. And that's the same, I mean, with Nick and so on. I mean, like, we are working in full transparency. there's no surprises at all.

00:35:34 Speaker_02
Because if you take a decision and the decision is no, and then you can appeal, in a way, to try to negotiate to make it yes, like every companies do, and then you add up time, you add up those ad hoc meetings, or let's do another meeting to really look at it and then do another one and so on.

00:35:51 Speaker_02
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 positives. There are definitely some false positives where we may say yes and it should have been a no, and we said no and it should have been a yes.

00:36:01 Speaker_02
So I'm not saying it's perfect. It's not perfect at all. But at least we move a lot faster. And yes, there's some cost in terms of false positives, but it's a lot more powerful.

00:36:11 Speaker_01
I always think to Gustave at Spotify, who's the CPO of Spotify, and he says, you know, talk is cheap, so we should do a lot more of it. And it's, you know, the power of debate and discussion in teams.

00:36:22 Speaker_01
And it's just the flip side of this, which is, nope, it's black or it's white.

00:36:26 Speaker_02
Yeah. Yeah, because you don't add up time. You go quicker. And then you do not lose creativity. I don't think creativity is necessarily No, because you iterate so much, you create more, because you do more.

00:36:39 Speaker_02
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.

00:36:53 Speaker_02
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 more stuff done.

00:37:08 Speaker_02
I think from a creativity perspective, it still works.

00:37:10 Speaker_01
How do you think about Revolute US? The US is always the big golden nut to crack. Everyone's tried it. How do you think about how to crack the US?

00:37:18 Speaker_02
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 the biggest.

00:37:26 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, Cash App is, but it's not that big, you know, when you consider the size of the US.

00:37:33 Speaker_01
It's really poor. I mean, Chime, you know, is probably a quarter of the enterprise value of Revolut now.

00:37:38 Speaker_02
I think there is a negative correlation between the maturity of the economy and the penetration of fintech. Take the other example, Germany.

00:37:46 Speaker_02
Germany, like, there's no... I mean, like, the penetration of fintech in Germany is extremely low, extremely low, you know, as well. While... Why is that?

00:37:55 Speaker_02
While if you look at the penetration of fintech in India or in Pakistan or 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?

00:38:08 Speaker_02
You know, it's a bit like in telecoms. The penetration of mobile actually went super high, because ultimately what they did, the jump generation, they never built any ADSL cable, et cetera, et cetera. You know, it's like, you know what? Screw it.

00:38:23 Speaker_01
We'll just jump directly to the next generation. You mentioned the global element there of Taiwan and Indonesia and then Germany. You live in Barcelona, and you have a remote team. You very much believe in the power of remote teams.

00:38:38 Speaker_01
Can you unpack that for me? Why? So not everything is good about remote, first of all.

00:38:42 Speaker_02
What's bad about remote? I mean, like, the human contact, you know, I think, as well. I mean, at some point, you need to be with people and so on, especially when you're early on in your career and so on.

00:38:55 Speaker_02
For some people, it doesn't work, you know, be alone at home and so on.

00:38:59 Speaker_01
How often do you get together now? Once a year. So you do once-a-year meetups, that's frequent. That's really good for the loneliness pandemic. Hold on, Anton. Once a year meetups and that's the downside. Why do we think it's great?

00:39:11 Speaker_02
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 things remotely, meaning you can actually have meetings of 15 minutes or 30 minutes, it works.

00:39:29 Speaker_02
A meeting of 15 minutes remotely works. In the real world, it doesn't work, a meeting of 15 minutes.

00:39:35 Speaker_02
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. For example, I know I have a dominant nature. So where I sit in the room matters.

00:39:53 Speaker_02
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 the diversity aspect that is a bit overlooked is introvert versus extrovert.

00:40:05 Speaker_02
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.

00:40:17 Speaker_02
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

00:40:31 Speaker_02
People tend to cut off each other, et cetera, et cetera. So sometimes the dynamic can be quite, quite polluted.

00:40:36 Speaker_02
While when you're on the video conference, press the button to raise the hand, and then people will let you speak in a very polite way and so on. So I think that works really well. That is the best invention.

00:40:49 Speaker_01
Do you not think that we need to develop some social skills and say, I'm so sorry, Antoine, do you mind if I just jump in here? Actually, I was thinking this. Like, I think we... But it's not easy for everyone to say that.

00:41:00 Speaker_01
No, but you learn and you grow. But that's how you do it. It's like anything, you learn by doing. and we are creating an escape valve for people to not learn. And actually, the lessons for everything in life is in the cracks.

00:41:12 Speaker_01
Me and you come out of a customer pitch, and on the tube home, you're like, Harry, what did you notice about that? What did we do well? What did we not do well? You never have the postmortems in a remote world. ever?

00:41:23 Speaker_02
Well, yes and no.

00:41:24 Speaker_02
So because the way we work the post mortem, 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.

00:41:38 Speaker_01
But then you've got 50 meetings a week.

00:41:40 Speaker_02
Yeah, ultimately, you know, it's it's a loop where I use business review, where I give a lot of my inputs, but I use my one on ones to receive the feedback from what we talked about.

00:41:51 Speaker_02
And that's this way, I have a touchpoint pretty much every other day with all my team leads, etc, etc, 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.

00:42:05 Speaker_01
you do with the lead, but the 10 people beneath them who all work... But they do the same on their side, at their level, you know? And you think that's the same?

00:42:14 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, that's the objective, yeah. Because is it right after the meeting?

00:42:18 Speaker_02
Well, I 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 as before or after, it's just a cycle, you know, it's like, so you get always the feedback loop.

00:42:30 Speaker_01
What's in a problem-solving interview?

00:42:32 Speaker_02
Well, it's like a case study. We tell you, OK, I have this problem. I mean, it can be a marketing campaign, et cetera, et cetera. And then we ask the candidate, what do you think the problem is, and how would you solve it, and so on.

00:42:43 Speaker_02
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

00:42:54 Speaker_02
slice it at the right level of granularity so that suddenly a big problem just becomes 10 small problems and then you saw them one by one and then you get there and you don't try to find a miracle solution by being Einstein and super complex if I know I mean there's no there's no need for that just do it simple keep it simple.

00:43:12 Speaker_01
What are the biggest mistakes you think people make in hiring and growth.

00:43:15 Speaker_02
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.

00:43:34 Speaker_02
And then they hire growth managers, which I have no idea what a growth manager is. They manage growth. Yeah, but what is growth? Is it variety? Is it performance marketing? Is it some brand marketing aspect? What is it? Is it pricing?

00:43:51 Speaker_01
I mean, you can do anything, you know? Well, you said, what is growth? When we were chatting before, you mentioned 10x or 100x.

00:43:57 Speaker_01
The thing I'm never sure about with growth is like, is growth's role, let's try this big picture new product that's going to change Revolut forever, or is it let's iterate on all of these little things that combined will add up to a big thing?

00:44:12 Speaker_01
Definitely the second one.

00:44:13 Speaker_02
I'm a huge advocate of the second one. I'll give you a very simple analogy, you know, look at Usain Bolt. Everyone remembers Usain Bolt. But he was not winning by much. He was not winning by 10x.

00:44:26 Speaker_02
He was winning by a hundredth of a second and so on because he was able to optimize the departure, this, et cetera, et cetera. So he was not 10x better than everyone, but at the end, everyone thinks he was 10x better. You see what I mean?

00:44:40 Speaker_02
And it's because growth is a bidding war. It's a bidding war. It's about whether you're able to bid above everyone else on all the different channels at the end of the day.

00:44:50 Speaker_02
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.

00:45:00 Speaker_02
And that's why it's ultimately because you optimize every single part of either the funnel, either the creative, either your bidding strategy, et cetera, et cetera.

00:45:10 Speaker_02
It's every single element that's like small increment of 1% here, 2% there, et cetera, et cetera, that add up to put you on top of the waterfall and to take it all.

00:45:20 Speaker_01
So people are wrong to think then that it is these kind of moonshot bats that is great. Yeah, I think so, totally.

00:45:26 Speaker_02
So they fish for the moonshot and so on, while actually it's just down there being excellent in the execution in everything you do, at the lowest level of granularity. And once you have everything, that's why, you know what I was saying?

00:45:38 Speaker_02
If someone asked me, what is the success of Revolut? It's a million things.

00:45:41 Speaker_01
What have you not optimized with Revolut yet that you need to optimize?

00:45:45 Speaker_02
I mean, I think we're still very much at the beginning of building our brand marketing. I think we're still a very young brand.

00:45:53 Speaker_02
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?

00:46:11 Speaker_02
Is brand a marketing thing or a product thing? Because a lot of people think about brand on marketing. And I'll give you two examples.

00:46:20 Speaker_02
Out of a 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. It was a huge brand before putting any penny in it.

00:46:32 Speaker_01
I can't argue that it's both. I'll take the iPod. Okay, it's the way that it was boxed, the way that it felt, the scroll wheel, the white, the silver, the product.

00:46:43 Speaker_01
But it was also the brilliance of a thousand songs in your pocket, the white background, the beautiful pictures. It was a combination that made it pop.

00:46:51 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:46:52 Speaker_01
I think it's in between.

00:46:53 Speaker_02
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.

00:47:00 Speaker_02
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?

00:47:09 Speaker_02
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'll just make it bigger, feel it more and so on.

00:47:23 Speaker_02
But at the end of the day, it's still the product that is starting the journey. The brand journey is starting there.

00:47:28 Speaker_01
What brand do you respect most today?

00:47:30 Speaker_02
And why them? I mean, you mentioned Apple. I mean, obviously, Apple is a great brand because they've done something that is quite amazing.

00:47:38 Speaker_02
I mean, Apple and as well, some of the luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and so on, which is quite amazing that they've developed a luxury positioning for mass market. Is there anything that you think people fuck up with brand?

00:47:49 Speaker_02
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 boost my growth.

00:48:10 Speaker_02
And I always reply, well, if your product was so good, people would know about it.

00:48:14 Speaker_01
Do you believe if you build it, they will come, if it's a great product?

00:48:18 Speaker_02
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.

00:48:29 Speaker_02
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 think is a mistake.

00:48:41 Speaker_02
You know, like, there is a correlation between brand awareness and product penetration. But 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?

00:48:53 Speaker_02
And in the early days, I think the causality is the other way around.

00:48:56 Speaker_02
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.

00:49:13 Speaker_02
I think in the early days actually your brand awareness is driven by your product penetration and not the other way around.

00:49:18 Speaker_01
What product did you think would have the most impact that in the end ended up having the least?

00:49:24 Speaker_02
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.

00:49:31 Speaker_01
Does anyone use the airport lounges? Yeah, that works.

00:49:34 Speaker_02
That works. Especially now as part of the, you know, with the ultra subscription.

00:49:40 Speaker_01
Ultra is like the premium. Yeah. This is like the 600 quid a year one. Yeah. This is working. That's working. That's working.

00:49:46 Speaker_02
I mean, UK, France and those markets is working really well. What's the best thing that you get from it? Well, you get this, but as well, you get better interest rates as well on some of your saving accounts.

00:49:57 Speaker_02
You get a free subscription to FT, to other type of services. I mean, if you like playing chess, chess.com, Platinum is coming for free, and so on. So get a lot of add-ons on top of that. It's all for 600 quid a year. All for 600 quid a year.

00:50:14 Speaker_01
I hope you've got a lot of cash in your account, because the interest premiums are going to have to be big for that one.

00:50:20 Speaker_02
But you get, now as well, we've launched RefPoints, 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.

00:50:33 Speaker_02
You've worked with Nick now for a number of years. What makes him so good? It's his resilience, it's his ability to focus,

00:50:42 Speaker_02
he mastered the helicopter view, where he's flying around everything, and then when he sees a problem, he lands, and he lands, 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 keeps on going.

00:51:04 Speaker_01
How have you changed as an operator working with him?

00:51:08 Speaker_02
I've taken his approach of managing my teams, what we said about beating them weekly. Yeah, I mean, like, like the whole problem solving thing, the whole we're all here to solve problems.

00:51:21 Speaker_02
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.

00:51:28 Speaker_02
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 everyone is like, Wow, we're amazing. And so on.

00:51:41 Speaker_02
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 solving it.

00:51:52 Speaker_02
That's the thing that is very, very powerful.

00:51:55 Speaker_01
I could talk to you all day, so I'm going to do a quick fire round with you. I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Okay, that's fine. So what tactics and growth have not changed over the last five years?

00:52:06 Speaker_01
I think performance marketing is still the key. What tactics have died a death?

00:52:10 Speaker_02
I think virality is a lot more difficult than what it used to be.

00:52:12 Speaker_01
Why?

00:52:13 Speaker_02
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.

00:52:22 Speaker_01
True, iOS changes have made that tougher and are going to continue to make that tougher. Has TikTok made virality easier?

00:52:28 Speaker_02
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 more difficult.

00:52:36 Speaker_01
What is the biggest mistake founders make when hiring growth teams? They hire generalists to do a bit of everything. They should focus. You've got a growth leader. He comes to you and says, Antoine, I'm starting my new role tomorrow as head of growth.

00:52:50 Speaker_01
What do you advise them the day before they start? Build the analytical framework before you start spending anything.

00:52:55 Speaker_02
What would you most like to change about 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.

00:53:11 Speaker_02
And because it's brand, you just spend whatever you want and you don't track anything and it's better for them.

00:53:16 Speaker_01
Penultimate one. What product does Revolut not have today that you would love to have? Well, we're working on it. I want mortgage. Do you have student loans? Not yet. That'd be cool. That would be really cool. Yeah, that would be really cool. I agree.

00:53:29 Speaker_01
Is mortgages and student loans a game changer?

00:53:31 Speaker_02
Because whether you sell it or not, it's a huge perception shift. It's legit. Are you worried that the banking license will inhibit speed? I mean, we're working with different banking licenses, you know, across the world.

00:53:44 Speaker_02
We got the one in Mexico and so on. It's just business as usual.

00:53:48 Speaker_01
Final one. What company growth strategy have you been most impressed by outside of Revolut? Well, I think Nubank isn't really good. Why?

00:53:55 Speaker_02
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 they are on Mexico. They are getting some very nice growth.

00:54:08 Speaker_02
But what they've done in Brazil is truly impressive.

00:54:11 Speaker_01
It's truly impressive. Incredible. David is amazing. So is Jack. Listen, Antoine, I've loved doing this. Thank you so much for putting up with my prying questions. And you've been amazing. Thank you. Thanks a lot.

00:54:22 Speaker_00
I so hope you enjoyed it. You can find the full episode on YouTube by searching for 20VC. But before we leave you today, many founders I've talked to touch on this idea of if you want to go fast, go alone. Want to go far, then go together.

00:54:34 Speaker_00
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00:56:31 Speaker_00
As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode this coming Monday with one of the greats of our vintage of venture investors, Mahmoud Hamid at Kleiner Perkins.