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VCs pissed off Revolut co-founder and CEO, Nik Storonsky so much that he started his own fund to compete:
“I had this fight and then I was extremely pissed off, and I thought I also need to compete with VCs in their business because they are so bad.”
“And out of my frustration, I started the fund as well.”
“The idea was basically to invest not based on human judgment, but based on data science and machine learning models. Statistical investment is number one.”
“Number two, actually help founders with operational advice. Playbooks that we developed at Revolut: how to hire people, how to do performance management, how to do product expansions.”
“And then finally help them sell their product as well, because we are a large enterprise. We are buying from a lot of vendors. Having us as a client helps to sell into other enterprises, or potentially sell to our customers as well, our Revolut customers.”
“Plus my personal advice, obviously. So I thought overall the package was so much better compared to purely financial players, VCs.”
FT: @davidsenra @NStoronsky
Full episode:
xitter.cf/davidsenra/status/2114…
Nik Storonsky is one of the most hardcore and competitive founders I’ve ever talked to. He’s the founder of Revolut, a $115 billion company, and wants to be the number one bank in 100 countries.
When someone asked Nik if he was coming for Jamie Dimon's lunch, he said “I’m coming for his dinner.”
“We want to dominate, otherwise what’s the point?”
He removed every VC from his board, and when one investor pushed him too far, he started his own fund to compete with them.
Nik has a lot of ideas on talent, product design, marketing, constraints, and what makes founder-led companies special.
This is a fascinating conversation about competition, speed, and building a machine-like company.
0:00 Coming for Jamie Dimon's dinner
2:04 Building the #1 bank in 100 countries
6:12 Why founders beat professional CEOs
8:45 Revolut's biggest mistake
12:47 Why legacy banks can't innovate
17:20 Running a company like a machine
20:28 Funding winners and cutting losers like a trader
23:31 How AI is changing Revolut's team structure
25:23 50 direct reports and spreading innovation fast
29:59 Hiring self-guided missiles
33:31 Too much money makes founders weaker
37:38 What Europe's constraints taught Revolut
41:08 Why VCs are like football cheerleaders
49:28 Starting a fund to compete with VCs
54:28 From zero marketing to buying Europe's airports
1:00:21 Funding moonshots like a global tech company
1:03:58 Building an unstoppable machine
Includes paid partnerships.
Revolut co-founder and CEO Nik Storonsky on building a full-stack AI employee with today’s technology:
“I think we’re just in the beginning. We automated customer support, so 90% of all customer support team is automated now. Before, it used to be 5,000 people plus. Now it’s much less.”
“Obviously, engineering is automated as well. We increased speed of engineers by 30%. Translation, cross-selling as well, done by LLMs now. A lot of things.”
“I think the ultimate goal, or at least a bet for us now, is to be able to build a full-stack AI employee. I think it’s completely doable with current technology.”
“It’s not like a chat tool or another interface where you tell what to do and then it produces something.”
“No, it’s more like an AI employee which can join calls with you, which has email, which has a Slack account, which has access to all internal back-office systems and can do work.”
“I think that’s kind of the ultimate goal that, sooner or later, the majority of companies will come to.”
FT: @davidsenra @NStoronsky
Full Ep: xitter.cf/davidsenra/status/2114…
Nik Storonsky is one of the most hardcore and competitive founders I’ve ever talked to. He’s the founder of Revolut, a $115 billion company, and wants to be the number one bank in 100 countries.
When someone asked Nik if he was coming for Jamie Dimon's lunch, he said “I’m coming for his dinner.”
“We want to dominate, otherwise what’s the point?”
He removed every VC from his board, and when one investor pushed him too far, he started his own fund to compete with them.
Nik has a lot of ideas on talent, product design, marketing, constraints, and what makes founder-led companies special.
This is a fascinating conversation about competition, speed, and building a machine-like company.
0:00 Coming for Jamie Dimon's dinner
2:04 Building the #1 bank in 100 countries
6:12 Why founders beat professional CEOs
8:45 Revolut's biggest mistake
12:47 Why legacy banks can't innovate
17:20 Running a company like a machine
20:28 Funding winners and cutting losers like a trader
23:31 How AI is changing Revolut's team structure
25:23 50 direct reports and spreading innovation fast
29:59 Hiring self-guided missiles
33:31 Too much money makes founders weaker
37:38 What Europe's constraints taught Revolut
41:08 Why VCs are like football cheerleaders
49:28 Starting a fund to compete with VCs
54:28 From zero marketing to buying Europe's airports
1:00:21 Funding moonshots like a global tech company
1:03:58 Building an unstoppable machine
Includes paid partnerships.
Lots of apprehension in the markets with FOMC and mid terms coming up. But BTC has been holding up relatively well against equities which is always nice to see.
Rory O'Driscoll, Partner at Scale, on how big the inference market could become:
“You look at the four or five key inference providers and you add them all up, and maybe they’re plus or minus $5-6 billion in run-rate revenue, which is a lot. But if you think about it, they’re all serving all the open-weight models in a world where the sum of the OpenAI and Anthropic revenues is probably north of a $100-110 billion right now.”
“So by dollars, it’s less than five percent. So it just points to the opportunity here. Do I want to give money to Claude Code and give them a 70% gross margin for this token? Or do I want to buy it on Modal and give them 30% gross margin for this token? Well, if the tokens are roughly the same, you know what you’re going to do.”
“It does point to the upside there."
@HarryStebbings adds on:
"I'm constantly shocked by like the infinite expanding size of the inference market. It's the one thing that I know today that I wish I'd known 12 months ago, because I would have done things slightly differently 12 months ago, had I been more expansive around my mindset."
FT: @rodriscoll @HarryStebbings
Full episode:
xitter.cf/HarryStebbings/status/…
I get more messages about this podcast every week than anything else I do.
We all want to look and sound smart in the investment committee or all hands meeting.
This is the only show in tech you have to listen to every week.
No egos, no politics, just tech.
AGENDA:
- Venture is Broken: Trillion or Bust
- Coreweave Sell-Off Creates Panic
- Town at $1B, Anduril at $90B: Are Revenue Multiples Out of Control?
- General Atlantic Eyes IPO
- Modal Raises $750M at $15.75B
My notes with @jasonlk and @rodriscoll
1. Why Fundraising Is Back to Being a Numbers Game
Founders with top-decile numbers now have to meet 100 VCs, as in the old days. It will not be Benchmark, Index, Andreessen or Bessemer, but other growth investors will take the bet at a reasonable but still elevated valuation because it is the best deal they have seen that quarter.
2. Why the Big Funds Have to Have Billion-Dollar Positions to Make It Worthwhile?
A $5B plus fund needs $BN positions in everything. Without 51% ownership, which most founders will not accept, a $2B Listen Labs is not good enough, while 1% of Anthropic could still get there even with dilution.
Love to hear your thoughts on this @venkyganesan @DavidGeorge83
3. Why Are CoreWeave and Oracle B-Tier and What Does That Mean for Their Price Volatility?
With massive debt loads, CoreWeave and Oracle should be hypersensitive to any bump at Anthropic or OpenAI. CoreWeave exists because NVIDIA needs it for now, and Oracle rents out excess capacity because it cannot sell enough enterprise software.
4. Why the Best Markets for App Layer Companies Compete Directly With the Models
The fastest-growing AI apps, such as code generation, code review and legal, sit closest to the foundation models. That brings a moment of terror every six months, but it is also why companies like CodeRabbit are growing faster than ever.
Love to hear your thoughts on this @spdholakia @mmurph
5. Why Code Review Is the Single Most Important Category in Software
AI-generated code is pretty good but never production-ready, and reviewing it takes an order of magnitude more time than building it. Getting code into production matters more than generating it, so the best code review teams would be worth 10 bets.
Love to hear your thoughts on this @reidRMC @evrishria @Joshuabrowder
6. How Big Is the Market for Inference Truly?
The key inference providers add up to roughly $5B to $6B in run-rate revenue, under 5% of OpenAI and Anthropic combined. If tokens are roughly the same, Replit would rather pay Modal a 30% gross margin than give Claude Code 70%.
How do you analyse the TAM for inference today? What do people not see that they should see? @sarahcat21 @bernhardsson
7. Why Bending Spoons Is a Berkshire Hathaway of Software
Bending Spoons buys software to hold, the way Warren Buffett wanted to hold See's Candy forever. It made Vimeo and Evernote work with price increases, and with Miro and Airtable the quality of its assets is improving.
Love to hear your thoughts on this as an analogy @ncsh
(links in comments)
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on how companies can defend against AI-powered attacks:
“The ability to always rapidly understand what the offense is doing and making sure that your defense keeps up with it is going to be the key.”
"If you show people how the offense works, the defense is going to be a lot better. You’ve got to give as good or better capabilities to the defender than what the offense has. And if you’re just slightly better, just mathematically, you’re still going to have an advantage.”
“The only way to fight AI today is with better AI. And you’ve got to use the advantages you have. The defender knows their own systems. The defender has the architectural diagrams. The defender has the code.”
“So how do you put all of that into something that you can dramatically increase your probability of outsmarting the offensive AI?”
FT @George_Kurtz @saranormous @NoPriorsPod
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on the threat of AI agents to the internet:
"I think it's nonsense. Is security and what agents can do and the risks that they pose, is that serious? Of course. That's serious business. We should all look at that and go, yeah, we got to make sure that we lock things down. But is the world going to end because of these agents anytime soon? No."
"And when you look at what the agents are doing, I think there's this sort of mythical view of what an agent does. Like an agent doesn't just beam itself from your computer to another computer. It actually just does the same thing a human would do, just better and faster. There might be more lower level sort of vulnerabilities chained together and those sort of things."
" But there isn't like a unique class that all of a sudden an agent just beams itself somewhere. And I think people just get wrapped around the axle of like there's some new class of technique that's taken. There isn't. It's just been trained on what we know. It hasn't developed its own yet."
"I think some of the concern is there and it should be there. But sort of like there's a lot of kind of doomerism around some of this stuff and I just don't think it's necessarily warranted."
Jason Lemkin says Bending Spoons is becoming the Berkshire Hathaway of software:
“I think Bending Spoons is like the Berkshire version of software. It’s like See’s Candy or Coke. They’re not flipping them. These are holding companies. Warren Buffett wanted to hold See’s forever.”
“Bending Spoons is saying, listen, we’re going to be diligent. We look at 1,000 deals a year or whatever you have. We’re going to do five or six. And we’re going to find enduring software assets that we’re going to hold for as long as we can hold them.”
“If you actually step back for a minute, the quality of assets is improving. Vimeo, kind of a dog. Evernote, kind of a dog. Now, they made them work with price increases. They’re going to make money off both those deals.”
“Eventbrite, kind of a dog. Miro and Airtable, I’m going to argue, better.”
“You’re going to make these into a bunch of See’s Candies and Coca-Colas. And folks think you can’t make them enduring, but you’re going to make these endure for a decade or longer.”
“Maybe I’m wrong, but I think they ultimately probably see some similar attributes that they can make these long-lasting assets.”
Spotify 👉 open.spotify.com/episode/5ZS…
Youtube 👉 youtu.be/OJX2L21e4fA
Apple Podcasts 👉 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Jason Lemkin on whether CoreWeave is a buy:
“The simple learning is the markets are going to be very sensitive, right? Any bump with Anthropic, any bump with OpenAI, any bump anywhere. Of course, CoreWeave et al. and Oracle should be hypersensitive because they have massive debt loads and massive risk.”
“But they’re also the B-tier players. CoreWeave is B-tier compared to Nvidia and friends. So I don’t know, you can make money in the B-tier, but why would you want to hold the B-tier?”
“CoreWeave exists because Nvidia and friends need it to exist for now. It has no inherent reason to exist. It is not producing a singular set of silicon and GPU and software today that no one else can do.”
“And I think more importantly, they should be more sensitive to shocks in the system. The B-tier assets. The A-tier assets should be, in theory, less sensitive.”
“Why buy any IPOs that aren’t A-tier? If you get your nice seed entry at eight million post, you can make money on the B-tier. Why buy, there's just nothing in the public. It’s A-tier or bust.”
“I'm not going long on CoreWeave. I’m not passing CoreWeave to my great-grandchildren. I’m not putting it into their 529s that I’m giving to my great-grandchildren. You know, there’s no way.”
@jasonlk on @HarryStebbings 20VC.
Saw a ton of people pointing out the big IBIT inflow on Monday and using it as an indicator for future price action.
I wanted to know if that has ever held up, so I checked the data. Here's what I found:
1) ETF investors sell the falls and buy the rallies. Outflows came in 7 of 8 sell-offs, and inflows in all 9 rallies. The last two sell-offs saw the heaviest selling of the ETF era: −$6.9B and −$8.2B.
2) Flows follow price; they don’t lead it. They correlate 0.54 with BTC’s prior five days and 0.03 with the next five.
3) Selling starts at about −7%. A 7% fall from the 20-day high flips flows from +$74m a day to −$72m.
4) Sell-offs are smoother, not shallower. They fall as far as before (median −21%), but more slowly, and crash days dropped from about 6 a year to 2.
5) IBIT carries no extra signal.
6) Big outflows on quiet days are a warning, not a signal. They preceded sharp falls in two sell-offs and rallies in four other cases.
Two things can be true at once.
AI is the biggest technological shift we’ve seen in a long time. Existing “ai-kills-this” businesses can still grow tremendously.
"What's the slowest thing to move in technology? The humans that work with it."
@Alfred_Lin on why the gap between model capability and real-world use is where the opportunity is at @stanfordaiclub
Tokenization was all everyone could talk about during TOKEN2049.
So I took a look at the numbers to figure out how much progress has been made and if they’re actually being used onchain.
Golden age of hardware and tech.
Just a glimpse of what humanity can achieve when you don't take no for an answer. Believe in the impossible. And have the courage to build the future you want to see.
