The Revolut CEO says to hire smart people and let them do their thing

But I disagree and I'll explain why.

I was watching this youtube interview the other day of Nik Storonsky, the founder and CEO of Revolut, and I found the things he said to be quite interesting.

Revolut is a UK-based fintech that provides a wide range of banking and financial services through its app. It’s latest valuation was $45 billion and they announced that they had $545m in profit in 2023 on $2.2bn in revenues.

That is a pretty serious amount of profit in the tech world.

They’ve also gone global and are one of the few examples of a UK tech company competing successfully in the US.

I want to break down a bit of what Nik mentioned in regards to his management philosophy as I think it is quite unique. And then also chime in where I agree vs. disagree.

Revolut CEO's philosophy is to "let smart people figure it out"

I was listening to the Revolut CEO describe how he manages his team and it sounded retty straightforward - hire really smart people and let them figure stuff out on their own.

His argument is that if you give a smart person a complex task, you can come back in a month and they'll have figured it out. Whereas with average folks, you need to check in weekly and iterate with them constantly.

So his solution? Only hire leaders who can figure things out independently. And he manages about 40 of them directly.

This “hire smart people and let them do their thing” approach has been a popular one for quite awhile but he takes a bit of a fresh slant on it with having so many direct reports.

Why i'm not a fan of this philosophy

Now, there are certain elements I agree with. Having 40 direct reports? Hell yes. I've been preaching this for several years now with my Beast Method.

But here's where I think this philosophy falls short:

It assumes these smart people don't have many dependencies on each other. But in my experience, especially in earlier stages pretty much everything in a company is interconnected.

If you let a bunch of smart people run off and solve a solution completely independently… you are going to get a whole bunch of solutions that do not really align to one another.

And yes sure.. you could just throw in a “and make sure you’ve aligned what you are doing with everyone else.”

But if there’s even say 10 other leaders in the company… that means aligning with 10 other people who are not necessarily that motivated to align with you. Because you are peers and nobody has leverage.

It’s much easier in my view if everyone needs to align with a central person, eg. the CEO. And so the CEO kind of acts like the puppetmaster orchestrating the grand strategy to ensure that everything fits.

But, I'll admit - Revolut seems to be doing well with this approach. They're profitable and growing. So perhaps they’ve found a way of circumventing the problem i lay out above.

I think the Beast Method will result in better outcomes for early stage startups

The Beast Method takes a pretty different approach. Instead of having 40 people all figuring things out independently, you have one person orchestrating everything early on.

Each person is breaking down their goals into tasks with a central person (typically the CEO) looped in and following their updates. And giving feedback quickly.

Instead of getting an update at the end of the month.. i want several updates each and every day.

But those updates just take the form of comments on Clickup cards and barely take any time at all.

This, however, gives me the inputs i need to ensure that the direction Joe is going aligns with the direction that Mary and Will are going.

I’m directing the herd multiple times a day instead of saying “let’s meet at the rendevous!” but leaving it up to them to decide how to get there.

Because perhaps Mary finds out that there’s this big river on the east side that is uncrossable. And so no point in having numerous others waste their time finding out the exact same thing.

Much better to relay this vital information almost real time so that everyone else is benefitting.

This ensures everyone is aligned to the same overarching strategy. No conflicting microstrategies. No wasted effort solving the same problems multiple times.

One thing I like to say is…

“Optimizing how a business operates is not that different from playing a multiplayer video game at a very high level. If you’re playing Fortnite do you rapidly update each other with information all game long or do you just set a single strategy in the beginning and then stay silent?”

This also means the entire company can pivot much faster when needed. Try getting 40 independent smart people to all change direction at once. Aint’ gonna happen.

I saw this in action at Lazada

One place I saw this play out was when I was at Lazada back in 2014 (a couple years after its founding).

Each country was run by really smart, driven people - similar to the Revolut model.

Many of them were ex-McKinsey or ex-BCG types. They were creative problem solvers that were highly motivated and could work lots of hours.

And it worked decently well.

The country leaders focused on achieving the KPI’s and were given a decent amount of freedom to determine how they got there.

Meanwhile the regional team helped ensure best practices and share learnings between countries.

But each of the countries burned a LOT of cash learning some of the same lessons. Which doesn’t end up being a big problem if you have lots of cash to burn (luckily they did).

However most companies do not have that luxury.

So how could it have looked different?

Ok let’s say i was trying to create a brand new competitor to Lazada today and call it ‘Bazada’. And i have a pile of cash to do it. How would I do it?

1st: I would put everyone in the same Clickup workspace.

And i’d set up a ‘space’ in that workspace for each major department of each country (eg. Marketing, Operations, etc.).

Say there are 6 countries and 8 departments in each. This would mean 48 (=6 x 8) spaces. A bit of overload I know… but each person could essentially hide all of the spaces that are not relevant to them.

2nd: Each department in each country would need to organize their folders and lists in a consistent way.

I would control this at the beginning.

3rd: Everybody would have to adhere to the ‘everything is a task’ method.

Meaning everything that takes >10 minutes is a task and all work is an update to a task.

Then if I was say running the ‘Electronics’ category in Malaysia I would have easy access to all of the tasks that my equivalent was doing in all the other countries.

I could follow their cards and get all of their learnings real-time as updates.

And if I was running Electronics for the region I’d be getting all of these micro-updates from all the countries and coordinating them real-time with relatively little effort.

End result…

• As the CEO i’d have a single place where I could see everything that is going on.

• If i wanna dig into a topic I just open that folder up and start browsing cards and commenting.

• If i needed to pivot, I could pivot on a dime. Because I would have complete visibility on what tasks were prioritised vs. paused and could just deprioritise tasks in bulk myself.

If someone were competing against me using traditional methods… I’d run circles around them. Because i would be operating with a level of transparency and speed that they could only dream about.

A Napoleon battle plan

Closing thoughts

Look, I get the appeal of letting smart people figure things out. It probably leads to more creativity sometimes. People feel more autonomous.

But in my experience, you lose something really valuable - the power of rapid iteration and tight communication cycles.

The Beast Method might seem more controlling on the surface. But when everyone is working in lockstep, updating their tasks daily, and getting feedback within hours instead of weeks - that's when the real magic happens.

Because at the end of the day, I'd rather have a team of B+ players all executing perfectly in sync than a bunch of A+ players each doing their own thing.

Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is stop trying to figure everything out yourself and just follow a system that works.