Builder of fintech and magna-tile forts. Exited founder turned Army Special Forces then back to tech.
Joined December 2014
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Hate launch posts that go "we just killed [incumbent name]".
No you didn't.
You just launched.
You just got to step 1.
More like step 0 actually.
Congrats on getting approximately nowhere yet.
Hey kid, love the costume, you get a full-sized candy bar if your dad comes up here and connects his gmail to my data selling app.
This is the correct founder mindset.
As Governor Schwarzenegger once said, "what is best in life is to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their wo...investors."
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.
You open Slack. Looking for a convo you had with someone 5 months ago. You ask your coworker if they know where it is. They don't. Search doesn't work.
You wince as you click Slackbot and emotionally prepare yourself for the bot to swing and miss.
Slackbot proudly surfaces the chat you just had with your coworker about trying to find the convo. Thanks Slackbot.
You realize Slack hasn't really evolved much since AI entered the scene. How could that be, you wonder.
Then you come across this post on X, and it all makes sense: "eaten by whale".
Latest (and probably penultimate) Building Slack post is up: buildingslack.com/salesforce…
What it's like being eaten by the whale
It's actually a huge idea because if you make MWDs a little smarter then you can replace Marines.
If failing startups sell their data for $$$ to labs, don't you just get a model that's really good at running failing startups?
I've been trying Retatrutide for 3 weeks.
It is insane.
I experience zero "food noise" during the day. No desire to eat sugar or drink alcohol. Just don't want it.
Food is just fuel. That is the extent of it.
My mental clarity is v high. I already hit my target BMI. I sleep better.
My new POV is everyone should be taking some kind/amount of GLP-1.
I'd rather play Russian Roulette than be on a live range with a bunch of SF founders who have never practiced muzzle awareness.
Parenting tip: you can just book a time to get a personal tour of your local fire station.
10/10 would recommend.
My 2yo son would freak if he saw this. Obsessed with construction equipment.
SpaceX/@elonmusk:
1. Get some better cameras.
2. Live stream the construction.
3. Charge $5/mo for the "NFL Redzone of kid's construction entertainment." lol
"Ever see a lion stretch before it hunts? I didn't think so." — my Special Forces cadre whispered to me while I was stretching before an unknown distance / unknown time run.
He was apparently a visionary, brilliant man.
Stretching before exercise does not prevent injuries. A 2014 meta-analysis of 26,610 participants in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that stretching had no effect on injury rates at all. Strength training cut injuries by a third.
The study was led by Jeppe Bo Lauersen at the University of Copenhagen. His team pooled every randomised trial that tested whether exercise-based programmes could prevent sports injuries, and compared the results by type: stretching, strength training, balance work, and combinations. Stretching reduced nothing. Strength training reduced injuries by 33 percent and cut overuse injuries, the ones that build up slowly over weeks, by nearly half.
The reason stretching fails is that it addresses the wrong problem. A muscle tear happens when a muscle is asked to produce more force than it can handle. Making a muscle longer does not make it stronger. Strength training does, and it also thickens tendons and stiffens the connective tissue around joints, all of which protect against the sudden loads that cause tears and sprains.
The finding goes against what every gym teacher, track coach, and physical therapist has said for fifty years. But the data is not close. Across every trial, every sport, and every injury type, stretching before exercise had zero detectable effect on whether the person got hurt.
This does not mean flexibility has no value. It means the five-minute hamstring stretch before a run is doing nothing for injury prevention, and replacing it with five minutes of bodyweight squats and lunges would be measurably better. The body does not need to be looser before it works. It needs to be ready to handle load, and that is a strength problem, not a flexibility problem. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2410…
I charge German investors a fair €1500 to read them SAFEs so they feel at home when investing in US startups.
Met a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.
This quote accidentally explains what makes a great founding team.
They bake better ideas faster together.
One of them tosses out the initial kernel of an idea to the group, and what comes out the other end after 20 mins of iterating, steering, and agreeing/disagreeing is an idea that would take one of them 2 months to arrive at alone.
“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy.
Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.”
—John Steinbeck, East of Eden
