[00:00:00] hello, and welcome to the bottom up Podcast. I'm Mike Parsons, I'm the chief innovation officer at Qualitance and i'm coming to you from the work from home studio. And today is the second installment of our Revolut case study. Uh, we're going to look at the people side of things. The previous show we just did.

Product. So now we're into the people. And this is so fascinating because they have over 2000 staff and they started with just two, five years ago. And, uh, this might suggest why we think they might become the Amazon of banking. Now we learned a ton about how they are. Growing fast and building a product in quite a revolutionary, new way for the category in the previous show.

Today what we're going to get into is the people side of things. And so I want to break this down for you and really help you [00:01:00] understand, um, how team structures and culture and the way you work together really does affect the product. In fact, I would argue that only great teams can build great product and there's no way you can build a great product.

If you don't have a great team. Okay. Before we get into it, if you are interested in going deep on our case study on a not only Revolut but we work or you want to get any of our masterclasses, it's all free. Jump over to bottom up.io and you can grab everything you want there. Listen, tomorrow episodes of the podcast, take master classes, read blog posts, you name it.

It's all there. Okay, let's talk about people. Let's talk about culture at Revolut. Well, I had to think of like one idea that kind of captures how Revolut works, and I think it is best described as being very hard and fast culture. Uh, so what I [00:02:00] mean by that is they move very fast in a bit, uh, common to some of the early days of Facebook.

They kind of move fast and break things. In their case, they're very commercial. They move very fast. It's quite a high pressure, um, working environment. And I think that actually. If there was any of the four P's. So with them product, they're doing exceptionally well, we're going to learn about promotion and profit and as a bit of a heads up, they do pretty damn well there.

I would actually say that it's on the people side of things where they are most challenged and I think it's this hard and fast culture. So let's break it down and talk about what we think is at the heart of this. So I would propose to you, if you have like a hyper speed, you know, fifth gear kind of culture.

This means long days, long nights, often working weekends, working long hours, um, a lot of [00:03:00] stretch goals, um, in how you organize the team. You know, the thing that is the real truth that I think we can learn from Revolut is they had a lot of churn in employees in the early days. And I think it's specifically because of this culture and the truth inside of this is that a hard and fast culture,  has a very small talent pool that will actually have a good fit with the job said differently.

Out of every hundred candidates that might apply for a job. Even if they have the skills, it's the behavior fit around this hard and fast. It's extremely challenging and personally, when I think about all the teams I've been part of. A constant hard and fast culture, like it's quite unrelenting. And I think that very few people have the stamina to keep that up.

Most people need a bit more time and space. So Revolut is actually recruiting for a very narrow specific [00:04:00] segment in the employee. Kind of ask it. And I think that's a why. Hard and fast is not for all. I would even go as far as saying, harden fast is not for the many. Um, it's a really challenging our culture and at the heart of their culture.

I think this is where you see the deep motivational level of this hard and fast culture. I'm talking about. Is there what they call in the terms of their values, they call it getting it done. That's how they've labeled it. If you wanted to say that. Otherwise you could say it's all about ownership and you can check out all sorts of great authors like, uh, Jaco Willink is, is really good on extreme ownership.

But the point here is that you take ownership for the results and you never blame anyone else. You do whatever it takes to get the results across the line. And so they call it getting it done. So it's a very bold, very brave, very 100% [00:05:00] all in. And I think that's the real truth about the culture they created.

And when you go this hard, not only as yet, not for many, sometimes you can like the, the barrier between what is. Uh, the right thing to do versus the wrong thing to do. They can get kind of blurred. And what I mean by that is you can push yourself so hard. You can push the team so hard, the organization so hard, you can be so entrepreneurial that you can almost break things.

So I would actually say in the case of Revolut, they had some serious problems a couple of years ago around this and this getting it done. Culture really got them into some, uh, tricky, uh, shall we say, hot water. So I want to tell you this, a little story that kind of brings this altogether. And, uh, this was all exposed in a wired magazine article.

You can [00:06:00] find out more about just Google wide Revolut and, um, some of the things that they got up to in the early days. So here's how they used to recruit. This is crazy. So let's imagine you and I are potential candidates for a job at Revolut and we raise our hand and said, yep, we send in a CV. Hey Hi [me], Hey Hi [me] and we get a, an email or a call and they want to have a meeting.

So you do your first interview. At the end of the first interview, Revolut used to give out this task. They've stopped this practice after it was exposed, but they, this is what they used to do. They used to say, let's imagine you and I are the candidates. They would say, okay, Hey Mike, if you would like to continue in this process, the first thing you have to do is go and recruit.

200 customers for the platform. And if you go and check out our masterclass at bottom up, I actually have a screenshot [00:07:00] of the brief that they would send to be where you can see they like Revolut home tasks, required applicants for various positions to recruit new app users. 200 or more signups would be a very strong indication that you'd go into the next round of the interview.

Now, just so you know, if you've got the 200 it doesn't guarantee you a job. It doesn't even guarantee you another interview. This is where the hard sell and this hard and fast culture kind of gets a bit over the top and out of control. And that's what I was talking about before. That fine line. Between, you know, on track and where you get a little bit off track.

Now I want to say that this is how they used to do it. They've stopped this practice and what's really interesting is if you jump over to class door and you'll look at some of the reviews and you really have a snapshot of the entire company around culture right there on glass door. So they have good [00:08:00] advocacy and referral rate, and uh, Nicholi Stronovski gets a really good 81% approval as a CEO.

So that's good. And what's really interesting, they highlight two pros in two cons on Glassdoor about the culture. And these are all taken from employee feedback. The company is really fast paced, it's growing, and it gives you a good reputation. That was one of the first ones. The second one is you learn a lot, and so that's the upside of a hard and fast culture.

I mean, you just always learning. It's like really dense. But this is really interesting on the cons, which you know, almost dou...