Work Like a Founder: How we’ll never lose the startup mentality

From the day he joined, Rishi Stocker has been pushing the boundaries of what we do at Revolut. In 2016, he reached out as an avid user who wanted to get involved in making our product a market leader. He had some big ideas, and Revolut was ready to listen. It’s appropriate, then, that he is now one of our Expansion Leads, tasked with bringing the product to new territories around the world.

One of the biggest qualities that we look for outside of our core values is the ability to work autonomously and own your successes. Put simply: we look for people who think like a founder. Rishi is one of those people. Since he joined Revolut, he’s been relentlessly ambitious in what he wants the product to be and do. His first role as Head of Partnerships involved him in driving diversification of the products that Revolut offered. He could see that Revolut could be so much more than a prepaid travel card, and he wanted to make that happen.

As a lean startup, experimentation has to be conducted sensibly. Numerous ideas may appear interesting or feasible at first glance, but deciding which initiatives should be taken forward requires resources. “Find a way to experiment without taking your development team’s focus off the main goal,” he tells me, and it helps me to better understand his principles of failing fast, but learning from every iteration. Those principles have served him well in his career so far, as Revolut is the second tech unicorn that he has brought to new international territories.

He talks about how it’s an interesting time to be at Revolut now, given the healthy tension between early employees who are driven by their zero-to-one mentality, and those who are coming aboard to scale us up from one, to ten and beyond. But for Rishi, this doesn’t mean that we have to sell out. “There’s still plenty of room for entrepreneurial spirit at Revolut,” he muses, “if you have bold ideas that you can justify with data, you’re enabled to make it happen.”

One of his greatest personal and professional successes at Revolut has been bringing the product to Japan. Initially, he was discouraged from attempting to expand into the territory, naysayers citing the big cultural differences as a hurdle that was almost impossible to overcome. Rishi managed to convince management that it was worth the effort, given the size of the market and the lack of major fintech players there.

Revolut has no better home than somewhere like Japan. Its residents, who have historically faced high barriers and exorbitant fees to open and maintain bank accounts, can now turn to Revolut for a seamless way to manage their finances.  

For now, though, he’s ready to push into the next territory, and bring Revolut to a whole new set of customers. I ask where he thinks we might go, and he remains coy - so I suppose you’ll have to watch this space to find out where on the map we’ve touched our finger to go this time.

Revolut might just be the next place on your career map to touch your finger to - so if you’re thrilled by the idea of pushing boundaries and discovering your next challenge, why don’t you explore open job opportunities on our Careers site?