Nik Storonsky, Founder of $45 billion superapp Revolut, shares his secrets to building high-performance tech startups

QuantumLight, the quantitative venture capital and growth equity firm, today unveils its playbook, ‘Driving High Performance: A Founder’s Guide to Cultivating Top Talent at Scale’. Co-authored with Nik Storonsky, the visionary founder behind the $45 billion fintech giant Revolut, this playbook is set to raise the bar for performance in the tech startup world.

“We are publishing best practices that I wish I had access to in the early days of Revolut. We condensed years of learning into an easily accessible tool for the unicorn founders of tomorrow,” said Nik Storonsky, Founder of QuantumLight and Founder & CEO of Revolut.

Maintaining stellar performance and tracking employee progress in a rapidly growing start-up is a crucial yet highly complex task. QuantumLight’s playbook demystifies this process through a systematic and data-driven approach. It promotes treating performance as science rather than art – by setting clear expectations and metrics around competencies and cultural fit, it reduces manager bias and provides clear career paths for employees. Notably, it also advocates for exponential bonuses to reward top performers and suggests forming a dedicated task force for performance management, distinct from HR and recruitment.

The playbook acts as a step-by-step guide for implementing these best practices into any tech startup that founders can easily put into action. These best practices are supplemented by Revolut’s recently launched company management platform (Revolut People), offering an out-of-the-box solution to put Storonsky’s performance playbook into practice.

Ilya Kondrashov, CEO of QuantumLight, emphasised the significance of this release, stating, “Cultivating a high-performance environment in your startup is a complex but crucial task, and, in the tech world, sound advice from founders who built a global business is hard to come by.”

This unique approach to employee performance has also been successfully replicated by Revolut’s alumni across scale-ups, with more than 100 startups led by Revolut alumni collectively raising over $2.2 billion in funding, underscoring the potential for these methods for tech startups and scaleups across the world.

The playbook’s methodology for enhancing organisational performance is systematic and mirrors QuantumLight’s approach as a venture capital firm. Unlike traditional funds which rely on mostly qualitative factors in their deal selection, QuantumLight uses sophisticated data models and crunches through billions of data points to make more precise investment decisions.

Several of QuantumLight’s portfolio companies have already reaped the benefits of this playbook. Ghost, the California-based B2B platform for buying and selling excess inventory, comments about their experience:

“We recently implemented a structured performance review system, taking inspiration from QuantumLight’s playbook. These best practices helped us gain a better understanding of our talent base and promote a higher bar for employee performance. Nik’s scientific approach to performance management is a powerful tool for any tech company, as evidenced by his success with Revolut,” said Josh Kaplan, Co-Founder at Ghost.

Sebastian Fallert, Founder of Ben, the London-based tech company building the first all-in-one platform for global and flexible employee benefits, also commented about their experience, adding, “We were inspired by QuantumLight’s playbook when designing our own performance incentives system. We hope to replicate Nik’s success in creating high performance and scale at Revolut, and are already seeing improvements in our ability to attract and foster top talent. It’s rare to see an accomplished founder like Storonsky share their best practices in such an accessible format – this will positively impact the tech ecosystem.”

QuantumLight’s performance playbook is available for immediate implementation and is expected to become a key resource for founders, executives, and investors.