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How Did Revolut Co-Founder Come Up With an Idea?
A question that is popping up in my mind recently is whether it is crucial to be an expert in a field you wanna start a business/startup. Does the whole thing about building companies come down to this one simple thing: having an X amount of years of expertise, recognizing the "pains" and executing the solution appropriately?
There is a second part to the issue being young people without that much experience don't have the so-called
"curse of knowledge" bias so they can come up with fresh and bold ideas without giving too much thought if that can actually work. I have a great example to prove this thesis.
How did the idea of
Revolut come about? In one of the interviews, the co-founder Nikolay Storonsky told a story about the origin of Revolut. 💬
He was a stock market broker at Lehman Brothers 🏦 so he was pretty close to the financial sector so to speak. He was irritated by the number of fees that banks were cutting from each client's transaction. He thought to himself what if existed an international user-friendly bank with 0% commissions and fees.
In order to make the idea happen, he gathered a team and consulted one of the best financial advisors in banking and transaction topics. After a couple of hours of intense conversation, the advisor said that
it is impossible to create such a bank (pretty ironic, huh?)
.
Storonsky didn't give up, instead, he “bought this guy out” for a couple of days in order to get insights about transaction policies, walkarounds, etc. in the banking sector. They gathered all the necessary infos and started brainstorming potential solutions.
It took them 3 weeks to come up with one which seemed to meet all the legal criteria. They called up the advisor guy again, laid out all the cards - showed him what they have come up with and whether they are not missing anything.
🤯
He was stunned and said, "yes, that should work”.
He was stunned not because the idea was brilliant, but because he couldn’t see the solution they came up with without having years of experience. 💼
It turns out, sometimes to come up with something disruptive you gotta distance yourself from the expertise, gather information, and build the actual thing.
I believe, it is a great example of human creative spirit.
No matter how regulated a certain industry is, it is possible to create value there. Obviously, you have to be somewhat familiar with the industry (Storonsky was a broker after all), not necessarily be an expert already.
Dream, build, spread. 🚀
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#FoodForThought