Revolut's Storonsky: Keep VCs Off Your Board or Pay for It Later

Revolut Chief Executive Nik Storonsky says founders who hand venture capitalists board seats and voting rights are signing away control of their own companies. In a recent interview credited to Ramp, he called the standard VC power grab a governance trap that only reveals itself when things go wrong.

"These people basically think that because of them, the company was created because they gave money, and that they are entitled to a large part of its success," Storonsky said. He founded Revolut more than a decade ago, when raising money in Europe was, in his words, extremely difficult and dominated by "extremely aggressive, extremely legalistic" private-sector investors.

The result, he says, was founders signing bad terms just to get funded: liquidation preferences, board seats, and reduced founder voting rights baked into shareholder agreements.

What does Storonsky want founders to do instead?

His advice is blunt: read the paperwork before you sign it, and strip investors of operational power.

"My advice to entrepreneurs would be: even if you raise money from VCs, pay a lot of attention to shareholder agreement," he said. "Ensure that they're purely financial players, with no voting rights and no seat at the table in decision-making."

That structure rarely causes friction while revenue climbs. The danger arrives with turbulence. "If something goes wrong, you effectively have cheerleaders who look at the match, and then try to play the match instead of professional players. That's always a disaster," Storonsky said.

Why he thinks VCs overestimate their own value

Storonsky argues the VC business model is far easier than building an operating company. Funds collect money from limited partners, deploy it across many startups, and collect fees — a "2 and 20" structure he describes as much simpler than running a real business from scratch. Their competition, he notes, is for deals, not customers.

He also disputes the claim that investors bring operational wisdom. Almost none of the VCs he encountered had ever built a company themselves, he said. "Having a board seat doesn't teach you how to run a company at all. You're just an observer."

Yet those observers hold real power — capital plus contractual conditions plus, in his telling, a mentality that they can tell founders what to do. Storonsky said he experienced multiple cases where VC advice was simply wrong for the company.

The executive-hiring argument that failed at Revolut

One piece of advice stood out: hire experienced executives. Storonsky tested it and says it collapsed. In his first five years running Revolut, he hired more than 50 experienced executives. Within a year, he kept only two.

His explanation has two parts. First, careers have a prime, like athletes. Priorities shift, and a past track record doesn't guarantee future performance in a changed market. "It's extremely naive to think" otherwise, he said.

Second, he argues there's a negative selection bias when you recruit seasoned executives. The genuinely top performers have already made it — running their own businesses or retired. The people available for hire are, by definition, those without extreme career progression.

Storonsky's own hiring method: identify people in the top 1% of career progression among their peers, and recruit them at 25 to 30 years old, betting they continue that trajectory inside Revolut.

What does this change for founders negotiating now?

For practitioners, the message is concrete: the term sheet is where founder control lives or dies. Storonsky's position — built on a decade of boardroom fights at one of Europe's most valuable fintechs — is that capital should come without vetoes, and that operators, not observers, should run the company. Founders heading into a raise will want their lawyers to focus on exactly those clauses.