QuantumLight supports outstanding Series A+ scale-up founders across the globe with the best practices that made Revolut, the $45bn fintech, into Europe’s most valuable tech company. Our founder, Nik Storonsky, accumulated these learnings in almost 10 years of trial and error at the helm of the business.

Revolut’s claim to fame was its extraordinary ability to scale in a highly competitive market, occupied by established players. The key was a high-performance organization that promoted and nurtured amazing talent. Investors have also been betting that this unique performance can be replicated in other scale-ups – more than 100 startups led by Revolut alumni collectively raised over $2.2bn in funding.

Building a high-performance organization is a challenging but game-changing endeavour. This playbook is here to help you with it, by condensing the best practices developed by Nik in almost a decade at Revolut.

As you read through the following sections, you can look at QuantumLight's own performance review framework - we've developed a working Google Sheets templateto show you how performance reviews can work in practice!

In addition, Revolut started commercialising their proprietary company management platform (Revolut People), offering an out-of-the-box solution to implement Storonsky’s performance playbook at your own company.

Protocols for Driving High Performance

Set Foundations

• [ ] Treat performance as a priority and focus on A-players. Make performance a top CEO priority, with a standardized approach to identify high performers.
• [ ] Set up a performance team. Hire 1-2 top operators to build and manage your performance processes.

Build Processes

• [ ] Define a talent framework. Create a scientific and fair framework that accurately distinguishes great and poor performance.
• [ ] Standardize assessments - Turn reviews into a simple and quick quarterly process that saves managers' time.

Act on Results

• [ ] Standardize promotions and automatically exit underperformers. Identify poor performance early and keep a high bar via automatic triggers.
• [ ] Incentivise A-players with performance-based equity bonuses. Give exponentially increasing bonuses based on individual, team or company performance.
• [ ] Pay above-average salaries for above-average talent - Ensure you're always offering competitive salaries by maintaining benchmarks.

1. Talent Philosophy

This section at a glance

• A high-performance organization is A-player centric (top 15%-25%), focusing resources to retain and promote top talent while exiting underperformers as fast as possible
• Establishing a high-performance organization relies on
  • Defining and following a standardised approach to performance management that removes manager bias
  • Ensuring performance is a top CEO priority, with a dedicated team of smart operators reporting on it
  • Strengthening the link between performance, compensation and career trajectory