Fuse CEO Alan Chang: The Revolut Playbook of Speed & Ownership, Why Founders Aren’t Ambitious Enough

Summary

• Fuse Energy has 10x’d revenue every year since inception — first year £2M, second £20M, “this year we’re going to end at over 200” (roughly 260; over 400M annualized) — and just raised 70 at 5 billion, what Harry calls a “suicide round.” Alan Chang’s plan for next year is ~5x “but we’ll still shoot for 10,” and the single barrier to a billion is “speed of hiring quality engineering. There’s no capital” constraint.
• The Revolut lesson: roadmaps don’t differentiate, execution does. Revolut, Monzo and N26 had “basically the same” product roadmaps; what made the winner “crystal clear” to Chang was ambition and speed — Revolut was the only team at Level 39 working past 7pm and weekends, and Nick told him “he wants to be JP Morgan.” His test for his Revolut team: “If you have a gun pointed to your head today, would you have done more? If the answer is yes, that means you’re not doing a good job.”
• His answer to 996 critics — including his own investors at Balderton (likely): “Don’t join Fuse.” He has “total respect” for people wanting a 9-to-5, “but I think the only way to build a generational company is very, very strong work ethic. I just don’t see any other way to do it.”
• “Any energy company that’s claiming they’re 100% renewable is a complete lie” — solar and wind are highly correlated, batteries are mostly sub-2-hour, and the claims run on purchased renewable certificates. Proof point: when Russia invaded Ukraine, gas prices shot up and “100% renewable” tariff prices went up with them. Second misconception: power isn’t fungible across time and space — Scottish wind gets curtailed because the grid can’t move it to London.
• The UK is in the deepest energy trouble: per-capita energy consumption down 25% in 25 years while China’s rose 7x; cost per kilowatt roughly $25–30 in UK/Europe vs $10–15 in US and $8 in China. His policy fix: deregulate physical building entirely and “delete all subsidies of any kind” — a subsidy means the project isn’t profitable and ratepayers eat the cost. The country to copy is China, which “deploys more solar than all Western economies combined” while also building more gas, coal and grid.
• Management is extreme ownership with no comp bands: “If you’re a leader of an area in the company, excuses don’t matter. If you succeed, you get all the praise. If you fail, you get all the blame.” Hiring is graded skill-by-skill and the offer tracks the grade — “ultimately we’re buying skills” — with straight-A candidates bid above their current pay so leaving is unthinkable, straight-B offers possibly below it. His biggest mis-hire lesson: he overvalued IQ and undervalued “deeply caring.”
• “We need to do everything” — the anti-focus playbook. Company throughput equals the number of great leaders, so the expansionist founder hires more leaders to pursue more parallel bets; Revolut’s COVID lockdowns proved it when interchange revenue went near zero and trading/crypto revenue offset it. On Revolut itself: Harry pegs it at $250B ($500B with the US); Chang says “I think of a trillion dollar company” and would start selling at “trillion” — Harry, meanwhile, is “trying to buy every Revolut share I can.”

Deep dive

1. Hired in five minutes: the Revolut origin and the JP Morgan tell

• Chang found Revolut on a Facebook group called London Startups just after graduating; Nick replied within five minutes, interviewed him face-to-face the next day with “a bunch of physics questions,” and offered on the spot — “the fastest interview process I’ve ever had.” Full-time headcount then: Nick, Vlad, two engineers. His title was operations analyst; the first three months were customer support.
• Two moments told him it would be massive. At the Level 39 co-working space of 200+ startups, Revolut was the only team working past 7pm and the only team working weekends — “after 7:00 p.m., the whole floor is dead.” And when he asked Nick what drove him, already wealthy: “He told me he wants to be JP Morgan.”
• On the neobank race: for the first two years Revolut, Monzo and N26 looked “neck to neck” from outside, “but for me it was crystal clear” — because roadmaps were undifferentiated (“almost everyone would tell you basically the same”) and the only differentiators were ambition and speed of execution.

2. Manufacturing urgency: small teams, self-guiding missiles, a gun to the head

• His speed recipe for Harry: small teams operating as independent units with very clear goals — “monitor those teams and if they do well let them be, if they don’t do well replace the team.” From Nick he took the taxonomy of three types of people: those who self-identify the target and hit it, those who hit it once pointed, and neither — “the throughput of your company is basically the sum of the number of people in the first and second bucket.”
• He took Revolut’s “get it done culture” and “amped it up even more”: constant emphasis that “we’re not moving fast enough” — he told his team last year execution was 4 out of 10 and needed to be 10 out of 10. The extreme version: “If you have a gun pointed to your head today, would you have done more? If the answer is yes, that means you’re not doing a good job.”
• To the work-life-balance objection — which Harry notes comes even from Chang’s own investors at Balderton (likely) — his answer is blunt: “Don’t join Fuse.” “There’s nothing wrong with wanting work-life balance. But I think the only way to build a generational company is very, very strong work ethic. I just don’t see any other way to do it.” Yes, he expects weekends: Fuse is fighting incumbents with billions in revenue, and “the only way to win… with much smaller balance sheets is work ethic.”
• Revolut had six cultural values from memory — “a bit too many for me. I always forget all of them.” He keeps one: never settle. But he concedes Harry’s “how you do anything is how you do everything” skepticism: pick your battles — never settle on the most important roles, “the roles that matter less, I think it’s perfectly okay to settle.”

3. Where he broke with Nick: KPIs get gamed

• His biggest disagreement at Revolut was the overuse of KPIs. Measure everything, yes — “but once you start incentivizing against that, teams find ways to game it.” Nick is “a super number-driven guy” and it mostly worked, “but I would say not everything should be a KPI.”
• His example, as told: give a recruiter a hires-per-month KPI with bonus attached, and they start convincing hiring managers to lower the talent bar — “this is the best you’re going to find” — “and I’ve seen that happen before.” The test for any metric: what are the second-order consequences?

4. Diversification saved Revolut’s revenue — and regulators are structurally risk-averse

• The proof of product diversification came in COVID lockdowns: interchange revenue “went basically near zero” amid stimulus checks and booming stock and crypto markets, so trading revenue rose and “it kind of offset each other” — revenues got much more resilient.
• On whether Revolut should have taken the banking license earlier (Nick has said yes publicly): Chang thinks diversification would have happened either way, but agrees on the deeper problem — “the bigger you get, the more scared the regulators are of you.” If you succeed they get no bigger bonus; if you fail they might lose their jobs — “they’re incentivized to be risk-averse as opposed to risk-neutral, whereas what’s best for the economy is actually risk-neutral regulators.”
• A live disagreement worth keeping: Chang says “I still don’t think the incumbents have woken up yet.” Harry’s rebuttal — he spoke at an incumbent’s event where “pretty much the only thing discussed at their away day is Revolut,” but the structures, comp bands and hired-CEO incentives mean “they know the challenge but they are unable to fight against it” — which is exactly why he’s “trying to buy every Revolut share I can at a good price.” Chang, drily: “Talking about it and doing something about it is very different. But yeah, I get the point.”

5. The energy crisis is already here — and the UK is the worst offender

• “I think we’re in an energy crisis already in the whole developed economies. UK is in the deepest trouble.” His numbers: UK energy consumption per capita down 25% in 25 years; US flat; China up seven times over the same period — while UK prices and volatility rose. Harry corroborates from a data-infrastructure provider: energy is 16% of their revenue in the UK vs 3–4% elsewhere.
• Cause one is overregulation of anything physical: for Fuse’s own UK power plant, councils’ planning discretion meant “wintering bird surveys over several winters” — “you hire a guy with a clipboard and they count the number of birds… until that survey is done you can’t build.” Infra capital wants to deploy: “the problem is not capital. The problem is it’s very, very hard to build.” Cause two: incumbents are “not technology-driven at all… pen and paper, spreadsheet-based companies.”
• Fuse’s framing is a common goal, not an enemy: “no trade-offs.” Twenty years of the green movement told people to use less of everything while prices crept up — “that’s totally wrong… we should be using more energy.” Energy per capita correlates strongly with quality of life; Americans use “almost eight times more energy than Europeans” and the middle-class American home shows it. Harry pushes back hard — that lifestyle sits on record consumer debt and a “manufactured” food supply — Chang concedes “that’s also true,” but holds the takeaway: you can have low-cost, more, and lower-carbon energy at the same time.

6. Renewable misconceptions, and the China playbook

• Misconception one: “There’s no such thing as 100% renewable.” Solar and wind are “extremely correlated with each other” — overbuild all you like, certain hours still yield near zero — and most batteries are sub-two-hour and far too expensive to bridge days or weeks. So “any energy company claiming they’re 100% renewable is a complete lie” resting on purchased certificates. His proof: when Russia invaded Ukraine, gas prices shot up — and the “100% renewable” tariffs went up too. “How is that possible if it’s 100% renewable?”
• Misconception two: power is not fungible across time and space — north-of-Scotland wind gets told to turn off because the grid can’t deliver it to demand centers like London.
• His policy program if he ran UK energy: deregulate physical building — “make it so easy for anyone to build” — and “delete all subsidies of any kind.” A subsidy means the project isn’t actually profitable, and ratepayers carry the burden: “let the free market do its thing. If it’s profitable to build it, people will build it.”
• The country to follow: China. Cost per kilowatt: UK/Europe roughly $25–30, US $10–15, China $8. While the West turned generation choices political, “in China, they built everything” — more solar deployed than all Western economies combined, plus more gas, coal, cables and grid than all Western economies combined. “It’s common sense, right?”

7. Short-term bearish Britain, long-term bullish — Harry isn’t buying it

• Chang rates UK talent “world class” — “the key ingredient to build anything successful” — so he’s “short-term bearish but long-term bullish” on the UK. The bear case: “current government’s heading the wrong direction… there’s a lot of talk about growth, but it’s just talk and no action.”
• Harry’s pushback, worth keeping: “I don’t know how you can be long-term bullish but short-term bearish” given a multi-decade structural decline, with Farage and Reform the likely next government rather than “the intellectual Matt Clifford.” Chang’s answer: deregulation only needs “a very, very strong will” plus a top advisory team; his hope is that “people with common sense will elect a more sensible government.” Both admit to being politically homeless — Chang wants “the most competent individuals leading countries regardless of party,” and names Matt Clifford as “a pretty good choice.”

8. Hiring as bidding for skills: no comp bands, no PIPs, caring over IQ

• Fuse grades candidates skill-by-skill — coding (language-agnostic, though the whole backend is Python), system design, problem solving, culture fit — assessed by the internal best at each. There are no comp bands: “the higher the grade, the higher our bid, because ultimately we’re buying skills.” Straight-A candidates get offers “much higher than what they make today” so Fuse is “a no-brainer… you will never think about leaving”; straight-B candidates still clear the bar but the offer “could be below what you’re making today — if you have a better offer elsewhere, good luck to you.”
• The green flag when he pitches the ambition and the hard work: body language — “are they leaning in or leaning out.” Red flags: serial one-year stints, fluffy CVs, anything over a page — “if Elon Musk can put a CV in one page, so could you.”
• His biggest mis-hire lesson: “I used to overvalue IQ and didn’t put enough weighting on deeply caring.” The screen isn’t luck — he pitches the pain (“it’s going to be very tough… why do you want to do this yourself?”) and listens: “depends on the pay” means out; “I’ve been so bored at my corporate job… I’m in” means in. Titles are never granted on entry — head-of positions come only by internal promotion on performance.
• Underperformance surfaces in a month or two; he gives a verbal warning and skips formal PIPs — “a waste of time” — because “most people we hire are already self-aware of where they fall short.” One more chance, then out.

9. Excuses don’t matter: the janitor-and-VP rule

• When Chang once explained a failure to Nick, Nick sent him an article explaining the janitor-and-VP distinction: if the janitor misses the trash because the locks changed, that’s acceptable — “somewhere between the janitor and the VP, reasons stop mattering.” Now every time a Fuse leader explains a miss, “I send him this article.” The rule: “If you’re a leader of an area in the company, excuses don’t matter. If you succeed, you get all the praise. If you fail, you get all the blame. And it does not matter why you failed.”
• Told he’s too harsh: “I don’t care what they think.” Harry’s counter — protect your best performers, hear them out — gets flipped: “that’s not protecting, that’s just hiding information from your best performers.” Chang initially resisted Nick’s feedback as unfair, “but then I thought more about it and it made me a better person… I thank him for sending the article.” His generalization: “top performers internalize negative feedback very well… if there are people who don’t take negative feedback well, I don’t think they’re top performers.” And if repeated feedback doesn’t land, “I just stop bothering — they can leave the company.”
• On fear-based leadership (Harry: people are scared of Nick): “What matters is people need to feel like they can speak the truth.” Chang says he told Nick when ideas were bad — “sometimes I change his mind, sometimes I don’t.”

10. Do everything, 10x every year: from a $1M MVP to a 5 billion round

• Asked which single Revolut product decision moved the needle: “No — because the answer is we need to do everything.” His resolution of the focus-vs-sprawl orthodoxy: “there are not enough ambitious founders out there.” Parallel throughput is dictated by the number of great leaders, so the zero-sum founder rations bets while the expansionist “figures out ways to hire more leaders so you can pursue more.” On direct reports he leans Jensen-style — many, unmanaged: “self-guiding missiles… you debate the target, but once you both agree, that’s it. You just monitor.” (Offices in Canary Wharf for the same reason: expandable leases and “far away from the party.”)
• The full-stack MVP on $1M, as told: a single wind turbine in north Scotland for 750K, a license for 75K, the former Ofgem CEO advising for equity only, and co-founder Charles personally qualifying as both energy trader and electrician. “I don’t think you need a lot of capital… you don’t need a huge seed round to get started.”
• Fundraising history: he rocked up to Balderton (likely) — Ferrari outside — saying he’d raise a $60M seed and closed 78 at roughly 145 (equity plus tokens, which Harry admits killed his own participation — “my biggest lesson and mistake”). His one regret: “raised at too low price” — a higher term sheet arrived after an oral agreement with Balderton and he honored his word: “if you say you’re going to do something, you should do it.” Advice to founders: he underestimated the company’s worth; “wait for a bit longer.”
• The numbers behind the recent 70 at 5 billion: over 400 million annualized revenue, having 10x’d every year — £2M, £20M, “this year we’re going to end at over 200.” Harry: “You can’t 10x again.” Chang: “We’ll try” — the business plan says ~5x. Endgame: Shell does “a billion revenue a day approximately” yet is worth just north of $300B (a London-listing discount, he thinks) — “I think we could be bigger than Shell.” He sees no need to list while private liquidity holds; if Fuse ever lists, it’s the US. And on Revolut, where he sold only for personal consumption: Harry says $250B easily, $500B with the US — Chang: “I think of a trillion dollar company,” sell at “trillion,” and “if someone’s going to do it, it’s Nicolai.”