Data Platforms and Digital Money
City of London, UK
Joined September 2009
- Tweets28.6K
- Following5.1K
- Followers3.7K
- Likes9.8K
Dan Feaheny retweeted
It was truly inspirational to watch @NStoronsky operate closely. He's one of the most ambitious founders I have met. During the time I was at @Revolut, he would be the first person in the office and the last to leave. Ungodly amount of energy. He would meet all the teams on a regular basis and provide clear feedback on every product.
We brought several learnings with us to @sardine, several of them were very counter intuitive at the time!
Nik Storonsky is one of the most hardcore and competitive founders I’ve ever talked to. He’s the founder of Revolut, a $115 billion company, and wants to be the number one bank in 100 countries.
When someone asked Nik if he was coming for Jamie Dimon's lunch, he said “I’m coming for his dinner.”
“We want to dominate, otherwise what’s the point?”
He removed every VC from his board, and when one investor pushed him too far, he started his own fund to compete with them.
Nik has a lot of ideas on talent, product design, marketing, constraints, and what makes founder-led companies special.
This is a fascinating conversation about competition, speed, and building a machine-like company.
0:00 Coming for Jamie Dimon's dinner
2:04 Building the #1 bank in 100 countries
6:12 Why founders beat professional CEOs
8:45 Revolut's biggest mistake
12:47 Why legacy banks can't innovate
17:20 Running a company like a machine
20:28 Funding winners and cutting losers like a trader
23:31 How AI is changing Revolut's team structure
25:23 50 direct reports and spreading innovation fast
29:59 Hiring self-guided missiles
33:31 Too much money makes founders weaker
37:38 What Europe's constraints taught Revolut
41:08 Why VCs are like football cheerleaders
49:28 Starting a fund to compete with VCs
54:28 From zero marketing to buying Europe's airports
1:00:21 Funding moonshots like a global tech company
1:03:58 Building an unstoppable machine
Includes paid partnerships.
Dan Feaheny retweeted
Anthropic is launching a European consultancy that:
"will embed AI consultants and engineers into European businesses"
It will launch by the end of this year with hubs in London and Berlin.
A large proportion of the UK economy is based on professional services / consultancies.
Anthropic is swooping in to gobble it up.
Dan Feaheny retweeted
Earlier this year, I almost fell for an elaborate phishing attempt.
It was convincing enough that I nearly went along with it.
For an entire weekend I felt shame.
Unfortunately, the latest “Black October” security findings suggest things are going to get worse.
Old security flaws that once took too much time to exploit can now be targeted by 10k agents working overnight for the cost of a Pumpkin Spice Latte (okay... or two).
A few things people much smarter than me have noticed over the past week:
• Amazon spotted an attempted attack on website software four days before the public warning went out. The flaws could let someone take control without a password. Businesses were being targeted before they knew they needed a fix.
• PHP, the software behind WordPress and many other websites, needed emergency fixes for two flaws that could let attackers take over servers without a login. Vercel added firewall protections before the public warning, but website owners still need to update PHP itself.
• One of the secret keys used to help verify that websites are genuine was simply the number 4. Eight keys at certificate provider eMudhra were easy to guess. Updated browsers have protections, but older software may still trust the affected certificates.
• NorForge researchers found criminals putting AI agents to work against online shops and payment systems. One group had more than 1,100 attack projects across its dashboards.
• Quest Diagnostics, one of the biggest medical companies in the U.S., disclosed a breach this week and believes someone accessed patient records. It is still investigating how many people were affected.
AI didn’t cause all of these failures. But it does make existing weaknesses cheaper to find and exploit.
Not to play the doomer or alarmist, but now is a good time for a few reminders.
-Use a password manager.
-Turn on two-factor authentication.
-If someone unexpectedly asks you to send money or download something, check through a number or account you already know.
-Follow trusted security experts online.
Working in tech or being chronically online doesn’t make you immune.
Be safe out there.
Dan Feaheny retweeted
Marc Andreessen says the gap between what AI-native startups and incumbents think AI can do is the widest he’s ever seen:
"The AI-native early stage startups have just a completely different view on what they can do with AI than the typical incumbents in almost any industry, almost without exception."
"AI is just racing ahead in capability even week by week... There are going to be a lot of industries that are really up for grabs in a fundamentally more profound way than maybe has been the case in the past."
"The founders are gonna have a level of superpowers coming from the use of these tools and these technologies that they just simply haven't had in the past... Had I had Astra and Netscape in 1994, like, oh my God. Like, Ben, what would you and I have been able to do at Netscape?"
"Those entrepreneurs are gonna color way outside the lines. We already see this. They're not gonna think of themselves as like, 'I'm just a software company,' or, 'I'm just a hardware company,' or even, 'I'm just an AI company.'"
@pmarca @bhorowitz
Today, a16z Crypto is becoming a16z Frontier.
Since joining a16z in 2013, @cdixon has focused on technologies that look futuristic well before they reach the mainstream. Those themes led to investments in Oculus, Skydio, Zipline, Coinbase, Solana, and Uniswap.
Frontier expands that mandate beyond crypto to back "outer planet" founders who are building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop.
Chris joins @pmarca, @bhorowitz, and @eriktorenberg to discuss why crypto has become part of the broader tech landscape, why Frontier fills a hole in the firm's architecture, and why they'd rather be too early than too late.
They also get into why the gap between AI-native startups and incumbents is the widest Marc has ever seen, how AI could pull forward 20 years of frontier technology, why stablecoins may become the way AI agents pay each other, how AI is breaking the internet's business model, and why today's 18-year-olds are about to become superhumans.
0:50 Introducing a16z Frontier
2:49 Smartphone parts to drones and VR
4:47 Backing the "outer planets"
7:11 Good ideas that look like bad ideas
10:43 The JP Morgan photo in Marc's office
15:13 Good tech ideas eventually work
16:53 AI may pull tech 20 years forward
18:18 The widest AI gap Marc's ever seen
22:06 Workers adopt AI before companies do
26:32 Old use cases vs. AI-native ones
30:08 Beyond "product manager brain"
34:45 AI can reverse engineer any hardware
38:23 The case for open source AI
46:36 How AI breaks the internet's model
49:11 VR, homebrew hacking, multiplayer AI
54:00 If you're 18, study "modern alchemy"
YouTube: youtu.be/-9XQMHhpypc
Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more information. A list of investments made by a16z is available at a16z.com/portfolio.
Dan Feaheny retweeted
Due Diligence 2.0: Connecting AI insight to operating reality in fintech dlvr.it/TW1S1m
Dan Feaheny retweeted
M2020, Recap Part 3. Red hot bank issue is Meta Muse in "Agentic Finance". Per previous tweet, consumers not only giving over their banking credentials, but also their OTP. Expect move to structured APIs, explicit consumer permissions that banks hold, data agreements between agentic platforms and banks (with rules and pricing).
Most agree that KYA makes no sense. Banks don't need to know the agent, they need to know what the consumer authorized, and how the consumer was authenticated (by the agent). They also need ensure the agent operator will abide by access terms and rules (ex never asking for OTP).
Dan Feaheny retweeted
Revolut services are back online after yesterday’s outage.
The disruption began shortly after 7am BST on 20 Oct, when a power event hit Google Cloud’s London region (europe-west2-b). Failures interrupted services for hours. Most Google Cloud issues were mitigated by early afternoon; Revolut later confirmed the issue was fixed and services restored. Customer money and data remained safe throughout.
The impact was significant. Revolut has about 70m customers in Europe, and it seems most were affected. Reports came from the UK, Ireland, France, Spain and elsewhere. Card payments, transfers, ATMs, currency exchange and app access were affected. Revolut Business (850k+ companies) was also disrupted, hitting payments and operations.
Lloyds Banking Group, HSBC, Halifax, UK courts, Rightmove, DPD, and others also reported problems. Customers described abandoned purchases at tills and petrol stations, couldn't pay for travel, and businesses couldn't process payments.
This was a clear concentration-risk event. One cloud zone became a single point of failure for critical payment and banking services used by millions. The UK's FCA said it was engaging with Google and affected firms. The PRA and Bank of England were also reported to be in contact under the critical third-party regime (Google Cloud was designated in July 2026).
Revolut had previously signalled plans to move to multi-cloud by adding Amazon Web Services (AWS), with a roadmap to 2027. The outage indicates those measures were not yet sufficiently in place for core European operations. Some rivals, such as Monzo, were not widely reported as affected.
Google will investigate and publish a fuller report on the power event. That will clarify the technical details, but not the strategic questions: how quickly firms can reduce single-cloud and single-region dependence, and whether workable contingencies are actually ready. An event at one data centre near London was enough to disrupt millions of people and significant commercial activity.
Dan Feaheny retweeted
Decoding Emergence- #Digital #Defense Report 2026-@Microsoft
#Bigdata #ArtificialIntelligence #Dataprivacy #Cybersecurity #Hacking #Fintech #Finserv #Regulation #Regtech #AIRisk #RiskManagement
@Damien_CABADI @bamitav @mikeflache @Corix_JC @Nicochan33
microsoft.com/en-us/corporat…
Dan Feaheny retweeted
🚨 𝗕𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚: Revolut is now valued at more than $121 BILLION!
And $200B could be next.
Forge Global marked Revolut shares at $2,125 on October 15, implying a valuation of roughly $121.2B: startupfortune.com/revolut-h…
For context:
→ August 2024: $45B
→ November 2025: $75B
→ July 2026: $115B
→ October 2026: $121.2B 🤯
Important: this is not a new funding round. It is an implied valuation based on private secondary-market pricing.
But the numbers behind it are getting difficult to ignore:
→ 2025 revenue: $6.0B (+46%)
→ Profit before tax: $2.3B (+57%)
→ Retail customers: 68.3M (+30%)
→ Fifth consecutive profitable year
And now the IPO talk is getting serious.
CEO Nik Storonsky has reportedly told investors that Revolut could target a valuation of between $150B and $200B when it eventually goes public.
He has also indicated that a US listing is his preferred option.
From a $33B valuation in 2021 to potentially $200B at IPO.
Revolut’s rise is becoming one of the biggest FinTech stories of this decade.
Would you buy Revolut at a $200B valuation?
Dan Feaheny retweeted
Ramp is currently valued at $60 billion. That price assumes it keeps taking work away from the finance department.
The product line says as much.
Ramp now closes your books, tracks what you spend on AI, and routes which model answers the question.
Fintech Mercury hooked its accounts and payments into AI agents, with a human tap required before money leaves.
Software has handled corporate spend for years.
What changes now is that it starts making the call on where the cash sits and which rail the payment takes.
Banks spent a decade competing for the CFO. The CFO is increasingly a workflow with a budget attached, and it does not care about your app redesign.That is the real bet inside the valuation. Not a better card.
A customer who decides where the deposits go.
I wrote about it in the latest Fintech Blueprint, including the debt quietly underwriting all this conviction:
lex.substack.com/p/analysis-…
Dan Feaheny retweeted
🚨𝙃𝙀𝙍𝙀 𝙒𝙀 𝙂𝙊! @Mastercard didn't waste any time with @BVNKFinance.
Two months after the acquisition, the first joint product is already live.
It's called Global Money Platform, and the idea is pretty simple: fiat and stablecoins sitting side by side in one account, behind one API.
Banks and FinTechs can plug it into their own apps under their own brand. Here's what they get:
• Multi-currency accounts (fiat + stablecoins)
• Real-time conversion between the two
• Stablecoin-linked cards
• Local bank payouts via Mastercard Move
And this is where Mastercard's scale kicks in. Think 17B+ endpoints, hundreds of millions of merchants where you can spend stablecoin balances, and card issuing in 130+ countries 🤯
@Nuvei and @marqeta are among the first to sign up, together with OnTop, Beem and @AlmondFintech.
Why does this matter? Ask any company paying suppliers in 10 different countries. Separate accounts, separate vendors, money pre-funded everywhere.. Mastercard wants to make that one integration.
And they're already looking further ahead, with agentic commerce and tokenized deposits on the roadmap.
For years, stablecoins were happening next to the card networks. Now Mastercard is pulling them right into its own stack.
Dan Feaheny retweeted
Future of #shopping and #payments- @Mastercard
#Digitalpayment #ecommerce #AIAgent #Agenticcommerce #AI #AgenticAI #fintech #finserv #crypto #dataprivacy #cybersecurity #regulation #Regtech #trust
@Damien_CABADI @bamitav @mikeflache @Corix_JC
@jasuja
mastercard.com/news/europe/e…
