YouSaid · the spoken record

Alan Chang

lines on the record: 74
first: 2026-01-05
most recent: 2026-01-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“They're very old school, sew pen and paper, spreadsheet based companies that are incredibly inefficient. Now, there's not much I can do about regulation, but I think we can for sure build the best version of best energy company using the latest technology.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reasons. The first reason is overregulation. It's very hard to build anything in the UK, like physical otherwise. Let me give you an example, right? So we try and build a power plant in the UK. And, you know, one of the things the council have a complete discretion over is planning, especially around environmental impact. So we had to do wintering bird surveys over several winters. So how that works is you hire a guy with a clipboard and they count number birds in the winter. And until that survey is done, you can't build. So that's one example where it's so hard to build something physical in Britain. Right now, I can tell you if you speak to any of the infra capital providers, they want to deploy a lot of capital to building infrastructure. So the problem is not capital. The problem is it's very, very hard to build. So that's the first reason. The second reason I would say is the quality of companies operating in this space is not very sophisticated. Like a lot of these existing energy companies, they are not technology driven.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're in energy crisis already. In the whole developed economies, UK is in the deepest trouble. So if you look at energy consumption per capita in the last 25 years, UK's dropped 25%. In the US, it's been flat. In China, in the same period of time, it's gone up by seven times, seven times in the same period of time. And energy prices have gone up. price volatility has gone up. Everything is trending in the wrong direct”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the takeaway is you can have it all three ways, right? You can have low cost energy, you're going to have more energy, and you can have lower carbon energy at the same time.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Think about the average American home, right? They have a large detached house, big driveway, several cars, big backyard, maybe a swimming pool, maybe a sauna, and maybe a jacuzzi. And that's like, you know, middle class. Like we're not talking about like ultra-wealthy Americans. Even if you look at the wealthy Brits living in London.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's important to have a common goal. For example, if Fuse, our common goal is no trade-offs. You know, looking back last 20 years, right? Like this green movement, basically telling people to use less, right? So you had politicians that says you shouldn't drive less to work. You should turn heating on less often. You should fly less. You should do less of everything in order to save the environment. And then you have energy prices slowly creeping up over the last 20 years as well. It's basically trade-offs. I think that's totally wrong. It's actually moving in the complete opposite direction, right? We should be using more energy. There's actually a very strong correlation between how much energy you use per capita and quality of life, right? And if you look at the Americans, right, the Americans use almost eight times more energy than Europeans and look at the quality of life.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I think the product diversification could have happened even if Revel got the banking license earlier. I think Nick is totally right. The issue is the bigger you get, the I guess more scared the regulators are of you because if you succeed, they have no upside. They don't get a bigger bonus. But if you fail, they might lose their jobs. So they're incentivized to be risk averse as opposed to risk neutral, right? Whereas what's best for the economy is actually risk neutral regulators.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think product diversification is so important. I mean, let me give one example why that was so important. So I drained the COVID lockdowns, the interchange revenue. So, you know, revenue from people spending on cards, especially abroad, went basically near zero. However, there was a lot of seamless checks, right? From the COVID times and the stock market was booming and the crypto market was booming. So whilst the interchange revenue went down, you know, trading revenue went off. So it kind of offset each other. So that was a great example where diversification actually helped make the company's revenues much more resilient.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you site incentivizing a metric, you need to think about okay what are the second order consequences? Let's take a very simple example. Let's say a recruiter. If you give a KPI to a recruiter, let's say on hires per month, what they might start to do because their bonus depends on it, is trying to convince hiring managers to lower the talent bar. And I've seen that happen before. That's actually not what the company wants, right? What the company wants is actually keep the talent bar high. So instead, they try to, you know, some recruiters that really want to chase a bonus is they try and negotiate hiring managers, try and convince them, this is the best you're going to find, you're going to find someone better, et cetera, et cetera.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say the overuse of KPIs because ultimately there are things you should measure which tells you the health of that team, how well they're doing, and you should 100% do that. But then once you start incentivizing against that, teams find ways to game it. Nick is a super numbers driven guy, right? And I think that worked very well in a large part. But I would say not everything should be the KPI.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with that, yeah. I think you have to pick a battles for sure. Ultimately, you need to identify the most important roles in the company and never settle on those roles. But the roles that matter less, I think it's perfectly okay to settle.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Rebels culture never settled, like in terms of speed and quality is something I took over. Revela had a lot of cultural values and to be honest, like, I think it's a bit too many for me. I always forget all of them.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Join Fuse, that's okay. Like, I totally respect what people want, you know, like a nine to five job, right? There's nothing wrong with wanting work-life balance. But I think the only way to build a generational company is like very, very strong work ethic. I just don't see any other way to do it.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're off execution maybe every year. I think the mindset should be, I think you need to be best versions of yourself. So you always need to review, okay, in the past week, in the past month, what could I have done better? Maybe a more extreme analogy, right? Like I used to ask my team, right, at Rev, 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.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem was speed of execution. We were too slow. We want to ship a bunch of things and we didn't. Things were delayed.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of results, right? Or lack thereof. I always emphasize we're not moving fast enough, we could be doing more, but we're not. For example, I told the team last year execution was maybe four out of ten, right? And we need to get a 10 to 10 out of 10 and we're not passing.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll say the Getcha Done culture, the best way to build something great, very, very fast. And it's something I talk on board by even amped it up even more.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All about results. I think Nicks make this analogy before the three types of people in the world are people who can self-identify the target and shoot and hit the goal. Then there are people who can't identify targets. But if you point, they shoot and they hit the goal. And then the third type of people, which is neither, right? You want to maximize the first and second group of people and you want ideally the first and second type of people leading teams. And basically the throughput of your company is basically a sum of the number of people in the first and second bucket.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think have small teams operating in the independent units and give them very clear goals, let them execute. And what you should do is monitor those teams. If they do well, let them be. If they don't do well, replace the team.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, at the time when we got started, there were basically three players there was Revluts, Monzo, and N26. And for the first two years, at least from the outside, it feels like neck to neck, right? It wasn't clear who the winner was. But for me, it was crystal clear, right? It was crystal clear who's going to win. And the reason why is because it's just the team's ambition and execution, right? Because ultimately, if you ask the same teams at the time, like basically the product roll map. Almost everyone would tell you basically the same. There wasn't any differentiation in product roadmap. But what differentiate between us and everyone else was basically ambition and the speed of execution. I think that was it.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and so level 39 is for those who don't know it's basically a giant startup co-working space with maybe over 200 startups. And Revlut was the only team that worked past 7 p.m. on the weekday. So after 7 p.m., the whole floor is dead. It was also the only team that worked on the weekends. So when I realized that I knew there was something special, the second moment was I asked Nick, what's your ambition? What keeps you motivated? And at the time he's worth quite a bit of money already, so what drives him, right? And he told me he wants to be JP Morgan. So that's the second moment I realized this is going to be a massive company.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so at the time, Tessa full time, it was Nick Blood and two other full-time engineers, and that was it. So it was just hot desking. Job was just, it was called Operations Analyst, but effectively the first three months was doing customer support.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the time I just graduated, and I was just perusing on the Facebook group, like it was called London Startups. And I saw this job post Revolut. I was like, okay, I have no idea what this company does. But I was looking for fresh cries. I was like, okay, I applied. And Nick replied within five minutes. I was like, oh wow, that's very quick. And then he asked me to come for a face-to-face interview the next day. So I came for an interview and he asked me a bunch of physics questions. I was like, I didn't realize I was applying for a physics job. And he offered me a role in a right after the interview. I said yes. And that was it. That was like the fastest interview process I've ever had.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. There's nothing wrong with wanting work-life balance. But I think the only way to build a generational company is like very, very strong work ethic. I just don't see any other way to do it. Excuses don't matter. 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. We increase our revenue 10x every year since inception. The first year was £2 million. Second year was £20. And then this year we're going to end at over £200.”
2026-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source