Revolut doubled its graduate and intern intake this year to over 200 people, up from around 120 in 2025. The acceptance rate for the program, called Rev-celerator, sits somewhere between 0.44% and 0.67%, tighter than Goldman Sachs runs for its own summer analysts. More than 70% of interns from the last three cohorts got converted into full-time offers. This isn't an informal habit of the founder. It's a named, published, company-wide policy that Revolut has run for years and just doubled in size.
The company that hires this way also invests this way
Last week Nik Storonsky's venture fund closed its second round at $500 million, oversubscribed, fifteen months after the first one. He started QuantumLight in 2023 while still running Revolut day to day, and it screens startups through a system called Aleph with as little gut feel as the firm can manage. Twenty-seven companies backed, five of them already unicorns. When the first fund closed, he described the whole idea in one sentence: "Our ambition is to build the world's best systematic venture capital and growth equity firm, and support the new generation of founders by sharing some of the operating principles that we developed at Revolut."
Read that sentence carefully. He isn't describing his own instincts. He's describing Revolut's operating principles, the same ones behind Rev-celerator, applied to a different kind of asset.
Same policy, different asset
A venture fund that waits until a startup has proven itself pays growth-stage prices for what used to be seed-stage risk, which defeats the entire point of investing early. QuantumLight's CEO, Ilya Kondrashov, described the fund's whole premise as testing "whether systematic analysis can consistently identify market leaders in an industry traditionally driven by personal networks." Find the company before the market agrees it's good, while a stake in it is still cheap.
Revolut's hiring policy is the identical trade, just with a different asset. Instead of a startup, it's a 22-year-old three months out of university.
By the time someone's value is obvious to everyone, it's already priced into their salary.
And once it's priced in, every other company with a checkbook is bidding against you for the same person. Get there earlier, while they're still unproven and cheap to bet on, and you get two things a later hire almost never gives you. The upside if the bet works out. And the loyalty of someone who remembers exactly who took the risk on them when nobody else would.
I've hired the safe, finished-looking candidate before, the one three other companies were chasing at the same time, and paid full price for the privilege of being one of five equally flattering offers on their desk. The hires who stayed the longest were never that person. They were always the ones nobody else had circled yet.
articleDiscussionTitle