George Robson

Education, like entrepreneurship, is an incredible vehicle for change. For my parents, education unlocked a new world of opportunities, so they prioritized it for me and my sisters. We could go wherever we wanted for school, provided we got enough scholarships to get there. So I sat waves of exams from age 10. I had phenomenal schooling, earning my right to be there from the generosity of others. I think about that a lot and it forced me to think more seriously about how I spent my time. I went to the LSE to study economics. It’s a fascinating place—like 140 countries on one small campus. While at LSE, I co-founded an accelerator with some friends and am still on the board.

I first met the Revolut team while I was studying. When I was at Morgan Stanley I saw the product starting to take off. I was drawn to this group of outsiders to financial services, disrupting the world’s largest industry for the benefit of millions of consumers and businesses. I built a product line there, and left intending to start my own company. Then COVID hit. Heeding the Black Swan Memo, I decided to wait six months, and Sequoia was a welcome interloper in those plans.

Grit and determination. They’re intangibles that I seek out in those I like to spend time with. You can have this without big logos or big brands on your CV. I think it’s increasingly true that you can live anywhere, do any job from anywhere and found a business from anywhere. This creates a lot of opportunity here in the EU with so many ecosystems and centers for excellence.

Strong teams need to have alignment about what success looks like. Building a company is incredibly incremental, a group of you trying to push a giant rock up a hill. I think there’s something quite beautiful about that kind of challenge.

The world’s first trillionaire will either be in climate, or in crypto. Zero-carbon concrete—somebody needs to solve that problem. It’s not sexy, but it would give us more time to solve everything else. In crypto there is a unique opportunity to rewrite pillars of our financial system; enabling people to share digital assets across borders instantly for free and promote greater interoperability of both data, assets and global liquidity. It has the capacity to be an important leveler for people to participate in the financial system, wherever they are.