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Next, on The Recursive podcast we welcome Victor Trokoudes, co-Founder and CEO of one of the fastest-growing fintech companies in the UK, Plum.
Plum is a European smart money app that aims to grow people’s wealth through automation. It’s built to improve financial outcomes for everyone by helping customers save, invest, budget, and spend. The company currently has over 1.3 million customers in Europe and has raised more than $24 million in investment.
From the trading floor to entrepreneurship
As Victor explains, the idea for building Plum was to have “a button that you press and your financial life is sorted out.”
Victor Trokoudes is a Cypriot- Canadian serial entrepreneur, who grew up in Cyprus. He now lives in London but has a solid educational background from the USA, where he studied economics at Harvard, and France, where he got his MBA at INSEAD.
Victor started his career on a trading floor at Morgan Stanley, and then joined a small team of 5 at TransferWise, which was a fintech unicorn of 600 employees by the time he left.
Despite his success in the corporate world and clear future prospects, Victor always knew he wanted to go down the entrepreneurial path. First with the POS terminal reseller BlueBird, which he exited successfully and then with Plum.
“If you look at the world and you see things that are not good or less optimal and you can make them better, I think that’s when you create value. For me, tech is taking fat out of things. There is a lot of fat in the world, in financial services especially, so it feels like you create value because you’re taking a process and making it more efficient, and, in our case, [creating] better outcomes for individuals”, Victor says about what pushed him to become a tech entrepreneur.
Both with TransferWise and Plum, Trokoudes collected extensive experience in scaling a business. Now, running his own company, he applies the vision of leading a mission-driven company where you bring value to the world and move things in a better direction. He believes that having a clear mission and a clear impact attracts like-minded people which makes scaling easier and alignment within the company smoother.
“The most dangerous thing when you’re launching a startup is to think small”, he adds. “If you think small, you’ll always be thinking about the cost side of the business, rather than the growth side of the business. Thinking big gives you the advantage to build a bigger, stronger team and motivate people that are motivated by big things.”
Tune in to learn more about his leadership style and vision. In the episode, Victor also shares some insightful tips & tricks on building your investment strategy.
Watch the previous episode to delve into the specifics of building a successful marketplace with Svetoslav Dimov, CEO of the Bulgarian IT job board DEV.BG.
