Antoine Le Nel on Why Belief Is the Enemy of Growth

The Anti-Playbook Playbook

Antoine Le Nel doesn't believe in anything. Not in brand marketing. Not in influencers. Not in Formula One sponsorships or billboard campaigns or the conventional wisdom that experienced operators bring playbooks that work. After seven years at King, where he was VP of Growth for Candy Crush, and now as Chief Growth & Marketing Officer at Revolut, one of the fastest-growing fintechs on the planet, Le Nel has arrived at a counterintuitive thesis: belief is the enemy of growth.

I have no belief in anything. I have no belief in anything. I don't necessarily believe more in brand than in influencers than in this and so on. Whatever works works for me.

— Antoine Le Nel

This isn't nihilism. It's empiricism taken to its logical extreme. At Revolut, there are no grand marketing coups, no viral moments that show up as spikes in the data. The company's growth curve is unnervingly steady, accelerating week after week, powered not by conviction but by a growth engine built from dozens of interlocking components, each one measured, tweaked, and killed if it doesn't perform. The result? A company that continues to grow faster as it gets bigger, defying the gravitational pull that slows most high-growth businesses.

King Taught Him to Worship Data. Revolut Taught Him When to Ignore It.

At King, Le Nel worked inside what he calls "the most data-driven organization I've ever been in." The company launched games every quarter, ran a thousand A/B tests in parallel, and killed projects quickly when the numbers didn't show promise. It was a volume game: test extensively, launch fast, optimize everything. Data wasn't just an input at King—it was the only decision maker.

That approach worked brilliantly for a mobile gaming company in optimization mode. But it also went too far. Le Nel recalls looking at spreadsheets in meetings instead of playing the games themselves. The data became more important than the product experience. When he joined Revolut, he found almost no A/B testing. His initial reaction was shock. Then he understood why.

If you're a good product manager, you don't need an A/B test. You should be able to know what is the right product. The second reason is because at Revolut, we wanted to do like 10x. Everything is 10x and so on. You don't need an A/B test to measure a 10x. You do it, you see it goes up, it's good.

— Antoine Le Nel

The third reason: A/B testing slows you down. At King, teams would test, wait for results, then launch. At Revolut, they just launch. The philosophy isn't reckless—it's lifecycle-appropriate. Revolut is still in creation mode, not optimization mode. The company is organized as a collection of self-sufficient startups, each with extreme autonomy and focus. Product velocity matters more than precision. When something doesn't work—a TV campaign in week two, a generic creative, an influencer with weak social media chops—they cut it immediately.

Growth Is a Bidding War, and Measurement Is Your Only Moat

Performance marketing, in Le Nel's view, hasn't fundamentally changed since his King days. Yes, attribution is harder post-iOS 14. Yes, the landscape is more crowded and expensive. But the core game remains the same: it's a bidding war. Whoever can bid highest wins the impressions. The question is who can afford to bid highest, and that comes down to one thing: your measurement framework.

Your competitive advantage will always come from your ability to measure more than your competitors, because then suddenly you're going to do that.

— Antoine Le Nel

At King, Le Nel's team cracked TV attribution before competitors, allowing them to scale TV spend while others stayed away. At Revolut, he's built what he calls a "growth engine"—a synchronized machine where upper funnel (brand), mid funnel, and lower funnel (conversion) work together. The lower funnel acts as a fishing net, grabbing every conversion that brand and mid-funnel activity feed it. The balance between these components shifts based on market maturity: newer markets focus on conversion, mature markets invest more in upper funnel.

The hardest part of building a growth engine? The measurement framework. Tech operators suffer from a predictable bias: they do things they can measure. Le Nel's answer is to measure things others can't. Take Revolut's airport advertising. The company doesn't just run ads on jet bridges at Rome airport—they install vending machines next to them where travelers can collect a Revolut card on the spot. Scan a QR code, create an account, the card links automatically. Attribution solved.

Virality Is Infrastructure, Not a Campaign

Most growth teams treat virality as a tactic—a referral program to bolt on later. Le Nel treats it as foundational infrastructure. Virality should be baked into the product from day one, sitting "below the lower funnel" in the growth engine. But there's a division of labor: product teams build the virality engine with the right parameters and user experience, then hand it to growth teams to operate and optimize. Growth has better analytical frameworks to measure ROI. Product has better instincts for what users will tolerate.

This separation also prevents the most common way growth engines break down: when operators start to believe in things. Belief leads to conviction. Conviction leads to doubling down on tactics that feel right but don't perform. Le Nel changed his own playbook dramatically when he moved from King to Revolut. At King, he was skeptical of upper-funnel brand marketing—it was hard to measure, hard to trust. At Revolut, he tested it in mature markets and found it worked. Not because he believed in it, but because he could prove it.

There's been some influencers that just didn't work at all. Doing some big brand campaigns with some celebrities that are just not necessarily super good with social media, let's put it this way, that just doesn't work. You just learn.

— Antoine Le Nel

Founder Mode on Steroids, and the Question of Endurance

Le Nel describes working at Revolut as "founder mode on steroids." The founding team remains heavily involved, setting the tempo and maintaining the same mindset they had at launch a decade ago. That consistency is rare and powerful. But Le Nel raises a question most people don't ask about founder mode: how long can you sustain it?

At Revolut, the answer so far is: longer than expected. The company's growth isn't slowing—it's accelerating. There are no massive marketing campaigns, no spikes from viral moments. Just a steady, compounding engine that gets more optimized every week. The company is flat, teams are self-sufficient, and there's no tolerance for interdependencies that slow things down. Critics might call them silos. Le Nel calls it focus.

We are splitting the company into as many startups as possible. Every team has a huge amount of autonomy and of focus to really go very fast in what they do.

— Antoine Le Nel

There's no CAC discussion at Revolut. The company only talks about ROI, because focusing on customer acquisition cost encourages teams to acquire the worst cohorts—the cheapest ones. There's no belief in localization, which Le Nel considers overrated. There's no waiting for campaigns to finish if the data shows failure in week two. And there's no room for the kind of optimization theater that plagues mature organizations, where A/B tests become a way to avoid making decisions.

Le Nel's approach is both disciplined and ruthless. He's willing to test anything—vending machines, influencers, TV, airport billboards—but only if he can measure it. And if it doesn't work, he kills it fast. The growth engine at Revolut isn't built on big bets or visionary hunches. It's built on dozens of small, measurable experiments that compound into something bigger. The moment you start believing in your tactics more than your data, the engine breaks. That's the playbook: have no playbook. Measure everything. Believe in nothing.