Revolut engineers will (really) not be hurt by falling valuation

Getting paid shares in a startup used to be an exciting bonus for joining fintech. Today it’s a game. Revolut may be on the verge of a decline in value soon, but will its employees really be hurt by it?

For top unicorns operating in the fintech space, a key factor attracting top talent has long been the inclusion of stock in their compensation plans. Fintechs such as Stripe have historically paid shares in a number of ways, such as RSUs (restricted stock units) that give their employees more of a vested interest in the company and allow them to benefit more from the company’s success.

Things have changed over the past year as funding rounds have dwindled and valuations have fallen. Revolut is still operating at the $33 billion valuation it achieved in 2021, but as investors gradually reduce their assessments of the value of their stakes in the company (Schroders roughly halved its valuation this week), it seems unlikely they can operate at that value. forever.

This is something that all the biggest fintechs have to face. Stripe recently halved its valuation as part of a funding round that allowed the company to buy back all the RSUs it gave its employees, but for Revolut’s employees, the negative impact of a declining valuation isn’t really that important.

Salary data from levels.fyi tells us that warehouse payments at Revolut are not that common, nor are they particularly large when they do happen. Of the 13 salaries paid in 2023, only three reported stock payments and two of those were less than $10,000.

Revolut’s largest equity payment at Levelsfyi this year was $60,000, just a third of the engineer’s total compensation. This is nothing compared to Stripe, where it’s more common to get paid over $100k in inventory than not. The highest engineering share payment so far this year was $640,000 of a TC just over $1M. Given the drop in value, it is unlikely that he would have received the full amount in the RSU vesting.

Level data on alternative employee roles is more scarce, but indicates that this may not be uniform across the company. Product managers, for example, appear to receive stock payments more frequently, with the most recent salary reported to be an entry-level employee receiving $18.1 in stock payments.

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