When Did Experience Become a Liability? – The Revolut CEO and the Myth of Human Expiration Dates

I came across an article in the Swedish newspaper Göteborgs-Posten about Nik Storonsky, founder and CEO of the digital bank Revolut. The headline explained why he avoids hiring experienced executives. His argument is simple and provocative: previous achievements do not predict future success. During Revolut's first five years, he reportedly recruited more than 50 experienced executives. After one year, only two remained. His conclusion is that traditional management experience is often overrated and that companies should instead look for people who are still on their way up.

In an interview with David Senra on October 25, 2026, he elaborates on this thinking. He compares executives to professional football players who reach their highest performance level during a relatively limited period. Eventually, priorities change, competition evolves, and the qualities that once made them successful may no longer be as valuable. Storonsky therefore prefers recruiting people around the ages of 25 to 30 who have already demonstrated exceptionally rapid career development. He wants to capture their potential before they reach their peak.

I understand what he means. After many years in professional life, I have encountered people whose primary competence seems to be their ability to refer to something they accomplished a long time ago. But I have also met young people who, before turning thirty, have already become completely convinced that they know everything worth knowing.

That is why I question his conclusion. Not because experience is automatically valuable, but because he seems to confuse two entirely different characteristics: having lived a long life and having stopped developing.

When Past Achievements Become a False Sense of Security

There is legitimate criticism in Storonsky's argument. Many organizations still recruit people based on previous titles, prestigious employers, and impressive positions. Someone who has been the CEO of a major company is assumed to be qualified to lead another. Someone who built a successful organization fifteen years ago is expected to repeat that achievement under entirely different technological and economic circumstances.

The world does not work that way.

Success always depends on context. It emerges through a combination of individual ability, favorable circumstances, available resources, other people, and sometimes sheer luck. Someone who succeeded in a hierarchical organization with enormous budgets and hundreds of employees may not be particularly effective in a small, fast-moving operation where decisions are made immediately and technology changes every week.

Long experience can also create a kind of intellectual complacency. When your methods have been rewarded for many years, it becomes increasingly easy to confuse them with universal truths. You begin defending what you already know rather than exploring what you have yet to understand.

This is a genuine problem. But it is not an age problem. It is a question of attitude, self-image, and the ability to reconsider one's own conclusions.

What makes Storonsky's argument somewhat contradictory is that he himself uses previous achievements to predict future performance. He wants to recruit young people who already belong to the most successful members of their age group. Their rapid development is supposed to indicate continued potential. In other words, he does not reject historical achievements. He simply chooses a different kind of history and assumes it is more relevant.

That may be a successful strategy at Revolut. But it remains a prediction based on the past. A 28-year-old with an exceptional career trajectory may stagnate at 35, just as a 60-year-old may discover an entirely new field and develop faster than ever before.

The real question should therefore not be how quickly someone has advanced, but what happens when that person encounters something that cannot be solved using previous experience.

Only then do we discover whether we are dealing with genuine learning ability or merely a well-trained capacity to repeat previous successes.

Fifty Failed Recruitments – But Whose Failure Was It?

There is another aspect of the interview that I find equally interesting. Storonsky explains that more than 50 experienced executive recruitments resulted in only two people remaining after one year. He presents this as evidence against hiring experienced executives.

But shouldn't such a figure also raise questions about the employer?

If an organization recruits a large number of highly qualified people and almost all of them disappear within a year, there are at least three possible explanations. The individuals were unsuitable for their assignments, the recruitment process was flawed, or the organization's leadership and culture created conditions these people could not or would not accept. Naturally, it could also be a combination of these factors.

We do not know enough to determine which explanation is correct.

There is also a difference between someone failing and someone choosing to leave. An experienced executive may discover that an organization's working methods, values, or leadership philosophy are incompatible with their own understanding of how a company should operate. Walking away from such an environment is not necessarily a sign of inadequate competence.

Storonsky also describes a company where competition, speed, independence, and performance measurement appear to carry enormous importance. He wants people who barely need managing, who can identify problems and immediately turn decisions into action. There is something appealingly efficient about that philosophy. I have always appreciated people who take responsibility without asking permission for every decision.

But independence is not the same as youth. And intense performance is not always synonymous with sustainable success.

This points to something characteristic of parts of today's technology industry: the assumption that an organization's success can be explained through the personal convictions of its founder. When a company grows rapidly, the founder's working methods can easily become universal truths. What worked in one particular company is presented as a principle everyone else should follow.

We should be cautious about drawing such conclusions. A successful entrepreneur can be right about their own business while simultaneously reaching questionable conclusions about human ability in general.

Research Tells a Different Story About Our Best Years

The idea that entrepreneurship primarily belongs to young people is remarkably persistent. We have become accustomed to stories about young technology geniuses founding billion-dollar companies from student rooms and garages. Their stories are fascinating, but they do not necessarily represent the broader reality.

An extensive American study by Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda, first published as a research paper in 2018 and later in American Economic Review: Insights, examined the ages of founders of high-growth companies. The results surprised many observers: among the founders of the fastest-growing 0.1 percent of new businesses, the average age at founding was 45. The researchers also found that previous experience within the relevant industry was strongly associated with the likelihood of entrepreneurial success.

This does not mean that 45 is some magical age, or that research about company founders can be transferred directly to executive recruitment. But it challenges the popular assumption that youth itself is the primary prerequisite for innovation.

Another meta-analysis, published by Thomas Ng and Daniel Feldman in 2008, examined the relationship between age and ten different dimensions of job performance. The researchers found that age was largely unrelated to performance in core work tasks, creativity, and training outcomes. Relationships varied, however, across other categories of workplace behavior.

There is therefore no straightforward scientific basis for claiming that people generally become worse at their jobs simply because they grow older.

At the same time, we should not romanticize aging. According to the OECD's Employment Outlook 2025, participation in continuing education declines with age. In 2023, only about one-third of people aged 60–65 had participated in adult learning during the previous year, compared with more than half of those aged 25–44. Learning through everyday work also declines.

This is a genuine challenge. But the OECD also shows that employers invest less in training older workers. Lower participation in education therefore cannot be explained solely by individual motivation.

A vicious circle emerges. Employers expect older people to be less interested in learning, consequently invest less in their development, and then use their lower participation in training as confirmation that the original assumption was correct.

It is a self-fulfilling prophecy that risks being mistaken for objective reality.

AI Is Changing the Rules – Even for Those Over Sixty

What makes this entire discussion particularly relevant is the technological transformation taking place around us. Artificial intelligence is beginning to change the relationship between experience, competence, and practical ability in ways that have not yet received enough attention.

Throughout most of my professional life, an idea had to pass through many hands before it could become reality. It required organizations, specialists, financing, technical resources, and considerable coordination. Someone could have an excellent idea but lack the ability to execute it independently.

That is now changing.

A person who has never programmed before can begin developing digital services with the assistance of AI. Someone with a background in healthcare, logistics, culture, tourism, or industry can use their experience to identify problems and combine that understanding with new technology to create solutions. This does not mean technical expertise has become unnecessary or that AI automatically produces functional products. But the distance between an idea and a working prototype has become considerably shorter.

This is also the background to my own work with PROTO, an independent digital idea workshop where I explore AI, applications, and new concepts. After a long professional life in film production, concerts, events, and international projects, I no longer operate in the same professional world as before. Nor am I trying to return to it.

Instead, I am using those experiences as the foundation for something new.

What interests me is not the idea that I have suddenly become a programmer or an artificial intelligence expert. It is that I can combine previous experience of people, organizations, complex projects, and practical problem-solving with technological possibilities that were beyond my reach only a few years ago.

The results are not polished success stories. They are experiments, prototypes, mistakes, revisions, and a growing understanding of what can actually be achieved.

I am also aware that my situation is not representative of everyone. Curiosity is not equally distributed, digital tools are not automatically accessible, and many older people lack both the financial freedom and the confidence to start again. That is precisely why we need new approaches to learning that do not assume people should primarily maintain their existing knowledge after reaching a certain age.

This is one of the ideas behind PROTO PLUS, an initiative aimed at people over sixty that explores how new technology can create opportunities for continued creativity, independence, and personal development.

Not because everyone should become an entrepreneur. Not because people should work until they die. But because the right to remain curious should not expire when the labor market begins treating us as finished products.

The real potential may not lie in older people trying to compete with younger people on exactly the same terms. It may lie in combining different strengths. A younger person may bring technical speed and a close understanding of emerging behaviors. An older person may bring deeper experience of context, consequences, conflicts, and human needs. None of these qualities is guaranteed by age, but their combination can be considerably more valuable than the endless search for an ideal age group.

And as AI reduces the need for large organizations, someone with a long professional career may suddenly gain access to tools that allow them to work more independently than ever before. Experience no longer needs to be used primarily to manage other people. It can be applied directly to creating something.

Perhaps the Most Dangerous Age Is the Age When We Stop Being Curious

I believe Storonsky is right about one important thing. Previous success guarantees nothing. Anyone who believes they are competent simply because they were successful in the past is taking a considerable risk in a rapidly changing world.

But the same reasoning should work in the opposite direction. Youth does not guarantee future success. An exceptional career at 28 is no proof that someone will continue developing throughout their life.

Perhaps the decisive quality is the ability to abandon an old conviction when reality demonstrates that it no longer holds.

Personally, I have little interest in reclaiming old positions. I no longer need to prove that I can lead major projects, manage crises, or make complex productions work. That part of my life has given me experiences I value, but it is not where I am looking for my future.

What interests me now is everything I do not yet know. The opportunity to learn something new, investigate an idea, and occasionally discover that something I thought was impossible can actually be accomplished.

There is a particular freedom in no longer needing to defend a professional identity. You can allow yourself to become a beginner again without having to start your entire life from zero.

Perhaps this is what Storonsky's reasoning overlooks. He is searching for people who have not yet reached their professional peak. But what if human development is not a single mountain with an ascent, a summit, and a decline? What if life consists instead of several different landscapes, where experiences from one field open pathways into another?

Someone may have passed the peak of one particular career while simultaneously entering the beginning of their most creative period.

That is also why I find the labor market's constant distinction between young people's potential and older people's experience so limiting. It suggests that young people have a future while older people primarily have a past.

But experience is not merely something we accumulate. It can also become something we use to imagine possibilities that do not yet exist.

Perhaps, then, we should stop asking when people reach their highest performance level and begin asking what they need in order to continue developing.

Because one of the most underestimated resources in tomorrow's society may well be the untapped potential of older people.

And that potential does not disappear at 40, 50, 60, or 70.

It disappears only when we ourselves, or the society around us, decide that there is no longer any point in trying.