From Uber to Revolut to Bitpanda: Inside Irina Scarlat’s formula for ‘hyper-growth’

It is fitting that Irina Scarlat, chief growth officer at the $4.1 billion investment platform Bitpanda, speaks so quickly. So, too, is it apt that her language is chock-full of the tropes of the tech startup industry. Her last five years have been a whirlwind tour of it. 

Scarlat wants to hire “A-players,” she explains over a video call. She has a precise formula for vaulting startups into “hyper-growth” mode. And she likens working in rapidly expanding companies to “building a rocket ship while flying it.”

To what extent Scarlat has assumed this language and to what extent she helped formulate it during stints in senior roles at Uber, Revolut and now Bitpanda is difficult to discern. Either way, her methods seem to be effective.

In July 2016, she became Uber’s first marketing recruit in her native Romania. She describes the experience as her “MBA [Master of Business Administration].”

During her two-year stint, Uber went from zero to one million local users.

Scarlat then joined Revolut, the $33 billion digital bank, to run its operations in Romania. By the time she left in March 2021, she was global head of growth — a department she set up herself. According to reports, Revolut had around two million users in 2018; it had more than 15 million by the time Scarlat left.

In her new role at Bitpanda, a platform that allows users to invest in a range of cryptocurrencies, stocks and precious metals, Scarlat aims to grow the platform’s three million users to ten million by the end of 2022.

In search of hyper-growth

Revolut and Uber, whatever else their reputation, are two of the fastest-growing startups of the past decade. Their secret, according to Scarlat, is that their success came about through “community-driven growth.”

She has a formula for how this happens. First, a startup needs a good product.

“If you have a bad product, no matter how good at marketing you are, you’re not going to be able to grow it,” says Scarlat. 

Marketing-driven growth only works, she argues, as a method of amplifying organic growth. But there is a “missing link” between having a stellar product and paying for marketing, be it digital or physical: an engaged community. What follows are the sort of network effects that can propel apps into the mainstream, according to Scarlat. 

And what is the recipe for a lively community? Here she returns to the language of the tech world. 

“Everything that’s connected to thought leadership; everything that’s connected to building a strong community of users around your product; looking at your power users and bringing them close to you, listening to them in order to optimize the product, and turning them into brand ambassadors and brand advocates for your product,” she says.

Another of Scarlat’s key priorities for shifting Bitpanda into hyper-growth mode is the fine-tuning of its Vienna-headquartered workforce. Specifically, she wants to “build the organization structure for scale.” As part of this, the firm is developing a standard remote working setup. 

The plan, of course, also involves hiring and lots of it. That is to be expected of a startup that has raised more than $500 million in the past 12 months from the likes of Peter Thiel and Alan Howard, the British billionaire.

But the finer mechanics of hyper-growth environments warrant closer attention. Misalignments, after all, can create punishing working conditions for the people at the controls — as we have seen with both Revolut and Uber before it.

Escaping the hamster wheel

Scarlat believes there is “a special category of person” for whom working in the high-pressure startup world is well-suited.

She says she loved her time working at both Uber and Revolut — but that is not to say there were not low moments. She says she was “struggling” during the early stages of her stint at Uber, working more than 12 hours a day, six days a week. It was only the intervention of her manager at the time, who gave her license to hire a bigger team to tackle the workload, that prevented her from quitting.

“Because you can easily burn out, I think prioritization is key,” she says. “Particularly in the beginning, if you’re junior, if you’re mid-level — you need to have the right manager in place to help you prioritize correctly because otherwise, you might end up running like a hamster in a wheel and not actually delivering results.”

Scarlat describes herself as a Type A personality who can’t sit still. She published a blog post in March in which she explained that she had worked until the moment she gave birth to her son, who was born halfway through her stint at Revolut, and returned to work shortly after.

But she says she is, today more so than earlier in her career, a firm believer in work-life balance. When she left Revolut she committed to taking at least three months off.

“I took four, so I declare it a success,” she says. “It’s up to us, as people operating in a high-growth environment, to prioritize our mental wellbeing.”

Of course, the extent to which any employee can, in fact, prioritize their mental wellbeing is also determined by the nature of their place of work. In this regard, Scarlat likes what she has seen from Bitpanda’s co-CEO Eric Demuth. She perused his LinkedIn posts about Bitpanda before joining and noted that all of them were about the people behind the platform.

“We have a saying in the Romanian language that the fence is well painted on the outside but there is a leopard inside. It wasn’t that situation here. It was clear that it was genuine,” she says.

Maintaining that environment as Bitpanda scales will take careful planning. The business appears poised at roughly the same point that both Uber and Revolut were when Scarlat joined them. It is, as she puts it, at “a very interesting stage because we’re too small to be managed like a big company but too big to be managed like a small one.”

No better time to apply Scarlat's formula for hyper-growth.