Building Europe’s Investment Rails with Martin Kassing, Founder & CEO @ Upvest
Martin Kassing built Upvest into the infrastructure backbone powering investment features for fintech giants like Revolut and N26, but his approach to scaling breaks conventional wisdom. Rather than delegating recruitment and sales, he personally hired his entire executive team through LinkedIn outreach and still spends three-quarters of his time selling—treating even talent acquisition as a sales process.
Key takeaways
- •Recruit your entire executive team personally through direct LinkedIn outreach rather than outsourcing to headhunters or HR.
- •Break down every business decision into quantifiable numbers and actionable steps, a discipline borrowed from private equity that prevents founder overwhelm.
- •Embrace that 75% of a CEO's job is sales—whether selling to customers, investors, or potential hires.
- •Channel competitive drive by seeking constant challenges, as entrepreneurial success often stems from an inability to accept boredom or stagnation.
Listen to full episode
Best moment
CEO reveals his unconventional hiring strategy for building entire executive teams
“That's always, like, a a good insight for me.”
something that I'm personally quite proud of and probably will also continue doing this. I hired the entire exec team myself, and most of them just by reaching out on LinkedIn.
What's your favorite question to ask someone in an interview?
That is a tough question. I mean, typically, I ask them, how do they picture the future? Because then I get an understanding, you know, where they would like to be in the future. And then I can see if that fits with our strategy. I typically ask them where are they really terrible at. Yeah. That's always, like, a a good insight for me.
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