Episode 29 - Victor Orlovski
In this episode, I sit down with Victor Orlovski, Managing Partner at R136 Ventures.
Guests
Show notes
In this episode, I sit down with Victor Orlovski, Managing Partner at R136 Ventures.
Victor started at IBM, then he became CTO of one of Europe's largest banks, managing a 25,000-person engineering team serving 90M+ users. But he discovered then that the real challenge, and his true passion, wasn't scaling tech. It was scaling founders.
He started his journey in Venture at Fort Ross Ventures in 2015. Now, he is General Partner at R136 Ventures, a $500M fund investing in Series B+ rounds ranging from AI, fintech, B2B software, and more. He was also the author of: "From Rhino to Unicorn", a WSJ Bestseller, and a Forbes contributor on late-stage markets and agentic AI.
Some of his exits over time: eToro (Nasdaq, $5.2B), Dynamic Yield (McDonald's, $327M), Granulate (Intel), DeciAI (Nvidia).
With him, we talked about the very basic dynamics of venture markets, the impact of AI on the global economy, but also why he thinks virtual assets and metaverse will be one of the main trends to watch.
In this episode
Victor Orlovski, a former bank CTO who scaled digital banking to tens of millions of users before moving into venture capital, explains how AI agents are transforming engineering teams and why highly qualified experts will be the first to be displaced. He argues that more jobs will be created than lost, with a virtual economy becoming the main source of growth, and that today's AI leaders are not settled. He sees agent-to-agent payments, tokenisation and deglobalised banking shaping fintech.
Chapters
Key facts
Victor was CTO at two of the region's largest banks; from 2008 to 2015 he took the largest from almost no digital footprint to 90 million users and over 45 million daily active users.
At that bank more than 25,000 people in technology and product reported to him.
In 2015 Victor moved to California and started a venture firm; today he is one of four partners with a team of ten, managing a little under $500 million.
One portfolio company went from over 100 software engineers at the end of 2023 to 35 in mid-2025 while tripling output, with each senior developer overseeing 30–40 AI agents.
A stealth deep-drilling company he backed planned to grow its research team to 12 but stopped at five because ChatGPT's deep research did the rest.
Victor's firm invested in Airwallex.
When code is written by AI agents, only proprietary data, deep industry knowledge and sales efficiency still differentiate companies.
The biggest obstacle to AI adoption is experts, and unlike past revolutions AI will displace highly qualified jobs first.
AI will create far more jobs than it destroys, and a virtual economy will become the main source of growth.
Today's AI leaders are not settled; big companies cannot lead disruptive innovation, and paying huge salaries is a last resort.
Financial services' biggest challenge will be paying and billing billions of AI agents transacting with each other in real time.
Banks are retreating to their home countries, and companies like Airwallex can serve businesses operating across many markets.
Only three of about 14,000 US banks hold licences in all 50 states, and US banks make little use of their customer data.
Questions and answers
What does a former bank CTO bring to venture?
Knowledge of how large enterprises buy and how to scale technology teams from a handful to thousands.
Why do experts resist AI?
They are the last to believe they can be replaced, so CEOs must turn them into early adopters.
What will fintech look like in five years?
Agent-to-agent payments, tokenisation of assets, embedded payments and platforms that bridge fragmenting national banking systems.