The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · Harry Stebbings

20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy

January 5, 2026·57 min·5 clips

Alan Chang asks his team: if you had a gun to your head today, would you have done more?

Alan Chang is co-founder and CEO of Fuse Energy, a UK-based technology-driven energy retailer. He joins Harry Stebbings on The Twenty Minute VC to discuss scaling Fuse from £2M to £200M in annual revenue across three consecutive years, a 10x annual growth rate. Chang traces his foundational training to Revolut, where he was one of the first three hires alongside founder Nick Storonsky, joining after a same-day offer following a physics-question interview. He describes realizing Revolut would be massive because it was the only team at co-working space Level 39 still working past 7pm and on weekends, and because Storonsky told him the goal was to become JP Morgan. Chang credits Revolut's early edge not to a different product roadmap — Revolut, Monzo, and N26 had nearly identical feature plans — but to superior ambition and speed of execution. The hiring philosophy Chang takes from Revolut centers on small independent teams with clear goals, replacing underperformers rather than managing around them. Chang distinguishes between people who self-identify targets and hit them, people who hit targets when pointed at them, and those who can do neither, arguing company throughput is the sum of the first two groups. His single cultural value is 'never settle,' which he condensed from Revolut's six values. Chang describes his 'gun to your head' management philosophy — asking team members whether they could have done more that day — and is unapologetic about the intensity, saying people who want work-life balance should not join Fuse. On energy, Chang argues the UK faces a genuine crisis: per capita energy consumption has dropped 25% over 25 years while China's has risen 700%, and UK electricity costs are roughly three times US rates. He identifies two root causes: extreme difficulty building physical infrastructure due to planning regulations (citing multi-winter bird survey requirements for a single power plant approval), and incumbents operating as pen-and-paper businesses without technology sophistication. Chang dismisses 100% renewable claims as fraudulent, noting that when Russian gas prices spiked, renewable-only tariffs rose in lockstep, which would be impossible if they were truly decoupled. He explains that solar and wind generation are highly correlated — both near-zero in the same hours — and that sub-two-hour battery storage cannot bridge multi-day lulls. His policy prescription is to delete all subsidies (which he argues transfer costs to ratepayers) and deregulate all physical construction. He cites China as the model: vertically integrated state energy companies that build everything simultaneously — solar, coal, gas, and grid — rather than treating energy as a political question. On hiring, Chang uses a structured rubric: candidates are assessed on discrete skills by internal domain experts, graded A or B, and compensated according to their grade rather than their stated salary expectations. He says he now explicitly tests for 'deep caring' about the mission, having historically over-indexed on IQ. He uses the Steve Jobs janitor-versus-VP anecdote to illustrate his intolerance for excuses from leaders, saying outcome accountability and reason-giving are incompatible at the leadership level.

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