00:00:00
your heart drops is this it is this the moment the company dies tom bloomfield entrepreneur investor and
00:00:06
founder of monzo i've never actually talked about this before after six months i just thought i can't work with this person i just really it's
00:00:12
really damaging to me and my mental health and so i resigned and the response to that resignation she called nor house meeting and fired
00:00:18
the entire company if i knew then what i knew now i would never have done it really if i knew what the amount of pain and heartache
00:00:24
that would be involved i would never have started but i didn't know that i cry quite a lot
00:00:30
you know i'm not ashamed of that for about three or four seconds i'd forgotten what my life was i was
00:00:36
calm and then three or four seconds later all the memories came back it was just like this crushing weight that really was the moment i sort of
00:00:43
knew this is this is no life there were no other emotions in my life really apart from just anxiety
00:00:49
i mean it was serious by the end we would detect criminals and shut their accounts down customs would turn up sometimes with weapons
00:00:54
and they threatened to turn up with you know a bottle of acid and throw it in someone's face that was tough
00:00:59
[Music]
00:01:08
tom bloomfield what a remarkable entrepreneur one of the uk's recent real success
00:01:14
stories and he and his team managed to disrupt the archaic incumbent banking system at a time when
00:01:21
nobody thought it could be disrupted but man his story is crazy absolutely crazy and the reason why i
00:01:29
started the diary of a ceo is demonstrated perfectly in this podcast it has it all
00:01:36
controversy drama business wars depression
00:01:41
anxiety resilience success and failure and today you're going to
00:01:48
hear a particular business story one that's never been heard before but tom felt that today
00:01:54
and here was the place to share it if you're an aspiring entrepreneur and you want to get to the point in your
00:02:00
life where you're running a hundred million or a billion pound company today might be your warning because as
00:02:06
tom is going to tell you all that glitters is in gold
00:02:12
and the true cost of entrepreneurship the cost that nobody seems to talk about
00:02:17
is sometimes greater than the reward on offer this is one of the most emotional raw
00:02:23
honest vulnerable brilliant gripping conversations i've ever had on this podcast
00:02:28
and i can't thank tom enough for opening up his diary and allowing us to look inside
00:02:35
without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the dire ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are
00:02:42
then please keep this to yourself
00:02:51
tom why why entrepreneurship i made a very bad employee
00:02:58
i've never been promoted and i've been fired i would guess two or three times depending on how you count
00:03:04
why were you fired so often um my first ever job was a consulting firm
00:03:09
in london i actually wasn't fired from this one i was um but i wasn't promoted and they said i was uh highly disruptive
00:03:17
and not in a good way not in a sort of you know tech found disrupts industry more in sort of you know annoying junior analysts can't
00:03:23
follow instructions so i think i'm much i'm much better founder than i am an employee
00:03:28
what was it about you that was disruptive though i want some specifics um whenever i'm i see a problem i think
00:03:35
that this is in common with anyone who starts a business i look at the way something's done and immediately start thinking of better ways to do it
00:03:42
rather than just doing what i'm told i sort of scratch my head and think no it just doesn't make sense to me why are we doing it this way that we could do
00:03:48
this other way which is ten times faster i mean i one of my first ever jobs was to
00:03:53
uh with another analyst go and count all of the jewelry items on a like a massive jewelry website it must be a thousand to do a
00:03:59
tally chart of the price range and this guy i started doing by hand so i scratched my head and wrote a little excel script to script basically scrape
00:04:06
the website and just tally them up and go there's your results and but they didn't want that because they were billing by
00:04:11
the hour and that'd only taken an hour of my time rather than 20 hours and so they could only bill me out for an hour like no no go back
00:04:17
and do it by hand so it that kind of stuff just drove me crazy and i was always just looking for ways to automate ways to do things
00:04:24
better um i guess that's what led me into entrepreneurship have you heard about this idea of first principle thinking absolutely yeah
00:04:30
my co-founder jonas at monzo was just i think he would say first principal thinking at least once a day
00:04:35
because that's that sounds to me like first principle thinking you're looking at conventions way of doing things and thinking well no this is there's a much
00:04:42
easier yeah absolutely you sort of start from physics and build build up from there really how's that how's that voted for you in
00:04:48
your in your personal life though so because life is personal life is full of convention marriage school
00:04:54
follow this path do you know what i mean yeah and i you know i i'm not married but certainly when i was younger i followed that conventional
00:05:01
path i i went to a grammar school i did my exams i got a place at oxford um i even did a master's at oxford so i
00:05:06
sort of i was following that conventional path towards becoming a lawyer i guess but somewhere along the way i started
00:05:14
realizing it probably wasn't for me but definitely in the early years that was my path you
00:05:20
built this hyper fast growing business which was you know funny that you used
00:05:25
the word disrupter which was known as one of the uk's great disrupters and still is known as one of the uk great disruptors um
00:05:32
can you tell me why like because i when i when i speak to shaq do you know shaq shaquille khan about
00:05:39
daniel eck and when i think about your story you both made the decision to take on
00:05:45
just what what many entrepreneurs would consider to be an immovable object you took on the banking system
00:05:50
um danielek took on the in this massive music industry that was seemed to be
00:05:56
immune to change i was talking to shaq about this last week oh really he texted me last night about um about harry's new fund so he i think
00:06:03
that's why he's fresh of mine what gave you the conviction and the
00:06:09
confidence that you could take on such a mammoth industry with monzo
00:06:16
um i mean arrogance for naivety and arrogance i think in no small part
00:06:21
um i i'd already built a company called gocardless which is a payment processor so that sort of
00:06:27
taught me that you know three young guys could get access to the payment system and actually move money around
00:06:32
um and banking was a step up from there it was it was more regulated more complicated
00:06:37
but i had the background in payments and i was an early natwest user or rather when i was young and they were
00:06:43
very old i was a network user and i was deeply deeply disappointed and i think like any founder really a
00:06:48
huge sort of dose of naivety you know you look at a problem and think it's probably i think if i knew now what i knew if i
00:06:54
knew then what i knew now i would never have done it really if i knew what the amount of pain and heartache that would be involved i would never
00:07:01
have started but i didn't know that and so i had a huge amount of self-confidence huge amount of naivety
00:07:06
and just assumed that i could figure it out and i think we got a really really long way and i mean the company's still doing fabulously so
00:07:12
i'm incredibly proud of of what we built i find that point about naivety so interesting
00:07:18
because it almost feels like founders like yourself need to be deluded on one end in terms of their own
00:07:24
confidence yep right because if you look at the stats and all the odds they're clearly against you so founders
00:07:30
like yourself seem to be i deleted sounds like a negative word but it's like for me i'm saying in a positive way
00:07:36
almost like deluded to the or naive to the the stats and the probability of this success yeah totally but also self-aware
00:07:43
enough to listen to feedback and to not be blinded by their hypotheses listen to some feedback
00:07:49
i mean a lot of the feedback i got in the early days was this is impossible you can never do it you know go back to your day job um so i
00:07:56
think you do have to be incredibly optimistic as well but a little bit like investing i'm
00:08:01
doing a little bit of investing now i think you if you have a lot of experience the downside is you've seen
00:08:07
these ideas fail again and again and again and it's really hard to then leave that
00:08:12
baggage behind and look at a company um i looked at one yesterday it's like i i've seen that model
00:08:18
fail four times not my you know i wasn't running it others were running it but to um have a fresh enough mind to think
00:08:26
okay maybe the timing's different maybe the founding team's different maybe the technology's changed this can now work so i think actually
00:08:32
the benefit of being naive and even being quite young in your career is you don't have that baggage of knowing how it failed the five times before
00:08:38
um which i i find super interesting when you're looking at founders in your investments now
00:08:44
from your own experience of being a founder yeah what are the attributes you're looking for i mean the really simple one is being
00:08:51
technical being able to write code i think is just a huge huge leg up and all of the founders who aren't technical and there are many
00:08:56
great ones um i think the biggest problem the early stage is finding a technical co-founder so that's just a
00:09:01
an immediate benefit and if if i could talk to my um if i could talk to people in a sort
00:09:06
of if age 12 to 18 i would basically just go and say learn to code you're going to have a
00:09:12
really well paying career for the rest of your life and it'll it's a great step into entrepreneurship
00:09:17
are you technical yeah i learned to code when i was 12 or 13. bit websites um i mean i was never
00:09:25
i studied law not computer science but i can i can code i there's still code i wrote probably in the monza code base somewhere
00:09:30
i think it puts the emojis into the the push notifications but um
00:09:36
yeah so being technical i think is just the easy answer um more fundamentally i think just being
00:09:41
really really determined and resilient seeing as you said an immovable object and either finding a way
00:09:47
sort of round it or over or under it or just straight through it it is some that um being indifferential basically i
00:09:52
think is is the single biggest predictor of success you um you strike me as someone that has great
00:09:58
confidence and i imagine that's come from as you kind of alluded to with go cardless you've built evidence over time
00:10:03
that you could do things so i i i sometimes think of confidence as like a self-reinforcing
00:10:09
cycle either upwards or downwards um i think i was more confident when i was 28 than i am now for sure and i think that
00:10:14
comes with experience um i think you
00:10:19
you take enough knocks that you start to and you realize you don't know i think at 27 28 i thought i knew everything and
00:10:26
now i realize i you know i like to think i know a lot about a lot of things but i realize i don't um and so my i'm still
00:10:33
a confident person i'd guess but if you put me in front of my 27 year old self i think you would see two different people
00:10:40
maybe less naivety maybe that would be yeah exactly yeah i've seen the failures a few times now
00:10:45
because i i was saying that because there's a lot of um a lot of young people in my in my dms that are dreaming big dreams
00:10:52
like yours but they would just never have the confidence or conviction to pursue them so i was wondering is that i'm trying to
00:10:59
get to i guess the crux of what made you so starkly different from every all of the young people that have
00:11:05
at least verbalized equally big dreams i think i'm also just really impulsive
00:11:10
so i i think quite self-confident but i was um i've taken quite big life decisions
00:11:17
without very much reflection um and that's worked out really well i'm you know i'm hugely privileged i
00:11:23
um i've grown up in the uk which i think is enormous privilege compared to a lot you know people in my position but growing up in
00:11:30
in rural africa are not going to have the same opportunity i have great education i had parents who supported me and i knew i could take risk because if
00:11:36
that risk didn't pay off i've have i have that safety net and so um yes i was confident
00:11:43
i think yes i was impulsive but i that was enabled from a place of huge privilege because i could
00:11:48
take the risk and i actually think people in this country um with great supportive
00:11:54
families don't take enough risk in general i think people go into pretty safe
00:11:59
careers in law or consulting or whatever and i think they could
00:12:05
do more interesting things have more impact make more money if that's what drives you by taking more risk i just
00:12:11
don't think they do you know i think i put myself on the risk-loving end of the spectrum um and so i've quit
00:12:16
jobs and moved countries you know with like hours notice um i started go cardless
00:12:22
with matt hiroki because i quit my consulting job to go to a bigger consultancy and in that gardening leave
00:12:27
i just got bored i had three months off and they said let's start a website and i said yes and then my combination said come out and
00:12:33
interview and we did and we got the offer to do y combinator and their investment about three days before my mckinsey start date
00:12:39
so i just sort of said ah this sounds fun i'll i'll do the startup thing instead you launched gocardless you take that to
00:12:46
i think a nine figure valuation uh it's 970 million dollars at their last round
00:12:52
i believe that's what was reported so not quite a billion um okay 10 figures
00:13:01
i mean that is a that is an achievement that most people in their lifetimes would you know would never go near um in of
00:13:07
itself you you then depart go cardless i left early um i we were 35 people you know it was a
00:13:14
the valuation was in the region of 30 or 40 million at the time hiroki my co-founder at time um
00:13:20
i took on the ceo role and it's done just a phenomenal job i'm just ten and a half years old now it's and it's but it's been
00:13:27
that was not an overnight success story that was ten and a half years of really really hard work and huge credit to him and matt also who
00:13:33
who stuck around a lot longer than me i was there for the first three years i think i put something of myself into it but it was i was there for
00:13:40
the beginning not the uh not the middle and certainly not the end why did you leave i wasn't really pat i think it's a great
00:13:46
company but i wasn't really passionate about b2b direct debit software right it helps
00:13:51
you know um lots of different uh suppliers collect money from their customers
00:13:56
um in a sort of back-office way it didn't have a big consumer brand it wasn't direct to consumer really and i didn't
00:14:04
b2b sales i found uh really difficult and frustrating and not something i was good at
00:14:09
and the tech kind of was built um and that had been my role so i sort of i went from there to join a
00:14:16
dating site which is like the polar opposite you know uh all about brand direct to consumer
00:14:21
um really fun every day uh terrible business model that was one of the ones i got fired
00:14:26
from um i was head of growth that we stopped growing um it was bad you were head of growth
00:14:33
and you stopped and the company stopped growing very self-aware and honest for you to admit that um and in fact i saw the charts and it
00:14:41
looked like a rocket ship when i was sort of interviewing there for crazy 48 hour interview process i flew out to new york they showed me some
00:14:47
of their growth charts really sort of hockey stick metrics um and then it all just started to plateau and i
00:14:52
kind of ignored that yeah i said okay that's my job to come in it had flattened out and i joined to kind of
00:14:57
reignite and i didn't i wasn't able to reignite it we sort of plateaued along for about 10 months and then it fell off a
00:15:05
cliff revenue declined 70 um within about two to four weeks
00:15:11
without any kind of macroeconomic this wasn't covered or something this was back in 2014. the world was going
00:15:16
well the dating site just was no longer cool i think um so we rode this wave of
00:15:21
popularity and sort of zeitgeist um it was called grouper it was it was incredibly
00:15:26
sort of cool novel idea back in 2013-14 um and then people just got bored of it
00:15:33
i think so the idea was um it was six of you three three guys and three girls or three guys and three guys if that's your
00:15:38
your preference um or three girls and three girls um but six of you you and two friends
00:15:43
would go and meet three other people so you knew your friends and they knew each other and it would put the group together you need to kind of
00:15:49
go and have a wild night out um rather than traditional dating apps sort of one-on-one this was sort of a group social experience
00:15:56
uh really really fun but um not a great business model you got fired uh yeah most the company
00:16:02
got laid off actually yeah and then you took how long off before you swung back into the next thing
00:16:07
um so i uh about two months but only
00:16:14
about two months um because it was the u.s i was on a weird visa this is not
00:16:19
interesting but basically i couldn't take another job and i couldn't as soon as i crossed the us border my visa expired yes i've yeah
00:16:26
but whilst i was there i could stay there for actually two years or something um so i just spent a summer in new york
00:16:31
chilling out and then came back to the uk and i think about 48 hours after arriving in the uk i met up with
00:16:36
ann bowdan at starling and agreed to be their cto within about again 24 hours um and there's a lot
00:16:42
written about how i mean how your relationship with and transpired and your relationship with
00:16:48
stalin more broadly transpired what's what are what are the key highlights from that from that journey
00:16:53
choose your co-founder really carefully yeah uh i mean there were 14 of us at
00:16:59
starling and 13 of us started monso it was that stuck
00:17:05
wait say that again 14 people at starling and 13 of you started monzo 13 of those 14 started 13 of those 14
00:17:12
started monday okay including the chairman of the board um the entire management team the office
00:17:18
manager everyone so one one would say well you know tom must have ripped them all away
00:17:24
[Laughter] no no i just didn't want to work with
00:17:31
anne like really i've never actually talked about this before and there was there has been a book i haven't read the book uh the brief version is after six months
00:17:38
i got fired twice in six months um i was never paid i invested my own money which is i lost
00:17:44
um there was never any paperwork which is my fault um and after six months i just thought i
00:17:49
can't work with this person i just really it's really damaging to me and my mental health and so i resigned
00:17:55
and the response to that resignation she called an all hands meeting and fired the entire company
00:18:02
because you resigned yep so i didn't i didn't pull anyone away she fired the entire company that's not true two people happened to
00:18:08
not be in the office so they weren't at the meeting where they got fired so they had to work two weeks notice
00:18:14
because they weren't technically fired but everyone else was fired so we all went to this gin bar to kind of
00:18:20
it was called ask for janus on smithfield market it's a great buy you should go there um we all went there to basically commiserate just think this is crazy
00:18:27
what's just happened and literally it's i think we were there for two days basically in this gin bar playing we we
00:18:33
all played speed chess it was this very nerdy kind of four players we're playing lots and lots of bhs uh just trying to figure out what
00:18:40
we're gonna do and eventually like we can um we think we can do this ourselves um
00:18:45
so it wasn't a case of like you know me leading a coo me pulling the company
00:18:50
away i quit i was just like good luck to you i'm just i'm going to sit on a beach for a while and in response she fired the entire
00:18:56
company which is just i think a reflection of the way she she operates
00:19:02
i can't quite wrap my head around the idea of one person resigning and then firing everybody as a
00:19:10
show of i don't even know no it's not something i would do
00:19:17
where did that leave starling though if they only if they'd lost pretty much everybody other than the two people that didn't manage to make it into work that
00:19:23
day and they also resigned the day after yeah to come and work with us um she hired another management team
00:19:29
another oh really okay and it turned out that we weren't the first team there'd been a previous team as well
00:19:34
oh wow that she'd fired wow and then off so that's that's crazy so
00:19:40
you started essentially monzo was founded in that gin bar yep yep asked
00:19:45
for janice and it's still there we go back for some of our reunions really yeah yeah yeah and how did you feel so
00:19:52
you're fired you know from starling you all convene in this gin bar you spend a couple of
00:19:58
days there you end up um deciding that you're gonna go again together yep and
00:20:03
i guess you feel pretty fired up and charged up to not only disrupt the industry but also to compete with starling though
00:20:09
um it was unavoidable that feeling of [ __ ] them kind of but
00:20:15
we didn't i didn't really know that that she you know and was going to rehire a bunch of people it was over right and there was a big
00:20:22
feeling of like we put quite a lot of work into this actually and like we've had to leave everything behind so we came to
00:20:27
you know rewrite the code base redo all our regulatory submissions really from scratch which was kind of like a
00:20:32
oh i wish we didn't have to do this but we did um [Music] but in a way it actually led us we'd
00:20:39
made the mistakes once the first time so actually that sort of rebuilding process was nice because it was on fresh ground
00:20:46
but yeah it felt like a i mean initially we tried to negotiate with that and say why did you know
00:20:52
why did you step down why do like how can we we don't want to throw away this side for some people they've been there 12
00:20:58
months why are we throwing away 12 months of work and that was a sort of very convoluted week or two um where we almost had a
00:21:04
deal a couple of times and it just similar thing happened you know huge blow up and we just walked away um but no we never i think at monza we
00:21:12
never really thought about the competition actually it wasn't a you know we weren't looking over our shoulder at revolut or styling
00:21:17
it was uh if anything we were looking at the big banks thinking how can we take market share off them
00:21:23
co-founders when you started monzo you started with was was paul ripping your only co-founder no uh there
00:21:29
were f uh and it was a it was sort of weird actually because of 13 of us like how do you pick which ones are you
00:21:35
all they were all literally there on day one um so in a sense that was the founding team and they all got stock like not
00:21:41
options actually full you know stock um but the for arbitrary reasons which i can't really remember there were five of us so myself
00:21:49
paul um became deputy ceo and was the chief risk officer he became deputy ceo because the bank of
00:21:55
england looked at me and i think i was 29 or 30 or something i said you have you ever worked in a bank no it's
00:22:01
like and you're applying to be ceo of our newest bank yes and they sort of scratch your head for a bit and said how about this
00:22:08
sort of very experienced guy next to you this co-founder of yours how about they didn't say that they said
00:22:13
we'd like you to find a deputy ceo who's actually run a bank before please and i you know i said paul has won
00:22:18
several banks so he became deputy a ceo gary was cfo um he'd been at
00:22:24
abn amro and mizuho bank i think uh there's a guy called jason who is
00:22:29
sort of more customer marketing and then jonas who is the only one left now was a cto really really talented
00:22:36
developer um so he stepped into the cta how important is that you talked earlier about the importance of business
00:22:42
partners and that being one of your big regrets but how critically important is because you know
00:22:48
definitely one of the biggest mistakes i made in my career was when i was very young just hired anybody because i thought you know like oh you
00:22:54
like i remember being in selfridges one day there was a guy selling prada bags so like you can be a director you know what
00:22:59
i mean because you don't know what you don't know i didn't do that i did i was thinking i
00:23:05
was like 18 so um but i in hindsight i i know it's the most well
00:23:13
for me that core team is the most important thing yeah it's probably the single biggest determining factor of successful
00:23:18
failure in my view yeah so how important what was it for you to assemble
00:23:23
um that skilled co-founding team i mean it was it was luck at monzo
00:23:30
because that was the group that was uh starting and it was sort of like how do we keep this team together and it really was
00:23:36
sort of it felt like everyone's going to disappear into the wind um there was a you know it really was a
00:23:42
debate are we going to really try and do this again or you know is this it we just go back to whatever
00:23:47
we were doing before and so to keep everyone together i think it wasn't a and so i think we were really fortunate we had
00:23:53
such a great um different set of skills um but it wasn't hugely uh sort of
00:23:59
planned no i have a another example of this i started a company when i was at university through young
00:24:05
enterprise and on day one they were like 14 co-found co-founders of this business which is just a ridiculous way to start
00:24:12
a company and within about two we had meetings meetings nothing ever got done so within three months or so
00:24:18
three of us basically said look you 11. you can have right on your seat that's what you want but you know you're not really
00:24:25
here to run a business the three of actually are gonna like work all summer um one of them uh quit his job to do
00:24:32
he just left to work at deutsche bank and then three hours are actually going to try and run a startup here and so figuring out that core team i
00:24:38
think is is really really important to get right and having a group of 14 is not the way to do it really when
00:24:44
you when you started monzo from that i say from the gym but it wasn't really from the gym bar but you see what i mean that was the kind of
00:24:50
i guess the inception moment um what was the driving force for you to go on that journey was it money was
00:24:57
it the chance of you know moving an industry what was it
00:25:03
oh gosh uh insecurity i think for me it was i was much of the reason i started my business
00:25:09
was probably based on deep childhood insecurities about wanting to be rich and yeah like all of that i think tied up
00:25:15
into a bunch of weird sort of deep-rooted psychological problems um
00:25:20
wanting to prove myself wanting to win or wanting to be seen to be successful i
00:25:26
think um that money played a part in it not the driving part but certainly there was a factor there
00:25:32
um a deep hatred for natwest bank um why they're just incredibly
00:25:38
frustrating to use just every everyone who came to work at monto had
00:25:43
one of these horror stories about their banks you know matt one of our early developers went 10p overdrawn with a
00:25:50
a different bank and paid the 10p in um and then closed it counts like i'm
00:25:55
done with this but he'd incurred the chart he didn't know they applied the charge at the end of month so it's like a
00:26:00
five pound overdraft fee that month which then the month after a month after a month after should have rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled and two up
00:26:06
you know two years later they came after him for several thousand pounds because he'd been 10p overdrawn for a day um just
00:26:13
everyone's got those kind of stories and so a big part of it was a frustration that banking worked like that
00:26:19
and a sort of feeling that it didn't have to be like that because we looked at apps like spotify or or uber and they felt magical you know
00:26:26
the i the people who've grown up with that technology it's sort of normal now but i
00:26:31
remember you know i downloaded nap stuff for the first time i remember showing my dad and my uncle you know think of any song you want in
00:26:36
the world yeah type it in and it starts playing and that's that is
00:26:41
magical um but now it's so commonplace and banking for years has just been
00:26:47
you want to change change your address down i've downloaded a form filled in the form assigned and had to post it off
00:26:52
this is for an online bank um so we really just felt quite deeply that it could be
00:26:58
the experience could be much much better do you want to come in and watch this podcast live from behind the scenes if
00:27:04
you do all you have to do is hit the subscribe button and now that the world has opened up you'll be behind the scenes as many of
00:27:09
our subscribers have been i can't wait to meet you and one of the other reasons you gave there as a driving force was wanting to
00:27:15
be seen to win yeah or can you explain that one not to win i think that's probably the
00:27:21
wrong i i use that phrase but i to be seen to be a success i think like
00:27:26
validation yeah kind of yeah you know that's to my family and my friends and my school and teachers and um
00:27:35
you've already been a success though with gocardless did you yeah i had a bit but go kardas
00:27:42
circa 2014 2015 was still relatively unknown it was doing
00:27:48
well but not it wasn't a breakout success yet in the way it is today i think um just on that feeling of
00:27:55
wanting that validation from friends because we can all relate to that like i'm i'm playing devil's advocate but i know exactly what you mean you're on a tv
00:28:01
show exactly exactly and i'm doing a podcast 17 cameras right now um but uh but just drilling down into
00:28:08
that in hindsight was that a feeling that you think could have ever been attained um was it a mirage
00:28:17
i think i have attained it yeah oh i know i don't mean i'm the world's big success that's not what i mean i mean
00:28:23
that like i've tasted what that feels like that's mixing my metaphors there i felt what
00:28:28
that feel you know i've experienced that thing that's sort of like being in the newspapers and that sort of
00:28:34
um people using in monzo card and that stuff and it's
00:28:41
somewhat rewarding but it's not like i and i don't feel anymore i think what i'm trying to say is sort
00:28:46
of that need to prove myself has sort of disappeared actually um and so either i've realized
00:28:53
it was a stupid goal to start with or like i got far enough along that i sort of like take that off the list and sort of
00:28:58
thought you know that sort of it was fun but it's not my overriding purpose now um and i'm not i'm your next question
00:29:05
what is your purpose i'm not sure i have one it's sort of more like living day to day and enjoying life and i
00:29:11
i was never good at that i've really really driven from a very very young age so i worked incredibly hard for my exams and
00:29:17
my you know through oxford and starting companies um and very rarely paused to enjoy the journey
00:29:25
or the you know the cliche the small things in life the you know the choose your cliche right like how your
00:29:31
coffee tastes in the morning or the sort of the tweeting of the birds in the in the trees
00:29:36
and that stuff now i'm am spending more time kind of being more i guess mindful and kind of living in the moment do you have to like
00:29:43
reprogram yourself to get there though because i feel like society well for me anyway is um kind of conditions you to to
00:29:49
chase climb promote move up strive and and you're kind of deferring your
00:29:54
happiness to towards some future achievement accomplishment yeah so how did you get to the point where you just
00:30:01
enjoy it what it you know life for what it is in the moment was it reprogramming yeah i guess like
00:30:06
you know like you i i left my company i didn't um and that was really really hard and that was not a
00:30:14
that was um you know deep deep anxiety and bordering on depression and
00:30:20
uh like i i i wouldn't use the words rock bottom but like it was not a happy time and so
00:30:27
then recovering from that uh and i took a year off and you know travel around europe went kite surfing
00:30:32
and learned the language and all this kind of you know cliches um and that experience now
00:30:39
leads me uh whenever i i still get these like urges like sort of um they my local mp passed away
00:30:46
a few months ago and there was a by-election i was like why did i why did i stand for that seat and i could be an mp and then maybe i could you know
00:30:52
maybe it could be the prime minister and then i'm like but then what
00:30:57
crap yeah exactly and you know i think like i could start a company
00:31:03
and then you know what if it goes well and then i end up running a big company again so uh yeah just like a couple of sort of
00:31:11
those brain cycles and i'm like no what am i what am i thinking um i quite quickly come back to like i'm
00:31:17
really enjoying my life at the moment i'm lucky enough that i'm financially sort of independent now i have a great
00:31:22
group of friends like why um why do i want to go and make myself miserable again um where does that narrative that voice
00:31:28
come from so many people have that way because it's funny because you're saying right i'm i'm a i'm at a stage of peace now
00:31:34
i wasn't before but you still have that yearning or that voice that comes and goes come on tom do it
00:31:40
um it's that it's that sort of i guess disruptive kind of um i see something that's not working
00:31:45
and it's incredibly frustrating and i go i could i could make that work better i'm um
00:31:50
i'm uh reluctant i've talked about this before i'm working in the in the i'm
00:31:57
volunteering the vaccination program and it sounds like a sort of i'm proud of doing it and it's like a great feeling kind of being part of
00:32:03
a team that's uh hopefully helping kind of the country
00:32:09
get out of this lockdown rubbish but even there there are so many things that just drive me absolutely nuts
00:32:16
um and i think that's probably nhs sort of more broadly i think the smart use of
00:32:21
technology could really really improve the way we deliver care to everyone really medical care and so i
00:32:27
keep thinking i just want to like just give me you know experience um i just yeah why
00:32:32
can't i just come in and fix it for a you know it's incredibly you know i've struggled with a company of 2000 people the nhs employees i think
00:32:38
a million and a half people or something so um probably not for me but there's
00:32:43
always that like your question you know what what is that drive it's the
00:32:49
looking at something that's like clearly broken at least to my naive eyes um and that feeling that i feel like
00:32:56
along with a small group of smart people i could make it better okay quick one if you've listened to this podcast you
00:33:02
know i'm the biggest fan of fuel in the world and last week huel released hule's brand new
00:33:08
protein powders and i have to tell you the salted caramel huel protein powder which only
00:33:16
has a hundred calories in it roughly and 20 grams of protein has become my
00:33:22
go-to drink and you can if you're watching this on youtube you'll see i'm going to open that it's almost almost nearly done and i've
00:33:28
had it for a week um but i've been looking for a source of protein that is also low calories and
00:33:34
that tastes like heaven on earth and i finally found it so if i was to put my word
00:33:39
to you next to a product it would be hewls salted caramel new protein powders 20
00:33:45
grams of protein 26 of your vitamins and minerals in case you're not nutritionally complete or sort of
00:33:51
getting all of your vitamins and minerals and that 105 calories in a serving and it tastes like
00:33:58
heaven on earth what were the the good times at monzo the times you look back most fondly
00:34:03
small team so sub 100 [Music] being able to um
00:34:11
go from a kind of an idea or a customer insight or something like a conversation with a customer
00:34:16
about a problem to figuring out a kind of product feature to very quickly prototyping and building
00:34:22
that and launching it and then seeing people use it um and then tell their friends about it that very quick iterative
00:34:28
product development cycle i love um and a lot of the brand and marketing
00:34:33
stuff uh i when i was at gocardless i didn't believe in brand uh which is a ridiculous thing to say um
00:34:40
and i you know you has a marketing background that's almost offensive i guess but it's like no this is you know this
00:34:46
doesn't this doesn't exist really people um and then the day when i worked at the dating site that really opened my eyes
00:34:52
to the kind of power of human psychology and brand and and mission and values and we really took a lot of that into
00:34:58
monsoon and that it it was just astonishing so we started out even before we had a
00:35:04
product talking a lot about our mission and some of our values like transparency and kind of community orientation
00:35:11
and that worked so incredibly well um so yeah it was working with a small team
00:35:17
to build the brand build the product get into users hands really quickly and then see them enjoy it i've talked about
00:35:22
this a lot before that feeling of um standing in line at a coffee shop and seeing the person at the counter paying
00:35:29
with a the hot coral monzo card and then having the bartender or the the server say you know i've got one of
00:35:34
those as well and then listening to that conversation as sort of an anonymous bystander that's just incredibly rewarding feeling
00:35:40
that you've had a hand in in creating something that's that people are enjoying so much
00:35:46
let's dig into the point about brand then marketing because monzo really was a uk stand-up brand i think everybody
00:35:52
knew it um even if they didn't use it because of its disruptive values because of it it felt
00:35:59
unconventional in everything it did i mean even the card was completely unconventional intentionally yeah tell me
00:36:05
tell me what the secret was to monzo's branding success
00:36:10
um for authenticity i think um it was
00:36:16
we had a couple of early marketing hires who who didn't work out um and they were very senior people from
00:36:22
very very big companies who came in and they were a lot older and cayman is sort of like you know
00:36:28
how the kids going to think about this and we were like we are the kids um so we had a very early community
00:36:34
manager called tristan thomas who was there from almost in the first few months uh he just very recently left to start his own company
00:36:40
and he's now he was a vp of of um marketing running a massive team with a massive budget by the end
00:36:46
but he was a 23 year old when he started you know 23 24 year old um and i worked on it a lot hugo our
00:36:53
head of design worked on a lot and it was um it was just an authentic
00:36:58
representation of i think who we were and what we believed more than anything and we we did want to
00:37:03
be different from the big banks we intentionally positioned ourselves as a part so the hot roll card every other bank
00:37:10
was you know blue or purple or kind of a shade of black basically so like how far come from that can we get
00:37:15
and the big banks were very impersonal you know you you never felt like you were talking to a human and so we everything we did was human and
00:37:22
transparent um we we shared a lot of internal information that everyone you know we
00:37:28
published our product roadmap this is what we're going to be working on for the next two years which people thought were with bonkers but it
00:37:33
that was a way of building trust and humanity in opposition to these big sort of faceless banks
00:37:38
um these all sound like first principles yeah i mean none of tristan had never worked
00:37:44
in marketing before his previous job was at a refugee camp in in the middle east
00:37:49
i'd never really worked in marketing i'd spent nine months at a dating site but we yeah we um we came up we thought about
00:37:56
these principles and it felt like the kind of company we wanted to run and so
00:38:01
um we did and it worked really well um yeah with without any experience it goes
00:38:07
to show the risk of reading marketing books no genuinely i've always thought this because i've never studied marketing or
00:38:13
did any degree you know our business was did really well in in the marketing industry but i think it did well because we hadn't
00:38:19
read those books and we hadn't been sort of diluted or polluted by conventions idea of how yeah i think this today when i go when i
00:38:26
work and go into these family offices and i'm working on the marketing plan that the ceo often
00:38:32
will want to hire someone who's done marketing in that industry for 20 years and you immediately feel that that's the
00:38:38
fastest route to not standing out at all and not having any point of difference yeah yeah it depends what you want to
00:38:44
achieve if you are a family office or if you're managing the wealth of you know generational rich families then
00:38:51
perhaps you do want to look trustworthy in like everyone else if you're a challenger bank appealing to
00:38:56
21 to 25 year olds maybe you want a different approach i don't think there's a right answer but i think authenticity gets you
00:39:02
a really really long way whoever your target demographic is i am one of the things so we talked a little
00:39:09
bit there about the your best times at monzo and i wasn't surprised to hear that it was when the company was small um because i've
00:39:14
heard that before but i also understand the feeling um and your worst times
00:39:21
um least enjoyable times least enjoyable uh i never liked fundraising we did that
00:39:27
a lot i mean i and i had to i think monzo's raised something like 600 million and i probably did 400 of that um that was
00:39:35
always tough uh and you only hear about the really quick round though you know the ad funding yeah we hit a billion the round where we
00:39:41
hit a billion valuation was very very fast um and very competitive so it was that easy but all the other rounds were real
00:39:47
slog so fundraising was never fun we had a weird time with the press where
00:39:52
they spent the first three or four years almost not idolizing us but certainly building us up you know the new kind of
00:40:00
uh the the sort of next great hope almost um and we could almost do nothing wrong which is not healthy and then we got big
00:40:06
enough and it flipped overnight and just everything we did was we'd get like
00:40:12
vitriol for in a way that i i mean i can understand it because it drives readership right and it's um there's a
00:40:18
point in time where the telegraph would put monzo in the headline at least every day even if it was a
00:40:25
story about one of our competitors it would be monzo competitor blah doing just like what
00:40:30
why and i i eventually sort of called out the journalists on this and took him for a beer and it's like look
00:40:35
come on tell me what's going on and he's like look every time i put your name in the headline or rather he's like look it's
00:40:41
my subs who do i i write the article they choose the headline um or my editor but every time they do that we just get
00:40:47
way more subscribers it's like you know sorry um but it it was really the entire from the bbc to
00:40:55
the telegraph to everyone it felt like a pile on in a way that didn't seem
00:41:01
fair uh really and it's i'm not to say that we never did anything wrong we absolutely did but even the good stuff
00:41:06
we did got um got negative headlines um and i think that's a peculiarity of the
00:41:11
british press in particular sort of building something up until it's like big enough to tear down
00:41:18
and that was just so confusing um yeah that was tough at one point we had
00:41:23
a bbc camera crew outside our office um and this was when we
00:41:29
we'd grown big enough we had um a small a small minority of people using monzo for financial
00:41:34
crime basically with money laundering for scams um and we'd have to freeze their account and we
00:41:40
weren't allowed to tell them why we'd froze in their account we'd sort of send the money back to where where wherever it had come from was a
00:41:46
very frustrating experience really and it's quite strict in the law that you have to shut the account you can't tell a person
00:41:51
so it's it's a really bad customer experience um but watchdog were running a program about this you know monzo
00:41:58
freezes accounts and they brought us a series of accounts that we'd frozen um over a series of several weeks saying
00:42:05
you know this is we've got you and we sort of brought the editor of the program and said look here is the
00:42:10
here's the criminal background of the person whose account we've frozen are you you're really going to run a program about about this
00:42:17
it's like oh no okay okay okay this happened 12 times and every every one of the times we showed we the evidence and like okay
00:42:24
you know and on the it was the 13th or 14th like that was a 50 50. you know we block the
00:42:29
account we stand by it but we don't have cast iron proofing like great we've got you so bbc camera crew
00:42:34
turns up and they'd commissioned a block of ice an enormous ice sculpture with a frozen
00:42:41
monzo card in the ice that they dumped outside our office and put a camera crew there for the day uh to see if they could find anyone
00:42:46
walking past it or you know to watch the thing melting which was like
00:42:52
what's going on you know i was like i started this company to try and sort of build a better bank and somehow
00:42:58
the bbc is camped outside my office trying to like i don't know i don't know what they're
00:43:03
trying to do um drive drive viewership um but that was deeply
00:43:08
annoying this whole press thing is i've heard this a million times and it terrifies the [ __ ] out of me because
00:43:13
you know joining dragonstone you join i was like oh my god amazing and then someone told me i think it might be one of the other dragons that's
00:43:20
been there for nearly two decades said here's what's here's what here's what's gonna happen is they're going to build
00:43:25
you up to a point where you're interesting enough to tear down again and hearing you say the same thing terrifies
00:43:31
the life out of me and it happens in everything tech startups um facebook
00:43:36
uh yeah i mean facebook's a great example of it but it happens to sports stars it happens to politicians it
00:43:41
happens to you know singers yeah yeah what advice would you give
00:43:46
someone that's don't read the good stuff or the you know just ignore it all basically i think
00:43:51
it's all yeah just ignore it all the hype and yeah because when they're
00:43:57
good when they're writing good stuff that's that's overblown as well that's not real life the bad stuff's also not true so
00:44:03
just i just ignore it all and did that have an impact on your mental health the worst parts of the press coverage
00:44:11
it didn't help and i stopped reading it you know i genuinely stopped reading it and i'd have friends sort of come and say it you know on a
00:44:18
saturday or sunday they'd read the weekend papers and it's like are you all right it's like i'm fine
00:44:24
what have i done that's the worst because then you've got to justify to people you care about yeah and make them not care like i'm
00:44:30
fine like okay just don't read the times this weekend it's like yeah never read the times um that was annoying but i don't know
00:44:39
so yeah the um the press was not fun um investment's not fun regulation got
00:44:44
really really tough by the end because we were a bank and ultimately if we fail the government has to step in and refund
00:44:50
everyone their money so the rules there were very very strict and because we got so big
00:44:56
so early and weren't profitable that that got quite tough um and i'm going to go through a list of
00:45:02
the bad things now the f i will stop on the final one which was um just organizational politics when you
00:45:07
get to we were almost 2 000 people and when you're 100 or 200 people you can know everyone and you can
00:45:13
you develop a really close culture really a sense of team spirit you know everyone you can know everyone's names um you get to 2000 people and you don't
00:45:20
and it um you get subcultures so teams develop their own sort of internal
00:45:26
narrative as to why they exist and what they're for and sometimes like we're saving the company from this other team over there and it's
00:45:32
you know becomes um really not collaborative actually and you get uh especially with some sort of quite
00:45:39
senior people start building their little fifedems
00:45:44
and you get this just weird politics and rivalries going on that i'd never worked in the company for it's like total it was totally uh
00:45:52
new to me um especially when you're this is unfair not everyone but sometimes when you hire people from
00:45:58
big banks they've grown up with that um uh culture toxic culture frankly
00:46:05
um and they bring it to a place like monzo and everyone's like what that what's weird what's going
00:46:10
on here but it definitely changed um and that was having to deal with that was was tricky
00:46:17
you talked about not being profitable i've heard you talk about you know that being one of the um
00:46:23
probably in hindsight one of the things you should have thought about more in the early days which was like the commercial model or the business model
00:46:29
of the bank yep is that fair yeah absolutely yeah um and we thought about it for sure
00:46:35
i think what we didn't do was make the hard decisions to uh to turn the corner earlier like we
00:46:42
thought about it and it was this was not it's not like we um blindly ran into
00:46:47
unprofitability we took a series of actions we knew they were loss making but we um did that in order
00:46:53
to to acquire users without paying so basically we swapped marketing spec we had no
00:46:58
marketing spend but instead we ran um uh like like operational losses
00:47:04
so we'd give away features to customers that would cost us money to get more customers because it meant our marketing budget
00:47:09
was zero and we grew to five or six million people with we probably spent less than 10
00:47:15
million on marketing total that's an average cost per customer of one pound 50. great
00:47:21
right so um but that that's that hides operational losses that's our
00:47:26
real marketing budget was giving away things like html withdrawals for free for example and we just didn't take the hard
00:47:31
decisions to turn some of those things off when we um we got to a certain size and it cost us way too much
00:47:36
free cards yeah expensive
00:47:41
with that it's like the long tail it's you know it's the um the very small number of people who are ordering 20 or 30 cards a year
00:47:48
most people they order zero to one that's fine but some people just lose their card every weekend and they get struggled no
00:47:54
problem just order another one it'll be here tomorrow morning uh and that's just annoying and costly
00:47:59
the other thing though um so we should have paid more attention to reducing costs and
00:48:05
taking a hard decision to drive revenues earlier uh we consciously didn't but part of it was avoiding those hard
00:48:11
decisions the other half of it though is weird um
00:48:16
i've thought about it a lot it's basically how you get almost self-reinforcement from your
00:48:23
investors so you run a business a certain way you get to a certain scale and you present it to a set of investors
00:48:30
and the ones who are more or less the ones who agree with what you've done and think it's the right approach we'll invest
00:48:36
and the ones who think you're bonkers will not invest and they'll go to someone else the problem is that becomes
00:48:41
self-reinforcing because they like what you did before so like yeah just do more of that
00:48:46
and it can become um a bit of an echo chamber where you just get the group of investors around the table who are all
00:48:52
big supporters who all really believe in the model and there's not really anyone being like uh you know you're running
00:48:59
um you should really think about this other stuff and a really a really smart thing i've
00:49:05
heard which i didn't do and i i hope i will will have the humility to do in future is to sort of
00:49:10
pick out the smartest investors you can or smarter's advisors or other other founders
00:49:16
and ask them why you think your business will fail and then really try to think deeply
00:49:22
about that rather than i think the natural tendency is just like ah you know whatever they don't know what they're talking about i'll just the people who think i'm brilliant i'll
00:49:28
listen to them um but that can become i don't think you grow as much from that so
00:49:33
really finding the doubters even the not so much the haters but the doubt is certainly and interrogating them about your
00:49:40
business and really trying to think through how you can solve those problems i think that would
00:49:47
have helped us a lot hindsight's a wonderful thing yeah now you have those some of those answers in hindsight and
00:49:53
what were what are those answers in hindsight that you wish you'd um
00:49:58
you'd known sooner so one of them's obviously you know getting to a profitable business model sooner making those transitions
00:50:04
profitable business model um cutting costs driving revenue by taking hard decisions to sort of limit some of the
00:50:09
free features and charges some of the things we gave for free i think she'd done that way way earlier um that's the biggest any cultural
00:50:17
decisions i knew there was a merging of the startup guys and the uh banking people which i guess that's necessary
00:50:25
right yeah i struggled to get the banking license without that and you've seen you can see that at revolut you look at all their recent senior
00:50:30
highs over the last year or two and it's big wigs from the big banks because they're trying to get a banking licence so
00:50:36
i think that's sort of inevitable um and you pay a cost for that you pay the price um customer service is always
00:50:44
one of big one of our uh investors who shall name remain nameless um was a bit of
00:50:50
contrarians basically said the quality of your customer service is too high
00:50:56
and it's costing you too much and it's going to be the you know it's going to be the weight around your neck for the next whatever 10 years until you can slash
00:51:03
and i'm not sure if he was right or not actually um that's when i still debate um i've
00:51:08
noticed revel revolute's uh customer service has declined month almost month over month for the
00:51:15
last two years i've been a customer there on monday but revolut they've made a real significant
00:51:20
it feels like effort to either cut back on customer service costs or just because they've got more users
00:51:25
they're struggling yeah but i've from when i joined revolu it was just amazing yep and two years almost three
00:51:32
years on it's just awful yeah and i think monzo's hopefully it's not awful but i think it
00:51:39
was amazing at the start and i think it's now variable i think sometimes it's really really
00:51:45
great but sometimes you end up waiting a little too long sometimes it's a little too hard to talk to a customer service agent arguably
00:51:51
i think i still think it's pretty good but in the early days it was spectacular it was the number one thing our
00:51:57
customers talked about was the service by far you'd look on social media whatever it was just
00:52:03
and if we'd have the revenue to support that i think we could have continued it's not it's not very expensive it cost us about
00:52:09
12 or 13 pounds per customer per year to provide that and i think the benchmark that everyone's aiming for is less than that
00:52:16
clearly and so the drive is always to automate more to put you know chatbots in to do whatever there comes a
00:52:23
point in your journey with monzo where you realize that you're no longer enjoying it for me in my business
00:52:29
it was kind of like a there wasn't a point it wasn't a day when i woke up it was kind of a compounding of several issues that
00:52:35
slowly wore me down yes uh uh yes it was that plus covered
00:52:40
and covered it was like knockout punch but yeah it was four or five four five six issues that
00:52:46
meant for the last year or two i wasn't having a good time really and i talked to my board about it i talked to investors about i think
00:52:54
hiring really good senior leaders was part of the potential solution and
00:52:59
we didn't do that fast enough um we've got some great great senior leaders in now
00:53:04
um and i sort of wonder what would have happened if we could have got those people in a year or two earlier um possibly they wouldn't we wouldn't
00:53:10
pay them enough they wouldn't have joined um i did talk about this a ts our new ceos like
00:53:15
if you'd have come five years ago i would have joined five years ago i was like go back in time um uh but yeah it was
00:53:24
four five six issues and then covered and that was just i mean for so many people in the world that was horrific for us our revenue
00:53:30
declined at least 50 percent within about a week or so uh the cost base was the same revenue goes down 50
00:53:37
we were already lost making so now it's sort of we had a funding we had 100 million funding round lined up
00:53:43
to close on the monday and on friday before london went to lockdown and all the terms she's got pulled
00:53:50
so again retrospects uh hindsight is 2020. um everything has bounced back
00:53:58
even like the in the investment market private investment and public investments are stronger than it was pre-covet and
00:54:04
so people just take these really short-term decisions in a kind of in a shock in a crisis destroy a
00:54:10
ton of value for themselves um and you know six nine 12 months later everything's bounced back even harder i
00:54:15
just don't understand it um but anyway covid was definitely the straw that broke the camel's back
00:54:22
and about six weeks into that six to eight weeks which is like i'm i'm working seven days a week i'm not
00:54:27
sleeping here this is just you know i need sort of throw the towel in almost you know i need to i need to
00:54:33
be subbed out had you been thinking about that conversation for some time before you got to the point where you
00:54:39
you approached the board with the decisiveness that this has been done i'm not even thinking about i've been
00:54:44
talking to them about it for a year or two yeah not the whole board but yeah two members our chairman and uh
00:54:50
one of our lead investors absolutely we'd we'd had multiple conversations about me not enjoying the role as it was then
00:54:56
configured and the answer was like okay let's reconfigure a role let's bring people around you let's because
00:55:02
because we're growing so quickly and the way that senior hiring works by the time you realize you've got a gap
00:55:09
it's 12 to 18 months before you can actually fill that gap and you know muggins here ends up doing to be fair all of my senior team
00:55:16
were doing more than one job trying to fill the gaps but um that was the biggest problem for me that
00:55:24
we didn't have the right senior leadership in place so i was working several jobs uh and so the conversation was always
00:55:30
okay well we'll fill these roles we'll fill these roles but by the time you filled that role this other role over there the person who's doing really well at 200
00:55:36
you're now 2000 people and the person's burnt out or you know not doing well and you have to replace them and so
00:55:42
it was like whack-a-mole [Music] and i think that was the biggest contributing factor but those are
00:55:49
conversations i very regularly had with um board members and investors do you think those conversations were treated
00:55:54
with with urgency no from from either yourself or the board no
00:56:00
absolutely not it was always like oh yeah oh yeah we'll just hire you know we'll hire the person it'll
00:56:05
be fine or i'll just stick it out for another couple of years and it'll all be fine and eventually
00:56:11
it's like no i've got a couple of weeks
00:56:16
yeah i think a lot of them did a huge amount i mean eileen the one of
00:56:23
our investors from passion personally put in so much time to support the company and support me and
00:56:28
i'm really really grateful for that but ultimately um yeah we just didn't
00:56:34
hire see great senior people fast enough that if i can find one root cause it was that
00:56:40
do you think if you'd gone to the board with more urgency and decisiveness yourself though you would have been taken more
00:56:46
seriously if you said listen i'm going to go next week
00:56:52
if these issues aren't fixed because i i'm asking these questions from same reasons as uh i said before i
00:56:59
went through the same thing where i approached the board i said i've got some problems here these are the issues can we fix them and it was probably a little bit of lip
00:57:05
service yeah until the day that i resigned yeah i don't know i think a lot of people put
00:57:10
a lot of effort into fixing it ultimately was like on me to fix no one else is going to come in and hire a really top senior team for me it's
00:57:17
that's sort of my job um [Music] so i don't know i also i do wonder
00:57:24
whether you really could have got those great senior people in at a earlier stage the analogy's sort of like
00:57:31
a football team you're starting in the i don't know what the fourth division now is cool but you know you're there and you get promoted
00:57:36
and you want to hire someone for the third division but everyone's like oh go and hire ronald it's like ronaldo is not coming to play
00:57:42
for a third division team you know so it's a constant process of upgra like gradually upgrading until you get into
00:57:47
premiership um and even then you know you're you're charleston athletic or something
00:57:53
uh so i just think it's tough i don't i don't think there's a magic bullet actually a
00:57:59
quick one since leaving social chain a couple years ago as you probably know i've kept my options open i've worked in a series of companies as
00:58:05
a consultant as a creative director as an advisor as an investor but i've kept my options open and that is about to change because
00:58:11
i'm about to embark on my next chapter building my next company and i'm going to tell you guys about it first but i
00:58:17
wanted to talk about something related to that when i'm building this new company as i have been over the last three months
00:58:22
we need everything from websites to logos to editing work done to some sort of admin
00:58:28
stuff done and it's crazy that even me even though i have a lot of financial resources i still
00:58:35
turn to fiverr.comfiveerr.com to help me with freelance services for
00:58:42
me it is a godsend if you're scaling your business if you're looking to start a project or you're developing yours
00:58:48
try fiverr.com if you go to f i v e r r dot com slash ceo
00:58:55
pick a service try it and then send me a message and let me know how you found it i'm gonna be paying for five people to
00:59:02
have their services done on fiverr.com so go to that website now links in the bio and let me know what you think
00:59:08
you said you weren't sleeping working seven days a week talk me through those moments when you when
00:59:13
things were have you experienced that i've oh definitely experienced
00:59:19
um anxiety and not sleeping well and an issue usually like payroll or
00:59:24
some kind of investor issue plaguing me for days and days and then getting sick yeah and
00:59:30
why have i got a cold i never get it cold and then yeah oh of course because there's no [ __ ] money in the bank or something
00:59:36
yeah um similar things uh we talked about a little earlier sort of that depletion of emotional energy so
00:59:42
that you have a you know there's a sort of a problem there you need to make a decision about maybe it's like one of your senior teams not working out you
00:59:48
know you have to fire them basically but like if i do that that's going to cause a bunch of other knock-on problems i don't want to
00:59:54
deal with yet because i'm i'm just trying to close this like 100 million pound funding round so just let me focus on that and and the
01:00:00
um the realization was sort of when the round closes when the money's in the bank and that weight lifts
01:00:06
you then look at all these other problems and they're very very easy actually like you re-energize quite quickly and able to
01:00:12
take those decisions but while there's just too many things sort of resting on your shoulders you it piles up and piles up and piles up
01:00:19
and so for me yeah it was um waking up at sort of four or five in
01:00:24
the morning often with um often with problems in the cold light of day are
01:00:29
relatively easy to solve but this the conscious part of your mind gets turned off when you're sleeping it's a sort of
01:00:35
subconscious like irrational part that blows the thing into a unsolvable problem and the next more you
01:00:42
can whatever you write it down you come back to the next day and go that that's ridiculous why am i even worrying about that
01:00:48
um so it's not a rational thing it's a much more of an emotional um at least for me emotional response
01:00:56
but because you're tired you make worse decisions and because you make worse decisions you end up creating more problems to yourself um
01:01:02
you know and the solution is easy to say and hard to do which is exercise more and you know stay off
01:01:09
alcohol and get to bed early and don't have your phone in your bedroom and like turn off your computer at the weekends
01:01:15
all this sort of stuff you know you should do um but when each one gives way the next
01:01:21
one's harder you know you haven't slept well so you don't want to go to the gym in the morning and because you look at the gym you blah blah blah blah blah so you can
01:01:27
either get into i think really good reinforcing cycles or very destructive kind of negatively reinforcing cycles
01:01:34
because you knew your mind was going to do that when you fell asleep did you upon getting in bed and laying down
01:01:41
presumably you knew that your mind was then going to run off with all of the thoughts and worries did that make that
01:01:48
process just before you fall asleep quite unpleasant yes and you sort of
01:01:53
going to sleep almost inevitably knowing you're going to wake up at 4 am is quite annoying to say the least
01:02:04
and the
01:02:10
it's a very depressing thing to say but sometimes when i did sleep a sort of
01:02:15
full night i'd wake up at 7 8 9 a.m whatever and for about three or four seconds
01:02:21
i'd forgotten what my life was like i'd forgotten what i was doing what my job was all the
01:02:27
pressures and i was like i was calm and i was sort of you know not stressed not anxious and then
01:02:32
three or four seconds later all the memories came back it was just like this crushing weight that that feeling was just terrible and
01:02:41
that really was the moment i just sort of knew this is this is no life you know i want the life three seconds ago where i can wake
01:02:47
up and not be worried and not be stressed and not feel like just anxious the whole time like there
01:02:52
would there were no other emotions in my life really apart from just anxiety that was a ten out of ten and every
01:02:58
other emotion felt like it's a the volume had been switched down to one out of ten because like anxiety was just 10 out of 10.
01:03:04
and that was no fun how long did that last a year and a half two years maybe [ __ ]
01:03:11
you know god i can imagine two years not fun and
01:03:17
i split up with my girlfriend as a result of it it's like mate you know my life's [ __ ] what can i do about it let's like one by one try and change
01:03:24
things um and rather than changing the job first i changed a girlfriend first um and that was really tough um
01:03:32
[Music] i left monzo and within about a week or
01:03:38
so i was sleeping perfectly through the night and it really just all went away yeah and now i you know i am
01:03:46
uh i hesitate to use the word happy but yeah i happy like content calm relaxed like i find things
01:03:53
to do with my day that i find you know that i enjoy and and suddenly like the small those
01:04:00
like emotions that were one out of ten when they're not being crushed by a ten out of ten anxiety like sort of start to
01:04:05
bloom back which is cool which um i like this is life yeah yeah
01:04:14
the girlfriend topic i find compelling because i i've also struggled in that department forever yeah um
01:04:21
how was it trying to hold down a relationship whilst also this business just being this crushing
01:04:26
force in your life terrible uh and i really um
01:04:32
uh we we're um good friends still but she was a lovely kind considerate
01:04:39
person and i was just not a nice person to be around a lot of the time just like really um short-tempered
01:04:47
like inconsiderate and like intolerant basically intolerant there's something that was like tiny
01:04:54
tiny things that a normal person would just be like that's just a cute quirk i feel like that's so irritating you know
01:05:01
um and so we just ended up not enjoying spending time together sadly um and i i think she was doing a
01:05:08
lot to try and you know make our lives together wonderful and i was just a monster
01:05:14
because my primarily because my work was so [ __ ] um
01:05:20
which i regret a lot it's interesting so when um what i
01:05:25
noticed about myself is when i had a girlfriend at the height of my uh ceo [ __ ]
01:05:32
um i would make her feel incredibly lonely even if i sat next to her because i you know i was selfish and self-absorbed and
01:05:40
i did wasn't interested in anything but my own problems and i also didn't particularly want to talk to her about them because that was just
01:05:45
i felt like it would grow the problem if i then went home and just brain dumped on her yep um yeah
01:05:51
do you think it's possible for a ceo that's in a high intensity situation to
01:05:57
have a successful early-stage relationship i mean i never managed but i believe it
01:06:03
is possible i've seen other people do it and then i think um part of it is maturity
01:06:09
and um uh detachment but not in a bad way and i
01:06:15
mean detachment from your job being able to compartmentalize so paul one of my co-founders a little bit older
01:06:21
um and i think he had a really great ability to sort of come to work and be fully present in work and then to go home and just
01:06:27
totally switch it off as soon as his head hit the pillow he was asleep he had he and his wife run a lovely alpaca farm
01:06:34
in the north of england and he was just really good at having sort of of compartmentalizing his life i think
01:06:41
similarly with ts the new um the new ceo at monso he's an older guy um i think he's in his 50s and has run
01:06:49
big banks before and is you know finds it challenging and exciting and a little stressful but i
01:06:54
think he's able to go back to his family and sort of switch that part of his brain off and i could never do that i it was all-consuming uh sort of
01:07:02
emotionally that i would never even on holiday i could never switch off the nagging feeling about the
01:07:08
work um so towards the end there was a little bit more detachment and talking to jonas
01:07:14
my co-founder as well i think he took everything so personally in the early days and sort of six seven years in you you
01:07:20
there's a bit of detachment um and i think that's actually really healthy to realize that your
01:07:26
entire person is not intrinsically linked to this company and you can leave and the company will continue and
01:07:32
maybe the company fails and you'll still survive and that's sort of um by the way i think monzo's doing
01:07:37
incredibly well it's not going to fail um but just that emotional realization that you're not like the same being
01:07:43
as your company uh would have been helpful earlier on i heard you had a red phone in your bedroom or something is that true yes
01:07:51
why was it red um it was more like a sort of um childish
01:07:57
pink color actually right the red pho is probably a dramatization i think i described as a red phone it was a pink it was an old nokia
01:08:03
um uh and why so the reason why um is first of all
01:08:10
because to help sleep i didn't keep my own mobile in my bedroom
01:08:15
so i turned it off and i had it charging out the hallway which i think is i encourage everyone to do i think it's great because you know
01:08:20
the first thing i used to do when i wake up and sometimes i do it still it's like you grab the phone and start and that's just not healthy so not
01:08:27
having the phone in your eye lasting at night not having the first in the morning just charge it in another room um that is a great step unfortunately
01:08:35
when there are really significant problems at three or four in the morning and it doesn't happen often but you know it
01:08:41
happened occasionally you need to be able to wake the senior management team up and the ceo up to make the hard calls um and so that
01:08:49
phone was like the back phone if something went wrong that would be the only one in my room
01:08:54
the only no one had the number it was linked to our automatic alerting system so if at monzo if something went wrong you
01:09:00
sort of click a button it would escalate and if it got escalated far enough the ceo gets woken up but only that system had the phone
01:09:05
number this and so if it rang it was because the bank was down um
01:09:11
and that happened a handful of times not you know not every week but every two or three months sometimes um
01:09:17
what an awful phone call yeah oh yeah yeah and it wasn't a person it was a you know it's a robot saying like wake up
01:09:23
there's an incident you are required to blah blah blah it's like ugh yeah that it's horrible because you can
01:09:30
see your hand gesture then how it felt yeah the heart your heart drops and you know it's going to be
01:09:35
the rest of your week if not your month is going to be ruined and it's you don't know if this is like the one that's going to kill the company we had
01:09:42
a few like that it's like you know it's is i think a lot of founders have like those moments like
01:09:47
oh [ __ ] is you know is this it is this the moment the company dies um and there's often not a lot you can
01:09:54
do actually as a you know your engineers running around trying to fix a problem and you getting stuck in is not going to
01:10:00
help help things so you're sort of almost like a helpless sideline observer um you know you have
01:10:05
to make the phone call to the board and to the investors and sometimes to the regulators at four in the morning um
01:10:12
but yeah you're in a pretty helpless situation yes there was a red phone it was more like a pink nokia okay but it sounds
01:10:18
better it sounds way better in the movie it'll definitely be a red phone yeah
01:10:23
um it'll be in like a box with like a maybe a code on it um i find that what you just said they're really interesting so there's
01:10:30
because i've been through that those key moments where you're not sure if your company is going to survive and it feels like the answer or the
01:10:37
determinant factor is actually outside of your control yep so it's someone else's decision whether your company
01:10:42
survives yep did you have many moments like that where it felt like it was someone else's decision if your company was going to survive
01:10:49
an investor or yeah and not loads but a handful so early investment rounds um
01:10:56
it was binary if we don't raise the money we we're folding the later rounds are more like the money's going to come in at some
01:11:01
evaluation um uh or some early outages we had a
01:11:07
really very bad we were still a prepaid card at the time and one of our suppliers which connected us to the mastercard
01:11:14
network went down it really went down hard for about 10 or 11 hours we didn't know it was going to be 10 or
01:11:20
11 hours it just was down and we phoned them up and they were panicking and didn't have a they didn't know when it's going to be back and so
01:11:26
you know we had about 300 000 cars at the time sort of like this could be two months like all the
01:11:33
cars could not work for two months now or rather it would take us two months to rebuild this thing um and that yeah we're just sitting
01:11:40
there thinking this is we it's our fault in the sense that we picked the supplier but beyond that like
01:11:45
they've just [ __ ] up right then you know i it it was it was totally ridiculous what
01:11:51
had happened in retrospect but um yeah that was uh real like
01:11:57
we can't do anything we literally yeah we're sitting there on customer support the entire company we pulled in on a sunday to respond to
01:12:03
all the customers and to proactively learn all this good stuff but that was a sort of we don't know if
01:12:08
this is even gonna come back online outside of the business and the chaos of the business what was your life
01:12:15
at that point um fairly normal
01:12:22
um we had a pretty good culture around sort of work-life balance at monzo um
01:12:28
you know mostly i was working five days a week unless we were fundraising i guess and i traveled probably a week every month
01:12:35
mostly for fundraising but i had a really close group of friends mostly from
01:12:40
you know growing up mostly from my secondary school actually i lived with my girlfriend we live you
01:12:46
know we lived in a big house with friends we cooked a lot um i took up pottery i i exercised a
01:12:52
fair amount it was very very normal not really nothing extraordinary but i wasn't working 100 hours a week for sure
01:12:58
i was doing 45 50 55 hours um really not a the time pressure was
01:13:04
not the problem it was the mental like the mental load the inability to switch off outside those hours and then boom
01:13:09
pandemic yeah comes around term sheets get pulled yeah you're sat there you've already you
01:13:15
know it's by the sounds of it you're already on the verge of well you already weren't happy with how things were going and then that's the i
01:13:21
guess the straw that broke the camel's back for sure when you realized that you were going to depart
01:13:28
and you knew there was a date you knew people were gonna know you knew was going to come out in the press what were the range of emotions
01:13:35
and were sadness one of them yeah definitely um 80 was just like i can breathe again
01:13:43
so it was overwhelmingly positive for me i and i'm not afraid to say that um
01:13:48
and so i don't want to build it up and you know it's a sort of negative thing really but there were 20 things
01:13:54
like sadness that i was leaving a team
01:14:00
that i really really liked overwhelmingly um guilt that i'd recruited many of these
01:14:06
people and some of them had joined to come and work with me um and that i was leaving them to kind
01:14:11
of fix the mess um yeah guilt i think was more than sadness
01:14:19
were there tears shed um i cry quite a lot
01:14:26
i cried as well when i i went through a range of emotions my first one was i was angry a little bit because as i said i'd been given a lot i felt
01:14:32
what felt like lip service yeah so i was annoyed at first but then when i realized that i was actually gonna send the email
01:14:38
yeah it was like gratitude yeah and some kind of like sad or happy tears yep
01:14:46
um i uh so i did an all hands i announced it at a on a video call with like 1500 people or something
01:14:52
and i definitely welled up at one or two points there um in a in a genuine way but um
01:15:01
what i have learnt over the last few years is that um vulnerability is the best way to
01:15:07
inspire is confidence trust sort of become a leader to show if it's genuine you know you
01:15:14
can't sort of you know the fake tears but genuinely like showing your emotion and showing your
01:15:21
vulnerability and showing your screw-ups is such a powerful way
01:15:26
to inspire followership um and so what it doesn't i wasn't
01:15:31
i wasn't afraid of that or embarrassed by you know i was sort of welling up on a call with 1500 people but it wasn't the first time i'd like
01:15:38
practically cried in front of the company um you know i'm not ashamed of that so
01:15:44
and then the uh the weightlifting yeah great
01:15:51
no one can [ __ ] email you and you know um it was great actually it wasn't it was great but then we were in the
01:15:57
midst of a lockdown and i was my house was having building work done
01:16:02
so i had to get out of my house with four housemates we went to a farmhouse in devon
01:16:09
which was idyllic but everyone else was working i had no job it was in the middle of
01:16:14
nowhere it was pretty boring actually for quite a while i think if you know if london
01:16:20
had been booming and i could kind of go out and meet people have fun it would have been a great experience but actually that's um especially uh if remember sort
01:16:27
of thinking back to april may of last year when everything was really hard to lock down still
01:16:33
april may 2020 not a fun experience really i think i am an extrovert um i thought i thought about
01:16:41
this a lot i really i get energy from being around people and i was with four people just working all the time and um in the middle of
01:16:46
rural devon yeah not fun but i mean it's a lot to go from having such an intense overwhelming
01:16:53
purpose and sense of mission every day to having pretty much none yeah and waking up in
01:16:59
the morning and thinking what am i going to do today what happens today it's weird because my time was
01:17:06
especially monday to friday was scheduled from sort of nine nine am till about seven or eight pm was
01:17:12
scheduled down to the down to five minutes easily um and you'd look at my diary they would
01:17:18
you wouldn't find more than five minutes spare sort of in that block so yes having nothing to do was uh kind
01:17:24
of weird and so i you know i wrote a list of all the things i wanted to do i actually had this list for five or six years
01:17:30
so i started looking down the list for things i could do whilst in lockdown um many of the things i couldn't yet do
01:17:36
so i started drawing i spent two or three months drawing i saw that um
01:17:41
hockney had started using his ipad so i started drawing on my ipad which i i only kept up for about a month
01:17:47
or two um but learning a language was on the list i bought some kite surfing gear and did
01:17:52
a load of coat surfing which was amazing now um i'm training up to um
01:17:58
a big offshore sailing race so kind of a yacht race called fastnet uh so that's in august i'm learning to
01:18:04
fly so i have a list so now my time is not as planned but it's still and
01:18:10
i'm spending a couple of days a week vaccinating people which is um which is very rewarding um so i'm busy
01:18:15
again but each of it is like not inconsequential i think the vaccination service is a great thing to
01:18:22
do but if i wasn't there there would be someone else there you know doing the jabbing um so each one i could sort of walk away
01:18:29
from pretty easily so it's a it's busy but it's low low pressure i guess yeah
01:18:35
and it seems like you're focusing on things that give you like an intrinsic joy yeah and learning i really
01:18:42
like learning um any really anything so the process of going from a complete novice to someone you know
01:18:48
mediocre uh i love and i'm angel investing that's to keep a connection to the tech
01:18:54
community i'm i've made seven or eight investments in the first half of 2021 i'll probably make another seven or
01:19:00
eight towards the end of the year and i'm helping out a few of or at least i'm going in to bother the founders whether i'm helping or not i
01:19:06
don't know [Music]
01:19:13
it feels like a job where you have to pay to go to work you know um but i like that a lot uh
01:19:20
me and my co-founder went on felt two very different things when we departed we departed at the same time pretty much
01:19:27
and um he because he didn't have anything to do
01:19:32
um upon departing i think he struggled quite significantly you kind of lose the orientation in your life and yeah you're right when your
01:19:38
schedule you're so used to your schedule running your life when there's nothing there you get out of bed a bit later and then
01:19:43
you you know you can that's that sense of lacking purpose you see it within olympic athletes like
01:19:48
michael phelps when he wins all the gold medals and then comes home they call it gold medal depression and you don't have that
01:19:54
thing you're striving towards or for that meaningful goal life can seem to lose orientation a little bit your schedule now is as busy
01:20:01
now as it was when you were working no no i mean the dragon's done thing is as
01:20:07
and maybe maybe brought it close because it's like 7am and i get home at midnight yeah but um
01:20:13
dragons then aside no and i've also i mean there's nothing there isn't huge stakes so even the work
01:20:19
that i do do the things that are in my schedule i can just cancel if i don't want to do it whereas before it was huge stakes i had to get on the flight yeah
01:20:26
or i had to be up at 4am so you know so but but you know both you and me that
01:20:31
there's still going to be that yearning to go back no
01:20:38
do you think you'll ever go back to starting a company being the ceo i don't know i have thought about this a
01:20:44
lot and people have asked me uh and i don't know um the thought process goes something
01:20:49
like um i love the early stage so you get a few of your mates together people you've always wanted to work with
01:20:55
perhaps and you start something and one of two things happens
01:21:01
you fail and that you know now you're kind of relatively high profile founder who's on to his third thing the third
01:21:07
thing's flopped and like ah we all knew he's an idiot so like okay that's humiliating or it's a success and you grow and
01:21:13
become a two thousand person company and you're like why have i done this to myself again i hate running two thousand person
01:21:18
companies um so the out i like the journey bit but the outcome either end
01:21:25
don't lose lose yeah like it doesn't seem there's much upside i mean it it's financially like very remunerative if you do well but
01:21:32
um it doesn't make my life happier so so in that sense no um with some caveats
01:21:40
one thing i've thought about doing which i've i've not started yet really is kind of run a studio so you get
01:21:45
four or five mates together with the aim of coming up with an idea putting in a ceo or a founder a
01:21:50
management team and kind of incubating it for properly incubating for 12 months you know actually like
01:21:56
building the first version and doing the marketing and but once it's at 12 or 18 months putting a full management team in sort of
01:22:01
letting it go you know so you retain a minority equity stake but really it's the the ceo and the management team that's
01:22:08
that's owning and running it so you you're able to that first year but then you're like hands off and then doing
01:22:13
that every year for five or six years so you end up with a portfolio of i don't know six to ten companies
01:22:18
so i thought about that a bit seems like a lot of hard work um so i haven't done it yet but i might do
01:22:23
that i think you'd probably end up getting sucked into the same problems yeah i agree because i think the power
01:22:29
law distribution of startup success means that one if you are successful one of the ten will be incredibly successful and then
01:22:35
they'll be like oh you know the ceo's not quite doing as well as i would have liked and you know either you think you should go in or someone else thinks you should go
01:22:41
in and you're ultimately you're running a 2000 company again and that's the thing i'm trying to avoid
01:22:46
um because i know a guy that does that how's that going um yes but he hasn't avoided the
01:22:52
[ __ ] so he's what he's he's a billionaire he's a multi-billionaire um and he
01:22:58
says oh i'm not g he when when press asks him he goes oh yeah i'm just not good at the operational bit i know what he means is
01:23:04
because i've spoken to him privately he doesn't want to do the operational bit doesn't want to care about people's birthdays that's what he says i don't want to have to
01:23:09
think about people's birthdays right so what he does is he comes he'll have a passion in his life say
01:23:14
psychedelics yep and he'll go and assemble a team a ceo co-founding team he'll go and hire the
01:23:20
people and then he'll handle the fundraising piece yep and he'll go off you go company but i still know that when [ __ ]
01:23:28
hits the fan and they've got funding issues yeah because he is the the big name in the piece he'll be front
01:23:34
and center of trying to solve those problems um i i i he lives a much better life than i think the ceo would
01:23:41
yeah and i think that's fine like i wouldn't i'm not looking for a zero stress life
01:23:46
um but i think yeah a lot of the people [ __ ] i don't like um the fun fundraising isn't fun but i
01:23:54
i think i have done it enough now that i could do it again in a relatively stress-free way but at 2000 people it's
01:24:01
not even remembering people's birthdays right right in the calendar like that's not you know i had a great assistant who would help me with a lot of that stuff
01:24:07
like it doesn't come naturally to me it's more like you know there's someone misbehaving
01:24:13
like 2 000 people someone's done something stupid at the christmas party and like it should be the chief people after dealing
01:24:18
with it but maybe she was misbehaving this never happened at monzo but um for some reason it ends up on
01:24:26
your on your desk like why am i dealing with these miscreants like they're [ __ ] around like this is
01:24:32
not like on top of everything i'm doing i'm having to sort out this hr issue
01:24:38
you have to because it i've been i was thinking i was just thinking of one incident at christmas party because you said christmas party
01:24:44
i'm not going to me and my co-founder stopped like we would go until 8pm yeah and then leave you'll be like this
01:24:49
is not because it'd be too much alcohol yeah and when you're 50 100 people you
01:24:54
know each other so well that like people i don't know maybe we're just lucky but people sort of respect
01:25:01
boundaries and behave themselves two thousand just law of averages like there's you know one in a thousand
01:25:06
people is gonna do something stupid so you have two of them now at two thousand people doing something stupid every every party it's
01:25:12
like they're gonna get fired for i know one incident well many incidents but i mean the crazy
01:25:19
twists and turns of being the ceo and finding these things out and we had someone who had been on doing i think
01:25:26
silk road on the dark where seven years ago got arrested they'd worked for me for three and a half years i thought they were a great guy yeah
01:25:31
they got sent to jail for seven years like the nicest guy in the company and he'd done it when he's a student all kinds of things christmas parties
01:25:37
someone's pushed someone into the toilet and kissed them and these are the things that in fact you do have to make the call on yep
01:25:43
even though it's such it seems like such a pathetic thing but that is sexual assault totally and and you can't
01:25:49
allow an incident like that to be mis-mishandled right because that is like that proposes an existential risk
01:25:55
against your company yeah if that were to break in the press so yeah and you know and it's
01:26:01
and it's the right thing to do but uh it should be the chief people off the handle yeah right like that's sort of my that was my problem
01:26:07
like there were periods of time when we didn't have a chief people officer so it just landed my desk and i'm fine dealing with a section of those
01:26:14
but when you're dealing with like four or five people's jobs worth of that [ __ ] then it gets overwhelming so
01:26:19
yeah i think it always comes back you have a incredibly sort of um
01:26:26
successful talented senior team and the stress becomes left because each you don't a ceo don't deal with that
01:26:32
your chief people officer says by the way this happened and i've dealt with it you go great oh thank god yeah i love those people in business
01:26:38
they deal with it and then tell they come to you with it sometimes but they tell you they've already dealt with it yep no action required tom it's already
01:26:45
been solved but just so you're aware i love these people and that's but that's how a senior team should work
01:26:50
really um and at its best it works like that it is magical death threats
01:26:59
nice little transition though i'd never got death threats as the ceo of social chain but i hear that you got a few
01:27:07
uh not loads but yes we and um and several of our staff as well um and we've got people turning up to
01:27:13
the office being we had security full-time security at are office and still do now
01:27:18
because customs would turn up sometimes with weapons um they threatened to turn up with you know a bottle of acid and their acid in
01:27:25
someone's face um yeah and yeah and come you know there were sort of groups on
01:27:31
social media who sort of try to find our addresses and sort of hand them around because i mean with six million
01:27:39
customers again sort of probabilities if one in a million is a bad egg you've got six bad
01:27:44
eggs um because we were a bank we dealt with
01:27:49
people's money and because we had obligations to detect and prevent financial crime we would
01:27:55
um we would detect criminals and shut their accounts down and the like the really pro criminals
01:28:00
would just treat it as a cost of doing business right like fine we've got thousands of these things it was like the amateur criminal
01:28:08
who like really thought we had a payday it's like he scammed some old lady out of her retirement you know he's got 20
01:28:14
grand are you like no shutting it down sorry sending it back and it got crazy like this was my big payoff
01:28:20
i'm going to come and [ __ ] you up um and clearly there were times when we blocked
01:28:26
accounting correctly if you're blocking tens of thousands of accounts you absolutely are going to get
01:28:31
it wrong occasionally and it sometimes it takes too long to get money back and we work really hard to get that time period really really as
01:28:38
quick as possible but still the law gets in the way you know you have to report it to the national
01:28:43
crime agency you have to wait for them to get back to you and it can take four weeks and they just don't get back to you so it's like okay we'll give them
01:28:49
the four weeks and then we'll refund you so there are rare cases where you're sitting on a legitimate customs money
01:28:55
for four weeks and they're going ballistic because they can't feed their kids or whatever but a lot of the time it's scammer who's
01:29:00
like they would phone up and they would have a record of a baby playing in the background so you know i can't can't feel my baby
01:29:07
yeah yeah um so yes it was never the professional criminals because they just choose a costume
01:29:13
business and by the way there were a ton of those and we and we caught way more than our fair share we were using a lot of
01:29:20
um basic machine learning to track sort of weird patterns and shutting their accounts down
01:29:25
we worked very very closely with the with law enforcement to to shut a bunch of these things down i'm
01:29:30
some of them were like wild there was a big ring a couple of years no probably three or four years
01:29:35
ago now where um if you've got a fuel pump you can
01:29:41
um you basically put your you sort of pay at the pump but what it would do is pre-authorize a penny on your card you'd pump your
01:29:48
fuel and then it would try and then it would calculate how much fuel you'd actually spend and then then take the payment
01:29:54
so people get a monzo card put one p on it swipe it and then go with a modified ford transit
01:30:00
so it's not like a 80 feet of petrol the whole thing was a fuel tanker so they'd put 10 grand of petrol into
01:30:06
their ford transit and then just drive off and the the payment on the card would bounce and they'd go and use that
01:30:11
to like they'd sell it to whoever wants petrol haul is uh farmers whatever um but they're
01:30:18
basically scamming um all of these petrol stations uh so we spotted that pretty quickly
01:30:23
um and shut that down which i'm really really proud of um there were several people trafficking
01:30:29
rings where they would um bring in women from um often east like east um eastern europe uh and then
01:30:37
traffic them for sex basically um and you'd spot patterns of behavior like
01:30:43
patterns of spend which suggests basically someone is being driven around in a in an uber or a taxi to um to be
01:30:49
pimped out um we'd spot that and work with law enforcement to actually like
01:30:54
um go and rescue people which is amazing like that's an amazing amazing feeling um but and those were mostly the pros
01:31:02
who were like meh you know you got us this time we've got these other rings so like whatever but it was mostly the amateur ones who get
01:31:08
really really angry you know they'd scanned three or four grand out of someone and it sounds like a lot to think about tom
01:31:17
yeah there's all of this hidden stuff you know you know you think of monzo and it's like the hot cold card and some great branding
01:31:22
i thought it was just a like nice colored card oh my god i mean it was serious by the end like
01:31:27
the running a bank is serious we were processing i don't know 100 billion pounds a year
01:31:33
or something of payments like it this is it's a lot of money it's people's salaries it's
01:31:38
and you six million customers you see their whole life you see the great stuff and you see the terrible stuff um
01:31:46
were you ever scared or threatened personally did you ever feel threatened personally in terms of your
01:31:53
personal security was there ever where you thought you know actually i do feel about unsafe here
01:31:59
um i had security and there was a we got a security firm to come and like look at
01:32:04
my online profile look at my house and uh figure out how much of it i was in danger and that was
01:32:11
a bit unsettling and there were times when especially when we had customers saying i'm you know we know where your office is and you
01:32:18
don't know who i am but i'm going to come with a bottle of acid i'm going to throw it in someone's face so that as you let as we left the office
01:32:24
there was a bit of you know a little apprehension there certainly um but
01:32:29
but no in general no it wasn't something i live with every single day but um but it was on them on your mind
01:32:37
certainly in a way that i think most people at most companies thankfully don't have to deal with that kind of [ __ ]
01:32:43
but now you're enjoying the small things in life yeah yeah maybe i should go back to therapy now and like
01:32:48
you can make it even better yeah there's small things in life that you're enjoying what are they yeah walking in the park i
01:32:55
heard so uh my housemate's got a dog recently that's quite fun um uh a lot of my friends have just had
01:33:02
children so not me but you know my um i'm godfather to a couple of young kids my brother
01:33:08
has a young girl now um a disproportionate amount of kids you're you're getting same as me i am
01:33:14
the godfather to all of my friends kids now it's uh i'm not sure i have any friends left really who are not
01:33:19
either parents or trying to become parents we're you know i'm 35 so it's i'm trying to find new younger
01:33:25
friends now avoid that stage of my life for another few years um
01:33:31
yeah i i love pottery i'm learning to fly i'm sailing i love to cycle i kite surf a lot of
01:33:36
active outdoorsy stuff i'm growing plants on my roof my courgettes have just come out
01:33:42
which is uh yeah they're great what about your relationships are you single
01:33:48
taken dating i am dating uh i've always been um intrigued by
01:33:55
dating apps i worked at one um i've written about 20 of a book on one wow but over like the
01:34:01
last 12 years it's not going to get finished so i've been intrigued by that sort of whole scene for a while um
01:34:09
yeah and i'm dating and sort of having fun but i'm not um
01:34:16
not good at settling down i think or i don't know maybe i've just not met the right person to settle down i i
01:34:22
don't know i really enjoy meeting new people but after six months or a year or something i'm sort
01:34:28
of like um
01:34:33
i don't know what it is it's sort of like deciding to commit to each other and spend the rest of your life together i really admire people who are able to do that because i
01:34:39
have not yet been able to do that have you managed to analyze where you think that might come from
01:34:47
like inability to be content this is what i should go talk to a therapist about no because i'm asking for myself
01:34:54
i like novelty i really like new things new experiences and i get bored quite easily um
01:35:00
[Music] so i don't know yeah probably i think
01:35:05
combining um uh psychedelics and therapy to solve this problem
01:35:11
what's my next challenge have you ever done psychedelics i haven't neither of us i would love to i really wish i could say i had i'm
01:35:17
trying to but it's just finding the right place and time i think yeah so what's um so we look forward at the future of your
01:35:24
life i guess a lot a lot of question marks you're not really sure which direction you're going because i think i think you well i think you you kind of answered
01:35:30
yourself at the start about your your purpose in life now yeah what your purpose is i don't have one and i'm totally fine with that yeah um
01:35:41
i i think looking forward to sort of when i'm 60 65 um i think i would like a family
01:35:48
around but i'm not sure i'm willing to make sacrifices to
01:35:53
put in the hard work to actually make that happen you know what i mean what are those sacrifices like giving up the fun single life like
01:35:59
the bringing up a baby isn't i've seen it secondhand you know i'm not doing it day in day out but it's hard
01:36:04
really and i have huge respect for that i'm just not sure i'm willing to sacrifice my freedom and my my total
01:36:10
lack of like obligation um for that future lots of people find raising
01:36:16
babies rewarding i've heard oh my god um i do not
01:36:22
uh but that sort of future payoff of having you know that kind of close family it's i can't imagine being 65 and not having
01:36:28
that but then i'm not sure i'm gonna like make the sacrifices today to have that that's sort of
01:36:34
something i'm puzzling around in my head apart from that just sort of enjoying life and um helping out other
01:36:40
startups is a is a nice way to feel like i'm giving a little bit back without taking my life at the moment so for me
01:36:47
that's enough what do you think about i was looking to ask i'm glad i remembered what do you think about bitcoin
01:36:52
and cryptocurrencies generally terrifying um
01:36:59
i don't understand it i invested a little bit uh it went up a lot i thought i was the
01:37:04
smartest person in the world it came down again i sold before i lost any money really um it was too stressful
01:37:12
so there's a kind of two questions there which like is crypto what do you think of cryptocurrency long term and is it useful versus like what
01:37:18
is your experience of riding the roller coaster over the last year long term i don't know
01:37:23
i'm not i can see how it's interesting but i think it's at the moment massively
01:37:29
over hyped and i haven't really seen any cool applications in reality yet that solve a
01:37:35
real human problem that may change in future uh and then the you know the form a bit like the crazy speculation i
01:37:42
was you know checking the price of ethereum every 15 minutes or something it was that
01:37:48
that's just not healthy uh so i got out and i'm again sleeping much better now that i've liquidated my crypto positions um
01:37:56
yeah what about you are you a believer i i am so i did the whole 2017-2018 hype
01:38:01
cycle got burnt pretty bad there and then i'm a believer in blockchain as a technology
01:38:09
um i don't actually invest in bitcoin at all um i i invest in ethereum because i'm
01:38:15
slightly involved in building a company in silicon valley in around which is based on ethereum
01:38:21
but but i'm also not i'm fortunate that i'm not checking the price every day i'm a very significant ethereum holder
01:38:28
one of the top 5000 in the world but i don't check the price because i got burnt the first time
01:38:34
and i've just got this idea in my head that um i'm holding for 10 years anyway so irrespective of what happens i'd only
01:38:40
be checking the prices as if to inform a decision and i'm not going to make a decision if it goes down 75
01:38:45
there's no decision if it goes up which it did so yeah i think i have a healthy relationship but i didn't the first time yeah and also
01:38:51
the loss if i were to lose all the money it wouldn't have a material impact on my happiness or life i've heard smart
01:38:58
friends say similar things which is basically take a you're basically hedging into the risk
01:39:03
that this is like the future of the economy and so take between five and ten percent of your like net net assets put it in crypto and
01:39:10
really leave it for 10 years yes and so if it is like the future of money you have a significant enough proportion
01:39:16
of that that you're like well set up if it goes to zero you've still got the other 1995 percent to sustain you
01:39:21
and i'm well diversified across various different sort of asset classes so if i genuinely lost all of my ethereum
01:39:26
holdings i don't think i'd lose a night's sleep do you know what i mean and that makes
01:39:31
it easy not to but when i when i was at social chain when i was i hadn't had an exit or i hadn't taken anyone off the table at all
01:39:37
and the price went down it was like oh i was going up and down with you know with the price so again it
01:39:42
comes back to that video game mindset and i think the detachment point um you know when i started this podcast
01:39:48
tom i i did it for very much you know when i read your story i thought [ __ ] this is exactly why i
01:39:54
started this podcast because it's literally called the diary of a ceo and what i was trying to achieve there was to give up give people a more honest
01:40:00
view about what it takes to be a ceo um and because i didn't necessarily i
01:40:06
think that it's been kind of you know rock star like jet ski you know whatever millionaires
01:40:11
loads of money private jet um whereas there's a real as you've explained cost
01:40:16
which people don't appreciate um of being a ceo and so when i when i read your story i
01:40:22
think in the papers and you were so honest and open about the real nature of being a ceo the side of being a ceo that i can also
01:40:28
very much relate to that's why i just needed you to come here and to have this conversation with me
01:40:33
what is the upside of being a ceo i mean i think it is amazing i don't
01:40:38
want to sit here and kind of complain about my life um i think for
01:40:44
smart ambitious talented people it can be incredibly remunerative i mean
01:40:51
i i'm financially independent now as are you right and it's i think it um you can
01:40:59
create a lot of value but also like capture some of that value personally like and make money like that's true you can be
01:41:07
um you can choose the people you work with which i think is really really really important so you can select the
01:41:13
people around you and to um choose who you spend your time with and
01:41:19
you get to create something if you're successful that random people in the street use and that feeling of
01:41:25
um being a having created something out of nothing this thing would not exist if it weren't
01:41:32
for you and the team around you and that i think that feeling is um is amazing
01:41:37
and so i don't regret it at all um i'm lucky now that i'm 35 and i don't
01:41:42
have to work really unless i want to and all of my other friends are successful in their own careers but
01:41:48
they're going to be working until they're 60 or 65. um and so yeah it's hard and it's
01:41:54
stressful but you know it's i wouldn't change it for sure i would do some things differently i'd
01:41:59
try to i'm not sure it would change the outcome but i think today for smart ambitious
01:42:06
people i think becoming a founder is probably one of the best choices they could make if they're
01:42:12
if they are of that mindset it's not for everyone for sure but i think if you're ambitious and
01:42:18
confident and and want to create something it's it's unparalleled
01:42:24
and the the sort of the foundation of all of this the most important thing i guess is to make sure that you're happy yeah
01:42:31
and that i never thought about that i mean that wasn't part of my upbringing it was always secondary
01:42:37
yeah it was always like achieving or accomplishing a goal of winning and the
01:42:43
thing that i think i personally i don't know about anyone else any other founders but i never paid enough attention to whether i was
01:42:49
happy um [Music] uh which i think was a mistake
01:42:56
um and i'm now quite consciously doing that um yeah i think that's the probably the
01:43:02
downside so many smart ambitious people are just driven to kind of
01:43:07
jump over ever increasing hurdles um without thinking about why
01:43:13
did you think happiness was the outcome kind of yeah i thought that was the end yeah sort of
01:43:19
like yeah i didn't even really think about it
01:43:25
yeah it wasn't uh my family's always been quite um ambitious and driven and sort of
01:43:32
uh setting goals for you know i was as kids um and i i know other
01:43:39
families where that is not the case and i think talking more explicitly about like
01:43:44
happiness and contentment and love and relationships and those things and then having a balance
01:43:50
i've never done balance i think it's probably healthier if you do have that you know the different inputs and you can choose what's right
01:43:56
for you so you i don't i don't want to draw the point because i don't want to sound like your therapist and we're almost done here but it really made me curious that what
01:44:02
you're saying about your family and were your parents particularly goal orientated yes
01:44:08
they were very hard on you or um ambitious for us certainly particularly my dad um
01:44:16
and i i'm a huge admirer of what he started business youngish i think he was he was 35 or 40
01:44:23
when he set up his business and he'd retired by the time he's 45 um and so i always from a very young age
01:44:31
thought that sort of starting businesses was i never thought about starting business actually i thought about running
01:44:36
businesses so i had a privileged upbringing and my parents were around and sent me to good schools but
01:44:42
really pushed me you know it pushed me to be the top of the class and even when i was top of the class they sort of pushed me
01:44:47
further and i'd sort of say like come on well you know i i did well in my exams to a point
01:44:53
where it's like there is no more i can do in these things like i've got all the top marks um but they sort of didn't believe me
01:45:00
like no you must be hiding something where's the so there was always like um
01:45:05
i think my dad told me when i was 10 i should go to oxford and study law because it was the hardest course in the world so i went to oxford and studied law which
01:45:11
i'm not sure is super healthy actually so yeah they're driven very very driven
01:45:18
and sort of um because they you know i think their parents as well pushed
01:45:23
them and um my dad always likes to claim he came from like this really working class up bringing up in rockstar in manchester
01:45:29
it's just like it's i had a mercedes like come on and then you know with almost the same
01:45:35
breath he's like yeah we my mom had horses like what the [ __ ] are you talking about this sort of
01:45:40
working-class upcoming um yeah but they they always worked hard they moved to asia very young to make a better life
01:45:47
for themselves and they they did work hard and they provided us as kids with great opportunities um
01:45:53
and i think now later in life all of us have sort of realized that um thinking a little bit more about
01:46:00
balance and like happiness and relationships and family is more important as important certainly
01:46:07
and probably more important than um sort of achievement and um and money
01:46:13
have you got to the crux of you what makes you happy they're very not foundational for things um two or three things i know
01:46:20
definitely learning um new skills whatever i really
01:46:25
really really love that and um sort of like my ex was really into
01:46:33
not really that's unfair she um is it the languages of love like the way you sort of experience love
01:46:40
yeah yeah and so for me acts of service i hate the whole thing but i do but i see i see that in myself like i love to cook
01:46:46
for people i love to get friends together i love to you know cook a meal make cocktails whatever it is sort of
01:46:52
like get a house in the countryside and invite all my best friends that i i really like being together with
01:46:57
groups of people that are careful so learning new stuff being together with friends and kind of
01:47:03
creating like cooking whatever whatever it is so those those things uh and i in time
01:47:10
raising kids maybe we will see um that's more of an aspiration than a i
01:47:17
don't know well listen tom thank you so much for um coming and doing this today i think what the thing
01:47:23
that um you probably know but you might not fully realize um that i think is so incredibly
01:47:29
powerful is your willingness to be vulnerable and honest and i just wish there were more entrepreneurs
01:47:35
at all stages in their journey that were willing to be that vulnerable because of how um how
01:47:40
much of a how much of them reality is so much more comforting than the like
01:47:46
this kind of um phony um
01:47:51
untouchable narrative you get from a lot of entrepreneurs reality is such much more of a comforting um place to be
01:47:58
because i can relate to that and that gives peace to my own struggles and hardships and those are an
01:48:04
unavoidable part of the human experience and i think entrepreneurs like yourself that have been tremendously successful have
01:48:09
disrupted an industry and achieved so much who are also willing to be vulnerable
01:48:14
um are of a very special breed and we need more of those people so thank you so much and i appreciate your time today thank you it's been a
01:48:20
lot of fun thank you
01:48:35
[Music]
01:48:45
you