Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars: Tom BlomField

Key Takeaways

your heart drops is this it is this the moment the company dies tom bloomfield entrepreneur investor and 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 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 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 that would be involved i would never have started but i didn't know that i cry quite a lot you know i'm not ashamed of that for about three or four seconds i'd forgotten what my life was i was 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 knew this is this is no life there were no other emotions in my life really apart from just anxiety i mean it was serious by the end we would detect criminals and shut their accounts down customs would turn up sometimes with weapons and they threatened to turn up with you know a bottle of acid and throw it in someone's face that was tough [Music] tom bloomfield what a remarkable entrepreneur one of the uk's recent real success stories and he and his team managed to disrupt the archaic incumbent banking system at a time when nobody thought it could be disrupted but man his story is crazy absolutely crazy and the reason why i started the diary of a ceo is demonstrated perfectly in this podcast it has it all controversy drama business wars depression anxiety resilience success and failure and today you're going to hear a particular business story one that's never been heard before but tom felt that today and here was the place to share it if you're an aspiring entrepreneur and you want to get to the point in your life where you're running a hundred million or a billion pound company today might be your warning because as tom is going to tell you all that glitters is in gold and the true cost of entrepreneurship the cost that nobody seems to talk about is sometimes greater than the reward on offer this is one of the most emotional raw honest vulnerable brilliant gripping conversations i've ever had on this podcast and i can't thank tom enough for opening up his diary and allowing us to look inside without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the dire ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself tom why why entrepreneurship i made a very bad employee i've never been promoted and i've been fired i would guess two or three times depending on how you count why were you fired so often um my first ever job was a consulting firm 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 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 follow instructions so i think i'm much i'm much better founder than i am an employee what was it about you that was disruptive though i want some specifics um whenever i'm i see a problem i think 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 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 this other way which is ten times faster i mean i one of my first ever jobs was to 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 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 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 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 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 better um i guess that's what led me into entrepreneurship have you heard about this idea of first principle thinking absolutely yeah my co-founder jonas at monzo was just i think he would say first principal thinking at least once a day 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 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 your in your personal life though so because life is personal life is full of convention marriage school 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 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 sort of i was following that conventional path towards becoming a lawyer i guess but somewhere along the way i started realizing it probably wasn't for me but definitely in the early years that was my path you built this hyper fast growing business which was you know funny that you used 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 can you tell me why like because i when i when i speak to shaq do you know shaq shaquille khan about daniel eck and when i think about your story you both made the decision to take on just what what many entrepreneurs would consider to be an immovable object you took on the banking system um danielek took on the in this massive music industry that was seemed to be 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 that's why he's fresh of mine what gave you the conviction and the confidence that you could take on such a mammoth industry with monzo um i mean arrogance for naivety and arrogance i think in no small part um i i'd already built a company called gocardless which is a payment processor so that sort of taught me that you know three young guys could get access to the payment system and actually move money around um and banking was a step up from there it was it was more regulated more complicated but i had the background in payments and i was an early natwest user or rather when i was young and they were very old i was a network user and i was deeply deeply disappointed and i think like any founder really a 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 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 have started but i didn't know that and so i had a huge amount of self-confidence huge amount of naivety 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 i'm incredibly proud of of what we built i find that point about naivety so interesting because it almost feels like founders like yourself need to be deluded on one end in terms of their own confidence yep right because if you look at the stats and all the odds they're clearly against you so founders 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 almost like deluded to the or naive to the the stats and the probability of this success yeah totally but also self-aware enough to listen to feedback and to not be blinded by their hypotheses listen to some feedback 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 think you do have to be incredibly optimistic as well but a little bit like investing i'm doing a little bit of investing now i think you if you have a lot of experience the downside is you've seen these ideas fail again and again and again and it's really hard to then leave that baggage behind and look at a company um i looked at one yesterday it's like i i've seen that model 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 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 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 um which i i find super interesting when you're looking at founders in your investments now 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 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 great ones um i think the biggest problem the early stage is finding a technical co-founder so that's just a an immediate benefit and if if i could talk to my um if i could talk to people in a sort of if age 12 to 18 i would basically just go and say learn to code you're going to have a really well paying career for the rest of your life and it'll it's a great step into entrepreneurship are you technical yeah i learned to code when i was 12 or 13. bit websites um i mean i was never 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 i think it puts the emojis into the the push notifications but um yeah so being technical i think is just the easy answer um more fundamentally i think just being really really determined and resilient seeing as you said an immovable object and either finding a way sort of round it or over or under it or just straight through it it is some that um being indifferential basically i think is is the single biggest predictor of success you um you strike me as someone that has great confidence and i imagine that's come from as you kind of alluded to with go cardless you've built evidence over time that you could do things so i i i sometimes think of confidence as like a self-reinforcing 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 comes with experience um i think you 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 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 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 maybe less naivety maybe that would be yeah exactly yeah i've seen the failures a few times now 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 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 get to i guess the crux of what made you so starkly different from every all of the young people that have at least verbalized equally big dreams i think i'm also just really impulsive so i i think quite self-confident but i was um i've taken quite big life decisions without very much reflection um and that's worked out really well i'm you know i'm hugely privileged i 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 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 that risk didn't pay off i've have i have that safety net and so um yes i was confident i think yes i was impulsive but i that was enabled from a place of huge privilege because i could take the risk and i actually think people in this country um with great supportive families don't take enough risk in general i think people go into pretty safe careers in law or consulting or whatever and i think they could do more interesting things have more impact make more money if that's what drives you by taking more risk i just 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 jobs and moved countries you know with like hours notice um i started go cardless with matt hiroki because i quit my consulting job to go to a bigger consultancy and in that gardening leave 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 interview and we did and we got the offer to do y combinator and their investment about three days before my mckinsey start date 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 i think a nine figure valuation uh it's 970 million dollars at their last round i believe that's what was reported so not quite a billion um okay 10 figures 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 itself you you then depart go cardless i left early um i we were 35 people you know it was a the valuation was in the region of 30 or 40 million at the time hiroki my co-founder at time um 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 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 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 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 company but i wasn't really passionate about b2b direct debit software right it helps you know um lots of different uh suppliers collect money from their customers 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 b2b sales i found uh really difficult and frustrating and not something i was good at 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 dating site which is like the polar opposite you know uh all about brand direct to consumer um really fun every day uh terrible business model that was one of the ones i got fired from um i was head of growth that we stopped growing um it was bad you were head of growth 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 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 of their growth charts really sort of hockey stick metrics um and then it all just started to plateau and i 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 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 cliff revenue declined 70 um within about two to four weeks without any kind of macroeconomic this wasn't covered or something this was back in 2014. the world was going well the dating site just was no longer cool i think um so we rode this wave of popularity and sort of zeitgeist um it was called grouper it was it was incredibly sort of cool novel idea back in 2013-14 um and then people just got bored of it 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 your preference um or three girls and three girls um but six of you you and two friends 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 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 uh really really fun but um not a great business model you got fired uh yeah most the company got laid off actually yeah and then you took how long off before you swung back into the next thing um so i uh about two months but only about two months um because it was the u.s i was on a weird visa this is not 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 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 chilling out and then came back to the uk and i think about 48 hours after arriving in the uk i met up with ann bowdan at starling and agreed to be their cto within about again 24 hours um and there's a lot written about how i mean how your relationship with and transpired and your relationship with stalin more broadly transpired what's what are what are the key highlights from that from that journey choose your co-founder really carefully yeah uh i mean there were 14 of us at starling and 13 of us started monso it was that stuck wait say that again 14 people at starling and 13 of you started monzo 13 of those 14 started 13 of those 14 started monday okay including the chairman of the board um the entire management team the office manager everyone so one one would say well you know tom must have ripped them all away [Laughter] no no i just didn't want to work with 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 i got fired twice in six months um i was never paid i invested my own money which is i lost um there was never any paperwork which is my fault um and after six months i just thought i can't work with this person i just really it's really damaging to me and my mental health and so i resigned and the response to that resignation she called an all hands meeting and fired the entire company 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 not be in the office so they weren't at the meeting where they got fired so they had to work two weeks notice because they weren't technically fired but everyone else was fired so we all went to this gin bar to kind of 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 what's just happened and literally it's i think we were there for two days basically in this gin bar playing we we 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 we're gonna do and eventually like we can um we think we can do this ourselves um so it wasn't a case of like you know me leading a coo me pulling the company 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 company which is just i think a reflection of the way she she operates i can't quite wrap my head around the idea of one person resigning and then firing everybody as a show of i don't even know no it's not something i would do 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 day and they also resigned the day after yeah to come and work with us um she hired another management team another oh really okay and it turned out that we weren't the first team there'd been a previous team as well oh wow that she'd fired wow and then off so that's that's crazy so you started essentially monzo was founded in that gin bar yep yep asked 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 you're fired you know from starling you all convene in this gin bar you spend a couple of days there you end up um deciding that you're gonna go again together yep and i guess you feel pretty fired up and charged up to not only disrupt the industry but also to compete with starling though um it was unavoidable that feeling of [ __ ] them kind of but 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 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 you know rewrite the code base redo all our regulatory submissions really from scratch which was kind of like a 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 made the mistakes once the first time so actually that sort of rebuilding process was nice because it was on fresh ground but yeah it felt like a i mean initially we tried to negotiate with that and say why did you know 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 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 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 never really thought about the competition actually it wasn't a you know we weren't looking over our shoulder at revolut or styling it was uh if anything we were looking at the big banks thinking how can we take market share off them co-founders when you started monzo you started with was was paul ripping your only co-founder no uh there 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 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 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 paul um became deputy ceo and was the chief risk officer he became deputy ceo because the bank of 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 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 sort of very experienced guy next to you this co-founder of yours how about they didn't say that they said 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 several banks so he became deputy a ceo gary was cfo um he'd been at abn amro and mizuho bank i think uh there's a guy called jason who is sort of more customer marketing and then jonas who is the only one left now was a cto really really talented developer um so he stepped into the cta how important is that you talked earlier about the importance of business partners and that being one of your big regrets but how critically important is because you know 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 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 i mean because you don't know what you don't know i didn't do that i did i was thinking i was like 18 so um but i in hindsight i i know it's the most well for me that core team is the most important thing yeah it's probably the single biggest determining factor of successful failure in my view yeah so how important what was it for you to assemble um that skilled co-founding team i mean it was it was luck at monzo 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 sort of it felt like everyone's going to disappear into the wind um there was a you know it really was a debate are we going to really try and do this again or you know is this it we just go back to whatever 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 such a great um different set of skills um but it wasn't hugely uh sort of planned no i have a another example of this i started a company when i was at university through young enterprise and on day one they were like 14 co-found co-founders of this business which is just a ridiculous way to start a company and within about two we had meetings meetings nothing ever got done so within three months or so 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 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 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 think is is really really important to get right and having a group of 14 is not the way to do it really when 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 i guess the inception moment um what was the driving force for you to go on that journey was it money was it the chance of you know moving an industry what was it oh gosh uh insecurity i think for me it was i was much of the reason i started my business was probably based on deep childhood insecurities about wanting to be rich and yeah like all of that i think tied up into a bunch of weird sort of deep-rooted psychological problems um wanting to prove myself wanting to win or wanting to be seen to be successful i think um that money played a part in it not the driving part but certainly there was a factor there um a deep hatred for natwest bank um why they're just incredibly frustrating to use just every everyone who came to work at monto had one of these horror stories about their banks you know matt one of our early developers went 10p overdrawn with a a different bank and paid the 10p in um and then closed it counts like i'm 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 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 you know two years later they came after him for several thousand pounds because he'd been 10p overdrawn for a day um just everyone's got those kind of stories and so a big part of it was a frustration that banking worked like that 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 the i the people who've grown up with that technology it's sort of normal now but i 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 the world yeah type it in and it starts playing and that's that is magical um but now it's so commonplace and banking for years has just been you want to change change your address down i've downloaded a form filled in the form assigned and had to post it off this is for an online bank um so we really just felt quite deeply that it could be the experience could be much much better do you want to come in and watch this podcast live from behind the scenes if 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 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 be seen to win yeah or can you explain that one not to win i think that's probably the wrong i i use that phrase but i to be seen to be a success i think like validation yeah kind of yeah you know that's to my family and my friends and my school and teachers and um you've already been a success though with gocardless did you yeah i had a bit but go kardas circa 2014 2015 was still relatively unknown it was doing well but not it wasn't a breakout success yet in the way it is today i think um just on that feeling of 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 show exactly exactly and i'm doing a podcast 17 cameras right now um but uh but just drilling down into that in hindsight was that a feeling that you think could have ever been attained um was it a mirage 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 that like i've tasted what that feels like that's mixing my metaphors there i felt what that feel you know i've experienced that thing that's sort of like being in the newspapers and that sort of um people using in monzo card and that stuff and it's somewhat rewarding but it's not like i and i don't feel anymore i think what i'm trying to say is sort of that need to prove myself has sort of disappeared actually um and so either i've realized 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 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 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 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 my you know through oxford and starting companies um and very rarely paused to enjoy the journey or the you know the cliche the small things in life the you know the choose your cliche right like how your coffee tastes in the morning or the sort of the tweeting of the birds in the in the trees 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 reprogram yourself to get there though because i feel like society well for me anyway is um kind of conditions you to to chase climb promote move up strive and and you're kind of deferring your happiness to towards some future achievement accomplishment yeah so how did you get to the point where you just enjoy it what it you know life for what it is in the moment was it reprogramming yeah i guess like you know like you i i left my company i didn't um and that was really really hard and that was not a that was um you know deep deep anxiety and bordering on depression and uh like i i i wouldn't use the words rock bottom but like it was not a happy time and so then recovering from that uh and i took a year off and you know travel around europe went kite surfing and learned the language and all this kind of you know cliches um and that experience now leads me uh whenever i i still get these like urges like sort of um they my local mp passed away 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 maybe it could be the prime minister and then i'm like but then what crap yeah exactly and you know i think like i could start a company 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 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 really enjoying my life at the moment i'm lucky enough that i'm financially sort of independent now i have a great group of friends like why um why do i want to go and make myself miserable again um where does that narrative that voice 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 i wasn't before but you still have that yearning or that voice that comes and goes come on tom do it um it's that it's that sort of i guess disruptive kind of um i see something that's not working and it's incredibly frustrating and i go i could i could make that work better i'm um i'm uh reluctant i've talked about this before i'm working in the in the i'm 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 a team that's uh hopefully helping kind of the country get out of this lockdown rubbish but even there there are so many things that just drive me absolutely nuts um and i think that's probably nhs sort of more broadly i think the smart use of technology could really really improve the way we deliver care to everyone really medical care and so i keep thinking i just want to like just give me you know experience um i just yeah why 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 a million and a half people or something so um probably not for me but there's always that like your question you know what what is that drive it's the looking at something that's like clearly broken at least to my naive eyes um and that feeling that i feel like along with a small group of smart people i could make it better okay quick one if you've listened to this podcast you know i'm the biggest fan of fuel in the world and last week huel released hule's brand new protein powders and i have to tell you the salted caramel huel protein powder which only has a hundred calories in it roughly and 20 grams of protein has become my 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 had it for a week um but i've been looking for a source of protein that is also low calories and that tastes like heaven on earth and i finally found it so if i was to put my word to you next to a product it would be hewls salted caramel new protein powders 20 grams of protein 26 of your vitamins and minerals in case you're not nutritionally complete or sort of getting all of your vitamins and minerals and that 105 calories in a serving and it tastes like heaven on earth what were the the good times at monzo the times you look back most fondly small team so sub 100 [Music] being able to um go from a kind of an idea or a customer insight or something like a conversation with a customer about a problem to figuring out a kind of product feature to very quickly prototyping and building that and launching it and then seeing people use it um and then tell their friends about it that very quick iterative product development cycle i love um and a lot of the brand and marketing stuff uh i when i was at gocardless i didn't believe in brand uh which is a ridiculous thing to say um 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 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 to the kind of power of human psychology and brand and and mission and values and we really took a lot of that into monsoon and that it it was just astonishing so we started out even before we had a product talking a lot about our mission and some of our values like transparency and kind of community orientation and that worked so incredibly well um so yeah it was working with a small team to build the brand build the product get into users hands really quickly and then see them enjoy it i've talked about this a lot before that feeling of um standing in line at a coffee shop and seeing the person at the counter paying with a the hot coral monzo card and then having the bartender or the the server say you know i've got one of those as well and then listening to that conversation as sort of an anonymous bystander that's just incredibly rewarding feeling that you've had a hand in in creating something that's that people are enjoying so much let's dig into the point about brand then marketing because monzo really was a uk stand-up brand i think everybody knew it um even if they didn't use it because of its disruptive values because of it it felt unconventional in everything it did i mean even the card was completely unconventional intentionally yeah tell me tell me what the secret was to monzo's branding success um for authenticity i think um it was we had a couple of early marketing hires who who didn't work out um and they were very senior people from very very big companies who came in and they were a lot older and cayman is sort of like you know how the kids going to think about this and we were like we are the kids um so we had a very early community 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 and he's now he was a vp of of um marketing running a massive team with a massive budget by the end 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 head of design worked on a lot and it was um it was just an authentic representation of i think who we were and what we believed more than anything and we we did want to be different from the big banks we intentionally positioned ourselves as a part so the hot roll card every other bank was you know blue or purple or kind of a shade of black basically so like how far come from that can we get 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 transparent um we we shared a lot of internal information that everyone you know we 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 that was a way of building trust and humanity in opposition to these big sort of faceless banks um these all sound like first principles yeah i mean none of tristan had never worked in marketing before his previous job was at a refugee camp in in the middle east 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 these principles and it felt like the kind of company we wanted to run and so um we did and it worked really well um yeah with without any experience it goes to show the risk of reading marketing books no genuinely i've always thought this because i've never studied marketing or 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 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 work and go into these family offices and i'm working on the marketing plan that the ceo often will want to hire someone who's done marketing in that industry for 20 years and you immediately feel that that's the fastest route to not standing out at all and not having any point of difference yeah yeah it depends what you want to achieve if you are a family office or if you're managing the wealth of you know generational rich families then perhaps you do want to look trustworthy in like everyone else if you're a challenger bank appealing to 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 a really really long way whoever your target demographic is i am one of the things so we talked a little 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 heard that before but i also understand the feeling um and your worst times um least enjoyable times least enjoyable uh i never liked fundraising we did that 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 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 hit a billion valuation was very very fast um and very competitive so it was that easy but all the other rounds were real slog so fundraising was never fun we had a weird time with the press where they spent the first three or four years almost not idolizing us but certainly building us up you know the new kind of 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 enough and it flipped overnight and just everything we did was we'd get like 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 point in time where the telegraph would put monzo in the headline at least every day even if it was a story about one of our competitors it would be monzo competitor blah doing just like what why and i i eventually sort of called out the journalists on this and took him for a beer and it's like look 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 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 way more subscribers it's like you know sorry um but it it was really the entire from the bbc to the telegraph to everyone it felt like a pile on in a way that didn't seem 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 we did got um got negative headlines um and i think that's a peculiarity of the british press in particular sort of building something up until it's like big enough to tear down and that was just so confusing um yeah that was tough at one point we had a bbc camera crew outside our office um and this was when we we'd grown big enough we had um a small a small minority of people using monzo for financial crime basically with money laundering for scams um and we'd have to freeze their account and we 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 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 so it's it's a really bad customer experience um but watchdog were running a program about this you know monzo freezes accounts and they brought us a series of accounts that we'd frozen um over a series of several weeks saying you know this is we've got you and we sort of brought the editor of the program and said look here is the 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 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 you know and on the it was the 13th or 14th like that was a 50 50. you know we block the account we stand by it but we don't have cast iron proofing like great we've got you so bbc camera crew turns up and they'd commissioned a block of ice an enormous ice sculpture with a frozen 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 walking past it or you know to watch the thing melting which was like what's going on you know i was like i started this company to try and sort of build a better bank and somehow the bbc is camped outside my office trying to like i don't know i don't know what they're trying to do um drive drive viewership um but that was deeply annoying this whole press thing is i've heard this a million times and it terrifies the [ __ ] out of me because 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 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 you up to a point where you're interesting enough to tear down again and hearing you say the same thing terrifies the life out of me and it happens in everything tech startups um facebook uh yeah i mean facebook's a great example of it but it happens to sports stars it happens to politicians it happens to you know singers yeah yeah what advice would you give someone that's don't read the good stuff or the you know just ignore it all basically i think it's all yeah just ignore it all the hype and yeah because when they're 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 just i just ignore it all and did that have an impact on your mental health the worst parts of the press coverage 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 saturday or sunday they'd read the weekend papers and it's like are you all right it's like i'm fine 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 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 so yeah the um the press was not fun um investment's not fun regulation got really really tough by the end because we were a bank and ultimately if we fail the government has to step in and refund everyone their money so the rules there were very very strict and because we got so big so early and weren't profitable that that got quite tough um and i'm going to go through a list of the bad things now the f i will stop on the final one which was um just organizational politics when you get to we were almost 2 000 people and when you're 100 or 200 people you can know everyone and you can 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 and it um you get subcultures so teams develop their own sort of internal 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 you know becomes um really not collaborative actually and you get uh especially with some sort of quite senior people start building their little fifedems 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 new to me um especially when you're this is unfair not everyone but sometimes when you hire people from big banks they've grown up with that um uh culture toxic culture frankly um and they bring it to a place like monzo and everyone's like what that what's weird what's going on here but it definitely changed um and that was having to deal with that was was tricky you talked about not being profitable i've heard you talk about you know that being one of the um 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 of the bank yep is that fair yeah absolutely yeah um and we thought about it for sure i think what we didn't do was make the hard decisions to uh to turn the corner earlier like we thought about it and it was this was not it's not like we um blindly ran into unprofitability we took a series of actions we knew they were loss making but we um did that in order to to acquire users without paying so basically we swapped marketing spec we had no marketing spend but instead we ran um uh like like operational losses so we'd give away features to customers that would cost us money to get more customers because it meant our marketing budget was zero and we grew to five or six million people with we probably spent less than 10 million on marketing total that's an average cost per customer of one pound 50. great right so um but that that's that hides operational losses that's our real marketing budget was giving away things like html withdrawals for free for example and we just didn't take the hard decisions to turn some of those things off when we um we got to a certain size and it cost us way too much free cards yeah expensive 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 most people they order zero to one that's fine but some people just lose their card every weekend and they get struggled no problem just order another one it'll be here tomorrow morning uh and that's just annoying and costly the other thing though um so we should have paid more attention to reducing costs and taking a hard decision to drive revenues earlier uh we consciously didn't but part of it was avoiding those hard decisions the other half of it though is weird um i've thought about it a lot it's basically how you get almost self-reinforcement from your investors so you run a business a certain way you get to a certain scale and you present it to a set of investors 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 and the ones who think you're bonkers will not invest and they'll go to someone else the problem is that becomes self-reinforcing because they like what you did before so like yeah just do more of that and it can become um a bit of an echo chamber where you just get the group of i