The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett XX
[0] Did you know that the DariVosio now has its own channel exclusively on Samsung TV Plus?
[1] And I'm excited to say that we've partnered with Samsung TV to bring this to life, and the channel is available in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.
[2] Samsung TV Plus is a free streaming service available to all owners of Samsung Smart TVs and Galaxy mobiles and tablets.
[3] And along with the Dyeravisio channel, you'll find hundreds of more channels with entertainment for everyone all for free on Samsung TV plus.
[4] So if you own a Samsung TV, tune in now and watch the Dyer of a Cio channel.
[5] right now.
[6] What was it about you that was disruptive, though?
[7] I want some specifics.
[8] Whenever I'm, I see a problem.
[9] I think that this is in common with anyone who starts a business.
[10] I look at the way something's done and immediately start thinking of better ways to do it.
[11] 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?
[12] This way we could do it in this other way, which is 10 times faster.
[13] I mean, one of my first ever jobs was to, with another analyst, go and count all of the jewellery items on a, like a massive jewelry website.
[14] There must have been a thousand to do a tally chart of the price range.
[15] And this guy started doing it by hand.
[16] So I scratched my head and wrote a little Excel script to basically scrape the website and just tally them up and go, there's your results.
[17] But they didn't want that because they were billing by the hour.
[18] And that had only taken an hour of my time rather than 20 hours.
[19] And so they could only bill me out for an hour.
[20] They're like, no, no, no, go back and do it by hand.
[21] So that kind of stuff just drove me crazy.
[22] And I was always just looking for ways to automate, ways to do things better.
[23] I guess that's what led me into entrepreneurship.
[24] What gave you the conviction and the confidence that you could take on such a mammoth industry with Monzo?
[25] I mean, arrogance, naivety in arrogance, I think, in no small part.
[26] I'd already built a company called GoCardis, which is a payment process.
[27] So that sort of taught me that three young guys could get access to the payment system and actually move money around.
[28] and banking was a step up from there.
[29] It was more regulated, more complicated.
[30] 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 Net West user, and I was deeply, deeply disappointed.
[31] And I think like any founder, really, a huge sort of dose of naivity.
[32] 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.
[33] 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.
[34] And so I had a huge amount of self -confidence, a huge amount of naivety, and just assumed that I could figure it out.
[35] And I think we got a really, really long way.
[36] And I mean, the company is still doing fabulously.
[37] So I'm incredibly proud of what we built.
[38] I find that point about naivacy so interesting because it almost feels like founders like yourself need to be deluded on one end in terms of their own confidence.
[39] Right?
[40] Because if you look at the stats and all the odds, they're clearly against you.
[41] So founders like yourself seem to be, I deluded sounds like a negative word, but it's like for me I'm saying it in a positive way, almost like deluded to the, or naive to the stats and the probability of the success.
[42] Yeah, totally.
[43] But also self -aware enough to listen to feedback and to not be blinded by their hypotheses.
[44] Listen to some feedback.
[45] I mean, a lot of the feedback I got in the early days was this is impossible.
[46] You can never do it.
[47] You know, go back to a day job.
[48] So I think you do have to be incredibly optimistic as well.
[49] 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.
[50] And it's really hard to then leave that baggage behind and look at a company.
[51] And I looked at one yesterday.
[52] It's like, I've seen that model failed four times.
[53] Not my, you know, I wasn't running it.
[54] Others were running it.
[55] But to have a fresh enough mind to think, okay, maybe the timing's different, maybe the founding team is different, maybe the technology's changed, this can now work.
[56] 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, which I find super interesting.
[57] When you're looking at founders in your investments now, from your own experience of being a founder, what are the attributes you're looking for?
[58] I mean, the really simple one is being technical.
[59] Being able to write code, I think, is just a huge, huge leg up.
[60] And all of the founders who aren't technical, and there are many great ones, I think their biggest problem at the early stage is finding a technical co -founder.
[61] So that's just an immediate benefit.
[62] And if I could talk to my, if I could talk to people in a sort of age 12 to 18, I would basically just go and say, learn to code.
[63] You're going to have a really well -paying career for the rest of your life.
[64] And it's a great step into entrepreneurship.
[65] Are you technical?
[66] Yeah, I learned to code when I was 12 or 13, built websites.
[67] Why me?
[68] I mean, I was never, I studied law, not computer science, but I can, I can code.
[69] There's still code I wrote probably in the Monzo Codebase somewhere.
[70] I think it puts the emojis into the push notifications.
[71] But yeah, so being technical, I think is just the easy answer.
[72] More fundamentally, I think just being really, really determined and resilient, seeing, as we said, an immovable object and either finding a way sort of round it or over it or under it or just straight through it.
[73] You know, some that being indefatical, basically, I think is the single biggest predictor of success.
[74] You strike me as someone that has great confidence, and I imagine that's come from, as you kind of alluded to with Go Cardlers, you've built evidence over time that you could do things.
[75] So, and I sometimes think of confidence as like a self -reinforcing cyclii the upwards or downwards.
[76] I think I was more confident when I was 28 than I am now, for sure.
[77] And I think that comes with experience.
[78] 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.
[79] And so 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.
[80] Maybe less naivety.
[81] Maybe that would be at start a difference, right?
[82] I've seen the failures a few times now.
[83] because I was saying that because there's 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 the I guess the crux of what made you so starkly different from every all of the young people that have at least verbalize equally big dreams I think I'm also just really impulsive so I I think quite self -confident but I was I've taken quite big life decisions without very much reflection and that's worked out really well I'm hugely privileged I've grown up in the UK which I think is an enormous privilege compared to a lot people in my position but growing up 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 have that safety net and so yes I was confident I think yes I was impulsive, but that was enabled from a place of huge privilege because I could take the risk.
[84] And I actually think people in this country with great supportive families don't take enough risk in general.
[85] 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, you know, make more money if that's what drives you by taking more risk.
[86] I just don't think they do.
[87] And I think I put myself on the risk -loving end of the spectrum.
[88] And so I've quit jobs and moved countries with like hours notice.
[89] I started go cardless with Matt Hiroki because I quit my consulting job to go to a bigger consultancy.
[90] And in that gardening leave, I just got bored.
[91] I had three months off and they said, let's start a website.
[92] And I said, let's start a website.
[93] And I said, come out and interview.
[94] And we did.
[95] And we got the offer to do Wycombinator and their investment about three days before my McKinsey start date.
[96] So I just sort of said, ah, this sounds fun.
[97] and I'll do this startup thing instead.
[98] Did you know that the DarioVosio now has its own channel exclusively on Samsung TV Plus?
[99] And I'm excited to say that we've partnered with Samsung TV to bring this to life and the channel is available in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.
[100] Samsung TV Plus is a free streaming service available to all owners of Samsung Smart TVs and Galaxy mobiles and tablets.
[101] And along with the DariVosio channel, you'll find hundreds of more channels with entertainment for everyone all for free on Samsung TV Plus.
[102] So if you own a Samsung TV, tune in now and watch the Dyer of a CEO channel right now.