Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield

[0] Your heart drops.

[1] Is this it?

[2] Is this the moment the company dies?

[3] Tom Bloomfield, entrepreneur, investor and founder of Monzo.

[4] I've never actually talked about this before.

[5] After six months, I just thought I can't work with this person.

[6] It's really damaging to me and my mental health.

[7] And so I resigned.

[8] And the response to that resignation, she called Nornh's meeting and fired the entire company.

[9] If I knew then what I knew now, I would never have done it, really.

[10] If I knew what the amount of pain and heartache that would be involved, I would never have started.

[11] But I didn't know that.

[12] I cry quite a lot.

[13] You know, I'm not ashamed of that.

[14] For about three or four seconds, I'd forgotten what my life was.

[15] I was calm.

[16] And then three or four seconds later, all the memories came back, and it was just like this crushing weight.

[17] That really was the moment.

[18] I sort of knew this is no life.

[19] There were no other emotions in my life really apart from just anxiety.

[20] I mean, it was serious by the end.

[21] We would detect criminals and shut their accounts down.

[22] Customs would turn up sometimes with weapons.

[23] And they threatened to turn up with, you know, a bottle of acid and throw it in someone's face.

[24] That was tough.

[25] Tom Bloomfield.

[26] What a remarkable entrepreneur.

[27] 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.

[28] But man, his story is crazy.

[29] Absolutely crazy.

[30] And the reason why I started the driver's CEO is demonstrated perfectly in this podcast.

[31] It has, has it all.

[32] Controversy, drama, business wars, depression, anxiety, resilience, success and failure.

[33] And today you're going to hear a particular business story, one that's never been heard before.

[34] But Tom felt that today and here was the place to share it.

[35] 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 isn't gold.

[36] And the true cost of entrepreneurship, the cost that nobody seems to talk about, is sometimes greater than the reward on offer.

[37] This is one of the most emotional, raw, honest, vulnerable, brilliant, gripping conversations I've ever had on this podcast.

[38] And I can't thank Tom enough for opening up his diary and allowing us to look inside.

[39] Without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett, and this is the Dyer of a CEO.

[40] I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.

[41] Why entrepreneurship?

[42] I made a very bad employee.

[43] I've never been promoted and I've been fired.

[44] I would guess two or three times, depending on how you count.

[45] Why were you fired so often?

[46] My first ever job was a consulting firm in London.

[47] I actually wasn't fired from this one.

[48] I was, but I wasn't promoted.

[49] And they said I was highly disruptive and not in a good way, not in a sort of, you know, tech founder disrupts industry, more in sort of, you know, annoying junior analysts can't follow instructions.

[50] So I think I'm much, I'm much better founder than I am an employee.

[51] What was it about you that was disruptive, though?

[52] I want some specifics.

[53] Um, whenever I'm, I see a problem.

[54] I think that this is in common with anyone who starts a business.

[55] I look at the way something's done and immediately start thinking of better ways to do it.

[56] 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?

[57] This way we could do it in this other way, which is 10 times faster.

[58] I mean, I, one of my first ever jobs was to, with another analyst, go and count all of the jewelry items on a, like a massive jewelry website.

[59] There must be a thousand to do a tally chart of the price range.

[60] And this guy, I I started doing it by hand, so 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.

[61] But they didn't want that because they were billing by the hour and that had only taken an hour of my time rather than 20 hours.

[62] And so they could only bill me out for an hour.

[63] Like, no, no, no, go back and do it by hand.

[64] So that kind of stuff just drove me crazy.

[65] And I was always just looking for ways to automate, ways to do things better.

[66] I guess that's what led me into entrepreneurship.

[67] Have you heard about this idea of first principle thinking?

[68] Absolutely.

[69] Yeah.

[70] My co -founder Jonas at Monzo was just, I think he would say first principle thinking at least once a day.

[71] Because that sounds to me like first principle thinking, you're looking at convention's way of doing things and thinking, well, this is, there's a much easier way.

[72] Yeah, absolutely.

[73] You sort of start from physics and build up from there, really.

[74] How's that, how's that boded for you in your, in your personal life, though?

[75] So because life is, personal life is full of convention, marriage, school, follow this path.

[76] Do you know what I mean?

[77] Yeah.

[78] And I, you know, I'm not married, but certainly when I was younger, I followed that conventional path.

[79] I went to a grammar school.

[80] I did my exams.

[81] I got a place at Oxford.

[82] I even did a master's at Oxford.

[83] So I sort of, I was following that conventional path towards becoming a lawyer, I guess.

[84] But somewhere along the way, I started realizing it probably wasn't for me. But definitely in the early years, that was my path.

[85] You built this hyper fast growing business, which was, you know, funny that you used the word disruptor, which was known as one of the UK's great disruptors and I still is known as one of the UK great disruptors can you tell me why like because when I when I speak to Shaq do you know Shaq Shakil Khan about Daniel Eck and when I think about your story you both made the decision to take on just what many entrepreneurs would consider to be an immovable object you took on the banking system yeah Daniel like took on the in this massive music industry that was seem to be immune to change.

[86] I was talking to Shaq about this last week.

[87] Oh, really?

[88] He texted me last night about Harry's new fund.

[89] So I think that's why he's fresh of mind.

[90] What gave you the conviction and the confidence that you could take on such a mammoth industry with Monzo?

[91] I mean, arrogance, for naivity in arrogance, I think, in no small part.

[92] I'd already built a company called Go Cardas, which is a payment process.

[93] processes.

[94] That sort of taught me that, you know, three young guys could get access to the payment system and actually move money around.

[95] And banking was a step up from there.

[96] It was, it was more regulated, more complicated.

[97] But I had the background in payments, and I was an early Nat West user, or rather, when I was young and they were very old, I was a net west user, and I was deeply, deeply disappointed.

[98] And I think, like any founder, really, a huge sort of dose of naivety.

[99] 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.

[100] 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.

[101] And so I had a huge amount of self -confidence, huge amount of naivety, and just assumed that I could figure it out.

[102] And I think we got a really, really long way.

[103] And I mean, the company is still doing fabulously.

[104] So I'm incredibly proud of what we built.

[105] 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, right?

[106] because if you look at the stats and all the odds, they're clearly against you.

[107] So founders like yourself seem to be, 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.

[108] Yeah, totally.

[109] But also self -aware enough to listen to feedback and to not be blinded by their hypotheses.

[110] Listen to some feedback.

[111] I mean, a lot of the feedback I got in the early days was this is impossible.

[112] You can never do it, you know, go back to a day job.

[113] 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 and I looked at one yesterday it's like I've seen that model fail four times not my I wasn't running it others were running it but to 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.

[114] 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.

[115] 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?

[116] I mean, the really simple one is being technical, Being able to write code, I think, is just a huge, huge leg up.

[117] And all of the founders who aren't technical, and there are many great ones, I think the biggest problem at the early stage is finding a technical co -founder.

[118] So that's just an immediate benefit.

[119] And if I could talk to people in a sort of age 12 to 18, I would basically just go and say, learn to code.

[120] You're going to have a really well -paying career for the rest of your life, and it's a great step into entrepreneurship.

[121] Are you technical?

[122] Yeah, I learned to code when I was 12 or 13.

[123] built websites 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 Monzo code base somewhere I think it puts the emojis into the push notifications but yeah so being technical I think is just the easy answer 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 You know, some that being indefatical, basically, I think is the single biggest predictor of success.

[124] You strike me as someone that has great confidence.

[125] 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.

[126] So I sometimes think of confidence as like a self -reinforcing cyclii the upwards or downwards.

[127] I think I was more confident when I was 28 than I am now, for sure.

[128] And I think that comes with experience.

[129] 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.

[130] 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.

[131] Maybe less naivety.

[132] Yeah, exactly, yeah.

[133] I've seen the failures a few times now.

[134] 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.

[135] And that's worked out really well.

[136] I'm hugely privileged.

[137] I've grown up in the UK, which I think is an enormous privilege compared to a lot.

[138] People in my position, but growing up in rural Africa are not going to have the same opportunity.

[139] I have great education.

[140] 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.

[141] And so, yes, I was confident.

[142] 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 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 you know make more money if that's what drives you by taking more risk and I just don't think they do and I I think I put myself on the risk -loving end of the spectrum.

[143] And so I've quit jobs and moved countries with like hours notice.

[144] I started go cardless with Matt Hiroki because I quit my consulting job to go to a bigger consultancy.

[145] And in that gardening leave, I just got bored.

[146] I had three months off and they said, let's start a website.

[147] And I said, yes.

[148] And then Wycombinator said come out and interview.

[149] And we did.

[150] And we got the offer to do Wycombinator and their investment about three days before my McKinsey start date.

[151] So I just sort of said, ah, this sounds fun.

[152] I'll do this startup thing instead.

[153] You launch GoCardless.

[154] You take that to, I think, a nine -figure valuation.

[155] It's $970 million at their last round, I believe.

[156] That's what was reported.

[157] So not quite a billion.

[158] Okay, 10 -figure money.

[159] We'll round up, it's fine.

[160] I mean, that is an achievement that most people in their lifetimes would, you know, would never go near, in of itself.

[161] You then depart, Go -Cardless.

[162] I left early.

[163] We were 35 people.

[164] You know, it was a, the valuation was in the region of 30 or 40 million at the time.

[165] Hiroki, my co -founder at the time, took on the CEO role and it's done just a phenomenal job.

[166] I'm just 10 and a half years old now.

[167] But it's been, that was not an overnight success story.

[168] That was 10 and a half years of really, really hard work.

[169] And huge credit to him and Matt also, who stuck around a lot longer than me. I was there for the first three years.

[170] I think I put something of myself into it, but it was, I was there for the beginning, not the middle and certainly not the end.

[171] Why did you leave?

[172] I wasn't really, I think it was a great company, but I wasn't really passionate about B2B direct debit software.

[173] It helps, you know, lots of different supplies collect money from their customers in a sort of back office way.

[174] It didn't have a big consumer brand.

[175] It wasn't direct to consumer, really.

[176] And I didn't, B2B sales, I found really difficult and frustrating and not something I was good at.

[177] and the tech kind of was built 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 all about brand direct to consumer really fun every day terrible business model that's one of the ones I got fired from I was head of growth that we stopped growing oh yeah 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 and in fact I saw the charts and it looked like a rocket ship when I was sort of interviewing there crazy 48 hour interview process I flew out to New York they showed me sort of their growth charts really sort of hockey stick metrics and then it sort of started to plateau and I kind of ignored that you know I said okay that's my job to come in because it had flattened out and I joined to kind of re -ignite 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 % within about two to four weeks without any kind of macroeconomic this wasn't COVID or something this was back in 2014 the world was going well the dating site just was no longer cool I think so we rode this wave of popularity and sort of zeitgeist it was called Gruber it was incredibly sort of cool novel idea back in 2013 14 and then people just got bored of it I think so the idea was it was six of you three guys and three guys or three guys and three guys, if that's your preference, or three girls and three girls.

[178] But six of you, you and two friends would go and meet three other people.

[179] So you knew your friends and they knew each other, and it would put the group together and you'd kind of go and have a wild night out.

[180] Rather than traditional dating app, sort of one -on -one, this was sort of a group social experience.

[181] Really, really fun, but not a great business model.

[182] You got fired?

[183] Yeah, most of the company got laid off, actually.

[184] Yeah.

[185] And then you took how long off before you swung back into the next?

[186] 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 u .s 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 anne boden at Starling and agreed to be their CTO within about, again, 24 hours.

[187] And there's a lot written about how, I mean, how your relationship with and transpired and your relationship with Starling more broadly transpired.

[188] What are, what are the key highlights from that, from that journey?

[189] Choose your co -founder really carefully.

[190] Yeah.

[191] I mean, there were 14 of us at Starling and 13 of us started Monso.

[192] It was that stuck.

[193] Wait, say that again.

[194] 14 people at Starling and 13 of you started Monzo 13 of those 14 started 13 of those 14 started Monzo including the chairman of the board the entire management team the office manager everyone So one would say well you know Tom must have ripped them all away Starling No no I just didn't want to work with Anne I've never actually talked about this before And there was there has been a book I haven't read the book the brief version is after six months I got fired twice in six months I was never paid I invested my own money which is I lost there was never any paperwork which is my fault 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.

[195] Two people happened to not be in the office.

[196] So they weren't at the meeting where they got fired.

[197] So they had to work two weeks notice because they weren't technically fired.

[198] But everyone else was fired.

[199] So we all went to this gin bar to kind of, it was called Ask for Janice on Smithfield Market.

[200] It's a great bar you should go there.

[201] We all went there to basically commiserate.

[202] I just think this is crazy what's just happened.

[203] And literally it's, I think we were there for two days basically in this gin bar playing.

[204] We all played speed chess.

[205] It was this very nerdy kind of.

[206] ball player, we're playing lots and lots of speech chess, just trying to figure out what we're going to do.

[207] And eventually, like, we can, um, we think we can do this ourselves.

[208] Um, so it, it wasn't a case of like, you know, me leading a coup, me pulling the company away.

[209] I quit.

[210] I was just like, good luck to you.

[211] I'm just, I'm going to sit on a beach for a while.

[212] And in response, she fired the entire company, which is just, I think, a reflection of the way she, she operates.

[213] 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.

[214] No, it's not something I would do.

[215] Where did that leave Starling, though?

[216] If they had lost pretty much everybody other than the two people that didn't manage to make it into work that day.

[217] They also resigned the day after, yeah, to come and work with us.

[218] She hired another management team, another team.

[219] Oh, really?

[220] Okay.

[221] And it turned out that we weren't the first team.

[222] There'd been a previous team as well.

[223] Oh, wow.

[224] That she'd fired.

[225] Wow.

[226] And then off, so that's crazy.

[227] So you started, essentially Monzo was founded in that gin bar.

[228] Yep.

[229] Yep.

[230] Ask for Janice.

[231] And it's still there.

[232] We go back for some of our reunions.

[233] Really?

[234] Yeah.

[235] Yeah, yeah.

[236] And how did you feel?

[237] So you're fired, you know, from Starling.

[238] You all convening this gin bar.

[239] You spend a couple of days there.

[240] You end up deciding that you're going to go again together.

[241] Yep.

[242] And I guess you feel pretty fired up and charged up to not only disrupt the industry, but also to compete with Starling, no. was unavoidable that feeling of fuck them kind of but we didn't I didn't really know that that she you know Anne 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 we do 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 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 don't you step down why do it like how can we we don't want to throw away this side for some people they'd been there 12 months why are we throwing away 12 months of work and that was a sort of very convoluted week or two where we almost had a deal a couple of times and it just similar thing happening you know huge blow up and we just walked away but no we never I think at Monzo we never really thought about the competition actually it wasn't a you know we weren't looking over our shoulder at Revolut or at Starling it was 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 Paul Rippin your only co -founder no there were and it was 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 So in a sense, that was the founding team.

[243] They all got stock, like not options, but actually full, you know, stock.

[244] But for arbitrary reasons, which I can't really remember, there were five of us.

[245] So myself, Paul became deputy CEO and was the chief risk officer.

[246] He became deputy CEO because the Bank of England looked at me, and I think I was 29 or 30 or something.

[247] And I said, have you ever worked in a bank?

[248] No. And you're applying to be CEO of our newest bank.

[249] I said, yes.

[250] 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.

[251] They said, we'd like you to find a deputy CEO who's actually run a bank before, please.

[252] And I, you know, I said Paul has won several banks.

[253] So he became deputy CEO.

[254] Gary was CFO.

[255] He'd been at A .B. Amro and Mizuho Bank, I think.

[256] There's a guy called Jason, who is sort of more customer in marketing.

[257] And then Jonas, who is the only one left now, was a CTO, really, really talented developer.

[258] So he stepped into CTRO.

[259] How important is that?

[260] You talked earlier about the importance of business partners and that being one of your big regrets.

[261] 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.

[262] Because I thought, you know, like, oh, you, like, I remember being in Selfridges one day.

[263] There was a guy selling Prana bags of like, you can be a director.

[264] You know what I mean?

[265] Because you don't know what you don't know.

[266] I didn't do that.

[267] I did.

[268] I was like 18.

[269] So, um, but I, in hindsight, I know it's the most, well, for me, that core team is the most important thing.

[270] It's probably the single biggest determining factor of success or failure in my view.

[271] Yeah.

[272] So how, how important was it for you to, to assemble that skilled co -founding team?

[273] I mean, it was, it was luck at Monzo, because that was the group that was at Starling.

[274] And it was sort of like, how do we keep this team together?

[275] And it really was a sort of, it felt like everyone's going to disappear into the wind.

[276] There was a, you know, it really was a debate.

[277] Are we going to really try and do this again?

[278] Or, you know, is this it?

[279] We'd just go back to whatever we were doing before.

[280] And so to keep everyone together, I think.

[281] It wasn't a, and so I think we were really fortunate.

[282] We had such a great, different set of skills.

[283] But it wasn't hugely sort of planned.

[284] I have another example of this.

[285] I started a company when I was at university.

[286] through Young Enterprise and on day one there were like 14 co -founders with this business which is just a ridiculous way to start a company and within about two months we had meetings and meetings and nothing ever got done so within three months or so three of us basically said look you 11 you can have write it 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 going to like work all summer one of them quit his job to do he just left to work at Deutsche Bank and the three others are actually going to try and run a startup here.

[287] And so figuring out that core team, I think, is really, really important to get right.

[288] And having a group of 14 is not the way to do it, really.

[289] When you started Monzo from that, I say from the gym bar, it wasn't really from the gym bar, but you see what I mean?

[290] That was the kind of, I guess, the inception moment.

[291] What was the driving force for you to go on that journey?

[292] Was it money?

[293] Was it the chance of, you know, moving an industry?

[294] What was it?

[295] Oh, gosh.

[296] 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...

[297] Yeah, like all of that, I think, tied up into a bunch of weird sort of deep -rooted psychological problems.

[298] Wanting to prove myself, wanting to win, wanting to be seen to be successful, I think.

[299] That money played a part in it, not the driving part, but certainly there was a factor there.

[300] a deep hatred for Nat West Bank.

[301] Why?

[302] They were just incredibly frustrating to use.

[303] Just everyone who came to work at Monso had one of these horror stories about their banks.

[304] You know, Matt, one of our early developers, went 10P overdrawn with a different bank and paid the 10P in and then closed the account.

[305] It's like, I'm done with this.

[306] But he'd incurred the chart.

[307] He didn't know they applied the charge at the end of month.

[308] So it's like a £5 -pound overdraft.

[309] fee that month, which then the month after, a month after, should have rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled.

[310] And two years later, they came after him for several thousand pounds because he'd been 10 p over drawn for a day.

[311] Just everyone's got those kind of stories.

[312] And so a big part of it was a frustration that banking worked like that.

[313] And a sort of feeling that it didn't have to be like that because we looked at apps like Spotify or Uber.

[314] And they felt magical.

[315] The people who've grown up with that technology, it's sort of normal now.

[316] but I remember, you know, I downloaded Napster for the first time.

[317] I remember showing my dad and my uncle, you know, think of any song you want in the world.

[318] Type it.

[319] Yeah, type it in and it starts playing.

[320] And that's, that is magical.

[321] But now it's so commonplace.

[322] And banking for years has just been, you want to change your address.

[323] I've downloaded a form, filled in the form, signed it and had to post it off.

[324] This is for an online bank.

[325] So we really just felt quite deeply that it could be, the experience could be much, much better.

[326] And one of the other reasons you gave there as a driving force was wanting to be seen to win.

[327] Yeah.

[328] You explain that one.

[329] Not to win.

[330] I think that's probably the wrong.

[331] I use that phrase, but to be seen to be a success, I think.

[332] Like validation.

[333] Yeah, kind of, yeah.

[334] You know, that's to my family and my friends and my school and teachers and, um, you know.

[335] You've already been a success, though, with go cardless.

[336] Did you know?

[337] Yeah, I had a bit.

[338] but go card us 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 don't think just on that feeling of wanting that validation from friends because we can all relate to that like 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 with 17 cameras right now but just drilling down into that in hindsight was that that a feeling that you think could have ever been attained?

[339] Um, was it a mirage?

[340] I think I have attained it.

[341] Yeah.

[342] Oh, and I don't mean I'm the world's big success.

[343] That's not what I mean.

[344] I mean that like, I've tasted what that feels like, mixing my metaphors there.

[345] I felt what that feels, you know, I've experienced that thing, that sort of like being in the newspapers and that sort of, um, people using a Monzo card and that stuff.

[346] And it's, you know, 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 ticked 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 your next question is what is your purpose I'm not sure I have on it sort of more like living day to day and enjoying life.

[347] And I was never good at that.

[348] I've really, really driven from a very, very young age.

[349] So I worked incredibly hard for my exams and my, you know, through Oxford and starting companies 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?

[350] Like how your coffee tastes in the morning or the sort of the tweeting of the birds in the trees.

[351] And that stuff now I'm, am spending more time kind of being more, I guess, mindful and kind of living in the moment.

[352] Do you have to like reprogram yourself to get there, though, because I feel like society, well, for me anyway, is kind of conditions you to chase, climb, promote, move up, strive and you're kind of deferring your happiness towards some future achievement or accomplishment.

[353] Yeah.

[354] So how do you get to the point where you just enjoy it, you know, life for what it is in the moment?

[355] Was it reprogramming that you?

[356] Yeah, I guess.

[357] 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 at 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 on kite surfing and learn language and all this kind of, you know, cliches.

[358] And that experience now leads me whenever I, I still get these, like, urges.

[359] Like, oh, I sort of, my local MP passed away a few months ago, and there was a by -election.

[360] I was like, why did I stand for that seat?

[361] And I could be an MP, and then maybe I could, you know, maybe I could be the prime minister.

[362] And then I'm like, but then what?

[363] Crap!

[364] You're like to be awful.

[365] Yeah, exactly.

[366] And, you know, I think, like, I could start a company.

[367] And then it, you know, what if it goes well?

[368] And then I end up running a big company again and that'll be all.

[369] So, yeah, just like a couple of sort of those brain cycles.

[370] And I'm like, no, what am I thinking?

[371] I quite quickly come back to like, I'm really enjoying my life at the moment.

[372] I'm lucky enough that I'm financially sort of independent now.

[373] I have a great group of friends.

[374] Like, why do I want to go and make myself miserable again?

[375] Where does that that voice come from?

[376] So many people have that voice.

[377] Because it's funny because you're saying, right, I'm at a stage.

[378] of peace now.

[379] I wasn't before, but you still have that yearning or that voice that comes and it's, go on, Tom, do it.

[380] It's that sort of, I guess, disruptive kind of, I see something that's not working, and it's incredibly frustrating.

[381] And I could make that work better.

[382] I'm, I'm, I'm reluctant, and 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 hopefully helping kind of the country get out of this lockdown rubbish.

[383] But even there, there are so many things that just drive me absolutely nuts.

[384] And I think that's probably the NHS sort of more broadly.

[385] I think the smart use of technology could really, really improve the way we deliver care to everyone, really medical care.

[386] And so I keep thinking, I just want to like just give me, you know, I just Just, yeah, why can't I just come in and fix it for a year?

[387] And it's incredibly, you know, I've struggled with a company of 2 ,000 people.

[388] The NHS employees, I think, a million and a half people or something.

[389] So probably not for me. But there's always that, like, your question, you know, what is that drive?

[390] It's looking at something that's like clearly broken, at least in my naive eyes.

[391] And that feeling that I feel like, along with a small group of smart people, I could make it better.

[392] What were the good times at Monzo, the times you look back most fondly?

[393] Small team, so sub 100, being able to go from a kind of an idea or a customer insight or something like a conversation with the 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 and then tell all their friends about it.

[394] That very quick, iterative product development cycle, I love.

[395] And a lot of the brand and marketing stuff, I, when I was at GoCardis, I didn't believe in brand, which is a ridiculous thing to say.

[396] And I, you know, as a marketing background, that's almost offensive, I guess.

[397] But I was like, no, this is, you know, this doesn't exist, really.

[398] People, and then the day, when I worked at the dating site, that really opened my eyes, the kind of power of human psychology and brand and mission and values.

[399] And we really took a lot of that into Monzo, and that it was just astonishing.

[400] 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.

[401] And that worked so incredibly well.

[402] 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.

[403] I've talked about this a lot before, that feeling of standing in line at a coffee shop.

[404] and seeing the person at the counter paying with the hot car on Monzo card and then having the bartender or the service 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 creating something 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 even if they didn't use it because of its disruptive values, because of it, it felt unconventional in everything it did.

[405] I mean, even the card was completely unconventional.

[406] Intentionally, yeah.

[407] Tell me what the secret was to Monzo's branding success.

[408] For authenticity, I think.

[409] It was, we had a couple of early marketing hires who didn't work out, and they were very senior people from very, very big companies who came in, and they were a lot older and came in a sort of like, you know, how the kids are going to think about this?

[410] And we were like, we are the kids.

[411] So we had a very early community manager called Tristan Thomas, who was there from almost in the first few months.

[412] He just very recently left to start his own company.

[413] And he was a VP of marketing running a massive team with a massive budget by the end.

[414] But he was a 23 -year -old when he started, you know, 23, 24 -year -old.

[415] And I worked on it a lot.

[416] Hugo, our head of design, worked on it a lot.

[417] And it was just an authentic representation of, I think, who we were and what we believed, more than anything.

[418] And we did want to be different from the big banks.

[419] We intentionally positioned ourselves as a part.

[420] So the hot -crawl card, every other bank was, you know, blue or purple or kind of a shade of black, basically.

[421] So, like, how far from that can we get?

[422] And the big banks were very impersonal, you know, you never felt like you were talking to a human.

[423] And so everything we did was human and transparent.

[424] We shared a lot of internal information that everyone, you know, we published our product roadmap.

[425] This is what we're going to be working on for the next two years, which people thought were bonkers.

[426] But that was a way of building trust and humanity in opposition to these big sort of faceless banks.

[427] These all sound like first principles.

[428] Yeah.

[429] Tristan had never worked in marketing before.

[430] His previous job was at a refugee camp in in the Middle East.

[431] I'd never really worked in marketing.

[432] I'd spent nine months at a dating site.

[433] But we, yeah, we came up, we thought about these principles.

[434] And it felt like the kind of company we wanted to run.

[435] And so we did and it worked really well.

[436] Yeah, without any experience.

[437] Goes to show the risk of reading marketing books.

[438] No, genuinely, I've always thought this because I've never studied marketing or did any degree in, you know, our business did really well in the marketing industry.

[439] But I think it did well because we hadn't read those books and we hadn't been sort of diluted.

[440] polluted by convention's idea of how yeah i think there's 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 and 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.

[441] If you're a challenger bank appealing to 21 to 25 -year -olds, maybe you want a different approach.

[442] 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.

[443] I am one of the things, so we talked a little bit there about your best times at Monzo, and I wasn't surprised to hear that it was when the company was small, because I've had that before, but I also understand the feeling.

[444] and your worst times least enjoyable times I never liked fundraising we did that a lot and I had to I think Monsos raised something like 600 million and I probably did 400 of that that was always tough and you only hear about the really quick round that you know the ad funding yeah and the we hit a billion the round where we hit a billion valuation was very very fast and very competitive so it was easy but all the other rounds were real slog So fundraising was never fun.

[445] 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 the sort of next great hope almost.

[446] And we could almost do nothing wrong, which is not healthy.

[447] And then we got big enough and it flipped overnight.

[448] And just everything we did was we'd get vitriol for in a way that I, I mean, I can understand it because it drives leadership, right?

[449] And it's, there was a point in time where the telegraph would put Monzo in the headline at least every day.

[450] Even if it was a story about one of our competitors, it would be Monzo competitor, blah, doing, just like, why?

[451] And I eventually sort of called out the journalists on this and took him for a beer and was like, come on, tell me what's going on.

[452] 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 it.

[453] I write the article they choose the headline or my editor.

[454] But every time they do that, we just get way more subscribers.

[455] It's like, you know, sorry.

[456] But it was really from the BBC to the telegraph to everyone.

[457] It felt like a pile on in a way that didn't seem fair, really.

[458] And not to say that we never did anything wrong, we absolutely did.

[459] But even the good stuff we did got negative headlines.

[460] 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.

[461] And that was just so confusing.

[462] Yeah, that was tough.

[463] At one point we had a BBC camera crew outside our office.

[464] And this was when we'd grown big enough.

[465] We had a small minority of people using Monzo for financial crime, basically, of money laundering for scams.

[466] And we'd have to freeze their account and we weren't allowed to tell them why we'd frozen their account.

[467] We'd sort of send the money back to wherever it had come from, which is a very frustrating experience, really, and it's quite strict in the law that you have to shut the account, you can't tell the person.

[468] So it's a really bad customer experience.

[469] But Watchdog were running a program about this, you know, Monzo Freezers accounts.

[470] And they brought us a series of accounts that we'd frozen 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 in and said, look, here's the criminal background of the person who's account with frozen.

[471] You're really going to run a program about this.

[472] It's like, oh, no, no, okay, okay.

[473] This happened 12 times.

[474] And every one of the times we showed the evidence and like, okay, you know, and it was the 13th or 14th.

[475] Like, that one's a 50 -50.

[476] You know, we've blocked the account, we stand by it, but we don't have cast eye improvement.

[477] They're like, great, we've got you.

[478] So BBC camera crew turns up, and they'd commissioned a block of ice, an enormous ice sculpture with a frozen Monzo card, the ice that they dumped outside our office and put a camera crew there for the day to see if they could find anyone walking past it, of course, you know, to watch the thing melting, which was like, what's going on?

[479] 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, drive viewership.

[480] But that was deeply annoying.

[481] This whole press thing is, I've heard this a million times, and terrifies the shit out of me because, you know, joining Dragon's Den, you join, and I was like, oh my God, amazing.

[482] 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 going to happen.

[483] Yeah.

[484] Is they're going to build you up to a point where you're interesting enough to tear down again?

[485] Yeah.

[486] And hearing you say the same thing terrifies the life out of me. And it happens in every tech startups.

[487] Um, Facebook.

[488] Yeah, I mean, Facebook's a great example of it, but it happens to sports stars.

[489] It happens to politicians.

[490] It happened.

[491] to singers 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 when they're writing good stuff 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.

[492] And I stopped reading it.

[493] I genuinely stopped reading it.

[494] And I'd have friends sort of come and say it, you know, on a Saturday or Sunday.

[495] They'd read the weekend papers and it's like, are you all right?

[496] I was like, I'm fine.

[497] I fucking hate that.

[498] Don't you?

[499] What have I done?

[500] That's the worst because then you've got to justify to people you care about and make them not care.

[501] And I'm like, I'm fine.

[502] Like, okay, just don't read the Times this weekend.

[503] It's like, yeah, never read the Times.

[504] That was annoying.

[505] But I don't know.

[506] So yeah, the press was not fun.

[507] 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 got quite tough and I'm going to go through a list of the bad things now I will stop on the final one which was just organisational 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 sense of team spirit you know everyone you can know everyone's names um you get to 2 ,000 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 there some teams are 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 fiefdoms.

[508] And you get this just weird politics and rivalries going on that I'd never worked to become before.

[509] It was like total, it was totally new to me. 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.

[510] Um, and they bring it to a place like Monzo and everyone is sort of like, what, what's weird, what's going on here.

[511] But it definitely changed.

[512] And that was, having to deal with that was tricky.

[513] You talked about not being profitable.

[514] I've heard you talk about, you know, that being one of the, 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.

[515] Yep.

[516] Is that fair?

[517] Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

[518] And we've thought about it, for sure.

[519] I think what we didn't do was make the hard decisions to turn the corner earlier.

[520] Like we thought about it and it was, this was not, it's not like we blindly ran into unprofitability.

[521] We took a series of actions.

[522] We knew they were loss making, but we did that in order to acquire users without paying.

[523] So basically we swapped marketing spend.

[524] We had no marketing spend.

[525] Instead we ran like operational losses.

[526] So we'd give away features to customers that would cost us money to get more customers.

[527] customers because it meant our marketing budget was zero.

[528] And we grew to five or six million people with we probably spent less than 10 million on marketing total.

[529] That's an average cost per customer of £1 .50.

[530] Right.

[531] So, um, but that, that's that hides operational losses.

[532] That's our real marketing budget was giving away things like ATM and jewels for free, for example.

[533] 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 costs us way too much.

[534] Free cards.

[535] Yeah.

[536] Was that expensive?

[537] With that, it's like the long tail.

[538] It's, you know, it's the very small number of people who are ordering 20 or 30 cards a year.

[539] Most people, they order zero to one.

[540] It's fine.

[541] But some people just lose their card every weekend and they go to shrug.

[542] No problem.

[543] I'll just order another one and it'll be here tomorrow morning.

[544] And that's just annoying and costly.

[545] The other thing, though, so we should have paid more attention to reducing costs and taking hard decision to drive revenues earlier.

[546] We consciously didn't.

[547] But part of it was avoiding those hard decisions.

[548] The other half of it, though, is weird.

[549] I've thought about it a lot.

[550] It's basically how you get almost self -reinforcement from your investors.

[551] So you run a business a certain way.

[552] You get to a certain scale.

[553] And you present it to a set of investors.

[554] And the ones who are more or less the ones who agree with what you've done and think it's the right approach will invest.

[555] And the ones who think your bonkers will not invest and they'll go to someone else.

[556] the problem is that becomes self -reinforcing because they like what you did before.

[557] So they're like, yeah, just do more of that.

[558] And it can become a bit of an echo chamber where you just get the group of investors around the table who are all big supporters who all really believe in the model.

[559] And there's not really anyone being like, you know, you're running, you should really think about this other stuff.

[560] And a really smart thing I've heard, which I didn't do.

[561] and I hope I will have the humility to do in future is to sort of pick out the smartest investors you can or smart as advisors or other founders and ask them why you think your business will fail and then really try to think deeply 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 listen to them but that can become I don't think you grow as much from that so really finding the doubters even the head and not so much the haters, but the doubters, but the doubters, certainly, and interrogating them about your business and really trying to think through how you can solve those problems.

[562] I think that would have helped us a lot.

[563] Hindsight's a wonderful thing.

[564] Now you have some of those answers in hindsight.

[565] And what were, what are those answers in hindsight that you wish you'd known sooner?

[566] So one of them is obviously, you know, getting to a profitable business model sooner, making those high decisions.

[567] Profitable business model.

[568] cutting costs, driving revenue by taking hard decisions to sort of limit some of the free features and charges to some of the things we gave for free.

[569] I think we should have done that way, way earlier.

[570] That's the biggest.

[571] Any cultural decisions?

[572] I know there was a merging of the startup guys and the banking people, which, I guess that's necessary, right?

[573] Yeah, I struggled to get the banking license without that.

[574] And you can see that at Revolut.

[575] You look at all their recent senior hires with the last year or two, and it's big wigs from the big banks because they're trying to get a banking license.

[576] So I think that's sort of inevitable.

[577] And you pay a cost for that.

[578] You pay the price.

[579] Customer service is always one of our investors who shall remain nameless was a bit of contrarian, basically said, the quality of your customer service is too high.

[580] And it's costing you too much.

[581] And it's going to be the weight around your neck for the next whatever 10 years until you can slash it.

[582] And I'm not sure if he was right on.

[583] not actually.

[584] That's when I still debate.

[585] I've noticed Revolut's customer service has declined almost month over month for the last two years.

[586] I've been a customer there and at Monzo, but Revolut, they've made a real significant, it feels like effort to either cut back on customer service costs or just because they've got more uses they're struggling.

[587] But from when I joined Revolut, it was just amazing.

[588] And two years, almost three years on, it's just awful.

[589] Yeah.

[590] And I think Monso is, hopefully it's not awful, but I think it was amazing at the start, and I think it's now variable.

[591] I think sometimes it's really, really great, but sometimes you end up waiting a little too long.

[592] Sometimes it's a little too hard to talk to a customer service agent, arguably.

[593] I think, I still think it's pretty good, but in the early days, it was spectacular.

[594] It was the number one thing our customers talked about was the service.

[595] By far.

[596] You'd look on social media or whatever.

[597] It was just, and if we'd had the revenue to support that, I think we could have continued.

[598] It's not very expensive.

[599] It costs us about 12 or 13 pounds per customer per year to provide that.

[600] And I think the benchmark that everyone's aiming for is less than that clearly.

[601] And so the drive is always to automate more, to put, you know, chatbots in to do whatever.

[602] There comes a point in your journey with Monzo where you realize that you're no longer enjoying it.

[603] For me, in my business, it was kind of like a, there wasn't a point.

[604] There wasn't a day when I woke up.

[605] It was kind of a compounding of several issues that slowly wore me down.

[606] Yes.

[607] Yes, it was that plus COVID.

[608] And then COVID was like the knockout punch.

[609] But yeah, it was four or five, four or five, six issues that meant for the last year or two, I wasn't having a good time really.

[610] And I talked to my board about it.

[611] I talked to investors about, I think hiring really good senior leaders was part of the potential solution and we didn't do that fast enough.

[612] We got some great, great senior leaders in now.

[613] And I sort of wonder what would have happened if we could have got those people in a year or two earlier.

[614] Possibly we wouldn't have paid them enough.

[615] They wouldn't have joined.

[616] I did talk to them about this.

[617] A T .S. I knew CEO is like, if you'd have come five years ago, I would have joined five years ago.

[618] I was like, aha.

[619] Go back in time.

[620] But yeah, it was four, five, six issues and then COVID.

[621] And that was just, I mean, for so many people in the world.

[622] That was horrific.

[623] For us, our revenue declined at least 50 % within about a week or so.

[624] The cost space was the same.

[625] Revenue goes down 50%.

[626] We were already lost making.

[627] So now it's sort of, we had a fund, we had a hundred million pound funding round lined up to close on the Monday.

[628] And on Friday before London went to lockdown and all the terms she's got pulled.

[629] So again, retrospects, hindsight is 2020.

[630] Everything has bounced back.

[631] in the investment market, private investment and public investments are stronger than it was pre -COVID.

[632] And so people just take these really short -term decisions in a kind of in a shock, in a crisis, destroy a ton of value for themselves.

[633] And, you know, six, nine, 12 months later, everything's bounced back even harder.

[634] I just don't understand it.

[635] But anyway, COVID was definitely the straw that broke the camel's back.

[636] And about six weeks into that, six to eight weeks, I'm just like, I'm working seven days a week.

[637] I'm not sleeping here.

[638] this is just, you know, I need sort of throw the towel in almost.

[639] You know, I need to be subbed out.

[640] Had you been thinking about that conversation for some time before you got to the point where you approached the board with decisiveness that this is really done?

[641] I'm not even thinking about it.

[642] I've been talking to them about it for a year or two, yeah.

[643] Not the whole board, but yeah, two.

[644] Select members.

[645] Our chairman and one of our lead investors, absolutely.

[646] We'd had multiple conversations about me not enjoying the role as it was then configured.

[647] And the answer was like, okay, let's.

[648] reconfigure a role let's bring people around you let's because because we were growing so quickly and the way that senior hiring works by the time you realize you've got a gap 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 were doing more than one job trying to fill the gaps but um that was the biggest problem for me that we didn't have the right senior leadership in place so I was working several jobs and so the conversation was always okay well we'll fill these roles we'll fill these roles but by the time you filled that role this other role of there the person who was doing really well at 200 you're now 2 ,000 people and the person's burnt out or you know not doing well and you have to replace them and so it was like whackamole and I think that was the biggest contributing factor but those are conversations I very regularly had with board members and investors do you think those conversations were treated with urgency no from either yourself or the board.

[649] No, absolutely not.

[650] It was always like, oh yeah, we'll just hire, you know, we'll hire the person and it will be fine or, oh, just stick it out for another couple of years and it'll all be fine.

[651] And eventually it's like, you know, I've got a couple of weeks.

[652] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[653] Yeah, I think a lot of them did a huge amount.

[654] I mean, Eileen, one of our investors from Passion personally put in so much time to support the company and to support me and I'm really, really grateful for that.

[655] But ultimately, yeah, we just didn't hire great senior people fast enough.

[656] If I can find one root cause, it was that.

[657] Do you think if you'd gone to the board with more urgency and decisiveness yourself, you would have been taken more seriously?

[658] If you had said, listen, I'm going to go next week if these issues aren't fixed.

[659] Because I'm asking these questions, but for same reasons.

[660] I said before, I 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?

[661] And it was probably a little bit of lip service until the day that I resigned.

[662] I don't know, I think a lot of people put a lot of effort into fixing.

[663] It ultimately was like on me to fix.

[664] No one else is going to come in and hire a really top senior team for me. So that's sort of my job.

[665] So I don't know.

[666] I also, I do wonder whether you really could have got those great senior people in at a earlier stage.

[667] The analogy is sort of like a football team.

[668] You're starting in the, I don't know what the fourth division now is called, but you know, you're there and you get promoted.

[669] And you want to hire someone for the third division, but everyone's like, oh, go and hire Ronaldo.

[670] It's like, Ronaldo is not coming to play for a third division team, you know, so it's a constant process of like gradually upgrading until you get into premiership.

[671] And even then, you know, your child's an athletic or something.

[672] So I just think it's tough.

[673] I don't think there's a magic bullet, actually.

[674] You said you weren't sleeping, working seven days a week.

[675] Talk me through those moments when you, when things.

[676] Have you experienced that?

[677] I've, oh, definitely experienced anxiety and not sleeping well and an issue usually like payroll or some kind of investor issue plaguing me for days and days and then getting sick.

[678] And why have I got a cold?

[679] I never get a cold.

[680] And then, oh, of course, because there's no fucking money in the bank or something.

[681] yeah um similar things uh we talked about a little earlier sort of that depletion of emotional energies so that you have a you know there's a sort of a problem there you need to take a decision about maybe it's like one of your senior teams not working out and you 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 deal with yet because i'm just trying to close this like 100 million pound funding round so just let me focus on that and and the um the realization was sort of when the round closes, when the money's in the bank and that weight lifts, you then look at all the other problems and they're very, very easy.

[682] Actually, like, you re -energize quite quickly and able to take those decisions.

[683] But while there's just too many things sort of resting on your shoulders, it piles up and piles up and piles up.

[684] And so for me, yeah, it was waking up at sort of four or five in the morning, often with, often with problems in the cold light of day are relatively easy to solve but this the conscious part of your mind gets turned off when you're sleeping it's a sort of subconscious like irrational part that blows the thing into a unsolvable problem and the next more you can whatever you write it down you come back to the next thing that that's ridiculous why am i even worrying about that um so it's not a rational thing it's a much more of an emotional um or at least for me emotional response um but because you're tired you make worse decisions and because you make worse decisions you end up creating more problems you end up creating more problems to yourself, you know, and the solution is easy to say and hard to do, which is exercise more and, you know, stay off alcohol and get to bed early and don't have your phone in your bedroom and, like, turn off the computer at the weekends, all this sort of stuff you know you should do.

[685] But when each one gives way, the next 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 don't get in the gym, you're blah, blah, blah, blah.

[686] blah.

[687] So you can I think really good reinforcing cycles or very destructive kind of negatively reinforcing cycles.

[688] Because you knew your mind was going to do that when you fell asleep.

[689] Did you, upon getting in bed and laying down, presumably you knew that your mind was then going to run off with all of the thoughts and worries.

[690] Did that make that process just before you fall asleep quite unpleasant?

[691] Yes.

[692] And sort of going to sleep almost inevitably knowing you're going to wake up at 4 a .m. is quite annoying, to say the least.

[693] And the very depressing thing to say, but sometimes when I did sleep a sort of full night, I'd wake up at 7, 8, 9, and whatever.

[694] And for about 3 or 4 seconds, I'd forgotten what my life was.

[695] Like, I'd forgotten what I was doing, what my job was, all the pressures, and I was like, I was calm.

[696] And I was sort of, you know, not stressed, not anxious.

[697] And then three or four seconds later, all the memories came back.

[698] It was just like this crushing weight.

[699] That feeling was just terrible.

[700] And that really was the moment I sort of knew this is no life.

[701] You know, I want the life three seconds ago where I can wake up and not be worried and not be stressed and not feel like just anxious the whole time.

[702] Like there would, there were no other emotions in my life really apart from just anxiety.

[703] That was a 10 out of 10.

[704] and every other emotion felt like the volume had been switched down to 1 out of 10 because anxiety was just 10 out of 10.

[705] And that was no fun.

[706] How long did that last?

[707] A year and a half, two years maybe.

[708] Fucking hell.

[709] God, I can imagine two years.

[710] Not fun.

[711] And I spit up with my girlfriend as a result of it.

[712] It's like, mate, you know, my life's shit.

[713] What can I do about it?

[714] Let's like one by one try and change things.

[715] And rather than changing the job first, I changed a girlfriend first.

[716] first.

[717] And that was really tough.

[718] I left Monzo.

[719] And within about a week or so, I was sleeping perfectly through the night.

[720] I really just all went away.

[721] Yeah.

[722] And now, you know, I am, I hesitate to use the word happy, but yeah, I happy, like content, calm, relaxed.

[723] Like, I find things to do with my day that I find, you know, that I enjoy.

[724] And, And suddenly, like, the small, those, 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 bloom back, which is cool, which I like.

[725] This is life.

[726] Yeah.

[727] This is how normal people feel.

[728] The girlfriend topic I find compelling, because I've also struggled in that department forever.

[729] Yeah.

[730] How was it trying to hold it down a relationship whilst also this business just being this crushing force in your life?

[731] terrible and I really we're we're good friends still but she was a lovely kind considerate person and I was just not a nice person to be around a lot of the time just like really short -tempered like inconsiderate and like intolerant basically intolerant there's something that was like tiny tiny thing that a normal person would just be like that's a just a cute quirk.

[732] I thought that's so irritate, you know.

[733] And so we just ended up not enjoying spending time together, sadly.

[734] And I think she was doing a lot to try to, you know, make our lives together wonderful.

[735] And I was just a monster because my, primarily because my work was so shit, which I regret a lot.

[736] It's interesting.

[737] So when, what I noticed about myself is when I had a girlfriend at the heart of, height of my CEO bullshit I would make her feel incredibly lonely even if I was sat next to her because I was selfish and self -absorbed and I 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 I felt like it would grow the problem if I then went home and just brain dumped on her yeah yeah do you think it's possible for a CEO that's in a high intensity situation to have a successful, early stage relationship.

[738] I mean, I never managed, but I believe it is possible.

[739] I've seen other people do it.

[740] And I think part of it is maturity and detachment, but not in a bad way.

[741] And I mean, detachment from your job, being able to compartmentalize.

[742] So Paul, one of my co -founder, was a little bit older.

[743] 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 totally switched off.

[744] As soon as his head hit the pillow, he was asleep.

[745] He and his wife run a lovely alpaca farm in the north of England.

[746] And he was just really good at having sort of compartmentalizing his life.

[747] I think similarly with TS, the new CEO at Monso, he's an older guy.

[748] I think he's in his 50s and has run big banks before and finds it challenging and exciting and a little stressful, but I think he's able to go back to his family and sort of switch that part of his brain off.

[749] And I could never do that.

[750] It was all -consuming, sort of emotionally, that I would never, even on holiday, I could never switch off the nagging feeling about the work.

[751] So towards the end, there was a little bit more detachment.

[752] And talking to Jonas, my co -founder as well, I think he took everything so personally in the early days and sort of six, seven years in, there's a bit of detachment.

[753] And I think that's actually really healthy to realize that your entire person is not intrinsically linked to this company.

[754] And you can leave and the company will continue and maybe the company fails and you'll still survive.

[755] And that's sort of, by the way, I think Monsa's doing incredibly well and it's not going to fail.

[756] But just that emotional realization that you're not like the same being as your company would have been helpful earlier on.

[757] I heard you had a red phone in your bedroom or something.

[758] Is that true?

[759] Yes.

[760] Why was it red?

[761] It was more like a sort of childish pink color actually.

[762] The red phone is probably a dramatization.

[763] I think I did describe it as a red phone.

[764] It was an old Nokia.

[765] And why?

[766] So the reason why is, first of all, because to help sleep, I didn't keep my own mobile in my bedroom.

[767] So I turned it off and I had it charging out in the hallway, which I think is I encourage everyone to you.

[768] I think it's great because the first thing I used to do when I wake up and sometimes I do it still is like you grab the phone and starts, and it's just not healthy.

[769] So not having the phone in your eye lasting at night, not having the first thing in the morning, just charge it in another room.

[770] That is a great step.

[771] Unfortunately, when there are really significant problems at three or four in the morning, and it doesn't happen often, but it happened occasionally, you need to be able to wait the senior management team up and the CEO up to make the hard calls.

[772] And so that phone was like the bat phone.

[773] If something went wrong, that would be the only one in my room.

[774] The only, no one had.

[775] the number.

[776] It was linked to our automatic alerting system.

[777] So at Monzo, if something went wrong, you sort of click a button, it would escalate.

[778] And if it got escalated, far enough, the CEO gets woken up.

[779] But only that system had the phone number of this phone.

[780] And so if it rang, it was because the bank was down.

[781] And that happened a handful of times.

[782] Not, you know, not every week, but every two or three months sometimes.

[783] What an awful phone call.

[784] Yeah.

[785] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[786] And it wasn't a person.

[787] It was a bot, you know, it's a robot saying, like, wake up.

[788] There's an incident.

[789] You were required to blah, blah, blah, it's like ugh yeah that it's horrible because you can see by your hand gesture then how it felt yeah the heart your heart drops and you know it's going to be 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 a few like that's like you know is and i think a lot of founders have like those moments like oh shit is you know is this it is this the moment the company dies um and there's often not a lot you can do actually as a you know your end engineers running around and trying to fix a problem, and you getting stuck in is not going to help things.

[790] So you're sort of almost like a helpless sideline observer.

[791] You know, you have to make the phone call to the board and to the editors and sometimes to the regulators at 4 in the morning.

[792] But yeah, you're in a pretty helpless situation.

[793] Yes, there was a red phone.

[794] It was more like a pink Nokia.

[795] But it sounds better if you, it sounds more dramatic.

[796] In the movie, it'll definitely be a red phone.

[797] Yeah.

[798] It'll be in like a box with like a maybe a code on it.

[799] I find that what you just said, they're really interesting.

[800] So there's, because I've been through that, those key moments where you're not sure if your company's going to survive.

[801] Yeah.

[802] And it feels like the answer or the determinant factor is actually outside of your control.

[803] Yeah.

[804] So it's someone else's decision whether your company survives.

[805] Yep.

[806] Did you have many moments like that?

[807] Where it felt like it was someone else's decision if your company was going to survive.

[808] An investor or...

[809] Yeah.

[810] And not loads, but a handful.

[811] So early investment rounds.

[812] it was binary if we don't raise the money we're folding the later rounds were more like the money's going to come in at some valuation or some early outages we had a really very back we were still a prepaid card at the time and one of our suppliers which connected us to the MasterCard network went down really went down hard for about 10 or 11 hours we didn't know it was going to be 10 or 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.

[813] And so we had about 300 ,000 cards at the time.

[814] Sort of like, this could be two months.

[815] Like all the cards could not work for two months now.

[816] Or rather, it would take us two months to rebuild this thing.

[817] And that, yeah, we're just sitting there thinking this is we pick.

[818] It's our fault in the sense that we picked the supplier.

[819] But beyond that, like, they've just fucked up.

[820] Right.

[821] Then, you know, it was totally ridiculous what had happened in retrospect.

[822] but yeah that was a real like 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 all the customers and to proactively alert and all this good stuff but that was a sort of we don't know if this is leaving a comeback online outside of the business and the chaos of the business what was your life at that point um fairly normal um we had a pretty good good culture around sort of work -life balance at Monzo, you know, mostly I was working five days a week, unless we were fundraising, I guess.

[823] And I traveled probably a week every month, mostly for fundraising.

[824] But I had a really close group of friends, mostly from, you know, growing up, mostly from my secondary school, actually.

[825] I lived with my girlfriend.

[826] We lived, you know, we lived in a big house with friends.

[827] We cooked a lot.

[828] I took up pottery.

[829] I exercise a fair amount.

[830] It was very, very normal.

[831] Really nothing extraordinary.

[832] But I wasn't working 100 hours a week for sure.

[833] I was doing 45, 50, 55 hours.

[834] Really not a...

[835] The time pressure was not the problem.

[836] It was the mental, like, the mental load, the inability to switch off outside those hours.

[837] And then, boom, pandemic.

[838] Yeah.

[839] Comes around.

[840] Term sheets get pulled.

[841] Yeah.

[842] You're sat there.

[843] You know, by the sounds of it, you're already on the verge of...

[844] Well, you weren't happy with how things were going.

[845] And then that's the, I guess, the straw that broke the camel's back.

[846] for sure.

[847] When you realised that you were going to depart and you knew there was a date, you knew people were going to know, you knew it was going to come out in the press, what were the range of emotions and were sadness one of them?

[848] Yeah, definitely.

[849] I mean, 80 % was just like, I can breathe again.

[850] So it was overwhelmingly positive for me, and I'm not afraid to say that.

[851] And so I don't want to build it up and, you know, it's a sort of negative thing, really.

[852] But there were 20 % things like sadness that I was leaving a team that I really, really liked overwhelmingly, guilt that I'd recruited many of these people and some of them had joined to come and work with me and that I was leaving them to kind of fix the mess.

[853] Yeah, guilt, I think, was more than sadness.

[854] Were their tears shed?

[855] I cry quite a lot I cried as well 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 what felt like lip service so I was annoyed at first but then when I realized that I was actually going to send the email it was like gratitude and some kind of like sad or happy tears yeah so I did an all hands I announced it on a video call with like 1 ,500 people or something.

[856] And I definitely welled up at one or two points there in a genuine way.

[857] But what I have learnt over the last few years is that vulnerability is the best way to inspire, is confidence, trust, sort of become a leader to show, if it's genuine, you know, you can't sort of, you know, the fake tears, but genuinely like showing your emotion.

[858] and showing your vulnerability and showing your screw -ups is such a powerful way to inspire followership.

[859] And so it doesn't, I wasn't, I wasn't afraid of that or embarrassed by, you know, I was sort of welling up on a call with 1 ,500 people, but it wasn't the first time I, like, practically cried in front of the company.

[860] And, you know, I'm not ashamed of that.

[861] And then the weightlifting.

[862] Yeah, great.

[863] What a feeling.

[864] When you, no one can fucking email you and, you know.

[865] It was great.

[866] Actually, it wasn't, it was great.

[867] But then we were in the midst of a lockdown.

[868] And I was, my house was having building work done.

[869] So I had to get out of my house with four housemates.

[870] We went to a farmhouse in Devon, which was idyllic.

[871] But everyone else was working.

[872] I had no job.

[873] It was in the middle of nowhere.

[874] It was pretty boring, actually, for quite a while.

[875] I think if, you know, if London had been booming and I could kind of go out and meet people and have fun, it would have been a great experience.

[876] But actually that's, especially, I remember sort of thinking back to April, May of last year, when everything was really hard to lock down still, April, May 2020.

[877] Not a fun experience.

[878] And I think I am an extrovert.

[879] I thought about this a lot.

[880] I really, I get energy from being around people.

[881] And I was with four people who are just working all the time in the middle of rural Devon.

[882] Yeah, not fun.

[883] I mean, it's a lot to go from having such an intense, overwhelming purpose and sense of mission every day to having pretty much none.

[884] Yeah.

[885] And waking up in the morning and thinking, what am I going to do today?

[886] What happens today?

[887] It's weird, because my time was, especially Monday to Friday, was scheduled from sort of 9 a .m. till about 7 or 8 p .m. was scheduled down to the, down to five minutes easily.

[888] And you'd look at my diary.

[889] there would you wouldn't find more than five minutes spare sort of in that block so yes having nothing to do was uh kind of weird and so i you know i wrote a list of all the things i wanted to do i've actually had this list for five or six years 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 so i started drawing i spent two or three months drawing i saw that um hockney had started using his iPad so i started drawing on my iPad, which I only kept up for about a month or two.

[890] But learning a language was on the list.

[891] I bought some kite surfing gear and did a load of kite surfing, which is amazing.

[892] Now I'm training up to a big offshore sailing race, so you're kind of a yacht race called Fastnet.

[893] So that's in August.

[894] I'm learning to fly.

[895] So I have a list.

[896] So now my time is not as planned, but it's still and I'm spending a couple of days a week vaccinating people, which is very rewarding.

[897] So I'm busy again, but each of it is like not inconsequential.

[898] I think the vaccination stuff is a great thing to do, but if I wasn't there, there will be someone else there, you know, doing the jabbing.

[899] So each one I could sort of walk away from pretty easily.

[900] So it's busy, but it's low pressure, I guess.

[901] Yeah.

[902] And it seems like you're focusing on things that give you, like, intrinsic joy.

[903] Yeah, and learning.

[904] I really like learning, really anything.

[905] So the process of going from a complete novice to someone, you know, mediocre, I love.

[906] And I'm angel investing.

[907] So to keep a connection to the tech community, I've made seven or eight investments in the first half of 2021.

[908] I'll probably make another seven or eight towards the end of the year.

[909] And I'm helping out a few of the, or at least I'm going in to bother the founders, whether I'm helping or not, I don't know.

[910] Tom's here again.

[911] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[912] Which I like.

[913] It's a weird job.

[914] It feels like a job where you have to pay to go to work, you know.

[915] But I like that a lot.

[916] Me and my co -founder went on, felt two very different things when we departed.

[917] We departed at the same time, pretty much.

[918] And he, because he didn't have anything to do upon departing, I think he struggled quite significantly.

[919] You kind of lose orientation in your life.

[920] And you're right, when 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 you, you know, you can, that's that sense of lacking purpose.

[921] You see it within Olympic athletes like Michael Phelps when he wins all the gold medals and then comes home.

[922] They call it gold medal depression.

[923] But you don't have that thing you're striving towards or for, that meaningful goal.

[924] Life can seem to lose orientation a little bit.

[925] Your schedule now is it as busy now as it was when you were working?

[926] No. No. I mean, the Dragon's Den thing is, is an.

[927] maybe brought it close because it's like 7 a .m. and I get home at midnight.

[928] Yeah.

[929] But Dragon's Den aside, no. And I've also, I mean, there's nothing, there isn't huge stakes.

[930] So even the work that I do do, the things that are in my schedule, I can just cancel it if I don't want to do it.

[931] Whereas before it was huge stakes, I had to get on the flight.

[932] Yeah.

[933] Or I had to be up at 4 a .m. You know, so.

[934] But, but, you know, both you and me, that there's still going to be that yearning to go back.

[935] No?

[936] Do you think you'll ever go back to starting a company and being the CEO?

[937] I don't know.

[938] I have thought about this a lot.

[939] And people have asked me, and I don't know.

[940] The thought process goes something like, I love the early stage.

[941] So you get a few of your mates together, people you've always wanted to work with perhaps, and you start something.

[942] And one of two things happens.

[943] You fail.

[944] And now you're kind of relatively high profile founder who's onto his third thing.

[945] and the third thing flopped and like, ah, we all knew he was an idiot.

[946] So like, okay, that's humiliating.

[947] Or it's a success and you grow in and come to a 2 ,000 person company and you're like, why have I done this to myself again?

[948] I hate running 2 ,000 person companies.

[949] So the out, I like the journey bit, but the outcome either end.

[950] Don't lose, Yeah, like it doesn't seem there's much upside.

[951] I mean, it's financially like very remunitive if you do well, but it doesn't make my life happier.

[952] So, So in that sense, no, with some caveats, one thing I've thought about doing, which I've not started yet really, is kind of run a studio.

[953] So you get four or five mates together with the aim of coming up with an idea, putting in a CEO or a founder or a management team and kind of incubating it for, properly incubating it for 12 months, actually like building the first version and doing the marketing.

[954] But once it's at 12 or 18 months, putting a full management team in and sort of letting it go.

[955] So you retain a minority equity stake, but really it's the CEO and the management team that's owning and running it.

[956] So you're able to do that first year, but then you're like hands off and then doing that every year for five or six years.

[957] So you end up with a portfolio of, I don't know, six to ten companies.

[958] So I thought about that a bit.

[959] Seems like a lot of hard work.

[960] I haven't done it yet, but I might do that.

[961] I think you'd probably end up getting sucked into the same problems.

[962] Yeah, I agree.

[963] Because I think the power law distribution of startup success means that one, if you are successful, one of the ten will be incredibly successful and then they'll be like oh you know the CEO is 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 in and you're ultimately you're running a 2 ,000 person company again and that's the thing I'm trying to avoid um as I know a guy that does that how's that going um yes but he hasn't avoided the bullshit so he's what he's he always he's a billionaire he's a multi -billioner um and he says oh I'm not when press ask him he goes oh yeah I'm just not good at the operational bit I know what he means is, 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.

[964] It's what he says, I don't want to have to think about people's birthdays, right?

[965] So what he does is he comes, he'll have a passion in his life, say psychedelics, and he'll go and assemble a team, a CEO, co -founding team, he'll go and hire the people, and then he'll handle the fundraising piece, and he'll go, off you go, company.

[966] But I still know that when shit hits the fan, and they've got funding issues, because he is the the big name in the piece, he will be front and center of trying to solve those problems.

[967] He lives a much better life than I think the CEO would.

[968] Yep.

[969] And I think that's fine.

[970] I'm not looking for a zero stress life, but I think, yeah, a lot of the people bullshit I don't like.

[971] The fundraising isn't fun, but I think I have done it enough now that I could do it again in a relatively stress -free way.

[972] But at 2 ,000 people, it's not even remembering people's birthdays 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 like it doesn't come naturally to me it's more like you know there's someone misbehaving like 2 ,000 people someone's done something stupid at the Christmas party and like it should be the chief people officer dealing with it but maybe she was misbehaving this never happened at Monzo but um for some reason it ends up on your on your desk you're like why am I dealing with these miscreants like fucking around like this is not like on top of everything I'm doing I'm having to sort out this HR issue or you know it doesn't have to because it I was just thinking of one incident at Christmas party because you said Christmas party I'm not going to me and my co -fan has stopped like we would go until 8pm and leave just be like this is not because it'd be too much alcohol and yeah and when you're 50 or 100 people you know each other so well that like people I don't know maybe we're just lucky but people sort of respect boundaries and behave themselves.

[973] You're at 2 ,000.

[974] Just law of averages.

[975] Like there's, you know, one in a thousand people's going to do something stupid.

[976] So you have two of them now at 2 ,000 people doing something stupid every party.

[977] It's like they're going to get fired for.

[978] I know one incident.

[979] Well, many incidents, but I mean, the crazy twists and turns of being the CEO and finding these things out.

[980] And we had someone who had been on doing, I think, Silk Road on the Dark Web, seven years ago got arrested.

[981] They'd worked for me for three and a half years.

[982] I thought they were a great guy.

[983] Yeah.

[984] They got sent to jail for seven years.

[985] Oh, my gosh.

[986] Niceest guy in the company.

[987] And he's done it when he's a student.

[988] All kinds of things, Christmas parties, someone's pushed someone into the toilet and kiss them.

[989] And these are the things that, in fact, you do have to make the call on.

[990] Yep.

[991] Even though it seems like such a pathetic thing, but that is sexual assault.

[992] Totally.

[993] And you can't allow an incident like that to be mishandled, right?

[994] Because that is, like, that poses an existential risk against your company.

[995] Yep.

[996] if that were to break in the press, so...

[997] Yeah, I...

[998] And, you know, and it's...

[999] And it's the right thing to do, but it should be the chief people officer handling that, right?

[1000] Like, that's sort of my...

[1001] That was my problem.

[1002] Like, there were periods of time when we didn't have a chief people officer, so it just landed on my desk.

[1003] And I'm fine dealing with a section of those.

[1004] But when you're dealing with, like, four or five people's jobs worth of that shit, then it gets overwhelming.

[1005] So, yeah, I think it always comes back.

[1006] You have an incredibly sort of...

[1007] successful, talented senior team and the stress becomes left because each, you don't, as CEO, don't deal with that.

[1008] Your chief people officer says, by the way, this happened and I've dealt with it.

[1009] You go, great.

[1010] Oh, thank God.

[1011] I love those people in business.

[1012] They deal with it and then tell, they come to you with it sometimes, but they tell you they've already dealt with it.

[1013] Yeah.

[1014] No action required, Tom.

[1015] It's already been solved.

[1016] But just so you're aware, oh, I love those people.

[1017] And that's, but that is how a senior team should work, really.

[1018] And at its best, it works like that.

[1019] It's magical.

[1020] death threats nice little transition I'd never got death threats as the CEO of social chain but I hear that you've got a few not loads but yes and several of our staff as well and we got people turning up to the office we had security full -time security at our office and still do now because customs would turn up sometimes with weapons they threaten to turn up with a bottle of acid and they're at it in someone's face.

[1021] Yeah, and yeah, and come, you know, there were sort of groups on social media who sort of try to find our addresses and sort of hand them around.

[1022] Because, I mean, with six million customers, again, the sort of probabilities, if one in a million is bad egg, you've got six bad eggs.

[1023] Because we were a bank, we dealt with people's money, and because we had obligations to detect and prevent financial crime, we would um we would detect criminals and shut their accounts down and the like the really pro criminals would just treat it as a cost of doing business right it's like fine we've got thousands of these things they it was like the amateur criminal who like really thought he had a payday it's like he scammed some old lady out of her retirement you know he's got 20 grand you're like no shutting it down sorry sending it back and they got crazy like this was my big payoff I'm going to come and fuck you up um and clearly there were times when we blocked accounts incorrectly.

[1024] If you're blocking tens of thousands of accounts, you absolutely are going to get it wrong occasionally.

[1025] And sometimes it takes too long to get money back.

[1026] And we work really hard to get that time period really, really as quick as possible.

[1027] But still the law gets in the way.

[1028] You have to report it to the National Crime Agency.

[1029] You have to wait for them to get back to you.

[1030] And it can take four weeks.

[1031] And they just don't get back to you.

[1032] So it's like, okay, we'll give them the four weeks and then we'll refund you.

[1033] So there are rare cases where you're sitting on.

[1034] a legitimate customer's money for four weeks and they're going ballistic because they can't feed their kids or whatever.

[1035] But a lot of the time it's a scammer who's like they would phone up and they would have a record of a baby playing in the background.

[1036] So, you know, I can't feed my baby.

[1037] Yeah, yeah.

[1038] So yes, it was never the professional criminals because they just treatise the cost of doing business.

[1039] And by the way, there were a ton of those and we caught way more than our fair share.

[1040] We were using a lot of basic machine learning to track sort of weird patterns.

[1041] and shutting their accounts down.

[1042] We work very, very closely with law enforcement to shut a bunch of these things down.

[1043] Some of them were like wild.

[1044] There was a big ring a couple of years, no, probably three or four years ago now, where if you got a fuel pump, you basically put your, you sort of pay at the pump, but what it would do is pre -authorize a penny on your card.

[1045] You'd pump your fuel, and then it would calculate how much fuel you'd actually spend and then take the payment.

[1046] So people get a Monzo, card, put one P on it, swipe it, and then go with a modified Ford Transit.

[1047] So it's not like a 80 -quid of petrol.

[1048] The whole thing was a fuel tanker.

[1049] So they'd put 10 grand of petrol into their Ford Transit and then just drive off.

[1050] And the payment on the card would bounce and they'd go and use that to like, they'd sell it to whoever wants petrol, a haulier's, farmers, whatever.

[1051] But they're basically scamming all of these petrol stations.

[1052] So we spotted that pretty quickly and shut that down, which I'm really, really proud of.

[1053] There were several people trafficking rings where they would bring in women from often Eastern Europe and then traffic them for sex, basically.

[1054] And you'd spot patterns of behavior, like patterns of spend, which suggests basically someone is being driven around in an Uber or a taxi to be pimped out.

[1055] And we'd spot that and work with law.

[1056] enforcement to actually like um go and rescue people which is amazing like that's an amazing amazing amazing feeling um but and those were mostly the pros who like me you know you got us this time we've got these other rings so like whatever but it was mostly the amateur ones who'd get really really angry you know they'd scammed three or four grand out of someone and sounds like a lot to think about tom yeah there's all of this hidden stuff you know you think of monzone it's like the hot cold card and some great branding i thought it was just a like nice coloured card.

[1057] Oh, my God.

[1058] I mean, it was serious by the end.

[1059] Like, running a bank is serious.

[1060] We were processing, I don't know, £100 billion a year or something of payments.

[1061] Like, this is a lot of money.

[1062] It's people's salaries.

[1063] And six million customers, you see their whole life.

[1064] You see the great stuff and you see the terrible stuff.

[1065] Were you ever scared or threatened personally?

[1066] Did you ever feel threatened personally in terms of your personal?

[1067] or security.

[1068] Was there ever where you thought, do not actually, I do feel about unsafe here?

[1069] I had security.

[1070] There was a, we got a security firm to come and like look at my online profile, look at my house and figure out how much of it.

[1071] I was in danger.

[1072] And that was a bit unsettling.

[1073] And there were times when, especially when we had customers saying, you know, we know where your office is and you don't know who I am, but I'm going to come with a bottle of acid and I'm going to throw it in someone's face.

[1074] So that as you let.

[1075] As he left the office, there was a bit of, you know, a little apprehension there, certainly.

[1076] But no, in general, no, it wasn't something I live with every single day.

[1077] But it was on your mind, certainly, in a way that I think most people at most companies, thankfully, don't have to deal with that kind of shit.

[1078] But now you're enjoying the small things in life, you know?

[1079] Maybe I should go back to therapy now and, like, maybe it can make it even better.

[1080] What are those small things in life that you're enjoying?

[1081] What are they?

[1082] Yeah.

[1083] walking in the park I heard so my housemate's got a dog recently that's quite fun a lot of my friends have just had children so not me but you know I'm godfather to a couple of young kids my brother has a young girl now a disproportionate amount of kids you're getting the same as me I'm the godfather to all of my friends kids now it's I'm not sure I have any friends left really who are not either parents or trying to become parents you know I'm 35 so it's I'm trying to find new younger friends now avoid that stage of my life for another few years yeah I love pottery I'm learning to fly, I'm sailing I love to cycle like height surf a lot of active outdoorsy stuff I'm growing plants on my roof my courgettes have just cut out which is yeah they're great what about your relationships are you single taken to win the middle dating I am dating I am dating I've always been intrigued by dating apps I worked at one I've written about 20 % of a book on one but over like the last 12 years it's not going to get finished so I've been intrigued by that sort of whole scene for a while yeah and I'm dating and sort of having fun but I'm not 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 don't know I really enjoy me meeting new people, but after six months or a year or something, I'm sort of like, I don't know what it is.

[1084] That's sort of like deciding to commit to each other and spend the rest of your life together.

[1085] I really admire people who are able to do that, because I have not yet to be able to do that.

[1086] Have you managed to analyze where you think that might come from?

[1087] Like, inability to be content.

[1088] This is what I should go and talk to a therapist about.

[1089] No, because I'm asking for myself.

[1090] I just wonder if you figured it out.

[1091] I like novelty.

[1092] I really like new things.

[1093] new experiences and I get bored quite easily.

[1094] I don't know.

[1095] Yeah, probably, I think combining psychedelics and therapy to solve this problem, my next challenge.

[1096] Have you ever done psychedelics?

[1097] I haven't.

[1098] Neither have I. I would love to.

[1099] I really would love to.

[1100] I wish I could say I had.

[1101] I'm trying to, but it's just finding the right place and time, I think.

[1102] So we look forward at the future of your life.

[1103] I guess a lot of question marks.

[1104] You're not really sure which direction you're going.

[1105] Because I think I asked, I think you, well, I think you, you kind of answered yourself at the start about your, your purpose in life now.

[1106] Yeah.

[1107] And what your purpose is.

[1108] I don't have one.

[1109] And I'm totally fine with that.

[1110] Yeah.

[1111] I think, I think, looking forward to sort of when I'm 60, 65, I think I would like a family around.

[1112] But I'm not sure I'm willing to make the sacrifices to put in the hard work to actually make that happen.

[1113] You know what I mean?

[1114] What are those sacrifices?

[1115] Like giving up the fun single life, like the, bringing up a baby isn't I've seen it secondhand you know I'm not doing it day and day out but it's hard really and I have huge respect for that I'm just not sure I'm willing to sacrifice my freedom and my my total lack of like obligation um for that future pay lots of people find raising babies rewarding I've heard oh my god um I do not 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 that But then I'm not sure I'm going to, like, make the sacrifices today to have that.

[1116] That's sort of something I'm puzzling around in my head.

[1117] But apart from that, just sort of enjoying life and helping out other startups is a nice way to feel like I'm giving a little bit back without taking in my life at the moment.

[1118] So for me, that's enough.

[1119] What do you think about, I was I mean to ask you, I'm glad I remembered.

[1120] What do you think about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies generally?

[1121] Terrifying.

[1122] I don't understand it.

[1123] I invested a little bit.

[1124] It went up a lot.

[1125] I thought I was the smartest person in the world.

[1126] It came down again.

[1127] I sold before I lost any money, really.

[1128] It was too stressful.

[1129] So there's a kind of two questions there.

[1130] What do you think of cryptocurrency long -term and is it useful versus like, what is your experience of riding the roller coaster over the last year?

[1131] Long -term, I don't know.

[1132] I can see how it's interesting, but I think it's at the moment massively overhaul.

[1133] and I haven't really seen any cool applications in reality yet that solve a real human problem.

[1134] That may change in future.

[1135] And then the, you know, the former bit like the crazy speculation, I was, you know, checking the price of Ethereum every 15 minutes or something.

[1136] It was that, that's just not healthy.

[1137] So I got out and I'm, again, sleeping much better now that I've liquidated my crypto positions.

[1138] Yeah, what about you?

[1139] Are you a believer?

[1140] I am, so I did the whole 2017 -2018 hype cycle got burnt pretty bad there and then I'm a believer in blockchain as a technology yeah I don't actually invest in bitcoin at all um I I invest in Ethereum because I'm slightly involved in building a company in Silicon Valley in around which is based on Ethereum 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 one of the top 5 ,000 in the world.

[1141] but I don't check the price because I got burnt the first time and I've just got this idea in my head that I'm holding for 10 years anyway so irrespective of what happens I don't need to be checking the prices as if to inform a decision and I'm not going to make a decision if it goes down 75 % 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 and also 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 friends say similar things which is basically take a, you're basically hedging against the risk that this is like the future of the economy.

[1142] And so take between 5 and 10 % of your like net, net assets, put it in crypto and really leave it for 10 years.

[1143] And so if it is like the future of money, you have a significant enough proportion of that that you're like well set up.

[1144] If it goes to zero, you've still got the other 995 % to sustain you.

[1145] And I'm well diversified across various different sort of asset classes.

[1146] So if I genuinely lost all of my Ethereum holdings, I don't think I'd lose a night's sleep.

[1147] Do you know what I mean?

[1148] And that makes it easy not to, but when I, when I was at social chain, when I hadn't had an exit or hadn't taken any one of the table at all, and the price went down.

[1149] It was like, oh, I was going up and down with the, you know, with the price.

[1150] So again, it comes back to that video game mindset and I think the detachment point.

[1151] You know, when I started this podcast, Tom, I did it for very much, you know, when I read your story, I thought, fuck, this is exactly why I started this podcast.

[1152] Because it's literally called the diary of a CEO.

[1153] And what I was trying to achieve there was to give up.

[1154] give people a more honest view about what it takes to be a CEO.

[1155] And because I didn't necessarily, I think that it's been kind of, you know, rock style, like a jet ski, you know, whatever, millionaires, loads of money, private jet.

[1156] Whereas there's a real, as you've explained, cost which people don't appreciate, of being a CEO.

[1157] And so when I read your story, I 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 very much relate to, that's why I just needed you to come here and to have this conversation with me. Thank you.

[1158] What is the upside of being a CEO?

[1159] I mean, I think it is amazing.

[1160] And I don't want to sit here and kind of complain about my life.

[1161] I think for smart, ambitious, talented people, it can be incredibly remunitive.

[1162] I mean, I'm financially independent now, as are you, right?

[1163] And it's, I think it, you can create.

[1164] 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 um you can choose the people you work with which i think is really really really important so you can select the people around you and to um uh choose who you spend your time with and you get to create something if you're successful that random people in the street use and that feeling of um being a having a having a created something out of nothing this thing would not exist if it weren't for you and the team around you and that i think that feeling is um is amazing and so i don't regret it at all um i'm lucky now that i'm 35 and i don't have to work really unless i want to and all of my other friends are successful in their own careers but they're going to be working until they're 60 or 65 um and so yeah it's hard and it's stressful but you know it's i wouldn't change it for sure i would do some things differently.

[1165] I'd try to.

[1166] I'm not sure it would change the outcome.

[1167] But I think today for smart, ambitious people, I think becoming a founder is probably one of the best choices they could make if they are of that mindset.

[1168] It's not for everyone, for sure.

[1169] But I think if you're ambitious and confident and want to create something, it's unparalleled.

[1170] And the sort of the foundation of all of this, the most important thing, I guess, is to make sure that you're happy.

[1171] Yeah.

[1172] And I never thought about that.

[1173] I mean, that wasn't part of my upbringing.

[1174] That was always secondary.

[1175] Yeah.

[1176] It was always like achieving or a country to goal or winning.

[1177] And the 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 happy.

[1178] Which I think was a mistake.

[1179] And I'm now quite consciously doing that.

[1180] yeah i think that's the probably the downside you so many smart ambitious people are just driven to kind of jump over ever increasing hurdles um without thinking about why did you think happiness was the outcome kind of yeah thought that was the end yeah sort of like yeah um i didn't even really think about it yeah it wasn't uh my family's always been quite um ambitious and driven and sort of uh setting goals for you know others as kids um and i i know other families where that is not the case and i think talking more explicitly about like yeah happiness and contentment and love and relationships and those things and then having a balance 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 for you so you i don't want to do all the point because i don't sound like you're therapist and we're almost done here.

[1181] But it really made me curious there where you were saying about your family and were your parents particularly goal orientated?

[1182] Yes.

[1183] They were very hard on you or?

[1184] Ambitious for us, certainly particularly my dad.

[1185] And I'm a huge admirer of what he started business youngish.

[1186] I think he was he was 35 or 40 when he set up his business and he'd retired by the time he was 45.

[1187] And so I, always, from a very young age, thought that sort of starting businesses was, I never thought about starting business.

[1188] Actually, I thought about running businesses.

[1189] So I had a privileged upbringing.

[1190] My parents were around and sent me to good schools, but really pushed me, you know, pushed me to be the top of the class.

[1191] And even when I was top of the class, they'd sort of pushed me further.

[1192] And I sort of say, like, come on, you know, I did well in my exams to point where it's like, there is no more I can do in these things.

[1193] I've got all the top marks.

[1194] but they sort of didn't believe me. They're like, no, no, you must be hiding something.

[1195] So there was always like, 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.

[1196] So I went to Oxford and study law, which I'm not sure is super healthy, actually.

[1197] So, yeah, they're driven, very, very driven and sort of because they, you know, I think their parents as well pushed them.

[1198] And my dad always likes to claim he came from like this really work.

[1199] in class upbringing up in Rochelle in Manchester and it's just like it's out of Mercedes like come on and then you know with almost the same breath he's like yeah we my mum had horses it's like what the fuck are you talking about this sort of working class up yeah but they they always worked hard they moved to Asia very young to make make a better life themselves and they they did work hard and they provided us as kids with great opportunities and I think now later in life all of us have sort of realized that thinking a little bit more about balance and, like, happiness and relationships and family is more important, as important, certainly, and probably more important than sort of achievement and money.

[1200] Have you got to the crux of what makes you happy?

[1201] No, not.

[1202] The foundational things.

[1203] Two or three things I know definitely make me learning.

[1204] New skills, whatever.

[1205] I really, really, really love that.

[1206] and sort of like my ex was really into not really that's unfair she um is it the languages of love like the way you sort of express oh the love languages yeah yeah yeah and so for me acts of service i hate the whole thing but but i see i see that in myself like i love to cook for people i love to get friends together i love to you know cook a meal make cocktails whatever it is sort of like get a house in the countryside and invite all my best friends that i really like being together with groups of people that are careful.

[1207] So learning new stuff, being together with friends and kind of creating like cooking, whatever, whatever it is.

[1208] So those things.

[1209] And in time raising kids, maybe, we will see.

[1210] That's more of an aspiration than a, I don't know.

[1211] Well, listen, Tom, thank you so much for coming and doing this today.

[1212] I think the thing that you probably know, but you might not fully realize that I think is so incredibly powerful is your willingness to be vulnerable and honest.

[1213] And I just wish there were more entrepreneurs at all stages in their journey that were willing to be that vulnerable because of how much a, how much of a, reality is so much more comforting than the like this kind of phony, um, untouchable narrative you get from a lot of.

[1214] of entrepreneurs.

[1215] Reality is such much more of a comforting place to be because I can relate to that.

[1216] And that gives peace to my own struggles and hardships.

[1217] And those are an unavoidable part of the human experience.

[1218] And I think entrepreneurs like yourself that have been tremendously successful have disrupted an industry and achieve so much who are also willing to be vulnerable are of a very special breed.

[1219] And we need more of those people.

[1220] So thank you so much.

[1221] And I appreciate your time today.

[1222] Thank you.

[1223] It's been a lot of fun.

[1224] Thank you.

[1225] Oh