How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - The F-Word Miniseries: Nigel Morris on leaving school at 15 and becoming a billionaire

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

Welcome to The How To Fail F-Word miniseries! Three days, three guests, three different F-words.Today, we have Nigel Morris...on fuel.Nigel Morris is the definition of a self-made man: born in Essex, the son of an army sergeant father and a Welsh mother, he left school at 15 before going on to co-found one of the biggest banks in the world, Capital One. How did he do it? What motivates him? How does he manage his ambition?A slightly different How To Fail episode from usual, but perhaps an even more interesting one because of it. We don't get that many business people offering to share their failures in such an open way and I'm very grateful to Nigel for doing so.This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at an annual event hosted by Clearscore, the free credit score app. Full disclosure: Clearscore is my husband's company. I was not paid a fee so this is not a branded episode (but they're really good fyi).--How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted and produced by Elizabeth Day. To contact us, email [e-mail]--Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayHow To Fail @howtofailpod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to this How to Fail mini-series. Now, as you'll know if you're a regular listener, this podcast is dedicated to a greater understanding of what failure really is, what we learn from it, how we grow from it, and whether, if we choose not to be defined by our mistakes, it actually helps us become the truest versions of ourselves. Inspired by failure, I'm now bringing you the F word mini-series. Failure

is still the overarching theme, and two of these episodes have the conventional how-to-fail interview structure. But within that, we explore three different F words, feelings, friendships, and fuel. By fuel, I mean what motivates us, by the way. I'm not talking about oil or gas or, well, cheese. We'll be talking about ambition, motivation, and what drove the army sergeant's son who left school at 15 to found one of the biggest banks in the world and become a billionaire. Has money made him happy? And is his ambition a blessing or a curse? We'll also be talking to one of the

foremost experts in addiction and trauma about the importance of understanding our feelings and what can happen when we ignore them. And we'll be chatting to a How to Fail favourite about the power of friendship. Three days, three episodes, three F-words. It'll be effing great. Welcome to the How to Fail F-word mini-series. Today I speak to the most successful billionaire you've probably never heard of. Nigel Morris, the co-founder of Capital One, opens up about what fuels him. This was recorded in front of a live studio audience at an annual event run by ClearScore, the free credit scoring app, which, full disclosure, is my husband's Not an ad, just a marriage. Here we go. Hello. Nigel, take your seat. We've been having a heady discussion backstage as to whether we have a favourite side. We decided that we didn't. That's not going to be one of your failures,

Nigel. It's so wonderful to see so many of you here. I'm Elizabeth Day, and it's a joy to be doing this live podcast recording. There are in life many different types of failure. There are failures in our personal spheres, mistakes we make and either grow from or live alongside. But failure in business carries a different kind of resonance and often shapes wider societal perception of what success really is. Which is why I'm fascinated to talk to my guest today. Because when it comes to business success, there are few more telling examples than Nigel Morris. He is the definition of a self-made man, born in Essex, the son of an army sergeant father and a Welsh mother. As a child, he changed schools a lot and left before taking his A-levels. He studied psychology

at North East London Polytechnic before achieving an MBA at the London Business School, where he is now a fellow. A bank consultancy job after graduating led to a move to the US and a meeting with fellow consultant Richard Fairbank. The duo co-founded Capital One Financial Services in 1994, utterly transforming the consumer lending industry. It grew to a market cap of $43 billion and is now the sixth largest bank in America. Morris left Capital One in 2004 and founded QED Investors, a fintech venture capital platform. He is an investor in and chairman of ClearScore, which, full disclosure, is my husband's company. It's not what you know, it's who you know. And that's why we find ourselves here today. Morris was once asked what business had taught him. He replied, go long on ambition and curiosity,

try and fail fast. Everything is written in pencil and growth is life. Please welcome Nigel Morris to How to Fail. I really enjoyed reading that quote that I ended on, that idea that we should go long on curiosity. And I'm particularly interested when it comes to your curiosity, because I understand that you almost became a clinical psychologist. And I wonder if what attracted you to clinical psychology, the idea of working out what makes humans tick, is also what appeals to you about business.

Is there a correlation there? Thank you for having me along. I do believe that one of the critical attributes of success in business is having an insatiable curiosity. And that means about challenging everything, about railing against conventional wisdom. It's about using data and empirics to undress ideas that have been around forever, that may have worked once upon a time, may be sustainable in the future, but really coming to grips with, you know,

what is real and what is memorex? And where does real end? And where are things that we don't understand? And I think culturally in business, we're too comfortable accepting the status quo. And one of the things that we did in the Capital One days, Elizabeth, was to treat consumer finance like a giant experimental laboratory, which was actually to test things out and see what was real and what wasn't. And I think that if you take that thematic,

and then you roll it back to clinical psychology, as a teenager, while everybody else was listening to T-Rex and Slade, I was reading books, reading Jung and Freud and trying to understand psychology and philosophy. And I went off to undergrad to study it and became terribly disillusioned with it because I felt like it was made up. I felt like a bunch of people sitting in Vienna in the 1800s trying trying to wean themselves off heroin, were developing concepts of Oedipus and Electra and all these concepts that I thought were just kind of like, you know, something that you'd see in Harry Potter. And I became totally disillusioned with it and became a ray-beard empiricist. And what that meant to me was, if it can't be measured, it doesn't exist.

And let's put the onus on finding out how people really work and why and using experimental design to do that. So I retreated into stats and to mathematics and to experimental design. And that was very much part of that Capital One ethos, which was challenge everything, be insatiably curious, use data to find the truth. And then when you do find the truth, take advantage of it and make the world better. And that, yeah, so it was deep in me. So that addiction to empiricism, what does that mean when it comes to failure in business? Do you think that there is, in your mind, a different definition of failure in business as opposed to in your

personal life? I think in business, if you are thoughtful about what you do, you don't fail big. You fail small and you fail fast. And that is about learning really quickly. And if an idea is bankrupt, then throw it away really quickly and get onto a better idea it's where ego and where hierarchy and where momentum creates too much downside if it's wrong so much about business is test and learn so much about business is you don't know unless you try so much about business is may taking a step forward and see what the perspective is and how it's different from the step that you took before and i think that's really important to be willing to make mistakes and not condemn people when mistakes are made, but manage the downside. Where you deserve to be admonished is when you

make the same mistake over and over again, or where you bet the farm on a single idea, particularly if you have no empirical support for it. So business is about managing risk. I mean, in any business, there's risk of operations and compliance and credit risk and fraud. This audience knows a huge amount about that. You have to manage all those risks simultaneously. You can never completely get rid of risk. And if you're in the business of growing, you're going to make mistakes. So mistakes around business and mistakes around your personal life. Well, you know, in business, you learn quickly. In your personal life, mistakes take longer to gestate, right? To come back. And particularly with building a family, if you make a mistake with one of your children in terms of which school they went to or how you

dealt with a certain issue, that problem is often not manifest. You don't know if you made a good decision until 10, 20 years later. So yeah. And don't know if you've made a good decision until 10, 20 years later. So yeah. And you can't test and learn on your children in the same way. So yeah. But I think there's a vigilance around being constantly probing the fence and getting a really clear and unequivocal sense of, is it working, is it not working. In business, you can see the empirical data emerge. In life, you're testing and watching and you're asking questions. You're saying, how was that? Did that work? Could we do that better? And being open to simulating and improving the process. So I've got one more question before we get onto the first of your three failures

that you so kindly gave me, which is, does being in business help you deal with rejection personally? Do you take things less personally because of what you've learned in the boardroom? No. I'm so glad you said that because I'm one of the only people

who still watches The Apprentice and it's always like, oh, this is business, so there's no emotion in here. But a lot of business must be very driven by emotion. One of the things I learned in Capital One days was that if I came up with an idea and I branded it Nigel's idea, somehow people thought it was a good idea because it had my brand attached to it.

So I found that if I didn't say it's Nigel's idea, I'd say, look, I've heard about this idea, What do you think? People would pile on and say how ridiculous it was. So if you put your brand against an idea, somehow it becomes you and you start to suffer from proximity bias around the idea. So I think the key thing is to be independent and dispassionate about the ideas and let the market decide rather than it being branded based on hierarchy or politics or position. But I think failures in life are failures in life and you deal with them. But just because you have many failures in business, I don't think it necessarily gives you a heuristic or makes that any easier. It's how you respond to failure that is the true

test of character, isn't it, in business and in personal life, rather than the failure itself? To me, it's not like there's success and there's failure, and it's a bifurcated spectrum. It is a spectrum. And, you know, there are degrees of failure. There are egregious, catastrophic failures. And then there are nuance, things that could have gone better, that you can make better in the future. And I think that we all too often become too, you know, polarized by the ends of And I think that we all too often become too, you know, polarised by the ends of the spectrum rather than, hey, it's all a gradation. Your first failure is failing to connect with your Welshness. What does Welshness mean to you? How would you describe it? I call it sort of, you know, being unconvincingly Welsh because I don't sound Welsh,

but my mum came from Llanfersdiniog in Snowdonia and my dad's family came from Port Talbot via London. And growing up, there was a lot of Welshness around. Mum spoke English as a second language. And, you know, when she dropped the plate in the kitchen, she would swear it in Welsh. And I always grew up kind of longing for that Welshness. There's a Welsh word called heraf, which is basically longing or wanting to go back to something. And I always grew up kind of

embarrassed by the Welshness, because it was strange, and it was a different language, and it was kind of weird, and people made fun of the Welsh. But we'd go back every year, I lived there for some part of the time, and I had this sort of love-hate thing going on with the Welshness. And I was always disappointed that mum never taught us the language. There are 580,000 Welsh speakers, by the way, in the world. And the Welsh speakers in the north particularly define the world in terms of Welsh speakers and one-minus Welsh speakers, which means there are approximately 9 billion people

that are in the one-minus category. And if you're not part of that Welsh speaking world, then they won't invite you into it very readily. So I go through this sort of lineage, logical conversation that I have when I'm up there, because they look at me and they go, okay, Nigel, you're English, you look like you're English, you sound like you're English, and we don't really care for the English very much, because there were Romans and Anglo-Saxons and Normans, and they all tried to take away our culture. Where did your mum come from? I say she was born over there, and who are her brothers and sisters? Well, her oldest brother is Will, and he worked down the Clechwed Pit, and he's from Talwyneth, and I go through this whole building a story, the narrative of my lineage, and then at

the end of it, they go, okay, you're in. And then they'll speak English to you at that point. So otherwise, you can't figure out what the heck's going on. So to me, being let into that world, because of what I'm, you know, now, you know, now at 65, coming back to my Welshness, I bought the church in the local village, where my mum and dad are buried, because the church had been local village where my mum and dad are buried because the church had been given up by the Church of Wales because people weren't going anymore. This church in Llanfersinioch is on a promontory. And you look down this stunning valley, the Fersinioch Valley. To the left is Harlech, to the right is Porthmadog and Crickieff. But the

weather comes up this, screaming up this valley and smashes into this church. It's like a tap being run on the church, you know, 24 hours a day. The church had sold the property to a very well-meaning fellow, but he couldn't keep it up. And the rain was pouring through it. The kids had got underneath it. And it was just a matter of time before somebody had too many lagers and the thing burned down, somebody by accident. So we bought the church. And to me, this is about coming home and it's about being able to put something back into the community. We're turning the church into a community center. And I think it's just really fantastic to do that. So to be connected back to that Welshness. And the last bit of it is just in

the last few weeks, I made an investment in Swansea City football team. I mean, I've been a Tottenham fan forever, but the opportunity to learn the business of football and to do it through a Welsh team is great fun. You're the new Ryan Reynolds. He invested in Wrexham, didn't he? Just down the road. I'm sure that's not the first time I've heard that. Haven't they done an amazing job of building the brand? I was just talking to the chairman just yesterday, Andy Coleman, about how many very, very famous Welsh celebrities there are, particularly who live in Los Angeles, who are not tapped to celebrate that Welshness. For those of you who lived in America, there are large Irish contingents. And there's St. Patrick's Day. There's Tartan Day and people walking around on St. Andrew's Day. There is

nobody celebrating St. David's Day. If you ask people in the States about Wales, they say, well, you know, what was that great line from Ted Lasso? How many countries are in that country? That, you know, Wales is always the last in the England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales sequence. And I don't think it's known. I think it's a real opportunity to brand Wales in a way that people like Ryan Reynolds at Rexford will be doing. in a way that people like Ryan Reynolds at Rexford would be doing? I'm very interested in this notion of belonging because when we were chatting a few weeks ago and when I was researching this interview,

I realised that your childhood was quite dislocated geographically. You moved around a lot because of your father's job. And I'm always struck by how many very successful people I interview who had a similar kind of childhood, either because their parents were in the military or just because finances meant that they changed homes quite a lot. And they felt that they had to make themselves popular in every new school that they joined. Did you have that feeling? Yeah, I did.

I think I went to 11 different schools over the time that I was 16. And I always felt like I had the wrong accent. I always felt I supported the wrong football team. And I always felt like I was only going to be there for a short amount of time. So everything was always quite transitory. I never felt that I could put down roots. Maybe the Welshness thing and going back to from where my mum and dad came from is important to that. When I think about, you know, where I will end up will end up, where do you put yourself in the ground,

where do you want your legacy to be, I always look to that part of the world. So it is really, really important to me. I think that having so much transition in those early days, I treasure those long-term relationships now as I look back. And maybe it's because in my childhood, there was very little that was solid, stable, durable. Do you think it made you good at reading people as well, sussing out atmospheres? I think I got good at being able to read a room and read where there were threats and read where I could get comfort and read what the rules were of a group or of a system really

quickly. And I think that's actually been really helpful in business, where you walk into a board room or in venture capital, you're assessing a management team, kind of figuring out what the dynamic is. What's primary power, secondary power? Who's really influencing this? Somebody says that, but is it true? So yeah, I think I learned perhaps for survival to be able to assess and read that really quickly. And probably the learning how to be able to connect with different people in different ways. And I think I'm blessed with having an insatiable curiosity.

I think I feel like I'm a vampire sometimes, like I feed off other people's energy. If somebody's really excited about something, I get really excited about it. I want to hear all about it why is that so exciting how does that work so that curiosity allows me to be able to I think build rapport with people that have something to say I think that was really helpful in giving me some solace during that period of lots of transition it is an extraordinary story I mean I outlined it briefly in the introduction, but to go from that kind of modest and somewhat dislocating beginning to achieving what you've

achieved, what do you think child Nigel would think of you now? Would he be surprised? Yeah, yeah, he would have been gobsmacked. He would have been, really? How does that work? How do you get there? You know, we didn't have books in the house, I can remember. My dad was a royalist, working class Tory, daily mail. I remember being 15 and 16 and bringing the Guardian home just to antagonize him. I think that the idea of an academic background, the idea of building something entrepreneurially, entrepreneurial was so alien. I mean, not only did I not, anybody from the family ever go to college, university, I didn't know anybody.

I didn't know a single human. I didn't know a person who'd ever gone to private school. I mean, so it was a completely alien world for me. But I think what I had was just a tenacity and a drive to make something, do something, create something, be different that came from somewhere that I still carry around today. We'll talk about that. I'm sure that's going to come up in my... I gave Elizabeth 12 failures to choose from. So I don't know if she's going to choose that one. It's always the sign of a well-rounded person, I think. If they say, oh, I can't whittle it down to three failures, I've got too many.

So it shows emotional self-awareness. Look, I feel incredibly lucky and I'm incredibly blessed. And so much about life actually is being lucky. And I have thought to myself, if there's a just world out there, I don't think I was very lucky in the first 16 years, but I think I've been really lucky in the last 49. Maybe more bad luck is going to come later, but lots of incredible blessings. Peyton, it's happening. We're finally being recognized for being very online. It's about damn time. I mean, it's hard work being this opinionated. And correct.

You're such a Leo. All the time. So if you're looking for a home for your worst opinions. If you're a hater first and a lover of pop culture second. Then join me, Hunter Harris. And me, Peyton Dix, the host of Wondery's newest podcast, Let Me Say This. As beacons of truth and connoisseurs of mess, we are scouring the depths of the internet so you don't have to. We're obviously talking about the biggest gossip and celebrity news. Like, it's not

a question of if Drake got his body done, but when. You are so messy for that, but we will be giving you the B-sides. Don't you worry. The deep cuts, the niche, the obscure. Like that one photo of Nicole Kidman after she finalized her divorce from Tom Cruise. Mother. A mother to many. Follow Let Me Say This on the

Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new episodes on YouTube or listen to Let Me Say This on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new episodes on YouTube or listen to Let Me Say This ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest? This is a time of great foreboding. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago set in motion a chain of gruesome events

and sparked cult-like devotion across the world. I'm Matt Lewis. cult-like devotion across the world. I'm Matt Lewis. Join us as we unwrap the enigma and get to the heart of what really happened to Thomas Beckett by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. so you leave school at 16 15 15 you get a job don't you in the dad said go and get a job you know bring some money into the house so i went to be a clerk at the dhss in grey's thorough in essex how do you then get to london business school like how does that happen i got i don't know a bunch of o levelslevels, but I never stayed on for A-levels. While I was at the DHSS, I did day release in business studies. I got an

ordinary national certificate in business studies, which was law and accounting and econ. And I managed to trade that for access to North East London Poly to do psychology. They took non-A-level people. I was a little older at that point. I was 20, 21, 20, and I did that. Then I, look, I became then besotted and animated by the idea of studying psychology. So I was, you know, I did it all the time. I was reading all the journals when they came out. I was talking to all the professors all the time.

And I was fascinated by it. It was fantastic. And I was fascinated by it. It was fantastic. And I did well. And then I traded that into talking my way into LBS. I hadn't done the first thing about business. I'm not sure if I actually do now in many ways. But I certainly had not a clue because I'd never been around it. To me, it was just another wonderful, academic, interesting place to go and learn.

And I had places to go and do the clinical PhD and put it on hold. And one of my professors who did organizational behavior talked me into applying to London Business School. I thought, you know what, I don't think I'll get in, given how good a school that was. And I had no business experience. But we did some case studies and they let me in. And I thank them much. I joined their board to give something back, because that was an important step in my life. I think the interesting thread here is your curiosity. It's the thing that sort of this relentless urge to ask questions. And after LBS, you go to America, you have this bank consultancy job. And in a way, it's asking questions of how

banking is done that leads you to setting up Capital One with Richard Fairbank. And that leads us on to your second failure, which is having founded this hugely successful credit card company that is now a bank. You left in 2004 after 10 years there. And your second failure is leaving Capital One. But my understanding is it's about the timing of that. So tell us why you chose this as your second failure. Capital One was like a child to me. It was very, very important in my life. It was me and I was it. The co-founding of something, for those of you who are entrepreneurs or know entrepreneurs,

is really important. You put so much of your, pour your life into it. In many ways, it's a representation of you, certainly culturally. Rich and I consulted together at SPA, at post-business school. We built the banking practice, and then we left to join a client, Signet Bank. We had all this analytical testing and net present value-based business that became Capital One. We spun it off. I was 34, 35 when I became a president at Capital One. And then for 10 years, 11 years, I had a marvelous time again, massive learning of how to go from being somebody who'd only ever managed 10 people, and they all kind of looked

like I did, to now managing thousands of people. When I left, we had over 20,000 people, but a market cap of over 20 billion. You know, we'd had 10, 11 years of terrific earnings growth and return on equity. We'd come to the UK, to Canada, to France, to Italy, to Spain, to South Africa. We'd gone from credit cards to installment loans, deposits. And we'd built all this thing out. We had a best place to work culturally in all of them,

all of the magazines that rank the firms. Then I woke up in my middle 40s and said, you know, I'm not enjoying this in the same way as I did. It's changing. It's slowing down. Its verve is changing. And I'm not learning at the same rate that I was learning. I felt the calendar coming around. Oh, in February, we do this. In August, we do that. And it started to become too rote and too predictable. And I learned about myself there. I'm better at starting things and building things or breaking things and making them better. I don't really enjoy maintaining things.

A lot of people are great at maintaining. And I've worked with loads of people who are much better at it than me. But the little voice in my head was saying, Nigel, you're not being to thine own self true here. And you're not enjoying this. And you're putting in a lot of hard work. And it was, for me, the dilemma was heart versus head. So I knew that I wanted to move on.

I knew that it was time. I knew that I wanted new challenges. But my heart was still stuck in Capital One, this deep resonance and deep cultural affinity, not necessarily for the what's in your wallet brand, but much more for the people that I'd grown up with there, the people that I'd been part of, that I'd brought into the organization 10 years ago, that we'd grown up together, learned together, been through all that change and hell and opportunity together. And leaving them was very hard. So if I had my days again, I think I would have moved on earlier

than I did. But it took me time to get my head and my heart together. So the learning for me would be if I look back on it. I was with Ken Chenault recently. Ken Chenault led American Express for a long time, a terrific individual. And I asked him what he would have done differently in his life. So sort of a Mickey Mouse version of your three mistakes. You can have it. You can have the format. You should talk to Ken Chenault, a lovely guy. And he said, Nigel, I think maybe I could have had more courage at certain times. And he had an amazing, blistering career. He's a wonderful guy. But I think I could have had more courage to actually say, look, this is time and time to move on. And then Capital One, during that time

when I was mixed up, got itself into a pickle with the regulator. And by when the company had a pickle with the regulator, I basically said, look, I can't leave. Because if I left, it would look like I was leaving a sinking ship. So then I had to wait for the pickle with the regulator took 18, 24 months to be resolved before I could, the transition could occur. So I think the learning for me and for people in the audience is look, when you know, you know, and move with more alacrity. It's almost like when you know that somebody is not working out who works with you. We all have a tendency for hope springs eternal, you know, I'm sure she'll work out, I'm sure he'll work out, just give him a chance. But how many times we look back on the time when we gave somebody more time, that that was the right call? Almost invariably,

it's the wrong call. And you know what, it's the right thing for them too. So when it's time, it's time. I think that's so wise, and also very true of personal romantic relationships. Sometimes you know. And I think that the only reason to stay in it is so that you can not live with the regret of not having tried everything. You've thrown everything at it and it's still not working and therefore it is now time to leave. But I want to talk about the fact that it came in your life. You said you were in your 40s. But I want to talk about the fact that it came in your life. You said you were in your 40s.

That's a very powerful decade, one in which I'm currently inhabiting. And it's a very powerful time midlife because you do start to question where you are, what meaning is, what your purpose is. And I know that you have spoken very eloquently in the past about the mental health pressures on founders. Just to give you some statistics, founders are twice as likely to suffer from depression, six times more likely to suffer from ADHD, three times more likely to suffer from substance abuse, and twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts. How difficult was it for your mental health that period of time? How difficult was it for your mental health that period of time? People who commit their lives to doing things entrepreneurially are a very special species because they have to be comfortable with enormous amount of uncertainty and unstructured environments. I think there's a correlation, causation thing wrapped up in these mental health issues.

Sometimes being an entrepreneur creates those issues. And sometimes because of your natural how you're made, you have a tendency to seek them out. So I think there's a bit of both going on there. In my 40s, and I was really blessed to have had that experience at Capital One and really found myself, I mean, in the very early days of Capital One, people were saying it won't work. And if it was going to work, certainly you, Nigel, and Rich Fairbank can't possibly pull it off. In the very early days, a lot of the motivation, the energy was, we're going to prove them wrong. And then when everybody said, okay, right, it works, then you go, okay, you're looking around saying, now, how am I going to get motivated? And I think that by the time I got to my middle 40s, I was starting to seek

something bigger and different. And I also felt I'd made compromises in terms of my life, my relationships with my family, had, I think, been always not subjugated, but I'd had such love and zeal for building Capital One that the time to do other things in life was significantly diminished. And in leaving Capital One, in leaving having that interim period, allowed me to reinvest and be re-energized about my family, which turned out to be really, really important. If you stay with something after your 40s, I think you have a tendency to stay it to, you know, ad infinitum. So to me, it was like a mid-career change. But I want to go back to mental health, because we at QED lost a partner, Greg Mazenek, about four years ago to alcohol and to painkillers.

And it made a material impact on me. And I swore to his widow, Elaine, that whenever I got in front of a microphone and the issue came up, to make a plea to everybody. And that is, if you're not having mental health issues, and one in four or one in five of us probably are, then the people who work with you and the people who work for you are. If you don't see it in them, guaranteed the people who work for them are. And the key here is if I hurt my shoulder, and I go whinging to Elizabeth and say,

my shoulder really hurts, I'm going to go see the physiotherapist this afternoon. She'll go, okay, great. If I say, look, I couldn't sleep last night and I drank two bottles of wine and I did it the night before and I'm really frightened to leave the house today or I really think somebody's watching me or whatever or I feel I'm bipolar and I'm going to go along and see my therapist, people start to back off. There's a stigma attached to mental health in the workplace that I think is really poisonous and really toxic. And what I've tried to do, and I really encourage it, and I know that ClearScore take this very seriously, and that is get it out in the open. De-stigmatize it. Talk about it. And if you do that, then people can go and get help. And you know the help, be it chemical or be it advisory,

works. Just like you can fix somebody's shoulder, you can fix these things and you can work on them. So to me, it's about breaking the cultural barriers that we have, particularly actually around men rather than women, I think. And in some cultures other than Anglo-Saxon culture, it's even worse. So I think there's a real opportunity for leaders like myself in the venture community and in business in general to talk about it much more openly. Thank you for sharing that. And thank you for speaking Greg's name. And I'm sure that that was a terrible loss for everyone who loved him and worked with him. Have you ever struggled with your own mental health? Again, I think it's a spectrum in that, you know, I've never really had a problem with alcohol or drugs. Even though I played in bands, actually, when I was in, I mentioned Slade and T-Rex earlier,

but I got really caught up in the punk rock music, trying to be Joy Division and Gang of Four and all that. I feel like I'm discovering, every time I talk to you, I discover something else. If I had more than a couple of drinks, I was always hung over the next day and I never really got on with drugs. So no, not really. But I do have the voice in my head that is the imposter syndrome, the worthiness thing, which I carry around. It's always there. It's an ambient kind of voice. There's a guiltiness about being so blessed and so lucky that I say, you know, there's people who work every bit as hard as me, who actually in many ways, much more talented than me that haven't enjoyed what I've enjoyed and how's that right so that's in my head but not really I don't think I have the ups and downs of depression I think and

if you said why is that I think that I'm a fanatical exerciser so I do that all the time and I think that creates for me a level of peace and tranquility and a time to think and get distance from this pandemonium world that I've set up around me. I think that's been really important to me. Plus my family, my four children, and now four grandchildren, which is fantastic, by the way, and my lovely wife. And I'm about to celebrate 40 years of anniversary with Laurie this next month. Congratulations. 40 years, fantastic. You don't have to answer this, she said.

But asking it. It's one of those deep questions that I'm just nosy about. That internal voice that you mentioned, the imposter syndrome, the one that says you're not worthy. Is that a voice that dates from childhood? Yeah, yeah. I say this to most entrepreneurs and i put my i would say that you know i really feel i am an entrepreneur and therefore can resonate with other entrepreneurs to put your body through the degree of pressure uncertainty self-doubt capriciousness of whether or not it's going to work you never know going in we've invested in

200 companies unless both two of them maybe, have hit their numbers that they projected. The only thing you know for sure when a young entrepreneur, half your age and twice as smart as you, puts something in front of you, the only thing you know for sure is that that's not going to happen. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't invest in them because good things still can happen. But we force them into putting together these elaborate spreadsheets of made-up stuff. But I think that you choose to be an entrepreneur, but you have to be willing to deal with the challenges of it. And it's a really hard life to do that.

And I think that something is driving you to do it from early in your life. You can't be successful. You had a big brother that was much more successful in a traditional way. He was an artist or something, or your sister was a great something. So you try to find your own space. But something, there's a dynamo in you that says when you get hit, when you get dropped onto your backside, that you can get up and start again. And I think that that comes very deep. It's a tenacity

that drives that durability that often is in the face of the world shouting at you that it's not going to work, that gets you to do it. And I think it comes from early childhood. And I jokingly say sometimes most of the entrepreneurs I work with, something is wrong with them that allows them to continue in the face of all objective data to keep going. You know, we think that Apple or we think that, you know, Google or we think that, you know, Facebook had a linear road to success. That's not how it works. The road to success is never linear. It's always two steps forward, one step back. And there are all kinds of existential crises that occur en

route. It's just that in our folklore, we want to think that you snap your fingers and eureka, you create billions of dollars of value. And I've watched these young fledgling companies go through Hades, go through huge difficulties in order to be able to pull it off. And often it's the senior leadership that drives that. But one thing, parenthetically, there, often we talk about the power of, and we extol the virtues of the single leader. I'm much more a believer that it's a single team that does it. Rich and I built Capital One together.

And he was amazing in oh so many ways, but we were a great team. And then at QED, it was myself and Frank Rotman in the early days, and then others joined. And so much the power of leadership and creating things is realizing how to spot incredible abilities in people around you, their spiky capability, and knit a group together that creates two plus two equals seven. And that, I think, is a really powerful thing, and one thing that I'm very intentional and deliberate about doing. So when you leave Capital One, how do you deal with the money on a personal level? As someone who does have this imposter syndrome feeling,

this voice in the back of your head that feels you constantly have to prove, you've got a big old lump sum of cash. What does that do to a person? You try really hard to be grounded. In the last year at Capital One, and this was days when people carried around briefcases. I don't know if people have briefcases these days. And I had a sheet of paper in my briefcase

that was my net worth statement. Wow. And it had broke down all the bits. I'd say should I really leave my golly if I leave I won't have this money coming in tomorrow and my golly and you know am I going to be able to pay the mortgage and then I'd look at the net worth statement I go yeah I think I'll be okay you needed reminding you needed reminding but I mean it sounds bonkers yeah but I did do that and it was that sort you know, from whence you came working class mindset

that said, my dad telling me to go out to work before my 16th birthday to bring some money into the house. It said, you know, does this really make sense? When people leave something important, usually they lily pad to something else that's important for different reasons. I lily padded into oblivion

because I cut a piece of my body off every day for a year when I left Capital One. My mindset was, I'm going to leave and I'm going to leave this company and my baby in the best possible shape. And I'm going to subjugate my own needs over that year to make sure I embody it and empower it in the best way. So in the future, I can put my head on my pillow at night and say, you know what, I did the best thing for something that I really cared about. When I left, I came back here to the UK. We put the kids into the American school in North London, which was terrific. And I joined a bunch of boards. And I thought I might be done.

And to me, that was about being more of a pluralist and again my curiosity motivation kicked in so the economist and london business school and national geographic and brookings and ideas 42 and i thought that that intellectual stimulation would be enough and then i found that it wasn't i said this is all great but i don't have my hands on the steering wheel. And I want to build something again. I don't want to be just a pure advisor. So we came back to Northern Virginia in Alexandria, and we began then to build what became QED. Before we get onto that, because it ties into your third failure, have you now reached the stage in your life where you don't worry about money? You don't have to keep looking at that net worth statement. Well, I tell the kids and I will tell the grandkids, when you leave the room, turn the lights off. I love that. You're not in the room, you don't know if the light's on. So

no, I still fight it. Do you? I do. Yeah, yeah, I do fight it. And it's bizarre because it does not make any logical sense. And somebody who is largely, if anything, boringly empirical, it doesn't add up. But I think that's so fascinating and so generous of you to share, because in the world that we live in, all of the capitalist constructs would have us believe that if we accumulate enough money, that is the source of success, that is the source of happiness. And it's so riveting to have an insight from inside that that says, actually, it never quite leaves you, that fear. Yeah. And I hear all the time from my family, OK, so what are we going to do with all this? And I go, I don't know. I'm just enjoying building things. I park it at the side. And it's not

something I spend a huge amount of time on. I'm much more interested in if I build great things and we create super things and we do a great job, then there'll be more of it. But I still don't know what to do with it. What's the best present you've ever been given? I mean, you must be impossible to buy presents for. Laurie and I are going to go to Alaska for our 40th anniversary and we're going to see the orca. Okay, so experiences. It's experiences. Yeah, it's experiences that matter, not stuff. Yeah. Your final failure, and I'm so glad you've chosen it,

you were talking there about your compulsion to build things, and your final failure is managing your own ambition. Nigel Morris, how insatiable is your ambition on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the most insatiable? 8 or 9, probably. It's not getting any better. ambition on a scale of one to ten where ten is the most insatiable eight or nine probably okay it's not getting any better thinking about this issue recently it comes out of a this desire to please the desire to do the right thing to be authentic it comes out of wanting to coach and develop and empower other people i get so pleasure, so much gratification for watching people grow

and being part of watching them grow and maybe helping them a little bit on that growth and sharing some of my mistakes. I can speak to these entrepreneurs about the egregious errors I made so that they don't make the same ones. And I'm very happy to do that. But I do get up in the morning and I'm staring at a big pile of emails and I sigh and then I get stuck in and I go do it. And that tenacity and that energy is there. I listen to myself now and I still think I sound like that iconoclastic 32-year-old. When I look in the mirror, I don't see him anymore, but I still sound the same. And that says to me that I'm not changing that much. And I'm probably, if I'm still here in 10 or 20 years,

Elizabeth, I'm probably going to be saying the same kind of things. To me, it's the energy I get from other, back to being a vampire, being around other people, that curiosity, that energy I get from that is what keeps me going if I sit in a room by myself you know the light bulb gets duller and duller and duller every day so being around people and the dynamicism of people is really important do you feel that your ambition has ever gone too far has it ever cost you something personally? Yeah. I think that if I look back on some of the decisions that I made and the pace at which I drove people and teams and processes, I hold others to the same standards as myself.

I make compromises in my own life. And I think I sort of imposed my compromises on them, perhaps too stringently. This is one thing I have learned over the years. I believe that people who are really inspiring leaders infect other people with their passion in some way at an emotional level. People don't work for you for the money. People work for you for some meaning or something more important. They work with you because they believe that they're creating something bigger and grander. The downside of people that can infect people with

the energy and the passion and the love is that when you're unhappy, you show it. I used to find myself inadvertently crushing people in the workplace when they made a mistake by showing disappointment. I didn't have to yell at anybody. I remember somebody once came to me and said, Nigel, why don't you just bring me into the office, scream and shout at me, kick over the trash can, and then I'll move on. But you don't, you just go... Yeah.

So I've learned to manage that much better, but I think I do wear my emotions on my sleeve. And I believe in being honest and authentic as best you can in a constructive way. But I think I assume that everybody had the same objective function that I did. And therefore, they should be driven in the same way I was. Did your children teach you something helpful about that? Because the way that you were talking in business, it makes complete sense. But I wonder how much of that you took home with you.

You know, I watch so many of my friends and my contemporaries watching their children grow up with very successful parents who are often, certainly in my case, undeservedly put on some stage or pedestal sometimes. I think they're all finding their way. Ainsley has given us four grandchildren. She looks after my non-QED investments, and she has found her own way. She's a wonderful mum. Dylan is a data scientist, and he's finding his way. And Hadley is a public defender in LA, and she's found her own way. My youngest boy, Harry, is in grad school here in the UK in history. None of them are doing anything like I do. And I think that's really great

because none of them are trying to be a bigger, better version of dad. So they've found their way. They will say to me, you know, dad, why do you work so hard? Why are you doing this? And I think we have the conversations like you and I just had. Look, this is what I love to do. This is what gets me animated. This is what's important.

Because I'm intrigued as to why you've chosen it as a failure. So you've chosen the failure to manage your own ambition, but it sounds like you've kind of got it sorted. Yes, but I'm still wrestling with it, partly because I look at my peers, the people who came out of business school with me and are retiring, and they're going on to the next stage of life. And here I am thinking, I'm just getting started here with QED. This is what we want to do. So the world is telling me that I need to think about what comes next and succession and moving to the next stage of life.

But my own drive inside is saying, hey, this is great. So I don't know how that equation ends. I don't want to say that I see how to solve it. And I don't want to say that I'm happy with the stasis. Yes. Do you find it difficult to relax? Horribly difficult to relax. Yeah. Oh, no, I'm jumpy. I do not relax well. I've been trying to master meditation for a long time. Relaxation for me is cardio and riding my bike. And that's, I can switch off a bit then. Well, I want to talk about your cycling because I wonder, you describe it as something that is really good for your mental health and it helps you relax. But I wonder how much your ambition

has fed into the cycling. Do you want to do better and better and better with that? Yeah, and the trouble is you can measure everything now. So you can measure your wattage per hour, you can measure your FTP, and you can compare it with last year, and there's all the software that allows you to compare it. I set very clear, outrageous goals, and I work backwards from them. I try not to trick myself that I'm doing more than I am. I measure lots of things. We're taught, aren't we, when we're in really stressful times

to relax, to deep breathe, to go somewhere in your own head and think about that, listen to the birds or whatever it is that makes you calm down. And to me, when I go there, I'm riding my bike and I'm riding up a big hill. I can hear the bike and I can hear the gears and I can hear the birds. And usually I'm going up one of these big mountain passes that exist in the Alps. And to me, just looking down and you just climbed N thousand feet and you've got this wall that you're going to climb up. To me, that just feels just beautiful and tranquil. And if I just say that on that, one of the most special things about cycling is that you do it as a group. It's a very

individual thing, but to do it with others is like a rite of passage and you enjoy doing it. And several years back with my two boys, I was still young enough to do it and they were old enough to come with me. But we rode the Stelvio Pass, which is a 9,000-foot pass through the Alps from Italy. And to do it with the two of them was a wonderful, wonderful father-son experience. So the real benefits around life and family and mental health come from cycling. What I find so revealing about that meditative image

that you give yourself is that for me and I'm like you I am not I can't get into meditation but if I were to try the image I would have would be on the top of Mount Hollywood in LA overlooking the city and the sea in the distance but I'm on the top there so there's no more work to do. And you are riding up a hill. That's where you go to feel calm. Yeah, I'm looking up. That's right. Isn't that fascinating about your psychology? You're the one who should be the clinical psychologist. It was a bit of a challenge trying to interview someone who I know has

background training in clinical psychology. I'm very glad you've given me the chance to talk to you, Nigel. I wonder if I could draw this reluctantly to a close. Do you feel successful? The world is shouting at me that I am, by all objective measures. I'm still here, lovely family, healthy. I can't say I'm not, but I can't say that I've reached the top of this Delvio path yet. The hankering in me is back to the Welshness, and we talked about that. In fintech, for me, it's as a higher purpose. And we've invested in Klarna, we've invested in

Credit Karma, and ClearScore, and NewBank. And if you add all the customers up of those companies, it's about 300 million. And I said to myself recently, when we just raised our next fund, our eighth fund, was that I'd like to believe that QED and the great team that I have with me will impact the lives of a billion people before I pack this up. And when I say impact the lives of, it's leveling the playing field. It's empowering consumers. It's taking away the stress that exists in money management. It's making them feel more powerful, in control, and being able to manage something that's often

complex and not well taught in our society at all. To do that, we will need to crack the code of really big scale businesses in the developing world, in India, in Indonesia, in Nigeria. And I think I'm really excited about that. So let's have another conversation in five years, Elizabeth, about whether or not that 300 million has turned into a billion. And then maybe I'll be willing to give myself a silver star for that. It's a deal, but I suspect you'll still be cycling up that Silvio path, won't you? Well, Nigel, even though you are too modest and too relentlessly curious and ambitious to claim your own success, I have to say that I think you're an incredibly successful

How to Fail podcast guest. I cannot thank you enough for trusting me and for opening up. And I know that that's an unusual thing in this world of business. And I'm very, very grateful, as I'm sure everyone in this auditorium is. Thank you so, so much, Nigel Morris,

for coming on How to Fail. Thank you. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, I would so appreciate it if you could rate, review and subscribe. Apparently it helps other people know that we exist.