The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 30 - These Qualities Will Help You In Business: Tom Blomfield

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. Tom Blomfield has found multiple multi-million pound companies, but what is it which makes Tom such a successful serial-entrepreneur? In this moment clip, Tom reveals what he believes are the most significant qualities which made him the disruptive, industry-changing entrepreneur he is today. Episode 86 - https://g2ul0.app.link/KvEkNBrkTkb Tom: https://twitter.com/t_blom

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the united states and i'd be recording a lot more over in the states they put a massive billboard in time square um for the show so thank you so much amazon music um thank you to our team and thank you to all of you that listen to this show let's continue what was it about you that was disruptive though i want some specifics um whenever i'm i see a problem i think this is in common with anyone who starts a business i look at the way something's done and immediately start thinking of better ways to do it rather than just doing what i'm told i sort of scratch my head and think no this doesn't make sense to me why are we doing it this way that we could do it in this other way which is 10 times faster 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 there must be a thousand to do a tally chart of the price range and this guy started doing it by hand so scratch my head and wrote a little excel script to script basically scrape the website and just tally them up and go there's your results and but they didn't want that because they were billing by the hour and that had only taken an hour of my time rather than 20 hours and so they could only bill me out for an hour like no no go back and do it by hand so it that kind of stuff just drove me crazy and I was always just looking for ways to automate ways to do things better um I guess that's what led me into entrepreneurship what gave you the conviction and the confidence that you could take on such a mammoth industry with Monzo?

I mean, arrogance, naivety and arrogance, I think, in no small part. I'd already built a company called GoCardless, which is a payment processor. So that sort of taught me that, you know, three young guys could get access to the payment system and actually move money around um and banking was a step up from there it was it was more regulated more complicated um but i had the background in payments and i was an early natwest user or rather when i was young and they were very old i was a natwest user and i was deeply deeply disappointed and i think like any founder really a huge sort of dose of naivety. You know, you look at a problem and think it's probably,

I think if I knew now what I knew, if I knew then what I knew now, I would never have done it, really. If I knew what the amount of pain and heartache that would be involved, I would never have started, but I didn't know that. And so I had a huge amount of self-confidence, huge amount of naivety, and just assumed that I could figure it out. And I think we got a really, really long way. way and I mean the company's still doing fabulously so I'm incredibly proud of of what we built. I find that point about naivety so interesting because it almost feels like

founders like yourself need to be deluded on one end in terms of their own confidence yeah right because if you look at the stats and all the odds, they're clearly against you. 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 this success. Yeah, totally. But also self-aware enough to listen to feedback and not be blinded by their hypotheses. Listen to some feedback. I mean, a lot of the feedback I got in the early days was, this is impossible, you can never do it.

You know, go back to a day job. 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. I looked at one yesterday.

It's like, I've seen that model fail four times. Not my, you know, 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 is different. Maybe the technology's changed. This can now work. So I think actually the benefit of being naive and even being quite young in your career is you don't have that baggage of knowing how it failed the five times before, which I find super interesting. 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? I mean, the really simple one is being technical being able to write code i think is just a huge huge leg up and all of the founders who aren't technical and there were many great

ones um i think their biggest problem at the early stage is finding a technical co-founder so that's just a an immediate benefit and if you know if i could talk to my um if i could talk to people in the sort of age 12 to 18 i would basically just go and say learn to code you're going to have a really well paying career for the rest of your life and it's a great step into entrepreneurship Are you technical? Yeah I learned to code when I was 12 or 13

built websites I mean I was never I studied law not computer science but I can I can code, 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 you 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 indefatigable basically i think is is the single biggest predictor of success you um you strike me as someone that has great confidence and i imagine that's come from as you kind of alluded to with go cardless you've built evidence over time

that you could do things so and i i sometimes think of confidence as like a self-reinforcing cycling the upwards or downwards um i think i was more confident when i was 28 than i am now for sure and i think that comes with experience um i think you you take enough knocks that you start to and you realize you don't know i think at 27 28 i thought i knew everything and now i realize i you know i like to think I know a lot about a lot of things but I realize I don't um and so my I'm still a confident person I'd guess but if you put me in front of my 27 year old self I think you would see two different people maybe less naivety maybe that yeah exactly yeah I've seen the failures a few times now because I I was saying

that because there's a lot of um a lot of young people in my in my dms that are dreaming big dreams like yours but they would just never have the confidence or conviction to pursue them so i was wondering is that i'm trying to get to 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 um i've taken quite big life decisions without very much reflection um and that's worked out really well you know i'm hugely privileged i um i've grown up in the uk which i think is an enormous privilege compared to a lot you know people in my position my position, but growing up in rural Africa are not going to have the same opportunities. I have great education. I had parents who supported me and I knew I could take risk

because if that risk didn't pay off, I have that safety net. And so, yes, I was confident. I think, yes, I was impulsive, but that was enabled from a place of huge privilege because i could take the risk and i actually think people in this country um with great supportive families don't take enough risk in general i think um people go into um pretty safe careers in law or consulting or whatever and i think they could um do more interesting things have more impact you know make more money if that's what drives you by taking more risk. I just don't think they do. And I, I think I put myself on the risk loving end of the spectrum. And so I've quit jobs and moved countries, you know, with like hours notice. I started GoCardless with Matt Hiroki because I quit my consulting job to go to a bigger

consultancy. And in that gardening leave, I just got bored. I had three months off and they said let's start a website and I said yes and then Y Combinator said come out and interview and we did and we got the offer to do Y Combinator and their investment about three days before my McKinsey start date so I just sort of said ah this sounds fun I'll do this startup thing instead