The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield

Episode Date: June 28, 2021

Tom Blomfield, wow what an entrepreneur. This guy has founded multiple multi-million-pound companies, that have become monumental disrupters in the industry. And let’s face it, Monzo, one of the companies Tom founded and led, is the one of the most forward-thinking, innovative, fastest-growing companies there is. Tom was born in Hong Kong and lived with his father and mother. His father was a business-minded civil engineer and his mother was an artist. When Tom was a child, he moved to London to attend grammar school in Amersham, Buckinghamshire then moving on to study Law at Oxford. Whilst studying at Oxford, at the age of 21, he co-founded Boso.com an “eBay for students”. After a few internships with law firms he decided being a lawyer wasn't for him and followed the entrepreneurial journey instead. In January 2011 Blomfield co-founded the UK-based company GoCardless, an automated payment method that processes Direct Debit payments on behalf of other businesses and organisations. Blomfield stayed in Silicon Valley during his three years at the company, it raised around £35 million of investment and hired 100 people. When GoCardless appointed Hiroki Takeuchi as CEO in 2013, he left (keeping a "very small share" in the £50-100m valued company). Tom moved to New York to work for dating site Grouper social club as their Head of Growth. Blomfield left Grouper in 2014, and it closed in 2016. Following his departure from Grouper Social Club Blomfield joined Anne Boden’s Starling bank as the CTO. Startling was, at that point one of the first digital banking companies. Tom left the company in early 2015 after reports of disagreements at Starling, telling the Financial Times that "he could not comment under the terms of his departure". Today we learn about what really happened at Starling. In 2015, he founded challenger bank Monzo, operating with no branches and instead offering accounts online. In its first fundraising round, the company raised "£1 million in 96 seconds”. In April, Blomfield announced he would forgo his salary for one year to help his company during the COVID-19 pandemic. In May, he announced that he was stepping down as CEO of Monzo and taking on the role of president of the company. In January 2021 he announced he was leaving the company permanently. This conversation today takes us through Tom’s wild entrepreneurial journey expressing the highs and lows of running a business. He also talks about the disagreements at Starling bank and ultimately his reason for starting Monzo in the first place. His stories are unique, and more importantly honest. Unbelievably honest. He tells you the mistakes he made, his deepest insecurities, his biggest challenges and the things he wish he knew. Wow this is a good one. Follow Tom: Twitter - https://twitter.com/t_blom LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomblomfield

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 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 Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. Your heart drops. Is this it? Is this the moment the company dies? Tom Bloomfield, entrepreneur, investor and founder of Monzo. your heart drops is this it is this the moment the company dies tom bloomfield entrepreneur investor and founder of monzo i've never actually talked about this before after six months i just thought i can't work with this person i just really it's really damaging to me and my mental health and so i resigned and the response to that resignation she called an all-hands meeting and fired the entire company if i knew then what i knew now i would never have done it really if i knew what the amount of pain and heartache that would be involved,

I would never have started, but I didn't know that. I cry quite a lot. You know, I'm not ashamed of that. For about three or four seconds, I'd forgotten what my life was. I was calm, and then three or four seconds later, all the memories came back, and it was just like this crushing weight. That really was the moment I sort of knew this is no life. There were no other emotions in my life really apart from just anxiety. I mean, it was serious by the end.

We would detect criminals and shut their accounts down. Customs would turn up sometimes with weapons and they threatened to turn up with a bottle of acid and throw it in someone's face. That was tough. Tom Bloomfield, what a remarkable entrepreneur. One of the UK's recent real success stories and he and his team managed to disrupt the archaic incumbent banking system at a time when nobody thought it could be disrupted. But man, his story is crazy. Absolutely crazy. And the reason why I started The Diver CEO is demonstrated perfectly in this podcast. It has it all. Controversy, drama, business wars, depression, anxiety, resilience, success and failure. And today you're going to hear a particular business story, one that's never been heard before. But Tom felt that today and here

was the place to share it. If you're an aspiring entrepreneur and you want to get to the point in your life where you're running a hundred million or a billion pound company, today might be your warning. Because as Tom is going to tell you, all that glitters isn't gold. And the true cost of entrepreneurship, the cost that nobody seems to talk about, is sometimes greater than the reward on offer. This is one of the most emotional, raw, honest, vulnerable, brilliant, gripping conversations I've ever had on this podcast. And I can't thank Tom enough for opening up his diary and allowing us to look inside. Without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself why why entrepreneurship i made a very bad employee

i've never been promoted and i've been fired i would guess two or three times, depending on how you count. Why were you fired so often? My first ever job was a consulting firm in London. I actually wasn't fired from this one. I was, but I wasn't promoted. 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. So I think I'm much, I'm much better founder than I am an employee. What was it about you that was disruptive though I want some specifics. 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'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? We could do it this other way, which is 10 times faster. I mean, one of my first ever jobs was to, with another analyst, go and count all of the jewellery items on a massive jewellery website. There must have been a thousand. Do a tally chart of the price range.

And this guy started doing it by hand. So I scratched my head and wrote a little Excel script to basically scrape the website and just tally them up and go there's your results 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 have you heard about this idea of first principle thinking absolutely yeah my co-founder Jonas at Monzo was just I think he would say first principle thinking at least once a day because that's that sounds to me

like first principle thinking you're looking at conventions way of doing things and thinking well no this is there's a much easier yeah absolutely you sort of start from physics and build build up from there really how's that how's that boded for you in your in your personal life though so because life is personal life is full of convention marriage school follow this path do you know what i mean yeah and i you know i i'm not married but certainly when i was younger i followed that conventional path i i went to a grammar school i did my exams i got a place at oxford um i even did a a master's at Oxford so I sort of I was following that conventional path towards becoming a lawyer I guess but somewhere along the way I started realizing it probably wasn't for me but but definitely in the early years that was my path. You built this hyper fast

growing business which was you know funny that you use 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,

Shaquille Khan? Yeah. About Danielek. And when I think about your story, you both made the decision to take on just what, what many entrepreneurs would consider to be an immovable object. You took on the banking system. Daniel Ek took on this massive music industry that seemed to be immune to change. I was talking to Shaq about this last week.

Oh, really? He texted me last night about Harry's new fund. So I think that's why he's fresh of mind what what gave you the conviction like in the confidence that you could take on such a mammoth industry with monzo um i mean arrogance for naivety and arrogance i think in no small part um i don't i'd already built a company called GoCardless, which is a payment process. So that sort of taught me that, you know, three young guys could get access to the payment system and actually move money around. And banking was a step up from there. It was more regulated, more complicated. But I had the background in payments and I was an early NatWest user,

or rather when I was young and they were very old, I was a 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 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, 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 to not be blinded by their hypotheses. Listen to some feedback. I mean, a lot of the feedback I got in the early days was this is impossible. You can never do it. You know, go back to 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 um i looked at one yesterday it's like i i've seen that model fail four times not my you know i wasn't running it others were running it but

to um have a fresh enough mind to think, okay, maybe the timing's different, maybe the founding team's different, maybe the technology's changed, this can now work. So I think actually the benefit of being naive and even being quite young in your career is you don't have that baggage of knowing how it failed the five times before, 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 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 are many great ones, I think their biggest problem at the early stage is finding a technical co-founder. So that's just an immediate benefit. And 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'll it's a

great step into entrepreneurship are you technical yeah i learned to code when i was 12 or 13 built websites um i mean i was never i studied law not computer science but i can i can code i there's still code i wrote probably in the monzo code base somewhere i think it puts the emojis into the the push notifications but um uh yeah so being technical i think is just the easy answer um more fundamentally i think just being really really determined and resilient seeing as 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 indefatigable, basically, I think is the single biggest predictor of success. You strike me as someone that has great confidence.

And I imagine that's come from, as you kind of alluded to with GoCardless, you've built evidence over time that you could do things. So I sometimes think of confidence as like a self-reinforcing cycle, either upwards or downwards. I think I was more confident when I was 28 than I am now, for sure. And I think that comes with experience. I think you take enough knocks that you start to, and you realise you don't know.

I think at 27, 28, I thought I knew everything. And now I realize, I like to think I know a lot about a lot of things, but I realize I don't. 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. Maybe less naivety. Maybe that would be a stark difference.

Yeah, exactly. I've seen the failures a few times now. Because I was saying that because there's a lot of young people 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 all of the young people 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'm hugely privileged. I've grown up in the UK, which I think is an enormous privilege compared to a lot, you know, people in 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 um and so i've quit jobs and moved countries we you know with like hours notice um i started go cardless uh 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.

You launched GoCardless. You take that to, I think, a nine-figure valuation. It's $970 million at their last round, I believe. That's what was reported. So not quite a billion. Okay, a 10-figure value. We'll round up, it's fine. I mean, that is an achievement

that most people in their lifetimes would, you know, would never go near in and of itself. You then depart your cardless. I left early. We were 35 people. You know, it was the valuation was in the region of 30 or 40 million at the time. My co-founder at the time took on a CEO role and has done just a phenomenal job. I'm just 10 and a half years old now. But it's been, that was not an overnight success story.

That was 10 and a half years of really, really hard work and huge credit to him and Matt also, who stuck around a lot longer than me. I was there for the first three years. I think I put something of myself into it, but I was there for the beginning, not the middle and certainly not the end. Why did you leave?

I wasn't really, I think it was a great company, but I wasn't really passionate about B2B direct debit software. It helps lots of different suppliers collect money from their customers in a sort of back office way. It didn't have a big consumer brand. It wasn't direct to consumer, really.

And B2B sales i found uh really difficult and frustrating not something i was good at and the tech kind of was built um and that had been my role uh so i sort of i went from there to join a dating site which is like the polar opposite you know uh all about brand direct to consumer um really fun every day uh terrible business model that was one of the ones i got fired from um i was head of growth that we stopped growing um it was bad you were head of growth and you stopped and the company stopped growing very self-aware and honest for you to admit that and in fact i saw the charts and it looked like a rocket ship when i was sort of

interviewing their crazy 48 hour interview process i flew flew out to New York they showed me so their growth charts really sort of hockey stick metrics um 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 it had flattened out and I joined to kind of reignite and I didn't I wasn't able to reignite it we sort of plateaued along for about 10 months and then it fell off a cliff revenue declined 70 percent um 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 um so we rode this wave of popularity and sort of zeitgeist um it was called grouper it was it was incredibly sort of cool novel idea back in 2013 14 um and then people just got bored of it i think so the

idea was um it was six of you three three guys and three girls or three guys and three guys if that's your your preference um or three girls and three girls um but six of you you and two friends would go and meet three other people. So you knew your friends and they knew each other and it would put the group together and you'd kind of go and have a wild night out. Rather than traditional dating apps, sort of one-on-one, this was sort of a group social experience.

Really, really fun, but not a great business model. You got fired? Yeah, most of the company got laid off, actually. Yeah. And then you took how long off before you swung back into the next thing? So I, about two months, but only about two months. Because it was the US, I was on a weird visa. This is not interesting, but basically I couldn't take another job.

And I couldn't, as soon as I crossed the US border, my visa expired. Yes, 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 Bowden at Starling and agreed to be their CTO within about again 24 hours um and then there's a lot written about how I mean how your relationship with and transpired and your relationship with starling more broadly transpired what's what are what are the key highlights from that from that journey choose your co-founder really carefully yeah i mean there were 14 of us at starling and 13 of us started Monzo. It was that stark.

Wait, say that again. 14 people at Starling and 13 of you started Monzo? 13 of those 14 started Monzo. 13 of those 14 started Monzo. Okay. 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. so one one would say well you know tom must have ripped them all away no no i i just didn't want to work with ann like really i've never actually talked about this before and there was there has been a book i haven't read the book uh the brief version is after six months i got fired twice in six months um i was never paid i invested my own money which is i lost um there was never any paperwork which is my fault um and after six months i just thought i i can't work with this person i just really it's really damaging to me and my mental health and so i resigned and the response to that resignation she called an all-hands meeting and fired the entire company because you resigned yep so i didn't i didn't pull anyone away she fired the entire company that's not true two people happened to not be in the office so they weren't at the meeting where

they got fired so they had to work two weeks notice because they weren't technically fired but everyone else was fired so we all went to this gin bar to kind of it was called ask for janice on smithfield market it's a great bar you should go there um we all went there to basically commiserate just think this is crazy what's what's just happened and literally it's i think we were there for two days basically in this gin bar playing we we all played speed chess it was this very nerdy kind of four player speed we're playing lots and lots of speed chess uh just trying to figure out what we're going to do and eventually like we can um we think we can do this ourselves um so it wasn't a case of like you know me leading a coup me pulling the company away i quit i was just

like good luck to you i'm just i'm gonna go and sit on a beach for a while and in response she fired the entire company which is just i think a reflection of the way she she operates i can't quite wrap my head around the idea of one person resigning and then firing everybody as a show of i don't even know no it's not something i would do where did where did that leave starling though if they only if they had lost pretty much everybody other than the two people that didn't manage to make it into work that day and they also resigned the day after yeah to come and work with us um she hired another management team another team okay and it turned out that we weren't the first team there'd been a previous team as well oh wow that she'd fired wow and then off so that's that's crazy so you

started essentially monzo was founded in that gin bar yep yep ask for janice and it's still there we go back for some of our reunions really yeah yeah yeah and how did you feel so you're fired you know from starling you all convene in this gin bar you spend a couple of days there you end up um deciding that you're gonna go again together yep and i guess you feel pretty fired up and charged up to not only disrupt the industry, but also to compete with Starling, no? It was unavoidable, that feeling of, fuck them. Kind of, but I didn't really know that Anne was going to rehire a bunch of people.

But it was over, right? And there was a big feeling of like, we put quite a lot of work into this, actually, and we've had to leave everything behind so we came to you know rewrite the code base redo all our regulatory submissions really from scratch which was kind of like a oh i wish we didn't have to do this but we did um uh 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 um but yeah it felt like a i mean initially we tried to negotiate with that and say why did you know why did you step down why don't like how can we we don't want to throw away this like it for some people they've been there 12 months why are we throwing away 12 months of work

and that was a sort of very convoluted week or two um where we almost had a deal a couple of times and it just similar thing happening no huge blow up and we just walked away um 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 styling 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 was paul ripping your only co-founder no uh there were uh and it was all it was sort of weird actually because of 13 of us like how do you pick which ones are you all they were all literally there on day one um so in a sense that was the founding team they all got

stock like not options actually full you know full stock. But for arbitrary reasons, which I can't really remember, there were five of us. So myself, Paul became deputy CEO and was the chief risk officer. He became deputy CEO because the Bank of England looked at me and I was thinking I was 29 or 30 or something. And I said, have you ever worked in a bank?

No. It's like, and you're applying to be CEO of our newest bank. I said, yes. and they sort of scratch your head for a bit and said how about this sort of very experienced guy next to you this co-founder of yours how about they didn't say that they said we'd like you to find a deputy ceo who's actually run a bank before please and i you know i said paul has run several banks so he became deputy ceo gary was cfo um he'd been at abin amroro and Mizuho Bank, I think. There's a guy called Jason, who is sort of more customer marketing. And then Jonas, who is the only one left now, was a CTO,

really, really talented developer. So he stepped into the CTO role. How important is that? You talked earlier about the importance of business partners and that being one of your big regrets, but how critically important is, because talked earlier about the importance of business partners and that being one of your big regrets but how critically important is because you know definitely one of the biggest mistakes I made in my career was when I was very young just hired anybody because I thought you know like oh you like I remember being in Selfridges one day there was a guy selling Prada bags like you can be a director you know what I mean because you don't know what you don't know. I didn't do that. I did. I was like 18. So, but I, in hindsight, I know it's the most, well, for me, that core team is the most important thing.

Yeah. It's probably the single biggest determining factor of success or failure in my view. Yeah. So how important was it for you to assemble that skilled co-founding team? I mean, it was luck at Monzo because that was the group that was at Starling. And it was sort of like, how do we keep this team together?

And it really was a sort of, it felt like everyone's going to disappear into the wind. There was a, you know, it really was a debate. Are we going to really try and do this again? Or, you know, is this it? We just go back to whatever we were doing before. And so to keep everyone together, I think it wasn't. And so I think we were really fortunate. We had such a great different set of skills,

but it wasn't hugely sort of planned. I mean, I have another example of this. I started a company when I was at university through Young Enterprise. And on day one one there were like 14 co-found co-founders of this business which is just a ridiculous way to start a company and within about two we had meetings and meetings meet nothing ever got done so within three months or so three of us basically said look you 11 you can have it right on your sleeve 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 um one of them uh quit his job to do he just left to work at Deutsche Bank and the three of us are actually going to try and run a startup here and so figuring out that core team I think is is really really important to get right and having a group of 14 is not the way to do it really when you when you started monzo from that i say from the gym but it wasn't really from the gym bar but you see what i mean that was the kind of i guess the inception moment um what was the driving force for you to go on that journey was it money was it the chance of you know moving an industry what was it oh gosh uh insecurity i think for me it was I was much

of the reason I started my business was probably based on deep childhood insecurities about wanting to be rich and yeah like all of that I think tied up into a bunch of weird sort of deep-rooted psychological problems um wanting to prove myself wanting to be seen to be successful. I think, um, that money played a part in it, not the driving part, but certainly there was a factor there. Um, a deep hatred for NatWest Bank. Um, why? They were just incredibly frustrating to use. Just every, everyone who came to work at Monzo had one of these horror stories about their banks. 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. It's like, I'm done with this. But he'd incurred the charge. He didn't know they applied the charge at the end of the month. So it's like a five pound overdraft fee

at that month, which then the month after, month after, month after, sort of rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled and two up you know two years later they came after him for several thousand pounds because he'd been 10p overdrawn for a day um just everyone's got those kind of stories and so a big part of it was a frustration that banking worked like that and a sort of feeling that it didn't have to be like that because we looked at apps like spotify or or uber and they felt magical you know the i the people who've grown up with that technology it's

sort of normal now but i remember you know i downloaded napster for the first time i remember showing my dad and my uncle you know think of any song you want in the world yeah type it in and and it starts playing and that's that is magical um but now it's so commonplace and banking for years has just been you want to change some change your address down i've downloaded a form filled in the form signed and had to post it off this is for an online bank um so we really just felt quite deeply that could be the experience could be much much better and one of the other reasons you gave there as a driving force was wanting to be seen to win. Yeah. Can you explain that one? Not to win.

I think that's probably the wrong way I use that phrase, but to be seen to be a success, I think. Like validation. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. You know, that's to my family and my friends and my school and teachers. You've already been a success, though, with GoCardless. Did you? Yeah, I had a bit but go card us circa 2014 2015 was uh 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 um just on that

feeling of wanting that validation from friends because we can all relate to that like i'm i'm playing devil's advocate but i know exactly what you mean you're on a TV show exactly exactly and i'm doing a podcast with 17 cameras right now you know um but uh but just drilling down into that in hindsight was that a feeling that you think could have ever been attained um was it a mirage i think i have attained it yeah oh and i don't mean i'm the world's biggest success that's not what i mean i mean that like i've tasted what that feels like that i'm mixing my metaphors there i felt what that you know i've experienced that thing that's sort of like being in the newspapers and that sort of um people using a monzo card and that stuff and it's somewhat rewarding but it's

not like i and i don't feel anymore i think what i'm trying to say is sort of that need to prove myself has sort of disappeared actually um and so either i've realized it was a stupid goal to start with or like i got far enough along that I sort of like ticked that off the list and sort of thought, you know, that's sort of, it was fun, but it's not my overriding purpose now. And I'm not, and your next question is what is your purpose? I'm not sure I have one. It's sort of more like living day to day and enjoying life.

And I was never good at that. I've really, really driven from a very, very young age. So I worked incredibly hard for my exams and my, you know, through Oxford and starting companies and very rarely paused to enjoy the journey or the, you know, the cliche, the small things in life, the, you know, the choose your cliche, right? Like how your coffee tastes in the morning or the sort of the tweeting of the birds in the trees.

And that stuff now I'm spending more time kind of being more, I guess, mindful and kind of birds in the in the trees and that stuff now I'm am spending more time kind of being more I guess mindful and kind of living in the moment do you have to like reprogram yourself to get there though because I feel like society well for me anyway is um kind of conditions you to to chase climb promote move up strive and and you're kind of deferring your happiness towards some future achievement accomplishment yeah so how did you get to the point where you just enjoy it what it you know life for what it is in the moment was that reprogramming yeah i guess like you know like you i i left my company i didn't um and that was really really hard and that was not a that was um you know deep deep anxiety 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 and i took a year off and you know travel around europe and kite surfing and learn a language and all this kind of you know cliches um and that experience now leads me, whenever I, I still get these like urges, like, oh, it's sort of, my local MP passed away a few months ago and there was a by-election. I was like, why don't I stand for that seat and I could be an MP and then maybe I could, you know, maybe I could be the prime minister. And then I'm like, but then what?

Crap. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I think like I could start a company and then it, you know, what if it goes well? And then I end up running a big company again.

So, uh, yeah, just like a couple of sort of those brain cycles. And I'm like, no, what am I, what am I thinking?

Um, I quite quickly come back to like, I'm really enjoying my life at the moment i'm lucky enough that i'm financially sort of independent now i have a great group of friends like why um why do i want to go and make myself miserable again um where where does that narrative that voice come from so many people have that voice because it's funny because you're saying right i'm i'm at i'm at a stage of peace now i wasn't before but you still have that yearning or that voice that comes in it's gone tom do it um it's that it's that sort of i guess disruptive kind of um

i see something that's not working and it's incredibly frustrating and i go i could i could make that work better i'm um i'm uh reluctant i've talked about this before i'm working in the in the i'm volunteering the vaccination program and it sounds like a sort of um i'm proud of doing it and it's like a great feeling kind of being part of a team that's uh hopefully helping kind of the country get out of this lockdown rubbish um but even there there are so many things that just drive me absolutely nuts um and i think that's probably nhs sort of more broadly i think the smart use of technology could really really improve the way we

deliver care to everyone really medical care and so i keep thinking i just want to like just give me you know um i just yeah what why can't i just come in and fix it for a year it's incredibly you know i've struggled with a company of 2000 people. The NHS employs, I think, a million and a half people or something. So probably not for me. But there's always that, like, your question, you know,

what is that drive? It's the looking at something that's clearly broken, at least to my naive eyes. And that feeling that I feel like along with a small group of smart people i could make it better what were the the good times at monzo the times you look back most fondly small team so sub 100 um being able to um go from a kind of an idea or a customer insight or something like a

conversation with a customer about a problem to figuring out a kind of product feature to very quickly prototyping and building that and launching it and then seeing people use it um and then tell their friends about it that very quick iterative product development cycle i love um and a lot of the brand and marketing stuff uh i when i was at gokartist i didn't believe in brand uh which is a ridiculous thing to say um and i you know you as a marketing background that's almost offensive i guess but i was like no this is you know this doesn't this doesn't exist really people um and then the day when i worked at the dating site that really opened my eyes the kind of power of human psychology and brand and and mission and values and we really took a lot of that into

monzo and that it it was just astonishing um so we started out even before we had a product talking a lot about our mission and and some of our values like transparency and kind of community orientation and that worked so incredibly well um so yeah it was working with a small team to build the brand build the product get into users hands really quickly and then see them enjoy it i've talked about this a lot before that feeling of um standing in line at a coffee shop and seeing the person at the counter paying with a the hot car or monzo card and then having the bartender or the the service you know i've got one of those as well and then listening to that conversation as sort of an anonymous bystander that's just incredibly rewarding feeling that you've had a hand in in creating something that's that people are enjoying so much let's dig into the point

about brand then marketing because Monzo really was a UK standout 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 i mean even the card yeah was completely unconventional intentionally yeah tell me tell me what the secret was to monzo's branding success um authenticity i think um it was we had a couple of early marketing hires who, 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 as sort of like, you know, how, how the kid's going to think about this. And we were like, we, we are the kids. So we had a very early community manager called Tristan

Thomas, who was there from almost the first few months. He just very recently left to start his own company. And he was VP of marketing, running a massive team with a massive budget by the end. But he was a 23-year-old when he started, 23, 24-year-old. And I worked on it a lot. Hugo, our head of design, worked on it a lot.

And it was just an authentic representation of i think who we were and what we believed more than anything and we we did want to be different from the big banks we intentionally positioned ourselves as a part so the hot crawl card every other bank was you know blue or purple or kind of a shade of black basically so like how far can from that can we get and the big banks were very impersonal you know you you never felt like you were talking to a human and so we everything we did was human and transparent um we we shared a lot of internal information everyone you know we published our product roadmap this is what we're going to be working on for the next two years which people

thought were bonkers but it that was a way of building trust and humanity in opposition to these big sort of faceless banks um these all sound like first principles yeah we none of tristan had never worked in marketing before his previous job was at a refugee camp in in the middle east uh you know i'd never really worked in marketing i'd spent nine months at a dating site but we yeah we um we came up we thought about these principles and it felt like the kind of company we wanted to run. And so we did and it worked really well. Yeah. Without any experience. Goes to show the risk of reading marketing books. No, genuinely, I've always thought this because I've never studied marketing or did any degree in, you know, our business did really well in

the marketing industry, but I think it did well because we hadn't read those books and we hadn't been sort of diluted or polluted by conventions idea of how yeah i think this today when i go when i work and go into these family offices and i'm working on the marketing plan that the ceo often will want to hire someone who's done marketing in that industry for 20 years and you immediately feel that that's the fastest route to not standing out at all and not having any point of difference yeah yeah 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 and like everyone else if you're a challenger bank appealing to 21 to 25 year olds,

maybe you want a different approach. I don't think there's a right answer, but I think authenticity gets you a really, really long way, whoever your target demographic is. I am one of the things, so we talked a little bit there about the, your best times at Monzo, and I wasn't surprised to hear that it was when the company was small, because I've heard that before, but I understand the feeling um and your worst times um least enjoyable times least enjoyable uh i never liked fundraising we did that a lot i mean i and i had to i think monzo's raised something like 600 million and i probably did 400 of that um that was always tough uh and you only hear about the really quick round but you know the ad funding yeah and we hit a billion the round where we hit a billion valuation was

very very fast um and very competitive so it was easy but all the other rounds were real slog so fundraising was never fun we had a weird time with the press where they spent the first three or four years almost not idolizing us but certainly building us up you know the new kind of uh the the sort of next great hope almost um and we could almost do nothing wrong which is not healthy and then we got big enough and it flipped overnight and just everything we did was we'd get like vitriol for in a way that i i I mean, I can understand it because it drives readership, right? And it's, there was a point in time where the Telegraph would put Monzo in the headline at least every day. Even if it was a story about one of our competitors, it would be Monzo competitor, blah, doing, it's just like, why? And I eventually sort of called out the journalists on this and

took him for a beer and was like, look, come on, tell me what's going on. And he's like, look, every time I put your name in the headline, or rather he like look it's my subs who do it i i write the article they choose the headline um or my editor but every time they do that we just get way more subscribers so you know sorry um but it it was really the entire from the bbc to the telegraph to everyone it felt like a pile on in a way that didn't seem fair really and it's not to say that we never did anything wrong we absolutely did but even the good stuff we did got um got negative headlines um and i think that's a peculiarity of the british press in particular sort of building something up until it's like big enough to tear down and that was just so confusing um yeah that was tough at one point we had a bbc camera crew outside our office

um and this was when we we'd grown big enough we had um a small a small minority of people using monzo for financial crime basically money laundering for scams. And we'd have to freeze their account and we weren't allowed to tell them why we'd frozen their account. 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. So it's a really bad customer experience. But Watchdog were running a program about this you know monzo freezes accounts and they brought us a series of accounts that we'd frozen um over a series of sort of several weeks saying you know this is we've got you and we sort of brought the editor of the program and said look here is the here's the criminal background of the person whose account we've frozen are you really you're really going to run a program about about this it's like oh no no okay okay this happened 12 times and every every one of the

times we showed we the evidence and like okay you know and on the it was the 13th or 14th like that one's a 50 50 you know we've blocked the account we stand by it but we don't have cast iron proof like great we've got you so bbc camera crew turns up and they'd commissioned a block of ice an enormous ice sculpture with a frozen monzo card in the ice that they dumped outside our office and put a camera crew there for the day uh to see if they could find anyone walking past it of course you know to watch the thing melting which was like what's going on you know i was like i started this company to try and sort of build a better bank and somehow the bbc is camped outside my office trying to like i don't know i don't know what they're trying to do um drive drive viewership um but that was deeply annoying this whole press

thing is i've heard this a million times and it terrifies the shit out of me because you know joining dragon's den you join i was like oh my god amazing and then someone told me i think it might be one of the other dragons that's been there for nearly two decades said here's what's here's what here's what's going to happen yeah is they're going to build you up to a point where you're interesting enough to tear down again yeah and hearing you say the same thing terrifies the life out of me and it happens in every tech startups um facebook uh yeah i mean facebook's a great example of it but it happens to sports stars it happens to politicians it happens to you know singers yeah it 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 the good when they're writing good stuff that's that's overblown as well that's not real life the bad stuff's also not true so just i just ignore it all and did that have an impact on your mental health the worst parts of the press coverage it didn't help and i stopped reading it you know i genuinely stopped reading it and i'd have friends sort of come and say it you you know, on a Saturday or Sunday, they'd read the weekend papers. And it's like, are you all right?

It's like, I'm fine. I fucking hate that, don't you? What have I done? I hate that. That's the worst, because then you've got to justify to people you care about and make them not care. And I'm like, I'm fine.

What? And they're like, okay, just don't read the Times this weekend. It's like, yeah, never read the Times. That was annoying. But I don't know so yeah the um the press was not fun um investment's not fun regulation got really really tough by the end because we were a bank and ultimately if we fail the government has to step in and refund

everyone their money so the rules there were very very strict and because we got so big so early and weren't profitable that that got quite tough um and i'm going to go through a list of the bad things now the i will stop on the final one which was um just organizational politics when you get to we were almost 2 000 people and when you're 100 or 200 people you can know everyone and you can you develop a really close cultural 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 you know some teams are like we're saving the company from this other team over there and it's

you know it becomes um really not collaborative actually and you get uh especially with some sort of quite senior people start building their little fiefdoms um uh and you get this just weird politics and rivalries going on that i'd never worked in big company before it's like total it was totally uh 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 um and they bring it to a place like monzo and everyone's like what that's weird what's going on here um but it definitely changed um and that was having to deal with that was, was tricky. You talked about not being

profitable. I've heard you talk about, you know, that being one of the, um, probably in hindsight, one of the things you should have thought about more in the early days, which was like the commercial model or the business model of the bank. Is that fair? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Um, and we, we thought about it for sure. I think what we didn't do was make the hard decisions to turn the corner earlier. We thought about it and it was, this was not, it's not like we blindly ran into unprofitability.

We took a series of actions. We knew they were loss-making, but we did that in order to acquire users without paying. So basically we swapped marketing spend. We had no marketing spend. Instead we ran like operational losses. So we'd give away features to customers that would cost us money to get more customers

because it meant our marketing budget was zero. And we grew to five or six million people with, we probably spent less than 10 million on marketing total. That's an average cost per customer of 1 pound 50 great right so um but that that's that hides operational losses that's our real marketing budget was giving away things like html jewels for free for example and we just didn't take the hard decisions to turn some of those things off when we um we got to a certain size and it cost us way too much free cards

yeah it's expensive with that it's like the long tail it's you know it's the um the very small number of people who are ordering 20 or 30 cards a year most people they order zero to one it's fine but some people just lose their card every weekend and they get to struggle no problem i'll just order another one it'll be here tomorrow morning uh and that's just annoying and costly the other thing though um so we should have paid more attention to reducing costs and taking hard decision to drive revenues earlier uh we consciously didn't uh but part of it was avoiding those hard decisions the other half of it though is weird um i've thought about it a lot it's basically how you get um almost self-reinforcement from your investors so you run a business a certain way you get to a

certain scale and you present it to a set of investors uh 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 and the ones who think you're bonkers will not invest and they'll go to someone else. The problem is that becomes self-reinforcing because they like what you did before. So like, yeah, just do more of that. And it can become 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. And there's not really anyone being like, you know, you're running, you should really think about this other stuff.

And a really smart thing I've heard, which I didn't do, and I hope I will have the humility to do in future, is to sort of pick out the smartest investors you can, or smartest 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 didn't know what they're talking about. I'll just, the people who think I'm brilliant, I'll listen to them. Um, but that can become, I don't think you grow as much from that.

So really finding the doubters, even the, and not so much the haters, but the doubters certainly, and interrogating them about your business and really trying to think through how you can um solve those problems i think that would have helped us a lot hindsight's a wonderful thing yeah now you have those some of those answers in hindsight and what were what are those answers in hindsight that you wish you'd um you'd known sooner so one of them is obviously you know getting to a profitable business model sooner

making those decisions profitable business model um cutting costs driving revenue by taking hard decisions to sort of limit some of the free features and charges some of the things we gave for free i think we should have done that way way earlier um that's the biggest any cultural decisions i know there was a merging of the startup guys and the uh banking people which i guess that's necessary right yeah i'd struggle to get the banking license without that and you've seen you can see that at revolute you look at all their recent senior hires for the last year or two and it's big wigs from the big banks because they're trying to get a banking license so i think that's sort of inevitable um and you pay a cost for that you pay the price um customer service is always a one of big one of our uh investors who should name remain nameless um was a bit of contrarians

basically said the quality of your customer service is too high and it's costing you too much and it's going to be the you know it's going to be the weight around your neck for the next whatever 10 years until you can slash and i'm not sure if he was right or not actually um that's when i still debate i've noticed revolutes uh customer service has declined month almost month over month for the last two years 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 users,

they're struggling. But from when I joined Revolut, it was just amazing. And two years, almost three years on, it's just awful. Yeah. And I think Monzo, hopefully it's not awful but i think it was amazing at the start and i think it's now variable i think sometimes it's really really

great but sometimes you end up waiting a little too long sometimes it's a little too hard to talk to a customer service agent arguably i think i still think it's pretty good but in the early days it was spectacular it was the number one thing our customers talked about was the service by far you'd look on social media whatever it was just um and if we'd had the revenue to support that i think we could have continued it's not it's not very expensive it cost us about 12 or 13 pounds per customer per year to provide that and i think the benchmark everyone's aiming for is less than that clearly um and so the drive is always to automate more to put you know chatbots in to do whatever there comes a

point in your journey with monzo where you realize that you're no longer enjoying it or was what for me in my business it was kind of like a there wasn't a point there wasn't a day when i woke up it was kind of a compounding of several issues that slowly wore me down. Yes. Yes, it was that plus COVID. And then COVID was like the knockout punch. But yeah, it was four or five, four, five, six issues that meant for the last year or two, I wasn't having a good time really. And I talked to my board about it. 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. We've got some great, great senior leaders in now. And I sort of wonder what would have happened if we could have got those people in a year or two earlier. Possibly we wouldn't have paid them enough, they wouldn't have joined. I did talk to them about this.

A TS, our new CEO, was like, if you'd have come five years ago, I would have joined five years ago. I was like, ah, go back in time. But yeah, it was four, five, six issues and then COVID. And that was just, I mean, for so many people in the world,

that was horrific. For us, our revenue declined at least 50% within about a week or so. The cost base was the same. Revenue goes down 50%. We were already loss making. So now it's sort of, we had a hundred million pound funding round lined up

to close on the Monday. And on Friday before London went into lockdown and all the term sheets got pulled. So again, retrospect, hindsight is 2020. Everything has bounced back. In the in the investment market private investment and public investments are stronger than it was pre-covid 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 um and you know six nine twelve months later everything's bounced back even harder i just

don't understand it um but anyway covid was definitely the straw that broke the camel's back um and about six weeks into that six to eight weeks i'm just like i'm i'm working seven days a week i'm not sleeping here this is just you know i need sort of throw the towel in almost you know i need to i need to be subbed out had you been thinking about that conversation for some time before you got to the point where you you approached the board with decisiveness that this is me done i'm not even thinking about i've been talking to them about it for a year or two yeah not the whole board but yeah to select members our chairman and our one of our lead investors absolutely we'd we'd had multiple conversations about me not enjoying the role

as it was then configured and the answer was like okay let's reconfigure a role. Let's bring people around you. Let's, because, because we were growing so quickly, um, 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 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, OK, well, we'll fill these roles, we'll fill these roles. But by the time you fill that role, this other role over there, the person who was doing really well at 200, you're now 2000 people and the person's burnt out or, you know, not doing well and you have to replace them. And so it was like whack-a-mole. 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? No, absolutely not. It was always like, oh yeah, we'll just hire, you know, we'll hire the person and it will be fine. Or I'll just stick it out for another couple of years and it'll all be fine. And eventually it's like, no, I've got a couple of weeks.

Yeah. I think a lot of them did a huge amount i mean eileen the the one of our investors from passion personally put in so much time to support the company and support me and i'm really really grateful for that um but ultimately um yeah we just didn't hire great senior people fast enough that if i can find one root cause it was that do you think if you'd gone to the board with more urgency and decisiveness yourself that you would have been taken more seriously if you said listen i'm gonna go next week if these issues aren't fixed because i i'm asking these asking these questions, but for same reasons as I said before,

I went through the same thing where I approached the board and said, I've got some problems here. These are the issues. Can we fix them? And it was probably a little bit of lip service. Yeah. Until the day that I resigned. I don't know.

I think a lot of people put a lot of effort into fixing it. Ultimately it was like on me to fix. No one else is going to come in and hire a really top senior team for me so that's sort of my job um so i don't know i also i do wonder whether you really could have got those great senior people in at a earlier stage the analogy is sort of like a football team 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 and you want to hire someone for the third division but everyone's like oh go and hire ronaldo it's like ronaldo is not coming to play for a third division team you know so it's a

constant process of upgrade like gradually upgrading until you get into premiership um and even then you know you're you're charlton athletic or something um uh so i just think it's tough i don't i don't think there's a magic bullet actually. You said you weren't sleeping, working seven days a week. Talk me through those moments when you, when things were. Uh, have you experienced that? I've, oh, definitely experienced, um, 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.

And why have I got a cold? I never get a cold. And then, oh, of course, because there's no fucking money in the bank or something. Yeah. Similar things. We talked about a little earlier, sort of that depletion of emotional energy

so that you have a, you know, there's a sort of a problem there that you need to take a decision about. Maybe it's like one of your senior teams not working out 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.

Actually, like you re-energize quite quickly and able to take those decisions. But while there's just too many things sort of resting on your shoulders, it piles up and piles up and piles up. And so for me, yeah, it was waking up at sort of four or five in the morning often with um 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 morning you can whatever you write it down you come back to the next day go 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 for yourself um 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 um 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 go to the gym're blah blah blah blah so you can either get into i think really good reinforcing cycles or very destructive kind of negatively reinforcing cycles because you knew your mind was going to do that when you fell asleep 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. Did that make that process just before you fall asleep quite unpleasant? Yes. And sort of going to sleep almost inevitably knowing you're going to wake up at 4am is quite annoying to say but sometimes when i did sleep a sort of full night i'd wake up at seven eight nine a.m whatever and for about three or four seconds i'd forgotten what my life was like i'd forgotten what i was doing what my job was all the pressures and I was like I was calm and I was sort of you know not stressed not anxious and then three or four seconds later all the memories came back it was just like this crushing weight that that feeling was just terrible and that really was the moment I just sort of knew this is this is no life you

know I want the 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 like there would there were no other emotions in my life really apart from just anxiety that was a 10 out of 10 and every other emotion felt like it's a the volume had been switched down to 1 out of 10 because anxiety was just 10 out of 10 and that was no fun how long did that last a year and a half two years maybe fucking hell god i can imagine two years not fun and i split up with my girlfriend as a result of it it's like mate you know my life's shit what can i do about it let's like one by one try and change things um and rather than changing the job first i changed a girlfriend first um and that was really tough um i left monzo and within about a week or so i was sleeping perfectly through the night and it really just all went away

yeah and now i you know i am uh i hesitate that what to use the word happy but yeah i happy like content calm relaxed like i find things to do with my day that i find you know that i enjoy and and suddenly like the small those like emotions that were one out of ten when they're not being crushed by a 10 out of 10 anxiety like sort of of start to bloom back, which is cool, which I like. It's just life. Yeah. Yeah. This is how normal people feel.

The girlfriend topic I find compelling because I, I've also struggled in that department forever. Yeah. How, how was it trying to hold it down a relationship whilst also this business just being this crushing force in your life terrible uh and i really um uh we we're um 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 um 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 just a cute quirk that's so irritating you know um and so we just ended up not enjoying spending time together, sadly. And I think she was doing a lot to try to, you know, make our lives together wonderful. And I was just a monster because my, primarily because my work was so shit, which I regret a lot. It's interesting. So when, what I noticed about myself is when i had a girlfriend at the height of my uh ceo bullshit um i would make her feel incredibly lonely even if i sat

next to her because i you know 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 um yeah do you do you think it's possible for a CEO that's in a high intensity situation to have a successful early stage relationship I mean I never managed but I believe it is possible. I've seen other people do it. And I think part of it is maturity and detachment, but not in a bad way. And I mean, detachment from your job, being able to compartmentalize.

So Paul, one of my co-founders, a little bit older, 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. As soon as his head hit the pillow, he was asleep. He and his wife run a lovely alpaca farm in the north of England. And he was just really good at having sort of compartmentalizing his life. I think similarly with TS, the new CEO at Monzo, he's an older guy.

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. And I could never do that. 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. So towards the end, there was a little bit more detachment 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. And I think that's actually really healthy to realize that your entire person is not

intrinsically linked to this company and you can leave and the company will continue and maybe the company fails and you'll still survive and that's sort of um by the way i think ones are doing incredibly well it's not going to fail um but just that emotional realization that you're not like the same being as your company uh would have been helpful earlier on i heard you had a red phone in your bedroom or something is that true yes why was it red um it was more like a sort of um childish pink color actually right the red phone is probably a dramatization i think i did describe as a red phone it was a pink it was an old nokia um uh and why because so the reason why um is first of all because to help sleep i didn't keep my own mobile in my bedroom so i turned it off and i had it charging

out the hallway which i think is i encourage everyone to i think it's great because you know 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 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 um that is a great step unfortunately when there are really significant problems at three or four in the morning and it doesn't happen often but you know it happened occasionally you need to be able to wake the senior management team up and the CEO up to make the hard calls um and so that phone was like the bat phone you know if something went wrong that would be the only one

in my room the only no one had the number it was linked to our automatic alerting system so if at monzo if something went wrong you sort of click a button it would escalate and if it got escalated far enough the ceo gets woken up but only that system had the phone number of this phone. And so if it rang, it was because the bank was down. And that happened a handful of times. Not every week, but every two or three months sometimes. What an awful phone call. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it wasn't a person. It was a robot saying, like, there's an incident. You are required to blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, ugh. Yeah, it's a robot saying like, wake up, there's an incident, you're required to blah, blah, blah. It's like, ugh. Yeah, it's horrible. I can see by your hand gesture then how it felt. Yeah, your heart drops and you know it's going to be the rest of your week,

if not your month, it's going to be ruined. And you don't know if this is like the one that's going to kill the company. We had a few like that. It's like, you know, and I think a lot of founders have like those moments like, oh shit, is this it? Is this the moment the company dies?

And there's often not a lot you can do actually as a, you know, your engineers running around and trying to fix a problem and you getting stuck in is not going to help, help things. So you're sort of almost like a helpless sideline observer. You know, you have to make the phone call to the board and to the investors and sometimes to the regulators at four in the morning. But yeah, you're in a pretty helpless situation. Yes, there was a red phone.

It was more like a pink Nokia. But it sounds better if you... It sounds more dramatic. Yeah, it sounds way more dramatic. In the movie, it'll definitely be a red phone. Yeah. It'll be in like a box with like maybe a code on it.

I find that what you just said, they're really interesting there's because i've been through that those key moments where you're not sure if your company's going to survive yeah and it feels like the answer or the the determinant factor is actually outside of your control yeah so it's someone else's decision whether your company survives yeah did you have many moments like that where it felt like it was someone else's decision if your company was going to survive an investor or yeah and not loads but a handful so early investment rounds um it was binary if we don't raise the money we we're folding the later rounds are more like the money's going to come in at some valuation um uh or some early outages we had a really very bad we were still a prepaid card at the time and one of our suppliers which connected us to the mastercard network went down it 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 and so you know we had about 300 000 cards at the time sort of like this could be two months like all the cards could not work for two months now or rather it would take us two months to rebuild this thing um and that yeah we're just sitting there thinking this is we pick it's our fault in the sense that we picked the supplier but beyond that like they just fucked up right then you know it it was it was totally ridiculous what had happened in retrospect but um yeah that was a real like we can't do anything we literally you know 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 even going to come back 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 culture around sort of work-life balance at monzo um you know mostly i was working five days a week unless we were fundraising i guess and i traveled probably a week every month mostly for fundraising um but i had a really close group of friends mostly from uh you know growing up mostly from my secondary school actually actually. I lived with my girlfriend. We lived in a big house with friends. We cooked a lot.

I took up pottery. I exercised a fair amount. It was very, very normal. Really nothing extraordinary. But I wasn't working 100 hours a week for sure. I was doing 45, 50, 55 hours. Really not a... The time pressure was not the problem.

It was the mental, like, the mental it was the mental like the mental load the inability to switch off outside those hours and then boom pandemic yeah comes around term sheets get pulled yeah you're sat there you've already you know it's by the sounds of it you're already on the verge of well you already weren't happy with how things were going and then that's the i guess the straw that broke the camel's back for sure when you realized 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 was sadness one of them yeah definitely um i mean 80 was just like i can breathe again so it was overwhelmingly positive for me i and i'm not afraid to say

that. Um, and so I don't want to build it up and, you know, it's a sort of negative thing really, but there were 20% things like sadness that I was leaving a team that I really, really liked overwhelmingly, um, 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 yeah guilt I think was more than sadness were their tears shed um I cry quite a lot it's what I cried as well when i went through a range of emotions when 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 yeah so i was annoyed at first but then when i realized that i was actually going

to send the email yeah it was like gratitude yeah and some kind of like sad or happy tears yeah um i uh so i did an all-hands meet i announced it at a on a video call with like 1500 people or something and i definitely welled up at one or two points there um in a genuine way but um what i have learned over the last few years is that um 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 just fake tears but genuinely like showing your emotion and showing your vulnerability and showing your screw-ups is such a powerful way to inspire followership. And so I,

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 1500 people, but it wasn't the first time I like practically cried in front of the company. And it was, you know,

I'm not ashamed of that. And then the, the weightlifting. Yeah. Great. what a feeling when you no one can fucking email you and you know um it was great actually it wasn't it was great but then we were in the midst of a lockdown and i was my house was having building work done so i had to get out of my house with four housemates we went to a farmhouse in Devon which was idyllic but everyone else was working I had no job it was in the middle of nowhere it was pretty boring actually for uh quite a while I think if you know if London had been booming and I could kind of go out and meet people have fun it would have been a great experience

but actually that's some especially uh if remember sort of thinking back to april may of last year when everything was really hard sort of locked down still april may 2020 not a fun experience really i'm i think i am an extrovert um i thought i thought about this a lot i really i get energy from being around people and i was with four people who just working all working all the time in the middle of rural Devon. Yeah, not fun. 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.

Yeah. And waking up in the morning and thinking, what am I going to do today? What happens today? It's weird because my time was especially Monday to Friday was scheduled from sort of 9 9 a.m till about 7 or 8 p.m was scheduled down to the down to five minutes easily um and you'd look at my diary 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 uh which i i only kept up for about a month or two um but learning a language was on the list i bought some kite surfing gear and did a kite surfing which was amazing now um i'm training up to um a big offshore sailing race so you kind of a yacht race called fast net uh so that's in august i'm learning to fly so i have a list 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. So I'm busy again, but each of it is like, not inconsequential. I think the vaccination stuff

is a great thing to do, but if I wasn't there, there'll be someone else there, you know, doing the jabbing. So each one I could sort of walk away from pretty easily so it's a it's busy but it's low low pressure i guess yeah and it seems like you're focusing on things that give you like intrinsic joy yeah and learning i really like learning um and really anything so the process of going from a complete novice to someone you know mediocre uh i love and i'm angel investing that's a to keep a connection to the

tech community i'm i've made seven or eight investments in the first half of 2021 i'll probably make another seven or eight towards the end of the year and i'm helping out a few of or at least i'm going in to bother the founders, whether I'm helping or not, I don't know. Tom's here again. Yeah. Yeah. Which I like. It's a weird job.

It feels like a job where you have to pay to go to work, you know? But I like that a lot. Me and my co-founder went on, felt two very different things when we departed. We departed at the same time, pretty much and um he because he didn't have anything to do um upon departing i think he struggled quite significantly

you kind of lose the orientation in your life and you're right when your schedule 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 you see it within olympic athletes like michael phelps when he wins all the gold medals and then comes home they call it gold medal depression when you don't have that thing you're striving towards or for that meaningful goal life can seem to lose orientation a little bit your schedule now is it is it as busy now as it was when you were working no no i mean the dragon's den thing is as maybe i'd maybe brought it close because it's like 7 a.m and i get home at midnight yeah but um dragon's den aside no

and i've also i mean there's nothing there isn't huge stakes 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 whereas before it was huge stakes i had to get on the flight yeah or i had to be up at 4 a.m to you know so but but you know both you and me that there's still going to be that yearning to go back no do you think you'll ever go back to starting a company and being the CEO I don't know I have thought about this a lot and people have asked me uh and I don't know um the thought process goes something like, I love the early stage. So you get a few of your mates together, people you've always onto his third thing the third thing's flopped and like ah we all knew he was an idiot so like okay that's humiliating or it's a success and you grow and it becomes a 2 000 person company and you're like why have i done this to myself again i hate running 2 000 person companies um so the out i

like the journey bit but the outcome either end either end. Lose, lose. Yeah. Like it doesn't seem there's much upside. I mean, it's financially like very remunerative if you do well, but it doesn't make my life happier. 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. 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, probably incubating it for 12 months.

Actually like building the first version and doing the marketing. But once it's at 12 or 18 months, putting a full management team in and sort of letting it go. So you retain a minority equity stake, but really it's the the ceo and the management team that's that's owning and running it so you you're you're able to that first year but then

you're like hands off and then doing that every year for five or six years so you end up with a portfolio of i don't know six to ten companies so i thought about that a bit seems like a lot of hard work um i haven't done it yet but i might do that i think you'd probably end up getting sucked into the same problems. Yeah, I agree. Because I think the power law distribution of startup success means that if you are successful, one of the 10 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 either you think you should go in or someone else thinks you should go in and you're ultimately running a 2000 person company again. And that's the thing I'm trying to avoid. Because 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's a billionaire he's a multi-billionaire um and he says oh i'm not he when 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 that's what he always says i don't want to have to think about people's birthdays right so what he does is he comes he'll have a passion in his life say psychedelics yep 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 yep and he'll go off you go company but i still know that when shit hits the fan and they've got funding issues yeah because he is the the big name in the piece he'll be front and center of trying to solve those problems um i i he lives a much better life than i

think the ceo would yeah and i think that's fine like i wouldn't i'm not looking for a zero stress life um but i think yeah a lot of the people bullshit i don't like um the fun fundraising isn't fun but i i think i have done it enough now that i could do it again in a relatively stress-free way but at 2000 people it's not even remembering people's birthdays right 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 this you have to because it and i was thinking i was just thinking of one incident at christmas party because you said christmas party i'm not gonna me my co-founder stopped like we would go until 8pm and then leave because we'd be like this is not because it'd be too much alcohol

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 2000 just law of averages like there's you know one in a thousand people

is going to do something stupid so you have two of them now at 2000 people doing something stupid behave themselves 2000 just law of averages like there's you know one in a thousand people's gonna do something stupid so you have two of them now at 2000 people doing something stupid every every party it's like they're gonna get fired for i i know one incident well many incidents but i mean the crazy twists and turns of being the ceo and finding these things out and we had someone who had been on doing i think silk road on the dark web seven years ago got arrested they'd worked for me for three and a half years i thought they were a great guy yeah they got sent to jail for seven years oh my god nicest guy in the company and he'd done it when he was a student all kinds of things christmas parties someone's pushed someone into the toilet

and kissed them and these are the things that in fact you do have to make the call on yep even though it's such it seems like such a pathetic thing but that is sexual assault totally and and you can't allow an incident like that to be miss mishandled right because that is again that poses an existential risk against your company yeah if that were to break in the press so yeah i and you know and it's and it's the right thing to do but it should be the chief people officer handling that right like that that's sort of my that was my problem like there were periods of time when we didn't have a chief people officer so it just landed my desk and i'm fine dealing with a section of those but when you're dealing with like four or five people's jobs worth of that shit then it gets overwhelming so yeah i think always comes back you have a incredibly sort of successful, talented senior team

and the stress becomes less because each, you don't, as CEO, don't deal with that. Your chief people officer says, by the way, this happened and I've dealt with it. And you go, great. Oh, thank God. I love those people in business. They deal with it and then tell,

they come to you with it sometimes, but they tell you they've already dealt with it. No action required, Tom. It's already been solved. But just so you're aware, I love those people. And that's, but that's how a senior team should work, really. And at its best, it works like that.

It is magical. Death threats. Nice little transition there. I'd never got death threats as the CEO of Social Chain, but I hear that you 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 threatened to turn up with a bottle of acid and throw acid in someone's face. Yeah. And yeah. And, you know, there were sort of groups on social media who sort of try to find our addresses and sort of hand them around. Because, I mean, with six million customers, again, sort of probabilities, if one in a million is bad egg, you've got six bad eggs um 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 were like no shutting that down sorry sending it back and it got crazy like this was my big payoff i'm gonna come and fuck you up um and clearly there were times when we blocked accounts incorrectly if you're blocking tens of thousands of accounts you absolutely are going to get it wrong occasionally and it's sometimes it takes too long to get money back and we work really hard to get that time period really really

as quick as possible but still the law gets in the way you know you have to report it to the national crime agency you have to wait for them to get back to you and it can take four weeks and they just don't get back to you so it's like okay we'll give them the four weeks and then we'll refund you so there are rare cases where you're sitting on a legitimate customer's money for four weeks and they're going ballistic because they can't feed their kids or whatever but a lot of the time it's scammer who's like they would phone up and they would have a record of a baby playing in the background so you know you know, I can't, I can't see my baby. Yeah. Yeah.

So yes, it was never the professional criminals because they just treat it as a cost of doing business. And by the way, there are a ton of those. And we, and we caught way more than our fair share. We were using a lot of basic machine learning to track sort of weird patterns and shutting their accounts down.

We work very, very closely with the, with law enforcement to, to shut a bunch of these things down. We work very, very closely with law enforcement to shut a bunch of these things down. Some of them were like wild. There was a big ring a couple of years, no, probably three or four years ago now, where if you get 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 you'd pump your fuel and then it would try and then it would calculate how much fuel you'd actually spend and then then take the payment so people get a monzo card put one p on it swipe it and then go with a modified ford transit so it's not like a 80 quid of petrol the whole thing was a fuel tanker so they'd put 10 grand of petrol into their ford transit and then just drive off 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 at hauliers uh farmers whatever um but they're basically scamming um all of these petrol stations uh so we spotted that pretty quickly um and shut

that down which i'm really really, really proud of. There were several people trafficking rings where they would bring in women from often East, like East, Eastern Europe and then traffic them for sex, basically. And you'd spot patterns of behavior, like patterns of spend, which suggests basically someone is being driven around in a in an uber or a taxi to um to be pimped out um and we'd spot that and work with law enforcement to actually like um go and rescue people which is amazing like that's an amazing amazing feeling um but and those were mostly the pros who like meh 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.

Sounds like a lot to think about, Tom. Yeah. There's all of this hidden stuff. You know, you think of Monzo and it's like the hot card and some great branding. I thought it was just a nice colored card. Oh my God.

I mean, it was serious by the end. Running a bank is serious. We were processing, I don't know, a hundred billion pounds a year or something of payments. Like this is a lot of money. It's people's salaries. And six million customers, you see their whole life.

You see the great stuff and you see the terrible stuff. Were you ever scared or threatened personally did you ever feel threatened personally in terms of your personal security was there ever where you thought you know actually i do feel about unsafe here um i had security 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 a i was in danger and that was a bit unsettling and there were times when especially when we had customers saying i'm 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 i'm going to throw it in someone's face so that as you left as you left the office there bit of, you know, a little apprehension there, certainly.

But no, in general, no, it wasn't something I live with every single day, 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. But now you're enjoying the small things in life. Yeah, maybe I should go back to therapy now and maybe it can make it even better. What enjoying the small things in life yeah maybe i should go back to therapy now and like maybe it can make it even better yeah there's small things in life that you're

enjoying what are they yeah walking in the park i heard so uh my housemate's got a dog recently that's quite fun um uh a lot of my friends have just had children so not me but you know i um i'm godfather to a couple of young kids my brother has a young girl now um a disproportionate amount of kids you're you're getting the same as me i am the godfather to all of my friends kids now it's uh i'm not sure i have any friends left really who are not either parents or trying to become parents really you know i'm 35 uh 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. I kite surf. A lot of active outdoorsy stuff. I'm growing plants on my roof. My courgettes have just come out, which is, yeah, they're great. What about your relationships are you single taken

dating dating i am dating uh i've always been um intrigued by dating apps i worked at one um i've written about 20 of a book on one well but over like the last 12 years it's not going to get finished right um so i've been intrigued by that sort of whole scene for a while um yeah and i'm dating and sort of having fun but i'm not um 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 as i really enjoy meeting new people, but after six months or a year or something, I'm sort of like, I don't know what it is.

That's sort of like deciding to commit to each other and spend the rest of your life together. I really admire people who are able to do that because I have not yet been able to do that. Have you managed to analyse where you think that might come from? Like inability to be content. This is what i should go and talk to a therapist about no because i'm asking for myself i'm just wondering if you figured it out i like novelty i really like new things new experiences and i get bored quite easily um i don't know. Yeah, probably. I think combining psychedelics and therapy

to solve this problem might be my next challenge. Have you ever done psychedelics? I haven't. Neither have I. I would love to. I really would love to. I wish I could say I had. I'm trying to,

but it's just finding the right place and time, I think. So we look forward at the future of your life. I guess a lot of question marks. You're not really sure which direction you're going. Because I think you kind of answered forward at the future of your life. I guess a lot of question marks. You're not really sure which direction you're going. Because I think you kind of answered yourself at the start about your purpose in life now. Yeah. What your purpose is.

I don't have one, and I'm totally fine with that. Yeah. I think, looking forward to sort of when I'm 60, 65, I think I would like a family around, but I'm not sure I'm willing to make the sacrifices to put in the hard work to actually make that happen. You know what I mean? What are those sacrifices?

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 in, 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 and 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 make the sacrifices today to have that. That's sort of something I'm puzzling around in my head. 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 over my life at the moment. So for me, that's enough. What do you think about, I was meaning to ask, I'm giving a little bit back without taking my life at the moment so for me that's

enough what do you think about I was meaning to ask I'm glad I remembered what do you think about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies generally terrifying um I don't understand it I invested a little bit uh it went up a lot I thought I was the smartest person in the world. It came down again. I sold before I lost any money, really. It was too stressful. So there's a kind of two questions there, which like, is crypto, 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? Long-term, I don't know. I'm not, I can see how it's interesting, but I think it's at the moment massively overhyped. And I haven't really seen any cool applications in reality yet that solve a real human problem that may change in future. And then, you know, the former bit, like the crazy speculation, I was checking the price ethereum every 15 minutes or something it was that that's just not healthy uh so i got out and i'm again sleeping much better now that i've liquidated my crypto positions um yeah what about you are you a believer i 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 um 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. 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 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 and so take between five and ten percent of your like net net assets put it in crypto and really leave it for 10 years yes 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 if it goes to zero you've still got the other 90 95 percent to sustain you and i'm well diversified across various different sort of asset classes so if i

genuinely lost all of my ethereum holdings i don't think i'd lose a night's sleep do you know what i mean so 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 anyone off the table at all and the price went down it was like oh i was going up and down with you know with the price so again it comes back to that video game mindset and i think the detachment point um you know when i started this podcast tom i think the detachment point um you know when i started this podcast tom i i did it for very much you know when i read your story i thought fuck this is exactly why i started this podcast because it's literally called the diary of a ceo and what i was trying to achieve there was to give a give people a more honest view about what it

takes to be a ceo um and because i didn necessarily, I think that it's been kind of, you know, rockstar, like a jet ski, you know, whatever, millionaires, loads of money, private jet. Whereas there's a real, as you've explained, cost, which people don't appreciate of being a CEO. And so when I, 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. What is the upside of being a CEO? I mean, I think it is amazing. And I don't want to sit here and kind of complain about my life. I think for smart, ambitious, talented people, it can be incredibly remunerative.

I mean, I'm financially independent now, as are you, right? And I think you can create a lot of value, but also capture some of that value personally and make money. That's true. You can choose the people you work with, which I think is really, 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 being a, having 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 amazing. And so I don't regret it at all. 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.

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. I'd try to, I'm not sure it would change the outcome. 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. It's not for everyone, for sure. But I think if you're ambitious and confident and want to create something, it's unparalleled. And the sort of the foundation of all of this the most important thing i guess is to make sure that you're happy yeah and that i never thought about that i mean that wasn't part of my upbringing that was always secondary yeah it was always like achieving or accomplishing a

goal or winning and and the thing that i think i, I don't know about anyone else, any other founders, but I never paid enough attention to whether I was happy, which I think was a mistake. And I'm now quite consciously doing that. Yeah, I think that's probably the downside. 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 i 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 like 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 I don't want to dwell the point because I don't want to sound like your therapist and we're almost done here but it really made me curious though what you're saying about your family and were your parents particularly goal orientated yes they were very hard on you or um ambitious for us certainly particularly my dad um and i i'm a huge admirer of what he started business young ish 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.

And so I always, from a very young age, thought that sort of starting businesses was, I never thought about starting business, actually, I thought about running businesses. So I had a privileged upbringing and 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. And even when I was top of the class, they'd sort of push me you know push me to be the top of the class and even when i was top of the class they'd sort of push me further and i'd sort of say like come on well you know i i did well in my exams to point was like there there is no more i can do in these things like i've got all the top marks um but they sort of didn't believe me like no no you must be hiding something where's the so there was always like um i think my dad told me when i was 10 i should go to oxford and study law because it's the hardest course in the world so i went to oxford and study

law uh which i'm not sure is super healthy actually uh so yeah they're driven very very driven and sort of um because they you know i think their parents as well pushed them and um my dad always likes to claim he came from like this really working class upbringing up in Rochdale in Manchester. And it's just like, he's had a Mercedes, like, come on. And then, you know, with almost the same breath, he's like, yeah, my mum had horses. It's like, what the fuck are you talking about?

This sort of working class upbringing. Yeah, but they always worked hard. They moved to Asia very young to make a better life for themselves and they they did work hard and they provided us kids with great opportunities um and i think now later in life all of us have sort of realized that um 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 um sort of achievement and um and money have you got to the crux of what makes you happy

the foundational things um two or three things i know definitely make me learning um new skills whatever i really, really love that. And sort of like, my ex was really into, not really, that's unfair. She, 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 I see that in myself. Like I love to cook for people. I love to get friends together. I to you know cook a meal make cocktails whatever it is sort of like get a house in the countryside invite all my best friends that i i really like being together with groups of people that are careful so learning new stuff being together with friends and kind of creating like cooking whatever whatever it is so those things

and i in time raising kids maybe we will see um that's more of an aspiration than a i don't know well listen tom thank you so much for um coming and doing this today i think what the thing that um you you probably know but you might not fully realize um that i think is so incredibly powerful is your willingness to be vulnerable and honest and i just wish there were more entrepreneurs at all stages in their journey that were willing to be that vulnerable because of how um how much of a how much of um reality is so much more comforting than the, like this kind of, um, phony, um, untouchable narrative you get from a lot of entrepreneurs. Reality is such much more of a comforting place to be because I can relate to that. And that gives peace to my own struggles

and hardships. And those are an unavoidable part of the human experience. And I think entrepreneurs like yourself that have been tremendously successful have disrupted an industry and achieve so much you're also willing to be vulnerable um are of a very special breed and we need more of those people so thank you so much and i appreciate your time today thank you it's been a lot of fun thank you Thank you.