YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Blomfield

lines on the record: 141
first: 2021-06-28
most recent: 2021-06-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. And it wasn't a person, it was a robot saying, like, An incident you are required to blah blah blah. It's like, ugh. It's horrible because you get it by your hand.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so if it rang, it was because the bank was down. And that happened a handful of times, not, you know, not every week, but every two or three months sometimes.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 it happened occasionally, you need to be able to wake the senior management team up and the CEO up to make the hard calls. And so that phone was like the bat phone. If something went wrong, that would be the only one in my room. No one had the number it was linked to our automatic alerting system. So at Monsworth, 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.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was more like a sort of childish pink color, actually. The red phone is probably a dramatization. I think I did describe it as a red phone. It was a pink, it was an old Nokia. And why? So the reason why is first of all because to help sleep I didn't keep my own mobile in my bedroom. So I turned it off and had it charging out the hallway, which I think is, I encourage everyone to do. I think it's great because the first thing I used to do when I wake up and sometimes I do it still is like you grab the phone and starts and that's just not healthy.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could never switch off the nagging feeling about the work. So Towards the end, there was a little bit more detachment in 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 by the way, I think Monzo's doing incredibly well and it's not going to fail. But just that emotional realization that you're not like the same being as your company would have been helpful earlier on.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I never managed, but I believe it is possible. I've seen other people do it. And then 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 it 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 Monso, 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,”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Terrible And I really We're good friends still, but she was a lovely, kind, considerate person, and I was just not a nice person to be around a lot of the time, just like really. Short tempered, like inconsiderate and like intolerant, basically intolerant. There's something that was like tiny, tiny thing that a normal person would just be like, that's just a cute quirk. I just thought that's so irritating, you know. And so 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. And I was just a monster because my primarily because my work was so shit, which I regret a lot.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not fun in it. I split up with my girlfriend as a result of it. It's like, you know, my life's shit. What can I do about it? Let's like one by one try and change things. And rather than changing the job first, I changed the girlfriend first. And that was really tough I left Monzo, and within about a week or so I was sleeping perfectly through the night. I mean, really, it just all went away. Yeah. And now, you know, I am. I hesitate to use the word happy, but yeah, I'm happy, like content, calm, relaxed. Like, I find things to do with my day that I find, you know, that I enjoy. And suddenly those like emotions that were one out of 10 when they're not being crushed by a 10 out of 10 anxiety sort of start to bloom back, which is cool, which I like. This is how normal people feel.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And sort of going to sleep almost inevitably knowing you're going to wake up at 4 a.m. is quite annoying, to say the least. The A very depressing thing to say Sometimes when I did sleep a sort of full night, I'd wake up at 7, 8, 9 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. And it was just like this crushing weight. That feeling was just terrible. And that really was the moment I was sort of knew this is no life. You know, I want the life three seconds ago where I can wake up and not be worried and not be stressed and not feel like just anxious the whole time. 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, the volume had been switched down to 1 out of 10 because anxiety was just 10 out of 10. And that was no fun.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And because we make worse decisions, you end up creating more problems for yourself. And the solution is easy to say and hard to do, which is exercise more and stay off alcohol and get to bed early and don't have your phone in your bedroom and like turn off your computer at the weekends. All this sort of stuff you know you should do. But when each one gives way, the next one's harder. 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, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you can either get into, I think, really good reinforcing cycles or very destructive kind of negatively reinforcing cycles.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The realization was sort of when the round closes, when the money's in the bank and that wait lifts, you then look at all the other problems and they're very, very easy. Actually, 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 withten with problems in the cold light of day are relatively easy to solve, but the conscious part of your mind gets turned off when you're sleeping. It's a sort of subconscious irrational part that blows the thing into an unsolvable problem. And the next morning, you can, whatever, you write it down, you come back to it in the next day and go, that's ridiculous. Why am I even worrying about that? So it's not a rational thing. It's much more of an emotional, or at least for me, emotional response, but because you're tired, you make worse decisions.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Similar things. We talked about a little earlier, sort of that depletion of emotional energies so that you know there's a sort of a problem there. You need to take a decision about maybe it's like one of your senior teams not working out. 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 fund funding round. So just let me focus on that.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I don't know. I also do wonder whether you really could have got those great senior people in at an 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. So it's a constant process of gradually upgrading until you get into premiership. And even then, you know, your child's an athletic or something. So I just think it's tough. I don't think there's a magic bullet, actually.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I think a lot of people put a lot of effort into fixing. It ultimately 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.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, absolutely not. It was always like. Oh, yeah, we'll just hire the person, it'll be fine. Or, oh, 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. Huge amount. I mean, Eileen, one of our investors from Passion personally put in so much time to support the company and to support me. And I'm really, really grateful for that. But ultimately, yeah, we just didn't hire great senior people fast enough. If I can find one root cause, it was that.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that was the biggest contributing factor. But those are conversations I very regularly had with board members and investors.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 grow so quickly and the way that senior hiring works, by the time you realize you've got a gap, it's 12 to 18 months before you can actually fill that gap. And Muggins here ends up doing, to be fair, all of my senior team were doing more than one job trying to fill the gaps. That was the biggest problem for me that we didn't have the right senior leadership in place. So I was working several jobs. And so the conversation was always, okay, well, we'll fill these roles, we'll fill these roles. But by the time you filled that role, this other role over there, the person who's doing really well at 200, you're now 2,000 people and the person's burnt out or, you know, not doing well, and you have to replace them. And so it was like whack-a-mole.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be done. I'm not even thinking about it. I've been talking to them about it for a year or two. Yeah. Not the whole board, but yeah, our chairman and one of our lead investors absolutely we'd had multiple conversations about.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything has bounced back, even like 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 a shock, in a crisis, destroy a ton of value for themselves. And six, nine, 12 months later, everything's bounced back even harder. I just don't understand it. But anyway, COVID was definitely the straw that broke the camels back. And about six weeks into that six to eight weeks, I was just like, I'm working seven days a week. I'm not sleeping here. This is just... I need to sort of throw the towel in almost, you know, I need to, I need to be subbed out.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 lost making. So now it's sort of, we had $100 million funding. And on Friday before London went to lockdown and all the term sheets got pulled. So again, retrospect, hindsight is 2020”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But yeah, it was four or five, four or five, six issues that meant 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 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 on you CEO is like, if you'd have come five years ago, I would have joined five years ago. I was like, ah”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think Monday, 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 or whatever. It was just, and if we'd had the revenue to support that, I think we could have continued. It's not very expensive. It cost us about $12 or £13 per customer per year to provide that. And I think the benchmark that everyone's aiming for is less than that, clearly. And so the drive was always to automate more, to put chat bots in to do it or whatever.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Struggled to get the banking license without that. And you can see that at Revolute. You look at all their recent senior highs over 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. And you pay a cost for that. You pay the price. Customer service is always one of our investors who shall remain nameless was a bit of contrarians, basically said the quality of your customer service is too high. It's costing you too much, and it's going to be the weight around your neck for the next 10 years until you can slash it. And I'm not sure if he was right or not, actually. That's one I still debate.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Profitably model cutting cost, 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. That's the biggest.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And ask them why you think your business will fail. Then really try to think deeply about that rather than, I think the natural tendency is like, ah, you know, whatever, they don't know what they're talking about. The people who think I'm brilliant, I'll listen to them. But that can become, I don't think you grow as much from that. So really finding the doubters, even the, I'm not so much the haters, but the doubters certainly and interrogating them about your business and really trying to think through how you can solve those problems. I think that would have helped us a lot.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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, the smartest advisors or other founders.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That it's like the long tail, it's you know, it's 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 shrug out. No problem. I'll just order another one. It'll be here tomorrow morning. And that's just annoying and costly. The other thing, though. So we should have paid more attention to reducing costs and taking a hard decision to drive revenues earlier. We consciously didn't, but part of it was avoiding those hard decisions. The other half of it, though, is weird. I've thought about it a lot. It's basically how you get”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that hides your operational losses. That's our real marketing budget was giving away things like ATM withdrawals for free, for example. And we just didn't take the hard decisions to turn some of those things off when we got to a certain size. And it cost us way too much”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, yeah. And we thought about it for sure Think what we didn't do was make the hard decisions to turn the corner earlier. We thought about it and 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, but instead we ran 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 Probably spent less than 10 million on marketing total. That's an average cost per customer of £1.50.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is going on that I'd never worked in a big company for was like total 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... Toxic culture, frankly. And they bring it to a place like Monzo, and everyone's like, it's weird, what's going on here? But it Having to deal with that was tricky.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the rules there were very, very strict. And because we got so big so early and weren't profitable, that got quite tough. And I'm going to go through a list of the bad things now. I will stop on the final one, which was just organizational politics. When you get to, we were almost 2,000 people. And when you were 100 or 200 people, you can know everyone and you can, you develop a really close culture, a really sense of team spirit. You know everyone. You can know everyone's names. You get to 2,000 people and you don't. You get subcultures. So teams develop their own sort of internal narrative as to why they exist and what they're for. And some teams are like, we're saving the company from this other team over there. And it's, you know, becomes really not collaborative actually. And you get, especially with some sort of quite senior people, start building their little fifthoms. And you get this just weird politics and rivalry.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, fine. Okay, just don't read the times this weekend. Never read the Times. That was annoying. But I don't know. So yeah, the press was not fun. 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.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It didn't help, and I stopped reading it. I genuinely stopped reading it, and I'd have friends sort of come and say it, you know, on a Saturday or Sunday. They'd read the weekend papers and it's like, are you all right? I was like, I'm fine.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because when they're writing good stuff, that's overblown as well. That's not real life. The bad stuff's also not true. So just, I just ignore it all.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happens in every tech startups. Yeah, I mean, Facebook's a great example of it, but it happens to sports tires, it happens to politicians, it happens to singers. Yeah, yeah.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was the 13th or 14th. That one's a 50 50. We've blocked the account, we stand by it, but we don't have cast iron improvement. 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. They dumped outside our office and put a camera crew there for the day to see if they could find anyone walking past it or to watch the thing melting, which was like what's going on. 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”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Enough, we had a small minority of people using Monzo for financial crime, basically for money laundering, for scams, and we'd have to freeze their account and we weren't allowed to tell them why we'd froze 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 a person. So it's a really bad customer experience. But watchdog were running a program about this. Monso freezes accounts. And they brought us a series of accounts that we'd frozen over a series of several weeks saying, you know, this is, we've got, and we sort of brought the editor of the program in and said, look, here is the criminal background of the person whose account we've frozen. You're really going to run a program about this. It's like, oh, no, no, no, okay, okay, okay. It's happened 12 times. And every one of the times we showed the evidence and like, okay, you know,”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's like, look, come on, tell me what's going on. He's like, Look, every time I put your name in the headline, or rather, he's like, look, it's my subs who do it. I write the article, they choose the headline or my editor. But every time they do that, we just get way more subscribers. So, you know, sorry. But 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 not to say that we never did anything wrong. We absolutely did. But even the good stuff we did got negative headlines. And I think that's a peculiarity of the British press in particular, sort of building something up until it's big enough to tear down. And that was just so confusing. Yeah, that was tough. At one point, we had a BBC camera crew outside our office. And this was when we'd grown big.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we hit a billion, the round where we hit a billion in valuation was very, very fast and very competitive. So it was easy. But all the other rounds are real slogs. 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 the sort of next great hope almost. 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 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 just like, why? And I eventually sort of called out the journalists on this and sort of took him for a”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Least enjoyable. I never liked fundraising. We did that a lot, and I had to, I think Monza's raised something like $600 million, and I probably did 400 of that. That was always tough. And you only hear about the really quick round, the.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it depends what you want to achieve. If you are a family office or if you're managing the wealth of 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.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“None of Tristan had never worked in marketing before. His previous job was at a refugee camp in the Middle East. I'd never really worked in marketing. I'd spent nine months at a dating site. But 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.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was just an authentic representation of, I think, who we were and what we believed more than anything. And we did want to be different from the big banks. We intentionally positioned ourselves as a part. So the hot roll card, every other bank was blue or purple or kind of a shade of black, basically. So like, how far from that can we get? And the big banks were very impersonal. You never felt like you were talking to a human. And so everything we did was human and transparent. We shared a lot of internal information. We published our product roadmap. This is what we're going to be working on for the next two years, which people thought was bonkers. But that was a way of building trust and humanity in opposition to these big sort of faceless banks.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Authenticity, I think. It was We had a couple of early marketing hires who didn't work out, and they were very senior people from very, very big companies who came in, and they were a lot older and came in a sort of like, you know, how the kid's going to think about this. And we were like, 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, ahead of design, worked on it a lot. And it was...”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, it was working with a small team to build the brand, build the product, get it into users' hands really quickly, and then see them enjoy it. I've talked about this a lot before, that feeling of standing in line at a coffee shop and seeing the person at the counter paying with the hot roll monzo card, and then having the bartender or the service say, 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 creating something that's that people are enjoying so much.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the day I worked at the dating site that really opened my eyes to the kind of power of human psychology and brand and mission and values. And we really took a lot of that into Monso. And it was just astonishing. So we started out even before we had a product talking a lot about our mission and some of our values like transparency and kind of community orientation. And that worked so incredibly well.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Small team, so sub 100. Being able to Go from a kind of an idea or a customer insight or something like a conversation with 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 and then tell all their friends about it. That very quick iterative product development cycle I love. And a lot of the brand and marketing stuff I When I was at GoCardus, I didn't believe in brand, which is a ridiculous thing to say. As a marketing background, that's almost offensive, I guess. But I was like, no, this doesn't exist, really. People...”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just, yeah, why can't I just come in and fix it for? It's incredibly, you know, I've struggled with a company of 2,000 people, the NHS employees, I think a million and a half people or something. 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 in my naive eyes and that feeling that I feel like”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's that sort of, I guess, disruptive kind of, I see something that's not working and it's incredibly frustrating. And I go, I could, I could make that work better. Reluctant, I've talked about this before. I'm working, I'm volunteering in the vaccination program, and it sounds like a sort of, I'm proud of doing it, and it's like a great feeling kind of being part of a team that's hopefully helping kind of the country get out of this lockdown rubbish. But even there, there are so many things that just drive me absolutely nuts. And I think that's probably the 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 give me, you know.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My local MP passed away a few months ago, and there was a by-election. I was like, why did 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? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I think I could start a company. And then, you know, what if it goes well? And then I end up running a big company again and that would be awful. So, yeah, just like a couple of sort of those brain cycles. No, what am I thinking? 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 do I want to go and make myself miserable again?”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT