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, I guess, like, you know, like you, I left my company. I didn't. And that was really, really hard. And that was not a... That was deep, deep anxiety at bordering on depression. And I wouldn't use the words rock bottom, but it was not a happy time. And so then recovering from that, and I took a year off and, you know, traveled around Europe, went kite surfing and learned a language and all this kind of clich ⁇ s. And that experience now leads me whenever I still get these urges.”
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'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 pause to enjoy the journey or the, you know, the cliche, the small things in life that, you know, 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 living in the moment.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I have attained it I don't mean any of the world's big success. That's not what I mean. I mean that I've tasted. What that feels like, mixing my metaphors there. I felt what that feels, you know, I've experienced that thing, that sort of like being in the newspapers and that sort of people using a monzo card and that stuff. And it's Somewhat rewarding, but it's not like, 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. 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.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a bit, but Gokardus Circa 2014 was still relatively unknown. It was doing well, but it wasn't a breakout success yet in the way it is today, I don't think.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People who've grown up with that technology, it's sort of normal now, but I downloaded Napster for the first time. I remember showing my dad and my uncle, think of any song you want in the world. Yeah, type it in and then it starts playing. And that's magical. But now it's so commonplace. And banking for years has just been you want to change your address. I've downloaded a form, filled in the form, signed it, and had to post it off. This is for an online bank. So we really just felt quite deeply that it could be the experience could be much, much better.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone who came to work at Monso 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 close account. It's like, I'm done with this. But he'd incurred the chart. He didn't know they applied the charge at the end of month. So it's like a five pound overdraft fee that month, which then the month after month after month after sort of rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled. And two years later they came after him for several thousand pounds because he'd been 10p overdrawn for a day. 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.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like all of that, I think, tied up into a bunch of weird sort of deep-rooted psychological problems, wanting to prove myself, wanting to win, wanting to be seen to be successful, I think. Money played a part in it, not the driving part, but certainly there was a factor there. A deep hatred for Nat West Bank. They were just incredibly frustrating to use. Just every.”
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 figuring out that core team, I think, is really, really important to get right and having a group of 14 is not the way to do it, really.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a. 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. No, I have another example of this. I started to accompany it when I was at university through Young Enterprise. And on day one, there were like 14 co-founders with this business, which is just a ridiculous way to start a company. Within about two months, we had meetings and meetings. Nothing ever got done. So within three months or so, three of us basically said, look, U11, you can have it write it on your sieve. That's what you want. But you're not really here to run a business. The three of it actually are going to work all summer. One of them quit his job to do it. He just left at Deutsche Bank. And the three others are actually going to try and run a startup here.”
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 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.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Paul has won several banks, so he became deputy CEO, Gary was CFO. He'd been at Aben Amro and Mizuho Bank, I think. There's a guy called Jason who is sort of more customer in marketing. And then Jonas, who is the only one left now, was the CTO, really, really talented developer. So he stepped into the CTO role.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, there were. And it was sort of weird, actually, because of 13 of us. Like, how do you pick which ones are, they were all literally there on day one. So in a sense, that was the founding team. And they all got stock, like not options, but actually full, you know, stock. But for arbitrary reasons, which I can't really remember, there were five of us. So myself, Paul became deputy CEO and was a 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 BCEO of our newest bank, yes. And they sort of scratched their 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,”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why don't you step down? How can we? We don't want to throw away this side. 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 where we almost had a deal a couple of times and it just similar thing happening, you know, huge blow up and we just walked away. But no, he 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 Revolute or at Starlink. It was, if anything, we were looking at the big banks thinking, how can we take market share off them?”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there was a big feeling of like, we put quite a lot of work into this, actually. And like, we've had to leave everything behind. So we have to, you know, rewrite the code base, redo all our regulatory submissions really from scratch, which was kind of like a, I wish we didn't have to do this, but we did. But in a way, it actually led us, we'd made the mistakes once the first time. So actually that sort of rebuilding process was nice because it was on fresh ground. But yeah, it felt like a, I mean, initially we tried to negotiate with Anne and say, why did, 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
“We think we can do this ourselves. So it wasn't a case of like, Know me leading a coup, me pulling the company away, I quit. I was just like, good luck to you. I'm going to 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 operates.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To kind of, it was called Ask for Janice on Smithfield Marker. It's a great vibe. You should go there. We all went there to basically commiserate. I just think this is crazy what's just happened. And literally, it's, I think we were there for two days basically in this gin bar playing. We all played speed chess. It was this very nerdy kind of four-player speed. We were playing lots and lots of speed chess, just trying to figure out what we were going to do. And eventually we can.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
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 didn't pull anyone away. She fired the entire company. That's not true. Two people happened to knock in the office, so they weren't at the meeting where they got fired.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was never paid. I invested my own money, which I lost. There was never any paperwork, which is my fault. And after six months, I just thought I can't work with this person. It's really damaging to me and my mental health. And so I resigned. And the response to that resignation, she called an All-Hans meeting and fired the entire company.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, I just didn't want to work with Anne. I've never actually talked about this before. And there has been a book. I hadn't read the book. The brief version is after six months, I got fired twice in six months.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Choose your co-founder really carefully. Yeah. I mean, there were 14 of us at Starling and 13 of us started Monso. It was that stark.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But whilst I was there, I could stay there for actually two years or something. 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”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So 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.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of it, I think. So the idea was it was six of you, three guys and three girls, or three guys and three guys, if that's your preference, or three girls and three girls. 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 kind of go and have a wild night out rather than traditional dating app sort of one-on-one. This was sort of a group social experience. Really, really 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 in fact, I saw the charts and it looked like a rocket ship when I was sort of interviewing there, crazy 48 hour interview process. I flew out to New York. They showed me sort of their growth charts, really sort of hockey stick metrics. And then it all just started to plateau. And I kind of ignored that. I said, 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% within about two to four weeks without any kind of macroeconomic, this wasn't COVID or something. This was back in 2014. The world was going well. The dating site just was no longer cool, I think. So we rode this wave of popularity and sort of zeitgeist. It was called Group. It was incredibly sort of cool novel idea back in 2013, 14. And then people just got bought.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wasn't really, I think it was a great company, but I wasn't really passionate about B2B direct debit software. It helps, you know. 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 I didn't B2B sales, I found really difficult and frustrating and not something I was good at. And the tech kind of was built. And that had been my role. So I sort of, I went from there to join a dating site, which is like the polar opposite. all about brand direct to consumer, really fun every day, terrible business model. That was one of the ones I got fired from. I was head of growth that we stopped growing.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I left early. We were 35 people, it was the valuation was in the region of 30 or 40 million at the time. Hiroki, my co-founder at the time, took on the 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 it was, I was there for the beginning, not the middle and certainly not the end.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this country, with great support of families, don't take enough risk in general. I think people go into pretty safe careers in law or consulting or whatever. And I think they could do more interesting things, have more impact, you know, make more money if that's what drives you by taking more risk. And I just don't think they do. And I think I put myself on the risk loving end of the spectrum. And so I've quit jobs and moved countries with like hours notice. I started go cardless 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 my 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 McKinsey start date. So I just sort of said, ah, this sounds fun. I'll do this startup thing instead.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I'm also just really impulsive. So I think quite self-confident, but I've taken quite big life decisions without very much reflection. And that's worked out really well. I'm hugely privileged. I've grown up in the UK, which I think is enormous privilege compared to a lot of 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. I actually think 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 was more confident when I was 28 than I am now for sure. And I think that comes with experience. I think you You take enough knocks that you start to, and you realize you don't know. I think at 2728, 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.”
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, I was never, I studied law, not computer science, but I can code. There's still code I wrote probably in the Monzo code base somewhere. I think it puts the emojis into the push notifications. But yeah, so being technical, I think, is just the easy answer. More fundamentally, I think just being really, really determined and resilient. Seeing, as we said, an immovable object and either finding a way sort of round it or over or under it, just straight through it. being indefatigable basically i think is is the single biggest predictor of success”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a sort of age 12 to 18, I would basically just go and say, learn to code. You're going to have a really well-paying career for the rest of your life. And it's a great step into entrepreneurship.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you have a lot of experience, the downside is you've seen these ideas fail again and again and again. And it's really hard to then leave that baggage behind and look at a company. I looked at one yesterday and said, I've seen that model fail four times. I wasn't running it. Others were running it. But to have a fresh enough mind to think, okay, maybe the timing's different, maybe the founding team's different, maybe the technology's changed. This can now work. So I think actually the benefit of being naive, even being quite young in your career is you don't have that baggage of knowing how it failed the five times before.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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...”
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, arrogance for naivety and arrogance, I think, in no small part. I'd already built a company called GoCardus, which is a payment processor. So that sort of taught me that 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 Nat West user, or rather when I was young and they were very old, I was a Nat West user and I was deeply, deeply disappointed. And I think like any founder really, a huge sort of dose of naivety. You look at a problem and think it's probably, I think if I knew now what 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 what we built.”
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 I, you know, I'm not married, but certainly when I was younger, I followed that conventional path. I went to a grammar school, I did my exams, I got a place at Oxford, I even did 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 definitely in the early years, that was my path.”
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. My co-founder, Jonas at Monzo, was just, I think he would say first principle thinking at least once a day.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whenever I'm I see a problem, I think that this is in common with anyone who starts a business. I look at the way something's done and immediately start thinking of better ways to do it. Rather than just doing what I'm told, I sort of scratch my head and think, no, this doesn't make sense to me. Why are we doing it this way that we could do it 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 jewelry items on like a massive jewelry website. There must be a thousand to do a tally chart of the price range. And this guy started doing them 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. 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. They're like, no, no, no, go back and do it by hand. That kind of stuff just drove me crazy. And I was always just looking for ways to automate, ways to do things better. I guess that's what led me into entrepreneurship.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My first ever job was a consulting firm in London. I actually wasn't fired from this one. But I wasn't promoted. And they said I was highly disruptive and not in a good way, not in a sort of tech founder disrupts industry more in a sort of, you know, annoying junior analysts can't follow instructions. So I think I'm much better founder than I am an employee.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've never actually talked about this before. After six months, I just thought I can't work with this person. 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'd threaten to turn up with, you know, a bottle of acid and throw it in someone's face. That was tough.”
2021-06-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT