Monzo CEO On Death Threats, Depression & Digital Banking Wars - Tom Blomfield

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Your heart drops. Is this it? Is this the moment the company dies?

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  Tom Blomfield, entrepreneur, investor and founder of Monzo.

• 0:08Speaker 00

  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 house 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.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  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. It was just like this crushing weight. That really was the moment I just sort of knew this is, this is no life. There were no other emotions in my life, really, apart from just anxiety.

• 0:49Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, it was serious by the end.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  We would detect criminals and shut their accounts down. Customs would turn up sometimes with weapons and they threatened to turn up with, you know, a bottle of acid and throw it in someone's face. That was tough.

• 1:08Steven Bartlett?

  Tom Blomfield, 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 Diary of a 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.

• 1:52Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 2:12Steven Bartlett?

  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 Steven Bartlett, and this is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.

• 2:51Steven Bartlett?

  Tom, why entrepreneurship?

• 2:55Speaker 00

  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.

• 3:04Steven Bartlett?

  Why were you fired so often?

• 3:07Speaker 00

  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 analyst can't follow instructions. So I think I'm much, I'm much better founder than I am an employee.

• 3:28Steven Bartlett?

  Well, what was it about you that was disruptive, though? I want some specifics.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  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 in this other way, which is 10 times faster? I mean, I, one of my first ever jobs was to, with another analyst, go and count all of the jewelry items on a, like a massive jewelry website. There must 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'd only taken an hour of my time rather than 20 hours. And so they could only bill me out for an

• 4:16Speaker 00

  hour. Like, no, no, no, go back and do it by hand. So 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.

• 4:27Steven Bartlett?

  Have you heard about this idea of first principle thinking?

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Absolutely, yeah. My co-founder Jonas at Monzo was just, I think he would say first principle thinking at least once a day.

• 4:35Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. You sort of start from physics and build, build up from there, really.

• 4:46Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 4:57Speaker 00

  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. 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 realising it probably wasn't for me. But, but definitely in the early years, that was my path.

• 5:20Steven Bartlett?

  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 still is known as one of the UK great disruptors.

• 5:32Steven Bartlett?

  Can you tell me why, like, because when I, when I speak to Shaq, do you know Shaq, Shaquille Khan? About Daniel Ek. And when I think about your story, you both made the decision to take on just what, what, what many entrepreneurs would consider to be an immovable object. You took on the banking system.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 5:51Steven Bartlett?

  Daniel Ek took on the, this massive music industry that was, seemed to be immune to change.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  I was talking to Shaq about this last week.

• 5:58Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, really? He texted me last night about, about Harry's new fund. So he, I think that's why he's fresh of mind.

• 6:06Steven Bartlett?

  What, what gave you the conviction and the confidence that you could take on such a mammoth industry with Monzo?

• 6:16Speaker 00

  I mean arrogance, naivety and arrogance, I think, in no small part. I don't, I'd already built a company called Go Carders, which is a payment processor. So that sort of taught me that, you know, three young guys could get access to the payment system and, 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

• 6:59Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:15Steven Bartlett?

  I find that point about naivety so interesting because it almost feels like founders like yourself need to be

• 7:22Steven Bartlett?

  deluded on one end in terms of their own confidence.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 7:25Steven Bartlett?

  Right? Because if you looked at the stats and all the odds, they're clearly against you. So founders like yourself seem to be, I do it 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 the stats and the probability of the success.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 7:42Steven Bartlett?

  But also self-aware enough to listen to feedback and to not be blinded by their hypotheses.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  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 it's a little bit like investing. I'm doing a little bit of investing now. I think you, if you have a lot of experience, the downside is you've seen these ideas fail again and again and again. And it's really hard to then leave that baggage behind and look at a company. I looked at one yesterday. It's like, I've seen that model fail four times. Not my, you know, I wasn't running it. Others were running it, but to have a fresh enough mind to think, okay, maybe the timing's different, maybe the founding team's different, maybe the technology's changed, this can now work.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  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.

• 8:41Steven Bartlett?

  When you're looking at founders in your investments now, from your own experience of being a founder.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 8:46Steven Bartlett?

  What are the attributes you're looking for?

• 8:49Speaker 00

  I mean, the really simple one is being technical, being able to write code, I think, is just a huge, huge leg up. And all of the founders who aren't technical, and there were many great ones, 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's a great step into entrepreneurship.

• 9:18Steven Bartlett?

  Are you technical?

• 9:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I learnt to code when I was 12 or 13.

• 9:21Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, wow.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Built websites.

• 9:22Steven Bartlett?

  Why me?

• 9:24Speaker 00

  I mean, I was never, I studied law, not computer science, but I can code. There's still code I wrote probably in the Monza codebase 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 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.

• 9:56Steven Bartlett?

  You strike me as someone that has great confidence, and I imagine that's come from, as you kind of alluded to with Go Cardlers, 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.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  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 realise, I like to think I know a lot about a lot of things, but I realise 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.

• 10:40Steven Bartlett?

  Maybe less naivety, maybe that'd be a stark difference, right?

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, yeah. I've seen the failures a few times now.

• 10:45Steven Bartlett?

  Because I was saying that because there's a lot of, um, a lot of young people in my, in my DMs that are dreaming big dreams like yours, but they would just never have the confidence or conviction to pursue them. So I was wondering, is that, I was, I'm trying to get to the, I guess, the crux of what made you so starkly different from every, all of the young people that have, at least verbalize equally big dreams.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  I think I'm also just really impulsive. So I, I think quite self-confident, but I was, I've taken quite big life decisions without very much reflection. Um, and that's worked out really well. You know, I'm hugely privileged. I, um, I've grown up in the UK, which I think is an enormous privilege compared to a lot, you know, people in my position, but growing up in, 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 risks because if that risk didn't pay off, I have, I have that safety net. And so, um, yes, I was confident. I think, yes, I was impulsive, but I, that was enabled from a place of huge privilege because I could take

• 11:49Speaker 00

  the risk. And I, I actually think people in this country 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. And 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. I started GoCardless with Matt Hiroki because I'd 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

• 12:33Speaker 00

  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, I'll do the startup thing instead.

• 12:44Steven Bartlett?

  You launch Go Cardless, you take that to, I think, a nine-figure valuation.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  It's $970 million at their last round, I believe. That's what was reported. So not quite a billion.

• 12:55Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, 10-figure value.

• 12:58Steven Bartlett?

  We'll round up if it's fine.

• 13:01Steven Bartlett?

  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 Go Cardless.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  I left early. We were 35 people, you know, it was a, 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. It's, and it's, 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, not the middle and certainly not the end.

• 13:43Steven Bartlett?

  Why did you leave?

• 13:44Speaker 00

  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. You know, all about brand, direct to consumer, really fun every day, terrible business model.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  That was one of the ones I got fired from. I was head of growth and we stopped growing.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  It was bad.

• 14:33Steven Bartlett?

  You were head of growth and you stopped, and the company stopped growing. Very self-aware and honest for you to admit that.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Hmm. 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 sort of started to plateau and I kind of ignored that. I said, okay, that's my job to come in. It had flattened out and I joined to try to 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

• 15:22Speaker 00

  of zeitgeist. It was called Group. It was incredibly sort of cool novel idea back in 2013, 14. And then people just got bored of it, I think. So the idea was, it was six of you, three, three guys and three girls, or three guys and three guys, if that's your, 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'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.

• 16:00Steven Bartlett?

  You got fired?

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, most of the company got laid off, actually. Yeah.

• 16:04Steven Bartlett?

  And then you took how long off before you swung back into the next thing?

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Um, 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.

• 16:25Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, I've, yeah.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  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 Boden at Starling and agreed to be their CTO within about, again, 24 hours.

• 16:42Steven Bartlett?

  And then there's a lot written about how, I mean, how your relationship with Anne transpired and your relationship with Starling more broadly transpired. What's, what are, what are the key highlights from that, from that journey?

• 16:53Speaker 00

  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.

• 17:05Steven Bartlett?

  Wait, say that again. 14 people at Starling and 13 of you started Monzo?

• 17:10Speaker 00

  13 of those 14 started.

• 17:11Steven Bartlett?

  13 of those 14 started Monzo. Okay.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Including the chairman of the board, the entire management team, the office manager, everyone.

• 17:20Steven Bartlett?

  So one would say, well, you know, Tom must have ripped them all away.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  No, no, I just didn't want to work with Anne. Like, I've never actually talked about this before. And there has been a book, I haven't read the book. The brief version is after six months, I got fired twice in six months. I was never paid. I invested my own money, which is 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. 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 Northland's meeting and fired the entire company.

• 18:02Steven Bartlett?

  Because you resigned?

• 18:03Speaker 00

  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. We all went there to basically commiserate. 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, we're playing lots and lots of speed chess, just trying to figure out what we're going to do. And eventually, we're like, we can, we think we can do this ourselves. So it wasn't a case of like, you

• 18:48Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 19:02Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  No, it's not something I would do.

• 19:17Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 19:23Speaker 00

  And they also resigned the day after, yeah, to come and work with us. She hired another management team, another team.

• 19:30Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, really?

• 19:30Speaker 00

  And it turned out that we weren't the first team. There'd been a previous team as well.

• 19:35Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, wow.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  That she'd fired.

• 19:37Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 19:39Steven Bartlett?

  And then off, so that's crazy. So you started essentially Monzo was founded in that gin bar?

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Yep, yep, Asper Janis. And it's still there. We go back for some of our reunions.

• 19:49Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:52Steven Bartlett?

  And how did you feel? So you're fired, you know, from Starling. You convene in this gin bar. You spend a couple of days there. You end up deciding that you're gonna go again together.

• 20:02Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 20:02Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 20:15Speaker 00

  Kind of, but we didn't, I didn't really know that, that she, you know, Anne was gonna rehire a bunch of people.

• 20:20Steven Bartlett?

  But it was over, right?

• 20:21Speaker 00

  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 had 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.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  But yeah, it felt like a, I mean, initially, we tried to negotiate with Anne and say, why did, you know, why did you step down? Why do, like, how can we, we don't wanna throw away this, like, for some people, they'd 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 happened, you know, huge blow up and we just walked away.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  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 Starling. It was, if anything, we were looking at the big banks, thinking, how can we take market share off them?

• 21:23Steven Bartlett?

  Co-founders, when you started Monzo, you started with, was Paul Rippon your only co-founder?

• 21:28Speaker 00

  No, there were, and it was, 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. So in a sense, that was the founding team. They all got stock, like not options, actually full, you know, stock. But the 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? 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.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  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. He'd been at ABN AMRO and Mizuho Bank, I think. There's a guy called Jason, who is sort of more customer and 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.

• 22:39Steven Bartlett?

  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, you know, definitely one of the biggest mistakes I made in my career was when I was very young, just hire 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.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  I didn't do that.

• 23:04Steven Bartlett?

  I did, I was like, 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.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:16Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 23:29Speaker 00

  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 the 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 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. I have another example of this. I started a company when I was at university through Young Enterprise. And on day one, there were like 14 co-founders of this business, which is just a ridiculous way to start a company.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  And within about two, we had meetings and meetings and meetings, 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 us actually are going to like work all summer. One of them 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 really, really important to get right. And having a group of 14 is not the way to do it, really.

• 24:45Steven Bartlett?

  When you, when you started Monzo from that, I say from the gym bar, it wasn't really from the gym bar, but you see what I mean? That was the kind of, I guess, the inception moment. What was the driving force for you to go on that journey? Was it money? Was it the chance of, you know, moving in industry? What was it?

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Oh gosh.

• 25:05Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  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. That money played a part in it, not the driving part, but certainly there was a factor there.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  A deep hatred for NatWest Bank.

• 25:36Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 25:37Speaker 00

  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 accounts. 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 that month, which then the month after, and the month after, and the month after, should have rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled. And two, you know, 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

• 26:22Speaker 00

  at apps like Spotify or Uber and they felt magical. The, 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 it starts playing. And that's, that is magical. But now it's so commonplace. And banking for years has just been, you want to change, change your address. Down, 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 could be, the experience could be much, much better.

• 27:00Steven Bartlett?

  And one of the other reasons you gave there as a driving force was wanting to be seen to win.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:05Steven Bartlett?

  Can you explain that one?

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Not to win. I think that's probably the wrong, I use that phrase, but I, to be seen to be a success, I think.

• 27:14Steven Bartlett?

  Like validation.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, kind of. Yeah. And, you know, that's to my family and my friends and my school and teachers and.

• 27:22Steven Bartlett?

  You'd already been a success there with GoCardless, did you?

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I had a bit, but go carders circa 2014, 2015 was 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.

• 27:41Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  Sure, you're on a TV show.

• 27:50Steven Bartlett?

  Exactly, exactly. And I'm doing a podcast with 17 cameras right now. But, but just drilling down into that, in hindsight, was that a feeling that you think could have ever been attained? Was it a mirage?

• 28:04Speaker 00

  I think I have attained it. 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. Mixing my metaphors there. I felt what that, you know, I've experienced that thing, that sort of like being in the newspapers and that sort of,

• 28:22Speaker 00

  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.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  And so either I've realised 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 sort of, it was fun, but it's not my overriding purpose now.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  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, 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, in the trees. And that stuff, now I'm, I'm spending more time kind of being more, I guess, mindful and kind of living in the moment.

• 29:30Steven Bartlett?

  Do you have to like reprogram yourself to get there though? Because I feel like society, well, for me anyway, is, 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 or accomplishment.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:46Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess. Like, you know, like you, I I left my company. I didn't. And that was really, really hard. And that was not a that was

• 30:04Speaker 00

  you know, deep, deep anxiety, bordering on depression. And 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, 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.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  And that experience now leads me, whenever I I still get these like urges, like, oh, it's sort of they, my local MP passed away a few months ago, and there was a by-election. I was like, why did I, 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?

• 30:45Speaker 00

  Crap. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I think like, 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'll be all. So, yeah, just like a couple of sort of those brain cycles. And I'm like, no, what am I, 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? Why do I want to go and make myself miserable again?

• 31:14Steven Bartlett?

  Where where does that that voice come from? So many people have that voice, because it's funny, because you're saying, right, 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, go on, Tom, do it.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  It's that, 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. I'm, I'm

• 31:41Speaker 00

  reluctant, and 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 I'm proud of doing it. And it's like a great feeling, kind of being part of a team that's

• 31:54Speaker 00

  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.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  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, 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 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, what is that drive? It's the looking at something that's like clearly broken, at least in my naive eyes. And that feeling that I feel like along with a small group of smart people, I could make it better.

• 32:47Steven Bartlett?

  What were the, the, the good times at Monzo? The times you look back most fondly?

• 32:51Speaker 00

  Small team, so sub 100. Being able to

• 32:59Speaker 00

  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 Go Cardless, I didn't believe in brand, which is a ridiculous thing to say. I, you know, you as a marketing background, that's almost offensive, I guess, but I was like, no, this is, you know, this is doesn't, this doesn't exist really people. And then the day, while 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.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  And we really took a lot of that into Monzo and that it, it was just astonishing.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  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 a Hot Corral 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 people are enjoying so much.

• 34:33Steven Bartlett?

  Let's dig into the point about brand then, marketing, because Monzo really was a UK stand-up brand. I think everybody knew it, even if they didn't use it, because of its disruptive values, because of it felt unconventional in everything it did. I mean, even the card was completely unconventional.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Intentionally, yeah.

• 34:52Steven Bartlett?

  Tell me, tell me what the secret was to Monzo's branding success.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  Authenticity, I think.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  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 as sort of like, you know, how are the kids 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, you know, the first few months, he'd just very recently left to start his own company. And he's now, 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, you know, 23, 24-year-old. And I worked on it a lot, Hugo, our head of design, worked on it a lot. And it was, it was just an authentic representation of, I think,

• 35:47Speaker 00

  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 Corral card, every other bank was, you know, blue or purple or kind of a shade of black, basically. So we were like, how far from that can we get? And the big banks were very impersonal, you know, you never felt like you were talking to a human. And so we, everything we did was human and transparent. 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 was bonkers. But that was a way of building trust and humanity in opposition to these big, sort of faceless banks.

• 36:27Steven Bartlett?

  These all sound like first principles.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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, yeah, we, 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.

• 36:55Steven Bartlett?

  Goes to show the risk of reading marketing books. Genuinely, I've always thought this because I had never studied marketing or did anything. 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.

• 37:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:12Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. And 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're on a different approach. I didn't think there's a right answer. But I think authenticity gets you a really, really long way, whoever your target demographic is.

• 37:54Steven Bartlett?

  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 also understand the feeling. And your worst times?

• 38:10Steven Bartlett?

  Least enjoyable times.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  Least enjoyable.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  I never liked fundraising. We did that a lot. And I had to, I think Monzo'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, you know, the

• 38:26Steven Bartlett?

  Ad funding.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we hit a billion. The round where we hit a billion valuation was very, very fast 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 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

• 39:07Speaker 00

  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, 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's like, look, it's my subs who do it. I, I write the article, they choose the headline, or my editor. But every time they do that, we just get way more subscribers. It's like, you know, sorry. But it, it was really the entire, from the BBC to The Telegraph, to everyone, it felt like a pylon in a way that didn't seem fair, really. And it's, and not to say that we never did anything wrong,

• 39:52Speaker 00

  we absolutely did. But even the good stuff we did got, got negative headlines. 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. Yeah, that was tough. At one point, we had a BBC camera crew outside our office. And this was when we, we'd grown big enough, we had a small, a small minority of people using Monzo for financial crime, basically, of 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 where, wherever it had come from, which is a very frustrating

• 40:34Speaker 00

  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, 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. Over a series of several weeks saying, you know, this is, we've got you. And we sort of brought the editor of the program in 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, okay. It's 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.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  You know, we've blocked the account, we stand by it, but we don't have cast iron proof. And they're 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 to see if they could find anyone walking past it or, 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. Drive, drive for your ship. But that was deeply annoying.

• 41:57Steven Bartlett?

  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've been one of the other dragons that's been there for nearly two decades, said, here's what's, here's, here's what's going to happen.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:12Steven Bartlett?

  Is they're going to build you up to a point where you're interesting enough to tear down again?

• 42:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:16Steven Bartlett?

  And hearing you say the same thing terrifies the life out of me.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  And it happens in every tech startups.

• 42:23Steven Bartlett?

  Facebook?

• 42:24Speaker 00

  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. Yeah.

• 42:33Steven Bartlett?

  What advice would you give someone that's?

• 42:35Speaker 00

  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.

• 42:43Steven Bartlett?

  The hype and the criticism.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  When they're writing good stuff, that's overblown as well. That's not real life. The bad stuff's also not true. So I just ignore it all.

• 42:53Steven Bartlett?

  And did that have an impact on your mental health, the worst parts of the press coverage?

• 42:59Speaker 00

  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? It's like, I'm fine.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  What have I done?

• 43:13Steven Bartlett?

  That's the worst because then you've got to justify to people you care about and make them not care.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  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.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  That was annoying, but I don't know. So yeah, the press was not fun. Investment was 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 got quite tough.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  And I'm going to go through a list of the bad things now. I will stop on the final one, which was just organisational 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 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. And 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 becomes really not collaborative, actually. And you get, especially with some sort of quite senior people, start building their little fiefdoms.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  And you get this just weird politics and rivalries going on that I'd never worked in a company before. It was like total, it was totally 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.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  Culture, toxic culture frankly, and they bring it to a place like Monzo and everyone's sort of like, what, that's weird, what's going on here. But it definitely changed. And that was, having to deal with that was tricky.

• 45:05Steven Bartlett?

  You talked about not being profitable. I've heard you talk about, you know, that being one of the, 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.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 45:18Steven Bartlett?

  Is that fair?

• 45:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And we, we'd thought about it for sure. I think what we didn't do was make the hard decisions to, to turn the corner earlier. Like, we, 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, to acquire users without paying. So basically, we swapped marketing spend, we had no marketing spend. Instead, we ran like neg, 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

• 46:03Speaker 00

  marketing total. That's an average cost per customer of one pound fifty.

• 46:07Steven Bartlett?

  Great.

• 46:08Speaker 00

  Right? So, but that, that hides your operational losses. That's what, 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, we got to a certain size and it cost us way too much.

• 46:24Steven Bartlett?

  Free cards.

• 46:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:26Steven Bartlett?

  Was that expensive?

• 46:29Speaker 00

  With that, it's like the long tail, it's, you know, it's the, the very small number of people are ordering 20 or 30 cards a year. Most people, they order zero to one, that's fine, but some people just lose their card every weekend and they get shrug out, no problem, I'll just order another one and 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 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.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 47:34Speaker 00

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

• 48:18Speaker 00

  But that can become, I don't think you grow as much from that. So really finding the doubters, even 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.

• 48:35Steven Bartlett?

  Hindsight's a wonderful thing.

• 48:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:38Steven Bartlett?

  Now you have those, some of those answers in hindsight. And what were, what are those answers in hindsight that you wish you'd, you'd known sooner? So one of them's obviously, you know, getting to a profitable business model sooner.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. Profitable business model, cutting costs, driving revenue by taking hard decisions to sort of limit some of the free features and chart to some of the things we gave for free. I think we should have done that way, way earlier. That's the biggest.

• 49:04Steven Bartlett?

  Any cultural decisions? I know there was a merging of the startup guys and the banking people, which.

• 49:12Steven Bartlett?

  I guess that's necessary, right?

• 49:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I struggled to get banking licence without that. And you've seen, you can see that at Revolut. You look at all their recent senior hires over the last year or two, and it's big wigs from the big banks because they're trying to get a banking licence. So I think that's sort of inevitable and you pay a cost for that. You pay the price.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  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 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 it. And I'm not sure if he was right or not, actually. That's one I still debate.

• 49:56Steven Bartlett?

  I've noticed Revolut's 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.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:14Steven Bartlett?

  But I've, from when I joined Revolut, it was just amazing.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 50:18Steven Bartlett?

  And two years, almost three years on, it's just awful.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  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 or whatever, it was just, 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 that everyone's aiming for is less than that clearly.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  And so the drive is always to automate more, to put, you know, chatbots in, to do whatever.

• 51:10Steven Bartlett?

  There comes a point in your journey with Monzo where you realise that you're no longer enjoying it. 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.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  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, haha, go back in time.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  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 funding, 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, even like in the investment market, private investment and public investments are stronger than it was pre-Covid. And so people just take

• 52:52Speaker 00

  these really short term decisions in a kind of, in a shock, in a crisis, destroy a ton of value for themselves. And, you know, 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 camel's back. And about six weeks into that, six to eight weeks, I was 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.

• 53:22Steven Bartlett?

  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 only done?

• 53:31Speaker 00

  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, two, our chairman and 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 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, um, that was the biggest problem for me, that we didn't have the right senior leadership in place.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  So I was working several jobs. Uh, and so the conversation was always, okay, 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 2,000 people and the person's burnt out or, you know, not doing well, I have to replace them. And so it was like whack a mole. Um, and I think that was the biggest contributing factor. But those are conversations I very regularly had with board members and investors.

• 54:40Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think those conversations were treated with, with urgency?

• 54:43Speaker 00

  No.

• 54:44Steven Bartlett?

  From, from either yourself or the board?

• 54:47Speaker 00

  No, absolutely not. It was always like, oh yeah, we'll just hire, you know, we'll hire the person and it'll all 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.

• 55:00Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  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 to support me. And I'm really, really grateful for that. Uh, 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.

• 55:28Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think if you'd gone to the board with more urgency and decisiveness yourself, that you would have been taken more seriously?

• 55:36Steven Bartlett?

  If you had said, listen, I'm gonna go next week if these issues aren't fixed. Because I'm asking these questions 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.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:53Steven Bartlett?

  Until the day that I resigned.

• 55:57Speaker 00

  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. It's that's sort of my job.

• 56:09Speaker 00

  So I don't know. I also, I 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, you know? So it's a constant process of like gradually upgrading until you get into premiership. And even then, you know, you're, you're Charlton Athletic or something.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  So I just think it's tough. I don't, I don't think there's a magic bullet, actually.

• 56:46Steven Bartlett?

  You said you weren't sleeping, working seven days a week. Talk me through those moments when you, when things were.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  Have you experienced that?

• 56:55Steven Bartlett?

  I've, oh, definitely experienced anxiety and not sleeping well. And an issue usually like payroll or some kind of investor issue.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 57:04Steven Bartlett?

  Plaguing me for days and days and then getting sick.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 57:08Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  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 and 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 hundred million pound funding round. So just let me focus on that. And the the realisation was sort of when the round closes, when the money's in the bank and that weight lifts, you then look at all these other problems and they're very, very easy. Actually, like you re-energise quite quickly and able to take those decisions. But while there's just too many things sort of resting on your shoulders, you it piles up and piles

• 57:56Speaker 00

  up and piles up. And so for me, yeah, it was waking up at sort of four or five in the morning, often with 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 this 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 and go that, 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. And because you make worse decisions, you end up creating more problems to yourself.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  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. 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 get the gym, you're 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.

• 59:12Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 59:29Speaker 00

  Yes, and sort of going to sleep, almost inevitably knowing you're going to wake up at four AM is quite annoying, to say the least. And the

• 59:48Speaker 00

  It's a very depressing thing to say, but sometimes when I did sleep a sort of full night, I'd wake up at seven, eight, nine AM, 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, 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.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  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 one out of 10 because anxiety was just 10 out of 10. And that was no fun. How long did that last?

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  A year and a half, two years maybe. Fucking hell.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  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. And rather than changing the job first, I changed the girlfriend first.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  And that was really tough.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  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 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, and suddenly like the small, those like emotions that were one out of 10, when they're not being crushed by a 10 out of 10 anxiety, like sort of start to bloom back, which is cool, which I like. It's just life. Yeah.

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  This is how normal people feel.

• 1:01:53Steven Bartlett?

  The girlfriend topic I find compelling because I I've also struggled in that department forever.

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:59Steven Bartlett?

  How was it trying to hold down a relationship whilst also this business just being this crushing force in your life?

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  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 feel like that's so irritating, you know?

• 1:02:40Speaker 00

  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

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  primarily because my work was so shit, which I regret a lot.

• 1:03:01Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting. So when, what I noticed about myself is when I had a girlfriend at the height of my

• 1:03:09Steven Bartlett?

  CEO bullshit, 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.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:03:29Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think it's possible for a CEO that's in a high intensity situation to

• 1:03:36Steven Bartlett?

  have a successful early stage relationship?

• 1:03:40Speaker 00

  I mean, 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

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  Detachment, but not in a bad way. And I mean detachment from your job, being able to compartmentalise. 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 switch it off. As soon as his head hit the pillow, he was asleep. He had, he and his wife run a lovely alpaca farm in the north of England. And he was just really good at having sort of compartmentalising his life. I think similarly with TS, the new CEO, Monzo, he's an older guy, I think he's in his 50s, has run big banks before and is, you know, finds it challenging and exciting and a little stressful, but I think he's able to go back to his family and, and sort of switch that part of his

• 1:04:35Speaker 00

  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's 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, you, there's a bit of detachment. And I think that's actually really healthy, to realise 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 realisation

• 1:05:19Speaker 00

  that you're not like the same being as your company would have been helpful earlier on.

• 1:05:25Steven Bartlett?

  I heard you had a red phone in your bedroom or something. Is that true?

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:05:29Steven Bartlett?

  Why was it red?

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  It was more like a sort of childish pink colour, actually. The red phone is probably a dramatisation. I think I did describe it as a red phone. It was a pink, it was an old Nokia.

• 1:05:43Speaker 00

  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 I had it charging out the hallway, which I think is, I encourage everyone to do. 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 that'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. 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.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  And so that phone was like the bat phone. 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 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, you know, not every week, but every two or three months sometimes. What an awful phone call. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And it wasn't a person. It was a bot, you know, it's a robot saying, like, there's an incident, you are required to blah, blah, blah. It's like, ugh. Yeah, that, it's horrible. I can see by your hand gesture then, how it felt.

• 1:07:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, the heart, your heart drops and you know, it's gonna be, the rest of your week, if not your month is gonna be ruined. And it's, you don't know if this is like the one that's gonna kill the company. We had a few like that, that's like, you know, is, is, and I think a lot of founders have like those moments, like, oh shit, is, you know, 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 engineer is running around 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.

• 1:07:55Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  But it sounds better if you.

• 1:07:57Steven Bartlett?

  It sounds way.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  It sounds more dramatic.

• 1:08:00Steven Bartlett?

  In the movie, it'll definitely be a red phone.

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:02Steven Bartlett?

  It'll be in like a box with like a maybe a code on it. I find that what you just said really, really interesting. So there's, because I've been through that, those key moments where you're not sure if your company's going to survive.

• 1:08:11Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:08:12Steven Bartlett?

  And it feels like the answer or the determinant factor is actually outside of your control.

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:08:18Steven Bartlett?

  So it's someone else's decision whether your company survives.

• 1:08:21Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:08:22Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, not loads, but a handful. So early investment rounds.

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  It was binary. If we don't raise the money, we're folding. The later rounds were more like the money's going to come in at some valuation.

• 1:08:44Speaker 00

  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, 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. 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

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  know, 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, yeah, 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 a comeback online.

• 1:09:49Steven Bartlett?

  Outside of the business and the chaos of the business, what was your life at that point?

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  Um, fairly normal.

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  We had a pretty good culture around work-life balance at Monzo.

• 1:10:07Speaker 00

  Mostly I was working five days a week, unless we were fundraising, I guess. And I travelled probably a week every month, mostly for fundraising. But I had a really close group of friends, mostly from, you know, growing up, mostly from my secondary school, actually. I lived with my girlfriend, we lived in a big house with friends, we cooked a lot.

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  Really not a, the time pressure was not the problem, it was the mental, like, the mental load, the inability to switch off outside those hours.

• 1:10:47Steven Bartlett?

  And then boom, pandemic comes around, term sheets get pulled, you're sat there, you've already, you know, 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.

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 1:11:02Steven Bartlett?

  When you realised that you were going to depart,

• 1:11:06Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  80% was just like, I can breathe again. So it was overwhelmingly positive for me, and I'm not afraid to say that.

• 1:11:27Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, guilt, I think, was more than sadness.

• 1:11:57Steven Bartlett?

  Were their tears shed?

• 1:12:00Speaker 00

  Um, I cry quite a lot.

• 1:12:04Steven Bartlett?

  I cried as well when I, I went through a range of emotions. My first one was, I was angry a little bit because, as I said, I'd been given a lot of what felt like lip service. So I was annoyed at first, but then when I realised that I was actually going to send the email, it was like gratitude.

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Steven Bartlett?

  And some kind of like sad or happy tears.

• 1:12:23Speaker 00

  Yep. Um, I, so I did an all hands, I announced it 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,

• 1:12:39Speaker 00

  what I have learnt over the last few years is that 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,

• 1:12:55Speaker 00

  the 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 it. 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. You know, I'm not ashamed of that, so.

• 1:13:22Steven Bartlett?

  And then the, the weightlifting.

• 1:13:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, great.

• 1:13:27Steven Bartlett?

  What a feeling when you, no one can fucking email you and, you know.

• 1:13:31Speaker 00

  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 quite a while. I think if, you know, if London had been booming and I could kind of go out and meet people and have fun, it would have been a great experience. But actually, that's some, especially if you remember sort of thinking back to April, May of last year, when everything was really hard to lockdown still, April, May 2020.

• 1:14:13Speaker 00

  Not a fun experience. And I'm, I think I am an extrovert. I thought, I thought about this a lot. I really, I get energy from being around people. And I was with four people who are just working all the time and in the middle of rural Devon. Yeah, not fun, but.

• 1:14:27Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:14:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:37Steven Bartlett?

  And waking up in the morning and thinking.

• 1:14:40Speaker 00

  What am I going to do today?

• 1:14:41Steven Bartlett?

  What happens today?

• 1:14:43Speaker 00

  It's weird because my time was, especially Monday to Friday, was scheduled from sort of nine, nine AM till about seven or eight PM was scheduled down to the, down to five minutes easily. 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 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. Many of the things I couldn't yet do. So I started drawing. I spent two or three months drawing. I saw that Hockney had started using his iPad. So I started drawing on my iPad.

• 1:15:23Speaker 00

  Which I, I only kept up for about a month or two. But learning a language is on the list. I bought some kite surfing gear and did a load of kite surfing, which is amazing. Now I'm training up to a big offshore sailing race. So you kind of a yacht race called Fastnet. So that's in August. I'm learning to fly. So I've, 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, which is very rewarding. So I'm busy again, but each of it is like.

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  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 busy, but it's low, low pressure, I guess.

• 1:16:12Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. And it seems like you're focusing on things that give you like intrinsic joy.

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, and learning. I really like learning. Really anything. So the process of going from a complete novice to someone mediocre, I love. And I'm angel investing. To keep a connection to the tech community, 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.

• 1:16:46Steven Bartlett?

  Tom's here again.

• 1:16:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I like. It's a weird, it feels like a job where you have to pay to go to work, you know. But I like that a lot.

• 1:16:58Steven Bartlett?

  Me and my co-founder went on, felt two very different things when we departed. We departed at the same time, pretty much. And he, because he didn't have anything to do upon departing, I think he struggled quite significantly. You kind of lose orientation in your life. And you're right, when 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 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.

• 1:17:38Speaker 00

  Your schedule now, is it as busy now as it was when you were working?

• 1:17:41Steven Bartlett?

  No, no. I mean, the Dragon's Den thing is maybe, maybe brought it close because it's like 7am and I get home at midnight. But 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 or I had to be up at 4am 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?

• 1:18:16Speaker 00

  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 and I don't know. The thought process goes something like, I love the early stage. So you get a few of your mates together, people you've always wanted to work with perhaps, and you start something and one of two things happens. You fail and that, you know, now you're kind of relatively high profile founder who's on to 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 2000 person company and you're like, why have I done this to myself again?

• 1:18:55Speaker 00

  I hate running 2000 person companies. So the out, I like the journey bit, but the outcome either end don't. 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, so in that sense, no.

• 1:19:17Speaker 00

  With some caveats, one thing I've thought about doing, which I've, 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 founder or management team and kind of incubating it for properly incubating it for 12 months, you know, actually like building the first version and doing the marketing. And but once it's at 12 or 18 months, putting a full management team in the 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 were, you were able to do that first year, but then you're like hands off and then doing that every year for five or six years. So you, you end up with a portfolio of, I don't know, six to 10 companies. So I thought about that a bit. Seems like a lot of hard work. So I haven't done it yet, but I might do that.

• 1:20:02Speaker 00

  I think you'd probably end up getting sucked into the same problems. Yeah, I agree because I think the power law distribution of, of startup success means that one, 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, you know, either you think you should go in or someone else thinks you should go in and you're ultimately, you're 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?

• 1:20:28Steven Bartlett?

  Um. Yes, but he hasn't avoided the bullshit. So he's what he's always he's a billionaire. He's a multi billionaire. Um. And he says, oh, I'm not good. 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. It's what he 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.

• 1:20:53Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:20:54Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:21:01Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:21:02Steven Bartlett?

  And he'll go, off you go, company. But I still know that when shit hits the fan and they've got funding issues.

• 1:21:08Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:21:09Steven Bartlett?

  Because he is the the big name in the in the piece, he'll be front and center of trying to solve those problems.

• 1:21:16Steven Bartlett?

  I I I he lives a much better life than I think the CEO would.

• 1:21:19Speaker 00

  Yep. And I think that's fine. Like, I wouldn't, I'm not looking for a zero stress life. But I think, yeah, a lot of the people bullshit, I don't like. 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 2000 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,

• 1:22:02Speaker 00

  for some reason, it ends up on your on your desk, you know, 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.

• 1:22:16Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:22:24Speaker 00

  Me and my co founder stopped, like, we would go until 8pm and then leave, just be like, this is not.

• 1:22:29Steven Bartlett?

  Because there'd be too much alcohol and.

• 1:22:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. And and when you're 50 or 100 people, you know each other so well that like.

• 1:22:36Speaker 00

  People, I don't know, maybe we're just lucky, but people sort of respect boundaries and behave themselves. Who at 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 every, every party. It's like they're going to get fired for.

• 1:22:53Steven Bartlett?

  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, where seven years ago got arrested. They'd worked for me for three and a half years. I thought they were a great guy.

• 1:23:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:10Steven Bartlett?

  They got sent to jail for seven years.

• 1:23:11Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 1:23:12Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:23:20Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:23:21Steven Bartlett?

  Even though it's such, it seems like such a pathetic thing, but that is sexual assault.

• 1:23:26Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:23:26Steven Bartlett?

  And, and you can't allow an incident like that to be mishandled, right? Because that is, again, that poses an existential risk against your company.

• 1:23:34Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:23:35Steven Bartlett?

  If that were to break in the press.

• 1:23:36Speaker 00

  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 on 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 it always comes back, you have an incredibly sort of

• 1:24:04Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:24:14Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:24:21Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:24:21Steven Bartlett?

  No action required, Tom. It's already been solved, but just so you're aware, I love those people.

• 1:24:26Speaker 00

  And that's, but that's how a senior team should work, really.

• 1:24:31Speaker 00

  And at its best, it works like that. It is magical.

• 1:24:34Steven Bartlett?

  Death threats.

• 1:24:37Steven Bartlett?

  Nice little transition there.

• 1:24:40Steven Bartlett?

  I'd never got death threats as the CEO of Social Chain, but I hear that you got a few.

• 1:24:45Speaker 00

  Not loads, but yes, and several of our staff as well. We've got people turning up to the office, being, we have security, full-time security at our office and still do now. Because customers would turn up sometimes with weapons, they threatened to turn up with, you know, a bottle of acid and throw acid in someone's face.

• 1:25:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, and yeah, and come, you know, there were sort of groups on social media who sort of tried to find our addresses and sort of hand them around. Because, I mean, with six million customers, again, you'd sort of probabilities, if one in a million is bad egg, you've got six bad eggs.

• 1:25:25Speaker 00

  Because we were a bank, we dealt with people's money and because we had obligations to detect and prevent financial crime, we would, we would detect criminals and shut their accounts down. And 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. It was like the amateur criminal,

• 1:25:47Speaker 00

  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 they got crazy, like this was my big payoff. I'm going to come and fuck you up. 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

• 1:26:19Speaker 00

  still the law gets in the way. 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, I can't feed my baby.

• 1:26:45Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:26:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:48Speaker 00

  So yes, it was never the professional criminals because they just choose to constitute business. And by the way, there are a ton of those 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 worked very, very closely with the with law enforcement to to shut a bunch of these things down. And 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 go to a fuel pump, you can 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 spent,

• 1:27:30Speaker 00

  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 the payment on the card would bounce, and they'd go and use that to like, they'd sell it to whoever wants petrol, a hauliers, farmers, whatever. They're basically scamming all of these petrol stations. So we spotted that pretty quickly and shut that down, which I'm really, really proud of. There were several people trafficking rings where they would bring in women from often east, like east, Eastern

• 1:28:14Speaker 00

  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 to be pimped out. And we'd spot that and work with law enforcement to actually like, go and rescue people, which is amazing. Like, that's an amazing, amazing feeling. But and those were mostly the pros who were 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 get really, really angry. You know, they'd scammed three or four grand out of someone.

• 1:28:51Steven Bartlett?

  Sounds like a lot to think about, Tom.

• 1:28:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's all of this hidden stuff, you know, you think of Monzo and it's like the hot girl card and some great branding.

• 1:29:00Steven Bartlett?

  I thought it was just a nice coloured card.

• 1:29:02Speaker 00

  Oh my god. I mean, it was serious by the end. Like, 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, it's a lot of money. It's people's salaries. It's, and you, six million customers, you see their whole life. You see the great stuff and you see the terrible stuff.

• 1:29:22Steven Bartlett?

  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 a bit unsafe here?

• 1:29:36Speaker 00

  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 it 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 and I'm going to throw it in someone's face. So that as you left, as you left the office, there was a bit of, you know, a little apprehension there, certainly. But, but no, in general, no, it wasn't something I lived with every single day. But, um, but it was on them, 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.

• 1:30:20Steven Bartlett?

  But now you're enjoying the small things in life, aren't you?

• 1:30:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. Maybe I should go back to therapy now and like, make it even better. Yeah.

• 1:30:28Steven Bartlett?

  What are the small things in life that you're enjoying?

• 1:30:30Speaker 00

  What are they?

• 1:30:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. Walking in the park, I heard.

• 1:30:33Speaker 00

  So my housemate's got a dog recently. That's quite fun. A lot of my friends have just had children. So not me, but you know, I'm godfather to a couple of young kids. My brother has a young girl now.

• 1:30:47Steven Bartlett?

  A disproportionate amount of kids. You're getting, same as me. I am the godfather to all of my friends' kids now.

• 1:30:54Speaker 00

  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. Uh, 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 hike surf, a lot of active outdoorsy stuff. I'm growing plants on my roof, my courgettes have just cut out, which is, yeah, they're great.

• 1:31:23Steven Bartlett?

  What about your relationships? Are you single, taken?

• 1:31:27Speaker 00

  I'm dating.

• 1:31:28Steven Bartlett?

  Dating?

• 1:31:29Speaker 00

  I am dating. I've always been intrigued by dating apps. I worked at one. I've written about 20% of a book on one.

• 1:31:39Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 1:31:39Speaker 00

  But over like the last 12 years, it's not going to get finished.

• 1:31:42Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 1:31:43Speaker 00

  So I've been intrigued by that sort of whole scene for a while. Yeah, and I'm dating and sort of having fun, but I'm not

• 1:31:54Speaker 00

  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. I really enjoy meeting new people, but after six months or a year or something, I'm sort of like,

• 1:32:12Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:32:20Steven Bartlett?

  Have you managed to analyse where you think that might come from?

• 1:32:25Steven Bartlett?

  Like inability to be content?

• 1:32:27Speaker 00

  This is what I should go and talk to a therapist about.

• 1:32:29Steven Bartlett?

  No, because I'm asking for myself. I was just wondering if you figured it out.

• 1:32:32Speaker 00

  I like novelty. I really like new things, new experiences, and I get bored quite easily.

• 1:32:40Speaker 00

  I don't know. Yeah, probably, I think combining psychedelics and therapy to solve this problem might be my next challenge.

• 1:32:50Steven Bartlett?

  Have you ever done psychedelics?

• 1:32:51Speaker 00

  I haven't.

• 1:32:52Steven Bartlett?

  Neither have I.

• 1:32:52Speaker 00

  I would love to. I really would love to.

• 1:32:54Steven Bartlett?

  I wish I could say I had. I'm trying to, but it's just finding the right place and time, I think.

• 1:32:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:58Steven Bartlett?

  So what's, 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 I asked, I think you, well, I think you, you kind of answered yourself at the start about your, your purpose in life now.

• 1:33:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Steven Bartlett?

  What your purpose is.

• 1:33:13Speaker 00

  I don't have one, and I'm totally fine with that.

• 1:33:14Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:19Speaker 00

  I think, looking forward to sort of when I'm sixty, sixty five, 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?

• 1:33:33Steven Bartlett?

  What are those sacrifices?

• 1:33:35Speaker 00

  Like giving up the fun single life, like the bringing up a baby isn't, I've seen it second hand, 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 for that future pay. Lots of people find raising babies rewarding, I've heard.

• 1:33:57Steven Bartlett?

  Oh my god.

• 1:33:59Speaker 00

  I do not, but that sort of future payoff of having, you know, that kind of close family. I can't imagine being sixty five and not having that. But then I'm not sure I'm gonna like 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, 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.

• 1:34:27Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think about, I was meaning to ask you, I'm glad I remembered. What do you think about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies generally?

• 1:34:32Speaker 00

  Terrifying.

• 1:34:37Speaker 00

  I don't understand it. I invested a little bit.

• 1:34:41Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:34:48Speaker 00

  It was too stressful. So there's a kind of the 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 the former bit like the crazy speculation, I was checking the price of Ethereum every 15 minutes or something. It was that, that's just not healthy. So I got out and I'm again sleeping much better now that I've liquidated my crypto positions.

• 1:35:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. What about you? Are you a believer?

• 1:35:36Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:35:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:35:48Steven Bartlett?

  I don't actually invest in Bitcoin at all. 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, I'm a very significant Ethereum holder, one of the top 5,000 in the world.

• 1:36:08Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 1:36:08Steven Bartlett?

  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 even 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 I have a healthy relationship, but I didn't the first time. And also the loss of, if I were to lose all the money, it wouldn't have a material impact on my happiness or life.

• 1:36:35Speaker 00

  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 10% of your like net, net assets, put it in crypto and really leave it for 10 years.

• 1:36:50Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:36:50Speaker 00

  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% to sustain you.

• 1:36:59Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:37:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:08Steven Bartlett?

  So that's, 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 the, you know, with the price. So again, it comes back to that video game mindset. And I think the detachment point.

• 1:37:25Steven Bartlett?

  You know, when I started this podcast, Tom, 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 people a more honest view about what it takes to be a CEO. And because I didn't necessarily, I think that it's been kind of, you know, rock star, 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.

• 1:38:07Steven Bartlett?

  That's why I just needed you to come here and to have this conversation with me.

• 1:38:11Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:38:11Steven Bartlett?

  What is the upside of being a CEO?

• 1:38:14Speaker 00

  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, I'm financially independent now, as are you, right? And it's, I think it, you can create a lot of value, but also like capture some of that value personally like and make money. Like, that's true. You can be, 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 choose who you spend your time with.

• 1:38:57Speaker 00

  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, 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 till they're 60 or 65.

• 1:39:30Speaker 00

  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, or 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.

• 1:40:02Steven Bartlett?

  And the sort of the foundation of all of this, the most important thing, I guess, is to make sure that you're happy.

• 1:40:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I never thought about that. And that wasn't part of my upbringing.

• 1:40:14Steven Bartlett?

  That was always secondary.

• 1:40:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was always like achieving or accomplishing a goal or winning.

• 1:40:21Speaker 00

  And the thing that I think I personally, I don't know about anyone else, any other founders, but I never paid enough attention to whether I was happy.

• 1:40:32Speaker 00

  Which I think was a mistake.

• 1:40:35Speaker 00

  And I'm now quite consciously doing that.

• 1:40:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's probably the downside. So many smart, ambitious people are just driven to kind of jump over ever increasing hurdles without thinking about why.

• 1:40:51Steven Bartlett?

  Did you think happiness was the outcome?

• 1:40:53Speaker 00

  Kind of, yeah.

• 1:40:54Steven Bartlett?

  Thought that was the end?

• 1:40:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, sort of, like, yeah. I didn't even really think about it.

• 1:41:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, it wasn't a... My family's always been quite ambitious and driven and sort of setting goals for, you know, us as kids.

• 1:41:16Speaker 00

  And I know other families where that is not the case. And I think talking more explicitly about 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.

• 1:41:35Steven Bartlett?

  So I don't want to dwell on 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 were saying about your family. And were your parents particularly goal orientated?

• 1:41:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:41:46Steven Bartlett?

  They were very hard on you?

• 1:41:49Speaker 00

  Ambitious for us, certainly, particularly my dad.

• 1:41:54Speaker 00

  And 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.

• 1:42:06Speaker 00

  And so I always, from a very young age, thought that sort of starting businesses was... I never thought about starting businesses, actually I thought about running businesses. So I had a privileged upbringing and my parents were around and sent me to good schools that 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 further and I'd sort of say like, come on. You know, I did well in my exams to point where it's like, there is no more I can do in these things. Like I've got all the top marks. But they sort of didn't believe me, like, no, no, you must be hiding something. Whereas, 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 was the hardest course in the world. So I went to Oxford and studied law, uh, which I'm not sure is super healthy, actually.

• 1:42:53Speaker 00

  So yeah, they're driven, very, very driven and sort of, um, because they, you know,

• 1:43:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:43:12Speaker 00

  And then, you know, with almost the same breath, he's like, yeah, we, my mum had horses. It's like, what the fuck are you talking about this sort of working class upbringing? Yeah, but they, they always worked hard. They moved to Asia very young to make, make a better life for themselves. And they, they did work hard and they provided us as kids with great opportunities. 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, 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? No. The foundational things?

• 1:43:56Speaker 00

  Um, two or three things I know definitely make me happy. Learning, um, new skills, whatever. I really, really, really love that. And, um, sort of like,

• 1:44:10Speaker 00

  My ex was really into, not really, that's unfair. She, is it the languages of love, like the way you sort of express?

• 1:44:16Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, the love languages, yeah.

• 1:44:18Speaker 00

  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 love to cook a meal, make cocktails, whatever it is, sort of like get a house in the countryside, invite all my best friends. That, 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 in time, raising kids, maybe, we will see. That's more of an aspiration than a, I don't know.

• 1:44:56Steven Bartlett?

  Well, listen, Tom, thank you so much for coming and doing this today. I think the thing that you probably know, but you might not fully realise, 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, how much of a, how much of a, reality is so much more comforting than the like, this kind of phony, 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.

• 1:45:40Steven Bartlett?

  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 achieved so much, who are also willing to be vulnerable, are of a very special breed and we need more of those people. So, thank you so much and I appreciate your time today.

• 1:45:58Speaker 00

  Thank you, it's been a lot of fun.

• 1:45:59Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you.