Moment 30 - These Qualities Will Help You In Business: Tom Blomfield

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

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  What was it about you that was disruptive though? I want some specifics.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  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 jewellery items on a, like a massive jewellery website, there must have been a thousand, to 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 that, but they didn't want that because they were billing by the hour and that had only taken an hour of my time rather than 20 hours. And so they could only bill me out for an hour.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  They're like, no, no, no, go back and do it by hand. So it, that kind of stuff just drove me crazy and I was always just looking for ways to automate, ways to do things better. And I guess that's what led me into entrepreneurship.

• 1:02Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:12Speaker 01

  I mean arrogance, naivety and arrogance, I think, in no small part.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  I'd already built a company called GoCarders, which is a payment processor. So that sort of taught me that, you know, three young guys could get access to the payment system and actually move money around. And banking was a step up from there. It was, it was more regulated, more complicated. But I had the background in payments and I was an early NatWest user, or rather, when I was young and they were very old, I was a NatWest user and I was deeply, deeply disappointed. And I think like any founder, really a huge sort of dose of naivety. You know, you look at a problem and think it's probably, I think if I knew now what I knew, if I knew then what I knew now, I would never have done it, really. If I knew what the amount of pain and heartache that would be involved, I would never have started, but I didn't know that. And so I had a huge amount of self-confidence, huge amount of naivety and just assumed that I could figure it out.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  And I think we got a really, really long way. And I mean, the company's still doing fabulously. So I'm incredibly proud of, of what we built.

• 2:11Steven Bartlett?

  I find that point about naivety so interesting because it almost feels like founders like yourself need to be. Deluded on one end in terms of their own confidence.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:21Steven Bartlett?

  Right. Because if you look at the stats and all the odds, they're clearly against you. So founders like yourself seem to be, I deleted sounds like a negative word, but it's like, for me, I'm saying it in a positive way. Almost like deluded to the, or naive to the stats and the probability of the success.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:37Steven Bartlett?

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

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Listen to some feedback. I mean, a lot of the feedback I got in the early days was this is impossible. You can never do it. You know, go back to a day job. So I think you do have to be incredibly optimistic as well. But a little bit like investing, I'm doing a little bit of investing now. I think you, if you have a lot of experience, the downside is you've seen these ideas fail again and again and again. And it's really hard to then leave that baggage behind and look at a company. I looked at one yesterday. It's like, I've seen that model fail four times, not my, you know, I wasn't running it, others were running it. But to have a fresh enough mind to think, okay, maybe the timing's different. Maybe the founding team's different. Maybe the technology's changed. This can now work.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:37Steven Bartlett?

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

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:42Steven Bartlett?

  What are the attributes you're looking for?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  I mean, the, 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 a, an immediate benefit. And if, you know, if I could talk to my, if I could talk to people in the sort of age 12 to 18, I would basically just go and say, learn to code. You're going to have a really well-paying career for the rest of your life and it'll, it's a great step into entrepreneurship.

• 4:13Steven Bartlett?

  Are you technical?

• 4:14Speaker 01

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

• 4:17Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, wow.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Built websites. I mean, I was never, I studied law, not computer science, but I can, I can code. There's still code I wrote probably in the Monzo codebase somewhere. I think it puts the emojis into the, the push notifications, but um.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so being technical, I think, is just the easy answer. More fundamentally, I think, just being really, really determined and resilient, seeing, as you said, an immovable object and either finding a way sort of round it or over it or under it or just straight through it. You know, some that being indefatigable, basically, I think is, is the single biggest predictor of success.

• 4:51Steven Bartlett?

  You, you strike me as someone that has great confidence and I imagine that's come from, as you kind of alluded to with Go Cardinals, you've built evidence over time that you could do things. So I, I, I sometimes think of confidence as like a self reinforcing cycle, either upwards or downwards.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  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, 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, you know, I like to think I know a lot about a lot of things, but I realise I don't. And so my, I'm still a confident person, I'd guess, but if you put me in front of my 27 year old self, I think you would see two different people.

• 5:35Steven Bartlett?

  Maybe less naivety, maybe that.

• 5:37Speaker 01

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

• 5:41Steven Bartlett?

  Because I, I was saying that because there's a lot of, 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 verbalised equally big dreams.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  I think I'm also just really impulsive. So I, I think quite self confident, but I was.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  I've taken quite big life decisions without very much reflection. And that's worked out really well. You know, I'm hugely privileged.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  I've grown up in the UK, which I think is an enormous privilege compared to a lot, you know, people in my position, but growing up in rural Africa are not going to have the same opportunities. I have great education. I had parents who supported me and I knew I could take risk because if that risk didn't pay off, I have that safety net. And so, yes, I was confident. I think, yes, I was impulsive, but that was enabled from a place of huge privilege because I could take the risk. I actually think people in this country with great supportive families don't take enough risk in general. I think people go into pretty safe careers in law or consulting or whatever. And I think they could do more interesting things, have more impact, you know, make more

• 7:04Speaker 01

  money if that's what drives you by taking more risk. I just don't think they do. And I think I put myself on the risk-loving end of the spectrum. And so I've quit jobs and moved countries with like hours' notice. I started Go Cardless with Matt Hiroki because I'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 interview. And we did. And we got the offer to do Y Combinator and their investment about three days before my McKinsey start date. So I just sort of said, ah, this sounds fun. I'll do the startup thing instead.