Tom Blomfield — Entrepreneur, investor, and founder of UK digital bank Monzo (and earlier GoCardless); one of the UK's best-known fintech disruptors.
The gist
Tom Blomfield tells the story of how Monzo was founded after he resigned from Starling Bank and its CEO fired the entire company, leading 13 of 14 staff to start over in a gin bar. He candidly describes the toll entrepreneurship took on him: years of crushing anxiety, sleeplessness, a broken relationship, and bordering on depression that only lifted when he left Monzo. He reflects on Monzo's brand and growth, the failure to reach profitability fast enough, and the constant scrutiny of the British press. He also reveals the darker operational realities of running a bank, including financial crime, account freezes, and death threats from criminals whose accounts were shut down. Throughout, he stresses vulnerability, the importance of choosing co-founders carefully, and his late realization that he never prioritized his own happiness.
Big reveals
- After Tom resigned from Starling, CEO Anne Boden called an all-hands meeting and fired the entire company, prompting 13 of 14 staff to found Monzo together.
- Tom says he was fired twice in six months at Starling, was never paid, invested and lost his own money, and there was never any paperwork.
- Monzo was effectively founded at a gin bar called Ask For Janice on Smithfield Market, where the fired team played speed chess for two days deciding what to do.
- Tom describes waking each morning forgetting his life for three or four seconds of calm before a 'crushing weight' of anxiety returned, a feeling that lasted a year and a half to two years.
- He split up with his girlfriend because of the stress, describing himself as a 'monster' to be around during that period.
- Tom reveals an employee who had run Silk Road dark-web operations as a student was arrested after three and a half years working at Monzo and jailed for seven years.
- Criminals issued death threats, including threats to throw acid in staff faces, requiring full-time security at Monzo's office.
- Within about a week of leaving Monzo, Tom was sleeping perfectly through the night and his anxiety vanished.
Things worth remembering
- Monzo's earlier company GoCardless was reported at a roughly $970 million valuation at its last round.
- Monzo grew to five or six million customers having spent less than 10 million pounds on marketing, an average customer acquisition cost of about 1 pound 50.
- Monzo published its two-year product roadmap publicly to build trust, which people thought was bonkers.
- Monzo's high-quality customer service cost about 12 to 13 pounds per customer per year.
- The BBC's Watchdog brought 12-plus frozen-account cases to Monzo; each time the bank showed the customer's criminal background and the story was dropped.
- Tom kept a separate pink Nokia (dramatized as a 'red phone') in his bedroom linked only to Monzo's automatic alerting system, ringing only when the bank went down.
- Fraudsters used modified Ford Transit fuel tankers, paying 1p at the pump then bouncing the payment, to steal up to 10 grand of petrol per run before Monzo detected the pattern.
- Monzo spotted spend patterns indicating sex-trafficking rings and worked with law enforcement to rescue trafficked women.
- During COVID, Monzo's revenue dropped at least 50 percent in about a week and a 100 million pound funding round had its terms pulled the Friday before lockdown.
- Steven Bartlett describes himself as one of the top 5000 Ethereum holders in the world, holding for 10 years without checking the price.