Or 57 year old 
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I’m quite surprised by that article. This is Money is the Daily Mail, so I was expecting something awful, but instead it makes a very fair point. Worth pointing back to the last Times article also, which made the same point and some more besides (that article included extra examples of discussing value, and on all but one metric Monzo appeared overvalued).
It does well make the point that the valuation of shares has to be linked to the underlying business (something I think missed by people here thinking the shares could’ve sold for more ‘because of the demand’). I agree with the article to the extent that I think the shares are slightly overvalued at the moment, but I disagree with their assessment of growth; I don’t expect the share price to fall if the business succeeds, and I think there’s potentially enough room for a reasonable return (if not the massive one some people are hoping for). Granted, the business might fail and I’ll lose all the money but that would hold true whatever the price of the shares, so isn’t a direct factor in this argument.
tl;dr, a stark, if slightly negative, yet ultimately fair article from the Daily Mail. Blow me down.
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I could have done without some of the condescending language used but I thought that the points made were largely fair enough.
Some of the questions asked are also valid, unfortunately, but whether all who invested actually understood what they were taking on can’t be laid at Monzo’s door (not that the article seemed to be trying to do that).
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I agree. Many of these articles seem to be trying to smear Monzo and investors for not “understanding” their investment.
Monzo, for the most part, gave all the tools to do our own research; however, it was at our own behest as to whether we did the research or not.
I invested because I’m confident about the growth potential for the company. But I do think there are real questions about revenue generation going forward. I know Tom wants Monzo to be the ‘platform’ for all of your financial decision-making but it’s difficult to monetise that. And even if you do take a ‘commission approach’ where Monzo takes a top slice of any facilitated transaction, that is a way way more inefficient way of making money as a bank than offering mortgages, loans and other financial products. Ultimately I think there needs to be a reality check that if you want to generate revenue, and increase your customer segment in the over 40s then you need to offer a more diverse range of financial products. Not just facilitate transactions, but actually directly offer those products as a ‘bank’. And when we talk about expansion into other markets, especially the US, the range of the product offer becomes even more pivotal.
I think all these articles can be drawn under the heading of learning points for future rounds etc.
As long as Monzo and individuals learn from this experience(crowd funding) and do not repeat the same mistakes then its fine.
Its if the mistakes are repeated that I’ll grow concerned.
Not the media but for some reason YouTube dumped this in my suggestions.
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Monzo is mentioned at the footnote of a BBC article today about Barclays latest feature.
Barclays customers can now ‘switch off’ spending http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46512030
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Just stumbled across this interview with @tom on Capital Conversations.
Not too insightful (I’m only a short way into the video) but maybe worth a watch: https://youtu.be/AZXGTLvBZaE
Have you seen Tom in the wild recently?
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Really interesting interview and made my mind up that I should invest in the latest round.
I’ve moved this to the Monzo in the media thread where’s there’s already been a bit of chat about this!
Note any further sightings of Tom in the media below! 
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I actually think it’s more negative than you think. The trouble is that it, like many other such articles, misapprehends startup financing. I have seen the same meme repeated widely - that the financials in some way don’t look “good” vis-a-vis some established company. They take a swing (but it’s a miss) at this by calling Monzo “growth” oriented, but the miss is in thinking that profits are somehow being reinvested. While that’s true, it’s not really where the money is coming from - all that lovely lovely VC money is what is being burned, like piling rolls of hundred pound notes into a furnace. But, the point of a startup, and of VC funding, is to get nonlinear profits. Monzo isn’t a hairdresser, or a tools supply shop; the aim is to reach more than a billion people. So the gambit is that millions of pounds are ploughed into Monzo, at what looks like a terrible loss, but in the end they are able to get massive, stabilise the income and profits, and boom they’re suddenly worth billions.
What’s annoying is that all these articles are utterly ignorant of the fact that startups are supposed to burn money like it’s the Weimar Republic, because they can (if successful) have global reach and thus recoup even more money (and VCs hedge their bets by investing in many startups).
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You could almost hear media outlets crying when Tesla turned a profit last quarter. That’s the best example of this approach by the media I’ve ever seen.
I suppose we live in a media age when nothing is a story unless it can be sensationalised.
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I don’t think it is more negative than I think.
What you see as being true of a start-up is actually a pretty recent innovation. It was only really with Amazon that the idea of pumping in vast sums for a return in the long-term was invented, and other than Amazon I’d say that so far only Google and Facebook have also made succesful use of that strategy*.
The amount of money being pumped in is connected to the amount of shares. £85m at £8 a share is a different proposition to £85m at £4 a share. You can have the same amount of money going in but consider one one situation overvalued and the other good value.
Regardless of the amount of money being pumped in, there has to be some underlying worth to a business that justifies the individual share value.
Most startups fail. The vast majority of startups fail. If they all have money pumped into them on these lines, that’s a huge some of money flushed away.
Monzo failing and returning a loss to some degree or other - up to a total loss - is not an unrealistic scenario. If the gambit, as you put it, pays off - fantastic! But, as you put it, it’s a gambit - there’s nowhere near a guarantee it will. So it’s not negative to identify the risk. You may lose all your money.
I don’t want Monzo to fail. I’m invested in the company, both as a user who wants them to succeed so I can carry on using them, and as someone who got on-board in the last crowdfunding round (and has family who got on-board earlier). But I absolutely recognise it’s a risk. That I could lose everything. And to that extent, I’ve invested what I’m comfortable with losing (I’ll be upset, but I have other investments elsewhere to spread the risk).
So, I say again, it’s not more negative than I think, because I’m looking at the worst-case scenario anyway. Rather, it’s a cogent reality check, and I would be concerned that anyone who doesn’t see the risks outlined is potentially overextending themselves in the belief that future riches are more likely than they actually are.
tl;dr, hope for the best, plan for the worst.
*so far
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I think we’re slightly talking past each other. I agree with everything you’ve said there. I just think that the article misunderstands startup finance, and I see that happen in a lot of articles; the difference is, I guess, that with crowdfunding the public has access to these high-risk-high-reward offerings. Btw, venture finance goes all the way back to Fairchild.
Slightly late
‘A bit more over 2 days’
I’ll give that one a miss
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What would Monzo do? - Yahoo Finance
Not much better and on Crowdcube itself!