petition to let monzonauts read ur paywalled content about monzo
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Yeah, Tom was always explicit about it internally, too. But if anything, that reinforces my opinion of him even more - great leaders know when they’ve got something wrong and can admit to it.
But you know, hindsight is 20/20. I suspect he was coming from a place of the company doing so well, and introducing crypto undoubtedly would have come with some very serious challenges. But now, you can look back and see that the benefits of doing so would have mitigated the great COVID crash when the company revenue nosedived when lockdown happened due to no interchange revenue.
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I think he was right at the time. As well as all sorts of huge regulatory problems, it would have brought quite a negative look for Monzo imo as it tried to establish itself as a reliable bank.
Would VCs even have wanted it? If they wanted to fund a crypto business they could, that’s not really what they were putting their money in for.
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VC’s want one thing. A return. They don’t care if you pivot your entire business from what they originally invested in if it turns into something successful. There are many successful businesses that originally began life as something else… Including the place I work now 
You’ll often hear VCs talk about the fact that they invest in people rather than ideas.
Of course there are edges and nuances to this, but broadly speaking, I’ve found that to be true - and at this point I’ve come into contact with many of the biggest VC funds on the planet - there were some serious heavy-hitters behind Sphere!
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When looking at situations like this (or paths not taken in general), I find there are always two separate questions:
- Knowing what we know now, if another decision had been made, would the results have been better?
- But - was there evidence at the time that the decision could have been made the other way?
To give myself as an example - knowing what I know now, I could’ve been quids-in if I’d invested heavily in Tesla when I first started buying shares. But - looking at everything I knew then, I can’t see how I could have possibly made any decision other than the one I did. So even if I did go back in time, there’s no conclusion or course of action I could reasonably draw from the evidence.
In a way it reminds me a bit of what my parents always said when we used to watch Who Wants to be a Millionaire (early years) on TV; it’s only easy if you know the answer.
tl;dr, Knowing what we know now, Monzo missed a trick not capitalising on crypto. But that doesn’t mean it was a mistake or wrong decision from the evidence at the time.
(I still think the end game for crypto is that it’s a bubble that’s going to burst. Plenty of people have got rich in the meantime, but the risk of being the person left holding the parcel when the music stops is huge.)
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I don’t agree, bear in mind they still had to go and get more funding, more investors etc. I think that picture looks very different if you are saying ‘we’re putting a lot in crypto’. It’s a different level of risk and a different sort of opportunity. I think it would have made the raises harder really. The question ‘but what if crypto collapses’ is surely on most VCs minds too.
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Yeah, I agree. And with how Monzo was/is perceived, it’s hard to imagine how we could have dealt with the support for customers who got left holding the bag. You can put in all the educational onboarding you want and you’re still gonna get people who think it’s a good idea to put their savings into CrapCoinPlus3000 because someone on YouTube told them it was gonna go to the moon.
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Isn’t that a metaphor for all crypto though? 
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Where can I invest in this? 
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I think the truth there is that you’d simply court different investors with different risk appetites. If the current state of the market is anything to go by, nobody seems to have a problem raising money for most crypto efforts.
Perhaps the ideal strategy would have been to position a product as a processor gateway a la MoonPay rather than a customer facing investment portal. Since Monzo already had a processor built from the ground up, there was potentially opportunity there.
Send 10 ETH to my wallet and we’ll figure something out. You’ll get 100 billion coins. Bargain
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i photoshopped this but the image is too large for me too put on the forum >:(
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Photoshop → ‘Image’ → ‘Image Size’ → reduce image width to reduce overall size → save. Upload.
Like this one:
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Great welfare move for staff, however, explains why CS is not so great. They’re all on leave 
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I seen this other week in their jobs pages. Such a good move, just need a 4 day working week now and it’ll be best place on the planet. (Or in space, being a Monzonaut)
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If I had 3 months off and they coped without me, I’d worry about the security of my role!
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Our department recently hired a bunch of new people, it would be hell if in a few years time it was suddenly chopped in half again.
The article is paywalled. Does it go into any detail about them hiring temps or anything to cover when people take all that time off?
We don’t get the 30 days unpaid leave in COps. It’s only available in a very limited set of circumstances and certainly not for 30 days
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So it’s a privilege for the bosses and not the workers, then?
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