WOW!!!
THEY EVEN HAVE A BLOG POST ON HIGHLY PERFORMANT CONTINUOUS DELIVERY SYSTEMS!!!
THESE ARE MY KIND OF PEOPLE!!!
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No Monzo name there, but also applies to 
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Very interesting thread
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Thanks for sharing, @kolok !
Nice to get some insights on what was happening behind the scenes at that time.
Hope we’ll get to know more in the future.
For those interested, Tom already blogged about the early years.
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Certainly Plan C got basically zero public exposure, probably for the best given the inevitable reaction
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PDF pls? i cant view tweets thanks to elan musk
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The selling the business (or at least finding a safe harbour) was a known in early 2020 if you were around Fintechs at the time, and the likely purchaser(s) were known, one of which had put in two bids, I think the new thing was the winding down the business bit, as no one thought it was THAT bad.
TS has done an amazing job on the business, you talk to people at Monzo, and it’s best described as ‘the adults are now in charge’.
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It was the chatter in the industry, that Stripe was ready to get the business they had been after for 3 years https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/20/monzo-ceo-tom-blomfield-was-clear-to-stripe-founders-we-have-no-plans-to-be-acquired.html
Didn’t Lloyds want Monzo at one point too?
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yep, most major banks have certainly had a sniff, NatWest went and decided to pivot to being a fintech, and JP Morgan went and built their own
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Pretty much this. People who start a business are not always the best people to mature the business to profit.
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gotta say sujata is a beast and i am scared of her. extremely well respected. when I see “sujata” I think “works hard as fuck to make it happen”
my opinion on TS is meh, good experience but he has not personally affected me much unlike Sujata 
(Thans @kolok)
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Also I will say I think the article is missing some key people in terms of CSuites:
- Jonas - one of the best. Actually understands tech and Monzo literally wouldn’t be able to move fast if it wasn’t for him. Sujata and TS are cool, but without tech Monzo would be nothing
- Iain Lang - This guy really really knows risk. He sometimes writes reports internally about risk and how Monzo is positioned in the market, and how we can take on certain risks to improve our chances.
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It does mean that those on these boards who were concerned about Monzo’s viability on the back of their auditors expressing “material uncertainty” over its ability to survive as a business as a going concern in its 2020-21 annual results, were right to do so.
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Suspect the issue related more to the main revenue line being destroyed in March ‘20, and a funding round evaporating at the same time.
Think the counterfactual is COVID doesn’t arrive, the early 2020 funding round is a significant raise, and the interchange line continues at a steady rate.
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Tom and TS kind of sound like Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. One a visionary and innovator (but probably not going to know the margin of a product), and the other a an expert at keeping a business stable, maximising profit, and managing through consensus and finding the right people for a job.
It sounds like Tom probably left at the right time, and TS has been able to stabilise the business.
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Tom was tremendously unlucky to be at the helm during Covid, presented with critical issues he had little power to remedy. TS has done a great job, but the narrative shouldn’t be Tom had in any way done a bad job prior to TS taking over, far from it. Monzo is where it is because of both of them and for very different reasons.
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Yes, this seems like a highly revisionist take to me, too. The team, the tech, the product process - all those existed already.
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