If someone has a personal emergency they should try contacting Crowdcube Nominees first, mentioning their circumstances and asking them for the current process for getting approval to sell Monzo shares. If they don’t answer emails in a reasonable time then try phoning them. They should be able to assist. They’re paid just to manage our shareholdings so it is their business, even if you know there’s going to be an element of “monzo board needs to approve it”. They should still be able to guide you as to how to go about that, if not facilitate it themselves.
Out of -what was it - 40-50,000 monzo crowdfunding investors, how many will have had a bankruptcy in those 10 years or lost a job, signed on and told dwp they own monzo shares. How many will sadly have died and had their estates come for the shares or had other unfortunate reasons to no longer be able to continue holding the shares? In 10 years there will probably have been hundreds of sales in these emergency circumstances. It isn’t impossible to sell them, you just need to go the same route the lawyers would do if you were bankrupt or passed away, rather than asking on online forums then realising it’s very difficult and forgetting about it for a year or two until you decide you want to sell them again and then asking the forums again then realising it’s still very difficult and forgetting again 
As far as getting large amounts of crowdfunding investors to lobby monzo for fast liquidity… I don’t think that is going to happen. Most investors invested in later rounds where the returns have not been as fantastic so it’s not such a big deal for them.
In the early rounds where much bigger percentage returns lie, most investors didn’t invest that much so the return isn’t that much of a big deal for them either. There are probably less than a thousand investors sitting on a paper profit that is a seriously life changing amount for them so that means tens of thousands who aren’t sweating too much about it.
Don’t get me wrong every investor will be excited at the prospect of having the choice to take profits if they want to, but that’s what the IPO is for. Other crowdfunding investors aren’t breaking down the doors of the Investor Relations team because they can see the company is working towards an IPO which will bring us liquidity in time. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
Let’s not make this seem like a big scandal that early backers have been done wrong, taken for granted and ignored. We wrote a few comments on a forum and received free stuff from a startup. It was fun and we have shares in a successful company to show for it. They don’t owe us anything and we aren’t employees so aren’t at the front of their minds when private investment rounds come around.
Yes it would have been amazing if there had been an occasion when they said “let’s include those early crowdfunders in this private sale alongside the employees”, however there is clearly a lot of complexity in including a different class of shares and investors and having to think carefully about what information needs to be made public in order to invite 40,000 crowdfunders to join a private round. I understand why some investors feel hard done by but also I see why they haven’t done it.
Every crowdfunding investor is sitting on some form of profit and an IPO will hopefully make all of us happy.
Hope it happens this year. Best of luck to you all.
