four Monzo alumni as its founders: Tristan Thomas, former VP of marketing; Hugo Cornejo, former VP design; Josh Garnham, engineer; and Robin Bilgil, also an engineer (both soon to go full-time on Packfleet).
Bye @hugo 
Didn’t realise @hugo had left.
I thought it was quite good
or reroute orders so that they’re delivered to, say, the café a customer is sitting in.
and if you’ve been on a shopping spree, the doorbell can be disturbing Zoom meetings all day to announce a delivery
This just seems like something with no scale. Courier is 2 mins from your house and you go “Oh soz mate, I’m at Starbucks 10 miles away” or “Sorry, I’m in a meeting. Can you just wait 30 mins while my boss goes over everything again?”
That’s fine if you’ve paid £50 for delivery and the driver has 3 drops to do all day.
Parcel delivery is actually incredibly complex and the routes are planned for the best way of delivery all the parcels in the quickest way, not waiting around or diverting because you’ve gone for a coffee 
There’s something really annoying about the media assuming that just because some has worked at “X” company we need to give their cool new start up unquestionably good publicity and sing their praises just because they worked at “X” company before.
It’s not really going to happen, there’s a reason you can’t just pause a delivery or change it the last second.
They’ll not set the parcel delivery world on fire with this idea, they’ll soon realise it’s too expensive to allow customers to just change stuff last minute
It’s not exactly hard to open your front door of you’re in a “zoom meeting”. Sorry one minute there’s someone at the door, or I’m having technical issues I’ll leave the meeting and rejoin
It just sounds so arrogant and self entitled. We worked at Monzo and can therefore solve whatever we want.
Oh wow I didn’t read all of it, just went back.
Allow customers to try on clothes whist the courier waits.
What planet are they on, that courier will deliver hardly anything whilst they sit waiting at every stop.
Jesus 🤦
Depends how much extra the customer will pay for that
Nothing extra, there’s a reason customers choose fast fashion brands, that’s for how cheap it is to get an item.
But what, you might wonder, does this pack of digital banking veterans know about logistics?
Not all that much — but they do know a thing or two about building a fun customer experience, says Thomas, and that has been sorely lacking in parcel deliveries.
Exactly why it will fail. Logistics isn’t easy. Customers (that is not us, that is the company you order from) will chose who tenders the cheapest contract. What this startup is offering can never, ever be the cheapest. Rescheduling a delivery because I’m in a zoom meeting? Please!! For a paid upgrade maybe DPD will be offered which will give you a one hour slot. But you can’t change it. For a reason! Logistics is necessarily complicated.
Not something I’d pay for either but there’s probably some who would as part of the premium service
Spot on @Revels!
So many of these new startups at the moment seem to be setting out to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist rather than any of the problems connected to the chosen industry that do exist. Neobanks really had identified problems with the industry and we’ve seen the results across the board, that’s why they were so successful. Inventing issues just so you can ‘solve’ them using the knowledge you have rather than solving the needs of the industry is a recipe for disaster from the outset.
For business customers, priorities are “speed, ease and price,” says Thomas.
The priority for any business customer I’ve ever known (though granted I only know a tiny proportion 
) after ensuring it gets there on time (not necessarily fast, just when it’s due) and undamaged are not “speed, ease and price,” but price, price and price. I’ve no idea where this notion that everything has to arrive at your door within 4 minutes of ordering has come from.
I can’t believe that so many people here are using Monzo because of the improved user experience but can’t see the potential of this service.
As for the “lack of experience” comments, these are exactly the sorts of things that the people running the incumbents said when Monzo was founded. Maybe you missed this but only 2 of Monzo’s 12 person founding team were experienced bankers and Tom wasn’t. It’s possible to learn how logistics work. It’s also beneficial to approach a problem with a fresh pair of eyes, to avoid doing things the way they’ve always been done.
One of the first tests VCs apply to new ideas is “does this sound crazy?” - think AirBnb - (another is “how big is the addressable market?”) so it’s encouraging to hear comments like this. Of course this isn’t going to be easy and it might not work but if the idea was obvious then someone would have done it already. And this team has already shown that they can do the ‘impossible’.
But that could be countered by saying that Monzo has not made a penny profit (whilst its competitors have), its value was cut by 40% and that the founding team has been replaced by people wIth baking backgrounds because of it.
Monzo’s approach to growth was optimised for growth, which was the right strategy to take while VC funding was readily available. Unfortunately the pandemic changed that and I expect they’ve switched to a new strategy now but that doesn’t mean it was wrong.
There’s no way that the current team of executives would have come up with the marketing strategy that made Monzo so successful in the beginning for example.
For it to be financially viable, each delivery charge would have to be hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds.