Absolutely agree that no one involved in this is going to be unbiased here.
It doesn’t look great for tom I have to say:
He was hired by Anne and then tried to oust her as CEO
He went to Passion and told them he couldn’t work with Anne, rather than having the guts to go to Anne first and say it to her face
He then tried to get her to sign over the company
He then tried to get her to take responsibility for the companies debt when she agreed to resign (this is the bit that irks me the most). This seems like kicking someone when they’re down.
He didn’t even go face to face with Anne about this himself. It seemed to be all over email
There was undoubtedly interpersonal conflict leading up to that point. It’s highly unlikely that Tom went to Passion out of the blue and said “I can’t work with Anne”. To me it seems more probable that things happened and people butted horns and others in the company started talking and Passion asked Tom “What’s going on here?”
The only thing that’s clear to me was that Passion had decided Tom was the horse to back in terms of approach to business and building a bank. Everything else is supposition - in my case I’ve applied Occam’s razor to the situation.
(For clarity, I’ve not been able to read Anne’s article yet, I’m going from the info quoted and discussed here.)
The story I heard was tom was fired from Starling bank and then poached the staff and funding. I heard this story from multiple employees at monzo btw.
Looking in from the outside, it looks a bit suspect that lots of key staff would just be talked into moving to a rival if they didn’t have themselves have concerns about how Starling was being run. The article doesn’t going into much detail around that, conclude from that what you will.
I don’t know too much about early stage startups, but is it usual to have so much debt? £1m when there’s only a handful of employees and no tangible capital outlay feels big to me:
Then, the day after New Year’s Day, a serious issue emerged. Route 66 raised concerns over more than £1m of debt with KPMG and PwC. It wanted to renegotiate the value of the business down from £12m to £9m. In a matter of hours, the deal fell through.
Anyone with any more experience than me who can offer insight?
Writes about the theory behind startup debt, and uses $1m for the examples, so maybe not too unusual? So could be nothing than Route 66 being more conservative, or wanting more immediate returns/greater potential returns from increased equity.
Presumably KPMG and PwC had done £1m worth of work with payment due when they had a larger equity raise or achieved authorisation as a bank or similar.
Anne addresses this by explaining that Tom’s splinter business had the funding from Passion Capital, while Tom’s departure ensured that she was going to run out of money without being able to raise any (since she had no CTO and it would take time to find a new one, and time to find funding, and she needed to get a CTO first otherwise nobody would invest - this all added up to too much time and not enough money).
This is when she went back home to Marlow to think about what to do, as she felt like there was no obvious way forward - and it could have been the end of Starling.
All of this was obvious to the employees, and she says that Tom seized the opportunity to “sell” his new business to the other employees whilst she was not in the office.
It seems like that part is probably true, as if you were an employee you would want to work at the company which had funding - not the one which could be going bust within the week!
Does anybody else think this looks really bad for tom?. He seems to want to portray a kind personality to the public, but the above actions seem very cut throat.
I have to say, I like Anne and want to believe that she isn’t totally lying - I don’t think she would do that.
But I also like Eileen and Tom too.
I believe that almost everything that they have all said is true, aside from minor details which may be slightly embellished or misremembered. Anne’s account seems basically accurate, based on what we already know in the public domain. It seems Tom was quite cutthroat, but then even Anne herself admits some naivety and says she should always have at least been aware that Tom might want to be CEO.
It does read as though Anne thought of Tom as a friend and that’s partly why she never thought he would stab her in the back. It’s easy to see why she regards it as a betrayal. But then Tom probably did just think “business is business”, and this sort of thing goes on in Silicon Valley all the time.
In terms of “was he fair to Anne?”, I would find myself siding with Anne as I’d like to think I wouldn’t have behaved the way Tom did.
