Moment 30 - These Qualities Will Help You In Business: Tom Blomfield

00:03what was it about you that was disruptive though i want some specifics um whenever i'm i see a problem i think this is in common with anyone who starts a business i look at the way something's done and immediately start thinking of better ways to do it rather than just doing what i'm told i sort of scratch my head and think no this doesn't make sense to me why are we doing it this way that we could do it in this other way which is 10 times faster i mean i one of my first ever jobs was to with another analyst go and count all of the jewelry items on a like a massive jewelry website there must be a thousand to do a tally chart of the price range and this guy started doing it by hand so I scratched my head and wrote a little excel script to basically scrape the website and just tally them up and go there's your results and that but they didn't want that because they were billing by the hour and that had only taken an hour of my time rather than 20 hours and so they could only bill me out for an hour like no no go back and do it by hand so So that kind of stuff just drove me crazy.

00:56And I was always just looking for ways to automate, ways to do things better. I guess that's what led me into entrepreneurship. What gave you the conviction and the confidence that you could take on such a mammoth industry with Monzo? I mean, arrogance, naivety and arrogance, I think, in no small part. I'd already built a company called GoCardless, which is a payment processor. So that sort of taught me that, you know, three young guys could get access to the payment system and actually move money around.

01:29And banking was a step up from there. It was more regulated, more complicated. But I had the background in payments and I was an early NatWest user or rather when I was young and they were very old, I was a NatWest user and I was deeply, deeply disappointed. And I think like any founder, really a huge sort of dose of naivety. You know, you look at a problem and think it's probably, I think if I knew now what I knew, if I knew then what I knew now, I would never have done it, really.

01:53If I knew what the amount of pain and heartache that would be involved, I would never have started. But I didn't know that. And so I had a huge amount of self-confidence, huge amount of naivety and just assumed that I could figure it out. And I think we got a really, really long way. And I mean, the company is still doing fabulously. So I'm incredibly proud of what we built. find that point about naivety so interesting because it almost feels like founders like yourself need to be deluded on one end in terms of their own confidence yeah right because if you look at the stats and all the odds they're clearly against you so founders like yourself seem to be i deleted sounds like a negative word but it's like for me i'm saying it in a positive way almost like deluded to the or naive to the the stats and the probability of this success yeah totally but also self-aware enough to listen to feedback and to not be blinded by their hypotheses listen to some feedback i mean a lot of the feedback i got in the early days was this is impossible you can never do it you know go back to a day job um so i think you do have to be incredibly optimistic as well but a little bit like investing i'm doing a little bit of investing

02:57now i think you if you have a lot of experience the downside is you've seen these ideas fail again and again and again and it's really hard to then leave that baggage behind and look at a company um i looked at one yesterday it's like i i've seen that model fail four times not my you know i wasn't running it others were running it but to um have a fresh enough mind to think okay maybe the timing's different maybe the founding team's different maybe the technology's changed this can now work so i think actually the benefit of being naive and even being quite young in your career is you don't have that baggage of knowing how it failed the five times before um which i i find super interesting when you're looking at founders in your investments now from your own experience of being a founder yeah what are the attributes you're looking for i mean the the really simple one is being technical being able to write code i think is just a huge huge leg up and all of the founders who aren't technical and there are many great ones um i think their biggest problem at the early stage is finding a technical co-founder so that's just a an immediate benefit and if you know if i could talk to my um if i could talk to people in a sort of age 12 to 18 i would basically just go and say

04:06learn to code you're going to have a really well-paying career for the rest of your life and it'll it's a great step into entrepreneurship are you technical yeah i learned to code when i was 12 or 13 oh wow websites um i mean i was never i studied law not computer science but i can i can code i there's still code i wrote probably in the monzo code base somewhere i think it puts the emojis into the push notifications but um uh yeah so being technical i think is just the easy answer um more fundamentally i think just being really really determined and resilient seeing as you said an immovable object and either finding a way sort of round it or over or under it or just straight through it you know some that um being indefatical basically i think is is the single biggest predictor of success you um you strike me as someone that has great confidence and i imagine that's come from as you kind of alluded to with GoCardless you've built evidence over time that you could do things so and i i sometimes think of confidence as like a self-reinforcing cycling the upwards or downwards um i think i was more confident when i was 28 than i am now for sure and i think that comes with experience um i think you you take enough knocks that you

05:17start to and you realize you don't know i think at 27 28 i thought i knew everything and now i realize I you know I like to think I know a lot about a lot of things but I realize I don't um and so my I'm still a confident person I'd guess but if you put me in front of my 27 year old self I think you would see two different people maybe less naivety maybe that yeah exactly yeah right I've seen the failures a few times now because I I was saying that because there's a lot of um a lot of young people in my in my dms that are dreaming big dreams like yours but they would just never have the confidence or conviction to pursue them so i was wondering is that i'm trying to get to the i guess the crux of what made you so starkly different from every all of the young people that have at least verbalized equally big dreams i think i'm also just really impulsive so i i think quite self-confident but i was um i've taken quite big life decisions without very much reflection um and that's worked out really well for me you know i'm hugely privileged i um i've grown up in the uk which i think is an enormous privilege compared to a lot you know people in my position but growing up in in rural africa are not going to have the same

06:27opportunities i have great education i had parents who supported me and i knew i could take risk because if that risk didn't pay off i've had i have that safety net and so um yes i was confident i think yes i was impulsive but i that was enabled from a place of huge privilege because i could take the risk and i actually think people in this country um with great supportive families don't take enough risk in general i think um people go into um pretty safe careers in law or consulting or whatever and i think they could um do more interesting things have more impact you know make more money if that's what drives you by taking more risk i just don't think they do and i i think i put myself on the risk loving end of the spectrum um and so i've quit jobs and moved countries we you know with like hours notice um i started GoCardless uh with matt hiroki because i quit my consulting job to go to a bigger consultancy and in that gardening leave i just got bored i had three months off and they said let's start start a website and i said yes and then ycombinator said come out and interview and we did and we got the offer to do ycombinator and their investment about three days before my mckinsey start date so i just sort of said

07:36ah this sounds fun i'll do this startup thing instead