TS Anil
Appearances
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I want you to pause there for a second because those numbers are part of the proof point about this idea of mission and business. Can I just ask, sorry, how does that compare to a traditional high street bank? High Street Bank, which has disproportionate revenue contribution from mortgages, will probably be 300, 400. On the retail side? On the retail side. Wow. But that's mortgages.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
If you capital adjust, if you risk adjust, if you expense adjust, it obviously thins out very quickly.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Two answers for that, maybe. The first is just what that revenue mix looks like, right? So we're targeting and very close to these numbers. We're about a third, a third, a third. A third is transaction-based revenues, interchange, FX, and so on. A third is on-balance sheet lending, when customers take out an unsecured borrowing product from us, a loan or an overdraft or monzo flex.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
And then the last one-third is what I describe as good fees. And I say good fees because this is not stuff where we make money when customers make mistakes. It's not gotcha fees, right? These are fees like subscriptions when someone takes out a subscription product from us or on the marketplace of the original mortgage in the future, the interest margin that we make on the savings product.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So that's the last one-third.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So one of the products that we were really interested in building out was energy switching. And we shut that down, I want to say a year or two years ago now almost, because a few things happened, right? We thought it was a logical extension of the financial control center, helping people sort of get good choices and make good decisions.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Also amazing business on the origination side, if you can be that switching provider. So the market turned, right? When caps on energy costs and so on came in, right? That market changed and we just prioritized it lower. So we may get back to it if it becomes a thing again. That never quite worked out.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I mean, the big learning is to make sure that you stay close to customers always and are solving problems that they're seeing versus something that you think is intuitively right. So constantly learning, iterate fast. And I guess lastly, just the recognition that we're operating in a very dynamic market. So you have to roll with it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I mean, we can take this back to 2020, right? The early weeks after I had started, it was important to do two or three things. The first was have high conviction in the two or three things that we were going to do. So focus and then make sure you got those across the finish line. Number one. Number two, I think it was this thing about playing across different horizons.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
First horizon being stuff that you can ship in the next six to eight weeks. And then stuff that you knew had longer lead times, but you needed to get started now if you wanted to meet that thing that you wanted to launch in three quarters from now. So building a clear view of how do you play across these horizons and get going. So the subscriptions product that we launched in March,
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I want to say early July of 2020, we'd taken many runs at that product internally, right? And it was still spinning, but we hadn't brought it across the finish line. So that was one where we said, okay, digging in, we're going to ship this in four weeks. Let's figure out everything that we've learned, make the right decisions and just crack on. And we did.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So that one was a, this is a four week horizon thing. We're going to get it done. The longer horizon, an example of one, are borrowing business.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
We'd already launched loans and overdrafts, but it was clear as COVID kicked in, we needed to hit the pause button and really build that for scale, which means invest in world-class underwriting tools, in understanding how the customer journey would work much better, and all of the controls associated with building a borrowing business at scale. So that one, we said, okay, get started.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
at crazy intense pace, knowing that it was nine months away before we could ship it. But you need to invest in those longer lead time things as well if you're going to get it done, because if you just prioritize the what can we get done quickly, you'll forever be in a tactical mood without actually building out the business that you're setting out to build strategically.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
From a shipping perspective, that year was also about stuff that was not visible to customers. You know, product debt and tech debt is well understood in the industry. But we define this idea of controls debt, right? So when a company is scaling as fast as we were, you need to make sure that, again, back to the point about a regulated industry, that the controls scale alongside as well.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
And you don't want to pick up debt on the control side.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Well, it's one part of the life of a CEO of a bank. Here's the way I think about it, though, which is that, and I say this inside the company a lot, if we were running an e-commerce business that we wanted to run at scale, we wanted to build Amazon. If we sat around whinging and wringing our hands and complaining about warehouse logistics and, oh, my God, the supply chain is a bitch to handle.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I mean, you don't have a business then. I can't believe returns. Exactly that, right? If it's the business you're in, own the whole damn value chain and get great at it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Do you agree? No, I don't agree at all. They may be the hardest, they may be the most annoying and painful things, but sadly they're not. How do you run a business and build it to scale if your team is not aligned with what you're trying to do? How do you run a business where people that are closest to the decision, closest to the customer, are not freaking empowered to do the right thing?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
How do you build that? I get it. They're big words and they're annoying words and they're bandied around all the time in ways that like strategy and synergy and, you know.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I'd say there was two things that we needed to build real alignment on early. At the more senior levels, there was this false binary of, are we a tech company or are we a bank? And I say that's a false binary in the same way that I wouldn't expect the world's best e-commerce companies to say, are we a retailer or are we a tech company? You're both, but straddle it all.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So you don't frame a false binary that results in saying, I like this, I don't like that. So at the senior levels, there was that misalignment. I think at more junior levels, there was a misalignment about this idea of a mission and a business plan. And I would say a mission without a business plan is a bumper sticker. Anybody can write a strapline.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
And our mission is going to be powerful because it's back to the business plan. making money work for everyone. That standing alone without a business plan to make it happen, right, is a strapline. You and I could write like five more in the next two minutes. But that with a business plan that reinforces it makes it incredibly powerful.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
We were launching a new fee that we were going to charge customers for something. And we were, of course, doing it the Monza way, which was like wickedly transparent to the customers. They knew exactly how and when we were going to charge this thing. But I remember someone asking me in one of the meetings when we were discussing it,
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
that yes doesn't this seem like it's off mission like we shouldn't be charging for this and you know charging a fee feels like it's not on mission and i remember saying then if we choose to not charge for things where we transparently and with the customer and where we believe we're adding value to the customer if we choose to not charge it and we see that as somehow being a mission thing to do
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
It's effectively saying I'm doing charity at the cost of the VC. I shouldn't take any credit for it. I'm taking the VC's money and scaling an unprofitable business to be even more unprofitable. There's no good that comes out of that. What do you not monetize today that will be the biggest monetization lever in the future?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I still think transaction-based fees will be the biggest thing we do, but it's already there. So it's not as though it's a new thing we're building out. I still think it's going to be a big thing as we expand the ways in which people pay and get paid. That's probably still going to be the biggest thing we do. There's subtext in the question that you're asking me, right?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Which is like, is there the one thing? And here's the deal. When we're building a product that is about meeting all the needs that your wallet has, it's by definition going to be a diversified revenues, which by the way, is a high quality business model because it isn't hostage to economic cycles and credit cycles or interest rate cycles or any of that. You build it like a quality business.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I'm not a customer. Can't blame you for trying.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I think the when do we go international is now. We're public about the fact that we're investing in building out a strategy for Europe. We're public about the fact that we have a small team in the US building product for the US, for the American customer. We've had that for a while now. Not really. In the first iteration of the US, what we spent our time on was applying for the banking license.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
And we pulled out of that process when it felt like regulation there was unlikely to grant any fintech players licenses. So we pulled out of that process. That was the sort of first version. Was it the right decision to pull out? Oh, totally. Because I mean, nothing has moved on the regulatory front on that in the couple of years or three years, even since we pulled out.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So yeah, that was absolutely the right decision.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Because we're not looking to go in with a banking license. The US fintech industry has this well-established model of a partner bank, a sponsor bank, and most of the US fintech industry operates with that model. That's what we're doing.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So working with a partner bank and building out product for the customer and focused on the things that we do really well, which is work close to the customer and nail what will help them make better decisions. Why has no one won the US yet? It's interesting, Harry. So I've spent a lot of time looking at talking to different US fintech companies. There's lots of hypotheses. I have a couple.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
One is too much cheap capital chasing US fintech. Because what that I think ended up doing was create a context where most fintech entrepreneurs felt like they were being incented to grow users. And the number of businesses that we look at in the market, which is a mediocre product, sort of fueled by CAC marketing dollars, but the actual business, the actual product doesn't resonate.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
The actual product is not doing what they want it to do. And the monetization is coming from early wage access or some like one piece of it, as opposed to all of the other sort of talk about the business is staggering. So I feel like money chased the wrong things and people sort of built businesses that were sort of CAC fueled businesses in effect. But there's another reason, right?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Which is US fintech has been a developed industry for a while. In being a developed industry for the last couple of decades, what you have is really great fintech companies that have solved thin slivers of needs, right? So for P2P, there's a Venmo or there's a Cash App. For point of sale lending, there's someone else. For something else, there's someone else.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So it's a very fragmented fintech industry, but which is where we see the opportunity. The idea of bringing it together in a single place for the American customer seems very attractive.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Yeah, so the honest answer, we're still in a bit of discovery mode on that why will they come question. Is it not the same as the UK?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
No, I don't think so. It's a very credit hungry market. It's a market where a lot of people have been trained to apply for credit. And that's the hook product. I mean, ultimately, we think about it across, you know, why will they come? Why will they stay? And then how do we make money?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
We're still early days in sort of pounding the table and saying this is a high conviction answer to that question.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I mean, credit is the obvious hypothesis, as I said, right? Because if you look across the fintech industry, both in terms of how people are monetizing it and what's driving user growth, credit and its adjacent products, like early wage access and so on, seem to be a big part of the industry.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So that's what we're sort of working on and getting our heads around, like what that real thing there is and what's the best product for the customer in that context.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
It does. And that's why I said we're trying to figure out what's the differentiating thing that we can really uniquely bring.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So I think it's possible to be insanely ambitious and very disciplined at the same time. So it sounds like a catch-all, but let me explain what not doing that would look like. Not doing that would look like we look at the US and say, we have an okay product. Now let's just go buy growth. So that's being ambitious, but not being disciplined.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
We're saying, we're going to build a great product first, not burn a whole bunch of cash on the way to getting there, not painting buses and doing crazy things anytime soon. Build a great product, see that customers are using it, it's resonating with them. And then sure as hell, be incredibly ambitious about building scale in that market.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So Europe is still building out the strategy, still working with the regulators, still sort of building out what we think the game looks like. In the meantime, we have people building product for the US. So in some sense, this is back to my sort of play across horizons point, right? Because you're planting flowers and bushes and trees all the time.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
On a snapshot basis, this year, it's more like 3 in 7 in 90. Wow. 3 in U.S. ? Yeah, because I don't need to spend that just yet, right? I could take the opposite approach that says, no, no, no, I want to show user growth. I want to show numbers and I want to sort of manage this for a short term uptake. When does it become like 20?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
On the other side of feeling like we've got the high conviction product. Absolutely. Not shy to invest, not shy to aim for big numbers and build an extraordinary business in the US, just like we have over here. But it's a little bit cart before the horse to say, why aren't we spending 20 today?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Here's the thing about Europe. Obviously, it's easy to see it as a single market, and it is in some ways, and it's not in a whole bunch of others. So when Europe is a different question than sort of which markets and so on, that's the work we're doing right now. Which do you think is the most important in Europe to win for you? I think in the long arc of time, everything, right?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
We want to be big across Europe. Sequencing it as a function of where do we think size and odds of success sort of match up better. But the thing that we will do in the US, in Europe, just as we've done over here, like what won't change? Build a single global tech stack on the back of which we can build amazing products and ship them. Number two, build close to the customer, right?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Understand what the customer wants and build what's right in that context.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Too early to answer that question, Ari, but let me also play public about the fact that we're choosing Ireland as our beachhead into Europe. That's the regulatory regime we want to work with and that's where we want to domicile out of.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Yeah. So when I was answering those two criteria, I was answering in the context of where do we want to enter and win? Where do we want to domicile out of? And Ireland is an attractive market. It's not the biggest market. And so, of course, we want to do more than that. We'll start there.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
It's different countries with different makeups of what attracts customers, what is the real pain point they feel, what segment is more attractive or more underserved. Getting those nuances right is not trivial. Here's an ultimate product strategy.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
If we were planning to have a thin layer product that was thin ARPU, scaled to lots of customers, but fundamentally met a very narrow need, you can do that a lot more easily. But what we're looking to build is this idea of a business with high engagement with customers, extraordinary economics up and down the P&L,
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
And in sync with the mission that we have, you end up at a different place in terms of how you think about the strategy, right? You don't think about planting vanity flags, but you think about it in terms of like, how do I build businesses of scale everywhere?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So two things. One is the way we define engagement is usage. I'm not defining engagement as how much time do you spend thinking about your money, right?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Right, so that's not the thing. Engagement is how much do you use Monzo, right? We don't look at it, so we look at it in terms of weekly transacting usage, not just revenue active. You could have a lazy balance with us and be making money for Monzo. I don't think of you as an active customer. Are you using the product? So that's engagement. Why is that important?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Well, because it's correlated with the high ARPUs that you see. Those are average ARPUs. You can imagine what the highly engaged customers, even within the base, disaggregate that, what those outputs look like. So engagement drives greater economics for the product itself, but also the ability to buy more product from Monzo.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
An example, we talked about investments a lot today, but when we launched our investments product, I literally did one press interview. And by that evening, we had 150,000 customers add themselves to the waiting list for the Monzo investments product. Distribution is the outcome of something. And I'm saying that it's the outcome of engagement and trust with us.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
But that incredible customer base is not an accident, right? And that's the point. It's come about... Because we've built that love and trust. It's because warm, fuzzy words like mission are not warm, fuzzy words for us. It's about saying, how does it actually connect with the customer? What's the real problem we're trying to solve? And how do we stay maniacally obsessed with that?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Because it drives all those second order effects. But back to your question about engagement and why is it important? So that's one, right? But greater engagement is greater economics, ARPU, etc.,
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
There's a second piece of this, because what we're effectively building out, Harry, is a consumer platform where engagement is measured in the trust that customers place with Monzo, the love that they have for Monzo. By the way, here's a trivia question. Do you know how many times more likely it is that a customer uses the word love when they're writing a review about Monzo?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
seven times more likely than anybody else. And this is in the context of an industry where love and banking, love and financial service just don't go in the same zip code. But we're building this consumer platform where that engagement is measured in trust and love and doing more with Monzo. And on the back of that, we earn the right to do so much else for customers
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
You know, to answer that question, I'm going to have to back up a little bit, Harry, back up because, as you know, I've spent many years in different sorts of financial services companies and banks around the world. Through it all, I had this big unscratched itch of really thinking that someone needed to reinvent the sector.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
No, disagree. It's a difficult industry. If the only thing that mattered was the product, how do you reach customers? So you have to create the virtuous cycle. In our case, that virtuous cycle is the virality of it, is the tools that make people want to talk about us. So you've built a great product so that you create the love, but then you need things to happen around that.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So it's not just about the great product.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
It depends on the industry. Sure, there's some sectors where that's probably true. Do you think it's important that you're first to market in the markets? We're 500 years late to banking.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
We have the luxury of time. We have the gift of time because we have plenty of capital to build out our ambition. And not only that, we have extraordinarily supportive investors, patient, but also supportive as in would give us more capital if we needed it. So it's not a thing for its own sake. We know we'll make a great public company one day and we'll get there when we get there.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So two things. One is we already know how to operate in a highly regulated context. So the gap between a tech company like us versus another tech company that just doesn't have to deal with scrutiny is pretty wide. So the gap for us from here to becoming a public company is not insane. Let's start there. But why become a public company at all?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I mean, you and I could come up, we'd take some time to come up with five names of great brands, great companies that we respect that are not public, right? So we feel like at some point it's good for the business, it's good for investors, it's good for the brand to eventually become public anyway. So that's what...
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Sure. Yeah. So I guess it's just saying why ever, not why now. So yeah, why ever, I think it's a good question. And to the extent that that's not what we're obsessing right this second, there is a why ever thing that we should answer as well. Yeah.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I knew you'd ask that. Of course, it's the question you need to take a swing at. Well, you know exactly what I'm going to say.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
But it's too early for us to call it, Harry. I mean, that's the honest answer. I mean, I could say it lots of different ways, but that's the honest answer.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I mean, this is a home market. We're a huge brand in the UK. So there's lots of reasons to think about the UK.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Someone needed to reinvent how customers and money worked with each other. And in the bigger places I had worked, I tried to do it. But it was clear that the legacy players were never going to fix it. With the best of intent and the best of wanting to do it, it was never going to get fixed by incumbents. And the history of incumbents transforming their industries is anyways very, very sketchy.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Both the last government and this government are doing a bunch of things to improve that. There's been no dearth of policy changes that have come about and so on. And we have the gift of, I said, we have the gift of time. We have the gift of choice as well. And we'll wait and watch. There will be a time when we need to make that decision. It's not now. You asked me about tropes, by the way.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So we could go back. That was a better one. Get back, get back. This one, you know, I genuinely don't think I have a better answer than to say, you know, we don't have to make a decision today and we'll make it when we need to make it. That's the honest answer. I could say it in longer ways, but that's the heart of that one.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
But, you know, to the tropes was this, you know, you asked me this thing earlier as well about... Common misconceptions.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
How about that? So, I mean, it's all the rage that debate about, you know, founder mode and so on. And, you know, is there survivor bias in the analysis and how people talk about it and so on. But here's how I think about it. I think to build a great company at scale for the long term, a leader has to be good at a few different things.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Really good at setting the ambition for the company and a product vision to go there. Be able to operate really close to the product and the user experience and the way value is created. And then three, be able to scale execution, which means build the right leadership and the team and the culture that allows you to continue to scale at bigger and bigger numbers.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So you have to be good at all three. And some of these qualities get dubbed as one thing or the other. I think a debate about it's this is the only thing feels to me like a trope, right? I think of it like a triathlon, right? You have to swim, bike and run if you want to win this at scale.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So any discussion that feels like, oh, all you need to do is be great at swimming feels like kind of totally missing the point.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I'm sure it was difficult in some ways early on, but it was difficult only in that I was an anomaly. Most people, investors included, were used to seeing a 20, 30-year-old in a founder pitch mode. In that sense, hard, because there was an expectation of what they expected to see. And then I rock up, and it's different. Earning credibility and trust takes a different path. Mm-hmm.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
It was easy to see me as someone with lots of experience in big companies and a safe pair of hands. But would I 10x the company? And the team needs to believe that. Investors need to believe that. So hard in that sense, sure. But what's life without taking challenges like that on?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Yeah. And that was pretty quick after coming in. I mean, we did the down round within minutes after I started, like three weeks after I started. And then we topped up that down round over the next six months.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
It's not wrong. You know, in an industry where everybody likes to talk up the valuations, the interim valuations, of course, it's a thing and you need to manage that. You need to explain to people why. But importantly, as the leader, you have to see through the storm to the business you're building on the other side of it. And this was a storm.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
And we needed to know that we will, you know, we will right the ship. But really, this is not about safe pairs of hands righting the ship, but it's about building that business that you're going to build on the other side of it. So, of course, it's hard. to pretend otherwise would be silly.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
And for all of the obvious reasons of legacy tech and legacy mindset and business models to protect and this and that and the other. So it had been a thing for me for the longest time. So it wasn't an accident that I ended up in the conversation with Monzo in the first place. Because I'd been seeking to do that thing, be a part of a team that was going to change the sector forever and ever.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
But point is you have to play the long game and you have to have that conviction as the leader that you're going to get it done because everybody's picking up on your energy. Everybody's picking up on the cues of your conviction about it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
This last one we did.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Why do you think that was easier? Because anybody looking at our story by then could see the fact that we had been on a doubling K-Good revenue trajectory for a while. Anybody looking at the business could see everything that we talked about in terms of customer engagement and love wasn't warm, fuzzy, fluffy, but meant that our R pool was significantly higher than any competitor.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
The stickiness of revenues is higher than anybody else. I could see the dynamic of that business, could see that we're growing users as aggressively as we are, but it's not because I'm burning cash. It's because people are recommending us. So the dynamics of the business were clear.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Things that we'd been saying for three or four years were not just narrative, but were visible in every way you cut and looked at the business. And so our focus was really on getting quality investors. It wasn't just about the color of money. It was about who do we want on the journey with us.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So we're at the cusp of, you know, in the next round, whenever we do it, we'll get the big institutional investors. So right now we have a few. We have GIC and others who are institutional investors. But I think our journey looking ahead is not VC names.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Because you have this, let me rub my hands in glee and let's get into it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
We did an energy switching is probably the best example of it that we already closed down. Nothing else today.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Well, let's have some fun at Anu's expense. Okay. She's never going to be true. She's an old favorite. She's the reason I'm here at Monzo, actually. Really? Yeah. She was the one who actually first connected me with Tom and Jonas. Wow. What do you believe that most around you disbelieve? So, you know, when you're building a business with as much ambition as we are, there's always naysayers, right?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So the journey of people disbelieving in the early days of Monzo was, oh, this company is never going to make it, right? We just have to look for an easy way to sell the company and get out. then there would be things like, oh, it's going to be a great and cool app, but like really be like a few million customers and that's it. Then it was, oh, you have customers, but you'll never make money.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Or you have revenues, you'll never make profits and so on and so on and so forth. And it's been fun proving each of those naysayers wrong. So even now, when I say to you that we're, when I look ahead, I think globally, there will be a handful of companies only
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So that commitment and belief in the mission was very real for me. So encountering what Monzo was when I started, of course, you've talked about all of the things that were wrong or broken or difficult. But if I looked at the hand I had to play, there were some good cards in that hand. we had found a magical product market fit with our initial current account product.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
in the next decade that will truly be doing this business at scale and managing people's money, transforming that relationship that customers and money have with each other. And on the back of that, build businesses with extraordinary economics and growth. And we're playing to be one of them. Saying that out to you, there's going to be people that will naysay about, you know, lots of bits of that.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
It's going to be fun to prove that set of them wrong as well.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
No, I could. But I think that trope about it being a lonely job is real. I'm surrounded by the best people, right? I have an amazing village. And yet, I think any CEO role has an element of loneliness in it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I'd aim to build a global fintech company that would be extraordinarily mission oriented and a generational company that is not just amazing for customers, amazing for the economics of it, but also amazing for its employees.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So this is not one that weighs on me or anything, but it's obviously one that I think about and I'm learning about more and more is this IPO decision. It's an unmade decision, timing, location, all of it. And so we know we have to make it at some point. It's not one that weighs on me, but it does require that we think diligently about it in the coming months and years.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Cliched but real, Apple.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Because its magical design meets magical functionality meets like extraordinary business at scale. The most valuable company in the world and still a brand that inspires intimacy and trust with everyone. You know, you asked me about Apple Watch coming in. I'm in that ecosystem. And I love being in that ecosystem. It connects across my life to the whole point about an operating system.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
It does in the background so much for me in terms of protecting my data and making me feel like I can trust them. Yeah, all of that comes together there.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Judgment without kindness, opinions without curiosity.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
As a world, I think we are. It's become easier to shout out an opinion and harder to say, tell me more, learn more. What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you joined Monzo? That it would take us two years to get a really good coffee machine in the office. I would have just brought my own early on.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
She thought I was crazy. You know, she wasn't sure which was the bigger question to ask me why I was doing it or how I was doing it. Because I would start my day at two or three every morning, which is already 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock in the morning here in London. Did it feel nuts? Totally felt nuts.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
You know, I had this thing that I would joke with the team and with everybody at the time, this idea of, you know, what type one fun and type two fun are. So type one fun is when you're having fun in the moment, right? Great concert, great party, good whatever. Type two fun is like that camping trip gone bad, which, you know, is going to be an amazing story later.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
We'd found a brand and a tone of voice that had really resonated across the country. So in addition to that, all of those problems you talked about were real, right? We were running out of capital and there was COVID on our revenues that had fallen off of a cliff. Monetization was lagging the user growth. So every version of problem that you can think of, we certainly had that as well.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
And, you know, it's going to be fun when you look back at it and recount it to yourself and you remember that you lived through it and all of all of the crazy that happened. So, yeah, every day was some combination of type 1 fun and type 2 fun. Every single day, I'd keep score of how many face punches did we get today? How many body blows did we get today?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Because when you're in an existential time for a company, there's all of that happening all the time. How do you deal with the body blows or the face blows? But like, just... Quite literally the way I said, like this idea of type one fun, type two fun for me would be a joke about it. I'd say, oh, that's definitely going in the book. That's going to make a great story, right?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
It feels like shit right now. But, you know, you abstract yourself out of that moment and actually look at it with a hindsight.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Oh, dear God. There's so many. you know, an investor that I would have spent months working on in 2020 and they're that close and I know that it's going to be pivotal for us and it changes our story because on the back of that I will be able to raise more capital and they don't pull the trigger and I would be just like, oh,
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
and it always feels personal it is personal so yeah no dearth of those in any capital raise especially if it's but that's not type 2 fun I mean that in a nice way there's no fun about that I've been rejected many times too for fun but yeah not for public record but many of those are great stories we actually recount and tell ourselves remember that and my team will say to me you should never have gotten out of bed for that call you should never have gotten out of bed for that size of check
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
And I'd be like, dude, the question would be what would I get into bed for, not what would I get out of bed for even, right? Because you just had to do what you had to do. So no event in isolation may feel like that, but that phase feels like type two fun. That phase of, you know, the whole world's sort of crashing around you. There's not many believers.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
And yet you have this conviction that you're going to build this thing out with this amazing team with you. And as I was saying earlier, you sort of see through the storm. It's an extraordinary privilege to have an experience like that.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So, I mean, here's the thing. There's a false binary in what you're saying, right? Because there's this belief that a values-oriented culture can't also be a high-ambition, high-growth culture. And I actually don't, I reject that binary.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
But work-life is a part of an overall value system because ultimately, I believe that if you hire amazing people, put them into a culture which really values them and is an inclusive culture, people work incredibly hard against that mission. And it's a lot of things that add up to this culture where you care about customers, not because they're a number, not because they're an ARPU.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Not because they're sort of a stepping stone or a vanity metric, but because you say, okay, let's build it right. And I think if you get that magic right as a company and as a team, the outcomes of that are the quality of the business that we're building. I mean, the proof points are here.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
But if I looked at the full hand, this is what I wanted to play. And I guess at a deeper level, I've Never been shy to run towards a fire. Never been one to sort of balk because it feels difficult. If anything, it feels more like, yeah, I'm going to give this a swing. I'm going to give it everything I've got and it won't fail because of something I did not do.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
If I was saying this to you four years ago, you'd have been right to be even more skeptical and say like, what the hell, they're never going to happen. But look at where we are now.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I'm proud of the team, Harry. Inherited some amazing people that I've got to partner with. You know, Jonas, the co-founder, who stayed on as CTO. Sujata, the CEO, who joined us right after I'd started. And all of the amazing people that we've hired since then. And the amazing original Monzonauts that are still here building out the dream. I'm insanely proud of all of us.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
The odds were decked against us. The naysayers were having a field day. And it's amazing to actually build out what we've built.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Yeah, a lot feels to me like it has not changed. The size of my ambition for what we think Monzo will be has not changed. If anything, it's only been amplified. At each point of inflection in the business, what we have done as a team is bent the curve upwards.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So that's just it. You have to have a really clear sense of scale of ambition. You have to have a really clear sense of the product vision that you want to build out. But on the journey to getting there, right, you hope like hell that you only inflect to raising the ambition. It's like rock climbing, right? You're always focused on the next ledge, right?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
You know that you want to get to that summit, but your focus is on the next thing and the next thing. That's exhilarating, right? It's fun to take stock for a minute and see how far you've come, but really what you're thinking about is the next thing.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
T.S., tell me a song or a track you'd recommend I listen to now. I wish people asked me that more often. I always have music playing in my head, so there's always a track there.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So I'm a cheap date with dancing. There's like, you could play like 500 different tracks and you wouldn't have to convince me to get on the floor. Then talent is not correlated with desire to be on the floor with enthusiasm. So that's a low bar. I don't think there's a one track you could play when you have 500 tracks that would do it for me.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
But different question is what, if there's a deep track that sort of touches my soul, that's a different question. What would it be? There's a few, but I guess the one I'm going to go with is, you know, Eddie Vedder with Pearl Jam. He did this insane collaboration in the 90s with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. You know who Nusrat is?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Nusrat is a Pakistani Sufi music singer, probably one of the best musicians of the 20th century. Pearl Jam, so Eddie Vedder, grunge rocker from Seattle, and Sufi Qawwali singer, Nusrat, collaborated on this album, which was the soundtrack of the movie Dead Man Walking.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
There's a deep sense of like, I'm going to try and make this work. What was the single hardest thing that you had to embrace in terms of those challenges? There's some situations where you have to sharpen focus and just do the one thing. This was not one of them. I wish it was like this was the one thing we did that sort of unlocked everything else. And sadly, it was not.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Because it was a set of interlocking problems that we needed to raise capital because we had limited runway and we wanted to fund the ambition. But to raise capital, investors needed to have conviction. To give investors conviction, we needed to ship product and drive some momentum. To drive momentum and ship products, I needed the regulators to trust us.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
To drive that trust, we needed to fix a set of controls to keep them commensurate with the size of company we'd already become, the size of bank we'd already become. And then to do all of those things, you needed the right people. Every one of these things was like an interlocking problem in a way that it wasn't about doing the one thing.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So now you look at this whole landscape of things that needed to dig in and like, you know, get right. A lot of people and teams freeze in the space of that kind of overwhelm. We chose not to freeze. We said, we're going to dig in, look at everything that needs to happen, build a plan. We started with like a hundred day plan.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Just go after each one of those things, like chip away at each of those things. there isn't an answer other than to say we dug in on the whole damn thing, right? We say we're going to put our arms around this whole thing, dig and grind away at each of these problems, and then you start to unlock things.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So in being interlocking, the good news is that if you get a couple of things right, you start to create positive and virtuous cycles as well.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
In the arc of time, you have to get all of these things right. So sequencing it, you know, should we have gotten a license later in a life cycle versus earlier? Here's the thing.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
In the early days of a company, when you're building the foundations of the company, you build a great tech stack, you figure out the product market fit and the brand and how you want to go to market and all of those things. But in a regulated business, you also put in place the muscles to operate this at scale in a regulated context. Getting that right early on has meant a few things.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
It's meant that we've earned real trust from our customers. It's meant that we know how to do that and continue to scale. We know that getting it right actually creates a moat around our business in a very, very important way. Hindsight is a lovely thing, and we could debate what sequencing is better or worse. But here we are, the largest UK digital bank and so much more.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Sure, let's talk about cryptocurrency trading. That's a good one where we chose to not do it because letting the average customer buy 100 cryptocurrencies because we could make a buck off of it just felt not on mission at all.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
And it was clear to us that if we wanted customers to trust us and do what's right for them and their long-term financial interests, we were going to have to take them on a journey. The goal was, of course, we will offer all sorts of asset classes in time, but really build it around helping customers understand what they're doing. And so we chose to walk away from that.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
of of the millions of customers investing in cryptocurrency ranked number 75 because they saw a tweet does that sound to you like a customer that understands that currency and the reasons why that that particular currency has got tailwind of growth no but i'm as far right free market as you can come and so i think that you can't be the arbiter of consumer knowledge and saying you are smart enough versus you're not smart enough and so i'm not going to i don't disagree for a minute
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Because this is not about us being paternalistic. This is about us presenting to the customer the information to help them make a good decision. So if I want to have them invest, I think we should give them the tools to make good investing decisions. Do you think it was the right decision on crypto? If it wasn't, if we had relitigated that, we would have launched it in the time since.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So it wasn't a one-off decision. It wasn't a point-in-time decision. We've chosen not to do it yet. How do you think about stocks with that in mind? Sure. As I said, ultimately in my mind, we want to give customers a full range of asset classes to invest in.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I think it's just about sequencing and I'd rather have as part of a broader investment proposition, I think we should make all of the choices available to the customer. But how do you think about the right sequencing then given the many options you have in front of you? Sure. So with investing,
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
like we've done with every other product that we've built we built it with really going deep in understanding what our customers wanted what we learned from customers was that the two reasons most british customers most customers in the uk stay out of investing and keep their money in cash by the way one of the largest savings versus investments markets in the world is because of two things that one they think it's only for rich people and two they don't understand it
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Now, if you take those two insights, what we did with the product and the reason we're on the journey is we said, OK, let's start, let's solve those two problems. Let's make education available to customers in the app. So we demystified and it's not terms and conditions or disclosures. It's like, let me tell you what you need to do to make a good decision here.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
And we said we can start investing with as little as £1. The idea was to solve for getting this vast majority of people. We have north of 10 million customers now, Harry, to get started on the idea of making long term decisions with their money. So we've started with mutual funds and in time we will do ETFs and all sorts of other asset classes.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
And so to your point about sequencing, along that journey, the other asset classes will come and they'll be the right time to do it. In the meantime, we're not chasing just a fast buck.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Yeah, so the quick backdrop though of this is that we intend to meet all of these needs of a customer. Budget, borrow, spend, save, insure, invest, all of that in a single place. That's what we're building. The sequencing is driven by many things, right? It's driven by when we feel ready in terms of everything that we need to do to launch that product.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Where does it fit into our journey of sort of building out the economics of the business? What are customers saying they want right this second? So a bunch of different things end up informing that particular sequencing. Mortgages, as an example, I don't think we will ever do it on our own balance sheet, but we already are making mortgages visible to our customers. So it's not a Monzo mortgage.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
They've taken it from somewhere else. In the app, leveraging our technology, a customer can actually track their mortgage. Our mortgage is good business. Let me reframe that question. What part of mortgages is great business? The problem to be solved is at the front end of the customer journey. And we will solve that problem and we will originate for other balance sheets.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
And there's enough, you know, large balance sheets in the country with lots of lazy capital and liquidity that will happily distribute mortgages through us to our customers. So I want to play in the front end portion of that. You know, I would rather not deploy our capital and our balance sheet to funding the mortgage asset itself.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
It's the front end where we can differentiate, where the customer sees pain. Let's solve that problem, make the capital free high margin fees off of that and give the asset to someone else.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
The challenge is going to be defining what's a product versus what's a feature and stuff like that. But we don't seek to monetize every product and feature. As an example, the gambling block.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I don't know if you know about this feature that we built a few years ago, three, four years ago, coming out of a customer feedback about someone who had spent too much money online gambling the night before because they kept topping up their account. A customer service agent that was talking to them had this idea that maybe we should just give them the ability to block those transactions.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So customers can set up a gambling block on their account, which says that don't let me top it up. And if I choose to unblock it, I have a 24 hour cooling off period. The staggering numbers, Harry, more than 600,000 customers have turned that on. And it's not something we seek to monetize. In fact, we actually went and lobbied with the government saying every bank should make it available.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
So that's an example of a product feature that we're not doing it for the sake of monetization, but it's good for the customer and we will do it. A whole bunch of budgeting tools are free. We don't price that. The thing over here to get, right, which is the heart of, I can see that skeptic look on your face, we have to dig into this one.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
At the heart of this is rejecting this false binary that is your mission-oriented or you're a great commercial business. I think of that as a false binary because I think done right, both of these things reinforce each other.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
Talking to you about our mission and what Monzo really is good at, what we stand for and what we invest in every day, what we have built on the back of that is a business where the largest UK digital bank, but not just in terms of numbers of customers or revenues, but in the quality of those customers,
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
The engagement that we get from those customers tracked in weekly active users or daily active users is off the charts and leagues ahead of our competitors. The commerciality of it is, as an example, we add over 200,000 new users a month. The vast majority of those are word of mouth in an industry where people spend 100 quid to acquire an account or more.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
The engagement levels that I said mean that the propensity to buy every new product from Monzo is off the charts. Do you care about it being the primary account? Of course we do.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
not for its own thing i had um antoine manel who's the head of growth at revolut on 20 grocery and he was like no we're like a snackables you know try it try it and then over time but we don't care necessarily at first bite different question then do i care at first bite no i'd like to get that at first bite i'd like people to come and bring their whole relationship to monzo in the first instance and many and like large segments of customers do people that are new to banking coming of age new to the country
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
I don't have another bank account in this country, by the way, bring their entire relationship to us. And that's amazing. But I'm also fine if someone wants to try us out and use us for more and more because the unit economics of that make commercial sense. And it's a great way to make sure more people touch and feel Monzo.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
The reason main bank matters is not just because of the fact that you get more share of wallet and higher ARPUs because you can get that same ARPU, even if someone's not using you as the main bank, but takes out another bigger product from you, you can get similar ARPUs.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
But because when more of the relationship comes into Monzo, the ability for that customer to actually manage their money better, for us to add value by actually connecting the dots for them inside of the product is massive. And most customers' anxiety is also driven by the fact that their freaking wallet is fragmented. That I borrow here, I save there, I invest here, I insure there.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
That is high anxiety for most people. And it doesn't let them optimize and make good decisions. But when you sort of consolidate that, when you bring it into a single context, there's so much you do on the back of that. Can I ask, what's the ARPU today? 145 pounds. 145 pounds. On the retail side. On the retail side. And 550 on the small business side.