Monzo founder rues CEO mistakes, staff cashing out millions won't mind
Monzo is about to make its staff tens of millions of pounds richer. It announced a secondary share sale yesterday, allowing staff to cash out their units of stock pay, as its valuation rose from £4.1bn ($5.2bn) to £4.5bn. It's been a period of hypergrowth for the banking fintech, but founder Tom Blomfield revealed it hasn't all been smooth sailing in a blog post earlier this week.
Blomfield wrote about the virtues of staying in "founder mode;" when executives and managers at a startup remain actively involved with its product, rather than focusing on management and strategy. This can be a hard thing to maintain.
He made plenty of mistakes as Monzo's CEO. The fintech trialed "some pretty wacky management structures" in which middle management had no involvement on the output of their subordinates. He said that decision was "totally insane and overlapped with our period of lowest productivity by far."
Blomfield also says he "hired a number of bad executives" in his time at Monzo, but current CEO TS Anil wasn't one of them. He said he spent "about a year" ensuring he was the right fit, doing an extensive amount of reference checks after "deeply regretting" not doing so in the past. He now calls Anil one of "the best executive hires I've ever made."
It was Blomfield's excessive focus on the product that led to him leaving Monzo. He said "he couldn't ever really disconnect from the company," and treated each criticism as a personal attack. Evidently, "founder mode" is not a one-size-fits-all solution.
Blomfield says he was a "far from perfect CEO", but Monzo's early employees sitting on a wealth of stock units won't mind. Blomfield may not mind too much either. According to Monzo's most recent confirmation statement on Companies House from March 2023, he owns roughly 4.2% of Monzo stock, which would be worth £18.8m at its most recent valuation.
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