£1M in 96 seconds.
Not an Olympic Game record, but Tom Blomfield's first great achievement at the helm of Monzo in 2016 (Monzo). The Briton wasn’t a rookie; he had under his belt the experience at Auctomatic, GoCardless (as a founder) and a stint as Starling Bank’s CTO. The founder and CEO had an intuition: to apply the lean startup approach for the development of its banking products (infomation-age.com). Thanks to its full transparency and customer focus, the challenger bank received amazing feedback from its users who stuck with it… and they lived happily ever after.
Not quite so.
In May 2020 Tom stepped down as CEO role, taking the role of president. In June of the same year the scaleup completed a down round. Layoffs followed. Finally, in January 2021 Tom announced that he will quit the digital bank (sifted).
THE TAKEAWAY
Talking about his entrepreneur drive: “[...] the things I enjoy is working with small groups of passionate people to start and grow stuff from scratch. [...] Getting to profitability and IPOing it [...] are huge exciting challenges, just honestly not ones that I was interested in or particularly good at.”
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