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

what was it about that destructive though i want some specifics um whenever i'm i see a problem i think that this is in common with anyone who starts a business i look at the way something's done and immediately start thinking of better ways to do it rather than just doing what i'm told i sort of scratch my head and think no it doesn't make sense to me why are we doing it this way we could do it this other way which is 10 times faster and i one of my first jobs was to with another analyst go and count all of the jewelry items on a massive jewelry website it must be a thousand to a tally chart of the price range and this guy started doing by hand so i scratched my head and wrote a little excel script basically scrape the website and just tally them up and go there's your results and but they didn't want that because they were billing by the hour and they'd only take an hour of my time rather than 20 hours and so they could only bill me out for like no no go back and do it by hand so that kind of stuff just drove me crazy i was always just looking for ways to automate ways to do things better um i guess that's what led me to entrepreneurship what gave you the conviction and the confidence that you could take on such a mammoth industry with monzo um arrogance but naivety and arrogance i think in no small part um i'd already built a company called go carters which is a payment process that sort of taught me that you know three young guys could get access to the payment system and actually move money around um and banking's a step up from there it was more regulated more complicated um but i had the background payments and i was an early natwest user or rather when i was young when they were very old i was a natwest user and i was deeply deeply disappointed and i think like any founder really a huge sort of dose of naivety you know you look at a problem and think it's probably i think if i knew now when i knew if i knew then when i knew now i would never have done it really if i knew what the amount of pain and heartache that would be involved i would never start if i didn't know that and so i had a huge amount of self-confidence huge amount of naivety and just assumed to like figure it out and i think we've got a really really long way and the company's building fabulously so i'm incredibly proud of what we built i find that point about naivety so interesting because it almost feels like founders like yourself need to be deluded on one end in terms of their own confidence right because if you looked at the stats or the odds they're clearly against you so founders like yourself seem to be i believe it sounds like a negative word but it's like for me i'm saying it in a positive way almost deluded to the or naive to the stats and the probability of the success but also self-aware enough to listen to feedback and to not be blinded by their hypotheses listen to some feedback i mean a lot of feedback in the early days this is impossible you can never do it you know go back to a day job um so i think you do have to be incredibly optimistic as well but a little bit like investing i'm doing a little bit of investing now i think you if you have a lot of experience the downside is you've seen these ideas fail again and again and again and it's really hard to then leave that baggage behind and look at a company um yesterday it's like i've seen that model fail four times not my i was running others running it but to um have a fresh enough mind to think okay maybe the timing's different maybe the family team's different maybe the technology change this can now work so i think actually the benefit of being naive and even quite young in your career is you don't have that baggage of knowing how it failed the five times before um which i find super interesting when you're looking at founders in investments now from your own experience of being a founder yeah what are the attributes you're looking for i mean the the really simple one is being technical being able to write code i think is just a huge huge leg up and all of the founders who aren't technical and there are many great ones um i think the biggest problem is just finding a technical so that's just a an immediate benefit if i could talk to my um i could talk to people in sort of age 12 to 18 i would basically say learn to code you're gonna have a really well-paying career for the rest of your life and it's a great step into entrepreneurship are you technical? yeah i learned to code when i was 12 or 13 on the websites i mean i was never actually law or computer science but i can code there's still code i wrote probably in the monster code base somewhere i think it puts emojis into the push notifications but um uh yeah so being technical i think is just the easy answer um more fundamentally i think just being really really determined and resilient seeing as you said it and then move an object and either finding a way to sort of round it or round it or just straight through it it is some that um being in the tactical basically i think is the single biggest predictor success you um you strike me as someone that has great confidence i imagine that's come from as you kind of alluded to a card as you've built evidence over time that you could do things so i i sometimes think confidence is like a self-reinforcing psyche upwards or downwards um i think i was more confident when i was 28 than i am now for sure i think that comes with experience um i think you you take enough knocks that you start to and you realize you don't i think at 27 28 i thought i knew everything and now i realize i you know i like to think i know a lot about things but i realize i don't um and so i'm still a confident person i guess if you put me in front of my 27 year old self i think you'd see two different people maybe less naivety maybe that's right yeah i've seen the failures a few times now because i i was saying that because there's a lot of um a lot of young people in my in my dms that are dreaming big dreams like yours but they just never have the confidence or conviction to pursue them so i was wondering is that i was trying to get to i guess the crux of what made you so slightly different from all of the young people that have at least verbalized equally big dreams i think i'm also just really impulsive so i i think quite self-confident but i was um i've taken quite big life decisions without very much reflection um and that's worked out really well i'm hugely privileged i um i've grown up in the uk which i think is an illness privilege a lot you know people in my position but growing up in in rural africa not gonna have the same opportunities i had great education i had parents who supported me and i knew i could take risk because that risk didn't pay off i'd have a safe net and so um yes i was confident i think yes i was impulsive but i that was enabled from a place of huge privilege because i could take it i actually think people in this country um with great supportive families don't take enough risk in general i think um people go into pretty safe careers in law or consulting or whatever and i think they could um do more interesting things have more impact you know you make more money if that's what drives you by taking more risk i just don't think they do and i i think i put myself on the risk loving end of the spectrum um and so i've quit jobs and moved countries with you know with like hours notice um i started go cardless uh with because i quit my consulting job to go to a bigger consultancy and in that garden i just got bored i was three months off and they said let's start