 Hi, everyone. How are we? Sujatha, thank you so much for joining me here in Helsinki. Thanks for having me. We're going to have a great discussion about how to see a wall, now that it's a verb. Yeah, fair. Make it insightful, make it practical. But before we do that, what I really want to talk about are those shoes. You've really prepared well to come to Helsinki. Those are some fantastic shoes. They're both warm and a little bit badass, which I think is the right approach to helping you. You know, making me feel a little bit corporate. So, Sujatha, before joining Monzo, you spent 16 years at AmEx, and you ran a P&L for 30 countries, a lot of people there. You had a very bright trajectory ahead. I know that because you called a lot of people to find out what Sujatha was all about. But then you made the decision to jump ship and join a startup and join Monzo. So I have two questions. There's a lot of entrepreneurs and founders and operators in the audience who are thinking, should I hire a CEO? What is that all about? What do I really get with a CEO? So tell us a little bit about why you made the decision, but also take it from the other side. What does a sophisticated operator think about when they decide to join a startup? Because we're so used to thinking about it from our side as the startup is, should we hire this person? Should we not? But what did you think about? Yeah, when you're taking that risk. So I think when I think about my time at AmEx, it was a great and really varied career. But as you say, you get to a level of seniority that the incremental challenge, the incremental impact, it becomes incremental, right? So it's really just about power and prestige and less about learning. And I was certainly a lifelong learner and that's what motivated me. I also spent a lot of time looking at the Fintech space for AmEx and I had a real deep desire to be on the disruptor side of the equation versus the disrupted side. And really to see if I could make my impact on the world. So those are some of the motivations for why I was able to leave. And then Monzo piqued my interest and it was sort of a number of different factors that I looked at when I looked at the company. The first was obviously just business model investment thesis. I had bought into the kind of sectoral trend of challenger banks and what the promise of that was. The second was I was looking at the company to understand like what's the unique assets that they have to really win in the space. For Monzo that was an incredible brand. There's not really very many companies that have a 70 net promoter score in that space and coming from a place like AmEx. It was pretty high praise. And these weekly active user engagement rates that were over 50%. So just a lot of customer love which was a pretty unique asset to leverage. Then of course you look at values culture leaving a company where you fit in, where you've had a great career, where coming to work every day doesn't feel like an effort. You don't really want to go somewhere and have to fight an uphill battle in terms of culture. And certainly it ticked the boxes on that. And then finally I looked at really the specifics of the role. So what were the challenges that were needed for the COO to solve and trying to understand whether they were interesting to me and whether I was uniquely positioned to add value to it. So those are kind of some of the things that I think most people would think about when they look at a role. And then when you're coming from a big company you really want to understand the investment thesis of the company itself. That's really interesting. Entrepreneurs and founders think a lot about okay the investors are going to grill me. I better be prepared. But actually what I've seen is that the operators who join a company later on in their life they ask the hardest question. Yeah, I mean the investors. You grilled even every one of us and luckily I think we all said more or less the same thing. You were all really good. I think one of the investors, as you know, Y Combinator shared with me their investment thesis model as we actually walked through the model line by line to understand like okay what did you buy into what has to move for this company to be able to be good. Because I wanted to know can I be a part of this success? What am I signing up to and what has to happen for this to be a winner? Yes, and then it all worked out. So related to that, I'm going to be very honest. When I'm sitting on the hiring side of a startup we think very hard about what is the background of this person? Have they been in a startup before? Are they going to be scrappy? Are they going to roll up their sleeves? And even though there's such a wealth of experience in terms of hiring people who come from a big company, point of view sometimes we use the word corporate very loosely. There's this real fear and trepidation is that they won't be able to adjust. They won't be able to do the things that the startup still needs to do because its entire currency is being a startup. You hit the ball out of the park and you are hitting the ball out of the park and so the question I have for you is because even I don't know how to do this right, what are the sort of signals in terms of knowing whether someone will come in at sea level but they'll actually be able to adjust, able to roll up their sleeves, able to get their hands dirty. I think you've thought very hard about this because you've built out the rest of the management team. Yeah, no, it's something I'm obsessed about. So tell us some tips and tricks. So I think for me it's sort of like the story behind the curtain, the wizard behind the curtain a little bit. You have to look a little bit deeper than what you see on a CV. So in retrospect it probably was a lot more intuitive with me. I'm the first generation daughter of immigrants, family of entrepreneurs, even in the 16 years that I spent at AmEx I did 12 different jobs, a bunch of them were kind of builder jobs within the company. I sat for the vast majority of my career outside of the mothership so I was sitting in international where we were more of a challenger brand, you have to operate in a more lean and scrappy way so it wasn't necessarily like big corporate HQ kind of approach to things. When I'm hiring and I have had to hire a number of our executive team at Monzo, it's something that I look at a lot and I look at a couple of things. One is motivations for why they want to join, particularly if they're coming from a big company, why they want to join and leave at this point. And two, kind of positive signs for me. One is if they sort of express some sort of deep impatience with the way that incumbents are operating or real frustration with how things have been working and just a need to make it different. Right, make a change. Or if they talk about the impact that they want to have and really talk about how they want to help transform something. So those are usually two very telling motivations. In the interview itself, I've been told no interview with me goes the same way with any person, so I never follow like a real formula, but I usually try to get into problem solving. Not like a formal case study, but I will do things like, here's a problem that I'm facing in the business today and help me solve it together. And one, you get to see how people think. You get to see how first principles they are about it. And usually in that conversation, I offer up additional data first time, second time, and sometimes a third time to see if they can change their approach based on what I'm offering. And it's really telling if people get uncomfortable when you keep challenging them, not a good sign. If they start leaning into it because they're like, oh, this problem is getting more and more interesting and they have a really curious problem-solving nature, that's usually a great sign. I think there's two things that I always watch out for very much in interviews. One is when you're senior hires, I really watch out for people that express themselves in frameworks, which is funny, I'm an ex-strategy consultant, as you know, I spend my time at Spain, so you'd think I love frameworks. I hate when people do that in a... So you may like they talk about like... They talk about like, this is no way, even if they don't quote it, this is the way that I would solve that problem and express it in this way, because... It's a crutch. It's a crutch, and it speaks to me that they can't really get into the depth of where they are. Conversely, if I was interviewing someone from a startup, I love when they express themselves in frameworks because it means that they can take a problem, contextualize it, and pull it up. And scale it up. It's a watch out. The other thing that I do a lot of is when people talk to me about their accomplishments, I ask all of the hows, probably in a quite irritating way, but who on your team did that, and how did you implement that? And the kiss of death thing that I... If I hear it a couple of times in an interview is, well, I brought in a consultant to it, to do XYZ. Once that's happened, it's sort of like a no-go for me. No, no, no consultants in startup land. Okay, so I think it's still so a hit and miss. And what really is interesting is that for the candidates themselves, they actually don't ask the hard questions, and then they come in, and then they just realize it's not going to work, and we see this much more often than we should, given what I've been building startups now for so long. My next question is around how to think about the CEO role. It's really one of these roles that mean different things to different people. You have CEOs who actually have a lot of their tech team reporting to them. You have CEOs who are very, very deeply operational in nature. It's just about making the trains run on time. It's very sort of delivery-focused. You have CEOs where the CEO does one thing or two things or three things, and then everything else is kind of like the rest of the world's COO. And then, you know, there's sort of various permutations around that. So another discussion I have a lot with the CEO is how to think about the CEO role. What's your learning? It feels like it's something that befuddles a lot of people because I get a lot of calls about someone who's hiring a COO and they want to know how to think about it. Think about the role in this back, right? And I think my simple answer is you can't think about the role in isolation. The COO exists alongside the CEO, and so you really have to think about what the CEO needs to be able to build this business. So are you looking for the scale-up operator to a startup founder? Are you looking for the hardcore executor to the strategic visionary? Are you looking for someone that just needs to add bandwidth and be able to divide and conquer with that CEO given the scale of the role? And based on what that is, that helps you understand what that COO role should look like. And then, you have to really understand in that context how much is the CEO really willing to give up and allow that COO to operate? So I always ask the questions of what are the specific jobs to be done in that role? What are the metrics and key accountability that that COO is going to have? And when a CEO struggles to articulate that, it usually speaks to some degree of discomfort of letting go of the reins or thinking about that role very crisply. And so that's kind of the next stage of really digging in. And then I think you have to think about, culturally, what do you need across your leadership team? So what role do you need them to play? Do you need them to be like the lightning rod of transformation? Do you need them to be like the hardcore person that sits at the table and says no to the 50 million hiring requests and the kind of ridiculousness that can go on at the table? Do you need them to be the person that works across the executive team and is the glue and really helps everybody understand how things are operating and has all the right conversations? Can you be all these things? You can, yeah, you can. You just have to know what you want. And then I think it's really important to think about stage of company because early stage companies, COO, it's kind of jack-of-all-trades. As you get further up, you probably need them to have some very specific verticals of expertise. Because you have something like sort of 70% of the Monzo team in the world just to give us sort of framework or context for this conversation? Yeah, my world is I own customer servicing and operations, payments and the infrastructure there, marketing. I had a big chunk of my time at Monzo. I met Mx with marketing and then the people team officially. Right, okay, which is about 70%. And if you think about... You talked about lots of objectives, including lightning rod of transformation, glue. How does somebody coming in from the outside? So Monzo, when you joined us, about a thousand people-ish. You know, very distinct culture, very mission-driven, very customer-centric. And you joined during the lockdown, during the pandemic. We were going through a tough time, like the rest of the world. But of course, we're a bank and if you're not spending, it sort of was not easy at times. So there's a lot of things that had to happen and to get right. And so you were all of the above, if you will. How do you get buy-in? When you come in from the outside, a lot has to happen. It has to happen quickly. How does a C-level person, I mean, CO in this conversation, get buy-in from the grassroots? How do you do that effectively? It was quite funny, actually, because I was sitting in my attic, in my attic office, in my house, and I turned off the laptop. Yeah, and I turned off the laptop from AmEx. And then, like, eight weeks later, I turned on a laptop in the exact same space, and I was in Monzo, and I hadn't met a soul in person. And I spent my first roughly five months in the business that way, just glued to that computer and connecting with people virtually. The good thing is that I'd run a lot of global teams, so connecting virtually wasn't a huge challenge. It was something that I knew how to do. So I think the first thing is that you have to really let them know you and what you're about and share your values and be very transparent of why you're there and express how you've bought into the mission and the values of the company and give examples. And you do that in lots of different forums. I spent a lot of time, you know, going to different parts of the business and doing fireside chats and doing one-to-one. Getting to know you. Getting to know you. So just another tip that I heard some people have done is they write a memo about, this is me, this is Sujatha. This is what I'm like. This is what I like. This is what I don't like, which I think was really interesting. It's a great one. They're writers. I'm not, I mean, I am a writer personally, but I don't like to do the big manifesto. So I did mine much more in engagement and then one-to-ten or one-to-a-hundred. I did a few different all-hands. And I was very, very open about my background and what made me tick and all that kind of stuff. And TSR CEO did very similar things. I think I spent some time with what I would call the people in the business that I knew to be culture carriers to understand where were the third rails for people in the business and what they felt was really important and what the teams were craving from the leadership. I think that was really helpful to help me understand what I needed to do to connect really early. And then it was a really apocalyptic time in the world and our average age in the company is 29 now, which is actually quite old at this point, but still pretty young and living in flats and really struggling and had never lived through anything really this hard before in their professional lives. And so when I had been through the global financial crisis in my prior career, the leader that was there at the time said the most important thing is to define reality and give hope. And so we really took that to heart. And the second mantra that I've always had in that time is focus on what you can control, focus on your customers, focus on your colleagues, what's in front of you instead of spinning with the existential. And so I think I started in June. Six weeks later, I stood up in front of the company and said, like, here's where we are. And here is what I called the roadmap for winning. For the next six months, here are the things we have to do. Very distinctly, if we do these things, we are fine. Just to give people an understanding, like, it's going to be fine. We just have to focus on these things that we can control. This is what's right ahead of us. And I think that sort of became the rallying cry for us. And repeating those, right? Over and over. And then relentless communication. When you're in, it doesn't have to be a pandemic. It could be any kind of time of crisis just for your company. You know, don't hunker down. Don't, like, go inwards. You actually have to be communicating all the time. And so we were out there relentlessly communicating so that people understood they had something to latch on to. And it's incredible to me how people miss that. Just doing good communication, doing repeated communication, being consistent in the communication. Because otherwise, people don't know what to expect. And then they just, there's the fear of the unknown, right? So not just when things are going, you know, when things are difficult, but in general, communication is something that people don't have an active effort on. So I'm glad you brought that up. Okay, we're going to get a bit practical. We're not going to talk about frameworks because it's... Clearly, you like them in a certain guise. But to get a team of that size aligned, to keep that ambition, to keep the goals, but also to be productive and efficient, what are the processes that you use? What are your favorite sort of weapons of go-to and who kind of owns them? So me, I own them for the business. I would say in general, with process and companies, I believe you should have the least amount of process to create the outcome that you want because every process is a tax on the business. And so, you know, I run the people team, for example, and if they had a great idea for like, let's do a training thing or let's do a performance thing. And the question I was asked is, this is an extra piece of work for the company. What is the least onerous way you can do this and does it have enough impact to justify it? So there's a kind of a ruthless filter you need to put on as you're scaling a company because you can end up with just a ton of well-intended process that just adds up and becomes like, you know, it's a plunge for people to have to get through. I think from a planning process perspective, you know, it's going to sound more complex than it really is, but we sort of have three tiers. So we have, you know, a strategy plan that's roughly three years. We did it when we, it talks about, you know, markets and products and geographies, things like that that we're looking at with some high-level metrics and aspirations, and we've done that. And we do a light refresh of that. So we recently did a light refresh of that to respond to changes in the business and changes in the market. Then we have like an 18-month business plan with like a P&L attached to it and sort of some levers that are up and down based on investment decisions we may make or not make in some scenarios. And that really helps us. That's owned at the Exco level and the VP level, and that helps us understand the interdependencies across the business. It helps us get across like where might we need to hire, where do we not have the right skill set, you know, if we need to scale up operations because we're going to enter into this new product line, you know, getting ahead of that and thinking through more long-term what the business has to be ready for. And then we have much more tactically a six-month goals process. And that is owned at the VP level with their squads, bottoms up, meant to be 90% confidence level with very clear key metrics attached and single points of accountability. And those are pretty pressure-tested, aligned across the business again so everybody's working in sync. But they're very outcomes-focused goals. So what we really work hard to do is not work on the how. Of course, we test some of the how to make sure it's credible, but those are not just like numbers put into thin air. But ultimately, you know, you need to empower your teams to be able to make good decisions and be able to work over that course of time period. So it's about agreeing the outcomes but allowing the problem-solving to be close to the customer and close to the problem. And how do you keep the ambition? And how can you make sure those outcomes continue to be practical but you're on a path that is aspirational because it's all about that sort of day-to-day urgency, sense of urgency, because that's the currency, right, of a startup. So how do you balance, okay, this is deliverable, it's got a 90% pressure tested, but actually, this is going to end up in a place that we're all very proud to be. That's why there's the three tiers, right? Because we need to know what we're aiming for in the big sense. You need to know at 18 months what this kind of has to ladder up to and whether this six-month plan is getting you there. And then you have to pressure test that six month within that context. But we also do, I agree, like it's very easy to get into incremental thinking, you know, to just focus on your graph and like moving it upwards and to the right. And we actually talk very openly about what failure looks like for us in the context of ambition. So one of our co-founders, Jonas, is a CTO. He does a session with people at every onboarding. So, you know, we've grown by 70% in terms of people in the last year and a bit. Everybody that comes here is the what is Monzo story about like what is our ultimate ambition for the company. We have, and that's shared with new executives that joined. We recently shared that with the board just to make sure everybody's on the same page that we're aiming for that. Also, we've launched a lot of new products. Yeah, we've launched a ton of stuff. So it's just about knowing that. But we actually have like a slide that we've shared at all hands and we share with people, which is that if we become, you know, a successful mid-sized UK bank, that is failure. And we call it failure. And we want everyone to realize it if you are optimizing for that in any way. If you're thinking about, you know, a decision and that's what you think you're optimizing for, that's failure and we want none of it. And so it's pretty clear, we're pretty aligned across the whole business. That's still a big company, but of course, not aspiration and not ambition. So in the last few minutes that we have left, I want to talk about kind of the relationship between a CEO and the CEO and also the rest of the exact team. You talked about how you structured the role of a CEO, actually in relation to who the CEO is. Given that's such a key dynamic, what are the lessons you can share on how to get that right? How did you sync up with TS, who's the CEO of Monzo, because you both were actually, we met each other remotely for the longest time, right? So how did that work? I mean, he was sitting in San Francisco for the first... There was a time zone difference. Yeah, there was an eight-hour time difference. We were both on the computer a lot. And to be fair, he flew a few times to the UK just to be able to personally connect because personal connection for him is a real big thing. But I think that there's no shortcut to it. You just have to make time for each other in that relationship and really invest the time. So we did a lot of things. In the early days, it was a pretty crazy time. And we would have our one-to-ones at the end of the day. So I'm a night owl. Anybody that knows me knows that. The best time to reach me is probably midnight. And that's when I'm geared to talk to somebody. But I would do my one-to-ones with him at 10 o'clock at night. And it would be kind of the end of his first day in San Francisco. And that gave us a lot of uninterrupted time to connect over the course of the day. Like, what did we experience, what, you know, touch base? And we did that quite frequently, multiple times a week. We also made each other a priority. So, you know, if he called me or I called him, we'd drop things to be able to talk and be able to have, like, real stream of consciousness, conversations in the early days while we were kind of feeling each other out and understanding how each other thought. And then we really went into each other's, like, motivations and just agreed to have each other's back. And I think that we were pretty clear with each other what are his strengths, what are my strengths, and some areas of kind of just clear ownership. And I think that's made a big difference. And it's working. And what about the rest of the exec team? So, I think we mentioned that you've got the existing team, as you've scaled, because I think we've doubled revenue in the last year, so there's a lot of scaling going on. So, you've... Double revenue since the pre-pandemic, so, yeah. Yes, so, exactly. And so, you've added new people to kind of meet that scale. How does the exec team think up? I actually feel sometimes it's very spot-to-the-body and only when you've got the head all working properly does it all work in unison. And what is the CEO role in that? So, we, early on, probably in the first four months together, had an exec team off-site. It was during the pandemics that we did it on a roof terrace. Oh, yeah, I remember that, yeah. We were outdoors, and we were very... You could not do that in Helsinki in the winter. No, no. Well, it was summertime, so maybe in Helsinki. And we basically did a few things. One is, we kind of did a retro. Some of us were new to the business, but what was the last six months? What mistakes had been made? What was going well? And really just tried to get everybody on the same page of where the business was at that moment in time. We talked about where we needed to go and what all of us thought were the keys to success there and kind of gained some commitments across each other about how we would operate as an executive team. And we did some speed-dating one-to-ones, and we all kind of found our little corners of the terrace and would grill each other on what makes you tick, what do you care about, and just really got to spend some time in team formation. That paid huge dividends in terms of creating a really high-functioning team over the next period of time as we had to work together. And I think that what people forget is that as you onboard new executives, you have to reform the team. It's not like you do it once and then you're done. As you bring in new people to that level, you have to keep revisiting and keep providing context and keep creating those agreements. And then I think we've just done a really... I mean, I feel like we've done a good job of the people that we've brought on board. So we've hired for values, we've hired for obviously incredible competence in their area, but people that are flexible thinkers, really great problem solvers that are attached to the mission and have the same values. And I think that makes a big difference. And it's all working very well. So thank you very much, Sojata. So thank you everyone for listening and we'll talk about the shoes later. Take care. Bye-bye.