I’ve spent the past two and a half years of my life working to make this a reality. 

We’re calling it Sling Money. To Americans I would describe it as a “global Venmo” or “global Cash App.” To everyone else I’d describe it as “WhatsApp for money.”

You can download it today. Just search the Play Store or the App Store for “Sling Money.” Download it, complete signup, find me in the directory and send me a dollar from your welcome gift. I’ll send it right back to you. The transactions will be instant, wherever you happen to be. 

The idea for Sling Money was born about two and a half years ago when I used USDC – a US Dollar stablecoin – on Solana to send my friend Sam Lessin a few thousand dollars for an investment. 

The transfer was instant and free and kind of incredible. But a lot of things about it or around it were terrible – it was clear this technology hadn’t been polished for a mainstream customer base yet – but I knew how to fix all of the rough edges and so I said to Sam “we should start a global Venmo.” Sam runs a venture capital fund and so his reply was maybe predictable in retrospect: “I’ll wire you the money to do it right now. How much do you want?”

I told him to hold off. I wanted to do the work. So my co-founder Simon Amor and I spent the next months talking to everyone I could about this idea – trying to understand how difficult it would be to make a reality, trying to understand why no one else was doing it, probing for the early growth stories of Venmo and Cash App and PayPal and Wise – until I got to the point where it seemed obvious we should build it.

We raised our seed round in the summer of 2022. Ribbit Capital led the round along with Sam’s Slow Ventures and a bunch of angels. And we got started.

Where we are now

We’ve now built Sling Money. The app works. And we believe that all money is going to work this way in the future.

Sling Money now supports instant fiat payments across 76 countries including – as of today – the United States. It took us a year and a half and a bunch of starts and stops to get the US up and running, but we’ve got it. It’s now one of 76 countries across four continents that Sling Money supports instant payments in. 

Now, with Sling Money, you can move money from your bank account in Paris to your bank account in New York City in ~60 seconds and for free. Or you can send money from New York City to your friend or family member in Nairobi instantly and for free. They get a US Dollar stablecoin. Which they can keep or turn into Shillings in their M-Pesa whenever they want. And so on and so forth. We think this is how all money is going to work – instant, easy, cheap to move.

Our mission and what it means to me

Our mission is to connect everyone in the world to a global, instant financial system. At low cost.

We think that this hasn’t been possible previously because of the technological limitations of fiat money, but it’s now possible thanks to ultra-fast blockchains, real-time payment networks and high-quality regulated stablecoins. We’ve had this vision for more than two years now and we’ve been building all the regulatory and technological infrastructure to make it possible. 

It’s been an absolutely incredible journey. We’ve been continually presented with “impossible” challenges, with hard problems, with people telling us why this hasn’t been done or why it doesn’t exist. There have been ups and downs. It’s been a true roller coaster ride. There have been so many times along the way when it felt like it might not work but we’ve ignored the pain in our stomachs and just kept going. And so far, every time we’ve hit an insurmountable challenge, we’ve found a way over or around or through it.

As we’ve been doing this work I’ve come to the conclusion that this product really has the potential to change the world. It has become self-evident that everyone in the world should be able to financially transact with everyone else in the world. That it should be very low cost to do so. And that in a world where this is possible everyone will be better off. And I feel deeply, personally, incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to work on such a thing – and I can’t emphasize enough how much it feels like everything I’ve done before in my career has led up to this moment. 

Why you should use Sling Money

Sling Money is better, faster and cheaper than traditional money transmission products.

If you’re in the United States and only ever transact with people in the US it’s still faster than Venmo and Cash App. Peer to peer transactions are about the same speed as Venmo and Cash App but withdrawals from Sling Money to your bank are faster and free. Those guys charge 1.5 - 3% for instant withdrawals. Our instant withdrawals are faster than their instant withdrawals and entirely free.

With Sling Money it’s the same everywhere in the world. You can send money from New York City to Nairobi and your recipient can get their money in their M-Pesa wallet in a few seconds. 

Our user feedback so far has been insane. I’ve been building products on the internet since I dropped out of high school when I was fifteen. I’ve been lucky enough to work on a ton of products that people really loved like Monzo, Deliveroo and Facebook. But the feedback we’re getting from Sling Money is like nothing else. More people have called this thing “magic” than I’ve ever heard from anyone before about anything. It’s “a dream come true” and “truly magical” and it “works like a goddamn charm.”

All of this works with fiat integration in 76 countries so far, with more to come. And while we’re building out fiat integrations in more countries you can actually add and remove stablecoins in another 75 countries. This means that you can send money to someone in a country where we don’t have fiat payment integrations yet as long as your recipient is at least a little bit technical and can use an exchange like Coinbase or Luno. When we’ve done the math this has resulted in a ~90% discount against traditional fiat money transmitters even when accounting for local crypto exchange fees (if they’re charged at all).

We actually believe all of this should be free. If you can send a picture from San Francisco  to Paris for free on WhatsApp we think you should be able to send money from New York City to Nairobi for free on Sling Money. They’re both just bits. Just information. They should both move instantly and for free.

We are convinced that we can offer transactions between users on Sling Money for free. They cost us basically nothing and they should cost users basically nothing. And we think there’s a chance we may be able to offer our fiat gateways for free, too. We aren’t totally sure yet, but we think we’ve got a shot at doing it – and we’re going to try. So while we’re collecting data and figuring this out you can use Sling Money entirely for free, with us subsidizing the cost a little bit as we build scale.

Wait, you’re subsidizing transactions?

Yes. Because we think that, at scale, we may be able to do this entirely for free. 

When we started Sling Money I promised myself we weren’t going to build one of those companies that build a gross margin negative product and “made it up on volume” later. But here we are. I think we’ve got a 10% chance at making money transfer across the world instant and entirely free for everyone, and that’s just too big a prize to ignore. We’re going to go straight for it. And if we discover we can’t do it, that’s OK, we’ll figure out how to just make it “really, really cheap” compared to everyone else who’s using old-fashioned fiat technology. It’s fine.

I’m confident we can build a profitable business here. I think the real question is how big it’ll be. Stablecoins and blockchains allow us to build a much more efficient product and service, globally, than is possible with traditional database-based ledgers. And when we add AI and other modern technologies into the mix that help us with compliance and customer service we think we have the potential to build an insanely efficient company.

How it works under the hood

Sling Money works totally differently than just about every traditional financial product you’ve used. That’s because it’s built on top of completely different technologies.

The most fundamentally different thing about Sling Money from almost every other financial product you’ve used is that it’s a self-custodial product. 

Your money actually belongs to you. We can’t access the contents of your wallet. We don’t have your private key. We can’t initiate a transaction on your behalf. This is fundamentally different from a traditional bank, peer-to-peer payment system or even crypto exchange where all of the assets held by the company are held in a shared ledger and there’s just a database entry that they maintain that determines how much money you have.

This is a wildly different way for money to work, and I think probably a lot better. Your Sling Money balance has more in common with the cash you have in your pocket right now than it does with the money you have in Venmo or Chase.

These facts, together, mean that when you have money on Sling Money it’s really yours, and it’s basically free and instant to send to anyone else, anywhere the blockchain works. Which is pretty much everywhere. In this sense Sling Money is global by default.

In fact, the technology we’ve built Sling Money on top of is so global by default that we’ve had to do a ton of active work to make it work in fewer geographies. This is like the opposite of how traditional “fiat” money works. We’ve had to restrict the places where people can use Sling Money to comply with the law. Which takes a ton of active effort. It’s a kind of fascinating difference from a traditional bank where you really would have to do a ton of work to make it work in more than one country or currency.

This kind of theme repeats across all of the product. We’ve had to basically invent compliance systems from the ground up. We have invested heavily in AI technology, new types of transaction monitoring, and built a ton of tooling to make compliance work on the blockchain the way our regulators expect it to work. We have been the first customer of multiple new companies building compliance technology software. We have pushed our partners to build new things for us. We have built entirely things ourselves when we’ve needed to. It’s been wild.

A bunch of our engineering team used to work at a bank. I remember the first time one of them – who had worked on the core banking ledger at Monzo Bank – looked up and said something to the effect of “this is how all money will work in the future.”

And I really believe that. Once you start working seriously with blockchains and stablecoins it’s very hard to imagine that the old way of storing and moving and thinking about money will persist. This new technology is just too good. It’s going to replace the old stuff. It’s just a matter of how quickly it’ll happen.

I’ll do more posts in the future about all of the interesting things we’ve learned along the way and everything we’ve built. About some of our internal tools, some of the ways we use AI, some of the things we’ve discovered about the new physics of money. But that can wait for another day.

The team

We’re a fairly small team, and we plan to stay pretty small. We think it’s possible to build Sling Money in a more efficient way than past companies like this. We’re currently 23 people. We’re about 20% compliance and financial crime, 55% product and engineering, 10% marketing and 15% ops, partnerships and finance.

My co-founder Simon is a designer. Almost everyone on the team has worked together before and  I think everyone genuinely likes each other. For some of us we’re now on our third company working together.

And I think that, as a group, we’re uniquely suited to build this thing. We’ve got people here from the early Square days, the early Monzo Bank days, from Facebook, from Deliveroo, from Qonto, from Spotify. We’re a nice mix of people who have built social software at scale and people who have built regulated financial software at scale. 

And we have some incredible investors onboard as well. Justin Saslaw at Ribbit Capital sometimes feels like our third co-founder. The entire team at Ribbit has been incredible. As has the team at Union Square Ventures and our many wonderful angel investors.

I think that one of the single most important things in life is who you spend time with. And I feel incredibly lucky to spend so much time with this team of people. They are a joy and they make me better every day. And another really important thing is to work on things that matter and have the potential to make the world a better place. And I believe we’re doing that, too.

Where does it go from here?

We’re getting ready to enter growth mode. Now that we have the US, most of Europe, 26 countries in Africa, Brazil, and a bunch more countries, we’re going to start stepping on the gas. We’ll try to grow as fast as we can while staying in control of our compliance obligations and managing fraud and financial crime risk. 

And we’ll continue expanding into more countries. We have about twenty more countries on the short-term integration list. We really want to connect everyone in the world to an instant, global financial system. 

And as we do this we’ll collect a ton of data to determine whether or not it’s possible for us to offer Sling Money for free to everyone, or if we can do something with a free tier, a subscription model, or just much lower per-transaction pricing than people are used to. We will see. I’m optimistic.

Please send your feedback

I’d be really grateful if you’d sign up and try Sling Money out. We’re extremely early in our journey and every single piece of user feedback is valuable to us. You can get it by searching “Sling Money” on the App Store or Play Store. You’ll have to do IDV at the front door. Most people get through it in between two and five minutes. And from there you can send me a dollar from your welcome gift. Just find me in the directory. I’ll send it back to you, with a bit of interest. I can’t wait to hear what you think.

The product is called Sling, and it’s like a global Venmo.

With Sling you can send money to anyone in seconds, without knowing their account numbers or sort codes, and without them needing to have Sling. Sending money only takes a few taps and it’s very inexpensive – and free while we’re in beta. Sling currently works in 39 countries but we plan to add additional countries quickly.

We’re launching Sling in beta today – with a waitlist – and we’d love your feedback to help us make sure we’re building something great. You can download it for iOS or Android today.

Sling has a few features we think are unique and might be valuable to people:

• Sling can send money to anyone. They don’t need to have Sling in order to get the money and, in most cases, they can get the money you send them in their bank account in seconds without downloading Sling.

• No account numbers. You don’t need to know the recipient’s IBAN or account number or anything like that. You don’t even need to know their phone number. You can just send them a link with money on it. Or if they’re on Sling you can just search for their name.

• Transfers are basically instant. We’ve timed transfers from the UK to the US with Sling that take about ten seconds. Most competing products take 1-3 days to make the same transfer.

• Sling is global by nature. We’re starting out with 39 countries but we have plans to launch in a couple hundred countries overall.

• Sling supports any currency. You can denominate Sling transactions in any currency you want. Need to settle a bill in Thai Baht? No problem. Just switch your transaction’s display currency. All peer-to-peer transfers are completed using USDC, a stablecoin which is pegged to the US Dollar. We will be adding Euro and Pound stablecoins in the near future.

• We verify Sling user’s identities. We only display people in the Sling Directory if we’ve verified their identity and are confident they aren’t impersonating anyone else. Fraud and simple confusion are a huge problem in payments and we’ve put a lot of work into this.

• Sling is environmentally efficient. We use Solana’s distributed ledger to power Sling. Each transaction on Solana uses 0.878k Joules, which is less than a Google search and 0.0000243889% of the energy used in an hour by an LED light bulb. Solana publishes its real-time carbon footprint, and offsets its emissions.

• Sling is economically efficient. The nature of our technology removes middlemen and reduces our costs. We’ve built Sling with ten people. Most competing companies have thousands of people – 5,000 people, 13,000 people, 31,000 people to name a few. We can pass these savings on to our customers.

In the App Stores

Sling is now in the app stores in 39 countries including the UK and most of the European Union. You can download it from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.

We’ve got a waitlist set up but we’re currently letting people through pretty quickly. Please download Sling and give it a try. 

Give us feedback

We’ve been building Sling for about nine months now and we’re just at the very beginning. We need your help to make it great. We probably have lots of bugs, rough edges, difficult to understand bits, flows that can be improved, and missed opportunities. The only way we can make this better is with your feedback. You can do this in email, in reply to this post, or by joining our Slack community.

Join our Slack community

We’ve created a Slack community called Sling Friends. We’d love it if you joined us there to help give us feedback and just generally hang out and chat. 

More about the team

I started Sling with Simon Amor about nine months ago. Simon’s a brilliant product designer and we had worked together at Monzo, a UK-based neobank, a few years ago.

We’re now eleven people. I feel incredibly lucky to be working with this team. For some of us this is our third company working together. For many it’s at least the second. Everyone is smart, ambitious, experienced and determined. Everyone is intellectually open, curious, and customer obsessed. And they’re all good eggs. 

We also have awesome investors. Our seed round was led by Ribbit Capital and Slow Ventures and we have some really awesome and deeply experienced angel investors in our corner as well. 

I feel blessed and deeply lucky to be working with this set of people.

Why we started Sling

I’ve been obsessed with peer-to-peer payments ever since starting to work at Monzo, where peer-to-peer drove a huge amount of our growth. I found it weird then – and still find it weird – that this is still basically an unsolved problem in a lot of the world. And yet the technology to solve this problem was invented many years ago. It’s an eminently solvable problem.

Even now, in the UK, if you want to send people money the conversation goes like this: “Do you have Monzo? No. OK. Do you have Revolut? No. OK. What’s your sort code and account number?” And then you have to open your bank app and type in the sort code and account number… and then send…

And this is before you start transferring across borders and currencies. At that point transfers are not only clunky, they’re also usually very slow and very expensive.

We believe that you should be able to pay anyone in the world with just a couple taps and that transfers should be instant and super cheap. It shouldn’t matter what currency you’re using, and you shouldn’t have to know someone’s account number or IBAN in order to send them money. And it should just work everywhere.

You already expect most things to work this way. You can send text messages, photos, videos and email to anyone in the world instantly and basically for free. The internet has touched most aspects of our lives. Why hasn't the internet truly transformed how money and payments work yet? We think it’s time. 

My asks

If you wouldn’t mind I’d greatly appreciate it if you would:

• Download the app (iOS, Android)

• Join Sling Friends on Slack and give us feedback

Just in the past few months we’ve shipped three Zero to One products: Monzo Flex, Monzo Pay and Monzo Trends. These new products are doing great. And we’ve already shipped tons of improvements to these brand new products. All the graphs are going up and to the right. We’ve hired a ton of excellent people. And we just raised a lot of money.

I first got involved with Monzo three years ago when Tom Blomfield asked me if I wanted “a hobby” helping him build Monzo. That conversation led to me spending a day a week at the Monzo offices as an advisor. That day led to two, then three, then four days. By the end of 2019 I was basically doing a job and not just advising, and Tom asked me to officially join full time and accept a title. So I did.

I joined as Chief Product Officer in February of 2020. I started as CPO only a few weeks before the first Lockdown. Like a lot of companies, Covid hit us hard. It was difficult, but we got through it. We rebuilt and came out stronger. And now we’re shipping great products at pace.

Our products make our customers’ lives better. We’ve been taking the single greatest source of anxiety in people’s lives and making it better. Only a third of UK adults say they feel in control of their finances but more than two thirds of Monzo's customers say they feel in control of their finances. 

I’m incredibly proud of how we improve customers' lives, the pace at which we're shipping high quality products, and the way our graphs are moving up and to the right. But I want to work across a broader range of industries and I feel free to do so now that Monzo's doing so well. 

What I’ll be doing

I’ll be:

1. Angel investing

2. Helping out as a non-exec director

3. Tinkering, building and learning

Angel Investing

Caroline and I have been investing a lot lately, and we’ve been really enjoying the opportunity to support some great entrepeneurs. We’re really proud of our investments in companies like Practice, incident.io and Multiverse, and we’re hoping to develop relationships with more great entrepreneurs.

We work together as a team. Caroline brings deep marketing experience — she's CMO at Impala, was the sole product marketer on News Feed back in the day, and ran European marketing for both Airbnb and Facebook's consumer business. I bring, well, whatever it is that I do.

Helping out as a non-exec

I recently joined the Board of Trustees at BookTrust, the UK’s largest children’s reading charity. Our mission is to engage every child with books. This is something near and dear to my heart. I wasn’t very good at school and dropped out early. But my parents and my brother instilled a deep love of reading in me. Books were — and are — an incredibly important part of my life. I feel privileged to help an organisation give more children this gift.

And I’ve been on the board of VidIQ for a while now. It was started by a really good friend of mine — our start-ups competed with each other more than a decade ago — and it’s been a joy to help out.

I think there are also interesting opportunities to advise start-ups and entrepreneurs to help them figure out what to build and how to build those things well. I figure I might do some of this, too.

Tinkering, building and learning

I'm a builder at heart. I’m fascinated by a lot of things, and I have a lot of ideas. I want to learn a lot more about Web3, and quickly.

I have some ideas about how to build healthier, deeper conversational places on the internet. I’m fascinated by the idea that gig economy workers could participate in the financial upside of the networks that they help build. And, maybe most of all, I’m interested in building real, portable identity for the internet.

Next steps

It took a lot of work to get to this point, and I'm really happy about it. I'm already reaching out to a few people to ask their advice on some things I want to build. And, of course, I'm going to write even more. I can't wait.

I’m talking about the collection of technologies that we’re now calling Web3. I’m not talking about day trading and speculation. I have no idea whether Bored Ape #7745 is worth $255,726 and I don’t really care. I’m not interested in day trading a long tail of potentially Ponzi crypto and I’m not buying your shitty ripped off NFT. And I know that secret sharing is hard.

But the collection of technologies that we’re now calling Web3 are really incredible and promise to transform the world we live in. Blockchain infrastructure, DAOs, and even NFTs are incredibly exciting. The promise of mass decentralisation is an incredibly exciting one. The Interplanetary Filesystem is fascinating, and self-sovereign identity is one of the most exciting concepts I’ve discovered in years.

I remember the early days of Web2. They were electrifying. Blogging was an incredible and novel thing and RSS was deeply exciting. Dave Winer put enclosures in RSS and something special happened. You can thank him for podcasting. People tagging in Flickr felt transformational. Twitter and Foursquare exploded at SXSW in 2007 and 2009 respectively.

It was an incredibly exciting time. It wasn’t all about money. It felt like the world was changing and the Read-Write Web was going to permanently change the world for the better. We were so optimistic and idealogical.

This moment feels a lot like that too. Watch this video of Christopher Allen giving a talk on self-sovereign identity in February and tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.

That talk reminds me so much of talks from the early days of Web2 in the days when Flash video embeds were novel and iTunes didn’t have podcast support yet and Ev was best known for Blogger and we all thought citizen journalism was going to usher in a new era of ubiquitous liberal democracy while we self-organised bar crawls with Dodgeball and Foursquare.

Those were the days.

I think these are the days, too.

I’m ready to be optimistic about technology again. I’m ready to dream about what the world will look like when everyone controls their own identity. When everyone once again owns their own printing press. When the internet becomes censorship-resistant again. When artists can profit from their creations on their terms.

There is, of course, reason for caution. Maybe Jack’s right and you don’t own Web3.

Tim O’Reilly has called for caution, saying it’s “too early to get excited about Web3.” He makes two points that really stuck with me. The first is that the technology naturally goes through waves of centralisation and decentralisation and that we should ask “what the next locus for centralisation and control might be.”

He points to “[t]he rapid consolidation of bitcoin mining into a small number of hands by way of lower energy costs for computation indicates one kind of recentralization” as an example, adding that “there will be others.”

And, look, this is just plain funny:

I think maybe there’s something else going on here. After all, Square just renamed itself Block. And Block’s investing heavily in building Web3 infrastructure. Whatever you want to call it.

And, look, the reality is that Web2 didn’t totally turn out the way we’d hoped. We were young and naive. We carry scars. We all now understand second-order consequences a lot better than we did back then. The glories of Movable Type gave way to ranked feeds and we lost something along the way. The memes of Tumblr became the preening of Instagram, and the Arab Spring failed.

So many of us Web2 boomers now look to the world like a bunch of cynical bankers. Web2 created trillions and trillions of dollars in value for shareholders while creating a lot of societal disruption. We got so many things wrong and so many of us are now jaded. I think that’s driving some of the skepticism about Web3.

It would be a real shame to let that cynicism get in our way. I believed 20 years ago in decentralisation and ownership and I still do. I believe everyone should have their own printing press, and that everyone should control their own identity.

I believe that the setup and teardown costs of big, democratic institutions should be approximately zero. I believe artists should be able to directly profit from digital manifestations of their work. I also believe that we’ve learned a lot from the failings of Web2 and we can do a better job this time around.

And I still believe the internet should be natively censorship-resistant — and that a distributed reputation system could protect us from the worst consequences of such a system without requiring anyone to censor anything.

There’s a new set of technologies available and they’re really, really cool. They can enable some deeply positive things and they’re very much in their infancy. There are almost no good user experiences yet, and most of the promise of the technology is still unrealised.

And there’s more to do than just build good UX. There are fundamental bits of technology and connective tissue that are still missing.

Tim O’Reilly again:

So much is yet to be created. Let’s focus on the parts of the Web3 vision that aren’t about easy riches, on solving hard problems in trust, identity, and decentralized finance. And above all, let’s focus on the interface between crypto and the real world that people live in…

So many of us have lately been spending cycles on incremental improvements to ad ranking models or similar. New viral mechanics for 30 second videos or better e-commerce checkout flows, or whatever. Because that’s where the money’s been, but also because there hasn’t been much more interesting work to go around.

For a lot of younger people, who didn’t get to live through Web2, this has been their entire career.

But that’s changing now. Web3 has the promise to reorder basic elements of society in deeply positive ways — ways that simply didn’t exist a few years ago. And there’s a clear set of problems to be solved between here and there. Web3 is real. I can’t think of anything more exciting than that.

This is an important offsite. Monzo, and Product Management at Monzo, are at a critical inflection point. We’ve stepped up the quality of both our thinking and our work. We’ve shipped good new products and improved some we already had. The graphs are going up and to the right.

This is the result of a lot of hard work from a lot of people over a long period of time. It would be easy for us to pause and rest on our laurels. Let's not. I see a world in which Monzo becomes the definitive financial app. And this team becomes the best Product Management team in Europe and beyond.

This future seems more achievable than ever and it can be ours with careful focus and dedicated effort. Today will be, in large part, about what focus and effort we need moving forward.

What has gone well

We should all be well versed in the list, but I'll enumerate some things I think are especially notable:

1. Our velocity is good. In the past three months we’ve shipped three Zero to One products: Monzo Flex, Monzo Pay and Monzo Trends. All three are performing well. We have also developed novel new solutions to critical infrastructural problems.

2. We have, for the first time, a strong Product Led Growth capability. The work across our Growth teams prove this. We are systematically moving graphs that matter to us and our customers.

3. We've hired a lot of excellent people this year. We've added three new Product Directors and a lot of individual contributors. You can see the impact of every single Product Director. Each area that's gained a Product Director is performing better than it was before. And the individual contributors who have joined are great and already having meaningful impact. We aren't fully staffed yet, but we're on our way.

4. The graphs are moving.

We've also stepped up the quality of our work. Our ways of working are better and I'm seeing more data-driven decision making. More intellectual honesty and flexibility. Higher quality product execution and increased velocity in our day-to-day work. There's still room for us to grow, and these improvements are still uneven. But they're deeply meaningful and you can see what our future will look like. It's exciting.

I see this change in Product Management, Product more generally, and increasingly in the company. The more the company adopts these ways of working the more powerful they become and the easier our jobs become.

We're getting better and better. If we keep going this will become a self-reinforcing cycle with a natural acceleration curve. The better we do the faster we will improve.

How we keep the momentum

I've been thinking a lot about what's gone well over the last half and what hasn't. I think there are some common themes, and that with careful work and attention we can make even more go well next half and have fewer things fail. In the process I think we'll also become a better team and a better company.

Here they are:

1. Customer first. Company second. Squad third.

2. Separate belief and empirical fact

3. Form a theory of the world

4. Start small, think big

5. Find the leverage

6. Execute with alacrity against clear goals

7. Continually learn and evaluate performance

Together I think these themes start to form a new Way of Working for Product Management at Monzo. A lot of today will be dedicated to exploring them.

The customer always comes first

Ben Horowitz succinctly describes our job as being "the CEO of the product."

There are two types of CEOs:

• Walt Disney famously said "We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies."

• Jack Welch less famously said "Number one, cash is king... number two, communicate... number three, buy or bury the competition."

Disney is a product and customer-focused organisation. General Electric is focused on lucre and competition. I believe that one is clearly superior to the other. The evidence supports this conclusion. Disney's current market cap is $320 billion. General Electric's market cap is only $120 billion and it’s in the process of being broken up into three separate companies.

Monzo was not put on this Earth to worship cash. We were put on this Earth to build products that make our customers' lives better. To take the single greatest source of anxiety in people's lives and make it better. Only a third of UK adults say they feel in control of their finances but more than two thirds of Monzo's customers say they feel in control of their finances.

This is the source of our magic and I think this underscores the importance of being customer centric. Whenever we've tried to do things without the customer at the core we've failed.

I think this is also true when we try to build things for small, niche populations. We do best when we build easy to use products for broad customer segments. We have 5.3 million customers. That's more than 10% of the UK adult population. We don't have to build for all of them at once but there's still plenty for us to build for large, readily addressable customer segments.

The easiest way to learn how to do that and be customer centric is to talk to customers a lot. Learn what makes them happy, what causes them pain, and how they think about the world.

Separate belief from empirical fact

Belief and empirical fact are both important. You can't be a good Product Manager without both. But you must never confuse them. We've done well when we've differentiated between the two. I think Flex is a great example of this. There are other places where we conflated belief and empirical fact, or never did the work to anchor our belief in the first place. Those projects have almost universally failed.

If you separate belief from fact you can develop a couple superpowers:

1. You can easily build consensus with others and reason with others about your work. By saying things like “I believe we should go to the moon because of X and Y,” or “The data actually show X, not Y.” This will clarify points of agreement and disagreement, and ensure you operate from the same set of facts.

2. You can establish plans to test your beliefs. This will allow you to quickly change your mind based on new information, which is incredibly important.

3. You can easily debug things when they don’t work out — and put together a new plan — based on a new set of beliefs established from a new or additional set of facts.

If you don't separate belief from fact it’s hard to do any of these things. You'll move slower and you'll frequently reach the wrong conclusion without understanding why. Even worse, you'll often find out you were wrong way too late.

Develop a theory of the world

The world is one big dynamic system. And it's dynamic systems all the way down. Kind of like turtles.

It’s possible to have limited impact without understanding an entire system. You can tweak one variable and pull a lever without understanding what they really do. But your impact won’t last.

The only way to make graphs go up and to the right for a long time is to develop a theory of the world that points you in a certain direction. Without it you're just throwing spaghetti at the wall. A solid theory of the world will systematically guide you from product to product, feature to feature, enhancement to enhancement, growth hack to growth hack.

This is what strategy is. It comes from developing a solid theory of the world.

Find the leverage

Every company in the world is resource constrained. No one can do everything.

We must always do the least work for the biggest impact.

Gather data and develop your theory of the world until you know where the leverage is. The Pareto Principle — the 80/20 rule — is real, and sometimes understates the power of finding leverage. I've found that you can often get 80% of the impact from one percent of the work.

Start small, think big

It's easy to develop a theory of the world based on solid belief and empirical knowledge and then spend a year building against it without any customer feedback. This might be an appropriate strategy in hardware but it is not a good strategy in online software.

Being in online software means that we can learn and change our work continuously, and we can test our strategies cheaply. We can learn about the world rapidly through experiments If we aren’t sure yet how something works we can fix that by building a bunch of small things and seeing how customers respond.

Our ability to start small, learn and iterate is a huge strategic advantage that we enjoy over traditional banks who think in big, monolithic waterfalls. We must seize every advantage we can.

Execute with alacrity against clear goals

Clear goals align people. They bring you and your squad together, bring your squad and your product area together, and bring your product area and the company together. They are the ultimate tool for generating alignment.

Just being open with your goals will quickly reveal poor alignment and point the way to fixing it. We can then measure alignment empirically — “Are our goals compatible?”

Clear goals also focus your effort. If you have clear goals you will find yourself naturally spending most of your time trying to achieve them. You will minimise distraction and churn and focus on the things that matter most.

Finally, clear goals help you know if you're doing a good job. The answer is clear. You’re either on track to hit your goals or not. Without clear goals it’s murky. Different people will have different opinions. Some will be more charitable and some decidedly less charitable. And it’ll be easy to lie to yourself about how you’re doing. That’s bad. With clear goals everyone can be aligned on where they stand, what’s going well, and what needs improving. This is a blessing.

Once you have clear goals it's important to execute with alacrity. Alacrity is "brisk and cheerful readiness." I think it's a good encapsulation of how a good team operates. Especially in the face of setbacks. Everything we do either proves or disproves our hypotheses, contributing to our theory of the world, and ultimately helping us hit our goals.

Continually learn and evaluate performance

Ultimately our jobs are about impact.

I'm going to borrow from our progression framework here:

Impact is the difference between this reality and the alternate reality that would’ve occurred if a [team] hadn’t done what they did.

It's important that we objectively measure impact. It's the only way to know if we're doing a good job. And you cannot do a better job without understanding whether you're doing a good job. Objectively measuring impact helps us determine whether our beliefs are correct, our theory of the world is accurate and our work is good quality. Without this knowledge — and the intellectual humility to accept it — we risk continually doing the wrong thing.

If we do the wrong thing for too long we will destroy customer value and enterprise value. If we do the right thing for long enough we will transform our customers' lives and build an incredibly valuable company.

There are many ways to measure impact, but three stand out:

1. User research and usability testing

2. Experiments

3. Graphs on dashboards

User research and usability testing

It's easy to build products which are beautiful but confusing. And when you're close to them it's hard to know for sure without user testing. So you should user test pretty much everything, even if it's just in the hallway.

I know there are never enough user researchers to go around, but that's not an excuse. You can conduct your own research. It isn't that hard and the excellent researchers we do have here can help you do it well. And we’re hiring more researchers.

Experiments

We know that all of the work our growth teams are doing works because we have experiments. We also know which of our tactics work best because of experiments. We can discard the things that don't work and focus on the things that do. This knowledge helps us refine our approach, develop new theories, and get better and better at Product Growth over time.

Not everything requires an experiment, but I think most changes should be wrapped in them anyway to understand if we accidentally cause any degredation of experience or negative secondary or tertiary effects. Over time we can refine the set of things that we wrap in experiments.

Graphs on dashboards

It's hard to measure a Zero to One product like Monzo Pay with an experiment. Thankfully, dashboards work really well for this. We know Monzo Pay is going well because all of its graphs are moving in the right direction. We can also evaluate our work in all of Borrowing, Business Banking, Personal Banking, Subscriptions and more with simple dashboards that show us how our graphs are moving. They also point to one of our key functions — to inflect the graph.

Next steps

I'm really proud of where we are as a team. And a company. Our velocity is good, we've built a good Product Led Growth capability, we've hired some excellent people, and the graphs are moving.

This offsite is structured around what we have to do next. We'll focus on the product process and themes outlined above, and we'll spend a short time on hiring. Both should be focuses for this team over the next six months. And then, around five o'clock, we'll go out for dinner and drinks and celebrate what we've accomplished so far and what we're going to achieve next.

I've led a lot of product management organisations in the last 15 years that have built literally hundreds of products for billions of people, and I've advised countless more. I think this is becoming one of the best. And as we do that we will all become better PMs and we will improve the financial lives of millions of people.

I put this list together because we’re hiring PMs pretty fast and almost all of them ask for reading material on the way in. We also have a lot of people at Monzo who came from traditional banks in search of a new way of doing things. They really want to understand how this “product” thing works. So this list is for them too.

There’s a mix of old and new. I’ve got the Apple Human Interface Guidelines from 1987 on the list because it’s still one of the best things ever written about how to design interfaces for humans. And then there are short, kind of annoying posts from Farnham Street that illustrate concepts like second order thinking. Is this the best exposition on secondary and tertiary effects? Almost certainly not. But it does the trick in a quick and dirty way.

Anyway, I hope you find it valuable. Maybe there will be something in here which will cause you to think a bit differently, or understand a problem you’re working on from a new angle. Maybe a fully baked growth accounting visualisation will show you something surprising about your product and cause you to turn left where you would have otherwise turned right. Maybe a refresher on Metcalfe’s Law will lead you to prioritise social features, or “Why Speedboats Win and Tankers Sink” will lead you to re-emphasise the value of empiricism in your organisation.

And if you’ve got good stuff to read that isn’t on this list, please share.

Cheers!

Articles and videos

• Building Good Products

  • We Don't Sell Saddles Here by Stewart Butterfield

  • The 4 Stages of 0→1 Products by Julie Zhuo

  • The Next Feature Fallacy by Andrew Chen

  • Why Speedboats Win and Tankers Sink by our very own Mikkel Dengsøe

  • Casey's Guide to Finding Product/Market Fit by Casey Winters

  • Diligence at Social Capital series is absolutely essential reading

  • Metcalfe's Law

  • Purpose: the heart of the builder by Sep Kamvar from Mastery and Mimicry

  • Defining Product Success: Metrics and Goals by Chandra Narayanan, et al

  • What is Retention? by the Sequoia Data Science team

  • Training your product intuition by Merci Victoria Grace

  • How bad ideas get on the roadmap by Christian Bonilla

  • WTF is Strategy? by Vince Law

  • Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak by Kathy Sierra

  • Nine Business Models and the Metrics Investors Want video by Anu Hariharan (an investor in Monzo)

• Product Growth

  • How to build a growth team — lessons from Uber, Hubspot, and others by Andrew Chen

  • How to Set Up, Hire and Scale a Growth Strategy and Team by Anu Hariharan

  • The Power User Curve: The best way to understand your most engaged users by Andrew Chen

  • Quick Ratio as a Shortcut to Understand Product Growth by Ekaterina Skorobogatova

  • Videos:

    • Growth by Alex Schultz

    • How we put Facebook on the path to 1 billion users by Chamath Palihapitiya

    • Metrics and Hiring for your Growth Team by Anu Harihan and Gustaf Alstromer

• Product Management

  • Brian Armstrong's new PM letter

  • Facebook product sense interview (everything you need to know) by IGotAnOffer is a great guide to how to think as a product manager

  • Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager by Ben Horowitz is good to read but a bit outdated

  • How to Work with Designers by Julie Zhuo

• Building companies

  • Coordination Headwinds: Organisations Are Like Slime Molds by Alex Komoroske

  • Book Review: Talent by Zvi Mowshowitz

  • High Standards by Jeff Bezos

  • Individuals matter by Dan Luu

  • Prioritise the Highest Order Bit by Cedric Chin

  • Do Things That Don't Scale by Paul Graham

  • Practical Thought about Practical Thought: Turning $2 Million Into $2 Trillion by Charlie Munger

  • Software is Eating the World by Marc Andreessen

• Ways of thinking

  • Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (~100 Models Explained) from Farnham Street

  • Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform from Farnham Street

  • The Revised Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charlie Munger

• Ways of working

  • How to Set KPIs and Goals by Adora Cheung

  • Completed Staff Work by Tom Watson Jr of IBM

  • Mark Zuckerberg's Letter to Investors — focus on "The Hacker Way" section

  • Jeff Bezos: People who are 'right a lot' make decisions differently than everyone else — here's how — it's a click bait headline but it's right

  • The Motivation Wave video by BJ Fogg — When you have high willpower/motivation, do (1) hard things that structure future behavior; (2) hard things that make future behaviors easier; (3) hard things that increase your capability/skills.

Books

• Ways of thinking

  • The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts

  • The Great Mental Models Volume 3: Systems and Mathematics

  • Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows and Diana Wright

  • Thinking Strategically by Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff is a good introduction to Game Theory

• Building

  • Nudge: The Final Edition by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler

  • Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore

• Design

  • The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

  • The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda

  • Human Interface Guidelines: The Apple Desktop Interface by Apple

• Teams

  • High Output Management by Andy Grove

  • Crucial Conversations — Tools for talking when stakes are high by Kerry Patterson, et al

  • Organisational Culture and Leadership by Edgar Schein

  • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

• Self, Philosophy, Other

  • Mindset by Carol Dweck

  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

  • Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio

  • Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

As the publishing bar has dropped to zero three things have happened:

• More stupid people post more stupid shit;

• More smart people post more dangerous shit;

• More smart people post poorly polished shit.

All of this presents a problem — and an opportunity — for publishers like Facebook, Twitter and TikTok, who have responded with ranked feeds. Ranked feeds are a brilliant solution to the problem. They solve the discovery problem for you by showing you the content you want to see. And they solve the engagement problem for the publisher by showing you the content you want to see. Boom. Everyone wins.

Ranked feeds, of course, have a pretty big negative externality. They create filter bubbles which reinforces the stupid shit we already believe and cause our own personal Overton windows to shift rapidly in whatever direction we were predisposed to. The liberal get more liberal, the conservative get more conservative. The nut jobs get more nutty.

It wasn’t always thus. Our media — and national discourse — used to be dominated by a very small elite. Walter Cronkite ran the show. When Cronkite turned against the war in Vietnam, that was it. As LBJ said: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Getting out of Vietnam was obviously a good thing, but the domination of media by a small elite wasn’t obviously a good thing. Debate was confined to a narrow ideological range, and good ideas were stifled. Innovation happened in big containers like NASA and rarely in small, hyper-empowered groups of like-minded people. Revolution had to happen in the streets, not by pen.

Back to Substack.

The golden age of internet media started around 2001 with the launch of MovableType. Wordpress followed in 2003. No one serious used Blogger. Anyone could publish, but there was a barrier to entry. You had to have a web host. I had my own server collocated somewhere and built my own system with Gentoo. Obviously most people didn’t do this, but setting up MovableType still took work.

You had to have something to say and a burning need to say it. And the timing was good. MovableType debuted on September 3, 2001. Just before 9/11. And so everyone had something to write about. About the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush, José Padilla. A generation of pundits were born. Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, and so many more.

It took work to discover blogs. They would link to each other. You’d find people who roughly matched your ideology, but you didn’t agree about everything. You would read Andrew Sullivan every day or every few days and sometimes you’d read things you disagreed with. He’d link to Glenn Reynolds and you’d learn about a different perspective.

Now, of course, our feeds are just full of shit that we already agree with. And I think we’re getting bored of that. Facebook is slowly dying and the things replacing it don’t fill the gaps. They don’t support text. Instagram and TikTok are MTV. They aren’t the nightly news or the New York Times. They can never support Common Sense.

But Substack can. Anyone can have a Substack — hi! — but it takes work. You need to build an audience. The hard way. And your audience gets everything. The things they agree with and the things they don’t. It’s pushed to them. It’s like everyone subscribes to the RSS. And the posts can be forwarded by email. They can go viral. Sort of.

All the ingredients are there to return to the golden age as the great ranked feeds continue their slow and belabored deaths. A group of semi-elite intellectuals can post and build audiences again without having to resort to clickbait. The spreading of shit can focus on music videos and people throwing up airquotes as they answer questions no one ever asked them. And I can shake my fist at the sky like an angry old man remembering the “good old days” twenty years ago when I was young and naive and optimistic.

And, who knows, maybe this is the first step in the better future we all want.

I’ve been working in tech for 22 years. Billions of people around the world use things I’ve built. I’ve worked in banking, social media, food delivery, internet privacy, online video, venture capital and more. I used to blog prolifically and I’ve worked in a broad range of roles. And the entire time I’ve been fascinated by it all.

I’m going to use this platform to write with passion about the things I believe and the things I want to understand better. I hope that you’ll read it, and I hope you’ll join in the conversation too.

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