Thread by @patio11

Some companies are easy to start. Some companies less so. Sometimes you just enjoy playing life on hard mode, and so you start a bank. Tom Blomfield (CEO of @monzo) was kind enough to chat with Stripe Atlas users about what it took to do that: stripe.com/atlas/guides/a…

Thoughts:

Many software entrepreneurs feel that there is some sophistication thermocline beneath with it's all of us grubbing about with MVPs and stuff-that-doesn't-scale and above which there are invisible magic experts.

Nope, starting a business is starting a business, all the way up.

Tom's thoughts on dealing with regulators largely track my thoughts. I've found most to be surprisingly reasonable, mostly because they're pleasantly surprised that someone actually wants to read their Handy Guide To X Compliance that they spent 6 months on last year.

There are certainly some regulatory regimes which are more user-friendly than others, but broadly speaking, "Describe to me exactly what you need to approve X." and then providing **exactly** what was specified is often a successful strategy.

(It's a lot harder for most bureaucrats to get a variance to their standard process approved than for them to run their standard process on inputs where you, as an entrepreneur, might not perceive a whole lot of value from running the process that way. Make their life easy.)

A totally hypothetical example: if you are asked for a diagram of your telecommunication equipment, and you don't own any, you'll have more success submitting a doc which says "As we do not own any telecommunications equipment, this diagram is intentionally blank" than arguing.

I loved Tom's anecdote about stuffing envelopes with debit cards (to fulfill them for users). A lot of startups have a roll-up-the-sleeves story early in their life; they're both good because they solve the immediate business need and because they become company lore.

Among many: my failover strategy for Twilio going down at my last last company was a) a list of people who needed phone calls that day, b) a cell phone, and c) "I paid for college by working in a call center *knuckle crack* lets do this."

I think it is underremarked upon that seed investments are largely made on vision/promise/excitement but that Series A and up are made by hard-nosed professionals who care about your metrics, and the difficulty curve (even assuming a fundamentally healthy business) is rough.

I largely agree with Tom regarding domain expertise. Largely. There are probably fields which you need 10~20++ years to appreciate all the nuances, but for most fields, a sufficiently motivated smart person attacking reduced subset can get you enough proof points to hire experts.

Another way to phrase this is "Domain expertise is certainly important in X, but the set of problems it will help you with will kill you far later than the 73 things which are already set up to kill you."

(Contrary examples are the rare "Passed 73 gates; forgot 74th" variety.)