The Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield has become an investor and adviser at Tahora, an HR app which is trying to help young employees build meaningful relationships in a hybrid-working world.
The 36-year-old has spoken openly about his battles with depression, anxiety and poor mental health while at Monzo, the banking services firm he started in 2015 and which is now valued at around £1.2 billion. Blomfield left the business in January.
In an interview with Times Enterprise Network he said that since January he had made 46 angel investments and had taken on a “visiting partner” role at Y Combinator, a high-profile start-up incubator.
He said his involvement in Tahora went beyond being a passive investor. As well as participating in the company’s £825,000 seed round last December, he is guiding the start-up’s co-founders, Ben Towers, who previously set up the digital marketing agency Towers Design when he was 11 and sold it, aged 18 to Kent-based firm Zest, and Mike Rose, a former investment banker who has helped grow two Berlin-based VC-backed start-ups.
“What Tom brings is the fact he’s so blunt. If he doesn’t like something he’ll say, ‘I don’t like it’, and it’s done,” said Towers, 23. Blomfield is advising the firm on raising further investment. He raised “about $500 million” for Monzo during his time at the helm.
Towers said: “Tom has an incredible experience of raising money and that’s a massive thing as a tech start-up, to have people [involved] who have been on both sides [as an entrepreneur and an investor].”
Tahora’s board includes Helmut Schuster, former group HR director of BP, Richard Woodward, former CFO and CCO of Three UK, and Rob Wilmot, a serial tech entrepreneur and one of the youngest ever FTSE 100 CEOs when he held the role at Freeserve in 1999.
Tahora’s app is being used by the Metropolitan Police, Google and NatWest.
“We are a B2B product… but the [experience] needs to be more like the Monzo level where you open it up and enjoy using it. Until now a lot of the products that employers provide people with haven’t had that,” Towers said.
Towers and Rose started Tahora early last year. The seed of the idea was planted when Towers was working as a consultant at consumer goods giant GSK. “Two employees sat next to each other every single day and they didn’t realise that they both ran in the Royal Parks half marathon at the weekend, until the following Monday.”
With statistics from the charity Relate showing 42 per cent of employees did not have a friend at work, Towers decided to address loneliness at work, to improve happiness and productivity.
The issue has been amplified by the pandemic and the shift to hybrid working, he said. “This isn’t a new problem but hybrid working has heightened that problem when the physical connection has been lost.”
Blomfield said that maintaining employee happiness levels during Covid was a challenge for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
“We saw it at Monzo and I’ve heard it anecdotally from friends at other companies, especially for new joiners that it’s incredibly hard to make those connections. For the younger cohorts, coming out of university expecting to join a new firm and make new friendships, it’s really, really tough,” Blomfield said.
“There was one bank I heard of that found all their associates were getting burned out and their solution was to buy everyone a Peloton. Everyone’s trying to solve this problem. But I think Ben’s really cracked it with this desire for human connection and finding those activities that bind people together outside of the workplace.”
This story appeared in The Times on 27 September 2021