Mike Hudack
speaker
274 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Mike Hudack’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think, you know, a little bit like going from Facebook to Deliveroo, all of this time, the entire time that you're building things on the internet, I think that you are developing your intuition. I think that Deliveroo really prepared me for going into Monzo and being deeply curious about the way that British people approach money.
which is hugely different from the way that Americans approach money. You know, Americans get paid every two weeks. British people get paid monthly.
I mean, massively. And I had to learn how to do that. I think at various times I really chafed at that or found that very difficult. And I remember having this amazing conversation with this guy, Ian, who's the chief risk officer at Monzo, who also became a really good friend. And he's brilliant.
And he just said at some point, he was like, you know, you have to understand that most of or many of the crises that nations have faced in history are the result of financial crises or banking failures. you know, has a right, has an obligation to protect itself and people from those kind of situations, from those kind of outcomes. I think this is like a really important thing.
It's a really important lesson. You have to understand where people are coming from. And once you understand and you think about that critically and you change your perspective from somebody who is trying to make a graph go up into the right and trying to produce value for people as quickly as possible and experiment and, you know, you're like, why can't I test pricing?
I've tested pricing my entire career. Like, what are you talking about? I can't test pricing. And you change your perspective to like so much of society is based on the stability of the banking system.
i would have grown monzo globally i think that that's a very difficult thing to do it's doable over some period of time and i think that monza will expand geographically really well you know in the uk it's growing faster than anyone else it's doing incredibly well i think it will expand into more geos but like
I don't think it was a wrong decision at all. I think that the US is the very big prize. I think that you have to, when you're developing a bank, and it's very interesting, we've kind of taken the opposite perspective with Sling in a way, which is weird in a way, but banking is very regionally specific.
The way that mortgages work in the UK and the way that mortgages work in the US are completely different. Credit cards in the US versus credit cards in the UK, completely different. The way that people think about debt, the way that people think about saving, the way that people think about investing, the pace at which people get paid. All these things are different.
And I think it's very easy to think that you can take a highly localized product and just lift it and shift it somewhere else with a different license and it's going to work.
I suspect that the only way to truly do that successfully is to have people in the local market who take the bones of the thing, who deeply understand what has and has not worked about it, and then shape it around local insights. And I think that this is probably more particular to banking than almost anything else.
I think that as companies, we had very, very different philosophies. I wouldn't ship some of the stuff that they've shipped, some of the experiments that they've shipped. I would have said, well, I don't think that's going to work or I don't think it's core to our thing. What would you not have shipped? Well, I argued very strongly against shipping crypto products.
I didn't think it was the right thing to do for our audience, for our user base at the time. Do you think that was right with the benefit of hindsight?
yeah yeah why monzo is a bank it has a very specific position in people's lives of trust you know when i first started working there we didn't actually say the word bank anywhere on the website and one of the things that we realized pretty quickly was that we had all of the i don't want to call them downsides but all of the consequences of being a bank in terms of the regulatory framework and the you know
the constraints that it places on you and so on, with very little of the upside because people still thought of us very much as a prepaid card. And I think that one of the most important things that we had to do is shift people's perception from thinking that we were a prepaid card to thinking that we were a bank. And we built a whole program around becoming people's primary bank account.
Before we even got there, we had to figure out how we even measured that. Like, what does that even mean to be somebody's primary bank account? How do you know? Salaries. Yeah, for sure. But then how do you know that it's somebody's salary? Lots of people earn in different ways. We eventually settled on one, and then we built a goal around that.
And we built a goal around increasing the percentage of people who treated Monzo as their main bank. Then we built a bunch of... products and a bunch of features, fewer than Revolut, but like very targeted, very specific, I believe very innovative products around the idea of being somebody's bank. What can you do when you are somebody's bank? So like Monzo Flex, for example, is a lending product.
It's a credit card product, kind of integrates almost like buy now, pay later directly into your bank account. That takes a lot of work. to get right. It takes a lot of regulatory work, a lot of product design work, a lot of engineering work, and hopefully those bets that you make, you make fewer of them and they are more meaningful over time.
One of the most influential experiences that I had at Facebook was getting into ads having conversations with people where it felt very much like, and in fact, somebody said this to me explicitly, they were like, the thing that we have to do is we just have to build as many features as possible and ship them as fast as possible to see what works because we don't know what's going to work.
And, you know, I was like, okay, like if we truly don't know what's going to work, I agree that that is the right strategy. But maybe we should try to figure out what's going to work. Maybe we should develop a theory of the world. Maybe we should do fewer things well if it's knowable. And it took a lot of work to say, oh, OK, well, we have people's identity.
Showing 201–220 of 274 · page 11 of 14
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