Starting a Family and a Company at the Same Time

A conversation with Natasha Vernier, CEO, Cable

Natasha Vernier was introduced to me by Maria Campbell, the COO of Griffin. The two worked together at Monzo which is where the seed for Natasha’s startup Cable was planted. During our conversation, we talked about leaders' role as stress absorbers, the difference between being a leader and a CEO/founder, and what it’s like starting a family and founding a company…at the same time.

We met through a mutual friend, Maria Campbell. She’s in London and you’re in the English countryside?

I live in Cheltenham now, which is in the Cotswolds, a couple of hours west of London.

Is the Cotswolds as magical and dreamy, as that movie portrayed it? I can't think of the name. The Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet movie. (editors note: the movie is called The Holiday)

I know which one you're talking about. It wasn’t actually filmed in the Cotswolds. That's filmed somewhere south of London, but everyone always thinks it's the Cotswolds. They may even call it the Cotswolds.

Oh, interesting. They do call it the Cotswolds. Is it a cute little village kind of area?

It is. And you know what? I totally did not appreciate it when I grew up here. I'm actually from Cheltenham and when you're a kid, you don't notice things like nice hillsides and views. And when we moved back, I was driving to my mom's house from where we now live. And I noticed this beautiful hillside that I have walked on probably hundreds of times in my life. And I was like, oh my God, this is actually gorgeous. And I had never appreciated it before now. And it's pretty appalling, it took me that long. But yes, it is gorgeous. It is very pretty.

Oh, that's awesome. I grew up just outside Detroit. It's not gorgeous. We just had a field. We’d go back and make little forts out of trees. That was magical to me because we didn’t have a lot of green spaces like that. So where you grew up sounds idyllic to me. Ok, we're not here to talk about the Cotswolds or the surrounding areas. Can you give us a quick introduction of yourself?

I am the CEO and co-founder of Cable, which is a company that's now nearly two years old, about 18 months old. Before Cable, I was Head of Financial Crime at Monzo. I was with Monzo for nearly four and a half years. I was one of the early employees there. And before that, in what feels now like a whole other life, I worked in corporate finance, so a very, very different field. And I am also married to a wonderful woman called Stephanie and we have two children and a very naughty dog.

What made you start Cable?

Good question. When I joined Monzo, I was a business operations analyst. I did anything and everything that was needed to kind of just get Monzo moving. We've got a business operations manager at Cable now, which is what my job was. I think they are an integral role in any startup. I did things like setting up our card distribution program. Then we had some fraud and I was asked to deal with that. I’d never really had any experience in financial crime before. I found it absolutely fascinating, partly probably because I'm nosy and there's lots of investigating in financial crime, which is very, very interesting. But also because it's a weird combination of law, accounting, and coding. I have a law degree and I'm a qualified accountant. Then I went and learned to code.

It turned out to be the perfect combination of all of these things that I'd done. That wasn’t my plan. It was pure luck but worked out really well. I give that background because when I started doing financial crime work at Monzo, I didn't have any preconceived ideas or knowledge of how banks handled financial crime, how they dealt with it. That enabled me to come to this area with really fresh ideas and a different way of thinking about how we could mitigate financial crime.

One of the things I saw during my time at Monzo was this big difference in how the two main requirements that banks have with regard to financial crime were dealt with. The first is that banks have to identify the risks that they face from financial crime and build controls to mitigate those risks. That encompasses everything from things like your customer checks and identity verification checks. It also encompasses things like transaction monitoring and submitting reports to crime agencies. That part of stopping financial crime and fighting financial crime, there’s so much technology that you can buy to help with it. There are loads of very, very good companies all fighting to be the best, all coming up with new ways to improve all of the time.

The other requirement that banks have with regards to financial crime is to independently test that those controls work. When I was at Monzo I saw that there's no technology to help people do this part of the job. Most teams that do this part of the job have no engineers and no data scientists and nothing they can use to make their job more efficient and more effective. That just blew my mind. I thought it was totally crazy.

So the initial idea for Cable I was exploring was — could I build technology for that second requirement, for banks and other regulated institutions, to understand and test whether their controls actually helped stop financial crime? I did a bunch of research. I spoke to a lot of customers and I read, for my sins, all of the fines given by the regulators in the US and the UK for financial crime reasons for the last 10 years or so. It became apparent to me that the regulators care a lot about how ineffective bank controls are. Fines are being given at a quick rate for that reason.

It also became apparent to me that just this problem of financial crime was much bigger than I'd realized. $4 trillion is laundered every year. The UN estimates we catch less than 1% of it globally. So we're ineffective at stopping crime. We're terrible at it. The biggest banks in the world spend a billion pounds a year trying to stop crime and we catch less than 1% of it. 

Financial crime is this thing that almost nobody has heard of. I certainly had not heard of it before Monzo, but it impacts everybody every day. The bribery and corruption of governments in the UK and the US, for example, increases everyone's taxes. Four in every 1000 people is in modern slavery, which means that they're in a forced marriage or they're in forced labor. Once you start to think of those sorts of numbers you realize that you probably know people who have been impacted by financial crime. Just recently in the UK Mo Farah, who's won Olympic gold medals for running, talked about how he'd been human trafficked. This impacts literally everybody.

The mission behind Cable (which admittedly will take us a long time) is to reduce financial crime in the world. We do that by helping banks and other regulated institutions understand how well their controls are working, and help them stop more financial crime with the goal over time of reducing financial crime in the world.

That’s incredible. I feel a bit naive, but thinking about human trafficking and thinking about that in the context of like financial crime, I hadn't quite connected that before. I think others might be surprised to think about the impact and the ways it shows up.

It's not naive at all. I don't think most people in the world realize this. But organized crime gangs are very wealthy, well-run organizations. They have lawyers and accountants who do professional work for them. Their whole goal is to make more and more money in ways that governments consider mostly illegal and to be able to utilize that money for their benefit to buy houses, to live, and to have nice lives. If you think about the classic example of Mexican or South American drug gangs, well, they need people to work on their drug farms.

Remarkably, this even happens in the UK. Some people are brought to the UK by drug gangs, their passports are taken away from them. They’re forced to work producing drugs in the UK. That kind of blows my mind still when I think about it. And those things happen all of the time. People are trafficked to work for these organized crime gangs to make more money for them. They have their rights taken away. They're very often abused. It's all so this group of people, a small group of people, can make more money and utilize that money.

I'm stunned into silence. I just learned so much. That's an incredible mission. I think sometimes we think fintech might be boring or that it’s about bankers. You have a mission around helping people that will have impact.

Hopefully. It will take us a long time and a lot of hard work from a lot of people to get there. But that is our goal. That's why we're doing this.

Oh my gosh. I love that. I always tell my guests, "You don't have to cry," but now I have tears in my eyes. What a beautiful, beautiful mission. This is your first time founding a startup and the first time being a CEO. Was starting a company and leading it a goal you had?

Before I joined Monzo, I think I had a naive thought that maybe one day I'd start my own company and run it and that would be a cool thing to do. Then I joined Monzo and I saw how hard it was. I saw how stressed the co-founders of Monzo were, and how all-consuming it was. I thought, no way, I'll never do that! After a while of being at Monzo, I came full circle and decided that actually yeah, I think I could do this. Maybe I won't start a regulated bank because that does seem particularly difficult and particularly stressful. But running a company, bringing people together around a mission, and trying to build something that can impact the world did feel like something I wanted to take on.

You've been in leadership roles, as Monzo Bank's Head of Financial Crime. How is being a CEO different than the other leadership roles that you've held?

I don't think that they could be more different. My experience so far, and obviously I'm very new to being a CEO and co-founder and Cable is very early in its journey, but certainly, my experience so far has been that founding and leading a company is something quite different from anything else I've ever done before.

There are a couple of learnings from Monzo that do impact my job now. The first is the team at Monzo was just so smart. The founding team was probably just the smartest group of people I've ever met and worked with. Initially, it was very intimidating to see them take in a huge amount of information, understand it, analyze it, and then very quickly articulate a clear point of view, succinctly. That was a very important skill that I had to learn quickly at Monzo to sort of get along. It has been a beneficial skill to learn.

The second thing that I think about a lot that I took from Monzo was I had two different managers who told me about this concept of being a stress absorber, and about what I now call the stress curve. There was this very interesting video that went viral on Twitter a month or so ago, it was the Duke women’s basketball coach. She was talking about handling hard well. I just loved it. It all is related to this concept of being a stress absorber and this stress curve.

The idea is that as you take on more responsibility, as you learn more, as you take on bigger projects, things will get stressful. You feel like you are at the peak level of stress that you can handle. You can't possibly take on any more. And then you have a bit of relaxation, a bit of downtime, maybe you take a holiday and you never come back to the same base level that you originally were at. The next time that you take on more work and more responsibility, you realize that actually now you can take on even more stress. You can get to a higher peak. Then you take a pause and you take a rest and it goes on. And so you have this meandering curve that just goes up and to the right continuously. I think it's related to handling hard well, as that basketball coach talked about.

The stress absorber point is that as a manager, if somebody comes to you and they're like, "God, I'm so stressed, I can't possibly finish this piece of work." Or, "How are we as a company going to tackle this issue?" Or, "We have this customer problem." If you as a manager go, "God, you're so right. How are we going to do those things? It's a nightmare." Then you just amplify that stress and everything gets worse.

If as a leader you can absorb stress. If those people can leave conversations with you feeling calmer and like some of their stress has been taken away from them and is being dealt with by other people, then you are having an outsized impact on the company and on the people that you manage. 

So the concepts of the stress curve and being a stress absorber were things that I learnt as a leader at Monzo that definitely have helped me come and start Cable. That's not really what you asked though!

Yeah, but I love that. As a leader, being a stress absorber is important. I think what's hard is how do we absorb this stress for our team without actually taking it into our own lives, nervous system, and body? How do we do it in a way that is healthy for us?

I do not have an answer to that, but that is a big challenge, yeah!

I was like, do you have an answer? I think that's a trick of the challenge of leadership, especially as a CEO and a founder.

I don't know the answer to this, but my experience has been that this is something that  just gets easier with practice. When I was at Monzo, I got very, very stressed. I wrote a blog post about this. I had to take a month off at which point I decided that actually, the only way to deal with this was to leave Monzo. Through experience, I have learned to try to differentiate between the noise, and the things that will actually impact the future of the company. I think there is probably an element of as CEO and a co-founder, I have the most existential problems about the company to think about. And they will always be the most important.

What at Monzo might have seemed like a huge problem and a big stressor, now I imagine actually if I were to face those same problems, I'd be like, "Well, that compares not at all to keeping Cable running and paying the people that I employ," those are the actual problems that I deal with and the things that I think about most. Those are the much more important things.

So there's probably this degree of, I guess, just what you are dealing with in your role at that time and how those play out. 

One difference between being an employee in a senior role and being a co-founder and a CEO is the outsized impact that your bad days have on people. If I'm feeling frustrated, fed up, or if I'm feeling tired, or sad, I feel like I can't fully show that at work. Not because I don't feel comfortable telling the team. But it would have a bad impact on the company. So having to figure out what you can share, and at what time you can share things is really important.

This is one of the reasons that I've found having a co-founder is very important because having somebody who you can be open and transparent with in real-time is very, very important as a founder. That said, I suffered from postnatal depression after my second child, which was a couple of months ago. I did talk to the team about it, but I talked about it when I felt like I could talk about it coherently, and when I was over the worst of it. I was trying to be as open and as honest and as real-time as I could be without having that detrimental outsized impact on the trajectory of the company.

I think another difficult thing is balancing these relationships with people that you care about that you think you could be friends with, that you are friends with. But also you have this responsibility as their boss and as the leader of the company to separate these things. I think that is hard.

Well, yeah. And you have a responsibility. As a leader and especially as a CEO, the business is your boss. So how do you be a good shepherd of the business so that it can continue?

Yeah. Another difference between being a senior leader at an early-stage startup and a CEO and co-founder is the responsibility of hiring people for this idea that you had, however well-grounded that idea is in experience and knowledge, and market research. The fact that we employ people and have to keep those people employed and bring them a salary every month, plays on your mind as a founder. It plays on my mind every single day. That is a weight, a level of stress that I had not experienced before. I had thought about it logically and I could understand that it was going to happen, but I did not understand the impact it would have on me.

That’s a part of why I’m not a founder. I don’t want the stress of making sure I can pay people. That weight can be heavy. How big are you all now at the company?

There are 19 of us at the moment at Cable including my co-founder Katie.

I understand that a week after you signed the pre-seed term sheet, your first child was born. What was that like?

That was exhausting but probably easier than when we had our second child, which was just four months ago now. When we signed the pre-seed term sheet in August 2020, it was just me and a business plan. My co-founder was joining in January 2021. She was finishing out at Monzo first. So it was a case of talking to customers and trying to hire some people. But we had no customers. We had no one paying us. We had no deadlines. It was very early. It did  mean that we didn't move as quickly in the first three months as most companies move, most startups move, which might be a bad thing. But it meant that I got to spend a lot of time with my daughter and that I was able to be much more helpful to and present with my wife.

Having our second child, in April 2022 was very, very hard because we have paying customers, we have deadlines, and we have things we need to build on tight timelines. We are going to conferences. I have 5, 6, 7 customer calls a day. To try and step away from that at this stage in the company's life felt harder and much more stressful, which is probably partly why I ended up with postnatal depression this time around rather than the last time around.

You have two children under the age of two and your startup is about two years old. That's a lot going on at one time. So I just have to ask, was starting a family and starting a business at the same time an intention?

Not really! I'm married to a woman so we don't have the luxury of being able to just have a baby at any point in time. We had been going through IVF for a while before Stephanie got pregnant with our daughter. So we had tried to have our first child much earlier. It would've been a lot more relaxing having that baby when I was at Monzo and I would've been able to benefit from their great parental leave policy! That would've been great. That didn't work out quite as we planned. But I think that the fact that we were having a baby did bring up the idea of it's now or never as to whether to start a company. Once I knew what it's actually like, rather than just pretending I knew what it's going to be like to have kids, we thought there would be no way that I could or would do that.

Once you know how little sleep you have and once you know how little time you have at weekends, there's just no way that you'd then be like, "Okay, I'm going to start the company now because that sounds like another thing I can take on." So there was a feeling of, if I want to do this, I should really do this sooner rather than later. Yes, this will probably be difficult, but I'm very fortunate in that Stephanie is very, very patient, very accommodating, and very aware of what it was going to be like. We talked about it a lot. I'm very fortunate to be married to a woman because I think it's probably quite a female trait to talk about everything a lot. And we do that. So there was no surprise really when we went into this.

If Cable turns into the success that we hope it is, a huge part of that will be because of my wife Stephanie’s support and willingness to take on much more of managing our lives and helping our kids become great little human beings.

Mm yeah. That's why I asked you because two women, obviously there's like a different sort of mechanism there. That’s kind of what I thought. Sometimes life just lines up in its own way.

Yeah. And I also have this kind of, I guess I have a feminist stance that like, "God dammit, I should just be able to do everything at once if I want to." And so actually after we'd had our first child, I tried to get pregnant and I had an ectopic pregnancy. But had I gotten pregnant, I would've given birth to our second child mid-last year, which perhaps would've been even crazier. So I guess maybe that didn't work out for a reason. Maybe it was a good thing that I didn't carry our second. I think in hindsight that would've been very, very hard. But yeah, I don't know. I feel like so much of the narrative around venture-backed startups is bros sitting in dorm rooms dropping out of college, taking a 30K salary or less living on pot noodles. And I couldn't do that.

I needed a certain salary to support the family, pay our rent, and be able to afford the help that we needed for our family setup. We had to have a certain amount of money. I was very clear with our VCs about that. I spoke to our pre-seed investors right at the beginning. “I need this salary, otherwise I can't do this.” They were great about it. 

Katie and I have also built the company in a very particular way. We want people to have lives outside of Cable. We've got other people at the company that have kids. We have people at the company who have other dependents. That's something that shouldn't be impossible just because we're trying to build a big impactful company.

The narrative around venture-backed businesses is it has to be your whole life. You have to spend 100 hours a week working on this. All of your weekends will be spent coding or whatever it might be. I hope to prove those narratives wrong. We will see.

That's wonderful that you were upfront about that with your VCs and what you're trying to do with the team. Being a parent of young children and a CEO impacts how you lead.

Definitely. We wrote what we call our Operating System very early in Cable's life. It's our take on a values document or a culture document. There are five principles. They're how we want people to act at Cable. It's how we want to treat each other. It's the things that we think are most important to our long-term success. They're not focused on things like “move fast and break things” and that kind of culture. The first principle is Be Kind. We also need to make transparent decisions and communicate those things clearly. But I think that the first, Be Kind, sets the tone for how we do things.

And yes, you are right. I can't work all weekend because I have to look after my kids. That sends a very clear message that we do not expect our employees to work every weekend. There will be times when you have to work evenings and weekends, but that happens in every job. That's not just a startup thing. So being very clear about that, about I'm tired, I'm going to log off now, even though it's only 5:00 PM. That does happen. That has to happen.

Mmm hmm. I'm like, "Ooh, I'd want to work in a company like that.”

It's funny, the vast majority of people who apply to work at Cable say that the Operating System is why they applied. So it resonates with people I think.

I'm super encouraged by a company developing these principles early on because it says a lot about the culture and the way you're going to be treated. It's harder to shift those things later than to bake them in the beginning. It strikes me that you think about your business and your life in a pretty holistic way.

I guess so. And I think the first part there, thinking about the business in a holistic way is true. That was on purpose. Thinking about my life in a holistic way, perhaps was more by chance! But I appreciate that anyway.

What's been hardest for you about leading a company and having a family at the same time?

So much of it has been much harder than I thought it would be, honestly, but also more rewarding than I thought it would be. I think the most important things to learn have been brutal prioritization and efficiency. Because I cannot work all weekend, because I cannot work all night, because I'm awake all night when the baby's crying, I have to prioritize ruthlessly and I have to be highly efficient when I am working.

It's quite tiring to be that ruthless with your time and also super efficient. Days go by where I stand at my desk from 8:30 to 6:00 at which time I have to log off to help with bath time. I will be on back-to-back calls throughout those hours with no break, maybe 15 minutes for a quick lunch, and maybe I'll go to the toilet twice. You just have to power through stuff. But that's the decision I've made because I do want to go and help with bath time. I do want to see my kids before they go to bed and those sorts of things.

What are the kinds of things that keep you up at night?

Absolutely everything. I think the biggest shock was how I just never stop thinking about Cable. I probably think about it every single minute that I'm awake and I have done since I started it. It's just all-consuming. Sleeping can get really difficult in particular. If I have a good call with a customer, I'll be lying in bed with my head spinning about all the great things we're going to do with them and all the product features we need to build. If I have a bad call with a customer, I'm thinking about how to keep the team motivated and what to change next time, and those sorts of things.

Being a CEO and founder is relentless. I think the existential situation that our company is in, we're a venture-backed startup that is not yet profitable, means that we could not exist unless we get more customers and get to profitability or we raise more money. It definitely weighs on my mind. It’s very connected to being able to continue to pay all those wonderful people that we employ. It's also about how do we stay singularly focused on that mission? It’s remarkably easy to get distracted.

It’s easy to get distracted and to build things that customers mention or that other people mention that would be great things to build. But if we build all of those, we will never reach that mission. The team joined us and they believe in what we're doing because of our mission. We believe that we can actually do something different here that's never been done with fighting financial crime before. But we have to stick to the mission.

Staying close to the mission while also running a business that's profitable or moving towards profitability is tricky.

Let's have another conversation when we get there. (laughs)

While profitability has to lead, you’re still keeping the mission in the back of your mind, right? Because that’s a big reason people joined.

Totally. I think that's something that certainly my parents' generation struggled to wrap their heads around. My mom was a dentist for 35 years. She sat in the same room in the same chair for many years. Of course, she's having a positive impact on people's lives and sometimes even saving people's lives by finding cancers in the mouth and that kind of thing. But just the idea that you can work for a company because of the mission I think is something that is perhaps becoming more interesting to people now with some of the changes in the world.

I agree. What advice would you give other leaders who find themselves taking on a big leadership role while making big changes in their personal life like having children?

I think the most important thing that I have found is to make sure you have good support and open and honest communication with your family. It would simply not be possible for me to have done this if I didn't have Stephanie, who I talk to a lot about everything, stood right beside me. Just dealing with those ups and downs, dealing with the stresses, is the most important thing I think. So I guess my piece of advice for anyone in that position is just make sure you have that foundation, that support system. And if you do, then you can achieve anything.

That's so good. If you could time travel, is there anything you’d tell pre-CEO, pre-mom you?

Probably not because anything I would say would probably have stopped me from starting Cable! It's a lot harder than I imagined. I knew it would be hard. I knew there would be ups and downs. People talked about the emotional rollercoaster of starting a company. People had talked about the pros, the obvious pros, but also the cons of taking venture money. But the highs and lows are more severe and in a shorter space of time than I could ever have imagined. So no, I think I would've kept my mouth shut so I blindly continued down this path because it's also been pretty great!

That's awesome. I love you're like, "Nope, I would let that be revealed to my future self.” It sounds like you're quite satisfied or content with the choices you've made.

Yeah, very much so. I'm fully satisfied and content with my life outside of Cable. I feel immensely lucky with my wife. I think my children are adorable and wonderful and obviously the best children in the world, which I'm sure every parent thinks. Cable is doing a really cool thing and I get to work with great people. We've built something awesome that actually does have this great impact on companies. I hope that we can be around for many more years and can have that impact on the world that we set out to have.

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