A conversation between Rona Ruthen, ex-VP Monzo and Mirella, Community and Network Manager at Seedcamp.
- Scaling through hyper growth – when you grow quickly your operating model breaks every 6-12 months. There’s a need to re-think org structures, roles & responsibilities, communication, culture, systems and it can be painful. Scaling quickly requires a mindset of constant change and bringing others on the change journey with you. We’ll talk about what to expect when you grow quickly, what to prepare for and what to accept when it comes.
- Balancing automation and manual/scrappy solutions – when you’re building/scaling a company and moving quickly you always lack people/time to do everything you want as well as you could. It’s all about prioritization and compromise. A lot could be done with scrappy manual processes and they can be crucial to moving at pace. It’s all about balance and making risk based decisions (and revisiting them after a while).
- Scaling operations / fintech operations – lessons learned from building and scaling operations in several startups. What to think about, how to prioritize, how to work across leadership teams, how to plan ahead in uncertainty. We can talk about Customer Support, Operations, Fincrime, Fraud, Payments and card operations, outsourcing and more.
More about Rona:
During my time at Monzo she held a senior leadership position, scaling the team through Monzo’s hyper growth: from less than 1m customers to over 5m, 400 employees to over 1,800, on the journey to a valuation of £4.5b; through a global pandemic.
Prior to Monzo, she was an early employee at Curve (fintech, all your cards in one) – heading the Ops and payments team and before that she worked at Fiver (online marketplace for freelance services) and Payoneer (global payments company).
Alongside her work at Monzo, she has been working with startups, scale-ups and others organisations: Leadership advisory, Startups and scale ups, NED at the SLC and a bit of angel investing.
