Wonga was eighteen months old when Lehman fell.
The autumn of 2008 was, by every external measure, the worst possible time to be running a finance company that no one had heard of. Banks that were too big to fail did exactly that. Capital evaporated. The European venture ecosystem virtually shut down. Trust in traditional finance collapsed in the space of a single news cycle. Most founders I knew at the time spent those months not building, but defending.
We did the opposite. We built faster.
Wonga was founded on a conviction that the traditional finance industry was built on outdated assumptions, prejudicing many people. Credit decisioning was still dominated by bank managers whose intuition, however well-meaning, was implicitly biased and structurally slow. By 2005 there was enough data and alternative information available that machines could make less prejudiced, more consistent, and more appropriate credit decisions than humans for many financial purposes. That was the thesis. The technology went live in 2007. The crisis arrived a year later.
What I learned through 2008 and 2009 has shaped how I think about building in any environment, and especially how I think about backing founders today who are starting up in conditions that look unforgiving.
The first lesson was about discipline. Capital scarcity is, in retrospect, the best operating constraint a young company can have. When venture money is plentiful, the temptation is to outspend the problem. When venture money disappears, you are forced to build the unit economics that actually work, and to build them now. Wonga grew profitably through the GFC because it had to. The company was funded, expanding, and generating cash flow through the same eighteen months that the largest financial institutions in the world were being nationalised. That is not a story about heroism. It is a story about constraint.
The second lesson was about trust. In good times, customer trust accrues to incumbents. In a crisis, customer trust transfers — and it transfers fastest in the categories where the incumbents are most exposed. Banks were the most exposed institutions on the planet in late 2008. A new lender that made decisions transparently, in seconds, on data the customer could see was not just an alternative to the banks. In that moment, it was a relief from them. The crisis did not slow our growth. It accelerated it.
The third lesson was about talent. The labour market for engineers and data scientists in late 2008 was a buyer’s market for the first time in a decade. The people we hired in those eighteen months — the credit-risk team, the platform engineers, the data scientists — were the foundation of what eventually became the world’s first real-time artificial-intelligence system in consumer credit. Most of them were available because the firms that would normally have hired them had stopped hiring.
None of these lessons was theoretical. Each of them was the difference between a company that survived 2008 and a company that did not.
I think about this often when I write cheques today. The conditions for building have rarely felt easy in the last fifteen years. There has been a financial crisis, a pandemic, a war in Europe, a return of inflation, a collapse in venture funding, and a reordering of the global trade system within the same career. Founders who wait for conditions to be benign tend to wait too long.
The dust road is most useful when it is the only road open. Builders who know how to read the road in bad weather are the ones who arrive first when the weather clears.
Building when the world is burning is not about being brave. It is about recognising that the structural advantages — capital discipline, trust transfer, talent availability — are precisely the advantages that the incumbents lose first when conditions turn. The advantage is not despite the crisis. It is because of it.