By the autumn of 2013 Wonga had grown from launch to over $500 million in annual revenue in five years. The company was generating more than $100 million in annual cash flow. Customer Net Promoter Score sat at 73 — Apple and Google territory, ahead of every bank in the United Kingdom. We had built the world’s first real-time artificial-intelligence system in consumer credit, and a generation of customers who had been quietly excluded by traditional banks were responding accordingly.
By every external measure the business was a triumph.
In November of that year I resigned as CEO.
The story of why is the most important thing I took out of those seven years, and it is not the story most people tell about Wonga. It is a story about conviction — about the difference between conviction inside a single founder’s head and conviction inside a board.
Externally, two forces had converged. The first was a board split between those who wanted to invest in new markets, new products, and the internationalisation that the technology platform was built for, and those focused on near-term financials and an IPO. The second was regulatory friction from authorities who did not yet understand the product, did not yet understand AI-driven credit decisioning, and did not yet understand the customers we were lending to.
Either of those forces, alone, would have been a hard problem. Together, they were terminal — not because the business could not survive them, but because the strategic mandate to build the broader financial-technology platform I had envisioned was no longer there. A large secondary share sale resolved the impasse and I moved on.
What followed was a different company. The strategy narrowed: fewer markets, fewer products, retreat from the internationalisation roadmap, shutdown of the proprietary risk model, replacement of the custom technology platform with off-the-shelf software, reallocation of investment from data science and engineering to regulatory compliance. There was turnover of almost the entire team as a consequence. It did not end well.
The lesson stayed with me, and it has shaped how I write cheques today.
A great product and great customers are not enough. The unit economics are not enough. The team is not enough. The market is not enough. Without a unified board and a clear strategic mandate, even the strongest business can be pulled apart from within.
I had built Wonga around a single insight: that 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. The insight was correct. The product worked. The customers loved it. The numbers proved it.
But conviction inside a founder’s head is private. Conviction at a boardroom table is public, and it has to be reaffirmed every quarter, in conditions neither side foresaw when the cap table was assembled. Capital is not patient on its own. Patient capital is a discipline, and the discipline is shared.
Looking back, I would have done a few things differently.
I would have raised less capital, more slowly, from people whose strategic mandate matched mine for longer than three years. I would have spent more time in the early rounds testing not just whether an investor wanted the equity but whether they wanted the exact business I was building, in the exact geographies I planned to be in, on the exact timeline I needed to get there. I would have written the strategic mandate down — what we are building, what we are not building, when each milestone matures, what counts as a deviation — and asked every new shareholder to sign it before the cheque cleared.
The hardest part of that lesson is that it cuts both ways. As a builder, you have to be uncompromising about who shares your conviction before they buy a seat at your table. As an investor — which is what I have been since 2014, and permanently since Dust Road Ventures was formalised — you have to be honest about what you are buying when you write the cheque.
You are not buying equity. You are buying a seat at a table where conviction will be tested under pressure. The test will come — usually two or three years in, when the markets shift or the regulators arrive or the early-customer flywheel slows. If you have not earned the founder’s trust before that day, the day will not go well.
I still believe Wonga was the right company at the right time. Built profitably through the global financial crisis, when almost every other finance business worldwide was on the brink of collapse, with a credit-decisioning system focused on repayment probability rather than on what a person looked like or where they came from. The customers — millions of them — were not a mistake. The technology was a leap. The cash flow was real.
What broke was the alignment between the people in the room and the company on the page.
A great product and great customers are not enough. I will spend the rest of my career remembering that.