Founder & CEO
Monet Money Ltd (Fintech)

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I’m Jake, I’m the founder and CEO of Monet.

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So the main thing we do at Monet

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is we’re basically building a bank and the back office for creators,

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and that means everything related to finance

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or access to finance or your basic banking, your taxes

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and all of the admin that you don’t know how to do or want to do.

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So you can work safely and securely as a creator.

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The best things are definitely for me,

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the freedom to really just work how

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I want to but realize how I, you know, it’s kind of self-awareness thing

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how I actually better function.

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Just because you have the freedom to do what you want

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doesn’t mean it’s actually the best thing for you.

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So it’s actually allowed me

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to become more disciplined in some ways, but actually be more mentally healthy.

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The worst things I would say is there’s a huge inconsistency with, you know,

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security and safety and all that stuff to do with your finances and personal.

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So I pay myself a lot less than what I’ve been used to for a while.

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And it kind of tests your boundaries.

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You have to pick something which you’re so passionate

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about that you don’t care about those things.

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And I think that’s possibly the hardest, but ultimately feeds

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into again, the self-awareness of you.

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I’m pretty dyslexic, so my school background is quite mixed.

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I went to state school, which is a pretty good state school environment there

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Did well in maths and that kind of thing, struggled with attention.

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I have dyslexia still.

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The interesting thing about it is that

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even when I was tested, I had

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coping mechanisms already, and so I did well in most subjects for a while.

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But I just really struggled

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with various things, but I didn’t really have

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a lot of the support I needed until at university.

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I would say the dyslexia

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has allowed me to think in a manner which I’ve realized

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as I’ve got older, lots of other people aren’t thinking about.

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But it often means that I haven’t hit the basic marks which someone’s looking for

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because I’ve gone off on a tangent of trying to creatively solve a problem

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rather than actually just answering steps one to four in an exam

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and finding other people to work around me,

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which are totally different to me, has been really helpful as well.

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I went off to university and thought I’d get into sort of economics

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and asset management. That’s sort of where my skills were.

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I joined marketing and specifically in performance marketing,

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so it was very corporate wasn’t quite for me.

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I then met some really interesting folks and they were building

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quite an interesting financial technology company.

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I traded up kind of this freedom of not quite a bit wild,

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but kind of good money and everything to work with really smart, intelligent

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people who I’d never had the opportunity before. Did that

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and since then, I’ve left to start my own version of a fintech.

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I think that

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there’s a definitely an awareness that a lot of people

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want to work for themselves, but actually it’s kind of glamourised.

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And the reality of it is that it’s a lot of hard work

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and it really is a grind and you have to find something

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which you think this is worth solving or this is something that I love

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or something I really care about.