Do Good Work With Good People
First, an apology - last week’s post was too technical. I heard from more than a few of you that you appreciate the more human stories.
With that, and before I take a bit of time off with the family, I wanted to leave you with something that's been rattling around in my head since we recorded EP321 with Elaine Deehan last week.
It’s not really about Monzo. Or rather, it’s about Monzo the way the Danny Meyer piece I wrote last year was about digital identity - the episode is the hook, but the thing I actually want to talk about is something underneath it.
When I started Norio Ventures back in 2016, I wrote down a founding principle that I still carry around: do good work with good people. It sounds simple because it is. But I’ve spent nearly a decade now watching it compound in ways I never planned, and EP321 is one of the clearest examples of that I’ve had in a while.
Mick Concannon and Dame Street
I need to start with Mick Concannon, because none of this happens without him.
Mick led strategy and development for the Fintech & Payments Association of Ireland from 2018-2025, and he is one of those people who seems to exist specifically to connect other people. He doesn’t do it transactionally; he just does it because it’s who he is.
In October 2018, Mick introduced me to Elaine Deehan at an Enterprise Ireland event at the RDS. Elaine was building Pocketwire at the time, a startup that came from a very specific parenting anxiety: making sure your kids have money, knowing where they’re spending it, and doing all of that without the hassle that the traditional banking system makes you go through. It was a deeply human idea, rooted in the lived experience of a parent who wanted a better answer, but made possible by someone who could execute tirelessly. A week later, Elaine and I recorded EP23 of MoneyNeverSleeps in the old Bank of Ireland Startlab on Camden Street in Dublin.
Six weeks later, I was walking down Dame Street when I bumped into Mick. He asked what I was up to, and I told him I’d just come back from Chicago, where I’d been with a founder I was helping. I mentioned that Chicago had quietly become one of the most interesting crypto cities in America - all those former commodity traders who’d moved into crypto, because to them it didn’t matter whether they were trading pork bellies or Bitcoin; they just saw prices.
Mick lit up and said, oh, you know crypto? Have you heard of Coinbase? I said yes. He said his wife’s cousin’s fiancé - and this is a very Irish story - had just joined Coinbase and was looking for an INED for their Irish business.
That conversation on Dame Street led to my board seat with Coinbase Ireland, which I still hold today.
Two introductions, same person, same year. Neither of them planned.
The Home Office
When Elaine and I sat down to record EP321 last week, I noticed her background on the call. Not a sleek studio setup or a deliberately curated corporate backdrop. Her home office - family photos taped to the wall, awards her kids had won - was the kind of organized chaos that anyone raising a family while building something serious will recognize immediately.
After I published the episode last week, she called me to check in. I asked her about the wall in her home office. Was it deliberate? Was she making a point about Monzo being the more human digital bank by having that background up instead of something more polished and corporate?
She said it wasn’t intentional, but it does help to remind people that we’re here for a reason. And I believed her completely, because that’s just Elaine. She’s not performing “human“; she is human. There’s a difference, and you can feel it.
I had seen that same look on her face a few years earlier, when she came to visit me at Huckletree in 2022, the co-working space that hosted the Techstars accelerator I was running at the time. She sat across from me and told me, in the nicest possible way, that she wouldn’t be able to mentor the startups. She just didn’t have the time. There was no corporate brush-off in it. She was just being honest about what she could give, and she came in person to say it rather than sending an email.
I’ve always respected that about her. Knowing what your priorities are and being willing to say so clearly is rarer than it should be.
Jason Bates and the Streets of London
There’s a moment in EP321 where Elaine describes how Monzo prepared for the Irish launch - not a product migration, not a rebrand. Two years of surveys, in-person interviews, walking the streets of Irish cities and towns to talk to people about how they actually felt about their banks. All of that before a single customer was onboarded.
When she said it, I thought of Jason Bates.
Jason was one of Monzo’s co-founders, and the story of how Monzo got started involves him doing something similar in London in 2015, going out onto the street with a clipboard, asking strangers about their banking apps, their relationship with their bank, what frustrated them, what they actually wanted. Listening before building.
Elaine did the same thing in Ireland in 2024. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the Monzo DNA, carried forward by someone who understood what it was actually for.
It’s also, if you think about it, exactly what Danny Meyer was talking about in Setting the Table when he described the ABCD habit - always be collecting the dots. The dots aren’t always data. Sometimes they’re people’s feelings about their bank. Sometimes they’re the look on someone’s face when they’re telling you about a problem they wish someone would solve.
The French Boss
I want to go back to something for a moment, because it connects to all of this.
A few years before I started Norio Ventures, I had a French technocrat boss who sat me down and said something that has stuck with me ever since. He said:
“Pete, you’re too helpful. Everyone I ask has such good things to say about you. You need to be more cutthroat.”
I’m paraphrasing a conversation that probably happened in 2011, so I may be softening the edges slightly. But that was the gist of it.
It annoyed me enormously at the time. It still annoys me when I think about it, but I understand what he was trying to say. He probably wanted me to be more protective of my time, more strategic about who I gave it to. But the framing was wrong. Being helpful isn’t a weakness. Being helpful is how trust gets built, and the world moves at the speed of trust.
The principle I wrote down when I started Norio Ventures - do good work with good people - is the answer to that conversation. It’s the thing I decided I actually believed, as opposed to the thing I was being told I should believe.
The People
Here’s what a decade of doing good work with good people actually looks like, in practice.
Alejandro Gutierrez, Amor Sexton, Mai Santamaria, Elaine Deehan, Paul Smyth, Ollie Walsh, Niall Dennehy, Garrett Cassidy, Hesus Inoma, Rita Martins, Gray Webb, Laura Walsh.
All of them have been on MoneyNeverSleeps more than once. All of them were connected to the Techstars program in one way or another - some as mentors, some as founders, Elaine as someone who showed up in person even when she couldn’t commit to the full thing. All of them are people I’d call if something important was happening.
The podcast is the flywheel. It’s the reason I have a structured reason to stay in touch, to tell people’s stories properly, to keep the relationship alive across the chapters of a career. Techstars supercharged it - four years of running an accelerator put me in a room with a ton of founders and operators who were all trying to do something real, and the network that came from that is still the foundation of how I’m now building Norio Ventures into a proper VC.
None of this was planned. All of it was the result of showing up, being helpful, and trusting that good people find each other over time if you stay in the game long enough.
The Episode
EP321 with Elaine is out now. She’s building the playbook for what it means to take a digital bank and make it genuinely Irish - not just an Irish IBAN stapled onto a UK product, but something designed around how Irish people actually feel about money. And she’s doing it in a way that will travel, because the Irish playbook becomes the template for every EU market Monzo enters next.
It’s a good episode. Elaine is warm, specific, and honest in a way that not everyone is comfortable being on a podcast. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Til next time
If you’ve been listening for a while, thank you. If you’re new here, welcome. Either way, the full back catalog of 300+ episodes is at MoneyNeverSleeps.ie, reorganized into themed playlists so you can explore by topic rather than just scrolling chronologically.
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If this way of thinking resonates, follow along here. I’ll be writing more regularly - not show notes, but reflections like this one, connecting the threads across episodes as they emerge.
And if you’re building - particularly in crypto, fintech, or AI - I’m always happy to hear from founders thinking along these lines.
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