132,588
edits
Changes
Banking On It: How I Disrupted an Industry by Anne Boden (view source)
Revision as of 11:30, 8 December 2020
, 11:30, 8 December 2020no edit summary
The detail of setting up a bank might sound tedious, but this is a story of a woman fighting against entrenched views. Only 1% of venture capital goes to all-female teams and female entrepreneurs are a rarity. In her favour were good networking skills and the ability to pitch an idea and persuade KPMG and others to provide resources on a contingency basis. Any budding entrepreneur, male or female, would do well to take this section to heart: Boden is a strong personality and impressive role model. This is the woman who went out on the streets in the City offering choc ices to anyone who downloaded the Starling Bank app.
It was not all plain sailing along the way. She had an acrimonious split with the team that she had built, leaving her on her own: her only help was a friend who called in on spec and stayed to help her on an unpaid basis for a year. Her former team, led by Tom Blomfield, had tried to take over, leaving her with a debt of one million pounds. There could only be one winner in that battle - and I'm glad it was Anne Boden. This section of the book is utterly compelling: I was left pondering who would bid for the film rights - and this isn't something you often think about a business book.
Start-up banks need capital: we're taken on a journey to meet a Bahamas-based entrepreneur to whom Boden sells her vision and who believes enough in the concept to provide significant working capital in return for a stake in the business.