In this 40 Minute Mentor LIVE episode, we’re joined by Sujata Bhatia, former COO of Monzo and now Executive in Residence at Index Ventures, for a masterclass in what it really takes to turn around, rebuild and scale one of the UK’s most loved companies.
Sujata spent almost 16 years at American Express in senior global roles across payments, marketing and general management before making the leap in the dark days of 2020 to become COO of Monzo. She arrived at a company burning £10 million a month, with its founder gone, regulators circling and no product shipped in a year – and left five years later having helped lead what its founding CTO called a “refounding”: steering Monzo through turnaround, rapid growth and profitability.
In this candid conversation, Sujata shares the hard-won lessons from that journey – why she believes COO isn’t really a job at all, how she built one of tech’s great CEO-COO partnerships through midnight “speed dating” during lockdown, and her framework of context, clarity, curation and care for bringing teams through difficult change. She also unpacks the “momentum killers” that quietly tax scaling companies, why every hire must raise the bar, and how to have the hard conversations about moving people on with kindness.
Whether you’re a COO, an aspiring generalist, or a founder navigating your own refounding moment, this episode is packed with practical wisdom on culture, talent and leading through the hardest chapters of company building.
