About Tom
Tom Blomfield is Group Partner at Y Combinator. He co-founded Monzo and GoCardless and has extensive experience building and scaling startups. He now invests in early-stage companies, helping founders turn ideas into successful businesses.
Q&A
As an experienced founder, what skill ended up mattering far more than you expected when you were just starting out?
TB: "The hustle and grind of acquiring customers. I built a number of websites as a teenager, but I was more interested in coding than selling, so they mostly just languished with no customers. You’ve got to put in the hard work to sell."
When you decide to invest in a startup, what’s one quality or signal you look for that many investors often overlook?
TB: ”I don’t think I have any particularly unique insight here. I’m lucky at Y Combinator that we invest very early, and so I’m able to take a lot more risk on founders that other investors will overlook. It lets us fund people at different stages in their career, often earlier, and founders who are working on very risky projects like data centers in space or quantum chips.
I think that perseverance and tenacity are incredibly important. A certain level of intellect is required to be a great founder, but we often see supergeniuses who don’t like the constant rejection that’s part of startup life and give up too early.”
What’s one belief or mindset you had as a first-time founder that completely changed after going through the journey of building companies?
TB: ”As a first-time founder, my co-founders and I wanted to reimagine every part of the company from first principles, and it turns out that’s a waste of time, effort, and adds a lot of unnecessary risk. I now think you should devote your energy to innovating on the core product and really keep everything else about your company as vanilla as possible. You don’t need to reinvent management or performance reviews or compensation.”
Looking at young founders, both today and in the past, what’s one trait you rarely see but wish more of them developed early?
TB: ”If you’re deeply technical, it’s usually learning to sell.
For non-technical founders, learning to build product and code is vital. It’s easier than ever today with tools like Cursor and Claude Code. You can vibe code a great early product today.”
Q&A date: 10 Dec, 2025
https://earlyearlystage.substack.com/i/181263518/investor-q-and-a
Explore more Q&A’s: https://earlyearlystage.substack.com/t/q-and-as
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