Tom Blomfield
Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic. On 2 shows, 7 appearances, plus 5 compilation re-airs not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestorengineer@t_blom ↗blomfield.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Tom Blomfield is the co-founder and former CEO of Monzo and the co-founder of GoCardless. He later became a General Partner at Y Combinator before joining Anthropic.
2shows
7appearances
205statements
24resolved
17supported
1contradicted
71%fully supported
20said about them ↓ Everything Tom Blomfield said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Tom Blomfield says today's software engineering jobs will vanish within 10 years
“But the conclusion of all of that, I think, is that software engineering jobs of today, I think, will not exist in five or 10 years.”
Tom Blomfield says AI will fulfill surging global demand for software
“Like I could easily see the demand goes up 10 X or a hundred X, who knows, but I just think the AI is getting so good that you just won't have humans fulfilling that demand in anything but the most niche of niche cases.”
Blomfield: Rebranding Twitter to X was total insanity
“I think when you get something short and catchy, and you have the verb, just like total insanity to change, especially for something as meaningless as X, right?”
Blomfield: US-Europe startup gap is optimism and ambition, not work ethic
“I really don't think it's a work ethic question at all. I think there are other big differences. I think the big difference is one of, like, positivity, optimism, and ambition.”
Blomfield: SoftBank's London team is arrogant and unwelcome on cap tables
“Probably SoftBank. I had a very unpleasant experience with the SoftBank London team. Just a bunch of pretty arrogant, like, Deutsche Bank traders turned venture capital investors. They were not fun at all.”
Blomfield: Sam Altman was distracted at YC by OpenAI from early on
“And then really, honestly, under Sam Altman, I think it expanded in a bunch of different weird areas, and it just lacked strong, and Sam was distracted. He was doing OpenAI from very, very early on.”
Blomfield: Discussing pricing early almost never scares off enterprise prospects
“Founders are often very afraid to have a willingness to pay conversation. They feel like if they bring a dollar amount up, it might scare the customer off. But honestly, that's almost always not true.”
Blomfield: Early startups should accept customer contract terms unless company-ending
“So I'd be pretty flexible on signing, frankly, whatever your early customers want, as long as it's not going to expose you to like unlimited liability or container clause that's going to transfer all the IP in your product to your customer or something company…”
Blomfield: Embedding chatbots into software is almost always the wrong approach
“I kind of hate the kind of chatbot paradigm. Like it was the easiest It was the way to bring the most basic LLM experience to the whole world. You know, we had GPT before ChatGPT and ChatGPT brought it to the mainstream, but now every product is just embedding…”
Tom Blomfield predicts stark consequences for software engineering within 12 months
“I think we have a clear line of sight between where we are today and like improvements over the next three, six and 12 months. They're going to have quite stark consequences for software engineering, I think.”
Tom Blomfield built a 35,000-line app without writing any code manually
“Yeah, 35,000 lines, and I wrote not a single one. And honestly, after about the first 5000 lines, I stopped even reading the code.”
Tom Blomfield says future engineers will primarily focus on wrangling AI machines
“I think there will be demand for smart people who know how to wrangle these AI coding machines, and if we want to call those people software engineers, so be it. But I think the job is dramatically, dramatically different.”
Tom Blomfield says software startups are reaching revenue milestones faster than ever
“So getting to a 1,000,010 million, a hundred million of revenue with a software idea had is just happening faster and faster than ever.”
Tom Blomfield warns AI could displace hundreds of millions of workers
“And you could see hundreds of millions of people displaced, and the idea that they're going to retrain as in a different job, I think is going to be extremely painful. And I can see the societal impact and turmoil being very, very grave for 10 or 20 years as t…”
Tom Blomfield: AI applications are 80-90% traditional software and 10% AI
“Most people building application layer stuff in an AI say it's 80 to 90% traditional software with 10% AI.”
Blomfield: Monzo received 96 consecutive investor rejections for a 2020 flat round
“And I had 96 no's in a row for that fundraise to try and do a flat round.”
Blomfield: European neobanks N26, Revolut, and Monzo failed initial US expansion
“N-twenty-six has failed, Revolut's failed, Monzo's, the first go's failed”
Blomfield: VCs should back arrogant, obnoxious founders if they build massive businesses
“I don't think so. I mean, it helps, it makes your life more fun, but there are people who are just like a little bit scary, you know, it's like they're a little bit arrogant, perhaps a little bit obnoxious, a little bit too sure of themselves, and I wouldn't w…”
Blomfield: People who constantly call out broken systems make great startup founders
“I think it makes great founders, where they're like, just so annoyed if something's broken, they have to fix it, and they have to tell people something's wrong, and it's a, you can make a shitty employee, but a really good founder.”
Blomfield: YC partners gather enough evaluation data in 3 to 4 minutes
“Get enough in three or four minutes, but it seems rude to finish the interview so quickly.”
Blomfield: Standard Oxford-to-McKinsey career paths are 'boring' for YC candidates
“That's the kind of exceptionalism that we're looking for in some area of their life. And it might come out through the application, it might be the interview video, or the interview itself, but we're looking for that spark that they are not average, like they'…”
Blomfield: Repeatedly pivoting a startup indicates the founder is the problem
“Pivoting is like divorces. Like maybe one or two is reasonable, but if you're doing it multiple times in a row, maybe the problem is you.”
Blomfield: Shutting down Continuity improved YC's relationships with multi-stage VCs
“Shutting down continuity, our growth fund, has enabled to have a, enabled WIC to have a much more collaborative relationship with multi-stage VCs.”
The other half of the tape: Tom Blomfield's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 20 times in 8 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 17Pete Koomen 2TS Anil 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 18
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 2
2026 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2025 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 8 mentions in 1 episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Tom's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic | 2 +1 | 106 | 67% 14/21 | full record on 20VC → |
| Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic | 5 +4 | 99 | 100% 3/3 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |