The co-founder of a fintech mortgage lender backed by Monzo’s Tom Blomfield says working with your co-founder wife is “draining”, reflecting on the five and a half years they ran the startup together.
Gen H, previously known as Generation Home, was co-founded by husband and wife Will Rice and Sophia Guy-White, who are both in their thirties.
The startup, founded in 2019, is backed by Blomfield as well as Peter Thiel’s investment firm Mithril Capital.
Guy-White announced earlier this year she was standing down from her role as chief people officer at Gen H, as the couple looked to “reset”.
She said at the time: “It’s accepted wisdom that you shouldn’t work with your spouse, but I’ve found that accepted wisdom is often utter bologna propagated by the male, pale and stale.
“What a gift to watch your partner learn and thrive in a professional setting. What a gift to push one another because you know you’re capable of so much more. What a gift to know at a glance when you need to step up or step down.”
Rice, Gen H's CEO, admits that the five-plus years living and breathing Gen H with his wife was “draining” but said there were many positives to it.
On the plus side, he said it was ”the best thing about building the company”.
He said: “You have got a founding team that understands one another incredibly well and has already been heavily stress tested.
“When you have a husband and wife couple, you have got this incredibly intimate understanding of how they work, what they respond well to, often how they deal with adversity and how to best to work with them through it.”
On the downside, he said “there is just no separation whatsoever between your work and your personal life” and there “cease to be any boundaries”.
He said the couple would walk to work together, spend the day together, then walk home together. In the morning, his wife would nudge him awake with a work question.
He added: “When work is difficult, which it often is when you are building a business and you're under a lot of pressure, it means that you have got nothing to step back into to get away from it.”
Gen H has its own Gen H branded products: Income Booster (which allows a close relative to add their income to a customer’s mortgage), Deposit Booster, and New Build Booster.
Gen H services the mortgages, which are funded through third parties, such as banks and building societies. It earns a fee on the mortgages it originates.
The financial accounts for Imagine Mortgages Limited, the parent company of Gen H, have just been published at Companies House for the year ending 2023.
The accounts have been published late, after Gen H transgressed FCA rules on regulatory capital requirements.
The transgression relates to a 2024 £5.5m fundraise it undertook by issuing a convertible loan note.
Regulations impose a limit as to how much of a convertible loan note can contribute to regulatory capital and Gen H breached this.
Gen H reported the breach to the FCA in February last year.
To resolve the situation, Rice said it converted the note into preference shares.
Gen H reported losses of £13.8m in 2023, compared to losses of £14.5m the year previous.
Rice says the financial position of Gen H has “significantly improved” over the last year, pointing to growing revenues to a million pounds per month and cutting costs.
It cut the size of the team from 100 to around 70 last year, and Rice said Gen H was trading profitably in Q4 in 2024.
Rice said Gen H has no immediate plans for more fundraising.
Meanwhile, Blomfield stood down as an independent director of Gen H in February 2024, as part of a wider board restructure.
Blomfield stood down due to his commitment with Y Combinator in the US, said Rice.
Rice added: “He was going to struggle to put the amount of time into the role that we needed.”
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